A Little English Gallery by Louise Imogen Guiney

Author:Louise Imogen Guiney [Guiney, Louise Imogen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anboco
Published: 2017-02-20T23:00:00+00:00

FOOTNOTES:

[37] Incipit Annus Academicus Die Julii 9 a 1694.

Die 17a Julii

Georgius Farquhare Sizator

filius Gulielmi Farqhare Clerici

Annos 17

Natus Londonderry

ibidem educatus sub magistro Walker

Eu. Lloyd (college tutor)

This matriculation entry from the register of Trinity does away with our sizar’s presumed father, Rev. John Farquhar, prebendary of Raphoe. We hear nothing more, ever after, of the Farquhar family, who henceforth leave young George to his own profane devices; nor can any certainty be attached to additional information, sometimes proffered, that the father had seven children in all, and held a living of only one hundred and fifty pounds a year. One other point is fixed by the entry, to wit: if George Farquhar was seventeen in the July of 1694, he cannot have been born in 1678.

[38] This was the theatre built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672.

[39] Peter Anthony Motteux, the wild and clever linguist and dramatist, who made the best English translation of Don Quixote. The Stage Coach, itself an adaptation, has little merit beyond its liveliness.

[40] The register of burial is dated a month later than the received date of his death. It reads simply: “23 May, George Falkwere, M.” The initial is the sapient sexton’s indication that this was neither a W (woman) nor a C (child). The spelling of the name betokens its usual and original pronunciation. The present famous porticoed church was not built for nineteen years after Farquhar died.

[41] The not altogether foolish censure has been cast upon the rogue Teague in The Twin Rivals that he speaks an impossible brogue, which might as well be Welsh. Farquhar did not succeed in transferring to paper the weird and unlovely Ulster dialect with which he was familiar in boyhood, and which had figured already in the third act of Henry the Fifth, in Jonson’s Irish masque, in Shadwell’s Lancashire Witches; which was simultaneously being used in his farce The Committee, by Dryden’s friend Howard, and which was afterwards to have good corroboration in Aytoun’s Massacre of the MacPherson. Farquhar employs it twice elsewhere, passably well in the case of Torlough Macahone of the parish of Curroughabegley (the personage who built a mansion-house for himself and his predecessors after him), and with lamentable flatness in that of Dugard in his last comedy. Dugard is a rival of the nursery-maid dear to almanac humorists, who is wont to exclaim: “Can’t ye tell boi me accint that ’tis Frinch Oi am!” It was one of Farquhar’s inartistic mistakes that he made no loving study of this or of anything touching nearly his own people. His Irishmen, with the exception of Roebuck, are either rascals or characterless nobodies. The name Teague, or Teig, which Howard had also employed, is old and pure North Irish; and no less pleasant an authority than George Borrow reminds us in the Romano Lavo-Lil that it is Danish in origin.

[42] Dear Dick Steele, in 1701, while Captain of Fusileers, had a duel thrust upon him; and in parrying, his sword pierced his man. To his remorse may be ascribed his hatred of the custom of duelling, expressed afterwards on every occasion.

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