THE FINAL RELIQUES OF FATHER PROUT.* FINAL memorials, final remains,

and final reliques are, as a rule, apt to be disappointing. The rich sheaves have already been 'garnered, and the gleaner'a bundle makes but a poor show com- pared with them. As a rule, too, the gleaner is not over- • scrupulous about what he gathers, and the scattered ears which • had escaped the husbandman are too often bound up with a lot of weeds more fit for the rubbish-heap than the granary. We are heartily glad to say that Mr. Blanchard Jerrold's glean- ings are not of this description, and that there is not much darnel to be found among his wheat, but we could wish that he had stacked the latter a little more carefully and neatly.

In the first place, although this book is most beautifully printed, there are far too many errors of the press in it. In page ,427, a misprint of "though it" for " thought " makes Father .Prout talk nonsense ; and the same bad service is done to Mr. :Browning, in page 64, by a mispunctuation. The Greek quota- .-tion in page 440 is atrociously printed, and is absolutely un- intelligible ; and almost the same may be said of the epitaph , on Laacaris, in page 444, for although the Padre professes to give a plain, prose version of it, he obviously does nothing of the kind. Nor are the Latin quotations much better. "There was a quodam commune vinculum' between him and me," Mr. Sheehan is madQ to write (p. 12) ; and in an inscription, polished, we are told, ad unguem (p. 16), we

• find " blandus, comes." We are introduced to the poet Ausonias in page 43, where the italicised 'Pgue" is absurd. "Vita Aumana magnum theatrum" for "vitae humanae " (p. 50), " bene pacation et liberam civitatem " (p. 225), and " tants. molis erat" •

(p.442) may complete our list, for we don't know whether to credit Hildebrand himself—a super-grammatical Pope, perhaps— or the editor, with "edits: iniquitatem," in page 441. Now all these errata are obvious, and the more obvious they are, the less excuse has the editor for having allowed them to remain as un- seemly blots upon a book which is, we gratefully repeat, most beautifully and charmingly printed. But there are other blunders which are not so easy to correct. What, for instance, a porter's 8' gluteus maximus" is printed for is quite beyond our guessing powers : and the astounding statement in page 40, "that the virtue of the elder Cato (prisci Catonis) is most unjustifiably ascribed to potations of unreflecting Horace," can hardly be set right by reading ' by ' for of.' For most certainly Horace said nothing of the kind. His well-known lines simply mean that good or brave old Cato is said to have often cheered his heart with -wine. But enough, and more than enough of this. The second and last charge we have to bring against the editor is that there is a most plentiful lack of order in the first three chapters of his book. These chapters might have fairly been lumped together, and entitled, "Random Recollections of Father "'rout, by John Sheehan, Blanchard Jerrold, and others together with extracts -from some of his writings, and from a literary estimate of his genius by James Hannay." These disjointed materials are thrown together so carelessly, and are so inextricably mixed and intermixed, that it is a very difficult task for the reader to know The Final Relives of Father Prout (the Rem Francis l(ahony). Collected and editedby,Blanehard Jerrold. London:. Chatto and Windns. from time to time where he is and what he is reading. To say that a very vague notion of the events of Mahony's life can be got from them is a small thing. The chronology of the uneventful life of a literary man is of no great importance, but it does seem strange that, beyond a casual allusion to his "editorial chair in the Strand," no notice should have been taken of the fact that he was once the editor of Fraser's Magazine, and that the Oliver York (sic) of the first sentence in this book is the identical able editor whom Carlyle thus apostrophises at the end of Sartor Resartus :— " Thou too, miraculous entity, that namest thyself Yorke and Oliver, and with thy vivacities and genialities, with thy all-too Irish mirth and madness, and odour of palled punch. makest such strange work, farewell ; long as thou canst, tare-well. Have we not in the course of eternity, travelled some months of our life-journey in partial eight of one another ; have we not existed together, though in a state of quarrel ?"

After all, however, since the materials themselves, as we intimated above, are so good, some defects in their arrangement may be condoned and overlooked. Readers who know what:manner of man Father Prout was, will have their memories pleasantly re- freshed; and readers who do not will here make acquaintance with a lively, genial, and able man, who mistook his vocation by taking priest's orders in the Roman Catholic Church, and finding nature too strong for him, abandoned the pulpit for the desk, and the pastor's staff for the editor's pen. A quite suffi- cient appreciation of his merits may be gained from this book, and we do not intend to make it a peg on whioh to hang a review of the Re,liques themselves. We shall have something to say.about the scholarship of Father Prout, which does not strike us as being his strongest point, but for the rest we shall content ourselves with briefly pointing out to the reader what we conceive to be the most interesting portions of this book. There are some capital stories in the opening chapters,—notably one, told by John Sheehan, of a" row" between the Padre and a madman. The whole story is much too long to quote, but with some abridgment, we may give the beginning of it. Mr. Sheehan is describing one of his, al fresco dinner-parties :—

"On one occasion Prout dropped in on us at our sunset feeding-hour, an unexpected, but—as he ever was—a welcome guest. Fish had juat been served round when a tremendous tenta-ra-ra-ra knook at the hall- door shook the wliale house from chimney-pot to foundation. The new arrival, an old Cambridge friend of mine, and a Fellow of one of the Colleges, had gone wrong in his head, and fallen into very eccentric habits for some years back. The authorities of his college,haviug refused very naturally to recommend him to Orders, he had taken it into his head, it would appear, to come out on all occasions in the style of a clerical dandy, his idea being that in doing so he should 'spite . the Dons, and make them ashamed of themselves.' Getting somewhat excited on the subject, towards the end of dinner, he declared it to be his intention before long to mount an archdeacon's hat, and turn out in smalls and black gaiters as well.'Arc you a clergyman, Sir ?" demanded the Padre of the delinquent, sharply and suddenly, looking at him across the tables over his spectacles with those singular grey oyes of his, which twinkled far from pleasantly.—'I am not, and I am ; just as you are one, and you are not, said the challenged party. —‘ That's not logic,' said Prout.--' What is it, then ?' asked the other. And the dialogue went merrily on.—P. That's evading the question. But shall I answer it for you, Sir ?'—M. 'By all moans. It will be un- like your Church, which asks all sorts of questions, and answers none.—

P. 'Then, Sir, you are not a clergyman ; and therefore you have no right to assume the dress and appearance of one—M. Cucullus non

facit monackum. Is that logic, you old Jesuit.?'—P. 'You are laughing at your own joke! '—M. Who this a better right? '—P. Sir, you're sailing under false colours !'—M. 'And clerical rig (singing at the top of his voice)—" Now we sail, With the gale, Through the Groves of Blarney, 0! Where old Prout. Is drinking stout, And whisky with Kate Kearney. 0 ! "'—P. 'Sir, you're a privateer I '—M. 'Sir, you're a gazet- teer I ' There was no resisting this absurd hit at Ps-out's journalistic occupation."

And the rest of the story is quite as good as this. Equally good, too, is a sparring-match between the Padre and Thackeray on the Boulevards at Paris, and between the Padre and Douglas Jerrold at a symposium in London, and a graphic and Lever-like account of an Irish coursing-match and carousal. All these are from the pen of Mr. Sheehan, and illustrate the gayer side of Mahony's character ; a letter from the poet Browning does justice to his graver good qualities :—

" Once he camo and found me too indisposed to see him; he changed his whole manner of indifference, and pushed into my bed-room, despite all entreaty, saying 'he knew more than any doctor about sore-throat such as I was affected by.' I remember his earnest and affectionate way; he made me drink some compound of strong wine and good things, while the Italian servants declared that the pretaccio was mur- dering the signore. However, the signore got well at once. I thought be was a man full of sympathy and in want of it, vexed by the know- ledge that his reputed Jesuitism put people upon their guard, and threw suspicion on his own advances. His love for two or three who had got at his real nature, despite of its fantastic disguises, was all the more intense. Other subsidiary touches, too faint for reproduction, help to coafirm my instinctive guess at and subsequent certainty of

the goodness of Mahony's heart ; his fine scholarship and rare faculty were plain to everybody."

The fourth chapter, "Don Jeremy Savonarola," cannot be better described than in the editor's own words :—

" Whilst professing to hail from Sardinia, and to give an account of that island and its affairs during a disturbed political epoch, it covertly caricatures the state of Ireland daring the later years of the O'Connell era. As a political satire, it was worthy of Swift himself."

High praise this, but we willingly endorse it ; and one short extract will show how entirely free the Padre was from lues .Hthernica :—

"Not so the Sardinians Averse to habits of sustained industry, un- „milling to use the means of improvement placed within their reach, taught by designing rogues that they are the finest peasantry in Europe, which they have heard so often that they almost believe it a fact, they imagine they could cut a grand figure in the world, could they only 'cut the painter.' In the meantime, they sedulously neglect every single department of local, individual, or national amelioration.”

The fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters are composed of letters written from Rome for the Daily News, and are models of what "Our own Correspondent's" letters ought to be. They bring before us in the most graphic way the state of society in the Eternal City at the end of the long reign of Gregory XVI., and paint in the brightest and liveliest colours the "bright dawn of better days," lee beaux fours of the present Pontiff. The witty Irishman had indeed no plummet wherewith to sound the seething under-current of democracy, but for all that lay upon the surface he had the keenest and surest of eyes. There is a certain Irish seminary in Rome described as "fit only to produce a set of half- witted ascetics," and one of its officials had publicly said that "the Bishops in Ireland favourable to Maynooth ought to be denied Christian burial, and their ashes thrown into the Shannon." Sydney Smith could not have come down upon him harder than Prout did. "This wiseacre," he says, "is from Waterford, for which latitude he is better fitted than that of Rome, where as yet the Turkish custom has not generally obtained of keeping a holy idiot in each mosque for luck." One 'common and vulgar error,' however, into which the Padre seems to have fallen, we would fain correct. It appears, he says, that the Roman Jews, "as being the descendants of Hebrew men settled in Rome before the Crucifixion, are in the habit of dis- claiming any part or portion in the great misdeed visited upon them and their children." This, we conceive, is a mistake. We certainly do not approve of the excuse put forward on behalf of his people by the Premier in his life of Lord G. Bentinck, but in a more reverent spirit, we would ask if it is more likely that the Most High listened to the foolish cry of "His blood be upon us and upon our children," rather than to, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do ? "

The last chapter is called, "Paris Notes under the Second Empire." But clever and sparkling as these notes sometimes are, the good steed palpably ilia ducit, and we think they might have been ' omitted. One note is curiously inaccurate Is not excommuni- cation the proper weapon of the clergy, as an elephant fights with his trunk, a cuttle-fish with his black fluid, and a polecat with his odour ?" But an elephant fights with his tusks, a cuttle-fish with his tentacles, and a polecat with its teeth and claws. We thought, too, that the Padre is as much mistaken in his hopes that the fire- king will vanquish the water-channel, and 'Vulcan beat Simois ' again in Southern France. A most ingenious gentleman, Mons.

A. Mauler, has laid before the authorities of Toulouse and Bordeaux a scheme for an ocean-canal between the Bay of Biscay and the

Gulf of Lyons, which will complete the work of the Suez Canal, and by intercepting the water from the Pyrenees will prevent those dreadful inundations with which we are so familiar, and by the water-power so obtained turn the districts in the neighbourhood of the great work into a French Lancashire. The idea is a noble one, and we wish it all success.

We have said that we do not think that Father Front's scholar- ship is his strong point. We have no space to defend our opinion at full, but a few remarks—cpwrierra avseriuor—will prove that we have not formed it without reason. There are certain little blunders which, if a scholar can make them, indicate large seams of weakness in his scholarship. Take, for instance, this stanza, in the much praised version of Horace's famous ode Ad Thaliarchum.

Nunc, says the poet—and by nunc he means while you are young--

" Nun° et Campus et areas, Lenesque sub noctem susurri Com- posite repetatur bora." We have nothing to do with Venusian morality just now, but this advice is pretty much that of a Parisian Chesterfield who should bid his son look for a lass, at the " cannie hour" of evening in the Bois de Boulogne or on the Boulevards.

See what the Padre makes of it:—" While youth's hour lasts, be- guile it ; Follow the field, the camp, Each manly sport, till twilight

Brings on the vesper-lamp. Then let the loved one lisp her Fond feelings in a whisper." Something, we are aware, may be said

for the " manly-sport " interpretation, but campus, the camp The g ther's ear for quantity, too, is a little "more Irish and less nice," as Byron says, than we English scholars would like to find it. We hardly forgive Scott for his famous "Moritur et moriens dukes reminiscitur Argos," and we are not at all inclined to tolerate three false quantities in one line, which Mahony has given us in a quotation from Martial : "line septem dominos videre montes. Et totem licet contemplari Romam." A little slip like this of contemplari for wstimare proves that Front, although he could clearly have given Mr. Gladstone any amount of weight at rhyming Latin verses, had a deaf ear for the metre in which Catullus has- written some of his most charming lyrics. One more criticism, and we have done. We do not expect the accuracy of German exegesis in scholars of the stamp of Father Prout, but to suppose that "the Sabine humourirst ever asserted that the Muses had en- dowed Virgil with a talent for the facetious [molle atquefacetunt] " is going a little too far. In conclusion, we can gladly say that Mahony had gifts and acquirements of a far higher kind than scholarly, and we heartly commend this handsome volume to all lovers of sound wit, genuine humour, and manly sense.