1 Lord Bacon, the original, not the boatman.
“Pity,” I thought, “that the hand of man should be unhappily preoccupied--with a blunderbuss!”
“No,” he continued, “physicians, Danish, Saxon, and Norman, have prescribed for us (generally a course of bleeding and depletion) with so little success; the grand panacea, Protestantism, has been administered to us,--as gently as a ball to some restive horse, with a twitch upon our national nose, and a thrust down our national throat,--with so few favourable results, that I begin to fear our malady is chronic, and that affliction must be regarded as our normal.
“I have heard before,” I remarked, “that Ireland has not been considered by her medical advisers to be a very good _subject_.”
“I see,” he answered, “but we are more loyal, perhaps, than you are inclined to suppose, and quite as much so as you have a right to expect. Some people seem surprised that we Irish do not set up statues of Turgesius, the Norwegian gentleman, who favoured us with a tax called _Nosestate. Money_, by which he merely meant, that, if we declined to pay, he should remove the facial adjunct alluded to; that we do not paint memorial pictures of Prince John and his Normans ridiculing our Irish Chiefs, when they came to welcome them at Waterford, and chaffing them about their long hair and their short yellow shirts, which, I grant, must have been rather funny; that we exhibit no restlessness for the canonisation of Cromwell, and make no pious pilgrimages to the tomb of Dutch William. Now, I by no means say, with Junius, that 'Ireland has been uniformly plundered and oppressed,' but I do say that the bride which Pope Adrian, himself an Englishman, gave, with a gay marriage-ring of emeralds, to your second Henry, has not been very lovingly dealt with.”
“The wedding,” I said, “has not been, as yet, productive of much happiness; but you must remember, that if the husband has been harsh at times, and disagreeable, the conduct of the lady has been very aggravating and suspicious. Hath she not flirted with _Monsieur_ and _Jonathan?_ Hath she not decked herself with ribbons of obnoxious hue, and gone after strange priests, whom John Bull honoureth not? Could he have foreseen the troublous consequences of the union, he might have wished to imitate the example of Jupiter, who, having considered the subject in all its bearings, devoured Metis, his wife, lest she should produce an offspring wiser than himself.”