The christening of the “young heathen” took place in due time. The
ceremony is well described, and the style eminently characteristic, for
it is light, airy, graceful, and considerably profane. Then comes a
pause, extending, as it would appear, over some years—and after that a
graphic account of the lumbering of a post-coach, “on the evening of a
dreary winter’s day, up the ill-paved hill of an old street in the
oldest part of Dublin, called Fish Shambles Street.” Where the coach
came from we are not told, but it conveyed Mrs Owenson and her two
daughters (for by this time Olivia likewise had been born, and both she
and Sydney were able to take their share in conversation) to the new
home which Mr Owenson had prepared for them. And here comes another
mystery. The house is evidently a ruin—but why a ruin, and how, if ever,
repaired, we never learn. It is enough for us to know that Mr Owenson,
in breach of his engagement with Mr Daley of Castle Daley, had taken the
National Theatre Music Hall, and that it was opened with the
representation of three pieces,—“‘The Carmelite,’ ‘The Brave Irishman,’
and ‘The Poor Soldier.’ A medley of Irish airs made up the overture,
which ended with the Volunteers’ March, and my father wrote and spoke
the prologue in his own character of an Irish Volunteer.” Now, if we
recollect aright, the Irish Volunteers were in their glory about 1782,
and as we learn that Miss Sydney, when the “post-coach” set down its
burden, had held an interesting conversation with her mother about
Handel, it appears to us that on this eventful night she could not have
been less than six years old at the least.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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