"THE WILD IRISH GIRL".

Otago Witness, Issue 3385, 29 January 1919, Page 53

"THE WILD IRISH GIRL".

By Jbssib Mackat.

(Concluded.)

We have seen that Sydney Owenson had some ■uphill work in securing social success on. account of her unfashionable Eolitical and national convictions. But er way was greatly smoothed by her marriage to Dr (afterwards Sir Charles) Morgan, a Dublin physician in easy circumstances, though no longer young. The marriage -was one of genuine affection and esteem. Sir Charles was a man of scholarly mind and liberal ideas, who himself had written some books on philosophy," which had a vogue in their day. He was able to set his charming young wife free to follow the bent of her genius, and the best work she was to give out was accomplished after the Wild Irish Girl laid aside her youthful balladry and took up the pen of a travelled matron, taking the harvest of a not too quiet eye in Dublin, in London, and in France. For rhymes like "Kate Kearney" she was now to offer an admiring public that study of life in France under Napoleon's early rule which made her name on the Conti-

nent. Sprightly, kindly, witty, and charming, she never forgot her distressed country, though she saw clearly the weak- , nesses which played into the hands of Ireland's mal-administrators. A series of novels followed this, her first solid success in prose. " O'Donnell " was a patriotic presentment of the Irish cause in fiction. In " Florence -Macarthy " and other novels she showed the diverting side of the national character, writing with a freshness that wen her a place—at least, for a time—heside the better-remembered Maria Edgeworth. It is from the lastnamed romance that we gain a graphic impression of that Elizabethan survival, the Irish hedge schoolmaster, speaking English with the eclectic ponderosity of a Babu scholar, and carrying Homer and Virgil to the bogs in a fantastic afterglow of the Renaissance: A bevy of rough-headed students, with books as ragged as their habiliments, rushed forth at the sound of the horses' feet. Last of this singular group, '' followed O'Leary himself in learned deshabille, * his customary suit, an old great-coat fastened with a wooden skewer at his breast, the sleeves hanging unoccupied, Spanish-wise, as he termed it. His wig was laid aside, the shaven crown of his head resembling the clerical tonsure; a tattered Homer in one hand, and a slip of sallow in the other, with which he had been distributing some well-earned "pasnities" to his pupils. •

The ragged pedagogue airs his learning with much complacency before a chance visitor from England: " What does yez all crowd the gentleman for? Did never yez see a raal gentleman afore? I'll trouble yez to consider yourselves temporary. There's great * scholars among these ragged runagates, your honor, poor as they look. . • .. . There's my first class, plaze, your honor: sorrow one of these gossoons but would throw you off a page of Homer into Irish while he'd be clamp- , ing a turf stack. Come forward here, Padreen Mahohey, you little mitcher, ye. Have you no better courtesy than that, Padreen? Fie upon your manners! . . . Is that your bow, Padreen, with your head under your arm like a roosting hen? Mind me well, ye Homers, I'll expect Hector and Ordeoache to-morrow without fail; observe me well; I'll take no excuse for the classics, barring the bog, in respect of the weather being dry. . . ." Lady Morgan essayed painting the fashionable society of the day, but her stories of this school were unreal in conception and jarring in moral tone, while the pedantry of the times larded the whole with Latin, French, and Greek to an irritating degree. But her " France" and the subsequent " Italy," both seemingly founded on the plan of Madame de Stoel's " L'Allemagne," were commended by readers of note in that bygone time. The picture of Lady Morgan herself,

vivacious, responsive, sylph-like still, though 40 and over, is both typical and picturesque, as she breathes the old courtly air of La Grange, honoured guest of the gallant veteran, the Marquis La Fayette, or talks -with Byron under the {glamorous blue of Italian skies. To the ast days of her long life she cherished a fine miniature of Byron at his best, bequeathed to her by the ill-fated Lady Caroline Lamb. But flattery and fame did not turn her Irish heart, if it sometimes confirmed some harmless affectations. " Morgan is happy" was her. crowning reason for complacency if their paths were strewn more thickly with foreign roses than usual. The

one cloud upon her married life was the

lack of children, but she took to her maternal heart the daughters of her adored sister, Lady Clarke, loving and beloved by her own, while feted and Eetted by the great world. And if her eroes and heroines in the gay whirl were sometimes less than proper, her own conduct was faultless in a faulty age, and her canons of- behaviour were increasingly strict as the years went by. The most brilliant men and i women, however, were found in her London salon. In 1847 she lost her husband, a grief never forgotten, though she survived him for 12 years, dying in 1859. Pathetic reminiscences are written of her latter years, when, already past the allotted span, ahe «aw her court dwindled and her few home

ties loosed one by one. The friend of Byron, Moore, Lady Cork, La Payette Hved on like a ghos*fc in the alien air of the Mid-Vlotorian time.

She died three years after the close of the Crimean war, leaving but a -fragment of the book of memoirs which 1 was the last literary project of her busy life. The Wild Irish Girl had drunk of the wine of life and fame while she lived, but the dust of oblivion has covered her name in tiie 60 interveninjg years, and " Sydney Lady Morgan" lives only as a shadow amid the vital forms of a storied age of English literature.