"There, Dick, you are wrong," said O'Toole, sententiously. Both Misset
and Gaydon came to a dead stop and stared. Never had poetry so strange
an advocate. O'Toole set his great legs apart and his arms akimbo. He
rocked himself backwards and forwards on his heels and toes, while a
benevolent smile of superiority wrinkled across his broad face from ear
to ear. "Yes, I've done it," said he; "I've written poetry. It is a
thing a polite gentleman should be able to do. So I did it. It wasn't in
Latin, because the young lady it was written to didn't understand Latin.
Her name was Lucy, and I rhymed her to 'juicy,' and the pleasure of it
made her purple in the face. There were to have been four lines, but
there were never more than three and a half because I could not think of
a suitable rhyme to O'Toole. Lucy said she knew one, but she would never
tell it me."
Wogan's poetry, however, was of quite a different kind, and had Gaydon
looked at it a trifle more closely, he would have experienced some
relief. It was all about the sorrows and miseries of his unfortunate
race and the cruel oppression of England. England owed all its great men
to Ireland and was currish enough never to acknowledge the debt. Wogan
always grew melancholy and grave-faced on that subject when he had the
leisure to be idle. He thought bitterly of the many Irish officers sent
into exile and killed in the service of alien countries; his sense of
injustice grew into a passionate sort of despair, and the despair
tumbled out of him in sonorous Latin verse written in the Virgilian
measure. He wrote a deal of it during this month of waiting, and a long
while afterwards sent an extract to Dr. Swift and received the great
man's compliments upon its felicity, as anyone may see for himself in
the doctor's correspondence.
How the month passed for James Stuart in Rome may be partly guessed from
a letter which was brought to Wogan by Michael Vezozzi, the Chevalier's
body-servant.
The letter announced that King George of England had offered the
Princess Clementina a dowry of £100,000 if she would marry the Prince of
Baden, and that the Prince of Baden with a numerous following was
already at Innspruck to prosecute his suit.
"I do not know but what her Highness," he wrote, "will receive the best
consolation for her sufferings on my account if she accepts so
favourable a proposal, rather than run so many hazards as she must needs
do as my wife. For myself, I have been summoned most urgently into Spain
and am travelling thither on the instant."
Wogan could make neither head nor tail of the letter. Why should the
King go to Spain at the time when the Princess Clementina might be
expected at Bologna? It was plain that he did not expect Wogan would
succeed. He was disheartened. Wogan came to the conclusion that there
was the whole meaning of the letter. He was, however, for other reasons
glad to receive it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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