REMINISCENCES OF T. C. GRATTAN.*
CONNECTED by birth with some of the best families of Ireland, a man about town, a conversationist, an author of some note and success, a traveller and a diplomatist, Mr. Grattan has passed his life among curious scenes and people of whom the world is never tired. His autobiography, were it truly told, would be just one of those which shine brightly because they reflect back so much of the character of the really distinguished. He does not, however, intend to write it, for he disapproves autobiography, which requires, to be ac- curate, demands too much of self-exposure, and indicates "an insolent appraisement of one's self-importance." No man has a right to "traffic," as Rousseau and Heine did, "in the infirmities of nature for base lucre ;" and so, with a settled distaste for recording his own foibles, Mr. Grattan sits down to record some of those he has observed among his acquaintance. His book, it is true, is not malicious. There is no trace of the deep and half-unconscious dislike of his own friends which underlies De Quincey's accounts of the Lake School, nor has Mr. Grattan much of the acrid temper which deformed Rogers's allusions to any one to whom he had not lent money, but the general effect of his narratives is to reduce our estimate of their subjects. Moore's social littleness, Campbell's want of candour, and the vein of coarse hardness which marred Wordsworth's fine nature, come out in these stories more strongly than the qualities which, like precious spices, keep those dead minds for ever fresh among men. Mr. Grattan attacks nobody except Northern Americans, whom he hates with a hearty, unsparing malignity which enlarges our notions of the capacities of human nature in that line, but—to use one of those vile words with which Americans fill up the gaps in the English language, much as a gardener fills a gap in a flower bed with serviceable dung —he belittles them all. Everybody mentioned is a little smaller than he was before Mr. Grattan's experience of him was given to the world. That is no ground of exception to the book. It is much more important to the world that it should have an accurate idea of Campbell's mental status than a purely favourable one, but the tone is an element in estimating the value of all these sketches.
The first of the two volumes is filled with stories derived from personal observation of places and people in France and Ireland, and, with one exception, they are neither interesting nor good, feeble in anecdote, and inflated in tone. It is not very amusing to read a list of the survivors of the Convention whom Mr. Grattan saw or knew, but of whom he has nothing to tell, except that he shuddered to touch them, and thought Barere, on the whole, the most tolerable of them all. Our notion., of St. Just, the dreaming fanatic, with the head of St. John and the 4eart of Herod, are not much cleared by a criticism
'aeamnPaths. By T. C. Grattan. Chapman and Hall. which describes him as " a human tiger, a moral volcano, whirlwind, cataract, or all combined ;" for we have not the remotest conception what a mixture of man, tiger, cataract, and volcano would seem like if we came across it in the concrete ; nor can we truly state that we are much amused by learning that Beranger tasted plum-pudding but once in his life, and sent up his plate a second time " out of the re- spect which he felt for the national feeling entertained as he sup- posed by his hosts for ?dram plat de dorseeurs." These essays, in short, are generally the exceedingly trivial remarks of a very careless observer made upon men and events, both of which required study, and couched in language, which even its clearness and point cannot make tolerable to us. There is, however, one remarkable exception to this dispraise. Mr. Grattan has told one story "Bachelors' Hall," which, if his instinct as a novelist has not induced him to colour it, is the most extraordinary testimony to the condition of Ireland fifty years ago we ever remember to have seen. If it is fact, as it ap- pears to be, the wildest tale Lever ever improved is completely thrown into the shade. If it is fiction, Mr. Grattan missed his true line as a novelist when he sought scenes in Holland and personages from among a semi-feudal chivalry, and a bourgeois population. It is an account of a night with the Squire of Knockderrig, a man who held a consider- able property at the foot of Sliev-na-morra. This personage held some West India property, with the proceeds of which he kept up state among dependents as ferocious as himself, and passed his existence in hunting, drinking, and, if rumour might be trusted, darker pleasures. A magnificent rider, socially and sometimes legally an outlaw, and deemed capable of any act, he had increased his influence and amused himself, by importing a pack of Cuban blood-hounds, with which he and his dependants, who were alone admitted, hunted some unknown game. Mr. Grattan and a friend or two visited Knockderrig, and after a night of wild revelry, with whisky instead of water in the kettle, and glasses smashed against the ceiling, the Squire suddenly let in the daylight, summoned the half-mad guests to the saddle, loosed six couple of blood-hounds, and started in chase of a human being. A serf of the estate had consented, it would seem, to be smeared with blood, and give his master sport by running for his life before the bloodhounds to a point previously fixed. The pace was maddening, and the human character of the chase almost forgotten till after a terrible run he was seen ascending a tree, and sitting safe out of reach upon a branch. The guests were not so drunk but they uttered exclamations of relief, when the branch broke, and the wretched "drag" fell in front of the maddened pack. He took to the water, the dogs followed, and the riders dashed in anxious only to save the body. They succeeded, and, to their astonishment, saved the man too, but the Squire, horror-struck at the crime he had "so nearly V committed, shot all the bloodhounds on the same morning. He had started this sport for a "new excitement," and the story may enable us to understand those awful facts of the feudal times, those outbursts of maniacal contempt for humanity, which seem to us now so utterly incredible. It is, however, by the second volume that this book will be tested, for it contains recollections of Moore and Coleridge, Wordsworth and Campbell, Talma and Kean, and a host of minor celebrities, perhaps the more tasteful because they are so acid. Of Moore, Mr. Grattan says, "he was the most agreeable table-couipanion I ever met," and that his selecting a wife from the es de ballet of an Irish theatre showed great independence of mind. But it is on Moore's foibles, his passion for social success or "tuft hunting," and his an- noyance at his own figure, so small and so thickset, that Mr. Grattan dwells. As to the former, the writer speaks of Moore's "refined ob- sequiousness," and says, "the subservient plebeian fawned on nobility even when he knew that it held him cheap." The latter was ex- cusable, if, as Mr. Grattan says, Theodore Hook one day remarked that Moore "looked as if begotten between a toad and a Cupid," and that a Frenchman really mistook him for a schoolboy, and said, as he left, with great glee, "Air, le petit bonhomme s'en va!" Mr. Grattan's account of the burning of Byron's autobiography, however, reflects more seriously on the poet. There was a copy of the work, he says, made by a Mr. Dumoulin, at Moore's request, and this copy may be still in existence, while Moore engaged to furnish Messrs. Longman "with a life of Lord Byron composed chiefly from the unexception- able parts of the burned materials." It is difficult to avoid a sus- picion that the writer thinks Moore retained a copy of this much- dreaded manuscript, and, indeed, an opinion to that effect was in- sinuated by Mr. Grattan himself in an article in the Attic Miscel- lany, a periodical of which only one number ever appeared. Mr. Grattan defends Captain Medwm's account of Byron's conversations as authentic, but adds, that the Captain defended himself very badly, first challenging a clergyman and then Sir J. C. Hobhouse, and blames him for not having come to London with a brace of pistols in his portmanteau, prepared apparently to fight everybody. "I re- member making these remarks to Moore one day. I agree with you,' said lie, but I am told that Medwin is not a man of that trensise."
Moore proved a snob, and Medwin timid, Mr. Grattan passes to Campbell, of whom he gives but one story, how he asked Mt. Grattan to propose a vote of thanks to him as the founder of the London University, how Campbell was compelled to get a "man from the City" to perform the task, how Brougham snubbed the mall from the City, and how Campbell resisted the proposal, declaring no such idea had ever entered his head, an incident which convinced the author that Campbell was a singularly "little" man. The notices of Coleridge and Wordsworth are more kindly, but they are exceed- ingly alight. Mr. Grattan, however, who travelled with both in Belgium, defends Wordsworth from the charge of egotism, and says his most obvious peculiarity was a certain hardness of mind. In the midst of a beautiful scene, broken by the bridge of the Meuse, Wordsworth began counting the arches, while Coleridge, in answer to a clever remark of Grattan, that the reflexions of the moon under each arch looked "like so many ghosts of moons," murmured these lines, which are perhaps the best addition Mr. Grattan has made to our knowledge of Coleridge; " — and oft I saw him stray,
The bells of fox-glove on his hand—and ever And anon he to his ear would hold a blade Of that stiff grass that 'mid the heath-flower grows, Which made a subtle kind of melody,
Most like the apparition of a breeze,
Singing with its thin voice in shadowy worlds."
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