Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 5/Ana (September 28, 1861)

2698807Once a Week, Series 1, Volume V — Ana (September 28, 1861)
1861Edward Walford


ANA.


The late Mr. Pat Lalor, who sat in Parliament for a short time as M.P. for an Irish county, was as inveterate a joker as ever took his seat in the House of Commons. When a new Parliament was elected, Mr. Pease, the Quaker, and the late Mr. Edward Baines were among the recent additions to St. Stephens. “Bedad,” whispered honest Pat in his comic brogue to a friend on his right, “here’s the agricultural interest has sent us up some new members—in the shape of Pays and Banes.”

The late Mr. Nicholas Aylward Vigors, sometime M.P. for Carlow, was an F.R.S. and an eminent naturalist, and for many years honorary secretary of the Zoological Society. Some five-and-twenty years ago he was ejected from the representation of that constituency by Colonel Bruen. It is related in Dr. Doyle’s memoirs that a common friend remarked, à propos of the circumstance, that Vigors need not have gone very far from his favourite Zoological Gardens in the Regent’s Park to see Bruin at the top of the pole.

James Smith (“Rejected Addresses”) gave the following reason for the election of Gully, the boxer, for Ponte-fract:

You ask me the cause that made Pontefract sully
Her fame by returning to Parliament Gully?
The etymological cause, I suppose, is—
His breaking the bridges of so many noses.”