MARMION W. SAVAGE.

BORN 1823 DIED 1872.

tures in general regular and massive, with a free and daring expression which had a charm of its own for those who like what the French call une beauté insolente. She was above the middle height, and looked even taller than she actually was, in consequence of her remarkably stately and commanding carriage, a point to which, perhaps, she paid the more attention, as it was the only carriage she could call her own. All the developments of her person were on a large scale; she wanted no milliner's assistance to help her to bustle through the world.

Falcon was very tall and meagre; his nose was red and hooked; his eyes twinkling and intelligent; his forehead high, narrow, receding, bald, garnished on each side with an upright tuft of reddish hair.

[The novels of Marmion W. Savage were very popular in their day. They belong for the most part to that era in romance inaugurated by the late Charles Kingsley, in which a connection was preached between a firm belief in the truths of Christianity and the possession of well-developed muscles. Savage was born in Dublin in 1823 or 1824, and spent there the greater part of his life, holding an official position. Removing to London in 1856 he gave himself up to the literary profession, and produced in rapid succession a series of stories, The Bachelor of the Albany, My Uncle the Curate, Reuben Medlicott, and the Woman of Business. The first and third were highly popular, and have been reprinted in New York. The Falcon Family, produced at an earlier date, is on the whole the best known and the choicest of his stories. It is Mr. Falcon was an immense favourite with intended as a satire on the leaders of the little England; he was the school-boy's archiYoung Ireland party; and some of the sarcasm tect and ship-builder, and Master of the is very keen and amusing, but, as political pic | Ordnance to the British Nursery; incompartures, his sketches are no better than carica-able at making cannon with quills, mortars ture. Savage is happier in his description of Cockney adventurers than Irish extravagances; and his portraits of two social parasites are intensely amusing. He was the editor for some years of the Examiner; and he also brought out an edition with notes of Sheil's Political and Social Sketches. He died in Torquay, whither he had retired for his health, on May 1, 1872. He was married twice; his first wife was a niece of Lady Morgan. Savage would probably have been better known, but that the restraints of official life compelled him to veil the authorship of his early works. His novels fully make up for their want of constructive skill by their sketches of contemporary character-sketches not the less amusing because the standpoint of the author is that of good-humoured cynicism.]

of trotter-bones, armadas of old corks, and armies out of visiting-tickets. Then, for children who were sager than to play with anything but the toys of philosophy, he could suffocate canaries in exhausted receivers, develop electric sparks from the bristling backs of reluctant kittens, exhibit the laws of refraction with a slop-basin and a tea-spoon, and seduce needles out of work-boxes with a magnet of amazing virtue, which he always carried in his waistcoat pocket. In a word, he was the darling of the darlings; secured the nurseries first, and there planted the artillery with which he often carried the dining-room ; which was, of course, the main point.

Mrs. Falcon had the usual success that follows the steps of a fine and a clever woman, where she had not the sharpness or the jealousy of her own sex to cope with. Wherever male influence was ascendant, the gypsy was seldom repulsed, and often received with hearty welcome. What man, who had either the eye of a Rubens for florid beauty, or the taste of a Borrow for Zingaree adventure, could contemplate either her person or her character without admiration? In houses where petticoat government was established she had a more difficult card to play; and she

relied, of course, upon her intellectual re- | la voleuse!" when the daughter of the parson sources and diplomatic abilities altogether.

always did, a particular fancy for matters of gold and silver. But never could she resist the temptations of loose bijouterie; and numerous were the occasions when vanished thimbles, missing pencil-cases, and rings or bracelets supposed to be in the crucible or in the moon, were accidentally discovered in the recesses of her reticule, or the oubliette of some still more roguish privy pocket.

and niece of the lord trooped off in their satin Mrs. Falcon had been, in her maiden estate, boots, or marched away in their Cashmere a Miss Georgina Hawke, the daughter of a shawls. Considering that, amongst other dissipated clergyman, and the niece of a pro- houses, she had occasionally sojourned in fligate peer, who had passed from the House those of dignitaries of the Church, and even of Lords into the bankrupts' calendar in con- in episcopal palaces, it was marvellous that sequence of his patrician propensity to deal in Georgina Hawke's organ of conscientiousness horse-flesh. Lively and handsome, indif- had not been better developed, and very ferently educated, and loosely principled (hav-curious, too, that she should evince, as she ing lost her mother at a very early age), the brown Georgina passed the first twenty years of her life wandering up and down the British dominions, in a sort of aristocratic vagrancy, transmitted from house to house, forwarded from uncle to aunt, tossed from one cousin to another, generally received with welcome, because, beside being a relative, she was pretty and entertaining, but as commonly parted with (when she was not unceremoniously packed off) with equal or greater alacrity, in consequence of an amiable, and, in her case, a pardonable tendency to overtax the hospitalities of her friends and relations. Under these unfavourable circumstances, leading this vagabond life, the deficiences she laboured under in the refinements and accomplishments of ladies of her social rank were anything but surprising. A tomboy at twelve, she was an Amazon at twenty; and those free, rollicking manners, which made her popular enough with country gentlemen, rendered her proportionably formidable to her own sex, particularly to mothers who had daughters to bring up and out, of an age to be influenced by bad example. However, she managed to pick up as she jogged along a scrap of an accomplishment here, and a sprig of useful knowledge there. She could never remember where she got her music; and Heaven only knew where she acquired the little French she possessed, and of which she was apt to make an adventurous and amusing display. But she was accused of picking up other things, as well as information, on her rambles; and in truth she was from the outset a little predatory, as well as migratory, in her habits; that is to say, she did not participate in all the respect that judges and lawyers express for the rights of property; or perhaps she inclined to the primitive Christian system of community of goods. Her moral delinquencies, however, were generally taken in good part; her relatives and connections were as often entertained as annoyed by her petty larcenies; and sometimes they even laughed heartily as they screamed, "A la voleuse! A

Miss Hawke, in fact, was an Autolycus in petticoats, "littered under Mercury," a "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles;" for, having a shrewd gift of observation, she had remarked in her tenderest years the thousand "waifs and strays" (as lawyers phrase it) in the forms of combs, caps, aprons, chains, fans, feathers, veils, garters, flowers-the accumulations of bygone seasons, and the débris of fashions out of date-which strew and encumber the bedrooms and boudoirs of her sex, as leaves do the brooks in autumn; and perhaps she observed, too, that the hands of the lady's-maid are unequal in every case to the clearing away of all this gay rubbish. At any rate she was a match for any lady's-maid in the land at this species of Augean labour; but even when she pounced upon articles of greater value, a diamond brooch or a braid of pearls, how often did she redeem the act of temporary felony (in the opinion of all but the party plundered) by the transfer to a very pretty neck of what was destined to deck a very plain one?

Upon the whole, it was a question whether our hawk, turned "la pie voleuse" (for her girlhood was so nicknamed), was more admired than feared. She certainly did produce more or less alarm wherever she showed her handsome brazen face; and ere she attained her seventeenth year there was a desire very generally felt and expressed to see her married and settled in the world.

At length she was thrown, by one of the changes and chances of a roving life, into a mercantile circle in some town in the north of England; and from that hour she may be said to have become the undisputed property of the middle classes. Then, for the first

time, she found herself a personage, and dis- | clerk at Somerset House; he had once supercovered the importance in England of being intended a copper-mine; he had managed a allied even to nobility under a cloud. Could lunatic asylum; controlled the accounts of a she have minced herself into twenty pieces national cow-pock institution, supervised port there would not have been enough of the duties, been secretary to a horticultural assolord's niece for the excellent people into whose ciation, and acted as deputy librarian to the society she was now cast. Cotton and hard- British Museum; and he had now just reware fought for her: she was the desire of signed the place of inspector of works to a the potteries, the idol of the power-looms, and new railway company, which he had only the goddess of those who dealt in crockery. filled for three weeks, with a view to obtain Now an iron-master carried her off to Bir- the appointment of secretary to the Irish mingham; now the stocking-weavers of Not- Branch Society for the Conversion of Polish tingham possessed her; she was the pride of Jews. His employers had generally a high Kidderminster, the mania of Manchester, and opinion of his talents for a month or so, but the love of Leeds. There came matrimonial they usually got tired of him before the end offers in the course of things;-indigos pro- of a second; and if they did not, he got weary posed; teas paid their addresses; wine wooed, of them before the expiration of a third; and and cutlery courted her. It ended as such thus the engagement very rarely lasted for matters end frequently, in her intermarrying half a year. The consequence, however, of neither with china, cutlery, teas, wine, nor this multifarious life was that he knew a little indigo. Suddenly-marvellously, mysterious- of everything knowable, and something of ly-she committed matrimony one foggy everybody in England. He passed, upon morning with a moss-trooping adventurer twenty subjects, for a very learned man like herself. In short, never was there a amongst people who knew nothing at all more suitable union in point of character, or about them; in mathematics he had crossed a more hazardous one in point of prudence, the ass's bridge, peeped into the angles of a than that of Georgina Hawke to the ingenious parallelogram, and nibbled a little at square Mr. Peregrine Falcon. roots; he was geologist enough to talk of conglomerate, and to be up to trap; his botany qualified him to speak of the petals of a rose, the stamina of a tulip, and the nectary of a snap-dragon; he knew the alphabets of several languages, and had "a little Latin and less Greek," like his illustrious countryman William Shakspeare; so that, upon the whole, he was not one of the least accomplished smatterers of the smattering age we live in.

To the dismay of her patrician kindred she now reappeared at their houses in town, and their halls in the country, presenting them with her straggling, eccentric husband. His picture has been already drawn; it is only necessary to add here, that his nose was not uniformly pink, but changed colour with the seasons; -pink in spring, red in summer, purple in autumn, and in winter something between blue and crimson. The feature was the more important, because his nose was the only thing about Mr. Falcon that seemed to flourish. His person was a precise antithesis to his wife's a shilling pamphlet on Poor Laws by Ridgway beside a thumping quarto Book of Beauty, by Heath.

Falcon, however, resembled his spouse in being equally self-educated. Whatever were his intellectual deficiences he did not owe them to the systems of Eton and Harrow. He was a living proof that a man may be shallow without being indebted to Cambridge or under the slightest obligation to Oxford. Busy rather than industrious; volatile rather than active; cleverish rather than clever;he had been in fifty different offices in half that number of years; for all through life he was "the gentleman in search of a situation." He remembered the time when he had been a

In the course of his many-coloured life he had numerous opportunities of conferring little official favours and obligations on a variety of people, and he had used these opportunities with tolerable dexterity and effect (if not always with the strictest regard to probity), so as to make a considerable number of friends, not in the sentimental sense of the word, but in its most practical, economical, and fiscal signification.

Such was the pair which had now roamed the world, without certain income or fixed residence, with various fortunes and few misfortunes, not always hand in hand, but still conjugally united, for nearly twenty years; living none knew how, yet living tolerably well; dwelling none knew where, yet never very badly housed; eating, drinking, and sleeping better than nine-tenths of her majesty's subjects, yet seldom paying a butcher's

bill, very rarely a wine-merchant's, and never | already mentioned, they had another girl a landlord or a tax-collector. Meanwhile, named Paulina, and an elder boy, Pickever they had scrupulously obeyed the first rule of Falcon, who was heir to the family estates in Nature's arithmetic-the law of multiplica- Airshire, and the patrimonial castle in the tion. Besides the two daughters and the son isle of Sky.

THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER.

BORN 1823- DIED 1867.

[Meagher was the orator of the Young Ireland party; and his speeches-fiery, brilliant, and highly finished-contributed as much as the writings of the Nation to stir the people to insurrection.

tinguished himself at the battle of Bull's Run, where his horse was shot under him. Afterwards he raised the famous Irish Brigade, of which he was elected first general. The services which this gallant force rendered to the arms of the Union are well known, and have been admitted by all the historians of the civil war. The brigade especially distinguished itself in the seven days' fighting around Richmond; and its conduct at Antietam was made the subject of flattering notice in an order of the day by General M'Clellan. The terrible battle of Fredericksburg gave the general and his troops an opportunity of still further adding to their laurels. Seven times they charged up to the crest of the enemy's breastworks; and the best proof of their desperate courage was that out of 1200 men whom the general led into battle, only 280 appeared next day on parade. In this engagement Meagher himself was wounded in the leg, and for a while had to retire from active service. In the May following, however, he was able once more to lead his forces; and at Chancellorsville the destruction of the broken brigade was com

Thomas Francis Meagher was born on August 3, 1823, in Waterford, which his father had represented for some time. He left the colleges of Clongowes-Wood and Stonyhurst, where he had been educated, with a brilliant reputation. When he returned to Ireland in 1843, after a tour on the Continent, he found the country in the full fever of the repeal agitation; and he ultimately gave to the movement the benefit of his eloquent tongue. As time went on he joined the more fiery spirits of the Young Ireland party. He was one of the deputation to Paris in 1848 to congratulate France on the establishment of the Republic; and on his return he presented with a glowing speech an Irish tricolor flag to the citizens of Dublin. In May of the same year he was arrested for seditious language; but the jury being unable to agree, he was discharged. Soon after, when the passage of the treason felony act drove the Young Ire-pleted. Meagher now came to the conclusion land leaders into open insurrection, Meagher was among those who took the field. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. We quote his speech on this occasion.

The sen

tence was afterwards commuted to transportation, and he was sent to Tasmania with O'Brien and Macmanus.

In 1852 he made his escape and landed in America, where he was enthusiastically received. For a time he became public lecturer; in 1855 he was admitted to the bar. The outbreak of the American civil war opened up to Meagher another career. From the beginning he was an enthusiastic supporter of the cause of the North. First he raised a body of Zouaves, who were incorporated in the famous 69th New York Regiment under the command of Colonel Corcoran. He was present and dis

that it was no longer desirable to drag the phantom regiment into action, and resigned. Criticism was freely passed on Meagher's skill as a general, but there was complete agreement of opinion that he had proved himself a gallant soldier, of a courage at once cool and reckless. After he had resigned his command he was appointed by President Lincoln brigadiergeneral of volunteers, and also had charge of the district of Etowah, where he had under his orders a force of 12,000 infantry, 200 guns, and also some cavalry.

At the conclusion of the war he was made acting governor of the territory of Montana. He had a tragic end. While travelling in a steamer on the Mississippi, he fell overboard, and was drowned. His body was never recovered. At the time of his death, July 1,

1867, he was but forty-three years of age. He | feeling of resentment towards them.
published a volume of his speeches and some
essays under the title Recollections of Ireland
and the Irish. The latter display a keen sense
of humour, and some powers of description;
but his work as a writer was far inferior to
his achievements as an orator. He was at his
best when he was the youthful mouthpiece of
the passions and dreams of the "Young Ire-
landers;" his speeches in America, though
brilliant, were not unfairly, though somewhat
contemptuously, characterized by his friend
and admirer John Mitchel as "rhetorical
exercitations."]

fluenced as they must have been by the charge
of the lord chief-justice, they could have found
no other verdict. What of that charge? Any
strong observations on it I feel sincerely would
ill befit the solemnity of the scene; but I
earnestly beseech of you, my lord-you who
preside on that bench-when the passion and
the prejudices of this hour have passed away,
to appeal to your own conscience, and ask of
it, Was your charge as it ought to have been,
impartial and indifferent between the subject
and the crown?