windmill. It was unworthy of him to turn on O'Brien, after the intimacy of private correspondence; and if he was inclined for battle, he might have found a seemlier foe. Surely my young friend was not the quarry on which the vulture should delight to pounce, when there are so many literary reptiles to tempt his beak and glut his maw! Heaven knows, there is fair game and plentiful carrion on the plains of Boeotia. In the poet's picture of the pursuits of a royal bird, we find such sports alluded to

"In reluctantes dracones

Egit amor dapis atque pugnæ."

Let Moore, then, vent his indignation and satiate his voracity on the proper objects of a volatile of prey; but he will find in his own province of imaginative poetry a kindlier element, a purer atmosphere, for his winged excursions. Long, long may we behold the gorgeous bird soaring through the regions of inspiration, distinguished in his loftier as in his gentler flights, and combining, by a singular miracle of ornithology, the voice of the turtle-dove, the eagle's eye and untiring wing, with the plumage of the "bird of Paradise."

MEM. On the 28th of June, 1835, died, at the Hermitage, Hanwell," Henry O'Brien, author of the

Round Towers of Ireland." His portrait was hung up in the gallery of Regina on the 1st of August following; and the functionary who exhibits the "Literary Characters" dwelt thus on his merits:

In the village graveyard of Hanwell (ad viii. ab urbe lapidem) sleeps the original of yonder sketch, and the rude forefathers of the Saxon hamlet have consented to receive among them the clay of a Milesian scholar. That "original" was no stranger to us. Some time back we had our misgivings that the oil in his flickering lamp of life would soon dry up; still, we were not prepared to hear of his light being thus abruptly extinguished. "One morn we missed him" from the accustomed table at the library of the British Museum, where the page of antiquity awaited his perusal ; "another came-nor yet" was he to be seen behind the pile of "Asiatic Researches," poring over his favourite Herodotus, or deep in the Zendavesta. "The next" brought tidings of his death.

"Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive,

J'apparus un jour, et je meurs ;

Je meurs, et sur la tombe où, jeune encor, j'arrive
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs."

His book on "the Round Towers" has thrown more light on the
early history of Ireland, and on the freemasonry of these gigantic
puzzles, than will ever shine from the cracked pitchers of the
“Royal Irish Academy," or the farthing candle of Tommy Moore.
And it was quite natural that he should have received from them,
during his lifetime, such tokens of malignant hostility as might
sufficiently "tell how they hated his beams."
Irish" twaddlers must surely feel some compunction now, when
they look back on their paltry transactions in the matter of the
"prize-essay;" and though we do not expect much from "Tom
Brown the younger," or "Tom Little," the author of sundry

The " Royal

Tomfudgeries and Tomfooleries, still it would not surprise us if he now felt the necessity of atoning for his individual misconduct by doing appropriate penance in a white sheet, or a "blue and yellow" blanket, when next he walks abroad in that rickety gocart of drivelling dotage, the " Edinburgh Review."

While Cicero was quæstor in Sicily, he discovered in the suburbs of Syracuse the neglected grave of Archimedes, from the circumstance of a symbolical cylinder indicating the pursuits and favourite theories of the illustrious dead. Great was his joy at the recognition. No emblem will mark the sequestered spot where lies the Edipus of the Round Tower riddle-no hieroglyphic,

"Save daisies on the mould,

Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate,
His name and life's brief date."

B

But ye who wish for monuments to his memory, go to his native land, and there — circumspicite !—Glendalough, Devenish, Clondalkin, Inniscattery, rear their architectural cylinders; and each, through those mystic apertures that face the cardinal points, proclaims to the four winds of heaven, trumpet-tongued, the name of him who solved the problem of 3000 years, and who first disclosed the drift of these erections!

Fame, in the Latin poet's celebrated personification, is described as perched

From these Moore, in the

That of O'B. is pre-eminently so circumstanced. proud pinnacles nothing can dislodge his renown. recent pitiful compilation meant for "a history," talks of thes monuments as being so many "astronomical indexes." He might as well have said they were tubes for the purposes of gastronomy. "Tis plain he knew as little about their origin as he may be sup

posed to know of the " Hanging Tower of Pisa," or the "Torre degli Asinelli," or how the nose of the beloved resembled the tower of Damascus.

Concerning the subject of this memoir, suffice it to add that he was born in the kingdom of Iveragh, graduated in T. C. D. (having been classically "brought up at the feet of" the Rev. Charles Boyton); and fell a victim here to the intense ardour with which he pursued the antiquarian researches that he loved.

"Kerria me genuit; studia, heu! rapuêre; tenet nunc
Anglia: sed patriam turrigeram cecini."

265

No. VI.

LITERATURE AND THE JESUITS.

From the Prout Papers.

"Alii spem gentis adultos

Educunt fœtus: alii purissima mella

Stipant, et liquido distendunt nectare cellas."

VIRG. Georgic. IV.

"Through flowery paths

Skilled to guide youth, in haunts where learning dwells,

They filled with honey'd lore their cloistered cells."

PROUT.

THE recent massacre by a brutal populace in Madrid of fourteen Jesuits, in the very hall of their college of St. Isidoro, has drawn somewhat of notice, if not of sympathy, to this singular order of literati, whom we never fail, for the last three hundred years, to find mixed up with every political disturbance. There is a certain species of bird well known to ornithologists, but better still to mariners, which is sure to make its