Penelope's Irish ExperiencesWiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
General
Penelope's Irish Experiences
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith
Ireland -- Fiction
Mr. Jordan's wife has been long dead, but he has four sons, only one of
them, Napper Tandy, living at home. Theobald Wolfe Tone is practising
law in Dublin; Hamilton Rowan is a physician in Cork; and Daniel
O'Connell, commonly called 'Lib' (a delicate reference to the
Liberator), is still a lad at Trinity. It is a great pity that Mr.
Jordan could not have had a larger family, that he might have kept fresh
in the national heart the names of a few more patriots; for his library
walls, 'where Memory sits by the altar she has raised to Woe,' are hung
with engravings and prints of celebrated insurgents, rebels, agitators,
demagogues, denunciators, conspirators,--pictures of anybody, in a word,
who ever struck a blow, right or wrong, well or ill judged, for the
green isle. That gallant Jacobite, Patrick Sarsfield, Burke, Grattan,
Flood, and Robert Emmet stand shoulder to shoulder with three Fenian
gentlemen, names Allan, Larkin, and O'Brien, known in ultra-Nationalist
circles as the 'Manchester martyrs.' For some years after this trio was
hanged in Salford jail, it appears that the infant mind was sadly mixed
in its attempt to separate knowledge in the concrete from the more or
less abstract information contained in the Catechism; and many a bishop
was shocked, when asking in the confirmation service, “Who are the
martyrs?” to be told, “Allan, Larkin, and O'Brien, me lord!”
Francesca says she longs to smuggle into Mr. Jordan's library a picture
of Tom Steele, one of Daniel O'Connell's henchmen, to whom he gave the
title of Head Pacificator of Ireland. Many amusing stories are told
of this official, of his gaudy uniform, his strut and swagger, and his
pompous language. At a political meeting on one occasion, he attacked,
it seems, one Peter Purcell, a Dublin tradesman who had fallen out with
the Liberator on some minor question. “Say no more on the subject, Tom,”
cried O'Connell, who was in the chair, “I forgive Peter from the bottom
of my heart.”
“You may forgive him, liberator and saviour of my country,” rejoined
Steele, in a characteristic burst of his amazingly fervent rhetoric.
“Yes, you, in the discharge of your ethereal functions as the moral
regenerator of Ireland, may forgive him; but, revered leader, I also
have functions of my own to perform; and I tell you that, as Head
Pacificator of Ireland, I can never forgive the diabolical villain that
dared to dispute your august will.”
The doughty Steele, who appears to have been but poorly fitted by nature
for his office, was considered at the time to be half a madman, but as
Sir James O'Connell, Daniel's candid brother, said, “And who the divil
else would take such a job?” At any rate, when we gaze at Mr. Jordan's
gallery, imagining the scene that would ensue were the breath of life
breathed into the patriots' quivering nostrils, we feel sure that the
Head Pacificator would be kept busy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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