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The morning after Catalina's arrival she received
the visits of several officers, two of whom had the
honour of being aids to his excellency the governor
and commander-in-chief. They therefore merit
a particular introduction. “Gentle Reader, this
is Sir Thicknesse Throgmorton; and this is the
Honourable Barry Gilfillan, of an ancient and noble
Irish family, somewhat poor, but very honest, having
suffered divers forfeitures for its loyalty to the
Stuarts,—that stupid, worthless race, whose persevering
pretensions to a crown they had justly forfeited
by their tyranny, drew after them the ruin of
thousands of generous and devoted victims. Sir
Thicknesse and Colonel Gilfillan, this is the gentle
Reader, a beautiful, accomplished lady of great
taste, as all our female readers are, thank Heaven!”

Sir Thicknesse Throgmorton was what is now
generally designated a “real John Bull,” a being
combining more of the genuine elements of the
ridiculous than perhaps any other extant. Stiff as
buckram, and awkward as an ill-contrived automaton;
silent, stupid, and ill-mannered, yet at the same
time full of pretensions to a certain deference, due
only from others in exchange for courtesy and good-breeding.
Ignorant of his own country from

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incapacity to learn, and of the rest of the world from a
certain contemptuous stupidity, he exalted the one
and contemned the other without knowing exactly
why, except that—that it certainly was so, and there
was an end of the matter. His bow was both an
outrage upon nature and inclination, except when
he bent to the lady of the governor, or the governor
himself; and his dancing the essence of solemn
stupidity, aiming at a dignified nonchalance. Nothing
called forth his lofty indignation more than
being spoken to by an inferior in rank, dress, or station.
This indignation was manifested by a most
laughable jumble of insurmountable clumsiness with
affected dignity and high aristocratic breeding.
There was nothing he so much valued himself upon
as the air noble. Independently of the outrage
upon his personal, hereditary, and official dignity
manifested by an abrupt address from an inferior,
Sir Thicknesse had another special cause for disliking
to be spoken to by strangers. The fact is he
was so long in collecting the materials of an answer
to the most common observation, that he seldom
forgave a person for putting him to the trouble. He
had a most rare and, at that time, original style of
making the agreeable, which is now however pretty
general among high-bred persons. He placed himself
directly opposite the lady, straddling like a gigantic
pair of brass tongs, to collect his ideas into
one great explosion—such, for instance, as “Don't
you find it rather warm, Mawm?” Perfectly satisfied
with this mighty effort, the knight would strut
off in triumph, to repose himself for the rest of
the evening under the shade of his laurels. Added
to this he was a grumbling, ill-tempered, dissatisfied
being, full of pretensions on the score of his personal

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accomplishments and the interest of his family.
There is nothing in fact so dignified in the eyes of
“a real John Bull” as possessing a family influence,
which renders personal merit and services quite superfluous.

With regard to the person of Sir Thicknesse, it was
admirably contrived to set off his exemplary awkwardness
to the best advantage. It was a perfect
caricature of dignified clumsiness. His limbs struck
you as being too large for his body, until you studied
the latter, when it seemed perfectly clear that the
body was too large for the limbs. Taken by itself,
every feature of his face was out of proportion; but
examine them in connexion as a whole, and there
was an harmonious combination of unfinished magnitude,
that constituted a true and just proportion of
disproportions. His eyes sent forth a leaden lustre;
his nose was equally compounded of the pug and
the bottle; his lips would have been too large for
his mouth, had not his mouth been large enough to
harmonize with them; and his cheeks expanded into
sufficient amplitude to accommodate the rest of his
face without any of the features being crowded two
in a room, which every body knows is the abomination
of every “real John Bull” in existence. Sir
Thicknesse was of an ancient and honourable family,
distinguished in the annals of England. One of his
ancestors had committed an assassination in the very
precincts of the court, and being obliged to fly in the
disguise of a peasant, in order the more effectually to
escape detection, was overtaken by the king's pursuivant,
sawing wood with one of his companions in
a forest. His attendant faltering on the appearance
of the pursuivant, for a moment stopped sawing,
when the other exclaimed significantly, “Thorough”

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—or “Through”—tradition is doubtful which. The
attendant took the hint, continued his work, and the
pursuivant passed them without detection. In memory
of this great exploit, the illustrious fugitive from
justice adopted this phrase as the motto of his coat
of arms; and it descended to his posterity. Another
of his illustrious ancestors was distinguished in the
wars of York and Lancaster for his inflexible loyalty,
being always a most stanch supporter of the
king de facto, and holding kings de jure in great contempt.
A third, and the greatest of all the family
of Sir Thicknesse, was an illegitimate descendant
of a theatrical strumpet and a scoundrel king, who
demonstrated the force of blood by afterward marrying
an actress of precisely the same stamp as her
from whom he sprung. No wonder Sir Thicknesse
was proud of his family.

But great as his progenitors were, they could not
hold a candle to those of Colonel Barry Fitzgerald
Macartney Gilfillan, a genuine Milesian, whose ancestors
had been kings of Connaught, princes of
Breffny, and lords of Ballyshannon, Ballynamora,
Ballynahinch, Ballygruddrey, Ballyknockamora, and
several lordships besides. Gilfillan was an Irish
Bull, a perfect contrast to an English Bull. He was
all life, love, gallantry, whim, wit, humour, and hyperbole.
His animal spirits were to him as the
wings of a bird, on which he mounted into the regions
of imagination and folly. They flew away with him
ten times an hour. He learned every thing so fast
that he knew nothing perfectly; and such was the
impetuosity of his conceptions, that one-half the time
they came forth wrong end foremost. His ignorance
of a subject never for a moment prevented him from
dashing right into it, or stopped the torrent of his

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ideas, which resembled a stream swelled by the rains,
being excessively noisy and not very clear. His
ideas, in truth, seemed always turning somersets over
the heads of each other, and for the most part presented
that precise rhetorical arrangement which is
indicated by the phrase of “putting the cart before
the horse.” He never pleaded guilty to ignorance
of any thing, nor was ever known to stop a moment
to get hold of the right end of an idea,—maintaining
with a humorous obstinacy, that as he always came
to the right end at last, it was of no consequence
where he began.

Nature had given to Colonel Gilfillan a more than
usual share of the truly Irish propensity to falling in
love extempore. His heart was quite as hot as his
head, and between the two there was a perfect volcano.
He was always under high steam pressure.
He once acknowledged, or rather boasted—for he
never confessed any thing—that he had fallen in love
at the Curragh of Kildare with six ladies in one day,
and was refused by them all in less than twenty-four
hours afterward. “But, faith!” added he, “I killed
two horses riding about the country after them; and
that was some comfort.” “Comfort!” said a friend,
“how do you make that out, Gilfillan?” “Why,
wasn't it a proof I didn't stand shilly-shally, waiting
my own consent any more than that of the ladies, my
dear!” It is scarcely necessary to add, that he was
generous, uncalculating, brave, and a man of his
word, except in love affairs, and sometimes in affairs
of business, when he occasionally lost at play the
money he had promised to a tradesman. His person
exhibited a rich redundancy of manly beauty, luscious
with youth, health, and vigour; he sang charmingly;
played the fiddle so as to bring tears into your eyes;

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danced, laughed, chatted, blundered, gallanted, flattered,
and made love with a graceful confidence and
fearless audacity, that caused him to be a great favourite
and rather a dangerous companion for women
of warm imaginations and mere ordinary refinement of
manners and feelings. Like most men of his profession,
his ideas on certain subjects were of the latitudinarian
order. Gilfillan swore he was a man of as
much honour as ever wore a uniform. He would not
pick a pocket; but as for picking a lady's white bosom
of a sweet little heart—let him alone for that. A fair
exchange was no robbery all the world over; and
he always left his own with them, if there were
twenty. When his brother officers laughed at him
for having so many hearts, “Och, my dears!”
would he reply, “what, do you talk about having but
one heart? A man with only one heart in his bosom
is like a poor divil with only a shilling in his pocket—
he is afraid to part with it, and so starves himself
just for fear of starving!”

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