Tales and Novels Volume IV Part 5

"The learned man replied, 'Blockhead, as you are, why then do you say to me what you are now saying?'" [25]

Making allowance for the difference of manners in eastern and northern nations, there is, certainly, such a similarity between this oriental anecdote and Joe Miller's story, that we may conclude the latter is stolen from the former. Now, an _Irish_ bull must be a species of blunder _peculiar_ to Ireland; those that we have hitherto examined, though they may be called Irish bulls by the ignorant vulgar, have no right, t.i.tle, or claim to such a distinction. We should invariably exclude from that cla.s.s all blunders which can be found in another country. For instance, a speech of the celebrated Irish beauty, Lady C----, has been called a bull; but as a parallel can be produced in the speech of an English n.o.bleman, _it tells for nothing_. When her ladys.h.i.+p was presented at court, his majesty, George the Second, politely hoped, "that, since her arrival in England, she had been entertained with the gaieties of London."

"Oh, yes, please your majesty, I have seen every sight in London worth seeing, except a coronation."

This _navete_ is certainly not equal to that of the English earl marshal, who, when his king found fault with some arrangement at his coronation, said, "Please your majesty, I hope it will be better next time."

A _navete_ of the same species entailed a heavy tax upon the inhabitants of Beaune, in France. Beaune is famous for burgundy; and Henry the Fourth, pa.s.sing through his kingdom, stopped there, and was well entertained by his loyal subjects. His Majesty praised the burgundy which they set before him--"It was excellent! it was admirable!"

"Oh, sire!" cried they, "do you think this excellent? _we have much finer_ burgundy than this."

"Have you so? then you can afford to pay for it," replied Harry the Fourth; and he laid a double tax thenceforward upon the burgundy of Beaune.

Of the same cla.s.s of blunders is the following speech, which we actually heard not long ago from an Irishman:--

"Please your wors.h.i.+p, he sent me to the devil, and I came straight to your honour."

We thought this an original Irish blunder, till we recollected its prototype in Marmontel's Annette and Lubin. Lubin concludes his harangue with, "The bailiff sent us to the devil, and we come to put ourselves under your protection, my lord." [26]

The French, at least in former times, were celebrated for politeness; yet we meet with a _nave_ compliment of a Frenchman, which would have been accounted a bull if it had been found in Ireland.

A gentleman was complimenting Madame Denis on the manner in which she had just acted Zaire. "To act that part," said she, "a person should be young and handsome." "Ah, madam!" replied the complimenter _navement_, "you are a complete proof of the contrary." [27]

We know not any original Irish blunder superior to this, unless it be that which Lord Orford p.r.o.nounced to be the best bull that he ever heard.

"I hate that woman," said a gentleman, looking at one who had been his nurse; "I hate that woman, for she changed me at nurse."

Lord Orford particularly admires this bull, because in the confusion of the blunderer's ideas he is not clear even of his personal ident.i.ty.

Philosophers will not perhaps be so ready as his lords.h.i.+p has been to call this a blunder of the first magnitude. Those who have never been initiated into the mysteries of metaphysics may have the presumptuous ignorance to fancy that they understand what is meant by the common words _I_, or _me_; but the able metaphysician knows better than Lord Orford's changeling how to prove, to our satisfaction, that we know nothing of the matter.

"Personal ident.i.ty," says Locke, "consists not in the ident.i.ty of substance, but in the ident.i.ty of consciousness, wherein Socrates and the present mayor of Queenborough agree they are the same person: if the same Socrates, sleeping and waking, do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same person; and to punish Socrates waking for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of right than to punish one twin for what his brother twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides are so like that they could not be distinguished; for such twins have been seen." [28]

We may presume that our Hibernian's consciousness could not retrograde to the time when he was changed at nurse; consequently there was no continuity of ident.i.ty between the infant and the man who expressed his hatred of the nurse for perpetrating the fraud. At all events, the confusion of ident.i.ty which excited Lord Orford's admiration in our Hibernian is by no means unprecedented in France, England, or ancient Greece, and consequently it cannot be an instance of national idiosyncracy, or an Irish bull. We find a similar blunder in Spain, in the time of Cervantes:--

"Pray tell me, squire," says the d.u.c.h.ess, in Don Quixote, "is not your master the person whose history is printed under the name of the sage Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, who professes himself the admirer of one Dulcinea del Toboso?"

"The very same, my lady," answered Sancho; "and I myself am that very squire of his, who is mentioned, or ought to be mentioned, in that history, _unless they have changed me in the cradle_."

In Moliere's Amphitrion there is a dialogue between Mercure and Sosie, evidently taken from the _Attic_ Lucian. Sosie being completely puzzled out of his personal ident.i.ty, if not out of his senses, says literally, "of my being myself I begin to doubt in good earnest; yet when I feel myself, and when I recollect myself, it seems to me that _I am I_." [29]

We see that the puzzle about ident.i.ty proves at last to be of Grecian origin. It is really edifying to observe how those things which have long been objects of popular admiration shrink and fade when exposed to the light of strict examination. An experienced critic proposed that a work should be written to inquire into the pretensions of modern writers to original invention, to trace their thefts, and to restore the property to the ancient owners. Such a work would require powers and erudition beyond what can be expected from any ordinary individual; the labour must be shared amongst numbers, and we are proud to a.s.sist in ascertaining the rightful property even of bulls and blunders; though without pretending, like some literary blood-hounds, to follow up a plagiarism, where common sagacity is at a fault.

CHAPTER II.

IRISH NEWSPAPERS.

We presume that we have successfully disputed the claims imposed upon the public, in behalf of certain spurious alien blunders, pretending to be native, original Irish bulls; and we shall now with pleasure proceed to examine those which have better t.i.tles to notice. Even nonsense ceases to be worthy of attention and public favour, unless it be original.

"Dear Lady Emily," says Miss Allscrip, in the excellent comedy of the Heiress--"Dear Lady Emily, don't you dote upon folly?"

"To ecstasy!" replies her ladys.h.i.+p; "I only despair of seeing it well kept up."

We flatter ourselves, "there is no great danger of that," for we have the Irish newspapers before us, where, no doubt, we shall find a fresh harvest of indigenous absurdity ripe for the sickle.

The first advertis.e.m.e.nt that meets our eye is promising.

It is the late proclamation of an Irish mayor, in which we are informed, that certain business is to be transacted in that city "every Monday (Easter Sunday only excepted)." This seems rather an unnecessary exception; but it is not an inadvertency, caused by any hurry of business in his wors.h.i.+p; it is deliberately copied from a precedent, set in England, by a baronet formerly well known in parliament, who, in the preamble to a bill, proposed that certain regulations should take place "on every Monday (Tuesday excepted)." We fear, also, that an English mayor has been known to blunder. Some years ago the mayor of a capital English city published a proclamation and advertis.e.m.e.nt, previous to the races, "that no gentleman will be allowed to ride on the course, but _the horses_ that are to run." A mayor's blundering proclamation is not, however, worth half so much in the eye of ridicule as a lord lieutenant's.

"A saint in c.r.a.pe is twice a saint in lawn."

A bull on the throne is worth twice as much as a bull in the chair.

"By the lord lieutenant and council of Ireland.

A proclamation.

"Whereas the greatest economy is necessary in the consumption of _all species of grain, and especially in the consumption of potatoes, &c_.

"Given at the council chamber in Dublin."

This is the first time we have been informed, by authority, that potatoes are a species of grain; but we must accede to this new botanical arrangement, when published under such splendid auspices.

The a.s.sertion certainly is not made in distinct terms: but all who understand the construction of language must imply the conclusion that we draw from these premises. A general position is in the first member of the sentence laid down, "_that the greatest economy is necessary in the consumption of all species of grain_." A particular exemplification of the principle is made in the next clause, "_especially in the consumption of potatoes_."

The inference is as plain as can be made.

The next article in our newspaper is an advertis.e.m.e.nt of lands to be let to _an improving tenant_:--"A few miles from Cork, in _a most sporting country_, bounded by an _uncommon fine_ turf bog, on the verge of which there are a number of fine _lime kilns_, where _that manure_ may be had on very moderate terms, the distance for carriage not being many hundred yards. The whole lands being now in great heart, and completely laid down, entirely surrounded, and divided by _impenetrable furze ditches, made of quarried stones laid edgeways_."

It will be a matter of difficulty to the untravelled English reader to comprehend how furze ditches can be made of quarried stones laid edgeways, or any way; and we fear that we should only puzzle his intellects still more if we should attempt to explain to him the mysteries of Irish ditching in the technical terms of the country. With the face of a ditch he may be acquainted, but to _the back_ and _gripe_, and bottom of the gripe, and top of the back of a ditch, we fear he is still to be introduced.

We can never sufficiently admire these furze ditches made of quarried stones; they can, indeed, be found only in Ireland; but we have heard in England of things almost as extraordinary. Dr. Grey, in his erudite and entertaining notes on Hudibras, records the deposition of a lawyer, who, in an action of battery, told the judge "that the defendant beat his client with a certain _wooden instrument_ called _an iron pestle_." Nay, to go further still, a wise annotator on the Pentateuch, named Peter Harrison, observed of Moses' two _tables of stone_, that they were made of _s.h.i.+ttim-wood_. The stone furze ditches are scarcely bolder instances of the catachresis than the stone tables of s.h.i.+ttim-wood. This bold figure of rhetoric in an Irish advertis.e.m.e.nt of an estate may lead us to expect that Hibernian advertisers may, in time, emulate the fame of Christie, the prince of auctioneers, whose fine descriptive powers can make more of an estate on paper than ever was made of it in any other shape, except in the form of an ejectment. The fictions of law, indeed, surpa.s.s even the auctioneer's imagination; and a man may be said never to know the extent of his own possessions until he is served with a process of ejectment. He then finds himself required to give up the possession of a mult.i.tude of barns, orchards, fish-ponds, horse-ponds, dwelling-houses, pigeon-houses, dove-cotes, out-houses, and appurtenances, which he never saw or heard of, and which are nowhere to be found upon the surface of the habitable globe; so that we cannot really express this English legal transaction without being guilty of an Irish bull, and saying that the person ejected is _ousted_ from places which he never entered.

To proceed with our newspapers.--The next advertis.e.m.e.nt is from a schoolmaster: but we shall not descant upon its grammatical errors, because they are not blunders peculiar to Irish schoolmasters. We have frequently observed that the advertis.e.m.e.nts of schoolmasters, even in England, are seldom free from solecisms: too much care in writing, it seems, is almost as bad as too little. In the preface of the dictionary of the French Academy, there are, as it is computed by an able French critic, no less than sixteen faults; and in Harris, the celebrated grammarian's dedication of his Hermes, there is one bull, and almost as many faults as lines. It appears as if the most precise and learned writers sometimes, like the ladies in one of Congreve's plays, "run into the danger to avoid the apprehension."

After a careful scrutiny of the Hibernian advertis.e.m.e.nts, we are compelled to confess that we have not met with any blunders that more nearly resemble our notion of an Irish bull than one which, some years ago, appeared in our English papers. It was the t.i.tle to an advertis.e.m.e.nt of a was.h.i.+ng machine, in these words: "Every _Man_ his own _Washerwoman_!" We have this day, Nov. 19, 1807, seen the following: "This day were published, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, with a _new edition_ of her Poems, some of which have _never_ before appeared." And an eye-witness a.s.sures us, that lately he saw an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the following terms stuck up on the walls of an English coffee-house: "This coffee-house removed up-stairs!"

A Roman emperor used to draw his stairs up after him every night into his bedchamber, and we have heard of throwing a house out of the windows; but drawing a whole house up into itself is new.

How can we account for such a blunder, in an advertis.e.m.e.nt on the wall of an English coffee-house, except by supposing that it was penned by an Irish waiter? If that were the case, it would an admirable example of an Irish bull! and therefore we had best take it for granted.

Let not any conscientious person be startled at the mode of reasoning by which we have convicted an imaginary Irish waiter of a real bull: it is at least as good, if not better logic, than that which was successfully employed in the time of the _popish plot_, to convict an Irish physician of forgery. The matter is thus recorded by L'Estrange. The Irish physician "was charged with writing a treasonable libel, but denied the thing, and appealed to the unlikeness of the characters. It was agreed that there was no resemblance at all in the hands; but a.s.serted that the doctor had two hands; his _physic hand_ and his _plot hand_, and the one not a jot like the other. Now this was the doctor's plot hand, and it was insisted that, because it was not like one of his hands, it must be like the other."

By this convenient mode of reasoning, an Irishman may, at any time, be convicted of any crime, or of any absurdity.