THE LATE MR. CURRAN
The Atlas.][April 26, 1829.
This celebrated wit and orator in his latter days was a little in the back-ground. He had lodgings at Brompton; and riding into town one day, and hearing two gentlemen in the Park disputing about Mathews’s Curran, he said—‘In faith, it’s the only Mr. Curran, that is ever talked of now-a-days.’ He had some qualms about certain peccadillos of his past life, and wanted to make confessors of his friends. Certainly, a monastery is no unfit retreat for those who have been led away by the thoughtless vivacity of youth, and wish to keep up the excitement by turning the tables on themselves in age. The crime and the remorse are merely the alternations of the same passionate temperament. Mr. Curran had a flash of the eye, a musical intonation of voice, such as we have never known excelled. Mr. Mathews’s imitation of him, though it had been much admired, does not come up to the original. Some of his bursts of forensic eloquence deserve to be immortal, such as that appalling expression applied to a hired spy and informer, that he ‘had been buried as a man, and was dug up a witness.’ A person like this might find language to describe the lateshotsat Edinburgh. Mr. Curran did not shine so much in Parliament; but he sometimes succeeded admirably in turning the laugh against his opponents. He compared the situation of government after they had brought over a member of Opposition to their side, and found the renegado of no use to them, to the story of the country-gentleman who bought Punch and complained of his turning out dull company. Some ofMr. Curran’sbon-motsand sallies of humour were first-rate. He sometimes indulged in poetry, in which he did not excel. His taste in it was but indifferent. He neither likedParadise LostnorRomeo and Juliet. He had an ear for music, and both played and sung his native ballads delightfully. He contended that the English had no national music. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Mrs. Siddons. He said of John Kemble, that, ‘he had an eye rather tolook atthan tolook with.’ His great passion was a love of English literature and the society of literary men. He occasionally found his account in it. Being one day in a group of philosophers, and the invention of fire being spoken of, one of the party suggested that it was from seeing a horse’s shoe strike fire; ‘and I suppose,’ said Curran triumphantly, ‘the horse-shoe was afterwards made with that fire.’