Читать книгу Irish Memories - Ross Martin - Страница 11

The Famine yielded like the ice of the Northern Seas; it ran like melted snows in the veins of Ireland for many years afterwards. Landlords who had escaped ruin at the time were more slowly ruined as time went on and the money borrowed in the hour of need exacted its toll; Ross held its ground, with what stress its owners best knew. It was in those difficult years of Robert’s boyhood, when yet more brothers and sisters continued to arrive rapidly, that his father began to write for the Press. He contributed leading articles to the Morning Herald, a London paper, now extinct; he went to London and lived the life that the writing of leading articles entails, with its long waiting for the telegrams, and its small-hour suppers, and it told on the health of a man whose heart had been left behind him in the West. It tided over the evil time, it brought him into notice with the Conservative Party and the Irish Government, and probably gained for him subsequently his appointment of Poor Law Auditor.

His style in writing is quite unlike that of his eldest son; it is more rigid, less flowing; the sentences are short and pointed, evidently modelled on the rhythmic hammer-stroke of Macaulay; it has not the careless and sunshiny ease with which Robert achieved his best at the first attempt. That facility and versification that is akin to the gift of music, and, like it, is inborn, came from my mother, and came to him alone of his eight brothers and sisters; in her letters to her children she dropped into doggerel verse without an effort, rhymes and metres were in her blood, and to the last year of her life she never failed to criticise occasional and quite insignificant roughnesses in her son’s poems. Of her own polished and musical style one verse in illustration may be given.