NUMBER XLIX.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 20th, 1808,

Nec meus hic sermo est; sed quem præcepit Ofellus;
Rusticus.

No bull, that thro' this number bellows,

Is of the true Hibernian breed:

For as to country cousin O'Fellus,

He a Milesian! He indeed!

SIR,

To the Anonymous,

HOR.

THE following are not Irish, but exotick bulls.

I. Cowper, in a letter to the Reverend Walter Bagot, writing of Doctor Maty, describes him as " a critical character in all it's forms:-acute,-sour, -and blunt."

Quere,-could an Irishman, without a bull, bestow on the same individual the appellations,-sharp, and blunt?

II." Puisse ce sentiment, que je vous inspire,

"durer autant que ma vie! dit Corinne ;-ou, du "moins, puisse ma vie ne pas durer plus que lui!"*

To me now it appears, that if the sentiment endured as long as Corinne's life, she could run no risk whatever of surviving it;-and therefore that the Du moins of the above paragraph is no better than a bull.

III. "Or taste the smell of Dairy." THOMPSON.

The above is beautifully expressive. But it is nevertheless a Bull; and would be sacrificed as such at once, if a poor Irishman had used it.

IV. In Stella's lines to Swift, the following couplet involves a very distinguished bull; unless we interpret the Authoress to have desired that the Dean should die on the very day, on which this poem, (wishing him long life,) was written.

"To bear with dignity my sorrow,

"One day alone; and die to-morrow.”

Mrs. Johnson's only excuse, for thus confounding Demain with Le Lendemain, must be that she had been resident in Ireland for some years. The mere substitution of the for to would remove the blunder.

• Mme. de Stäel.

V. "Vale igitur mi Cicero;" (writes Tully to his “son ;) tibique persuade-esse te quidem mihi caris"simum; sed multo fore cariorem, si &cet. &cet. "&cet."

Here we have dearer than dearest.

In another of his letters (to Terentia) we have Miserrimo Miserior.

In a Roman, these are Hyperboles : in an Irishman, they would be Bulls.

VI. If the following passage from an absurd, and undeservedly celebrated work, (I mean the Voyage de Paris à Saint Cloud,) be denied to contain a Bull, I should be glad that the deniers would favour us with a translation. "Henriette me faisoit voir, "aujourdhui son potager; demain sa vigne; apres"demain son champ; &c. &c."

Transpose the order of the sentences; and it may stand thus: "Henriette me faisoit voir demain son "( potager; &c. &c.

Granted, that we understand what the Author would say: but a similar defence might be made for every (or almost every) Bull. To the insufficiency of a vindication, which, by proving too much, becomes altogether inadmissible, I shall have occasion, in the course of this letter, to recur.

VII. In England, the following monumental effu

sion was at one time, (and perhaps still is) to be found. The widower speaks.

"O cruel death! how could you be so unkind,
"As to take her before,—and to leave me behind?
"Better it were-have taken both,-if either:

"Which would have been more agreeable to the Survivor !"

Tristram Shandy's Father never analysed his griefs, with more metaphysical subtilty, than this disconsolate poet has displayed. The taking his wife before -appears, from her epitaph, to have been an affliction which, in common with many husbands, he might have borne with resignation. But Death, not content with taking her before, commits the cruel aggravation of leaving him behind; and this latter part of the calamity he is not sufficiently pétri of the marital spirit—to endure. The picture contained in the two concluding lines, which represent a husband departing this life along with a chere moitié, whom he contrives (notwithstanding) to survive, is one of inimitable, and even somewhat mysterious and abstruse refinement.*

VIII. In the third of his Moral Essays, (as he has been pleased to call them,) POPE Complains of a young Spendthrift, that he

"Mistook reverse of Wrong for Right."

Perhaps it may be though to justify the Du moins of Me. de

Stäel.

But the error is the Poet's; and consists in his supposing that the Reverse of Wrong can be anything but Right. Prodigality is indeed the opposite to Avarice; but they are both species of the one genus, Wrong;-the reverse of which, in the abstract, (as observed already) must be Right. Pope might as well accuse one of mistaking reverse of Black for White. Unquestionably we perceive what the Author was about. He may be said (in his own phrase) to have "blunder'd round about a meaning." But where is the Bull, from which we cannot extract a signification? Procumbet humi;-let him once be sacrificed; and I am content that, in his entrails, the soothsayers should divine a meaning.

We know that the single soldier, who boasted of having surrounded the guard which he made prisoners, intended to assert no more than that he had circumvented them.*When, in your last Number, we find Sir Teague O'Mega cry,

“You see you're blind,”

we are aware that by see, he would express perceive; and when the same Original Personage, is represented as saying of the Spaniards,

"Oh! them 's the real sort of Irishmen!
"Troth it's a pity they were born in Spain !t

* See Number VI.

A B C's Masquerade; Number XLVIII.