"only fault," said Macnish, was that he was careless of the morrow,—Maginn had been gradually descending in the world, till at length he became a prey to all the ills,—barring, indeed, the fourth,—which
"————— the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron and the gaol"[1]—
and which are happily more characteristic of the age which produced his countrymen. Goldsmith, Sheridan, and Dermody, than his own. Finally, a speculation to reprint, under the title of Magazine Miscellanies, the choicest of his contributions to serial literature, not having been successful, Maginn, in 1842, was thrown into the Fleet Prison for the expenses. Hence he emerged penniless, and in the last stage of consumption. In this sad condition, he was enabled to retreat to Walton-upon-Thames, and there he breathed his last, Aug. 20, 1842, in the forty-ninth year of his age, like Sheridan, utterly forsaken by the party for which he had done so much, and in ignorance of the noble munificence of Sir Robert Peel,[2] whose gift of £100, in answer to the touching appeal made to him on behalf of the dying scholar, only arrived in time to pay his burial fees. Alas! poor Yorick.
In the Dublin University Magazine for January, 1844, appeared a long, affectionate and scholarly,—if laboured and pedantic—biographical notice of Maginn. This has been attributed to D. M. Moir; but was actually written by his reverent and faithful friend and townsman, the late Edward Vaughan Kenealy, LL.D. The portrait prefixed to this,—a sort of imitation of ours in Fraser,—is by Mr. Samuel Skillin, of Cork; it is pronounced an admirable likeness, but its artistic inferiority is at once manifest, on comparing it with the masterly sketch by Maclise.
In the following year, 1845, was published by Churton of Holies Street, a charming little volume by the since notorious writer to whom I have just alluded; a rare mixture of Attic learning and Irish fun, which the lover of classical deliciæ will do well to hunt up, and place,—if he has the luck to meet with it, for it, too, is now a rare book,—by the side of the Religues of Father Front. It is entitled Brallaghan, or the Deipnosophists; and besides the humorous characterizations of Maginn and the other members of the Fraserian party, it contains at the end an affectionate and touching tribute to the deceased scholar, and a generous estimate of his character as a writer, and a man. One passage from this and I have done:—
"His funeral was quite private, and was attended only by a very few friends, who loved him fondly while he lived, and venerate his memory now that he is gone; and the tears that fell upon his grave were the last sad tribute to as true and warm and beautiful a soul as ever animated a human breast. The place in which he is buried is one that his own choice might have selected, for the Spirit of Repose itself seems to dwell around it, and lends a new charm to its rustic beauty. No noise is ever heard there but the rustling of the trees, or the gay chirp of the summer
- ↑ Dr. Johnson, Vanity of Human Wishes.
- ↑ This generous conduct on the part of the great statesman is the more to be commemorated, when we know that he had no personal knowledge of Maginn; that he had, a year or two before, contributed a like sum, through Lockhart, with a special stipulation of secresy, on the occasion of a private subscription to relieve him from some instant necessity; and that, moreover, he had been most bitterly assailed in every form of satire, by Maginn, who, as an Irish Orangeman, had unflinchingly opposed Sir Robert's pro-Catholic policy of 1829.
