Chapter 1

"_Malvolio._ 'Tis but fortune; all is fortune."

_Twelfth Night_.

"_Bassanio_. 'Tis not unknown to you, Antonio, How much I have disabled my state. By something showing a more swelling port Than my faint means would grant continuance."

_Merchant of Venice_.

I am by birth an Irishman, and descended from an ancient family. I lay no claim to any connection with Brian Boru, or Malichi, of the crown of gold, a gentleman who, notwithstanding the poetical authority of Tom Moore, we have some reason to believe during his long and illustrious reign was never master of a crown sterling. My ancestor was Colonel Hamilton, as stout a Cromwellian as ever led a squadron of Noll's Ironsides to a charge. If my education was not of the first order, it was for no lack of instructors. My father, a half-pay dragoon, had me on the pig-skin before my legs were long enough to reach the saddle-skirt; the keeper, in proper time, taught me to shoot: a retired gentleman, _olim_, of the Welsh fusileers, with a single leg and sixty pounds per annum, paid quarterly by Greenwood and Cox, indoctrinated me in the mystery of tying a fly, and casting the same correctly. The curate--the least successful of the lot, poor man--did his best to communicate Greek and Latin, and my cousin Constance gave me my first lessons in the art of love. All were able professors in their way, but cousin Constance was infinitely the most agreeable.

I am by accident an only son. My mother, in two years after she had sworn obedience at the altar, presented her liege lord with a couple of pledges of connubial love, and the gender of both was masculine. Twelve years elapsed and no addition was made to the Hamiltons; when lo! upon a fine spring morning a little Benjamin was ushered into existence, and I was the God-send. My father never could be persuaded that there was a gentlemanly profession in the world but one, and that was the trade of arms. My brothers, as they grew up, entirely coincided with him in opinion, and both would be soldiers. William died sword in hand, crowning the great breach at Rodrigo; and Henry, after demolishing three or four cuirassiers of the Imperial Guards, found his last resting-place on "red Waterloo." When they were named, my father's eyes would kindle, and my mother's be suffused with tears. He played a fictitious part, enacted the Roman, and would persuade you that he exulted in their deaths; but my mother played the true one, the woman's.

It was an autumnal evening, just when you smell the first indication of winter in a rarefied atmosphere, and see it in the clear curling of the smoke, as its woolly flakes rise from the cottage chimney and gradually are lost in the clear blue sky. Although not a cold evening, a log fire was extremely welcome. My father, Heaven rest him! had a slight touch in the toe of what finished him afterward in the stomach, namely, gout.

"James," said my lady mother, "it is time we came to some decision regarding what we have been talking of for the last twelve months. Frank will be eighteen next Wednesday."

"Faith! it is time, my dear Mary; the premises are true, but the difficulty is to come at the conclusion."

"You know, my love, that only for your pension and half-pay, from the tremendous depreciation in agricultural property since the peace, we should be obliged to lay down the old carriage, as you had to part with the harriers the year after Waterloo."

That to my father was a heavy hit. "It was a devil of a sacrifice, Mary,"--and he sighed, "to give up the sweetest pack that ever man rode to; one, that for a mile's run you could have covered with a blanket--heigh-ho! God's will be done;" and after that pious adjuration, my father turned down his tumbler No. 3, to the bottom. The memory of the lost harriers was always a painful recollection, and brought its silent evidence that the fortunes of the Hamiltons were not what they were a hundred years ago.

"With all my care," continued my mother, "and, as you know, I economize to the best of my judgement, and after all is done that can be done, our income barely will defray the outlay of our household."

"Or, as we used to say when I was dragooning thirty years ago, 'the tongue will scarcely meet the buckle,'" responded the colonel.

"I have been thinking," said my mother timidly, "that Frank might go to the bar."

"I would rather that he went direct to the devil," roared the commander, who hated lawyers, and whose great toe had at the moment undergone a disagreeable visitation.

"Do not lose temper, dear James," and she laid down her knitting to replace the hassock he had kicked away under the painful irritation of a disease that a stoic could not stand with patience, and, as they would say in Ireland, would fully justify a Quaker if "he kicked his mother."

"Curse the bar!" but he acknowledged his lady wife's kind offices by tapping her gently on the cheek. "When I was a boy, Mary, a lawyer and a gentleman were identified. Like the army--and, thank God! that is still intact, none but a man of decent pretensions claimed a gown, no more than a linen-draper's apprentice now would aspire to an epaulet. Is there a low fellow who has saved a few hundreds by retailing whisky by the noggin, who will not have his son 'Mister Counsellor O'Whack,' or 'Mister Barrister O'Finnigan'? No, no, if you must have Frank bred to a local profession, make him an apothecary; a twenty pound note will find drawers, drugs, and bottles. Occasionally he may be useful; pound honestly at his mortar, salve a broken head, carry the country news about, and lie down at night with a tolerably quiet conscience. He may have hastened a patient to his account by a trifling over-dose; but he has not hurried men into villainous litigation, that will eventuate in their ruin. His worst offense against the community shall be a mistaking of toothache for tic-douloureux, and lumbago for gout--oh, d----n the gout!"--for at that portion of his speech the poor colonel had sustained an awful twinge.

"Well," continued the dame, "would you feel inclined to let him enter the University, and take orders?"

"Become a churchman?" and away, with a furious kick, again went the hassock. "You should say, in simple English, make him a curate for the term of natural life. The church in Ireland, Mary, is like the bar, it once was tenanted by gentlemen who had birth, worth, piety, learning, or all united to recommend him to promotion. Now it is an arena where impure influence tilts against unblushing hypocrisy. The race is between some shuffling old lawyer, or a canting saint. One has reached the woolsack by political thimble-rigging, which means starting patriot, and turning, when the price is offered, a ministerial hack. He forks a drunken dean, his son, into a Father-in-Godship with all the trifling temporalities attendant on the same. Well, the other fellow is a 'regular go-a-head,' denounces popery, calculates the millennium, alarms thereby elderly women of both sexes, edifies old maids, who retire to their closets in the evening with the Bible in one hand, and a brandy-bottle in the other; and what he likes best, spiritualizes with the younger ones."

"Stop, dear James." The emphasis on the word _spiritualize_ had alarmed my mother, who, to tell the truth, had a slight touch of the prevailing malady, and, but for the counteracting influence of the commander, might have been deluded into saintship by degrees.

The great toe was, however, again awfully invaded, and my father's spiritual state of mind not all improved by the second twinge, which was a heavy one.

"Why, d----n it--"

"Don't curse, dear James."

"Curse! I will; for if you had the gout, you would swear like a trooper."

"Indeed I would not."

"Ah, Mary," replied my father, "between twinges, if you knew the comfort of a curse or two--it relieves one so."

"That, indeed, James, must be but a sorry consolation, as Mr. Cantwell said--"

"Oh! d----n Cantwell," roared my father, "a fellow that will tell you that there is but one path to heaven, and that he has discovered it. Pish! Mary, the grand route is open as the mail-coach road, and Papist and Protestant, Quaker and Anabaptist, may jog along at even pace. I'm not altogether sure about Jews and Methodists. One bearded vagabond at Portsmouth charged me, when I was going to the Peninsula, ten shillings a pound for exchanging bank notes for specie, and every guinea the circumcised scoundrel gave was a light one. He'll fry--or has fried already--and my poor bewildered old aunt, under the skillful management of the Methodist preachers, who for a dozen years in their rambles, had made her house an inn, left the three thousand five per cents, which I expected, to blow the gospel-trumpet, either in California or the Cape--for, God knows, I never particularly inquired in which country the trumpeter was to sound 'boot and saddle,' after I had ascertained that the doting fool had made a legal testament quite sufficient for the purposes of the holy knaves who humbugged her. Cantwell is one of the same crew, a specious hypocrite. I would attend to the fellow no more than to that red-headed rector--every priest is a rector now--who often held my horse at his father's forge, when T happened to throw a shoe hunting,--and would half break his back bowing, if I handed him now and then a sixpence. Would I believe the dictum of that low-born dog, when he told me that in head-quarters"--and my father elevated his hand toward heaven--"they cared this pinch of snuff, whether upon a Friday I ate a rasher or red-herring?"

Two episodes interrupted the polemical disquisition. In character none could be more different--the one eventuated in a clean knock down--the other decided indirectly my future fortunes--and, in the next chapter, both shall be detailed.

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