|
LADY CLONBRONY: ‘A strong Hibernian accent she had, with infinite difficulty, changed into an English tone. Mistaking reverse of wrong for right, she caricatured the English pronunciation; and the extraordinary precision of her London phraseology betrayed her not to be a Londoner.’ (Chap. 1, p.5.)
‘Lady Clonbrony had not, for her own part, the slightest notion how people could be brought to this pass, nor how any body out of Bedlam could prefer, to a good house, a decent equipage, and a proper establishment, what is called love in a cottage.’ (The Absentee, Chap. IV.)
[Lady Clonbrony acc. Lady Longdale:] ‘if you knew all she endures, to look, speak, move, breathe, like an Englishwoman, you would pity her’ (p.2.)
Terence O’Fay: ‘Lord Colambre could not help laughing, partly with and partly at his countryman [Terence O’Fay] … All the yard were in a roar … merely by the sound of the Irish brogue’ (p.9.)
[Sir Terence uses] ‘all the scraps of learning he had acquired’ (p.22.)
Lady Clonbrony speaks in affectionate moods ‘in an undisguised Irish accent, and with her natural warm manner’ (p.17.)
LORD CLONBRONY: ‘If people would but, as they might, stay in their own country, live on their own estates, and till their own - money need never be wanting’ (p.20-1.) ‘[a] nobody in England’ (p.22.)
[The BERRY estate - its fate compared with the CLONBRONY estate] ‘She had made her husband an ABSENTEE - an absentee from his home, his affairs, his duties, and his estate … whether the separation was effected by land or water - the consequences, the negligence, the extravagance, were the same.’ (p.54.)
[Of Mrs RAFFERTY’s house]: ‘studied crookedness’ (p.89.)
‘It was the same desire to appear what they were not, the same vain ambition to view with superior rank and fortune, or fashion, which actuated lady Clonbrony and Mrs Raffarty’ (p.91.)
[Larry the postillion in The Absentee confides his opinions to Colambre, travelling incognito:] ‘Lord Colambre was a very good jantleman, if he was not an absentee’ (p.141.)
he remembers wistfully Nugentstown, ‘once a snug place when my Lady Clonbrony was at home to whitewash it.’ (p.146.)
‘men wrangling, brawling, threatening, whining, drawling, cajoling, cursing, and every variety of wretchedness’ (p.162.)
‘That no attempt at proselytism had been made, and that no illiberal distinctions had been made in his school, Lord Colambre was convinced, in the best manner possible, by seeing the children of Protestants and Catholics sitting on the same benches with the same books, and speaking to each other with the same cordial familiarity.’ (OUP ed., p.183.)
COUNT O’HALLORAN: ‘[...] Military exploits fill every day’s newspapers, every conversation. A martial spirit is now essential to the liberty and the existence of our country’ (p.224.)
LORD COLAMBRE: bound to Ireland out of ‘a sense of duty and patriotism’ (p.7); ‘could never deprecate a sister country’
[Lord Colambre possesses:] ‘the sobriety of English good sense mixed most advantageously with Irish vivacity … English prudence governed but did not extinguish Irish enthusiasm’.]
GRACE NUGENT has ‘a tincture of Irish pride’ (p.17.)
Cf. ‘The sound of various brogues, the din of men wrangling, brawling, threatening, whining, drawling, cajoling, cursing and every variety of wretchedness … Is this Ireland? No, it is not Ireland … what I have just seen is the picture only of that to which an Irish estate and Irish tenantry may be degraded in the absence of those whose duty and interest it is to reside in Ireland, to uphold justice by example and authority but who neglecting this duty, commit power to bad hands and bad hearts, abandon their tenantry to oppression and their property to ruin.’ (Absentee, Everyman Library, ed., Brandon Matthews ([1910] 1972 edn.; OUP edn., 1988, p.162.)
[JAMES BROOKE’s vision of Irish society under the Union;] ‘a society … composed of a most agreeable and salutary mixture of birth and education, gentility and knowledge, manner and matter … new life and energy.’ (Absentee, Everyman ed. 1972, p.165.)
[BROOKE, on backbiting of the DASHFORTS]: ‘the domestic peace of families, on which, at last, public as well as private virtue and happiness depend (p.248.)
ORANMORE: ‘encouraging the people by judicious kindness’.
|