blackbirds, or the echo of the solemn hymns as they ascend to heaven in music on the Sabbath. Strangely contrasted, indeed, is its peacefulness with the troublous scenes of his many-coloured life, and provocative of pensive reflection the gentle silence that invests it like a spell. The rude villager, as he passes over his grave, little dreams of the splendid intellect that slumbers beneath, or the host of sweet and noble traits that lived within the heart already mouldering under his feet into a clod of the valley. But his genius has already sanctified the ground, lending to it the magic which entwines itself with the homes or tombs of celebrated men, rendering it henceforward a classic and muse-haunted solitude, to which history will point, and making it for all time a spot to which the scholar will piously resort, and where the young enthusiast of books will linger long and idolatrously in the soft sunlight, or beneath the radiant stars."
The following witty and pathetic lines,—termed by one of our leading newspaper critics "a vicious epitaph,"[1]—were written on his deceased friend, by Lockhart:—
"Here, early to bed, lies kind William Maginn,
Who with genius, wit, learning, life's trophies to win,
Had neither great lord, nor rich cit of his kin,
Nor discretion to set himself up as to tin;
So, his portion soon spent, like the poor heir of Lynn,
He turn'd author, while yet was no beard on his chin;
And whoever was out, or whoever was in,
For your Tories his fine Irish brains he would spin;
Who received prose and rhyme with a promising grin,
'Go ahead, you queer fish, and more power to your fin!'
But to save from starvation stirr'd never a pin.
Light for long was his heart, though his breeches were thin,
Else his acting, for certain, was equal to Quin;
But at last he was beat, and sought help from the bin,
(All the same to the Doctor, from claret to gin),
Which led swiftly to gaol, with consumption therein.
It was much, when the bones rattled loose in his skin,
He got leave to die here, out of Babylon's din.
Barring drink and the girls, I ne'er heard of a sin,
Many worse, better few, than bright, broken Maginn."
Walton-on-Thames, August, 1842.
I would touch with the softest hand upon the vice which, in these beautiful lines, is spoken of as having brought this gifted son of genius to disgrace, disease and death. "The rock upon which Steele and Burns split,"—says one who knew him,—"the sole blot upon Addison, the only stigma upon Charles Lamb, that which exiled Fox from the cabinet of England, and reduced Sheridan to poverty and shame, was the ruin, too, of the late William Maginn." Here, in expending the moral character of the man, it is but fair to take into account the possibility that he was unhappy in his domestic relations. I say "possibility," because there is a discrepancy of evidence which I am unable to reconcile from my own knowledge. Kenealy says that he loved his children with devotion, and that "their presence always brought brightness to his eyes;" but he adds,—if indeed he was the author of the obituary article I have referred to,—that he had "the misfortune to render applicable to him the bitterest part of the epigram of Phillipides, Ἄισχραν γυνάικ' ἐγήμας." On the other
- ↑ The Daily News, Nov. 13, 1873. The reader will judge of the propriety of the appellation.
