A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT IN PARIS.*

WE quite agree with the writer of these pages that they are disconnected, and, with a slight reservation, we accept his state- ment that they are veracious. That they are uncoloured by the- picturesque art of a clever literary draughtsman, Mr. O'Shea probably would be the last to deny. If he does not emulate the ultra-strict veracity of the Quaker, his chapters bear such marks- of truthfulness as we demand from a lively raconteur. And truly it would be difficult for a Special Correspondent to relate his strange experiences in a more lively fashion. He is always. frank, always in good-humour with himself, always kindly in, speaking of others. The reader, therefore, with a taste for gossip, and who likes it well served, may spend an hour or two agreeably enough at Mr. O'Shea's table.

His early experiences as a journalist were gained in Paris, where, about the close of the second Empire, he formed one of a small colony of Bohemians. "I was supposed," he writes, "to be studying medicine; but my visits were more frequent to those halls of young delight at the dancing gardens known as the Closerie des Lilas than to the wards of the Pity Hospital." Indeed, he confesses that he never took a degree, and lived by writing stories and news-letters. Among the little band of Irishmen with whom Mr. O'Shea associated, was John Mitchel, who in 1848

• Leaves front the Life of a Special Correspondent. By John Augustus O'Shea. 2 vols. London: Ward and Downey. 1885.

had been sentenced to transportation for treason-felony, and "subsequently escaped to New York." The author—who omits to add that he broke his parole—thinks that a great writer was lost in Mitchel, whose style is said to be as strong and lucid as that of Swift ; and "withal he could soar into realms of imagination, the most purely poetic, or unbend from his accustomed rigidity and indulge in passages of florid descrip- tion that might turn many a word-painter by vocation green with envy." Another Irishman who appeared in Mr. O'Shea's quarters was James Stephens, "the original Fenian head-eentre who had escaped from a Dublin prison most unaccountably."

Like Mitchel, Stephens had a turn for letters, and among other achievements, translated David Copperfield into French. Edmond O'Donovan, another "Irish colonist," combined a variety of accomplishments with the tastes of a man of learning.

When Mr. O'Shea knew him he was studying Arabic, and used "to take the grammar to bed with him, read himself to sleep poring over its pages, and reopen it when he turned on his pillow in the morning." Of O'Donovan, Mr. O'Shea relates the following election anecdote. He had volunteered to promote the return of John Martin for Longford :—

" Edmond succeeded in gaining the masses to his side by his im- passioned appeals from the top of a hogshead. 'While I was casting around mentally,' he said, for a few sentences for my peroration, with an occasional downward look at the hogshead, which was sway- ing under the pressure of the mob, and threatened to go over, I imagined I saw an eminence at the end of the street. There was my me. I besought my fellow-countrymen by their veneration for those ancestors whose bones rested in that hallowed mound below, and whose sanctified ghosts had their eyes upon them, to be true to the cause of God and Ireland, truth and manhood—the cause which was championed by John Martin, stainless confessor and stedfast martyr of nationality. I was rather taken aback that evening when a gentleman of the town told me that the hallowed mound of my imagination was in reality a heap of compost he had got together for his next potato- planting r "

Another linguist and patriot of the writer's acquaintance was a certain Professor Mortimer, "who spoke thirteen languages snore or less, and made all melodious with an irrepressible Cork brogue." This man had played many parts in life, and none apparently with success :—

"In his turn he had been ship's-carpenter and hotel-tout, champion vaulter in an Austrian circus and professor of Hebrew in a Hamburg college ; he made the tour of France as secretary to Murphy, the Irish giant ; the tour of Germany as lecturer on William Shakespeare. He had been the proprietor of a company of Spanish ballet-dancers, the boon companion of Sir William Don at Baden-Baden, paragraphist on the Independence Beige at Brussels, and tutor to Charles Lever's children at Florence."

Among those who came to lodge at the Pension was Madame Cle'mence Royer, a lady who had translated Darwin's works into French. She is said to have taken a profound interest in the origin of species and the theory of evolution :— " Whenever a greasy Italian happened to come into our premises with a hurdy-gurdy and an attenuated monkey, she rushed out and approached that monkey, not to present him with nuts or lump. sugar, but to inquire if he or she had a tail. I do believe if that lady were to discover a baby with a rudimentary queue, she would have gone delirious with ecstasy. Yet it is hard to understand what reasonable cause for joy there could be in an approach to proof of the fantasy that mankind are promoted simians. It is not as if a poor man were to succeed to a legacy, or an upstart were to find a family tree of whose existence he had no knowledge. We used to laugh at Mdme. Royer behind the arras. I am afraid we were Philistines, and had no proper appreciation of petticoated genius in the pursuit of the missing link."

Mr. O'Shea has plenty to tell of his own work as a critic and newspaper correspondent, and of the woik of others, and recalls the happy days when a writer's pen "was not handicapped by

that pestilent wire which is utterly destructive of style and too often lends itself, to inaccuracy." Of his contemporary jour- nalists in the French capital he writes freely and warmly, and

has a word to say of the greatest of them all, though not from personal knowledge, for Father Prout had ceased to write

for the Globe, and was nearing the .end of his life, when Mr. O'Shea knew him. And these recollections of brilliant but well-nigh forgotten men leads him to deplore the system

of anonymous journalism which, if it have some drawbacks, has, on the whole, advantages that outweigh them. The

author, however, does not think so, but regards the impersonal 'we" as a monstrous absurdity, and worse than a corporation,

since it has "neither a soul to be saved nor a posterior to be kicked."

Mr. O'Shea's first engagement on a London daily paper was to write an account of Troppmann's execution. "I could not afford to decline it," he says, "though if there be one duty of

my profession I would shirk, this was the duty." He does not fail, however, to describe the scene with the most careful attention to details. As Special Correspondent of the Standard, the writer described the trial of Pierre Bonaparte at Tours, and

there is perhaps too much of the verbiage allowed to corre- spondents in his account of the affair. Indeed, with all his liveliness, Mr. O'Shea grows occasionally a little tiresome; but in such cases the reader has the privilege of skipping, and so also has the reader. One lingers, however, with amusement, and something like amazement, at the writer's account of a well- known journalist whom he met at this trial for the first time, and who is described as "burly, florid, with smooth-lying, pitch- black hair, and a half-waggish, whole intelligent sunshine of meaning, with a blending of humour-clouds, mischief-clouds, and kindness-clouds, playing over his broad, sympathetic counten- ance." This gentleman Mr. O'Shea felt instinctively must be George Augustus Sala, and he confesses that his heart sank within him at the notion of being pitted against " this wondrous word-spinner who threw a warp of golden threads across the necessary woof of the commonplace, and who was sitting there jocund and self-possessed as if his pitch-black hair were not wreathed with greenest of journalistic laurels, unconscious that he was being worshipped in secret." It will be seen that Mr. O'Shea is not without the impulsiveness and

fervour commonly attributed to his countrymen. Nor is he in the least ashamed of the enthusiasm which, on one occasion, after reading Quentin Durward, sent him speeding "across the

breadth of Europe, from the German Ocean to the Adriatic, to shoulder a musket for glory and twopence-halfpenny per diem."

Nearly seventy pages are given to the "Passion Play "audits actors ; and for this there is some excuse. It is Mr. O'Shea's own "thunder," for his account of it in the Standard was the first

that ever appeared in a newspaper. After this, the "Special Correspondent" worked for his journal in London, and the record of his doings is diversified and amusing. He witnesses an entertainment to burglars, studies house-breaking at Scotland. Yard, attends a flogging of garotters, and "did not like the job"; makes the acquaintance of prize-fighters, and holds their art in high esteem ; grows familiar with acrobats and wild-beast tamers, and once put his hand into the mouth of a hyzena, which looked as frightened as he felt. With the elephant, too, Mr. O'Shea has more than a distant acquaintance. On one occasion he submitted to enthronement in a howdah in a Lord Mayor's Show, on another he rode an elephant across a tight- rope for a bet on the stage of Sanger's Hippodrome. Of the character of the elephant the writer has not formed a high opinion ; but the following anecdote shows that he was not afraid to put it to the test :—

" A young friend asked me once to show him some elephants in undress, and I took him along with me, having first borrowed an apron and filled it with oranges. This be was to carry whilst accom- panying me in the stable, but the moment we reached the door the herd set up such a trumpeting—they had scented the fruit—that he dropped the apron and its contents and scuttled off like a scared rabbit. There were eight elephants, and when I picked up the oranges 1 found I had five-and-twenty. I walked deliberately along the line giving one to each ; when I got to the extremity of the narrow stable, I turned and was about to begin the distribution again, when I suddenly reflected that if elephant No. 7 in the row saw me give two oranges in succession to No. 8, he might imagine he was being cheated, and give me a smack with his proboscis—that is where the elephant falls short of the human being—so I went to the door and began de note as before. Thrice I went along the line, and then I was in a fix. I had one orange left, and I had to get back to the door. Every elephant in the herd had his greedy gaze focussed on that orange. It was as much as my life was worth to give it to any one of them. What was I to do ? I held it up conspicuously, coolly peeled it, and sucked it myself. It was most amusing to notice the way those elephants nudged each other and shook their ponderous sides. They thoroughly entered into the humour of the thing."

It will be seen that Mr. O'Shea has played many parts, some of them insignificant enough, but made pleasant to read about from his imperturbable good-humour. And he has more serious actions to record. In the war of 1870 he did admirable service as a correspondent, and not without risk, through the siege of Paris, for he was thrice arrested. We may add that Mr. O'Shea's long acquaintance with Frenchmen—perhaps it would be more correct to say with Parisians—has not raised them in his esteem :—

" The generous French nation," he writes, "can be grudging when it likes. Why Irishmen should be particularly drawn towards it to me is a puzzle. In all that I have seen of it the guiding principle is the love, not of humanity, but of self. There are exceptions ; but the ordinary Frenchman—the Legitimists and the advanced Revolu- tionists, both parties with ideas put aside—is as watchful of his own interests to the exclusion of those of all others as any man I know."