are many terms which answer the description of Horace, and 'Græco fonte cadunt parce detorta.' Contrary to his own better taste and sounder judgment, he was, however, on last Shrove Tuesday, at a wedding-feast of some of my tenantry, induced, from complacency to the newly-married couple, to eat of the profane aliment; and never was the Attic derivation of the pancake more wofully accomplished than in the sad result-for his condescension cost him his life. The indigestible nature of the compost itself might not have been so destructive in an ordinary case; but it was quite a stranger and ill at ease in Father Prout's stomach: it eventually proved fatal in its effects, and hurried him away from this vale of tears, leaving the parish a widow, and making orphans of all his parishioners. My agent writes that his funeral (or berring, as the Irish call it) was thronged by dense multitudes from the whole county, and was as well attended as if it were a monster meeting. The whole body of his brother clergy, with the bishop as usual in full pontificals, were mourners on the occasion; and a Latin elegy was composed by the most learned of the order, Father Magrath, one, like Prout, of the old school, who had studied at Florence, and is still a correspondent of many learned Societies abroad. That elegy I have subjoined, as a record of Prout's genuine worth, and as a specimen of a kind of poetry called Leonine verse, little cultivated at the present day, but greatly in vogue at the revival of letters under Leo X. IN MORTEM VENERABILIS ANDREE PROUT, CARMEN. Plebs tenui fossá Pastoris condidit ossa, Namque furore brevi liquidâque ardentis aquæ vi Carpe, o carpe dies, nam tibi parta quies.' Sweet upland! where, like hermit old, in peace sojourn'à Mark where beneath thy verdant sod lie deep inurn'd Nor deck with monumental shrine or tapering column Whose soul, above earth's homage, meek yet solemn, Much was he prized, much loved; his stern rebuke And rogues fear'd more the good man's single look He's gone; and discord soon I ween will visit And the foul demon vex with stills illicit No fatal chance could happen more to cross And all the neighbourhood deplore his loss, For he kept Lent most strict, and pickled herring Grim Death has broke his angling-rod; his berring No more can he hook up carp, eel, or trout, Arts which Saint Peter loved, whose gate to Prout Mourn not, but verdantly let shamrocks keep The bad man's death it well becomes to weep,- 29 No. II. A PLEA FOR PILGRIMAGES; SIR WALTER SCOTT'S VISIT TO THE BLARNEY STONE. "Beware, beware Of the black friar, Who sitteth by Norman stone: In the midnight air, And his mass of the days that are gone." BYRON. SINCE the publication of this worthy man's "Apology for Lent," which, with some account of his lamented death and well-attended funeral, appeared in our last Number, we have written to his executors―(one of whom is Father Mat. Horrogan, P.P. of the neighbouring village of Blarney; and the other, our elegiac poet, Father Magrath)-in the hope of being able to negotiate for the valuable posthumous essays and fugitive pieces which we doubted not had been left behind in great abundance by the deceased. These two disinterested divines-fit associates and bosom-companions of Prout during his lifetime, and whom, from their joint letters, we should think eminently qualified to pick up the fallen mantle of the departed prophet-have, in the most handsome manner, promised us all the literary and philosophic treatises bequeathed to them by the late incumbent of Watergrasshill; expressing, in the very complimentary note which they have transmitted us, and which our modesty prevents us from inserting, their thanks and that of the whole parish, for our sympathy and condolence on this melancholy bereavement, and intimating at the same time their regret at not being able to send us also, for our private perusal, the collection of the good father's parochial sermons; the whole of which (a most valuable MS.) had been taken off for his own use by the bishop, whom he had made his residuary legatee. These sermons " must be 66 |