Scribbling all day; called down to the drawing-room at near five o’clock. “It’s Counsellor Curran, my lady!” Morgan, invalided, came up enchanted to see his friend Curran, though they are at the antipodes of human feeling—my own Morgan being all heart, &c.
Morgan said, “Curran, we are quite alone, do stay and dine with us.”
(Now this is a most unfair thing in husbands—this asking to dinner à l’impromptu, particularly a man like Curran, who likes a good dinner). Clever Curran, who knows all the little plis et replis in the human character better than the great, looked hesitatingly at me. I laughed, and said, “It is not fair to take you in; we are invalids; our dinner is an invalid dinner; soupe, bouilli and a roast fowl, except we order up the kitchen pièce de résistance—but I dare not mention it.”
“If it is not a leg of beef smothered in onions,” said Curran, laughing.
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“No; but is almost as bad—a leg of pork and pease-pudding,” said I.
Quoth he, “The thing in the world I like best.” So he ran home to dress, stipulating we should let him off the moment we had dined (an old trick of his); but I chose to make the agreeable, so did he, and he staid with us, en tiers, till midnight. He was, as he can always be, most clever, amusing, and rational. He gave us anecdotes and imitations of Steele, the Catholic demagogue, admirably, particularly his whacking the editor of the Morning Herald three several times, each time observing, “There! I don’t think I had complete satisfaction!”
We talked of the good, but coarse Irish novel, The Collegians. The story is a fact, and not only a fact, but the trial of the hero, and the whole melancholy event, was given by Curran in the New Monthly Magazine, just after it happened—in much finer style than in the Collegians. The hero was a Mr. Scanlan, a dissipated young man in the county of Limerick; his family are what the peasants call, “small gentry,” we, “gentry.” His uncle, Mr. Scanlan, was High Sheriff last year; Curran dined with him the day of the hero’s execution. Curran said the uncle’s sang-froid and indifference were frightful; he shrugged his shoulders, tucked his napkin under his chin, said “it was a sad business,” and called for soup. In this, one may discern the same temperament as in the nephew, the murderer.
The fair, frail girl, whom this Munster Lothario
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When he had sent her off in the boat with his servant, who was first to shoot and then fling her into the Shannon, he lurked about the shore waiting his return. To his dismay, he saw the party row back—she, all smiles and fondness, extending her arms to him. The servant, taking him aside, said, “I cannot kill her! Sure, when I had the pistol raised, she turned round with her innocent face, and smiled so in mine; I could not hurt a hair of her head, the crathur.”
Scanlan took him to a public-house; primed him with whiskey, gave him a fresh bribe, and sent him off once more, with his victim, to sail on the Shannon—waited his return on the shore, and saw him come back without her.
The other anecdote was this:—The jailor of Limerick had been an old and confidential servant in the Scanlan family, and had nursed this young man on his knee.
When the moment of execution arrived, and he knelt down to knock off the irons, his tears dropped on every link, and looking up in the young man’s face, said, “Ah, Masther John! when I nursed you in these arms, in your father’s house, little ever I thought this would be the office I should do for you.”
Scanlan died with a lie on his lips, denying the crime. He
had been condemned on the strongest circumstantial
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The Prima Sera, as the Italians call it, is very agreeable. It begins immediately after dinner, or siesta; it includes the drive on the Corso, and the visit before the Opera. We have a prima sera that is suited to our climate and is very agreeable. It has the freedom of evening society with the sociability of morning visits. I mean the two hours which intervene between the fall of evening at four o’clock, and the dressing or dinner-hour—the hour when the pleasant visitors drop in—when the fire burns brightest, and the lamps are few, and one is still in one’s morning-dress, and men put their splashed boots, without let or hinderance, where an hour or two afterwards it would be outlawry to appear in clean ones [shoes were, at that period, de rigueur in the evening], and the feet are put on the fender, and the shoulders find a resting-place in the luxurious arm-chair. The news comes fresh in from the ride or the club; the anecdote is still new from the ball or the soirée, where nothing is presumed and everything is ventured; when the story of the diner-out is not yet made, nor the sally of the professed wit held back for à apropos; when one talks nonsense best and laughs at it most. It is enough to know there is an epoch of the day when one may be agreeable without stimulus, and enjoy without effort.
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17th January.—Just heard of the death of Sir Thomas Lawrence and of Mr. Monkton, Lady Cork’s brother.
January 20.—Yesterday we dined at Lord Dungarvon’s, at Fairfield. Our party, Marquis and Marchioness Clanricarde, Earl and Countess of Howth, Lady E. St. Lawrence, Master Townsend and his daughter, Mr. Blake (Chief Remembrancer) and his wife; Colonel Cruise, and Dan O’Connell; this being the second time in my life that I ever met the redoubtable Dan. Dan is not brilliant in private society,—not even agreeable. He is mild, silent, unassuming, apparently absorbed, and an utter stranger to the give-and-take charm of good society; I said so to Lord Clanricarde, who replied, “If you knew how I found him this morning; his hall, and the very steps of his door crowded with his clientèle—he had a word or a written order for each and all, and then hurried off to the law courts, and from that to the Improvement Society, at the Royal Exchange, and was the first guest here to-day, when I arrived. Two hours before, he was making that clever but violent speech to Mr. La Touche, and now no wonder he looks like an extinct volcano.”
Lady Clanricarde is the only and much-loved
daughter of Canning, and is quite worthy
of being so, quelle tête, inside
and outside! beautiful and clever, every word an epigram or a thought, pleasant
and amusing with it all! The dinner was charming, with sweet Lady Dungarvon’s warm, cordial manner of
doing the honors in her own pretty house. I had lots of Irish shanaos
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Feb. 28th.—Poor Molly! I cannot drive her or her situation out of my head. She is dying, but well cared for at my dear sister’s.
