"THE DANE'S MAN."
IATITHOTTT committing ourselves to the proposition that
ignorance enhances the charm of conversation, we are even less inclined to hold that much book-learning or a vast stock of accurate knowledge makes a good talker. A witty lady of rank of the last generation was under the im- pression that a hydraulic ram was an animal, and the late Mr. Frederick Locker records in his " Confidences" how Dean Stanley failed to appreciate Sir Charles Halle's humorous story of the German servant and the lottery ticket because he was unable to realise that four times seven did not make twenty-three. These casual or unexpected lacunce in the mental equipment of educated, or even distin- guished, men and women are, however, too well known to be insisted upon. What we are more concerned to impress on our readers is the combination in the lower strata of our social system of practical illiteracy with a gift of racy or incisive speech which would make the fortune of those born in a higher station. To borrow a famous saying of the late Lord Bowen, we nowadays not only elaborately celebrate the centenary of nothing, but we exhaustively compile the biography of nobody. But how much that is really entertaining and suggestive is lost from the absence of those who are prepared to play Boswell to the un- tutored Johnsons who not only never emerge on to the plane of successful mediocrity, but live and die in humble, or even menial, positions. How many of our readers must have encountered original, quaint, or even beautiful characters amongst their nurses, cooks, butlers, coachmen, gillies, gardeners, or shepherds, and how often they must have regretted that they never preserved a faithful record of their shrewd or humorous sayings! The example of some of the greatest masters of fiction is certainly instructive on this point; to take two out of many instances, one need only point to Caleb Balderstone in "Tbe Bride of Lammermoor" and the old nurse in Tolstoi's "Souvenirs."
An almost ideal specimen of the way in which such a task should be executed has recently come into our hands in the shape of a little book printed for private circulation, and entitled "Edgiana," being a collection, with a memoir and notes, of some of the sayings of Edward Edge, who for twenty-five years served as porter to the late Dean of St. Patrick's. Edge, who was installed as " the Dane's man " in 1865, came, in his own phrase, of " a rale ould Prodesan County Wickla fam'ly." His education was meagre: he could not write, and read with difficulty. He never left Ireland; indeed, he probably never ranged beyond the borders of Dublin and Wicklow, and h's
geographical knowledge may be indicated by the statement, " Well, now, I'd accuse Ittle-y to be somewhere nigh-hand to th' island o' Hungary." To him a Huguenot was a " Jew- ganawt ''; bronchial tubes " bronnicle tubs," and homoe- opathy " home-potticks." He was, in fine, almost incapable of accuracy where polysyllables were concerned. His book- learning consisted of a few dates and names connected with ecclesiastical history—e.g., " The Council o' the Latther Ann " (Lateran), "Pope Hiliary Bran" (Hildebrand)—and a fairly exhaustive acquaintance with Culpepper's " Herbal!'
And yet this illiterate ea-farm labourer, by the originality of his language, the rich variety of his objurgations, and the shrewdness of his comments on men and things, appeals with equal force to the lover of humour and the student of folk- speech. Of his early days in his beloved "Co. Wickla" there are some most engaging reminiscences in the sayings,
—e.g., " Ilany's the time an' me a pup of a lad [in parts of Scotland they still call a kitten a pup-cat], I'd climb
up into the threes, and fling meself down off o' the boughs out o' pewer villiany. No bird id compare wid me." To his Wicklow days also belongs the anecdote of the frog- eater :—"I knew a great able nodget [nugget, i.e., a thick-set man] once in the Co. Wickla, an' be used t' ate frogs. Him and me was workin' in a field wan day, along wid some other
lads, and says he to me, says he, 'Did ye ever see a man ate a frog ? Bedad I'll ate 3 dozen for a penny apiece!' So we made a conscription and got divil a ha'porth less nor three or four shillin' in coppers, and me lad set to work swallyin' the frogs; an' I give you me throth he swallied seventeen o' them down his mild neck, and they tcarin' and scrawnain'!" Another heroic incident is that of Joe Kelly and the Bray robbers. Joe Kelly, a familiar figure at Bray for half a century, aft& giving the robbers due warning, blazed into them with his old blunderbuss with such effect that "for the next six weeks the' was laid up in disk-yize wid all the time the slugs and swandhrops comin' out o' their legs," or as Joe himself more modestly asserted, "they were occupied for the next week in pickin' the swandhrops out o' their breastbone wid a penknife." Edge's opinion of the English does not transpire, but he had a wholesome contempt for foreigners. On seeing a photograph of the Apollo Belvedere, he exclaimed : " What is it ata.11—atall ? Heth [i.e., Faith], an' is it a man or a woman ? Aw gor, I'm thinkin' it must be some kyind of a fawrdner," adding, " Sure the breed o' them ould fawrdners does be mostly mixed, just the same as it might be cows or sheep I" Though in some respects a " Black Protestant," he went so far as to admit that there were " rogues Roman " as well as "rogues Prodesan." In regard to medicine his views were somewhat mediaeval. Out of his numerous prescriptions we may select the following as typical : " Yid take and dhrink maybe it id be the divil a less than from three to four pints o' po.ertther wid a great big loomp o' bntther on top of each pint; well, yid fire that down your neck ; and then yid het up on an ould kyar, an' mindja the road should be rale joulty, an' yid give th' ould horse a couple of leadthers [i.e., strokes] o' the wattle an' make him gallop as hard as ever he could, and (be the good man !) it id give ye the divil's fine rallyin' and next mornin' yid be as clane as a whistle." Of Edge's copious and expressive store of ornamental expletives, it must suffice us to notice that they illustrate with remark. able felicity the practice, so common in the annals of objur- gation, of " dodging a curse" by the device of disguising the word—e.g., blazes becomes " blakers "—that, as the editor points out, some of his most ornate oaths occur in Shake- speare; and that the most curious of all, "Be the Mack," is to be found in Ben Jonson. As regards his diction generally, he disdained, like Virgil, to say a plain thing in a plain way, and never deviated into the commonplace. For him all boots were "Blootchers," tobacconists were sublimated into " tibacca-twisthers," a short coat was a " leppin'-frock, a smart umbrella a " fancy parapew," and a piano by a daring trope was metamorphosed into an "ould thrombone." Even a simple sheep's head attained distinction in the Edgian dialect as a " ram's skull," while an old stuffed heron was a "pelican." Indeed, almost every conceivable figure of speech or device of rhetoric can be illustrated in these sayings. What better
example of the pathetic fallacy, for instance, could be devised than the phrase "a peevish wind "? How dramatic, again,
are the exaggerations in the description of an excited crowd, "they run like an open rebellion," or of his own eye-lotion as being so powerful that "when ye shook the bottle, it id paha cork higher nor Pathrick's [i.e., the spire of St. Patrick's] wid the vi'lence o' the wash I'd make."
We have noted above the strange fact of ornate Shake- spearian oaths, long fallen into desuetude amongst the upper classes—the decline of swearing in good society, by the way, is commented on in Sir Algernon West's reminiscences— being perpetuated in the daily speech of "the Dane's man." But after all this is only in accordance with the fitness of things. Edge had probably never heard of Shakespeare, or at most might have "accused" him of being a " fawrdner," but he was none the less a thoroughly Shakespearian character, an intellectual descendant of one of the rustics and artisans immortalised by the dramatist. There was some- thing elemental in his self-esteem as in his ncti/vete. He was, in short, the raw material out of which a modern Dogberry might have evolved; and although the modest little book before ns is a photograph and not a dramatic portrait, we are reminded in its perusal of that "patient sympathy and kindly fellow- feeling for the narrow intelligence necessarily induced by narrow circumstances" which the late Mr. Bagehot declared, though quick and half-bred minds might despise it, to be "a necessary constituent in the composition of manifold genius." It also enforces the truth of Scott's admirable remark, which Mr. Bagehot quoted in his essay on Shakespeare, that "amid all the changes of our manners the ancient freedom of personal intercourse may still be indulged between a master and an out-of-door servant." Sir Walter, as one of his dependants said, " spoke to every man as if he was his blood relation." We owe to the maintenance of this honour- able tradition a fascinating memoir, enriched in its notes an 3 appendices with acute scholarship tempered by the play of whimsical fancy, of a genuine humourist who achieved originality of expression though unversed either in logic or in letters.
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