Yet good Father Roach understood human nature better.  Man and woman have a tendency to fuse.  And given a good-looking fellow and a woman, no matter of what age, who but deserves the name, and bring them together, and let the hero but have proper opportunities, and deuce is in it if nothing comes of the matter.  Animosity is no impediment.  On the contrary ’tis a more advantageous opening than indifference.  The Cid began his courtship by shooting his lady-love’s pigeons, and putting her into a pet and a frenzy.  The Cid knew what he was about.  Stir no matter what passions, provided they be passions, and get your image well into your lady’s head, and you may repeat, with like success, the wooing (which superficial people pronounce so unnatural) of crook-backed Richard and the Lady Anne.  Of course, there are limits.  I would not advise, for instance, a fat elderly gentleman, bald, carbuncled, dull of wit, and slow of speech, to hazard that particular method, lest he should find himself the worse of his experiment.  My counsel is for the young, the tolerably good-looking, for murmuring orators of the silver-tongue family, and romantic athletes with coaxing ways.

Worthy Father Roach constituted himself internuncio between Mahony, whom we remember first in his pride of place doing the honours of that feast of Mars in which his ‘friend’ Nutter was to have carved up the great O’Flaherty on the Fifteen Acres, and next, quantum, mutatus ab illo! a helpless but manly captive in the hands of the Dublin bailiffs, and that very Mrs. Elizabeth Woolly, relict and sole executrix of the late Timotheus Woolly, of High-street, tailor, &c., &c., who was the cruel cause of his incarceration.

Good Father Roach, though a paragon of celibacy, was of a gallant temperament, and a wheedling tongue, and unfolded before the offended eye of the insulted and vindictive executrix so interesting a picture of ’his noble young friend, the victim of circumstance, breaking his manly heart over his follies and misfortunes;’ and looking upon her, Mrs. Woolly, afar off, with an eye full of melancholy and awe, tempered with, mayhap, somewhat of romantic gallantry, like Sir Walter Raleigh from the Tower window on Queen Elizabeth, that he at length persuaded the tremendous ‘relict’ to visit her captive in his dungeon.  This she did, in a severe mood, with her attorney, and good Father Roach; and though Mahony’s statement was declamatory rather than precise, and dealt more with his feelings than his resources, and was carried on more in the way of an appeal to the ‘leedy’ than as an exposition to the man of law, leaving matters at the end in certainly no clearer state than before he began, yet the executrix consented to see the imprisoned youth once more, this time dispensing with her attorney’s attendance, and content with the protection of the priest, and even upon that, on some subsequent visits, she did not insist.