have seen few or no cases in which it might not be executed for 57. The minimum price for excavating and refilling a 4 feet 6 inch drain is, according to our experience, 14d. per yard. This low price is generally in those clays which require the most frequent drains. The maximum, 24d., except in cases where there is actual rock. The frequency with which the pickaxe is used is nearly an accurate measure of the necessary advance of price.

Our parting word shall assure our readers that every reported case of failure in draining which we have investigated has resolved itself into ignorance, blundering, bad materials, or bad execution.

ART. IV.-1. Personal Recollections of the Life and Times, with Extracts from the Correspondence, of Valentine Lord Cloncurry. Dublin. 1849.

2. Recollections and Experiences during a Parliamentary Career, from 1833 to 1848. By John O'Connell, Esq., M.P. 2 vols. London. 1849.

THESE books are of a somewhat novel aspect, and give rise to alarming forebodings. That two of the least significant persons in either House of Parliament (we wish to use as mild a term as possible) should have thought fit to print, each during his own lifetime, his own autobiography, is certainly a remarkable feature in the literary retrospect of 1849. But that they should also, under the pretext of recording their own poor doings and sayings, sit in judgment upon their most distinguished contemporaries, and pronounce authoritative decisions upon the merits of persons so immeasurably removed above themselves in all that constitutes character-all that gives a claim to respect in public men-is yet a more startling outrage against the common proprieties of life. Apologists may suggest, no doubt, that we should ascribe these violations of modesty and decorum merely to the long and case-hardening indulgence of two petty passions, namely, vanity and malice. But what shall be said of publishing some scores of letters written by others in the confidence of friendship or familiar acquaintance(and this applies to the Cloncurry delinquent rather than the O'Connell) such letters reflecting on third parties in the most unmeasured terms-such letters containing the private opinions and recording the private feelings of some who have died but yesterday, and some who survive to-day? The use to which such publications are subservient is manifest. The greedy appetite of the reading public for letters-the thirst they have of whatever

comes

comes out garnished with any known names, renders the sale of such works absolutely certain. Therefore Lord Cloncurry has taken a course which ensured the gaining of money, and his proceeding in this respect is, in fact, the only evidence of sagacity that his volume affords: while his fellow-reminiscent, if he at all calculated in the like sordid fashion, must at least be acquitted of having achieved his shabby object-he is merely guilty of the attempt. It is barely possible that his Lordship may have applied to all the survivors among his correspondents for their leave to print their private letters. He does not say so, however. If he made such application, did he send the letters for their perusal because he surely cannot imagine that those who write to him keep copies of all they write? But has he got the leave of the heirs or the representatives of those who are dead? We can undertake to answer that question with a direct negativefor we have been distinctly informed by some of them, that no such leave was asked, and never would have been given if asked. This is an offence which cannot be too severely reprobated. It opens the door to every kind of abuse. Mr. John O'Connell may print his father's private letters, and welcome. Lord Cloncurry has no right whatever, either moral or legal, to fill his 8vo. with Lord Holland's, Sir F. Burdett's, and Lord Melbourne's.-He seems to intimate that he did ask Lord Anglesey's leave, and that he received a somewhat contemptuous answer, to the effect that the noble Marquis never wrote anything he cared if all the world saw-an answer suitable no doubt to the native frankness of a soldier, but, we must venture to say, wholly unjustifiable in point of duty from one in a high public station-indeed very inconsistent with ordinary prudence in a private man; yet still, if the facts be so, we grant that a deduction must be made in so far with respect to the case of that gallant and unreflecting veteran.

But where is this practice of autobiography to end? If men of no greater mark than this Lord and that Commoner-men wholly unable to obtain an attention for five minutes in the Houses of Parliament to which they belong-must conceive, the one his Life and Times,' the other his Parliamentary Career,' important enough to be laid before the world, as if he were a Voltaire, a Gibbon, or a Hume-it may be safely affirmed that eleven or twelve hundred such books as these ought to appear, in order that the conduct of others may be in keeping with theirs. It is certain that in the whole number of members of both Houses, probably in the whole range of society, two mortals of less importance in any one way to any but their two selves are not to be found than Lord Cloncurry and Mr. John O'Connell. The

former

former is an Irish landowner and a Peer;* and in his early days he obtained a fleeting modicum of notoriety from haunting the company of certain bolder men who gained the full fame of rebels and traitors: the most kindly of mortals could not suggest any further claim that the noble offender has to any shadow or figment of distinction. All that can be said in his favour has been said. The other, and in no sense noble, culprit, is son of a man notorious enough in his day. A man of energetic faculties and of no qualms -the reckless praiser and calumniator by turns of all whom he ever had occasion to name-the lawyer of considerable attainment and extensive practice, of which he exaggerated the amount, and which he abandoned for the more lucrative profession of a factious mendicant-the politician who was ever ready to abandon his pretended principles, if any sting of passion, or spurt of caprice, or suggestion of Mammon required the sacrifice the ceaseless agitator of his country, now as the tool of the priests, now as their employer but withal a man of more personal influence, partly through those priests, partly through his own cunning worship of the mere mob, than any individual of his generation who had no official weight and no sterling merits of his own. But of all his talents, without one solitary exception-of all his professional knowledge-of all his political success of every portion of his influence-in short, of whatever made the father in any way remarkable, the son is utterly and absolutely devoid: he has neither ability, nor information, nor consequence of any kind or sort, except what he derives from the desperate attempt of some priests to snatch at his name as the rallying point for a new revival of a to them gainful agitation. This man, so obscure, so insignificant, whom the House he attempts to address will on no account hear-this cipher in public life must needs rush

*Like most other radical lords (Byron was no exception), he is never able to conceal the overweening importance he attaches to his rank. The book is full of that— the display is often insolent. The chapter in which he mentions his father and the creation of the peerage is amusing for its insinuations of high ancestral gentility, and its mystification as to the sources of that wealth which, being largely invested in the boroughmongering line, conducted him at last to a barony in the year 1789. He says the old gentleman was successful in the banking and woollen business '-read blanketing. Soon after he became my lord, he happened to witness some pantomime of Don Quixote in the Dublin Theatre, and attracted notice by the stentorian peals of his laughter when Sancho was tossed in the blanket. Next morning the newspapers produced these rhymes:

'Cloncurry! Cloncurry!

Why in such a hurry

To laugh at this comical squire?

Though he is toss'd high,

You cannot deny

That blankets have toss'd yourself higher.'

before

before the community with recollections of his Parliamentary Career.' Why, it would be just the same thing were one of the doorkeepers to give an account of his career! None of them all could describe with less exactness, or with more unbroken dullness, whatever he had chanced to see or had tried to pick up. None of them could indite in a more sickening style of imbecillity. The Cloncurry article is of scarcely higher merit as a composition; but it contains a number of letters by a variety of hands: therefore it will be read, and, what is more to the purpose, bought. Mr. John O'Connell's contains in that line only private letters of the old Agitator, which have no interest, as the vulgar qualities they display were quite familiar to everybody long ago-so these will go a short way to succour a main text far below contempt. We defy anybody but a reviewer to read through his book. We defy the Irish Trade to sell fifty copies of it, unless the confessors should patronize it in a body, by enjoining the purchase as a penance in place of grinding round St. Patrick's Purgatory on bare knees. Among the most graceless features of these two pitiful productions, we have noticed the judgments passed on individuals. What does the reader say, for instance, of our Peer's describing the Duke of Wellington as a specimen of dogged obstinacy, the self-complacent victim of gross flattery, distinguished by paltry spite,''shabby malice,' and 'perfidy'—of a heart inaccessible to pity (316,333, &c.)-of an understanding wholly deficient and obtusesothinks that great intellect, the Lord Cloncurry-nay, positively in one place, if we read him aright, the illustrious Duke is treated as a 'maniac.'* If any one has a curiosity to know the motive and

the

We do not refer to these phrases--miracles of insolent absurdity as they arewith any intention of insinuating that the like were never used by any patriotic authorities of more consequence than Lord Cloncurry. On the contrary, we are a great deal too old to have forgotten by what best public instructors' the Duke used to be described as a stunted Corporal,' 'a worn-out blunderbuss,' &c. &c. &c. But, melancholy as was the condition of the Liberal mind attested by the use and tolerance of such language -indicating such a measureless profound of ignorance and stupidity, to say nothing of envy, spite, and every other meanness-it is fair to acknowledge that from the appearance of Colonel Gurwood's publication a great change was manifested. From that date, a sense of shame made itself visible: in all higher places of Liberalism a totally different tone was adopted, and has since been adhered to-nay, the reaction has not seldom taken the shape of a fulsome prosternation that must have excited pity in the only quarter where a combination of merriment and disgust did not suffice. But the truth is, and we are bound to tell it, it was the liberal press in France that in this matter gave law to our patriots-both to their society and to their press. When French people could not resist the evidence of all great gifts and noble qualities with which that record was filled—when they owned that it would not do to persist in their old vein of disparagement now the world had before it that series of writings in which it was impossible to say whether one should admire most the range of knowledge, reflection, sense, and wisdom, or the unaffected display of every manly, modest, and humane feeling under an almost infinite variety of circumstances, and all conveyed in language of such inimitable simplicity, so thoroughly the style becoming a Captain and a Statesman of the most VOL. LXXXVI. NO. CLXXI.

K

illustrious

the meaning of all this measureless malignity, he may be assured that they arose from the Duke most properly giving a reprimand, though a gentle one, to Lord Anglesey, when Viceroy of Ireland, for his great indiscretion in going to the house of a person so committed to the desperate courses of O'Connell as Lord Cloncurry then was who in one day received the Lord Lieutenant at his country-house, and the next attended a Repeal meeting and addressed it, avowing his wishes for the success of the cause. Indeed, in reading this book-the most ill-arranged, rambling, foolish book of memoirs that we believe ever was written (except Mr. John O'Connell's)—there is nothing strikes the mind so forcibly as the evidence passim of an entirely unsound judgment, an understanding miserably uncultivated, a mind full of nothing except self-conceit and factious violence; and then to observe that this is the individual whom a Viceroy called to his councils, in whom he reposed unbounded confidence, to whom he unbosomed himself on every occasion-to whom he confided his projects for subverting the established relations between the Irish branch of our Church and the State, with all the other plans which in the intoxication of his early popularity he had formed-truly it is one of the most melancholy spectacles of human weakness ever displayed in so high a sphere. If Lord Anglesey really consented to the publication of the Letters with which this stupid volume teems-and that with any tolerable recollection of their character-he committed an act of yet more marvellous imprudence than even the intercourse itself, into which his good nature and the clumsy cajoleries of Lord Cloncurry betrayed him,

6

For do not let it be supposed that this Irish lord is a Cato, above all tendencies to bow and smirk when near the great. He took his share in what he now calls the strange madness which seized people of all ranks' on the King's visit in 1821—but a few months after they had made a public disturbance to obstruct a loyal address on his accession-and, being dispersed by the soldiery, voted an attack upon his Majesty for his treatment of his unhappy consort. Lord Cloncurry so far partook of the prevailing epidemic as to invite the King to visit HIM!-a step

illustrious class;—when this was the result in France, the home faction saw it was time to consider the matter, and they undoubtedly showed, and have continued to show, proper signs of repentance. The exceptions are very few. Here in England we know of uone at all in what can be called society-of none in the periodical press, beyond its very lowest disgraces. Among authors of books of any sort of note, verse or prose, we recollect of none, unless Mr. W. Savage Landor-who however clings with equal pertinacity to his ancient abuse of Buonaparte as a blockhead and a coward-of Byron as a rhymer wholly devoid of genius or wit-of Pitt as a villain-of Fox as a scoundrel-of Canning as a scamp-and so on. Lord Cloncurry's case, then, is noticeable chiefly on account of the date of his publication-down to 1835 or 1836 he might have pleaded the customary tenor of Whig as well as Radical discourse.