WILLIAM MAGINN,

SCHOLAR, HUMORIST, BOHEMIAN,

(1793-1842.)

CHIEF among English magazinists and first of bohemians, from whom Thackeray drew the more salient characteristics of Fred Bayham, Warrington and Captain Shandon, stands William Maginn, LL.D., scholar, humorist, essayist and poet. The once famous "Doctor" is now nothing but a name, if even so much, but there was a time that he was looked upon as one whose name was writ large " in the pantheon of English literature. No one seemed more assured of permanent fame, and certainly not any one, not Jeffrey nor Sidney Smith nor Wilson nor Lockhart, was more popular or more in demand as a writer. As a scholar he was ranked with Porson, as a humorist and satirist with Rabelais and Swift. Why, with all his learning and wit, his prodigious facility for acquiring languages and his command of every literary device

and art, he should have fallen into such neglect can hardly be explained upon any ordinary hypothesis, and must be attributed simply to that freak of fortune which awards favors blindly. He was careless in his habits and loved the bottle, but this does not account for it altogether. Byron committed greater excesses and Coleridge had less selfcontrol, yet on the score of native genius it is not so certain that either should be more assured of immortality than Maginn. It might be said, it has been said, that if he had been more steady he might have produced more lasting work, but this is at least questionable. His miscellaneous writings have been collected, and they are just as surely literature as any of the miscellaneous writings of De Quincey. It might be that if Maginn had devoted himself entirely to Shakespeare and the classics we might have had something that scholars would prize, but we never should have had "The Maxims of Odoherty or the song

of "The Irishman and the Lady."

Maginn was a man of his time, a literary bohemian in those good old days when a certain amount of scholarship and a capacity for drink were necessary qualifications for the profession. He was born in Cork in 1793, and was the son of an Irish schoolmaster. His talents were so pre

cocious that in his tenth year he was advanced enough to enter Trinity College, Dublin, and he graduated with distinction in the classics before he was fourteen. In addition to the regular studies he also acquired a knowledge of Hebrew, Sanscrit and Syriac. Through life he had an extraordinary aptitude for languages; and he knew and could converse fluently in nearly all the modern tongues. Maginn at first followed his father's profession, and became a school teacher, a vocation in which he was successful enough, but his true bent was toward letters. It was the fermenting period in magazine literature, and of the new magazines Blackwood was making the the greatest sensation. The political tone of this periodical suited exactly with Maginn's tastes, and to it he sent his contributions. His first article was a Latin translation of the ancient ballad of "Chevy Chase," which was so complete in meter and sense as to attract universal attention. The following is the opening stanza :

The Percy out of Northumberland,

And a vow to God made he

That he would hunt in the mountains

Of Cheviot within days three,

In the maugre of the doughty Douglas,
And all that with him be.

Which was thus rendered into Latin:

Persæus ex Northumbria

Vovebat, Diis iratis,
Vernare inter dies tres

In montibus Cheviates,

Contemptis forti Douglaso,

Et Omnibus cognatis.

This feat of turning English verse into Latin rhyme has been common enough since Maginn's time, but he was among the first that attempted it, and his performances in this respect have never been excelled.

Maginn became a favored contributor to Blackwood, and under the name of Ensign Morgan Odoherty figures as a chief character in a number of the "Noctes Ambrosianæ." He wrote several of these, and his famous song, the "Irishman and the Lady," which has often, in recent years, been attributed to Thackeray, appeared in one of the earlier "Noctes." Most readers will remember the first verse at least:

There was a lady lived in Leith,

A lady very stylish, man,

And yet, in spite of all her teeth,
She fell in love with an Irishman;

A nasty, ugly Irishman,

A wild, tremendous Irishman.

A tearing, swearing, thumping, bumping,
Ramping, roaring Irishman.

When Fraser's magazine was started in 1830 Maginn became principal contributor and partial editor of it, and he made it almost as notorious as Blackwood's had been. He removed to London and became one of the social lions for a time, but the pace was too great for him. He could not resist the power of the bottle, and he sank inevitably into poverty and degradation. Many of his writings, particularly "The Maxims of Odoherty," are redolent of rum punch and drams of various sorts. They are pervaded by an aroma of intoxication, and they thus mark in sharp contrast the progress society, literary and other, has made in the past fifty years. It is partially owing to this flavor of alcohol that permeates so much that he has written that his writings are now so nearly forgotten.

Nevertheless Maginn must always remain an interesting figure in our literature. He is the most conspicuous representative of that race of literary political writers, loose living and hard hitting, who flourished in England from the time of the establishment of the Edinburgh Review, followed by The Quarterly and Blackwood, down to very recent times. During that period, literary criticism was largely influenced by political opinion, and Maginn like Gifford, Crocker, or Lock