No More Learning

CH. IX.


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306
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
twenty-five years that the language of this poetry has been
carefully studied, and later scholars have had the advantage
over their predecessors in being able to introduce with great
effect reminiscences of the characteristic epithets and imagery
which formed a large part of the stock-in-trade of the medieval
bard.
We have indicated that the interesting individual character of
early Irish literature makes it worth while getting that literature
more fully represented in the English language through translation,
adaptation and the use of Irish themes in original English writings.
It may be desirable to point out here that, when Irish literature
had a wider recognition in Britain and on the continent than it
now commands, it thus found its way into European and Welsh and,
therefrom, into English literature. The Anglo-Norman conquerors
of Ireland, no doubt, clung to their French prose and verse
romances, and the native Irish chieftains were as conservative of
their native hero tales and poems. Yet, as E. C. Quiggin well puts it,
few serious scholars will be prepared to deny that the Island contributed in
considerable measure to the common literary stock of the Middle ages. In
the literature of vision, very popular in Ireland, a chord was struck which
continued to vibrate powerfully until the time of the reformation, and The
Vision of Tundale (Tnudgal), written with striking success by an Irishman
named Marcus at Regensburg about the middle of the twelfth century, was
probably known to Dante, and, in addition to the numerous continental
versions, there is a rendering of its story into middle English verse.
Apart from its visions, there is a section of Irish Gaelic literature
known as that of imrama or voyages. The earliest romance of the
kind is the voyage of Maeldun, to Joyce's translation of which, in
his Old Celtic Romances, the writer of this chapter called Tenny-
son's attention. Hence the appearance of Tennyson's wellknown
poem. A still more famous Irish imram is The Voyage of
St Brendan, which passed through all the Christian continent and,
therefore, as Quiggin points out, 'figures in The South English
Legendary. ' "The episode of St Brendan and the Whale, moreover,
was probably the ultimate source of one of Milton's best known
similes in his description of Satan. But the legend of St Brendan,
as told in Irish literature, differs both from the Latin version and
from those of France and Germany. Matthew Arnold's poem is
based on these foreign versions and introduces the incident of
Judas Iscariot being allowed out of hell for one day in the year,
because of an act of humanity when on earth.
The question is still vexed as to how far the characteristics of
Arthurian legends are due to their being possessed in common by


## p. 307 (#337) ############################################

IX]
Celtic Influence
307
6
the Irish and the Welsh, or to Irish influences over Welsh romantic
literature dating back to the days of Gruffydd ap Cynan. He was
the son of an Irish princess, who had spent much of his life as an
exile in Ireland and, on his return to Wales, undoubtedly brought
with him Irish bards and shenachies, who through their superior
literary knowledge and technique and musical skill, greatly
advanced the Cymric culture of his day.
But it now seems fairly certain, in the opinion of Windisch and
other Celtic scholars, including Quiggin, that
some of the Welsh rhapsodists apparently served a kind of apprenticeship
with their Irish brethren, and many things Irish were assimilated at this time
which, through this channel, were shortly to find their way into Anglo-French.
Thus it may now be regarded as certain that the name of the 'fair sword,'
Excalibur, by Geoffrey called Caliburnus (Welsh Caletfwlch) is taken from
Caladbolg, the far famed broadsword of Fergus Mac Roig. It does not
appear that the whole frame-work of the Irish sagas was taken over, but, as
Windisch points out, episodes were borrowed as well as tricks of imagery.
So, to mention but one, the central incident of Syr Gawayn and the Grene
Knyght is doubtless taken from the similar adventure of Cuchulain in
Bricriu's Feast. Thus, the share assigned to Irish influence in the matière
de Bretagne is likely to grow with the progress of research1.
Matthew Arnold considers Shakespeare full of Celtic magic in
his handling of nature, and makes a fine discrimination between
his Greek and Celtic nature notes; but whence did he come by the
latter? Was it, at second hand, through Edmund Spenser, or his
friend Dowland the lutenist, who, if not an Irishman, had an Irish
association, or was his mother, Mary Arden, who came from the
Welsh border, and whose distant kinsfolk were connected with
the Welsh Tudor court, of Cymric blood ? Yet the Celtic note
is there. But, while Shakespeare describes Welsh character
brilliantly, in three special types, those of Glendower, Fluellen
and Sir Hugh Evans, he only sketches one feather-headed Irish-
man, records not a single Irish incident in any of his plays and only
makes a few passing allusions to kerns and gallowglasses, and to
the marvellous powers of prophecy and of riming rats to death
claimed by Irish bards, weaving into his musical and lyrical
framework half a dozen Irish airs and a couple of references to
Irish folk-lore-if, indeed, his queen Mab is the Irish queen Medb
—
and his Puck is the Irish Puca, whose gambols and appearance are
very similar to Puck's.
Probably, Shakespeare was not unnaturally prejudiced against
the Irish, with whom, for much of his life, his country was at war,
and whom Spenser had described in unflattering terms, and at
1 'Irish Influence on English Literature,' Quiggin, E. C. , in The Glories of Ireland.
20—2


## p. 308 (#338) ############################################

308
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
whose hands he and Essex and other Englishmen with whom
Shakespeare must have been in intellectual sympathy had suffered
much. Spenser's own writings, also, suggest that, although his
Faerie Queene, largely written on the banks of the southern
Blackwater, has its scenery as a background in book y and else-
where, the bardic poetry which he had caused to be translated
for him, and which, in his opinion, was 'of sweet wit and good
invention,' made no personal appeal to him. Indeed, considering
how savagely hostile it was to his countrymen, as he declares, it
was not likely to have had any further effect upon him.
To what must we attribute the literary silence of the English-
speaking settlers in Ireland from the end of the twelfth to the
close of the sixteenth century? The causes are threefold. Irish
and Latin, for the mass of the inhabitants of Ireland, were their
written and spoken languages, and writers in English would have
had a very small hearing. Constant wars with the native Irish,
and a very precarious hold upon their property, made the pursuit
of English letters almost out of the question with the Anglo-Irish
of the Pale. Finally, the remarkable tendency of the Anglo-Norman
and Englishman to become, in course of time, more Irish than the
Irish, owing to intermarriage and fosterage and separation from
their kinsfolk in England and Wales, drew them away from
English and Welsh into Irish-Gaelic literature.
With the exception, therefore, of merely technical books such
as John Garland's Organum, a musical treatise in Latin, and
Lionel Power's first English treatise on music, in 1395, no Anglo-
Irish literary works are to be noted till we reach Stanyhurst's
Description of Ireland, together with part of a history of Ireland,
written, under the direction of Edmund Campion the Jesuit, for
Holinshed's Chronicles, published in 15781.
Works by Anglo-Irish writers of the seventeenth century are
largely in Latin and, therefore, are not dealt with here. A reference
to the bibliography of this chapter will, however, show that
a few of these have been rendered into English and should be
consulted, in this or in their original form, by students interested
in Irish history, archaeology and hagiology, secular and religious,
and in the treatment of these subjects by such distinguished con-
temporary writers as John Colgan, Sir James Ware—whom arch-
bishop Ussher had educated into an interest in Irish history and
antiquities--Luke Wadding and Philip O'Sullivan Beare. These,
too, were the times of Geoffrey Keating, the first writer of modern
1 See, ante, vol. II, p. 319.


## p. 309 (#339) ############################################

IX]
James Ussher.
The Sheridans
309
Irish who can claim to possess literary style, and of the O'Clery
family. Keating was a poet as well as a historian, and his lyric
Geoffrey Keating to his Letter on its way to Ireland is one of the
most charming of Irish patriotic poems. Keating's History of
Ireland has been recently issued by the Irish Text society, with
an excellent English translation facing the original Irish, and
Annals of the Four Masters may also be consulted in a satis-
factory English version.
But the first seventeenth century writer whose works are
familiar to contemporary Englishmen was James Ussher, one of
the first students of Trinity college, Dublin, afterwards archbishop
of Armagh and primate of Ireland, who, without doubt, was one
of the most remarkable of Irish scholars, being, according to
Selden, ad miraculam doctus. He wrote in English as well as in
Latin, and, moreover, was an Irish scholar. He discovered the
long lost Book of Kells, a MS of the four Gospels, the finest
specimen of Irish illuminated art in existence, and, indeed,
unparalleled for beauty by any other work of the kind, and he
bequeathed it, with the rest of his books and MSS, to Trinity
college, Dublin, in 1661. His writings are mainly concerned with
theological or controversial subjects, which had a great vogue
in his days. But his opus magnum is Annales Veteris et Novi
Testamenti, a chronological compendium in Latin of the history
of the world from the Creation to the dispersion of the Jews
under Vespasian, which brought him European fame. Ussher's
specially Irish works are mentioned in the bibliography.
&
а
Passing to later centuries, we shall find few instances of a here-
ditary talent so persistent as that of the Sheridan stock. Richard
Brinsley Sheridan himself inherited poetic tastes from his mother,
born Frances Chamberlaine, from his father Thomas Sheridan, a
noted actor and playwright, his dramatic bent, and from his grand-
father, Thomas Sheridan, Swift's intimate, a classical style. His own
brilliant wit descended to his son Tom Sheridan, father of Caroline
Sheridan, afterwards Mrs Norton-(the supposed prototype of George
Meredith's Diana of the Crossways), and, also, of Helen Sheridan,
lady Dufferin. From the Sheridan stock, too, descends the Le Fanu
talent; for Alice, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's sister, a clever
writer of verse and plays, was grandmother of Joseph Sheridan
Le Fanu, while Sheridan Knowles, the popular actor and dramatist,
was, also, of the Sheridan-Le Fanu stock. Caroline Norton does
See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. VI.


## p. 310 (#340) ############################################

310
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
a
not escape the influence of the sentimentality which marked the
verse of her time, as her sister lady Dufferin escapes it. The
simplest themes seemed to attract lady Dufferin most. Living a
happy domestic life amid Irish surroundings, her warm heart beats
in such close sympathy with her peasant neighbours that, in I'm
sitting on the stile, Mary, and The Bay of Dublin, she writes as
if she were one of themselves, while her sense of fun floats through
her Irish poems with a delicate breeziness.
A writer of the Sheridan blood nearer to present day literary
tastes than James Sheridan Knowles? was Joseph Sheridan Le
Fanu, Sheridan's great grand-nephew. T. W. Rolleston does not
say too much in Le Fanu's praise as a master of the mysterious and
terrible when he thus writes of him :
In Uncle Silas, in his wonderful tales of the supernatural, such as The
Watcher, and in a short and less known but most masterly story, The
Room in the Dragon Volant, he touched the springs of terror and suspense,
as perhaps no other writer of fiction in the language has been able to do.
His fine scholarship, poetic sense, and strong, yet delicate handling of
language and of incident give these tales a place quite apart among works
of sensational fiction. But perhaps the most interesting of all his novels is
The House by the Churchyard, a wonderful admixture of sentimentalism,
humour, tragedy, and romance.
To this may be added the belief that, in Le Fanu's verse and,
notably, in his drama Beatrice, the qualities above indicated are
often conveyed with a finer touch, and, at times, with extraordinary
directness of suggestion. Again, the lurid terror of his poetical
narratives is happily relieved by interludes of such haunting
beauty of colour and sound, that we cannot but lament the late-
ness of this discovery of his highest artistic self. Indeed, our
literature can ill afford to lose lyrical dramas with such a stamp
of appalling power upon them as is impressed on Beatrice, or
old-world idylls so full of Gaelic glamour as The Legend of
the Glaive, or so terrible a confession by a drunkard of how he
had fallen irrevocably into the toils of the enchantress drink as
The Song of the Bottle and such stirring Irish ballads as Shamps
O'Brien and Phaudrig Crohoore.
William Drennan was one of the founders and the terary
champion of 'The Society of United Irishmen’; for his Letters of
Orellana drew a large number of Ulstermen into its ranks, while
his fine lyrics The Wake of William Orr and Erin, admired by
Moore, earned him the title 'The Tyrtaeus of the United Irishmen,'
1 See, ante, vol. XIII, chap. VIII.


## p. 311 (#341) ############################################

1x]
National Folk-ballads
311
Mary Tighe, born Blachford-notable, like Mrs Hemans, for her
beauty, poetical talent and unhappy marriage----was the authoress
of Psyche, adapted from the story of Cupid and Psyche in The
Golden A88 of Apuleius—a long, harmonious, fanciful and un-
affected poem, in the Spenserian stanza, which had a wide
circulation in its day, influenced the work of Keats and won
Moore's praise in his lyric Tell me the witching Tale again.
With the later years of the eighteenth century begins that
period in Anglo-Irish literature when the brief but brilliant era
of Irish parliamentary independence gave an impulse to literature,
art and music in Ireland which survived the passing of the Act
of union for quite a generation. Apart from the patriotic poems of
Drennan and such national folk-ballads as The Shan van Vocht, and
The Wearing of the Green, and the brilliant oratory of Grattan,
Flood and Curran—there was a revival of interest in Irish native
poetry and music, evidenced by the publication of Charlotte
Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry, the holding of the Granard and
Belfast meetings of Irish harpers and the consequent issue of
Bunting's first and second collections of Ancient Irish Music,
which inspired Moore's Irish Melodies. Magazines began to
appear in Dublin, Belfast and Cork, which gave employment to
Irish men and women of letters. Learned societies sprang up and
flourished. Schools of art were founded and state-aided popular
education succeeded the hedge-schools. But these movements
were interrupted and marred by intermittent political agitations,
and Dublin lost more and more of its prestige as a capital. The
writers, artists and musicians who would have rallied around the
leaders of an independent Ireland were gradually led to seek their
living in London; and, for the same reasons, the mental vitality
they had showed at the end of the previous century declined
even more decidedly in Belfast, Cork and Limerick.
Two groups of Irish patriots, however, the one more purely
political, the other, owing to race, less actively so, conferred
literary credit upon Ireland even at a time when she was suffering
from unsatisfactory land laws and the imposition of a poor
law contrary to the character of her people.
One of these groups, the Young Irelanders, carried on its
literary propaganda very much as a protest against what they
regarded as the continuous misgovernment of their country; the
other group remained faithful to literary efforts for Ireland in spite
of the existing condition of the country; and, thus, though in
a large measure opposed to one another in politics, the two bodies


## p. 312 (#342) ############################################

312
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
worked side by side, more especially in universities and learned
societies.
George Petrie, a distinguished artist, archaeologist, musician
and man of letters, and a man of as much personal charm as
versatility of talent, drew around him the most eminent of the
non-political group of Irish writers referred to, in association
with Caesar Otway, who, somewhat late in life, discovered literary
gifts of a high order which he employed in writings descrip-
tive of Irish life, scenery and historic remains. He started
The Dublin Penny Journal and conducted it with spirit and
marked ability for a year, and, ten years later, The Irish
Penny Journal, which he carried on, this time as sole editor,
with equal enthusiasm and skill for the same short period.
The physician William Stokes, whose Biography of George
Petrie is a standard Irish work of its kind, is, however, con-
strained to say, that, though, next to politics and polemics, the
subjects treated of in these two illustrated magazines, namely,
the history, biography, poetry, antiquities, natural history,
legends and traditions of the country, were most likely to attract
the attention of the Irish people, yet,
there is no more striking evidence of the absence of public opinion or the
want of interest in the history of the country on the part of Irish society
than the failure of these two works, and it is remarkable that the principal
demand for them was from London and the provincial towns of England.
In literary merit, they were anything but failures and, indeed, it is told of
Southey, that he used to say, when talking of these volumes, that he prized
them as among the most valuable of his library.
The Irish writers who deserved this favourable verdict from
Southey were Carleton and the Banims, Crofton Croker, Mrs S. C.
Hall, Anster, Martin Doyle, Wills, D'Alton and Furlong.
Besides Petrie himself, author of two archaeological works
-Origin and uses of the Round Towers and Essay on Tara
Hill—each a masterpiece of scientific reasoning, and of a series of
descriptive articles relating to Clonmacnoise, the isles of Arran
and other places of Irish antiquarian and other interests, which
possess a charm as delicate and wistful as his Welsh and Irish
water-colour paintings, we find ourselves in the company of Otway,
of whom Archer Butler has well said :
a
Among all the panegyrists of Irish natural beauty, none has ever
approached him. You are not, indeed, to expect much method or system in
his sketches, but he had a higher and rarer gift. He was possessed by what
he saw and felt. His imagination seemed to revel in the sublimities he
described: his sentences became breathing pictures, better, because more
suggestive, than painting itself.


## p. 313 (#343) ############################################

IX]
Maginn, Lever and Lover
313
And now we may hark back a little to the writers who, after
qualifying for the task in Maga and other British magazines,
were to establish and carry on for a long season the brilliant
Dublin University Magazine. First and foremost of these was
William Maginn? This was the time when Lamb, De Quincey,
Lockhart and Wilson were giving most of their writings to maga-
zines, and Maginn proceeded to follow their example. His
classical scholarship gave him style, to which he added remarkable
versatility of literary power. It is said that he conceived the
idea of the famous Noctes Ambrosianae and wrote many of these
dialogues. He was the author of such brilliantly humorous,
if truculent and devil-may-care, verses as The Irishman and the
Lady and St Patrick; while, among his satiric writings, his
panegyric of colonel Pride may stand comparison even with Swift's
notable philippics; and his Sir Morgan O'Doherty was the
undoubted ancestor of Maxwell's and Lever's hard-drinking,
practical-joking Irish military heroes. Maginn, no doubt, suggested
to William Hamilton Maxwell, another Trinity college graduate,
the idea of laying himself out to write military novels ; hence, his
Stories of Waterloo. Maxwell was a great sportsman, if a poor
parson, and his Wild Sports of the West of Ireland enjoyed
a great, and, in the opinion of Christopher North,' a deserved,
popularity.
Charles Lever, as a young man, sat at Maxwell's feet, but
soon surpassed his master in popularity as a writer of the new
form of fiction originated by Maginn. He, too, was educated at
.
Trinity college, Dublin, and took a medical degree there and at
Louvain, but practised the healing art far more effectively than
Goldsmith. Most of his earlier work, like that of Maxwell,
appeared in The Dublin University Magazine, which he edited
when it was in its prime, and, here, his spirited and brilliant,
if somewhat rough and ready, military novels first saw the light.
In his later years, when he was consul at Trieste, his more
finished, if less popular, works, Cornelius O'Dowd and Lord
Kilgobbin, a novel of Fenian times, appeared. In verse as in
prose, Lever has a lighter and more human touch than Maginn,
without his masterfulness of style.
But he does not escape
from the somewhat selfish atmosphere in which the hard-
drinking, hard-riding squires and squireens of his day had their
being.
Samuel Lover, a protestant Irishman, took a stand against
1 See, ante, vol. xn, chap. VI.


## p. 314 (#344) ############################################

314
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
the Irish verse of his day and made a study, if not a deep one,
of his catholic compatriots. Lover has always been compared
with Lever, by whom, however, as a recent writer in The Quarterly
Review justly says,
he was overshadowed. Yet, within his limited sphere, he was a true
humourist, and the careless whimsical, illogical aspects of Irish character
have seldom been more effectively illustrated than by the author of Handy
Andy and The Gridiron. Paddy, as drawn by Lever, succeeds in spite of
his drawbacks, much as Brer Rabbit does in the tales of Uncle Remus.
Lover's heroes' liked action but they hated work'; the philosophy of thrift-
lessness is summed up to perfection in Paddy's Pastoral Rhapsody:
Here's a health to you, my darlin'
Though I'm not worth a farthin';
For when I'm drunk I think I'm rich,
I've a feather-bed in every ditch.
Still, it must be conceded that Lover made a strong step forward
as a writer of national songs and stories, even though he cannot be
held to possess the style and glamour that characterises some
latter day Irish novelists and poets.
The treatment of national stories was first raised to the level of
an art by Crofton Croker, in his Fairy Legends and Traditions of
Ireland, first published, anonymously, in 1825—a set of folk-tales
full of literary charm. For, just as Moore took Irish airs, touched
them up and partnered them with lyrics to suit what was deemed
to be British and Irish taste, so Croker gathered his folk-tales
from the Munster peasantry with whom he was familiar and,
assisted by literary friends, including Maginn (who is credited by
D. J. O'Donoghue with the authorship of that humorous pearl
of great price Daniel O'Rourke), gave them exactly the form and
finish needful to provide the reading public of his day with a
volume of fairy lore.
William Carleton and the brothers John and Michael Banim
followed Crofton Croker with what Douglas Hyde rightly describes
as folklore tales of an incidental and highly manipulated type.
William Carleton, one of the most remarkable of Irish writers, was
born at Prillisk, county Tyrone, the youngest of the fourteen
children of a poor peasant. His father was not only a man of
amazing memory, but a walking chronicle of old tales, legends
and historical anecdotes, which he loved to recount to his children,
and with which he delighted his son William. His mother, too,
was specially gifted; for she had a beautiful voice and sang old
Irish songs and ballads with great charm. He was intended
for the Roman catholic ministry, but his parents were too


## p. 315 (#345) ############################################

IX]
Carleton and Kennedy
315
poor to afford him an education at Maynooth, and, therefore, he
passed his time in desultory reading until he secured the appoint-
ment of tutor in the family of a well-to-do farmer. Tired of this
employment, he made his way to Dublin and, after many vicissi-
tudes, obtained employment from Caesar Otway on his periodical
The Christian Examiner. To this, he contributed thirty sketches
of Irish peasant life, which were collected and published (1832)
in a volume entitled Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry.
Carleton, at the time, was thirty-six years of age; but the success
of his book was great and immediate. A second series appeared
in 1833, and a kindred volume, Tales of Ireland, was issued in 1834.
Some of these sketches and stories appeared in The Dublin Penny
Journal as before stated, and later contributions of the kind in
The Irish Penny Journal. These stories and sketches, which
had a great vogue, are perfectly faithful to the Irish peasant
life they depicted, and, for their sudden and surprising alternation
of wild humour and profound melancholy, are a unique contribution
to folk literature. Challenged by critics who doubted his being
able to give the world anything but brief disconnected tales, he
replied with Fardorougha the Miser, an extraordinarily powerful,
if sombre, story of a man whose soul is divided between passion
for money and deep affection for an only son. The women's
characters as well as the men's are finely conceived. Other,
less successful, novels by Carleton are Valentine M Clutchy and
The Black Prophet. He left behind him an unpublished story,
Anne Cosgrave, which contains some remarkable chapters, but
which was written when he was in feeble health and broken spirits
caused by family bereavement. But he will be best remembered
by his descriptions of Irish peasant life, at an unsophisticated
period, rather than by his humorous folk-tales, which, though
extremely clever, lack the literary touch given to kindred work by
Maginn, Crofton and, it may be added, Patrick Kennedy.
Patrick Kennedy was, indeed, a genuine writer of Irish folk-tales.
His Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celt and Fireside Stories of
Ireland, Bardic Stories of Ireland, Evenings in the Duffrey and
Banks of the Boro' were put on paper much as he heard them when
a boy in his native county Wexford, when they had already passed,
with little change in the telling, from Gaelic into the peculiar
Anglo-Irish local dialect which is distinctly west-Saxon in its
character. Kennedy is a true story-teller, animated and humorous,
but not extravagantly so, like Carleton and Lover at times ;
indeed, his artistic restraint is remarkable.


## p. 316 (#346) ############################################

316
Anglo-Irish Literature [CH.
a
Francis Sylvester Mahony, better known as Father Prout, was
born in Cork in 1804. Ordained as a Jesuit, he became a master
at Clongowes college and, when there, began to write for English
magazines and journals—Fraser's Magazine, where the first of the
celebrated Reliques in prose and verse appeared with the afterwards
wellknown signature 'Father Prout P. P. of Watergrasshill, Co.
Cork’; The Daily News, to which he contributed a series of letters,
as Roman correspondent, under the designation 'Don Jeremy
Savonarola’; Bentley's Miscellany and The Cornhill. Afterwards,
he became Paris correspondent of The Globe, of which he was part
proprietor. He died in Paris in 1866. A learned and witty essayist
and a brilliant versifier in English and Latin, he had the audacity
to turn some of Moore's Irish Melodies into Latin verse and then
claim that his translations were the originals. He is now, how-
ever, best known by The Bells of Shandon and a droll imitation
of an Irish hedge-school ballad, entitled The Sabine Farmer's
Serenade.
The brothers Banim, John and Michael, are best known by
their joint work Tales of the O'Hara Family-one brother passing
on his work to the other for suggestions and criticism. Their several
gifts, as shown in their popular Irish tales, are in pleasant contrast.
'John's,' writes Katharine Tynan, 'was the stronger and more versatile,
Michael's the more humane and sunshiny. John's, occasionally in a page of
dark tragedy, recalls that grinding melancholy of Carleton, which is almost
squalid. It is a far cry from Father Connell to The Nowlans; in fact, the
two stories represent almost the extremes of human temperament. Michael's
was the gentler and more idealising nature, though no one should deny
tenderness to the author of Soggarth Aroon and Aileen. '
No doubt, John Banim's work was coloured by the melancholy
from which he suffered, due, in the first instance, to the death of his
betrothed, and, afterwards, to a somewhat morbid temperament.
Through the influence of his friend Sheil, he produced a successful
tragedy Damon and Pythias at Covent garden, and wrote a series
of clever essays Revelations of the Dead, satires on the follies and
affectations of the day, which were much read at the time.
Michael Banim was the best of brothers. Quite apart from the
modest manner in which he held back from claiming his share
in the popularity gained by John, through the success of The
Tales of the O'Hara Family, he begged him, when news came
of his failing health, to return with his wife from his work to
Kilkenny and make his home there with him, insisting that 'one
brother should not want while the other can supply him. ' Though


## p. 317 (#347) ############################################

IX]
Thomas Osborne Davis
317
the elder, Michael outlived John by thirty years, during which
period he produced Father Connell, one of his best novels, Clough
Fion and The Town of The Cascades.
We may here revert to the group of Irish writers who made
national Irish politics the vehicle for their literary propaganda
and, wise in their generation, thus secured a far wider hearing
than Petrie and Otway gained by means of their three magazines.
Thomas Osborne Davis, the son of parents of strictly unionist
principles, and with but little Irish blood in his veins, went,
as a protestant, to Trinity college, Dublin, but then began
to show his independence of mind. He did not lay himself out
for college distinction, which he could easily have gained, but
read omnivorously, won influence with his fellow-students and,
ultimately, became president of the Historical society, the leading
university debating-club. Called to the bar, he began to practise
in the revision courts and to dabble in political journalism.
This latter work attracted the attention of Charles Gavan Duffy,
the brilliant young editor of a Belfast national journal, and a
Roman catholic. The two men became friends, and a walk taken
by them and John Blake Dillon in Phoenix park led to the
establishment of The Nation, from which sprang what was soon
known as “The Young Ireland Movement,' and which, as Duffy
afterwards wrote, “profoundly influenced the mind of his own
generation and made a permanent change in the opinion of the
nation. '
At first, Davis, who was joint editor of The Nation, with Duffy,
was opposed to the introduction of verse into this journal. After-
wards, however, he recognised how readily his countrymen would
respond to this kind of appeal; and, in the third and sixth numbers
of the paper, respectively, there appeared two of his finest political
lyrics My Grave and his Lament for Owen Roe O'Neill. There-
after, he wrote much verse in The Nation, little of it, however,
deserving the name of poetry. Nor was this surprising. He had
not time to polish his lines ; besides, he wrote for “the enlighten-
ment and regeneration of the people,' and his verse, therefore,
tended to become didactic. Yet, in his few leisure hours, when
he could carefully think out and finish a poem, or when he was
under the inspiration of an ardent personal patriotism, he was a
true poet—as in bis Boatman of Kinsale, O the Marriage, the
Marriage and his historical ballad The Sack of Baltimore. But
Davis will further be remembered by his essays. Gavan Duffy, also,
broke into spirited, unaffected verse in The Nation : witness his
>


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318
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
Lay Sermon, The Irish Chief, Innishowen and The Patriots
Bride.
But there were two other constant contributors to The
Nation who excelled both him and Davis in poetic craft-Denis
Florence MacCarthy and Thomas D'Arcy MºGee. One of
MacCarthy's finest poems is in honour of the clan MacCaura, of
which he came, and his lyrics The Pillar Towers of Ireland and
Waiting for the May have become popular—the first, deservedly
so; the latter, in spite of its somewhat sickly cast of thought. His
translations of Calderon's dramas are accepted as standard works
of the kind ; while his Shelley's Early Life from original sources
is interesting as showing what that poet's efforts were for the
amelioration of the government of Ireland.
Thomas D'Arcy MºGee was the most considerable of The
Nation poets. He visited America at the age of seventeen, and,
two years later, became editor of The Boston Pilot, but, meanwhile,
the echo of a brilliant speech made by him reached O'Connell
across the Atlantic, and led to the offer of a post on The Freeman's
Journal, which he accepted, but, afterwards, abandoned in favour
of more congenial work, under Duffy, in The Nation. There is
a mystical splendour about his most remarkable poem The Celts,
contributed to its pages, and his patriotic poems I left two loves
on a distant strand, My Irish Wife and Home Thoughts deserve
remembrance as does The Sea-divided Gaels, which might serve
as a pan-Celtic anthem. His career was remarkable. Concerned
in the Irish rebellion of '48, and with a price set on his head, he
again found a home in the United States, started the New York
Nation, and, afterwards, at Boston, The American Celt. Meanwhile,
his political views underwent much modification. He passed into
Canada, entered the Canadian parliament and so distinguished
himself there that he became Canadian minister of agriculture.
But he so completely abandoned his revolutionary, in favour of
constitutional, views on the subject of Irish grievances that he
incurred the bitter hostility of the Fenians, and, on denouncing
their agitation, was assassinated.
Richard D'Alton Williams, author of The Munster War Song,
lady Wilde (“Speranza '), who wrote remarkable rhetorical verses
upon the Irish potato famine, and John Kells Ingram, author
of the immortal Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight? , who ended
his life as vice-provost of Trinity college, Dublin, are other poets
to be had in remembrance.
Meanwhile, Davis had died at a tragically early age, and Duffy,
after carrying on The Nation till its suppression on political


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IX]
Sir Samuel Ferguson
319
grounds and reviving it again, when he narrowly escaped trans-
portation for life on a charge of treason, sought and found a new
field for his indomitable energies in Australia. Here he rose to be
premier of Victoria, was knighted and returned to this country to
found the Irish literary societies of London and Dublin, and to
edit The New Irish Library, thus taking a prominent part in
what is now known as the Irish literary renascence.
Sheil possessed remarkable literary as well as oratorical gifts 1.
He wrote half-a-dozen tragedies, two of which, The Apostate and
Evadne or the Statue, were produced with marked success at
Covent garden, Eliza O'Neill, Kemble and Macready being included
in the cast of the first of these plays. He also wrote, for The New
Monthly Magazine, Sketches of the Irish Bar, in conjunction
with W. H. Curran. These became popular and were afterwards
republished. John Philpot Curran, the orator, was a witty and
graceful writer of verse, and his Deserter's Meditation, and Cushla
ma Chree have caught the Irish popular fancy and are still often
sung and recited. Samuel, afterwards Sir Samuel, Ferguson, came
into notice as a poet by the appearance of his Forging of the
Anchor contributed to Blackwood when he was but twenty-one,
in May 1832; a little later, The Return of Claneboy, a prose
romance which also appeared in Maga, may be regarded, to quote
himself, as the first indication of my ambition to raise the native
elements of Irish history to a dignified level. ' 'This ambition,' he
adds, ‘I think may be taken as the key to almost all the literary
work of my subsequent life. ' But, while casting about for nobler
themes to work upon than were to be found in Irish bardic and
peasant poems, finely rendered by him into English verse in the
pages of The Dublin University Magazine, he wrote his elegy
Thomas Davis, 1845, a poignant expression of his grief at the
death of the famous young nationalist leader. This poem was
not included in his published works, and appeared for the first
time in Sir Samuel Ferguson in the Ireland of his day, a
biography of her husband, by lady Ferguson, born Mary Guinness,
who had previously written an interesting Story of Ireland
before the English Conquest, finely illustrated by passages from
Sir Samuel's heroic poems.
The elegy on Davis certainly shows Ferguson at his highest as
a lyric poet, and is rightly described by Gavan Duffy as the most
Celtic in structure and spirit, of all the poetical tributes to the lost
leader. ' Ferguson was held back from his higher literary work
1 See, ante, chap. II.
a
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320 Anglo-Irish Literature
[ch.
8
6
by the exigencies of the Irish potato famine and expressed his
feelings at its mismanagement in verse full of bitter invective; but
he lived to turn his fine satiric gift against the successors of the
Young Ireland poets and patriots, with whom he had sympathised,
when he found them descending to what he characterised as 'a
sordid social war of classes carried on by the vilest methods. In
his satiric poems At the Polo Ground, he analyses, in Browning's
manner, Carey's frame of mind before giving the fatal signal to the
assassins of Burke and lord Frederick Cavendish ; and, in his
Dublin eclogue In Carey's Footsteps, and in The Curse of the Joyces,
he unsparingly exposes the cruelties of the Boycotting system. In
1864 appeared Lays of the Western Gael, containing a series of
Irish ballads full of much finer work than he had yet achieved. Of
these, The Tain Quest is, perhaps, the noblest effort ; but the mag-
nificently savage lay The Welshmen of Tirawley is the most striking.
In 1872 appeared Congal, a splendid story of the last heroic stand
by Celtic paganism against the Irish champions of the Cross, in
which the terrible shapes of Celtic superstition, the Giant Walker'
and the Washer of the Ford,' loom monstrously before us, and
in which the contending hosts at Moyra are marshalled with
fine realism. But Ferguson's genius was to break into even
finer flower at the last, and, in Deirdre and Conary, published
in his final volume of 1880, he reaches his fullest height as a poet.
Ferguson's tendency to act, at times, as a commentator on his
own work and to present it at other times in a too ponderously
Latinised form, as well as the careless, not to say bluff, disregard for
verbal delicacies into which, now and then, he lapses, are the only
habits to which exception can be taken in his technique. For
his method is uniformly manly, and his occasional periods of
inspiration sweep minor critical objections before them, as the blast
from his Mananan's mantle swept the chieftain and his hound
into the valley, like leaves before the wind.
Gerald Griffin, who has caught much of the quality of Oliver
Goldsmith's style, though his work is more consciously Irish, stands
midway between Anglo-Irish and Irish-Irish writers. He was
the author of The Collegians, perhaps the best of Irish novels
written in the nineteenth century. He also wrote a successful play,
Gisippus, and some charming ballads. He had a quiet sense of
humour, and carried this into his novels and Irish stories, and his
musical ear and deft use of unusual metres give him an enduring
place among our lyrical writers. He has a leaning towards Gaelic
words, and introduces them freely into the refrains to his songs :


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IX]
National Songs
321
but he neither attempts the Hiberno-English vernacular cultivated
by Lover, nor the form of Gaelic-English adopted by Walsh
and Ferguson, and, while his milieu is essentially, though not
obtrusively, Irish, his phraseology is distinctly English, or, at
any rate, Anglo-Irish.
William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh and sometime
professor of poetry at Oxford, deals very beautifully with Irish
scenery in many of his poems, and writes with delicate spirituality;
but his wife, Cecil Frances Alexander, born Humphreys, had a more
Irish heart with a wider range of sympathy, and the pulse beats
as quickly to her Siege of Derry as it does to 'Charlotte Eliza-
beth's' The Maiden City. Her hymns and sacred poems, including
The Burial of Moses, much admired by Tennyson, are household
words, and her less wellknown lyric The Irish Mother's Lament, is
one of the most poignant appeals of the kind ever uttered.
The recent death of T. D. Sullivan, long editor of The Nation
in its latest phase of political existence, removed from the field
of Irish patriotic literature its most distinguished veteran. For,
although he wrote stirring narrative poems entitled The Madness
of King Conchobar and The Siege of Dunboy, the stronghold of
the O'Sullivans of Beara, and shared with Robert Dwyer Joyce the
honour of giving to fine English verse the beautiful early Irish
Story of Blanaid, it was as a writer of patriotic Irish songs and
ballads that he made his special poetical mark. His God Save
Ireland, if but as a makeshift, has become the Irish national
anthem. His much finer Song from the Backwoods is widely
and affectionately known, as is, also, his impetuous rebel ballad
Michael Duyer, and his simple but most pathetic A Soldier's
Wake will not be forgotten.
The Fenian movement, unlike that of the Young Irelanders, was
unassociated with literary effort. Yet it had an organ, The Irish
People, whose staff included men of ability: T. Clarke Luby,
John O'Leary and C. J. Kickham. O'Leary lived to write, in his
old
age, the history of Fenianism in a rambling and disappointing
His sister Ellen had, however, a distinct literary gift.
During her brother's long period of imprisonment and banishment
she lived quietly in Tipperary, waiting the hour of his return and
then made a home for him in Dublin, which became a centre of
Irish literary influence. Robert Dwyer Joyce, the brother of the
historian and archaeologist Patrick Weston Joyce, was another
Fenian. After producing some stirring ballads such as The
Blacksmith of Limerick, he slipped away to the United States
21
manner.
E. L. XIV.
CH. IX.


## p. 322 (#352) ############################################

322
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
and made his mark in Boston, both as a medical man and as the
author of Deirdre and Blanaid, spirited narratives in Irish verse.
John Boyle O'Reilly, after reprieve from execution for having
joined the Fenians though a soldier in the service of the queen,
escaped from imprisonment in Australia on board an American
vessel, and, after a while, became editor of The Boston Pilot, as
MºGee had been before him. He wrote much spirited verse, includ-
ing The Amber Whale in his Songs from the Southern Seas, and
became a leading literary figure in Boston. But, undoubtedly,
Kickham was the Fenian writer who has left the best literary
work behind him. His ballads are touched with simple pathos
and deserve their wide popularity. Of these, The Irish Peasant
Girl is, perhaps, the bestknown. His novel, Knocknagow, has
been well compared in its characteristics to the work of Erckmann-
Chatrian for attention to minute details and homely incident,
and is brimfull of shrewd observation and bright humour; indeed,
it deserves to rank among the best novels descriptive of Irish life.
Sir Jonah Barrington is more properly a historian than a writer
of fiction; but his Personal Sketches of his own times have a
literary quality which makes them worth recording.
Marguerite Power, countess of Blessington, after an unhappy
first union, married the earl of Blessington and lived with him on
the continent. Her two volumes The Idler in Italy and The
Idler in France show the fruit of her foreign experiences
She lost her husband in 1829, and, subsequently, settled at Gore
house, which, for fourteen years, was the resort of many famous
men and women of letters of the day, and, in 1832, her Journal
of Conversations with Lord Byron was produced and became
at once popular. As a novelist and anecdotist, she favourably
impressed one side of the critical world of her day.
Sydney Owenson began life as a governess, and, at the age of
twenty-one, published a novel St Clair or the Heiress of Desmond,
which proved successful enough to enable her to devote herself to
literature. She married Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, after the pub-
lication of The Wild Irish Girl, and, with him, travelled abroad.
Like lady Blessington, she wrote her experiences of life in France
and Italy. In the French volume, she had her husband's assistance,
as, also, in her Book without a Name. Her two volumes of con-
tinental experiences, France and Italy, were bitterly attacked by
Croker in The Quarterly ; but she had as her champions Byron,
who, in a letter to Moore, speaks of her Italy as 'fearless and
2


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IX]
Women Writers
323
excellent on the subject of Italy,' and her friend sergeant Talfourd,
who assisted her to reply to Croker with wit and good temper.
Undoubtedly, she often wrote carelessly, often gushed in the
manner of her time and betrayed conceit in her writings, but, of
her bright ability as a novelist and storyteller, there can be no
doubt, and she has left one vivid Irish lyric behind her, Kate
Kearney, which is still frequently sung to the air to which she
wrote it.
Mary Shackleton, afterwards Mrs Leadbeater, whose quaker
father Richard Shackleton was Burke's schoolmaster, published,
in 1794, her first work, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for
the Improvement of Youth, intended to brighten the literature
to which her young friends were then restricted. She followed
this with a book of poems of quiet charm, and Cottage Dia-
logues of the Irish Peasantry, intended as an appeal on behalf
of that suffering class, and concluded her productivity with The
Annals of Ballitore from 1768-1824, a life-like record of the
doings and sayings, droll and pathetic, of the folk of a quaker village
during periods of peace and amid the scenes of the rebellion
of 1798, which she had herself witnessed. This work, with a
memoir of the authoress by her niece, Elizabeth Shackleton,
appeared in 1862 under the title The Leadbeater Papers.
An Irish woman writer of exceptional gifts was Anna Murphy! ,
the daughter of D. Brownell Murphy, an eminent Dublin miniature
painter, whose high intelligence had a marked influence upon her
subsequent career. She acted as governess in the family of the
marquis of Winchester, and, subsequently, in that of lord Hatherton,
with whom she travelled in Italy. It was during this period that
The Diary of an Ennuyée was written ; but it was not published
till after her marriage with Robert Jameson, a barrister who
became successively a puisne judge in the West Indies and in
Canada. This charming book became deservedly popular, as did
her fresh and fanciful Winter Stories and Summer Rambles in
Canada, into which country she had passed with her husband.
She also wrote many other works of different kinds, those
on art exhibiting much antiquarian knowledge and delicate
taste.
Somewhat wanting in constructive skill, but with a gift of
good-humoured cynicism, Marmion W. Savage belongs to the
novelists of the school of Charles Kingsley. Passing from an
official position in Dublin to journalistic duties in London, and
"See, ante, chap. III.
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## p. 324 (#354) ############################################

324
[Ch.
Anglo-Irish Literature
becoming editor of The Examiner, he found leisure to write a
series of novels, two of which, The Bachelor of The Albany
and Reuben Medlicott, became popular in this country and in
the United States, where they were reprinted. But his Falcon
Family, a satire on the leaders of the Young Ireland party, is the
best known and ablest of his stories, and if, as now conceded, some
of his sarcastic sketches of these men were overdrawn, they are, at
any rate, extremely amusing.
Julia Kavanagh was the daughter of Morgan Kavanagh, author
of writings on the source and science of language. Long residence
in France during girlhood enabled her to describe French life and
character with a fine faithfulness which have secured her tales and
a
novels much acceptance. Later, she visited Italy, the result being
A Summer and Winter in the Two Sicilies. Then followed her
successful French Women of Letters. Of her French tales, it
has been well said that they are exquisitely true to life, delicate in
colour, simple and refined in style and pure in tone, and, among
them, Natalie may well be said to be one of the best French
stories written by a British hand.
Annie Keary, daughter of an Irish clergyman holding a living
in Bath, where she was born, wrote a series of stories and novels
of which her Castle Daly, published in Macmillan's Magazine, and
A Doubting Heart, which did not appear till after her death,
are the most remarkable. But she was also authoress of A York
and Lancaster Rose, and, in collaboration with her sister, of a
Scandinavian story, The Heroes of Asgard. She was a singularly
unaffected writer, who knew her Irish atmosphere well, and who,
therefore, could give full effect to its sudden changes from bright-
ness to gloom, from storm to calm.
Emily Lawless, daughter of lord Cloncurry, was attracted
into the open-air life of Ireland by her taste for natural history
and, later, she was drawn by her sympathy with the country folk of
the west to study Irish history in its relation to them, with a result
shown most profoundly in her poems and works of prose fiction.
Ireland had been graven on her very soul. For, though there
is plenty of alternating Irish shower and sunshine in Hurrish
and Grania, and notes of exultation occasionally leap forth from
her With the Wild Geese, yet, no one can read through her first
two novels or, indeed, many pages of With Essex in Ireland,
without that painful perplexity which must haunt all who attempt
candidly to face the eternal riddle presented by that distressful
country to all students of its history.
>
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IX
]
Women Novelists
325
Finally, of recent women novelists, mention must be made of
Charlotte O'Conor Eccles, for her Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore
and A Matrimonial Lottery, which achieved popularity by their
droll situations and exuberant fun; but her Aliens of the West
contained work of much finer quality. She takes us behind the
shutters of Irish country shop life in a most convincing manner,
and the characters drawn from her Toomevara are true to type.
The disillusionment of Molly Devine, 'The Voteen,' with her
commonplace, not to say vulgar, home surroundings, on her
return from the convent school, with its superior refinements;
her refusal to marry so-called eligible, but, to her, repulsive,
suitors, encouraged by her mother and stepfather, and her final
resolve to become a nun, in order to escape farther persecution
of the kind, is told with convincing poignancy, while a variant
of this theme is treated with even more power and pathos in
Tom Connolly's Daughter.
6
a
John D'Alton was a principal contributor to Hardiman's Irish
Minstrelsy, and, in 1814, published Dermid or Erin in the days of
Boroimha, a metrical romance in twelve cantos, written in smooth
verse and showing a real knowledge of the times described, for
he was an antiquary of note. In addition, he wrote a series of
historical works of value, including The Annals of Boyle and The
History of County Dublin.
John Mitchel is a very significant figure in Anglo-Irish litera-
ture. The son of a nonconformist minister who had been a United
Irishman in 1798, Mitchel had the rebel in his blood. He was
a student of Trinity college, Dublin, and, afterwards, more or less
of a constitutionalist as writer and contributor to The Nation (of
which, at a later date, he became editor); and he was especially
subdued in tone in his preface to the Life of Hugh O'Neill,
earl of Tyrone, a work included in Gavan Duffy's first Irish
Library. But he drew apart from the moderate section of
repealers headed by Daniel O'Connell, and started The United
Irishman with the avowed object of fanning into rebellion
what he described as 'the holy hatred of English Rule. ' His
utterances in this organ finally became so dangerously violent
that it was suppressed, and he was prosecuted and found guilty of
treason felony. He was sentenced to undergo fourteen years
transportation, but, five years afterwards, escaped from Tasmania,
and, after many adventures, graphically described in his Jail
Journal, reached California, and, later, settled in New York.


## p. 326 (#356) ############################################

326
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
During the American civil war, in which he espoused the cause of
the south, and gave the lives of his two sons to that cause, he con-
ducted The Richmond Examiner. In 1867, he started The Irish
Citizen in New York and, in 1875, he was elected member for
Tipperary. Mitchel was a writer who showed undoubted genius
when the fit was on him ; but much of his work, in his History of
Ireland, is slovenly and not a little even of the Jail Journal is
rhetorical and long drawn out.
William McCullagh Torrens, eldest son of James McCullagh,
assumed his maternal name for family reasons. A successful
practitioner at the Irish, then at the English, bar, he entered
parliament for Finsbury, and successfully promoted measures for
the amelioration of the lower classes. He wrote biographies of
Sheil, Sir James Graham and lord Melbourne, and several im-
portant works on political science. He had a distinct literary
gift, of which his interesting and brightly written Life of
Melbourne is a typical example.
John Francis Waller, a Trinity college, Dublin, man, and
long a contributor to, and afterwards editor of, The Dublin
University Magazine, was best known in his day by his poems,
appearing under the nom-de-plume Jonathan Freke Slingsby.
Not a few of these lyrics, such as The Song of the Glass, The
Spinning Wheel Song, Kitty Neil, have become popular by their
grace and sparkle, and, occasionally, he succeeds in more serious
verse. Waller also wrote many of the articles in The Imperial
Dictionary of Universal Biography, and, generally, superintended
the production of this work.
John Francis O'Donnell drifted from the south of Ireland to
London, where, for a while, he was editor of The Tablet, and his
verse contributions were welcomed by Dickens to his magazines.
Many of his poems were also published in Chambers's Journal.
He wrote in The Lamp a novel entitled Agents and Evictions.
He will, however, be best remembered by his lyrics and, more
especially, by A Spinning Song, which has found its way into most
recent anthologies of Irish verse.
Francis Davis, 'the Belfast man,' as he is called, was the son of
a soldier of Ballincollig, county Cork; but, to his mother, a woman
of good Scottish Highland family and fine intellectual and moral
gifts, he owed the influences which made him a man of mark at
the times of catholic emancipation, and later. He lost her,
however, when but a boy, and his father then consigned him to the
care of a rich but miserly relative, for whom he worked at the


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IX
:
]
Later Writers
327
loom, suffering much hard treatment at his hands. On his father's
death, he escaped from this drudgery to Belfast, where
As the weaver plied his shuttle,
Wove he, too, the mystio rhyme.
Here, he became the Ebenezer Elliott of the northern popular
movement About 1830, he travelled through England and
Scotland, earning his living by his trade, and writing poems all the
while, and, at the same time, studying French, Latin, Greek and
Gaelic. Later, he left the loom for the editorial chair of The
Belfastman's Journal, and then became a contributor to many
periodicals. There is a distinctly Scottish strain in Davis's poems,
probably due to his mother's blood and early influences upon
him. His political verse is pointed and spirited, but inferior to his
countryside songs, which are simple and picturesque and full of
unaffected feeling, though they often need the pruning hook.
Bartholomew Simmons, who held an appointment in the
London excise office till his death in 1850, was a popular con-
tributor to leading English magazines. Of his Napoleon's last
look, Maga's critic thus wrote:
Simmons, on the theme of Napoleon, excels all our great poets. Byron's
lines on that subject are bad; Scott's poor, Wordsworth's weak; Lockhart
and Simmons may be bracketted as equal; theirs are good, rich and
strong.
This tribute cannot be said to be undeserved, though Simmons's
verses just miss perfection by their somewhat unrestrained rhetoric,
and his fine ballad, The Flight to Cyprus, has too much of Irish
exultation about it.
Miss Casey (E. Owens Blackburne) became blind at eleven
years of age, and remained so for many years. After a hard struggle
,
to secure a literary position in London, she succeeded as a novelist
and writer of short stories. A collection of the latter under the
title A bunch of Shamrocks was published in 1879, and shows her
knowledge of Irish peasant life and speech.
Richard Dowling passed from a business into a literary career.
He was on the staff of The Nation, became editor of Zozimus,
the Dublin Punch, and, afterwards, was the mainstay of Ireland's
Eye, another Irish humorous periodical, and, yet again, started
Yorick, a London comic paper. But he did not find himself, from
the literary point of view, till he wrote and published The Mystery
of Killard, the central idea of which is the abnormal nature of a
deafmute, which leads him to hate his own child because that
child can hear and speak. ' The originality of this theme, and the


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328
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
weird skill with which it was worked out, established his reputa-
tion as a novelist; but, perhaps, his best claim to literary reputation
is his volume of essays, On Babies and Ladders, which is full of
quaint fancies.
Lewis Wingfield, as actor, artist, surgeon, war-correspondent
and novelist had a curiously varied career, as may well be believed.
When the Franco-German war of 1870 broke out, he served as
surgeon on the German side, and was present at the battles of
Woerth and Wissembourg, but returned to Paris in time for the
first siege, and was then employed both as one of the surgeons
in the American hospital, and as correspondent of The Daily
Telegraph. Meanwhile, he was not idle with his brush, and one
of his pictures was bought by the French government. In
1876, he entered on his career of novel-writing. His first story
was Slippery Ground; his second, Lady Grizel, dealing with the
history of George III, attracted men's attention. His third effort,
My Lords of Strogue, describing Irish affairs at the time of the
union, was still more successful. Believing that books on prison
life published by ex-convicts are full of misrepresentations and
exaggerations, he obtained special facilities from the Home office
for studying the inside of prisons, and, as a result, published a
novel suggested by these experiences.
A group of friends, all of whom achieved success as writers on
antiquarian subjects, were the earl of Dunraven, James Henthorn
Todd, author of a Life of St Patrick, Sir John Gilbert, author of
The History of Dublin, William Stokes and his daughter Margaret
Stokes, authors respectively of The Life of George Petrie and
Early Christian Architecture in Ireland, bishops Graves and
Reeves, and, most noted and versatile of all, Patrick Weston Joyce.
Sixty-two years ago he contributed Irish folk-songs, and notes on
Irish dances to Petrie's Ancient Music of Ireland. In his spare
hours, when an active teacher, professor and training college
principal, he produced what have since become standard works
on Irish school method and Irish names of places. Turning his
attention to Irish history, he wrote several works on the subject;
the most important of which is his Social History of Ireland,
two volumes full of valuable learning, yet written with a direct
simplicity that at once engages the attention of the reader. His
old Celtic Romances, a series of free translations from old Irish
folk-tales, moreover, as has been said above, inspired Tennyson's
Voyage of Maeldune.
Archbishop McHale, next to O'Connell, exercised a more


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] IX
Russell and Synge
329
prolonged influence on the Roman catholic population of his
country than any Irishman of his time. Appointed professor of
dogmatic theology at Maynooth, he wrote a series of letters chiefly
concerned with controversial questions and catholic emancipation,
under the signature Hierophilus. His letters showed great vigour
of style and this, coupled with the energy of his character and
eloquence gained for him from O'Connell the title "The Lion of the
fold of Judah. ' Appointed archbishop of Tuam, he continued his
controversial letters and preached many sermons of note. He
was also a renowned Irish scholar, and not only translated sixty of
Moore's melodies into that language, but rendered into Gaelic six
books of the Iliad and several portions of the Bible.
Matthew Russell, S. J. , was the younger son of Arthur Russell
of Killowen, and brother of Charles, lord Russell of Killowen
and lord chief justice of England. A devoted Jesuit priest, father
Russell yet found time to gather round him at the office of his
Irish Monthly, which he conducted for more than a generation
with the utmost zeal and judgment, all the ablest of the young
Irish writers of his day. There, Oscar Wilde and Rosa Mulholland
and that charming but too short-lived poetess Rose Kavanagh and,
indeed, all the rising story-writers and poets and poetesses of
the Ireland of his day enjoyed his wise friendship and literary
advice. But the little periodical' as one of the women contri-
butors to it, now become famous, writes 'has real distinction
apart from the names, distinguished and to be distinguished
that are ever amongst its contributors. ' Much of this was due
to the work of its editor, who was a writer of both graceful and
moving verse and prose, touched with fine spirituality.
Descended, it is understood, from a court musician dubbed
'Synge' for his vocal talents by Henry VIII, John M. Synge
spent his early manhood in Paris amid art and literary influences
which attracted him to the elemental aspect of the Irish peasant
mind when he returned to his native Wicklow. He did not find
himself or rather he was not found by W. B. Yeats for the Irish
Literary theatre till he was approaching forty years of age and he
died almost as soon as he had become famous. By that time he had
written six remarkable plays, including the brilliant and much
criticised Playboy of the Western World, which, indeed, became a
storm centre of political and literary antagonism between those
who regarded it as an outrage on Irish character and those who
defended it as a justifiable treatment of certain phases of Irish
fundamental passions. Synge's medium of dramatic expression is


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330
[CH, IX
Anglo-Irish Literature
6
an artistic modification of the dialect used by those of the Irish
peasantry who carry Gaelic turns of thought and expression
into their current English speech.
This he uses with convincing skill not only in The Playboy,
the beautiful tragedy entitled The Riders to the Sea, the broad,
bitter, whimsical, wistful Well of the Saints and the brutally
humorous Tinker's Wedding, but, above all, in his single verse
drama, his lovely, fatalistic Deidre of the Sorrows, written when
he knew he was dying of an incurable disease.