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LIFE OF CHARLES HALIDAY. XCV11
home no such researches were ever allowed to interfere with
his business pursuits.
The Rev. James Graves, Secretary to the Royal Irish
Historical and Archaeological Society, told me that visiting
Dr. Todd, one day at his chambers, in Trinity College,
Dr. Todd said to him, " Come here, Graves, and see
what that noble fellow, Charles Haliday, has done ;
"
and,
opening a box, he showed him some fine prehistoric gold
ornaments, amongst others two torques or twisted collars,
" the likes of which "
(said Todd) " I never saw before.
They are part," said he, " of a find a fifth part only of
what five navvies chanced upon while working in a
cutting on the Limerick and Foynes Railway track. They
agreed to keep the secret of their discovery, and to divide it
amongst themselves. One of them sold his share to West,
the jeweller, of Dame-street, and Haliday, hearing of it,
went there, and West sold it to him for 160, the price ho
had paid for it, which was only the value of the gold.
Haliday did this to secure it for the Royal Irish Academy,
and allowing them to select such articles as they desired
for their museum of antiquities, sold the rest."
He, Lord Talbot, and Dr. Todd, contributed 25 apiece,
and secured for the Academy the Book of Fermoy, an
ancient Irish manuscript, sold at Monck Mason's sale. He
offered, he told me, 800 for Eugene O'Curry's papers, but
the Catholic University would not let anyone have them
but themselves.
Between the years 1854 and 1860 Monsieur Ferdinand Monsieur de
de Lesseps came over to Dublin, and at a special meeting c.
of the Chamber of Commerce, unfolded his scheme for a
canal through the Isthmus of Suez, so run down and
derided in Parliament by Lord Palmerston (who got
Stephenson, the great engineer, after an inspection of the
mouth of the canal, in the Mediterranean, in his yacht, to
declare it impracticable), that he would be scarce listened