Born at Cork and educated in his native city, and afterwards at a college of the Jesuits abroad, where he acquired the intimate knowledge of Latin which was such a prominent characteristic of his scholarship. He entered the Roman Catholic priesthood, but practised his profession for only about two years, officiating during that time at the Chapel of the Bavarian Legation, London. In 1834 he commenced to contribute to Fraser’s Magazine the “Prout Papers,” which were modelled on the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” of Blackwood, and had for their non de plume the name of a Roman Catholic priest, who had lived for many years at Watergrass Hill in the County of Cork. In 1864 he visited Rome as the special correspondent of the London Daily News, and during the last years of his life was the foreign correspondent of the London Globe at Paris.

Personal

  He (Thackeray) said Father Prout was “good but dirty!”

  The loneliness and celibacy of his life developed a certain oddity which always belonged to him. His dress was curiously negligent. He looked up at you with his keen blue eyes, over his spectacles, turning his head to one side, like some strange old bird; told an anecdote, or growled out a sarcasm, or quoted “Horace,” with a voice still retaining a flavour of the Cork brogue; then, making no salutation of any kind and sticking his hands in his coat-pockets, he shot off, and his dapper little black figure disappeared around the corner. There was a half-cynical indifference to life, and even to literature, about the old Father in his last years; but, as the evening wore on, a strange little well of sentiment would bubble up in his talk, and remind you that he was the author of the “Bells of Shandon,” as well as of endless epigrams.

  I would do much when appealed to in the name of our common friend Mahony. How can I make the very nothings I shall be able to tell you—which yet are all I remember and like “characteristic points” in the man whom I knew so little, and liked so much—into something worthy of record? I met him first at Emerson Tennent’s, many years ago. We talked and agreed about Rabelais and Erasmus, disagreeing as notably when he undervalued Spenser. I henceforth continued to meet him about town, generally in Regent Street. I never knew where he lived; he used to disappear and return as unexpectedly, and our communication was a Latin word or two of greeting: “Where have you been?” His answer, “at Constantinople,”—“at Rome,”—a classical good-bye, and there an end.

  Of the manner of man he was, the space he filled in intellectual society at home and abroad; his quaint sayings; his genial outbursts of sentiment, sometimes more candid than courtly; his stern sense of right; his reverence for religion, and hatred of scoffers; his unqualified religious toleration, which caused him, whilst they were proud of him, to be looked on coldly by the men of his cloth; his rare gifted and discriminating mind; his most sympathetic heart—all these traits and features of his personal character and history may be traced through the various anecdotes and sketches supplied to this volume by friends who knew him long and intimately.

  Francis Mahony—or, as he called himself, O’Mahony, better known as Father Prout—was a kindred spirit, with the same mixture of fun, learning, and fluency which distinguished Maginn. The fact that he was a priest, with something of an academical aspect even at his wildest, lent a certain piquancy to the strange Bohemian with his fine and delicate countenance, and the touch of sentiment which mellowed his mirth. He is called by somebody “an Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt,” and the comparison has a certain appropriateness.

  “Father Prout” spent most of his latter years in Paris, living the life of a mingled anchorite and sensualist. He occupied an attic there, where I once saw him, toasting a mutton-chop on which he was about to dine, while on a corner of his table, among letters and MSS., was laid a not very clean serviette—his table-cloth. But in these later years of Mahony’s life his room of reception was the reading room at Galignani’s, where, however, he seldom held any intercourse with his kind, usually entering, remaining for an hour or two, and departing without exchanging a word with any one; and if earth gave him any sources of enjoyment they were not those to which the good, the generous, the sympathetic resort for happiness. He was not often a visitor to London; but I believe he was rarely in the metropolis without paying a visit to us. Yet he never came with any apparent motive in view, and sometimes his conversation as to past, present, and future, was limited to half a dozen sentences. Occasionally he would enter our drawing-room, keep his hands in his pockets, look all about him, make some such observation as, “You have changed your curtains since I was here last,” bid us good-morning, and retire, his visit, from first to last, having perhaps occupied some three minutes. Few, I imagine, looked on Mahony with regard—none, probably, with respect. His was an unlovely as well as a lonely life.

  When I knew him there was still a touch of the clerical in his costume, as he was always in black, but he had ceased to be a Jesuit in anything but name. He could not be called a denizen of the London Bohemia, but was domiciled in its outskirts, visiting occasionally the haunts of the more reputable of its inhabitants, for even the Bohemia of those days had its class distinction. He invited me to have a chat with him in the old office of the Globe, then a Liberal organ, to the staff of which he was attached, and for which the malicious averred he wrote, without stirring from the Strand, what professed to be correspondence from Rome. He was a genial, kindly little man, whose blue eyes looked at you over his spectacles, and who spoke in an undertone with a slightly Milesian accent. In a dark and dingy room of the Globe office he poured into my willing ears the early story of Fraser’s Magazine, with racy anecdotes of its founders, all of which were reproduced in the Critic. In his last years he was Paris correspondent of the Globe, and did really write his letters in Paris, where he died. They buried him in his native Cork, within earshot of those “bells of Shandon” of which he sang in still-remembered rhymes.

General

  If Francis Mahony, otherwise Prout, has preferred all along the service of literature to that of his Church, he has paid homage to his spiritual mother all the same. One of his best essays is on “Literature and the Jesuits,” where he cordially recognises and pleasantly describes what the Order which bred him has done for the field of action which tempted him. Nay, he pays a handsome compliment to his Church by choosing to embody himself in this very figure of a priest in the county of Cork, by which he is pleased to be represented. No man can separate himself from his traditions and early associations even if he tries. But a wise and generous man does not choose to try. He adores his own Sparta, though he may grumble at her modern government, and be tired of her black broth. There is no separating Carlyle altogether from Scotch Presbyterianism; and the cosmopolitan Mahony, known as well at Rome as at London, and at Paris as at either, has the kind of genius and accomplishments natural to an Irish Catholic and an Irishman of the South.

  Nothing is more disappointing to the Irish reader of the volume before us than the marked absence of Irish flavour in its pages. Were we to judge from this volume alone we should boldly assert that the sayings of the great Irish wit were neither wit nor Irish. There is some humour in the fragment which forms chapter IV. There is much interesting information and acute observation in the letters from Rome. But as for wit, there is none. Still worse, the laboured attempts at it are remarkable either for savageness or stupidity. I fear the former quality, associated with some vanity, was often shown by the great Padre…. In the next place, even jokes of general interest, and of cosmopolitan character, are often nothing when severed from the connection in which they occur, from the temper of the company and from the general tone of the conversation which led up to them. These considerations are sufficient to make us pronounce no general verdict on Father Prout from these his recorded conversations; nay, rather, the great repute of the man leads us to believe that he was far wittier and more brilliant in talking than in writing, and that, as with most Irishmen, his pen was weaker than his tongue…. Father Mahony was a very clever litterateur, a happy translator into various languages, a very brilliant essayist, an unmatched correspondent; but as an original thinker or poet he has left no mark beyond his own circle.

  Mahony was rather possessed of his learning than the master of it like Maginn, and entirely lacked the vigor, conciseness, and strength of the latter. His illustrations and quotations were, however, sometimes happy as well as curious, and one of his translations, a paraphrase of Béranger’s “Le Grenier,” is among the happiest in the English language, having both the grace and spirit of the original, and a felicity of rhythm that thoroughly accented it in the mind. There have been many translations of the poem, but none that rivals this of Mahony.

  We may quote, however, one snatch of characteristic verse, which has something in it of the visionary home-sickness and tender longing of an exile. To have heard Mahony sing this, an old man, leaning his fine old head, like a carving in ivory, against the mantelshelf, in a cracked and thready voice which had once been fine, is a pathetic memory. Between the melodious commonplace of Moore’s melodies and the wild and impassioned ravings of the Shan Van Voght this more temperate type of Irish verse with its characteristic broken melody, its touch of mockery, its soul of tender if not profound resemblance, is wholesome and grateful, though it has no pretension to be great.

  I had a deference for Mahony from what I had been told of his courageous discharge of his duties as a priest during the prevalence of an epidemic in St. Giles’s, and I had an admiration for him because of his sprightly, scholarly, daintily-lettered style. When he died, a gentleman, whose name I choose to forget, had the hardihood to think he could replace and reproduce him. He stepped into his shoes but did not fill them. What a lamentable misfit! Mahony’s writing had the fresh scent of learned allusion, spontaneously springing from the text. This gentleman’s smelt offensively of the concordance.

  Mahony had personally less amiability than is proverbial with Irish humorists, and his cosmopolitan culture often obscured in his more scholarly essays the character of his nationality. But vivacity was rarely absent, and in both his prose and verse he grew at times so hilarious as to bring him on the verge of nonsense. Elsewhere, as in his essay on “Dean Swift’s Madness,” he showed himself capable of pathetic eloquence. He himself claimed to be “a rare combination of the Teian lyre and Irish bagpipe; of the Ionian dialect, blending harmoniously with the Cork brogue; an Irish potato, seasoned with Attic salt.”