on the public with a splendor to which they were unused. Scarcely one appeared in which there was not something libellous; but the sting was so beautifully applied, and so mitigated by the surrounding fun, that it was difficult seriously to quarrel with the author; and Mr. Blackwood seemed to take as strong a delight in publishing the sarcasms as Maginn in writing them." Several subjects were suggested by Blackwood himself, who constantly expressed his gratitude to Maginn, and put it into a tangible form, by very liberal payments. The two volumes of this collection, containing the "ODOHERTY PAPERS,” will show how abundantly, as well as how ably, Maginn supplied the Magazine with a great variety of all sorts of articles, and it must be remembered that I have only made a selection. The interest of many of Maginn's contributions were too temporary and personal to allow my re-printing them. I have only taken such as would best bear transplanting.

In 1823, submitting to the ordinary fate of mortals, Dr. Maginn entered the estate of matrimony. As it has been reported that he made what is called "a low match," and that his wife was every way far beneath him, I think it due to both to deny the imputation. A Cork lady (whose name I do not consider myself at liberty to mention here), has very kindly and fully given me information respecting Dr. Maginn, which I have freely and relyingly used in this Memoir for all her brothers were Maginn's pupils; he was most intimate at her father's house; she afterward maintained friendly relations with him in London, and her son-in-law was the medical gentleman who kindly attended him in his last illness, and saw him buried at Walton-on-Thames. This lady writes: "Mr. Kenealy was right in the year that the Doctor married [1823], over thirty years ago. I do not know the exact date in that year, although I recollect that Dr. Maginn spent the evening before at my father's at a ball. Mrs. Maginn's family were there also, but the lady herself was not. She was the daughter of the Rev. Mr. Bullen, Rector of Kanturk, and was related to the most respectable families among the gentry of the South of Ireland. The Doctor was so fond of my son John, that, though he never liked teaching (he had so much of it in his youth), he instructed him in Greek and Hebrew, even when most occupied with his own literary labors. He used to come to our house every week with Mrs. Maginn and the children. He was greatly maligned by his pretended friends, and no one could possibly sit an evening in his company without getting some information on every subject introduced. He had an unfailing memory, and a fund of wit and humor. Many a story which I have heard him tell, I have known to be claimed afterward by others, to whom he had related

them, and passed off as their own. Dr. Maginn was a most affectionate father, fondly attached to his wife, and sincere and firm in his friendship. Unfortunately, he was too popular. There was a constant competition for the society and companionship of a man so gifted, brilliant, and amusing. But he enjoyed home, and there I have passed many happy evenings with him and Mrs. Maginn. They had three children-one boy and two girls. The lad got a commission from Sir Robert Peel. The eldest girl died of consumption, after her father's decease. She was well educated and clever, and indeed wrote a book, which was published. I believe that Mrs. Maginn and her surviving daughter reside at Queen's-town [Cove] near Cork."

In a preceding page I have stated that the elder Maginn had little faith, as a schoolmaster, in subjecting young people to the forcing process. In the case of his own son, however, his practice greatly differed from his principle. For a lad of ten years to enter the University, with marked success and credit, was a wonder at the time. That such precocity should have turned out so brilliantly as it did, may be considered yet more extraordinary. The elder Maginn commenced to cram his son with learning, almost from the time he could speak plain -straining the lad's nervous system, as his feeble frame in later years showed, at a sacrifice of his physique. My amiable correspondent communicates an anecdote, which she had from his father, to show that the Doctor, even as a child, was out of the ordinary class. "When he was about four years old, he got the poem of Emma' to get by heart. Having read it, he returned it to and said, Here are the lines

'In Edwin's gentle heart, a war

Of different passions strove.'

She says: Edwin and·

his father,

'I want to know how there could be a gentle heart, if there was a war of passions in it?""

Immediately after his marriage, Dr. Maginn determined to give up his school, and make literature his profession. His Blackwood articles, the authorship of which was now well known, had won him considerable reputation, and he was received in London, in 1824, as a wellknown writer, of great wit, readiness, learning, and Toryism. Theodore Hook invited him to conduct a Wednesday's newspaper, which the proprietors of the John Bull intended to raise on the ruins of halfa-dozen nearly defunct journals. Mr. Barham says that, "Partly to assist the old, but principally to superintend the new speculation, to which Hook also was to be a large contributor, Maginn was summoned from Cork, and engaged at a moderate salary. Twenty pounds a

His talents were, doubtless,

month we believe to have been the sum. of a high order, and his scholarship and education infinitely superior to those of his friend Hook, for such he soon became, but unfortunately he possessed the same excitable erratic temperament only exaggerated, Hibernized to a degree, that rendered it somewhat unsafe to rely upon him in a matter demanding the prudence and punctuality to be observed in the conduct of a weekly paper. So far as John Bull was concerned, the idea of retaining his services was speedily abandoned. Its ally started fairly enough, but the circulation it obtained was not commensurate with the projector's expectations; and Hook, who had not the patience to play an uphill game, soon threw it up in disgust; it lingered on for some months under the direction of the Doctor, and was finally abandoned at a heavy loss."

He was employed, also, on the London Literary Journal (a weak and short-lived rival to the Literary Gazette), and wrote several articles in the Quarterly Review. Indeed, so high did he stand, at this time, that when it was determined, on what was called 66 the destruction" of Lord Byron's autobiographic manuscripts, that Moore should not write the Life of the noble Childe, it was Maginn that Murray selected for that purpose. Mr. Kenealy, the friend and biographer of Maginn, says, "Nothing can more clearly show the high opinion of those best qualified to judge of his abilities, than this fact. A young man, from an Irish provincial town, who had never written a book, and whose name was little known, intrusted with the biography of the greatest of England's poets, by one of the shrewdest booksellers that ever lived, is a spectacle not often seen, and Maginn used to speak of it with no little satisfaction. The papers and letters of his Lordship were accordingly placed in the Doctor's hands, and remained in his possession for some time, but no steps were taken in the biography, and it was finally intrusted to Mr. Moore." Highly as I estimate the ability of Dr. Maginn, I think that he was not so well qualified for the biography as Moore, whose personal knowledge of Byron was so long and lasting. It is surprising that Murray, astute as he was, should have ever seriously thought of employing Maginn on the Byron papers. It may be proper here to state that, when Dr. Maginn quitted Cork, he resigned the school to his brother John, who continued to conduct it for some years. The Rev. John Maginn was much more solid and steady than his more gifted brother, and well maintained the hereditary high character of the school. Dr. Maginn had three sisters -- respectively named Margaret, Mary, and Anne, I believe - and, in the house in Marlborough street, next to that in which male pupils had been instructed for many years, there was kept up, for a long time, a very su

perior boarding and day-school, known as "The Misses Maginn's Establishment for Young Ladies." The two seminaries were among the very best in Cork, within my own knowledge and memory. As has already been mentioned, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Kyle, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, was appointed Bishop of Cork and Ross, in 1830, in succession to Dr. St. Lawrence. Proud of Dr. Maginn, as his most distinguished pupil, and attached to John Maginn (to whom he had also been college tutor), he took the earliest opportunity in his power of giving a suitable (i. e. a sufficient) clerical appointment to the latter. In 1835, on the death of Bishop Brinkley, the diocese of Cloyne was annexed to, or absorbed in, that of Cork and Ross, and the patronage of Bishop Kyle greatly extended thereby. On a vacancy, he appointed the Rev. John Maginn to the lucrative rectory of Castletown-Roche (midway between Mallow and Fermoy), and the Marlborough-street school was thereupon discontinued. Charles A. Maginn, the youngest of the family (I have heard that he was born fourteen years after his youngest sister), also entered the Church, and became his brother's curate. The Rev. John Maginn having died of apoplexy, the parishioners of Castletown-Roche memorialized Bishop Kyle, strongly urging him to bestow the vacant rectory on Charles Maginn, whose ministration had at once benefited and gratified them. At the same time, Dr. Maginn wrote to the Bishop, urging his brother's claims, as strongly as he could. The case, I am told, was one of delicacy and difficulty—for Dr. Kyle was one of the Bishops who had the strongest dislike to any such " pressure from without" as might be suspected to exist in any parishioners presuming or pretending to nominate their own "spiritual pastor and master." Persons in office, lay or clerical, almost universally object to being told, as it were, whom they should appoint. Friendship, however, carried the day. The Bishop's reply to the memorialists was that he had invariably declined acceding to requests such as they had made-believing that he, rather than the supplicants, was best qualified to decide on the fitness of a clergyman for promotion — but that, from the high character he bore, the zealous manner in which the late incumbent had performed his duties, and the great scholarship, worthily employed (the Bishop greatly admired the Doctor's High-Tory journalism), he had "pleasure in appointing the Rev. Charles A. Maginn, A. M., to the Rectory and Vicarage of Castletown-Roche, in the diocese of Cloyne." Mr. Maginn yet continues in this incumbency [i. e. in 1857], and is married to Miss Power, of the County of Waterford. One of his sisters is dead: the two survivors reside with him. He continues as popular, as useful, and as much beloved-not only by his own Protestant parishioners,

but by his Catholic neighbors also—as he was in the distant and humble days of his active service as curate.

The failure of Shackell's newspaper, to edit which Maginn had expressly been brought over from Cork to London, was a temporary difficulty. But Dr. Maginn was then in the fullness of his reputation, as one of the leading wits of Blackwood - for which he continued to write a great deal during the first four years of his metropolitan residence. Among other magnates of "the Row" (though his locality was in Albemarle street), John Murray, the publisher, more particularly formed a high estimate of Maginn's abilities and aptitude. Very high, indeed, must his opinion have been when it made him solicitous to employ Maginn, as the biographer of Lord Byron.

Had he executed this task, the result would have been very different from Moore's Apology for the Life of Byron. I doubt whether Maginn had ever read the Autobiography bestowed by Byron on Moore; sold by Moore to Murray; copied, in extenso, by at least five persons, Ladies Burghersh and Blessington included, out of the dozen to whom it had been confided for perusal; but he had heard the most piquant passages in it freely repeated and commented on, at Murray's table, and knew, almost as if he had read every page of it, what was the character of its revelations. Maginn himself said, "It contained scarcely any thing more than what we already know. The whole object seemed to be to puff himself and run down every body else."

In the NOCTES AMBROSIANE, NO. XV.,* where Maginn, as Morgan Odoherty, spoke somewhat dramatically, he boasted that he had read Byron's autobiography himself twice over-that it had been copied for the private reading of a great Lady in Florence†— and that Galignani had bought the MS., with the intention of immediately publishing it in Paris. He then adds "One volume of his Memoirs, in short, consists of a Dictionary of all his friends and acquaintances, alphabetically arranged, with proper definitions of their characters - criticisms on their works (when they had any)—and generally a few specimens of their correspondence. To me this seemed, on the whole, the most

amusing of the three."

This Dictionary was not among the manuscripts burnt by Moore at the instance of Lord Byron's executors. One of the persons who read it informed me that it was written on long foolscap, covered with stiff whited-brown or cartridge-paper, bound together or stitched with narrow pink ribbon. The specimens of the correspondence" spoken of

66

*Noctes Ambrosianæ, vol. i. pp. 436-446.

† Lady Burghersh, whose husband was then British ambassador there.