“Mark the effects of this observance in Ireland, where it is no humbug, but continues in its primitive austerity, undiminished, unshorn of its beams. The Irish may be wrong, but the consequences to Protestant England are immense. To Lent you owe the connexion of the two islands; it is the golden link that binds the two kingdoms together. Abolish fasting, and from that evil hour no beef or pork would be suffered by the wild natives to go over to your English markets; and the export of provisions would be discontinued by a people that had unlearned the lessons of starvation. Adieu to shipments of live-stock and consignments of bacon! Were there not some potent mysterious spell over this country, think you we should allow the fat of the land to be everlastingly abstracted? Let us learn that there is no virtue in Lent, and repeal is triumphant to-morrow. We are in truth a most abstemious race. Hence our great superiority over our Protestant fellow-countrymen in the jury-box. It having been found that they could never hold out against hunger as we can, when locked up, and that the verdict was generally carried by popish obstinacy, former administrations discountenanced our admission to serve on juries at all. By an oversight of Sergeant Lefroy, all this has escaped the framers of the new jury-bill for Ireland. "To return to the Irish exports. The principal item is that of pigs. The hog is as essential an in mate of the Irish cabin as the Arab steed of the shepherd's tent on the plains of Mesopotamia. Both are looked on as part of the household; and the affectionate manner in which these dumb friends of the family are treated, here as well as there, is a trait of national resemblance, denoting a common origin. We are quite oriental in most of our peculiarities. The learned Vallancey will have it, that our consanguinity is with the Jews. I might elucidate the colonel's discovery, by shewing how the pig in Ireland plays the part of the scape-goat of the Israelites: he is a sacred thing, gets the run of the kitchen, is rarely molested, never killed, but alive and buoyant leaves the cabin when taken off by the landlord's driver for arrears of rent, and is then shipped clean out of the country, to be heard of no more. Indeed, the pigs of Ireland bear this notable resemblance to their cousins of Judea, that nothing can keep them from the sea,a tendency which strikes all travellers in the interior of the island whenever they meet our droves of swine precipitating themselves towards the outports for shipment. "To ordinary observers this forbearance of the most ill-fed people on the face of the globe towards their pigs would appear inexplicable; and if you have read the legend of Saint Anthony and his pig, you will understand the value of their resistance to temptation. "They have a great resource in the potato. This capital esculent grows no where in such perfection, not even in America, where it is indigenous. But it has often struck me that a great national delinquency has occurred in the sad neglect of people in this country towards the memory of the great and good man who conferred on us so valuable a boon, on his return from the expedition to Virginia. To Sir Walter Raleigh no monument has yet been erected, and nothing has been done to repair the injustice of his contemporaries. His head has rolled from the scaffold on Tower Hill; and though he has fed with his discovery more families, and given a greater impulse to population, than any other benefactor of mankind, no testimonial exists to commemorate his benefaction. Nelson has a pillar in Dublin:—in the city of Limerick a whole column has been devoted to Spring Rice!! and the mighty genius of Raleigh is forgotten. I have seen some animals feed under the majestic oak on the acorns that fell from its spreading branches (glande sues læti), without once looking up to the parent tree that showered down blessings on their ungrateful heads." Here endeth the "Apology," and so abruptly terminate my notes of Prout's Lenten vindicia. But, alas! still more abrupt was the death of this respectable divine, which occurred last month, on Shrove Tuesday. There was a peculiar fitness in the manner of Anacreon's exit from this life; but not so in the melancholy termination of Prout's abstemious career, an account of which is conveyed to me in a long and pathetic letter from my agent in Ireland. It was well known that he disliked revelry on all occasions; but if there was a species of gormandising which he more especially abhorred, it was that practised in the parish on pancake-night, which he frequently endeavoured to discountenance and put down, but unsuccessfully. Oft did he tell his rude auditors (for he was a profound Hellenist) that such orgies had originated with the heathen Greeks, and had been even among them the source of many evils, as the very name shewed, παν κακον! Tay xaxoy! So it would appear, by Prout's etymology of the pancake, that in the English language there are many terms which answer the description of Horace, and "Græco fonte cadent parce detorta." Contrary to his own better taste and sounder judgment, he was, however, on last Shrove Tuesday, at a wedding-feast of some of my tenantry, induced, from complacency to the newly married couple, to eat of the profane aliment; and never was the Attic derivation of the pancake more wofully accomplished than in the sad result,-for his condescension cost him his life. The indigestible nature of the compost itself might not have been so destructive in an ordinary case; but it was quite a stranger and ill at ease in Father Prout's stomach: it eventually proved fatal in its effects, and hurried him away from this vale of tears, leaving the parish a widow, and making orphans of all his parishioners. My agent writes that his funeral (or berring, as the Irish call it) was thronged by dense multitudes from the whole county, and was as well attended as if it were a tithe-meeting. The whole body of his brother clergy, with the bishop as usual in full pontificals, were mourners on the occasion; and a Latin elegy was composed by the most learned of the order, Father Magrath, one, like Prout, of the old school, who had studied at Florence, and is still a correspondent of many learned Societies abroad. That elegy I have subjoined, as a record of Prout's genuine worth, and as a specimen of a kind of poetry called Leonine verse, little cultivated at the present day, but greatly in vogue at the revival of letters under Leo X. IN MORTEM VENERABILIS ANDREÆ PROUT, CARMEN. Quid juvat in pulchro Sanctos dormire sepulchro ! Plebs tenui fossá Pastoris condidit ossa, |