The Ottawa Free Trader

Archibald Hamilton Rowan.

If ever knight errantry was realized in ancient or modern days, it was so in Archibald Hamilton Rowan. Endowed with a figure of the grandest proportions, he possessed a mind guileless and romantic to a degree that, if depicted in a novel, would be looked upon as forced and incredible. Confident in his great strength and courage, and prompted by his generous feelings, he was always ready to undertake the redressal of the wrongs of distressed damsels, or of the needy and oppressed of either sex, it was not, therefore, matter of wonder that he should have devoted himself with a hearty enthusiasm to the cause of the relief of his suffering country. He did so in the purest spirit of patriotism, and with the most entire disregard of his personal interests, and, up to the last moments, like feelings continued to influence him.

Those who remember the streets of Dublin thirty years since, can scarcely have forgotten that gigantic old man, in his old fashioned dress, and with his following of the two last of the race of Irish wolf-dogs. His appearance then, however, could scarcely convey a notion of what he was some five-and-twenty years earlier, when he and I made a pedestrian tour of England together, and when, as I well remember, his practice at starting from an inn, of a wet morning, was to roll himself into the first pool he met, in order that he might be beforehand with the rain. The laurels were then fresh which he had won by the performance of a grand feat, under the eyes of Marie Antoinette, and of which he was not a little proud. He had run a foot race, in presence of the whole French court, in jack boots, against an officer of the Garde du Corps, dressed in light shoes and silk stockings, and had won with ease, to the great admiration of the queen, who honored him with special marks of her regard. When I first knew Rowan, he was master of a fortune of full £5,000 a year, upon which, however, his philanthropic escapades caused heavy drafts.

He had always some adventure upon hand; and two or three of these, in which he rescued distressed damsels from the stares and force of ravishers of rank, made a good deal of noise at the time; the particulars being made known by means of a private printing press, which he kept in his house, ready for such occasions. While he was obliged to take refuge in America, he was frequently in pecuniary distress, owing to the uncertainty with which remittances reached him from home, and I recollect his telling me that he was, for a good part of the time, indebted for a livelihood to his mechanical knowledge, which was very considerable, and enabled him to take charge of a cotton factory in New York. The last time I saw him was at his house of Rathcoffey, in the county of Kildare, where I went for the purpose of introducing to him Lady Campbell, the daughter of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who was on a visit to Lyons. He was unable to leave his room, and but the mummy of the former Archibald Hamilton Rowan; yet that the spirit of the premier chevalier, who had won the smiles of the Queen of France, still lived in that skeleton, was abundantly manifested in the affectionate gallantry with which he received and greeted the daughter of his early associate and friend,—Lord Cloncurry's Recollections