He was at that time Mr. Wolfe. An information _ex officio_ had been filed against a printer in Cork for a seditious newspaper: it turned out that the two Counsellors Sheers were the real editors. They begged of me to mediate with the attorney-general. He had always a strong feeling for the honour and character of his profession, and forgave all parties, on conditions which I all but _vouched for_, but to which they certainly did not adhere.
An Irish peasant cutting his own head off _by mistake_—His reputed ghost—Humours of an Irish _Wake_—_Natural_ deaths of the Irish peasantry—Reflections on the Excise laws.
Among my memorandums of singular incidents, I find one which even now affords me as much amusement as such a circumstance can possibly admit of: and as it is, at the same time, highly characteristic of the people among whom it occurred, in that view I relate it. A man _decapitating himself by mistake_ is indeed a _blunder_ of true Hibernian character.[20]
This anecdote has been termed “_fabulous_” by some of the sapient periodical critics, and a “_bounce_” by others. “’Tis quite impossible,” say the scribblers, “for any man to cut _his own_ head off.” This no doubt singular decapitation, however, happens to be a well known and comparatively recent _fact_; and if either of the aforesaid sceptics will be so obliging as to try the same species of guillotine that Ned did at the Barrow water, he may, with the greatest facility, get rid of, probably, the _thickest_ and _heaviest_ article belonging to him.
The Emperor of Morocco, it is said, to convince his subjects what an easy matter decapitation was, and what an uncertain tenure a head has in his dominions, used to cut off the head of a jack-ass every morning with one back stroke of his sabre. Should his copper-coloured Majesty honour England with his august presence, to be feasted, fire-worked, and subsidised like Don Miguel the First, what noble practice at decapitation, in the absence of his _jack-asses_, he might have in London among the periodical _scribblers_—without doing much injury to the _animals_ themselves, and none at all either to the “Société des lettres,” or what is called in England the “discerning public.”