ndence is a heavy burden, and who
consequently incurs such labor as rarely as is possible. The composition
had all the charm of ease, and was as unstudied as need be; the writer
being evidently one who cared little for the graces of style,
satisfied to discuss his subject in the familiar terms of his ordinary
conversation.

Although I did not mean to impose more than an extract from it on my
reader, I must reserve even that much for my next chapter.

CHAPTER VII. FATHER DYKE'S LETTER.

Father Dyke was one of those characters which Ireland alone produces,--a
sporting priest. In France, Spain, or Italy, the type is unknown. Time
was, when the _abbe_, elegant, witty, and well-bred, was a great element
of polished life; when his brilliant conversation and his insidious
address threw all the charm of culture over a society which was only
rescued from coarseness by the marvellous dexterity of such intellectual
gladiators. They have passed away, like many other things brilliant and
striking: the gilded coach, the red-heeled slipper, and the supper of
the regency; the powdered marquise, for a smile of whose dimpled mouth
the deadly rapier has flashed in the moonlight; the perfumed beauty,
for one of whose glances a poet would have racked his brain to render
worthily in verse; the gilded _salon_ where, in a sort of incense,
all the homage of genius was offered up before the altar of
loveliness,--gone are they all! _Au fond_, the world is pretty much the
same, although we drive to a club dinner in a one-horse brougham; and
if we meet the _cure_ of St. Roch, we find him to be rather a morose
middle-aged man with a taste for truffles, and a talent for silence. It
is not as the successor of the witty _abbe_ that I adduce the sporting
priest, but simply as a variety of the ecclesiastical character which,
doubtless, a very few more years will have consigned to the realm of
history. He, too, will be a bygone! Father Tom, as he was popularly
called, never needing any more definite designation, was _tam Marte quam
Mercurio_, as much poacher as priest, and made his sporting acquirements
subservient to the demands of an admirable table. The thickest salmon,
the curdiest trout, the fattest partridge, and the most tender woodcock
smoked on his board, and, rumor said, cooked with a delicacy that more
pretentious houses could not rival. In the great world nothing is more
common than to see some favored individual permitted to do things