What direful thoughts of sickening gloom,
Around me gathers, this evening noon! (Question)
Enough to quench, the little ray of joy (splendid
That grew with me, ere I was a boy (harmony
Like waves that roll, with thundering, tempest tost (from a
And dash their fury, on the sea beat coast (fiddle
With mad’ning force, and mountains of white foam
Engulphing man, into one vengeful doom
Like tyranny – rose that demon power
(A.F.R) Griff1 – dark as midnight hour
With nostrils gaping!!! See behold they come
With fiendish strides, and hell’sh brimstone fume
To suffocate devour and dethrone
All poor surveyors, and hunt them home
For why the millions, T.R.2 lays is growing slack
Those beggars I’ll hunt – Griff your knapsack
To hold the surplus of the Government Stock,
Tis little enough. Me they will shortly dock hooray!
Of all my vestures maps and title deeds (more
For robbing the surveyors of their fees. (music!
But what for that, I to myself must look (Oh
I’m almost blind youth hath me forsook, (Lord!
My ears grow cold, a naccous3 juice doth flow
From out the poers4 – oh! misery sorrow woe
To be deprived of life oh! God what shall I do
For satan claims his own, I cannot look to you
See the fiend comes, while blasted spirits attend
To waft my soul to H - -5 most wretched is my end
So ends the the life of one, a blasted race did run
A robbing thieving knave. A father’s ‘cursed son’.
Philantrophist6
These last 8 defy all common sense! The ‘Scotch Reviewers’7 would throw down their scourging quills in despair and set about writing an ode to the memory of ‘damned nonsense’ It excels all I ever seen or imagined in the way of literary hotch potch! Certainly it is a philantrophical effusion with a heavy vengeance! In the letter speaking of it he8 says I ‘must not publish it’ – as the subject is rather a ‘domestic one’ This is the first letter I had from poor ‘Blackthorn’9 since I came to England so that it is quite evident that it is his own high opinion of ‘the poem’ that induced him to write. I’ll keep him to it! until I get a few more from him. Byron10 could not afford as much amusement!
(A.F.R.)
Quere. Tucker or Tom Reynolds of Carlow notoriety.11
First he devours all poor surveyors and then hunts them home! For why the millions &c. &c. – !!!– –
Mark! Some dirty stuff is flowing out of his ears!
I received your letter12 Friday evening as I came in from patroling the woods of ‘Crosby Hall’.13 Tyndall I am surveying a most beautiful place – a gentleman’s demesne14 – it took me two days last week to produce a line of 600015 I had to cut my road through wood for one half and to crawl under shrubs and flowers and apple trees and over ice houses garden walls the other. I can just get as much apples, peaches, currants resberries, strawberries, gooseberries, melans,16 cucumbers, &c &c &c. as I like to eat or pocket. I will be in the demesne for a month yet all I have to amuse me is a pack of hounds that are in a kennel ready to devour me if I put a foot within the precints of their stinking domicile. The hares and rabbits go about in flocks, seriously when we make our appearance at one end of the lawn they just scour away like a flock of sheep from a dog. The pheasants and partridges are innumerable I counted 17 partridges in a cluster ten minutes before I got your letter. I have nabbed one hare already. The chainman I have has pinned two. I killed him with a tip of the pole – we can positively trip them with the chain.17
Yours &c. | Ginty.
RI MS JT 1/11/3589–90
LT Transcript Only
(A.F.R) Griff: possibly a comical allusion to acting Lance Corporal David Griffin, whose subsequent demotion to Private Ginty saw as a deserved vengeance; see letter 0199. The abbreviation (A.F.R.) is used again later in the letter, but its meaning is unclear (although the A may stand for Acting).
T.R.: possibly either Captain Henry Tucker or Thomas Reynolds; see Ginty’s exegetical comments on the poem and n. 11.
naccous: not identified.
poers: variant spelling of pores.
H - -: Hell.
Philantrophist: Rather than a misspelling, this poetic pseudonym seems to combine the word philanthropist, indicating a purveyor of practical benevolence, with the Greek term for one who loves to overthrow or ruin, anantrepo (άνατρεπω). Ginty’s response to the poem suggests he recognized this.
‘Scotch Reviewers’: censorious critics of poetry in journals such as the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, as satirized by Lord Byron in his poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).
he: presumably Martin Cuddy; see n. 9.
poor ‘Blackthorn’: Cuddy’s poetic pseudonym; see letter 0127, n. 2.
Byron: George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824).
Tom Reynolds of Carlow notoriety: Beyond the Captain Thomas V. Reynolds who had worked on trigonometrical surveys for the Board of Ordnance in the 1790s, no other Tom Reynolds was involved in the Ordnance Survey at this time, so this is possibly the Thomas Reynolds who was a leading member of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association; see letter 0066, n. 4. In June 1841, Reynolds, a City Marshal in Dublin, ‘went down to the County Carlow to canvass the electors’ in the bitterly fought election, and ‘remained several weeks’, which may account for his apparent notoriety (W. J. O’N. Daunt, Personal Recollections of Daniel O’Connell, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1848), vol. 1, p. 292).
your letter: letter missing.
‘Crosby Hall’: see letter 0169, n. 27.
demesne: private estate (OED).
a line of 6000: presumably a chain line of 6000 feet, made by a chainman and a follower stretching a chain of 66 feet in length between ranging rods and then successively repeating the action; see letter 0143, n. 30.
resberries … melans: variant spellings of raspberries and melons.
Chainman … with the chain: see n. 15.
Please cite as “Tyndall0170,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 26 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0170