Now and then the political state of Ireland is mentioned: ‘her depressed trade, her neglected populace, her renegade nobility, her dissipated, and careless, and unnational gentry’—but almost always in the form of a discourse, apart from the story. Events and personages throwing light upon the state of Ireland and her national character, are not allowed to speak for themselves; when the discourse is finished, the reader again finds himself in the drawing-room of Lady Montrevor. In a few instances only the descriptions present a glimpse of Irish life freed from comment. There is a dinner-party at the house of the elder Hammond, of a riotous and disorderly character, the account of which, a note informs us, is taken from real life. The other is an instance of so-called ‘paddyism,’ unique in the production of Maturin who, unlike most older Irish novelists, was not at all fond of depicting the lower classes with sympathetic humour. The night the Montrevors arrive at their castle, the tenantry are gathered to receive them, having shortened the tedium of waiting by indulging in a drop of whiskey, with the result that the approaching family are hailed with an Irish cry that frightens their horses and endangers their very lives. Their intentions were all the best, as is explained by an old man:

This is one of the preludes to the innumerable scenes of Irish boisterousness and characteristic blunders, found in the pages of later writers, Carleton, Lover, Lever, and others.

The ancient glory of Ireland is touched upon in the figure of the old Milesian.[48] The type had been introduced into fiction by Miss Owenson; her story of The Wild Irish Girl is the first patriotic Irish novel of a predominantly romantic colouring, and essentially influenced, as will be seen, Maturin’s third book. It is an immature and extravagant, but not undelightful tale of an Irish chieftain, the prince of Inismore, whose ancestors, in the Cromwellian wars, lost nearly all their estates to an English soldier, the same estates still being in possession of the English soldier’s descendants. The present prince of Inismore lives in solitary retirement with his chaplain and his daughter, a beautiful, gifted and accomplished young lady, whose only ‘wildness’ is her naturalness of manners and purity of heart. The head of the English family has made several attempts at reconciliation, his advances having always been proudly rejected. Nevertheless both he and his son visit the prince without revealing their identity, at the same time also concealing their respective visits from each other; both succeed in securing the friendship of the old man, and both fall in love with his daughter. A tragedy is avoided by the father voluntarily retiring and leaving to his son the girl and all his Irish estates. This intrigue, however, is merely a setting for the real tendency of the story, which is to make Ireland known. The colloquies held at Castle Inismore form the principal part of the book; they treat exclusively of the past of Ireland and are furnished with notes and quotations from Walker, Ware, Young, and other historians, all tending to prove the oriental descent and great antiquity of the Milesian race, its attachment to poetry and music, as well as its other noble qualities and high standard of civilization at a very early period.

In spite of its promising title, Maturin’s second book contains no loans from The Wild Irish Girl except the venerable Milesian with his inevitable chapelain de maison, and even this figure has undergone a change. De Lacy is a rich man who has travelled much in foreign parts and is, in every way, more modern and less romantic than the prince of Inismore. The latter always appears in a dress ‘strictly conformable to the ancient costume of the Irish nobles;’ De Lacy wears ‘the English habit of fifty years ago,’ with only an Irish cloak to remind one of his nationality. But their notions of their race and their country are the same, De Lacy also assuring us that ‘he who shakes my belief in the antiquity of my country, must first shake my belief in the beatitude of the immaculate Virgin Mary.’

The Wild Irish Boy appears to have met with the very fate Maturin had hoped to avoid by trying to please all: it attracted but little attention, or, if the statement of a writer[49] is to be relied upon, that the book was ‘admired, talked of, praised,’ the attention probably was confined to the literary circles of Dublin. In dedicating his third book to the ‘Quarterly Reviewers’ Maturin says that they had been pleased to notice his romance of Montorio, but there are no indications of his second book having been subject to public review. As a means of brightening the economic outlook of its author, The Wild Irish Boy failed completely; it was, like Montorio, published at his own risk, and the success was not distinct enough to induce any publisher to purchase the copyright. Discouraged from an immediate renewal of the attempt, Maturin, for four years to come, devoted his leisure hours exclusively to some less precarious occupation, which, in all probability, consisted in the enlargement of and still closer attention to his boarding-school. What support he might hitherto have had from his father now also ceased, for about 1810 Maturin senior was dismissed from his situation. One biographer,[50] alluding to this deplorable event, says that Charles Robert was ‘roused to poetry by disappointment,’ which would antedate the event in question by about 5 years. There seems, however, to be more reason to believe Alaric Watts, who, writing in 1819, states that William Maturin was dismissed after a service of 47 years, adding the following particulars: ‘The day of his dismissal he was pennyless: it is singular, that though the commissioners of inquiry, who sat repeatedly on the business pronounced this unfortunate gentleman wholly innocent of the charge (of fraud) brought against him, he has been suffered to linger for nine years since, without redress, without relief, and without notice.’ Whether this be correct or not, there is no further intelligence about Mr. William Maturin; but in any case his last years must have cast a gloom over all the family, and exercised a further pressure upon the toiling life of his son.——

In 1810 appeared Scott’s critique on Montorio, ending with this passage:

As Maturin had, somehow or other, come to know who this friendly reviewer was, he availed himself of the opportunity to write to Scott and solicit him to become his literary friend and counsellor. This gave rise to an intimate, lifelong correspondence, during the course of which Scott faithfully assisted the poor Irishman with good advice and, sometimes, even in a more substantial way. His epistolary intimacy with the great novelist Maturin always counted among his greatest distinctions, and although the two men never met, their friendship continued warm and sincere until Maturin’s death.[51]

There are no more details available with regard to Maturin’s life at that period, but he was undoubtedly successful in his vocation as a teacher, for when he again turned to literature, he did so in rather a hopeful state of mind. His biographer[52] says that when Maturin was writing The Milesian Chief—which was published in the beginning of 1812—his genius was ‘elastic and ardent, his knowledge of composition improved with the errors of his former works before him, and an increasing desire to do something worthy of fame: he was at the age and under the circumstances that are calculated to improve and correct the taste.’ Colburn paid 80 pounds for the copyright, which was the first success of this kind Maturin had ever experienced; and full of confidence he finishes his preface—in which he does not care to enlarge upon his second book—:

The preface is in the form of a dedication to the Quarterly Reviewers, whom Maturin accuses of writing reviews merely to make a display of their own cleverness and neglecting to speak of the works they are to judge:

The tone is throughout very different from that of the preface to The Wild Irish Boy; herein speaks the artist to whom a literary reputation is by no means indifferent. Here also is found the much-quoted sentence where Maturin defines his characteristic powers:

Of the work now at hand Maturin adds:

All this material is, very likely, not attended to in The Milesian Chief, yet it is certainly by far the noblest of Maturin’s three earlier romances.—

The Milesian Chief is Connal O’Morven, a young man of an ancient and formerly potent Irish family, now reduced to extreme poverty. Their castle and estates have been sold to an Englishman, Lord Montclare, and Connal lives with his aged and insane grandfather in a ruined watch-tower, subsisting chiefly on memories of bygone glory. The old man, in his frantic rage against England, conceives a plan of insurrection, for the liberation of Ireland; and Connal, young and inexperienced as he is, engages himself to be the leader of it. In the meantime Miss Armida Fitzalban, the daughter of Lord Montclare, whose beauty and talents have struck all Europe with amazement, arrives at the castle, and a violent passion flames up between her and Connal. Fully comprehending the impossibility of success in his enterprise, Connal is determined to dissolve the conspiracy, but the treacherous conduct of Armida’s unsuccessful lover, an English officer called Wandesford, who happens to get wind of the plan, compels him to take up arms. Armida renounces everything and follows Connal and his band to a remote island on the Atlantic coast. The government troops, however, track them even there, and as the cause of the rebels is hopeless, Armida is conducted back to her home. Becoming now a prey to the machinations of an unnatural mother, she ends her days by taking poison; Connal surrenders himself to the government and is sentenced to death.

By the side of this love-story there is another, equally unhappy, but bizarre rather than gloomy, curious rather than grand: of Connal’s younger brother Desmond, and Armida’s younger sister Ines. The last-named, for family reasons, is, by her mother, given out as a boy; and being very young and innocent she never suspects her sex but imagines herself to love Desmond as brother loves brother. At last the secret is revealed and they are married for a short time, but subsequently Ines is also implicated in the schemes of her mother, and dies of a broken heart in a state of insanity.

The destinies of these four people form the contents of the book. It is a record of human passions which are incalculable from the external basis upon which the incidents take place, and the interest is absorbed by the sufferings and inner conflicts of a few figures powerfully domineering at the expense of the milieu. This is, indeed, the case with all Maturin’s Irish stories; a dissection of the social state of Ireland, with a comprehensive view of the different classes, something in the style of Gerald Griffin’s well-known tale of The Collegians (1828), it would hardly have been within his capacity to create. In The Milesian Chief the political state of the country and the insurrection, instead of being the main subject of the story, form but a background to the personal tragedy of Connal O’Morven, which becomes only the more poignant as he fights for a cause in which he does not believe. He is the first to comprehend that it is ‘impossible for Ireland to subsist as an independent country,’ and the masses he has at his disposal are in no way calculated to heighten his confidence. The Milesian spirit so highly admired Maturin finds only in a few surviving descendants of the noblest families; his ideas of the people are tinged with the somewhat aristocratic notion which makes one of the distinctions between the typical 19th century romanticism and its pioneers in the preceding one. In some of his sermons Maturin clearly expresses his opinions on this point:

This, it must be added, Maturin does not find to be entirely the fault of the people:

But much ‘sinned against’ as the lower classes are, in the opinion of the clergyman, to the romantic they remain unattractive; and here is the basis of the fact that the Irish peasantry occupies, upon the whole, so inconspicuous a place in Maturin’s production, and never—except in the opening chapters of Melmoth—gives him the inspiration to his most interesting work. On the other hand his treatment of the subject is never undignified; if he has not created anything like the dark and impressive pictures of Irish rebels and outlaws found, say, in the pages of John Banim, neither does he give way to the popular habit of representing the Irish peasant as a cross between a fool and a jester, which idea was so keenly resented in the Irish literary circles in the fifties.[53]

Yet The Milesian Chief must be considered, in a way, a national tale, and it is even extremely characteristic as such; the plot, in its roughest outlines, is the identical one used by Irish novelists up to this day with a persistence which cannot escape any student of Anglo-Irish literature. These rough outlines are as follows. A person of eminence arrives in Ireland; he (or she) possesses every qualification for a rich and interesting life, yet nothing noteworthy has ever happened to him, and he is full of spleen until, once there, he is dragged into a whirl of undreamt-of adventures; his former habits, prejudices and ways of thinking suddenly give way to an all-absorbing passion, which irresistibly hurries him towards bliss or destruction, as the case may be. In the predilection of Irish novelists for an intrigue of this description there is something more than a natural partiality to a theme which aptly lends itself to literary aims; it is the revenge of a subdued and oppressed country upon her masters. In the field of fiction the conquered becomes the conqueror, and the first come in as the last. Connal O’Morven, unreal and idealized though he be, is the embodiment of all that is great and proud in the Milesian spirit, which spirit here subjugates the most brilliant representative of the happier race. This, again, does not hinder Armida’s infatuation from being quite individual in character, limited only to the person of Connal. His princely ancestry of which he is so proud, the ancient glory of Ireland, her poetry and music, are all indifferent to her, and Irish scenery, in all its grandeur, only makes her sigh for the sunny regions she has quitted. As Connal is persuaded that he could never be happy out of Ireland, their love is born under most unpromising auspices, and its tragic issue is necessitated by the circumstance of their having nothing in common.—

Armida and Connal—and Wandesford, too—are all nearly related. This fact is made no mystery of, but plainly communicated to Armida by her father, on their way to Ireland. At the time of the ruin of the Irish family, and upon the estates forthwith becoming the property of Lord Montclare, his sister has married Mr. Randal O’Morven, son of the old Milesian. The latter has never forgiven his son, any more than Lord Montclare has forgiven his sister; but shortly before her death Mrs O’Morven has written to her brother and disclosed the extreme misery of their condition. Lord Montclare has, consequently, appointed her husband to be his land-steward, and offered her sons commissions in the army. The younger, Desmond, has accepted the offer, while Connal prefers to starve with his grandfather.

The family has, it is true, been shrouded in a real mystery, but this also is shortly afterwards revealed by Lord Montclare, when lying at death’s door to which he is brought by the unexpected arrival in Ireland of the rest of the family, whose existence Armida has been wholly ignorant of. Her father has, long ago, contracted a marriage, having in view the sole purpose of excluding the O’Morvens from the property, by begetting a son. Armida, however, is the only child remaining alive, whereupon Lord Montclare, exasperated by his misfortunes, confines his wife in an obscure place and spreads the report of her death; this is done with the assistance of an Italian monk called Morosini, who subsequently turns out to be in the service of two masters. Before Lord Montclare has time to form another connection, his lady is delivered of a son. Under the circumstances he cannot acknowledge his heir without acknowledging his imposture, and threatened and persecuted by Morosini he flees from land to land, too feeble in courage to reveal the secret. Wandesford—who is the son of his younger sister—is the only person acquainted with the actual facts of the case, and therefore Lord Montclare eagerly presses Armida to accept his proposal. At last he is determined to give the matter publicity in Ireland, for the consolatory reason that in this country ‘the judgment of his character was indifferent to him from his contempt for its inhabitants.’ Before, however, he has accomplished his purpose, his death is caused by the sudden arrival of his family, who make their appearance at Castle Montclare, attended by Morosini and Desmond O’Morven. Desmond has come from Italy by the same boat as Lady Montclare, and has had an opportunity of saving her son from drowning, after which a very tender friendship has sprung up between the two.—

The commencement of the story in Ireland is preceded by two prologues, representing ‘Armida in Italy’ and ‘Armida in England.’ The first describes a banquet given by Lord Montclare at Naples, where Wandesford also makes his appearance. Armida has, for the occasion, arranged some tableaux in which her manifold accomplishments are dazzlingly displayed. In one of these the scene

There is, it will be observed, no stint of powerful attributes, the marvels of Armida leading directly back to Lady Montrevor in The Wild Irish Boy. Yet the descriptions here are somewhat softened, and the style is free from the extravagances of Maturin’s second book; Armida, somehow, seems more fit for a heroine of this extraordinary kind. Her cousin Wandesford, though a cold and selfish character, is so enraptured by her performance that he declares himself on the spot. Armida decidedly rejects his attentions, and on the following morning when he calls on her again, he is informed that Lord Montclare and his daughter have departed from Italy without any intentions of ever returning.

The second prologue represents Armida in London society, of which Maturin draws an amusing and curious picture. Here she is incapable of creating any sensation:

Wandesford reappears, and Armida, in her desolation, receives his attentions with something akin to gratitude. He renews his proposal, which is eagerly embraced by Lord Montclare. Harassed on all sides Armida at last complies and gives Wandesford her word; upon this she is hurried off to Ireland, where Wandesford is shortly to follow them.—

These two chapters are a clever preliminary to the thrilling adventures Armida is going forth to meet, besides giving a good idea of her character and circumstances. In spite of her brilliant position in society she feels lonely and unhappy in her restless life, where in everything she is subjected to the caprices of her father. Her only pleasure is the gratification of her pride through the admiration she excites with her talents; but in England her pride also gets a severe blow. She feels utterly humiliated and is, as it were, prepared to meet what she will be forced to surrender to. In a state of dejection she accepts the proposal of Wandesford, who is less than indifferent to her, nor is her future brightened by her father’s determination to set out for Ireland, which determination she cannot imagine to be anything but a fit of his incurable melancholy. She shudders to think of the country she is taken to, and travels on almost in apathy. Much ‘fury’—of which there is quite enough already—is spared by her not entering the scene of action immediately from the highest pinnacles of glory and triumph; and the deeper and truer side of her character is naturally developed in sorrow and desolation, which her father’s death increases to the uttermost. Her new-found relations cannot compensate for the loss. Lady Montclare, though always wearing a mask of unvarying suavity, inspires not the least confidence in her daughter, and her young son, Endymion, is so closely watched by her and Morosini, that it is impossible for Armida to approach him. Thus she is inevitably drawn to Connal O’Morven, who comes like an incarnation of his wild country, grand and solitary, distinct from anything she has ever seen or dreamt of, while at the same time the boundless devotion he offers her recalls by-gone, brighter days to her mind. Being thus mentally prepared for their fate, they are thrown together by external events with rather unnecessary violence: in the first dawn of their acquaintance Connal finds an opportunity of saving Armida’s life—at the risk of his own—three different times. Upon her first arrival to the castle her horses are terrified and rear staggering backwards on to the rock, and she would be lost did not Connal rush to the scene of imminent danger and snatch her from the carriage. The following day she walks out to the shore and sits down on a rock. Lost in meditations she fails to observe the tide coming on before it has cut off her return; again she would perish but for Connal, who happens to be close at hand. And a few days later, when Wandesford, too, has arrived, he and Armida and Connal visit a small islet to look at some Celtic antiquities. In the meantime a dreadful storm breaks out, and only by exerting his superhuman strength to the utmost Connal succeeds in rowing them back sufficiently near the shore to be rescued when the boat capsizes. In all this, however, there is a kind of inner veracity which saves any of the passages from becoming merely melodramatic. The delineation especially of Armida, who is not (like Connal) raised above human weaknesses, is skilfully represented, and the descriptions of her mental struggles are both psychologically, as well as poetically, true. In Ireland everything is so different from what she is accustomed to, and her relation particularly to Connal is so uncomfortable, that all her experience of the great world is unable to guide her upon her first encounters with him. When Connal rescues her from the waves of the tide, Armida, in her confusion, offers him her purse. The manner in which this ill-chosen retribution is rejected she imagines to imply contempt of her person. This is a possibility that has never before entered her mind; and though it makes her shed tears of resentment, she is unable to answer with the same feeling by dismissing him from her recollection; in order to rid herself from thoughts of Connal, she sits down to—write to Wandesford.

Wandesford himself arrives before he is expected, and is received by Lady Montclare with joyful attention, but with very marked indifference by Armida. She has contracted the habit of frequently strolling on the shore, attended by a newly-acquired friend, Rosine St. Austin. Here she meets Connal, and their acquaintance is quickly developed. He sings Irish songs to her and is, on the whole, quite at his ease, taking no pains to conceal his admiration for her, as he fully comprehends from first that his love is hopeless. But Armida, too, is in love, though her feeling, to begin with, asserts itself as a desire to dazzle him by the display of her accomplishments, for which purpose she invites him to the castle; or as what she imagines to be hatred, when he refuses, being disinclined to enter, as a stranger, the abode of his forefathers. He comes, however, and appears to be the only person capable of understanding Armida and appreciating her talents according to their merits. Their intimacy grows stronger every moment. Then follows the excursion to the islet, to which much piquancy is added by the presence of Wandesford, who is well aware that he has acquired a formidable rival; the storm under which Connal is exerting his strength to save Armida and at the same time his enemy, is very dramatically depicted. Being at last beyond all danger, Connal, wildly happy to have Armida in his arms and pressed to his heart, insists on carrying her so all the way to the castle:

Half-conscious as she is, the attitude touches a latent chord in Armida’s bosom, which makes her understand her own feelings; that same night her passion becomes clear to her. Yet there is still another experience in store for her, as novel as it is startling: the suspicion of a rival. The next time she goes to the shore, Connal appears in the door of a solitary hut which he, with some embarrassment, confesses that he often visits. Approaching it, Armida sees through the open door a beautiful woman with an infant in her lap. After this episode all the pangs of jealousy are roused to life, and sometimes take a very frenetic mode of expression. An explanation, however, is soon given by the woman herself, who accosts Armida and Rosine on one of their walks and tells them the story of her life. The father of her child is Wandesford, by whom she has been seduced during one of his former stays in Ireland, whereupon he has taken her with him to England and there abandoned her; under much suffering she has returned to Ireland, and would have perished but for the assistance of Connal, who is the only one that has taken pity on her fate. She is, and has always been, desperately in love with Connal, but as she understands that he adores Armida, she wishes to clear his character before her. Armida is calmed, and when she next meets Connal she is triumphant and impossible to resist. He is forced to throw himself at her feet, but remembers the conspiracy he is engaged in, and darkly hints that they must part for ever.—

The progress of Armida’s mind to the point of an all-absorbing passion is described with a consistency and a flexibility that gives the first remarkable proof of Maturin’s deep insight into feminine psychology. The characterization of Connal is much more schablonenmässig: he simply possesses every mental and bodily perfection. Nevertheless there are some good observations upon his character, which tend to naturalness rather than to eulogy. His inexperience of life and society, an effect of his solitary existence in which he has thought more than he has seen, is distinctly presented. Thus his high-sounding theories are sometimes dispersed by Armida’s charms and his own feelings. Once she asks him to come to a fête given by a lady in the neighbourhood. He first refuses to visit a house where, he says, his grandfather has been insulted; and when Armida resents his disobedience he assures her that ‘to a Milesian the sacrifice of his life is trivial to the sacrifice of his pride.’ All the same he makes his appearance at the feast, the description of which is one of the finest things in the book. Armida has been, all the evening, in a state of weariness and absent-mindedness that greatly enrages Wandesford. Through his carelessness a part of her drapery is torn in a dance, and she retires to repair it in the room of Lady Gabriella, the granddaughter of their hostess. Here she is joined by Connal, who has been wandering round the gardens in hope of catching a glimpse of her. Hitherto they have met mostly under circumstances endangering their lives, or else amid wildness and desolation; but now they are brought together in surroundings inviting them to happiness and joy. Armida confesses to Connal that his feelings are reciprocated, and they succeed in becoming oblivious to all but the present moment. Their interview being interrupted she asks him to accompany her, and he instantly obeys:

This, indeed, is the only time the sun shines upon them. The fête does not pass off without ominous collisions between Connal and Wandesford, and Lady Montclare, anxious for many reasons, hastens to take leave of the party. Having arrived home Armida again goes to meet Connal on the rocks. He dare not speak of the conspiration, but gives her to understand that he is compelled to leave Ireland to seek his sustenance. Armida, with tears, implores him to take her with him. All her pride is vanished; henceforth she is only a woman who loves. A hope springs to life in Connal, but this night the fatal event takes place which frustrates all his chances—it is told by Connal to Armida long afterwards, but may, for the sake of elucidation, be mentioned now. Inspired by Armida’s love Connal determines to dissolve the conspiracy. He seeks out his men, who are assembled in a cave, adjures them to surrender themselves to the mercy of the government and make him their hostage, if need be. They listen with conviction, when Wandesford, who has traced Connal’s footsteps from the castle, suddenly appears in their midst. The men are on the point of killing him, but Connal saves his life and appeals to him to intercede for them with the government, which Wandesford promises on his word of honour to do.—When Armida, however, on the following morning solemnly rejects him—on account of the story of the woman in the hut—Wandesford breaks his word without a scruple. He disappears for some days to prepare for his plan. This interval is filled by a very romantic description of an old Irish harper, who has remained faithful to the house of O’Morven. Connal takes Armida to see him, but he terrifies them both with prophecies of death and woe. And the following night, when they are together on the heath, the tower where Connal lives with his grandfather, is suddenly seen bursting into flames and besieged by soldiers, who are sent to suppress the intended rebellion. From this moment Connal is forced to appear in the character of a leader of rebels. He succeeds in retiring with his band into an inaccessible place in the mountains, whence reports of his miraculous valour soon reach Castle Montclare. Armida, having never taken any interest in Irish politics, has great difficulty in grasping what has happened. All the same she would be ready to follow Connal under any circumstances, but one day the news is spread that he has enticed Lady Gabriella to accompany him into his retreat. In reality this warm-blooded young lady, who has taken a fancy to the interesting Milesian, has followed him of her own accord, and Connal immediately restores her to her grandmother. Armida, however, finds no reason to doubt the news, and thus once more becomes a prey to unfounded suspicions. Besides being repetition, this means of bringing the plot forward is not very brilliant; but the emotions of Armida are again admirably analyzed. This time there is no outburst of pride or indignation, only silent despair. She walks out on the darkening heath, followed by Rosine, and hurries onward without aim or purpose, until they sink down exhausted and presently recognize, without being seen, two figures passing by them: Connal, conducting Gabriella back to her home. Having now lost all interest in life, Armida re-engages herself to Wandesford. His treatment of her continues to be very unchivalrous, as she does not conceal that her heart cannot be his; it is, however, determined that they are to proceed to England directly and get married there, Armida still being attended by Rosine. Their journey is soon impeded by a snowstorm, and they fall into the hands of the rebels. Wandesford is dragged away, but Connal, who is under the impression that Armida is already married to him, once more saves his life, enabling him to proceed alone to the nearest town. Connal then undertakes to conduct Armida back to Castle Montclare; before long he understands that she is not the wife of Wandesford, and she, on her part, learns the truth about Gabriella. After scenes of great passion their final resolution is impressively told in a few words, sounding, as it were, like the bang of a heavy gate:

There follows now a pause in the narrative, as Connal tells Armida the story of his life, his engagement in the rebellion, and the treachery of Wandesford. Upon this they are obliged to set out for the coast of the Atlantic, and at this period even Rosine is compelled to leave them. After a march through a country devastated by the ravages of famine and rape, enduring intolerable hardships and continual attacks from the troops of the government, they finally reach the isles, where a solitary hut with a bed of rushes becomes the dwelling of Armida for a long time to come. Ireland has taken her revenge; the proud and brilliant being at whose feet Europe has lain prostrate, is changed into a silent and self-sacrificing woman, deprived of all qualifications ever to re-assume her place in society. This trait is a remarkable one in the romantic fiction of the time, where the freshness and buoyancy of a heroine are usually not in the least affected by perilous adventures and privations ever so hard.

The story of Desmond and Endymion is more eccentric and presents a curious mixture of passion and fantastic gracefulness. It has already been said that Endymion, in reality, is a girl, though her mother, who covets the estates of Montclare, endeavours to conceal her sex. From the moment Desmond has clasped her to his heart, in saving her life, Endymion is absorbed by a feeling for him, the nature of which she does not comprehend. She plainly avows her love to Desmond, whom she imagines herself to regard in the light of an elder brother; he fully shares her sentiments, but, dreading their apparently unnatural tendency, tries, though without success, to avoid her presence:

The appearance, in the literature of all times, of a young female in male attire is, as a rule, connected with the gay and humorous—it is enough to call to mind Shakespeare’s comedies—or else it is used as a pretty and sentimental expedient finally leading to a happy result, as in Cymbeline, in certain episodes in Don Quixote, in the Monastery of Scott and the Albigenses of Maturin. The figure is not often taken very seriously, and the disguise still more seldom leads to conflicts of a tragical import. Of famous literary characters of the last-mentioned description, Goethe’s Mignon is slightly recalled by Endymion,[54] while the peculiar circumstances appertaining to the concealment of Endymion’s sex render her case well-nigh exceptional in fiction. The topic is delicate enough and its treatment difficult to the extreme. The tone might easily get a tinge of the ridiculous, or even of the coarse, yet here it does neither; Maturin’s singular skill and delicacy in depicting those young, pale and ethereal beings that unite precocity and purity, timidity and passion, by no means denies itself in the creation of Endymion.—Desmond, as a character, is more successful than Connal, if only as being less faultless. He is brave and high-minded like his brother, but at the same time light-headed and choleric; he is said to have been ‘famous for rural gallantry,’ and is not insensible to refined gallantry either. Shortly before the disastrous events narrated above take place, he learns the fact of Endymion’s being a woman from the old harper, who has overheard a conversation between Lady Montclare and the monk Morosini. About the same time he receives a note inviting him to a nightly rendez-vous. He takes it to come from Endymion, and, in spite of the serious admonitions of Connal, whom he makes his confidant, he goes to the meeting-place; but to his astonishment he finds that the writer of the billet is not Endymion, but her mother. Shocked and disgusted he leaves the castle, being thus absent when the rebellion breaks out. In the meantime he is thrown into the arms of Lady Gabriella. Having been rejected by Connal, she seeks consolation with the younger brother; Desmond, passionate and disappointed as he is, surrenders himself to her charms, and they disappear together for a long time.—In the meanwhile Connal leaves his island and undertakes an adventurous journey to Dublin, having heard that an eminent person there would be willing to intercede for him with the government. By accident he enters a theatre, where he sees his brother with Gabriella, and from a conversation near him he gathers that their life is considered to be a perfect scandal. He seeks out Desmond and persuades him to re-join his regiment, which is in the vicinity of Castle Montclare. The brothers part, Desmond being still entirely ignorant of Connal’s participation in the rebellion. Desmond travels back to the castle, where his position becomes very painful. Lady Montclare is about to contract a marriage with his father the agent, who is wholly unlike his sons. As for Endymion, she continues to be a victim of the shameful imposture and is, moreover, surrounded by dangers threatening both her life and her reason. Her love for Desmond is more conspicuous than ever; one night he finds her in the chapel where she is doing penance which Morosini has imposed on her for permitting her thoughts to dwell too much on Desmond. As the monk is often present during these penances, and she confesses that he talks to her in a way she does not understand, Desmond concludes that his motives for staying alone with the slightly-clad girl are not purely ecclesiastic. Indignant and despairing, but at a loss how to treat her, Desmond withdraws from the scene. The decisive moment, however, comes that very night; as in the case of Armida and Connal, it is told in a few simple sentences. Desmond is roused from his slumbers by hearing Endymion sobbing at his door and imploring him to open it. At last he yields to the entreaties: