It is a commonplace, even amounting to a bromide, to speak of the breadth, the depth, and the length of the ties of Irish kinship. In Ireland it is not so much Love that hath us in the net as Relationship. Pedigree takes precedence even of politics, and in all affairs that matter it governs unquestioned. It is sufficient to say that the candidate for any post, in any walk of life—is “a cousin of me own, by the Father”—“a sort of a relation o’ mine, by the Mother”—and support of the unfittest is condoned, even justified.

I am uncertain if the practice of deifying a relationship by the employment of the definite article is peculiar to Munster, or even to Ireland. “The fawther,” “the a’nt.” He who speaks to me of my father as “The Fawther,” implies a sort of humorous intimacy, a respect just tinged with facetiousness, that is quite lacking in the severe directness of “your father.”

There was once a high magnate of a self-satisfied provincial town (its identity is negligible). An exhibition was presently to be held there, and it chanced that a visit from Royalty occurred shortly before the completion of the arrangements. It also chanced that a possible visit to Ireland of a still greater Personage impended—(this was several years ago). The lesser Royalty partook of lunch with the magnate, and the latter broached the question of a State opening of the exhibition by the august visitor to be.

“When ye go back to London, now,” he beguiled, “coax the Brother!”

How winning is the method of address! It has in it something of the insidious coquetry of the little dog who skips, in affected artlessness, uninvited, upon your knee.

I have strayed from my text, which was the potency of the net of relationship. Being Irish, I have to acknowledge its spell, and I think it is indisputable that a thread, however slender, of kinship adds a force to friendship.

Martin’s mother and mine were first cousins, granddaughters of Chief Justice Charles Kendal Bushe, and of his wife, Anne Crampton. I have heard my mother assert that she had seventy first cousins, all grandchildren of “The Chief,” but I think there was a touch of fancy about this. There is something sounding and sumptuous about the number seventy, and some remembrance of Ahab and his seventy relatives may have been in it. In her memoir of her brother Robert, Martin has given some suggestion of the remarkable charm and influence of these great-grandparents of ours. The adoration that both of them inspired distils like a perfume from every record of them. They seem to have obliterated all their rival grandfathers and grandmothers. One reflects that each of the seventy first cousins must have possessed four grandparents, yet, in the radiance of this couple, the alternative grandpapas and grandmammas appear to have been, in the regard of their grandchildren, no more than shadows.

They lived in a strangely interesting time, the time of the Union, when there was room in the upper classes for each individual to be known to each, and the proportion of those that governed, and those that were governed, was as the players in an international cricket match to the lookers-on; and it is not too much to boast that, out of a very brilliant team, there was no better innings played than that of Charles Kendal Bushe. When, as in “the ’98,” the lookers-on attempted to join in the game, the result exemplified their incapacity and the advantages of the existing arrangement.

Martin had been given by her mother a boxful of old family letters; one of those pathetic collections of letters that no one either wants, or looks at, or feels justified in burning. I know not for how many years they had been hidden away. We had talked, every now and then, of examining them, but the examination had been postponed for a more convenient season that never came. Now life is emptier, and time seems of less value; I have read them all, and I think that some extracts from them will not come amiss among these memories.

It would require a sounder historian than I, and one who had specialised in Irish affairs of the latter years of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, to deal adequately with these old papers. The Chief Justice and his wife lived intensely, in the very heart of the most intense time, probably, that Ireland has ever known. They knew all the rebel leaders, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the rest of the splendid romantics who fought and died, and lit with the white flame of devotion one page at least of Ireland’s history. The names of Plunket, Grattan, Saurin, later, O’Connell, and others less well known, are found in many of these letters, and there are valentines from “Jemmy Saurin,” apostrophising “the blue eyes of Kitty” (one of the Chief’s daughters, and grandmother of “Martin Ross”); genuine, perhaps, but more probably faked by the young lady’s heartless relatives; anagrams upon the name of Charles Kendal Bushe, and an epigram, written by C. K. B. himself, which has a very charming deftness, and shall be transcribed here.

The more I investigate the contents of the old letter box the more fascinating they prove themselves to be.

I must, at all events, endeavour to refrain from irrelevant quotation—(even regretfully omitting “The cure for Ellen P.’s spots. Kate writes me word her face is now as clear as chrystal”)—and will try to deal only with such of the contents of the box as come legitimately within my scope.

The Chief’s letters cover a wide period, from about 1795 (a couple of years after his marriage) to 1837. One does not, perhaps, find in them the brilliance that is associated with his name in public life and in general society. Those from which I have made extracts were written to his wife. Deeply woven in them is the devotion to her that was the mainspring of his life, and in works of devotion one need not expect to find epigram.[3]

In one of them, written in 1807, he writes from Dublin, to her, in the country, telling her of “an unfortunate business” in which he, “without any personal ill-will to anyone,” “found it his duty to take a part.” He deplores that “among the Members of the Bar coldness and jealousy prevail, where there had been the utmost harmony and unanimity.” “It is not in my nature to like such a state of things,” he says, and, I believe, says truly, “and when I am alone my spirits are affected by it in a way that I wou’d not for the World confess to anyone but you. I am told that I am libell’d in the newspapers, which I dont know for I have not read them, and which I wou’d not care about, from the same motives that have so often, to your knowledge, made me indifferent about being prais’d in them.... You remember on a former trying occasion how I acted and I can never forget the heroism with which you supported me and encourag’d me in a conduct which was apparently ruinous in its consequences to yourself and our darling Babies. Ever since you left this, my mind has been agitated in the way I have described to you. I am seven years older and my nerves twenty years older than at the period of the Union. Judge, then, the delight I feel at the prospect of seeing again so soon, the bosom friend dearer than all, the only person upon whose heart I can repose my own when weary—I judge of it by the pleasure I feel in thus unburthening myself to you, and in the consciousness that the very writing of this letter has given me the only warm, comfortable and confidential glow of heart which I have felt since you left me. Adieu beloved Nan—Pray burn this immediately” (twice underlined) “and let no human being learn anything of those thoughts which to you alone I wou’d communicate. Ever yours C. K. B.”

It is a hundred and more years since this injunction was written. The paper is stained and brittle, and I think that perhaps a tear, perhaps also a kiss or two, have contributed a little to the staining. But though she disobeyed him I believe he has forgiven her. I hope he will also forgive a great-granddaughter who has chanced upon this record of a disobedience that few could blame and that any lover would extol.

Long afterwards the same thought came in nearly the same words to another Irishman, the poet, George Darley, and he wrote those lines that have in them the same note of whispered tenderness that still breathes from the discoloured page of the letter that should have been burned a hundred years ago.

* * * * *

I have said that it was an interesting time to be alive in, this junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That the Chief’s sympathies were, as I have already mentioned, with the men on the losing side is very well known. In one of the early letters to his wife, he speaks of having had “a very prosperous circuit,” and says his business was “pretty general, not confin’d to friends or United Irishmen, tho these latter have been no bad friends to me either.” He did not defend their methods, but he stood by his friends, and to the end of his life he stood by his opinions.

In a letter written by Mrs. Bushe to their son Charles, at Castlehaven, after the death of the Chief (that is to say, forty-three years, at least, after the Act of Union), she speaks of the chaotic state of the country, and the ruin caused by the arbitrary and ill-considered enforcement of the recent Poor Law legislation. “Useless however to complain. England has the might which supersedes the right, and we are punished now for our own folly in consenting to the Union! Just what your Father predicted—‘when Ireland gives up the rights that she has, what right has she then to complain?’—How true this little squib of the poor dear C——” (Chief). “Happy for him he did not live to see the ruin he predicted!”

The following account of a visit to Edgeworthstown forms part of a letter, written at Omagh and dated Monday, August 16th, 1810. It is from Chief Justice Bushe to his wife; the beginning portion of the letter is printed in the Appendix I. (page 332).

“I am not surpriz’d that you ask about Edgeworthstown, and I can only tell you that every thing which Smyly has often said to us in praise of it is true and unexaggerated. Society in that house is certainly on the best plan I have ever met with. Edgeworth is a very clever fellow of much talent, and tho not deeply inform’d on any subject, is highly (which is consistent with being superficially) so in all. He talks a great deal and very pleasantly and loves to exhibit and perhaps obtrude what he wou’d be so justifiably vain of (his daughter and her works) if you did not trace that pride to his predominant Egotism, and see that he admires her because she is his child, and her works because they are his Grand Children. Mrs. Edgeworth is uncommonly agreeable and has been and not long ago very pretty. She is a perfect Scholar, and at the same time a good Mother and housewife. She is an excellent painter, like yourself, and like you has been oblig’d by producing Originals to give up Copying: She is you know a 5th or 6th Wife and her last child was his 22d. Two Miss Sneyds, amiable old maids, live with him. They are sisters of one of his wives, a beautiful and celebrated Honoria Sneyd, mention’d in Miss Seward’s Monody on Major AndrÉ and known by her misfortune in having been betroth’d to that poor fellow. They are Litchfield people of the old literary set of the Garricks Dr. Johnson Miss Seward &c. &c. There are many young Edgeworths male and female all of promise and talent and all living round the same table with this set among whom I have not yet mention’d Miss Edgeworth, because I consider you as already knowing her from her works. In such a Society you may suppose Conversation must be good, but I was not prepared to find it so easy. It is the only set of the kind I ever met with in which you are neither led nor driven, but actually fall, and that imperceptibly, into literary topics, and I attribute it to this that in that house literature is not a treat for Company upon Invitation days, but is actually the daily bread of the family. Miss Edgeworth is for nothing more remarkable than for the total absence of vanity. She seems to have studied her father’s foibles for two purposes, to avoid them and never to appear to see them, and what does not always happen, her want of affectation is unaffected. She is as well bred and as well dress’d and as easy and as much like other people as if she was not a celebrated author. No pretensions, not a bit of blue stocking is to be discover’d. In the Conversation she neither advances or keeps back, but mixes naturally and cheerfully in it, and tho in the number of words she says less than anyone yet the excellence of her remarks and the unpremeditated point which she gives them makes you recollect her to have talk’d more than others. I was struck by a little felicity of hers the night I was there. Shakespear was talk’d of as he always is, and I mentioned what you have lately heard me speak of as a literary discovery and curiosity, that he has borrow’d the Character of Cardinal Wolsey from Campion, the old Chronicler of Ireland. This was new to them and Edgeworth began one of his rattles—