Gentlemen of England, where is your knowledge of history? which of your famed monarchs was it that was going to play this scurvy trick upon our _Goban_, and earn for himself the infamous notoriety of a second _Laomedon_, by defrauding this _architect_, who no doubt was a _Hercules_, of his stipulated salary? Ye shades of Alfred and of Ethelbert, I pause for a reply? But this indignity, if offered to _Goban_, would be even greater than that offered by Laomedon to Hercules; for in the latter case the crime was only that of _dishonesty_--which is not uncommon in any age--superadded to a spice of _impiety_, in cheating a god; but in the former case, over and above all these, would weigh a consideration which our people would never forget, namely, a violation of the laws of _gallantry_, this same Goban “having been believed in this part of this country to have been a _woman_!”[433] And yet the same vehicle that puts forth this trash has told us, in the preceding extract, that he was a _father_ and a _husband_! (I do not believe in hermaphrodites), and, to crown the climax of absurdity, gives us the following specimen of the _heroism_ of his _wife_, namely:-- “The Goban Saer having been barbarously murdered, together with his journeymen, by twelve highwaymen, the murderers proceeded to his house, and told the Goban’s wife, with an air of triumph, that they had killed her husband. She appearing nowise concerned, asked them to assist her in drawing open the trunk of a tree, which the Goban had been cutting up into planks. They put in their hands for the purpose, when, drawing out a wedge, she left them literally in a cleft stick, and taking up an axe, cut off all their heads at a blow”![434] But this is ludicrously trifling with the time of my readers. I am alive to the fact, and I most submissively crave forgiveness, which I doubt not I shall receive, when I state that my sole object was to expose the _flimsiness_ of that subterfuge by which the Royal Irish Academy, or rather their council! had hoped that they could blindfold the public as well as they had succeeded in sequestrating my prize! I do not deny indeed but that there may have been in Ireland at one time such a person as the Goban Saer: but if ever he did belong thereto, it must have been at least _sixteen hundred_ years before the epoch which the Academy sanction--and so sanction, be it observed, because that a weak-minded poor monk, when writing the biography of _St. Abhan_, and torturing his invention, in all quarters, for the purpose of conjuring up miracles to lay to his score, thought the similarity of sound between _Abhan_ and _Gobhan_ so inviting, that he must contrive an interview between the parties; and so, with “one fell swoop,” alias, _dash of the pen_, cutting off the centuries of separation, he treats himself and his pupils to the following burlesque:--