You turn
sometimes, and sicken as though you were at the country fair, and saw
the poor raucous-throated charlatan eating fire or swallowing swords to
the hideous accompaniments of the big drum and the deafening cymbal.
[Sidenote: Mr. Carson.]
No--Mr. T.W. Russell is the mere play-actor. If you want one of the real
actualities in the more sinister side of Irish life, look at and study
Mr. Carson. It is he who winds up the debate on the commission of Mr.
Justice Mathew--a debate made memorable by the ablest debating speech
Mr. Morley has made in the whole course of his Parliamentary career. I
see men talking to Mr. Carson that belong to an opposite side of
politics. I confess that I never see him pass without an internal
shudder. Just as the sight of an abbe gave M. Homais, in "Madame
Bovary," an unpleasant whiff of the winding-sheet, there is something in
the whole appearance of Mr. Carson that conveys to me the dank smell of
the prison, and the suffocating sense of the scaffold. Do you remember
that strange, terrible day in the "Derniere Incarnation de Vautrin," in
which Balzac describes Vautrin's passage through the ranks of the
gaol-birds and gaol officials among whom he had passed so much of his
life? Above all, do you recall that final, and supreme, and awful touch
in which, addressing consciously the handler of the guillotine, he
professes to take him for the chaplain, and, bringing the poor
executioner for once to confusion, is addressed with blushing face and
trembling lips with the observation, "Non, Monsieur, j'ai d'autres
fonctions"?
[Sidenote: Green Street Court-House.
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