Why should not nations be judged thus? Is not a full indulgence of its

natural tendencies essential to a _people's_ greatness? Force the

manners, dress, language, and constitution of Russia, or Italy, or

Norway, or America, and you instantly stunt and distort the whole mind

of either people.

The language, which grows up with a people, is conformed to their

organs, descriptive of their climate, constitution, and manners,

mingled inseparably with their history and their soil, fitted beyond

any other language to express their prevalent thoughts in the most

natural and efficient way.

To impose another language on such a people is to send their history

adrift among the accidents of translation--'tis to tear their identity

from all places--'tis to substitute arbitrary signs for picturesque and

suggestive names--'tis to cut off the entail of feeling, and separate

the people from their forefathers by a deep gulf--'tis to corrupt their

very organs, and abridge their power of expression.

The language of a nation's youth is the only easy and full speech for

its manhood and for its age. And when the language of its cradle goes,

itself craves a tomb.

What business has a Russian for the rippling language of Italy or

India? How could a Greek distort his organs and his soul to speak Dutch

upon the sides of the Hymettus, or the beach of Salamis, or on the

waste where once was Sparta? And is it befitting the fiery,

delicate-organed Celt to abandon his beautiful tongue, docile and

spirited as an Arab, "sweet as music, strong as the wave"--is it

befitting in him to abandon this wild, liquid speech for the mongrel of

a hundred breeds called English, which, powerful though it be, creaks

and bangs about the Celt who tries to use it?

We lately met a glorious thought in the "Triads of Mochmed," printed in

one of the Welsh codes by the Record Commission: "There are three

things without which there is no country--common language, common

judicature, and co-tillage land--for without these a country cannot

support itself in peace and social union."

A people without a language of its own is only half a nation. A nation

should guard its language more than its territories--'tis a surer

barrier, and more important frontier, than fortress or river.

And in good times it has ever been thought so. Who had dared to propose

the adoption of Persian or Egyptian in Greece--how had Pericles

thundered at the barbarian? How had Cato scourged from the forum him

who would have given the Attic or Gallic speech to men of Rome? How

proudly and how nobly Germany stopped "the incipient creeping" progress

of French! And no sooner had she succeeded than her genius, which had

tossed in a hot trance, sprung up fresh and triumphant.

Had Pyrrhus quelled Italy, or Xerxes subdued Greece for a time long

enough to impose new languages, where had been the literature which

gives a pedigree to human genius? Even liberty recovered had been

sickly and insecure without the language with which it had hunted in

the woods, worshipped at the fruit-strewn altar, debated on the

council-hill, and shouted in the battle-charge.

There is a fine song of the Fusians, which describes

"Language linked to liberty."

To lose your native tongue, and learn that of an alien, is the worst

badge of conquest--it is the chain on the soul. To have lost entirely

the national language is death; the fetter has worn through. So long as

the Saxon held to his German speech he could hope to resume his land

from the Norman; now, if he is to be free and locally governed, he must

build himself a new home. There is hope for Scotland--strong hope for

Wales--sure hope for Hungary. The speech of the alien is not universal

in the one; is gallantly held at bay in the other; is nearly expelled

from the third.

How unnatural--how corrupting 'tis for us, three-fourths of whom are of

Celtic blood, to speak a medley of Teutonic dialects! If we add the

Celtic Scots, who came back here from the thirteenth to the seventeenth

centuries, and the Celtic Welsh, who colonised many parts of Wexford

and other Leinster counties, to the Celts who never left Ireland,

probably five-sixths, or more, of us are Celts. What business have we

with the Norman-Sassenagh?

Nor let any doubt these proportions because of the number of English

_names_ in Ireland. With a politic cruelty the English of the Pale

passed an Act (3 Edw. IV., c. 3) compelling every Irishman within

English jurisdiction "to go like to one Englishman in apparel, and

shaving off his beard above the mouth," "and shall take to him an

English sirname of one town, as Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skryne, Corke,

Kinsale; or colour, as White, Blacke, Browne; or art or science, as

Smith or Carpenter; or office, as Cook, Butler; and that he and his

issue shall use this name, under pain of forfeiting his goods yearly."

And just as this Parliament before the Reformation, so did another

after the Reformation. By the 28th Henry VIII., c. 15, the dress and

language of the Irish were insolently described as barbarous by the

minions of that ruffian king, and were utterly forbidden and abolished

under many penalties and incapacities. These laws are still in force;

but whether the Archaeological Society, including Peel and O'Connell,

will be prosecuted seems doubtful.

There was, also, 'tis to be feared, an adoption of English names,

during some periods, from fashion, fear, or meanness. Some of our best

Irish names, too, have been so mangled as to require some scholarship

to identify them. For these and many more reasons the members of the

Celtic race here are immensely greater than at first appears.

But this is not all; for even the Saxon and Norman colonists,

notwithstanding these laws, melted down into the Irish, and adopted all

their ways and language. For centuries upon centuries Irish was spoken

by men of all bloods in Ireland, and English was unknown, save to a few

citizens and nobles of the Pale. 'Tis only within a very late period

that the majority of the people learned English.

But, it will be asked, how can the language be restored now?

We shall answer this partly by saying that, through the labours of the

Archaeological and many lesser societies, it _is_ being revived rapidly.

We shall consider this question of the possibility of reviving it more

at length some other day.

Nothing can make us believe that it is natural or honourable for the

Irish to speak the speech of the alien, the invader, the Sassenagh

tyrant, and to abandon the language of our kings and heroes. What! give

up the tongue of Ollamh Fodhla and Brian Boru, the tongue of M'Carty,

and the O'Nials, the tongue of Sarsfield's, Curran's, Mathew's, and

O'Connell's boyhood, for that of Strafford and Poynings, Sussex, Kirk,

and Cromwell!

No! oh, no! the "brighter days shall surely come," and the green flag

shall wave on our towers, and the sweet old language be heard once more

in college, mart, and senate.

But even should the effort to save it as the national language fail, by

the attempt we will rescue its old literature, and hand down to our

descendants proofs that we had a language as fit for love, and war, and

business, and pleasure, as the world ever knew, and that we had not the

spirit and nationality to preserve it!

Had Swift known Irish he would have sowed its seed by the side of that

nationality which he planted, and the close of the last century would

have seen the one as flourishing as the other. Had Ireland used Irish

in 1782, would it not have impeded England's re-conquest of us? But

'tis not yet too late.

For _you_, if the mixed speech called English was laid with

sweetmeats on your child's tongue, English is the best speech of

manhood. And yet, rather, in that case you are unfortunate. The hills,

and lakes, and rivers, the forts and castles, the churches and

parishes, the baronies and counties around you, have all Irish

names--names which describe the nature of the scenery or ground, the

name of founder, or chief, or priest, or the leading fact in the

history of the place. To you these are names hard to pronounce, and

without meaning.

And yet it were well for you to know them. That knowledge would be a

topography, and a history, and romance, walking by your side, and

helping your discourse. Meath tells it flatness, Clonmel the abundant

riches of its valley, Fermanagh is the land of the Lakes, Tyrone the

country of Owen, Kilkenny the Church of St. Canice, Dunmore the great

fort, Athenry the Ford of the Kings, Dunleary the Fort of O'Leary; and

the Phoenix Park, instead of taking its name from a fable, recognises

as christener the "sweet water" which yet springs near the east gate.[43]

All the names of our airs and songs are Irish, and we every day are as

puzzled and ingeniously wrong about them as the man who, when asked for

the air, "I am asleep, and don't waken me," called it "Tommy M'Cullagh

made boots for me."

The bulk of our history and poetry are written in Irish, and shall we,

who learn Italian, and Latin, and Greek, to read Dante, Livy, and Homer

in the original--shall we be content with ignorance or a translation of

Irish?

The want of modern scientific words in Irish is undeniable, and

doubtless we should adopt the existing names into our language. The

Germans have done the same thing, and no one calls German mongrel on

that account. Most of these names are clumsy and extravagant; and are

almost all derived from Greek or Latin, and cut as foreign a figure in

French and English as they would in Irish. Once Irish was recognised as

a language to be learned as much as French or Italian, our dictionaries

would fill up and our vocabularies ramify, to suit all the wants of

life and conversation.

These objections are ingenious refinements, however, rarely thought of

till after the other and great objection has been answered.

The usual objection to attempting the revival of Irish is, that it

could not succeed.

If an attempt were made to introduce Irish, either through the national

schools, or the courts of law, into the eastern side of the island, it

would certainly fail, and the reaction might extinguish it altogether.

But no one contemplates this save as a dream of what may happen a

hundred years hence. It is quite another thing to say, as we do, that

the Irish language should be cherished, taught, and esteemed, and that

it can be preserved and gradually extended.

What we seek is, that the people of the upper classes should have their

children taught the language which explains our names of persons or

places, our older history, and our music, and which is spoken in the

majority of our counties, rather than Italian, German, or French. It

would be more useful in life, more serviceable to the taste and genius

of young people, and a more flexible accomplishment for an Irish man or

woman to speak, sign, and write Irish than French.

At present the middle classes think it a sign of vulgarity to speak

Irish--the children are everywhere taught English, and English alone in

schools--and, what is worse, they are urged by rewards and punishments

to speak it at home, for English is the language of their masters. Now,

we think the example and exertions of the upper classes would be

sufficient to set the opposite and better fashion of preferring Irish;

and, even as a matter of taste, we think them bound to do so. And we

ask it of the pride, the patriotism, and the hearts of our farmers and

shopkeepers, will they try to drive out of their children's minds the

native language of almost every great man we had, from Brian Boru to

O'Connell--will they meanly sacrifice the language which names their

hills, and towns, and music, to the tongue of the stranger?

About half the people west of a line drawn from Derry to Waterford

speak Irish habitually, and in some of the mountain tracts east of that

line it is still common. Simply requiring the teachers of the national

schools in these Irish-speaking districts to know Irish, and supplying

them with Irish translations of the school books, would guard the

language where it now exists, and prevent it from being swept away by

the English tongue, as the Red Americans have been by the English race

from New York to New Orleans.

The example of the upper classes would extend and develop a modern

Irish literature, and the hearty support they have given to the

Archaeological Society makes us hope that they will have sense and

spirit to do so.

But the establishment of a newspaper partly or wholly Irish would be

the most rapid and sure way of serving the language. The Irish-speaking

man would find, in his native tongue, the political news and general

information he has now to seek in English; and the English-speaking

man, having Irish frequently before him in so attractive a form, would

be tempted to learn its characters, and, by-and-by, its meaning.

These newspapers in many languages are now to be found everywhere but

here. In South America many of these papers are Spanish and English, or

French; in North America, French and English; in Northern Italy, German

and Italian; in Denmark and Holland, German is used in addition to the

native tongue; in Alsace and Switzerland, French and German; in Poland,

German, French, and Sclavonic; in Turkey, French and Turkish; in

Hungary, Magyar, Sclavonic, and German; and the little Canton of Grison

uses three languages in its press. With the exception of Hungary, the

secondary language is, in all cases, spoken by fewer persons than the

Irish-speaking people of Ireland, and while they everywhere tolerate

and use one language as a medium of commerce, they cherish the other as

the vehicle of history, the wings of song, the soil of their genius,

and a mark and guard of nationality.

---------------------------------------------------------------

[43] 'Bright water' is the true rendering: Could Davis have been

thinking of _binn uisge_, and supposing that _binn_ meant sweet in

taste as well as in sound?--[Ed.]

INSTITUTIONS OF DUBLIN.

Judged by the _Directory_, Dublin is nobly supplied with institutions

for the promotion of Literature, Science, and Art; and, judged by its

men, there is mind enough here to make these institutions prosper, and

instruct and raise the country. Yet their performances are far short of

these promises, and the causes for ill-success are easily found. We

believe these causes could be almost as easily removed.

In the first place, we have too many of these institutions. Stingy

grants from Government and the general poverty of the people render

economy a matter of the first consequence; yet we find these societies

maintaining a number of separate establishments, at a great expense of

rent and salaries.

The consequence, of course, is that none of them flourish as they

ought--museums, meetings, lectures, libraries, and exhibitions are all

frittered away, and nothing is done so well as it might be. Moreover,

from the want of any arrangement and order, the same men are dragged

from one society to another--few men do much, because all are forced to

attempt so many things.

But 'tis better to examine this in detail, and in doing so we may as

well give some leading facts as to the chief of these bodies. Take, for

example, as a beginning, the

INSTITUTIONS FOR THE PROMOTION OF FINE ARTS.

And first there is the Hibernian Academy. It was founded in 1823,

received a present of its house in Abbey Street, and some books and

casts, from Francis Johnston, a Dublin architect, and has the miserable

income of L300 a year from the Treasury. It has a drawing-school, with

a few casts, no pictures, bad accommodation, and professors whose pay

is nearly nominal.

It undoubtedly has some men of great ability and attainments, and some

who have neither; but what can be done without funds, statues, or

pictures? To aggravate its difficulties, the Dublin Society has another

art school, still worse off as to casts, and equally deficient in

pictures. As a place of instruction in the designing of patterns for

manufactures and the like, the Dublin Society school has worked well;

and many of the best-paid controllers of design in the English

manufactories were educated there; but as a school of fine arts it does

little; and no wonder. Another branch of the Hibernian Academy's

operations is its annual exhibition of pictures. These exhibitions

attract crowds who would never otherwise see a painting, promote

thought on art, and procure patronage for artists. In this, too, the

Hibernian Academy has recently found a rival in the Society of Irish

Artists, established in 1842, which has an annual exhibition in College

Street, and pays the expenses of the exhibition out of the admission

fees, as does the Hibernian Academy. We are not attaching blame to the

Society of Irish Artists in noticing the fact of its rivalry.

There are three other bodies devoted to the encouragement of art. One

of these is the Art Union, founded in 1840, and maintained entirely by

subscriptions to its lottery. It distributes fine engravings from Irish

pictures among all its members, and pictures and statues, bought in the

exhibitions of the Hibernian Academy, and of the Society of Irish

Artists, among its prize-holders; and it gives premiums for the works

of native or resident artists. Its operation is as a patron of art;

and, in order to get funds for this purpose, and also to secure

superior works and a higher competition, it extends its purchases to

the best foreign works exhibited here. It has no collection, and has

merely an office in College Street--in fact, its best permanent

possession is its unwearied secretary. The Society of Ancient Art was

established last year for the formation of a public gallery of casts

from classical and mediaeval statues, and ultimately for purposes of

direct teaching by lectures, etc. It obtained some funds by

subscription; but under the expectation, 'tis said, of a public grant,

has done nothing. Lastly, there is the "Institute of Irish Architects,"

founded in 1839 "for the general advancement of civil architecture, for

promoting and facilitating the acquirement of a knowledge of the

various arts and sciences connected therewith, for the formation of a

library and museum," etc.

To us it is very plain that here are too many institutions, and that

the efficiency of all suffers materially from their want of connection

and arrangement. Some, at least, might be amalgamated with great

advantage, or rather all, except the Art Union. That is only a club of

purchasers, and any attempt materially to change its nature would peril

its funds. Some such plan as the following would accomplish all that is

vainly attempted now. Let the Government be pressed to give L2,000 a

year, if the public supply L1,000 a year. Let this income go to a new

Hibernian Academy--the present Hibernian Academy, Artists' Society,

Society of Ancient Art, the Art Schools of the Dublin Society, and the

Institute of Irish Architects being merged in it. This merger could be

easily secured through the inducements secured by the charter, and by

accommodation, salaries, and utility of the new body. The present

property of these bodies, with some moderate grant, would suffice for

the purchase of a space of ground ample for the schools, museums,

library, lecture-room, and yards of such an institution.

At the head of it should be a small body governing and accounting for

its finances, but _no person_ should be a governing member of more than

one of its sections. These sections should be for Statuary, Painting,

Architecture, and Design Drawing. Each of these sections should have

its own Gallery and its own Practice Rooms; but one Library and one

public Lecture Room would suffice for the entire. The architectural

section would also need some open space for its experiments and its

larger specimens. A present of copies of the British Museum casts,

along with the fund of the Ancient Art Society, would originate a Cast

Gallery, and a few good pictures could be bought as a commencement of a

National Gallery of Painting, leaving the economy of the managers and

the liberality of the public gradually to fill up. Collections of

native works in canvas and marble, and architectural models, could be

soon and cheaply procured. The Art Library of the Dublin Society added

to that of the Hibernian Academy would need few additions to make it

sufficient for the new body.

Such an Institute ought not to employ any but the best teachers and

lecturers. It should encourage proficiency by rewards that would

instruct the proficient; it should apply itself to cataloguing,

preserving, and making known all the works of art in the country; give

prizes for artistical works; publish its lectures and transactions;

issue engravings of the most instructive works of art; and hold evening

meetings, to which ladies would be admitted. It should allow at least

L400 a year for the support of free pupils. In connection with its

drawing and modelling schools should be a professorship of anatomy, or,

what were better, some arrangement might be made with the College of

Surgeons, or some such body, for courses of instruction for its pupils.

The training for its pupils in sculpture, painting, and design should

include the study of ancient and modern costumes, zoology, and of

vegetable and geological forms. For this purpose books should not be so

much relied on as lectures in gardens, museums, and during student

excursions. Of course the architectural pupils should be required to

answer at a preliminary examination in mathematics, and should receive

special instruction in the building materials, action of climate, etc.,

in Ireland.

Were the buildings standing, and the society chartered judiciously, the

sum we have mentioned would be sufficient. Four professors at from L200

to L300 a year each, four assistants at L100 a year each, a librarian

at the same rate, with payments for extra instruction in anatomy, etc.,

etc., and for porters, premiums, and so forth, would not exceed L2,000

a year. So that if L400 were expended on free pupils, there would

remain L600 a year for the purchase of works for the galleries.

At present there is much waste of money, great annoyance and loss of

time to the supporters of these institutions, and marvellously little

benefit to art. The plan we have proposed would be economical both of

time and money; but, what is of more worth, it would give us, what we

have not now, a National Gallery of Statuary and Painting--good

Exhibition Rooms for works of art--business-like Lecturers and

Lectures--great public excitement about art--and, finally, a great

National Academy.

If anyone has a better plan, let him say it; we have told ours. At all

events, some great change is needed, and there can be no fitter time

than this for it.

In any community it is desirable to have Literary Institutions, as well

classified as legal offices, and as free from counteraction; but it is

especially desirable here now. Our literary class is small, and its

duties measureless. The diseased suction of London--the absence of

gentry, offices, and Legislature--the heart-sickness that is on every

thoughtful man without a country--the want of a large, educated, and

therefore book-buying class--and (it must be confessed) the depression

and distrust produced by rash experiments and paltry failure, have left

us with few men for a great work. Probably the great remedy is the

restoration of our Parliament--bringing back, as it would, the

aristocracy and the public offices, giving society and support to

Writers and Artists, and giving them a country's praise to move and a

country's glory to reward them.

But one of the very means of attaining nationality is securing some

portion of that literary force which would gush abundantly from it;

and, therefore, consider it how you will, it is important to increase

and economise the exertions of the literary class in Ireland. Yet the

reverse is done. Institutions are multiplied instead of those being

made efficient which exist; and men talk as proudly of the new

"Teach-'em-everything-in-no-time-Society" as if its natty laws were a

library, its desk a laboratory and a museum, and its members fresh

labourers, when all they have done is to waste the time of persons who

had business, and to delude those who had none, into the belief that

they were doing good. Ephemeral things! which die not without

mischief--they have wasted hours and days of strong men in spinning

sand, and leave depression growing from their tombs.

It is a really useful deed to rescue from dissipation, or from idle

reading, or from mammon-hunting, one strong, passionate man or boy, and

to set him to work investigating, arranging, teaching. It is an honest

task to shame the 'broidered youth from meditation on waistcoats and

the display of polka steps into manly pursuits. It is an angel's

mission (oftenest the work of love) to startle a sleeping and

unconscious genius into the spring and victory of a roused lion. But it

is worse than useless to establish new associations and orders without

well considering first whether the same machinery do not already exist

and rust for want of the very energy and skill which you need too.

There is a bridge in a field near Blarney Castle where water never ran.

It was built "at the expense of the county." These men build their

mills close as houses in a capital, taking no thought for the stream to

turn them.

We have already censured this in some detail with reference to

societies for the promotion of the Fine Arts, and have urged the

formation, out of all these fiddling, clashing bodies, of some one

great institution for the promotion of Painting, Sculpture, and

Architecture, with a Museum, a Library, a Gallery, and Lecturers,

governed by professional minds, great enough to be known and regarded

by the people, and popular and strong enough to secure Government

support.

Similar defects exist everywhere. Take the Dublin Society for example.

Nothing can be more heterogeneous than its objects. We are far from

denying its utility. That utility is immense, the institution is

native, of old standing (it was founded in 1731), national, and, when

it wanted support, our pen was not idle in its behalf.

But we believe its utility greatly diminished by its attempting too

many things, and especially by including objects more fitly belonging

to other institutions; and on the opposite side it is maimed, by the

interference of other bodies, in its natural functions. The Dublin

Society was founded for the promotion of husbandry and other useful

arts. Its labours to serve agriculture have been repeated and

extensive, though not always judicious. It has also endeavoured to

promote manufactures. It has gardens and museums fitter for scientific

than practical instruction, admirable lecturers, a library most

generously opened, a drawing-school of the largest purposes and of

equivocal success, and various minor branches.

The Irish Academy has some of this fault. It endeavours to unite

antiquarianism and abstract science. Its meetings are alternately

entertained with mathematics and history, and its transactions are

equally comprehensive. We yield to none in anxiety for the promotion of

antiquarian studies; we think the public and the government disgraced

by the slight support given to the Academy. We are not a little proud

of the honour and strength given to our country by the science of

MacCullagh, Hamilton, and Lloyd; but we protest against the attempt to

mix the armoury of the ancient Irish, or the Celtic dialects, or the

essay on Round Towers, with trigonometry and the calculus, whether in a

lecture-room or a book.

Let us just set down, as we find them, some of the Literary and

Scientific Institutions. There are the Royal Dublin Society, the Royal

Irish Academy (we wish these royalties were dropped--no one minds

them), the Irish Archaeological Society, the Royal Zoological Society,

the Geological Society, the Dublin Natural History Society, the Dublin

Philosophical Society, the Royal Agricultural Society, etc., etc. Now,

we take it that these bodies might be usefully reduced to three, and if

three moderate government grants were made under conditions rewarding

such a classification, we doubt not it would instantly be made.

In the first place, we would divorce from the Irish Academy the

scientific department, requiring Trinity College to form some voluntary

organisation for the purpose. To this non-collegiate philosophers

should be admitted, and, thus disencumbered, we would devote the

Academy to antiquities and literature--incorporate with it the

Archaeological Society--transfer to it all the antiques (of which it had

not duplicates) in Trinity College, the Dublin Society, etc., and

enlarge its museums and meeting-room. Its section of "polite

literature" has long been a name--it should be made real. There would

be nothing inconvenient or strange in finding in its lecture-rooms or

transactions the antiquities and literature of Ireland, diversified by

general historical, critical, and aesthetical researches.

The Dublin Society would reasonably divide into two sections. One, for

the promotion of husbandry, might be aggrandised by tempting the

Agricultural Society to join it, and should have a permanent museum, an

extensive farm, premiums, shows, publications, and special lecturers.

The second section, for the encouragement of manufactures, should have

its museum, workshops, and experiment ground (the last, perhaps, as the

agricultural farm), and its special lecturers. The library might well

be joint, and managed by a joint committee, having separate funds. The

general lecturers on chemistry and other such subjects might be paid in

common. The drawing school (save that for pattern and machine drawing)

might be transferred to the Art Institution; and the botanic garden and

museum of minerals to a third body we propose.

This third body we would form from a union of the Zoological, the

Geological, the Natural History, and all other such societies, and

endow it with the Botanic and Zoological Gardens--give it rooms for a

general and for a specially Irish museum, and for lecture-rooms in

town, and supply it with a small fund to pay lecturers, who should go

through the provinces.

We are firmly convinced that this re-arrangement of the Institutions of

Dublin is quite practicable, would diminish unproductive expenses,

economise the time, and condense the purposes of our literary,

scientific, and artistical men, and increase enormously the use of the

institutions to the public.

Of course the whole plan will be laughed at as fanciful and improbable;

we think it easy, and we think it will be done.

IRELAND'S PEOPLE, LORDS, GENTRY, COMMONALTY.

When we are considering a country's resources and its fitness for a

peculiar destiny, its people are not to be overlooked. How much they

think, how much they work, what are their passions, as well as their

habits, what are their hopes and what their history, suggest inquiries

as well worth envious investigation as even the inside of a refugee's

letter.

And there is much in Ireland of that character--much that makes her

superior to slavery, and much that renders her inferior to freedom.

Her inhabitants are composed of Irish nobles, Irish gentry, and the

Irish people. Each has an interest in the independence of their

country, each a share in her disgrace. Upon each, too, there devolves a

separate duty in this crisis of her fate. They all have

responsibilities; but the infamy of failing in them is not alike in

all.

The nobles are the highest class. They have most to guard. In every

other country they are the champions of patriotism. They feel there is

no honour for them separate from their fatherland. Its freedom, its

dignity, its integrity, are as their own. They strive for it, legislate

for it, guard it, fight for it. Their names, their titles, their very

pride are of it.

In Ireland they are its disgrace. They were first to sell and would be

last to redeem it. Treachery to it is daubed on many an escutcheon in

its heraldry. It is the only nation where slaves have been ennobled for

contributing to its degradation.

It is a foul thing this--dignity emanating from the throne to gild the

filthy mass of national treason that forms the man's part of many an

Irish lord.

We do not include in this the whole Irish peerage. God forbid. There

are several of them not thus ignoble. Many of them worked, struggled,

sacrificed for Ireland. Many of them were true to her in the darkest

times.

They were her chiefs, her ornaments, her sentinels, her safeguards.

Alas! that they, too, should have shrunk from their position, and left

their duties to humbler, but bolder and better men.

Look at their station in the State. Is it not one of unequivocal shame?

They enjoy the half-mendicant privilege of voting for a representative

of their order, in the House of Lords, some twice or thrice in their

lives. One Irish peer represents about a dozen others of his class, and

thus, in his multiplex capacity, he is admitted into fellowship with

the English nobility. The borrowed plumes, the delegated authority of

so many of his equals, raise him to a half-admitted equality with an

English nobleman. And, although thus deprived of their inheritance of

dignity, they are not allowed even the privilege of a commoner. An

Irish lord cannot sit in the House of Commons for an Irish county or

city, nor can he vote for an Irish member.

But an Irish lord can represent an English constituency. The

distinction is a strange one--unintelligible to us in any sense but one

of national humiliation. We understand it thus--an Irish lord is too

mean in his own person, and by virtue of his Irish title, to rank with

the British peerage. He can only qualify for that honour by uniting in

his the suffrages and titles of ten or twelve others. But--flattering

distinction!--he is above the rank of an Irish commoner, nor is he

permitted to sully his name with the privileges of that order.

And--unspeakable dignity!--he may take his stand with a British mob.

There is no position to match this in shame. There is no guilt so

despicable as dozing in it without a blush or an effort, or even a

dream for independence. When all else are alive to indignity, and

working in the way of honour and liberty, they alone, whom it would

best become to be earliest and most earnest in the strife, sink back

replete with dishonour.

Of those, or their descendants, who, at the time of the Union, sold

their country and the high places they filled in her councils and in

her glory, for the promise of a foreign title, which has not been

redeemed, the shame and the mortification have been perhaps too great

to admit of any hope in regard to them. Their trust was sacred--their

honour unsuspected. The stake they guarded above life they betrayed

then for a false bauble; and it is no wonder if they think their infamy

irredeemable and eternal.

We know not but it is. There are many, however, not in that category.

They struggled at fearful odds, and every risk, against the fate of

their country. They strove when hope had left them. Wherefore do they

stand apart now, when she is again erect, and righteous, and daring?

Have they despaired for her greatness, because of the infidelity of

those to whom she had too blindly trusted?

The time is gone when she could be betrayed. This one result is already

guaranteed by recent teaching. We may not be yet thoroughly instructed

in the wisdom and the virtue necessary for the independent maintenance

of self-government; but we have mastered thus much of national

knowledge that we cannot be betrayed. There is no assurance every

nation gave which we have not given, or may not give, that our present

struggle shall end in triumph or in national death.

The writers of _The Nation_ have never concealed the defects or

flattered the good qualities of their countrymen. They have told them

in good faith that they wanted many an attribute of a free people, and

that the true way to command happiness and liberty was by learning the

arts and practising the culture that fitted men for their enjoyment.

Nor was it until we saw them thus learning and thus practising that our

faith became perfect, and that we felt entitled to say to all men, here

is a strife in which it will be stainless glory to be even defeated. It

is one in which the Irish nobility have the first interest and the

first stake in their individual capacities.

As they would be the most honoured and benefited by national success,

they are the guiltiest in opposing or being indifferent to national

patriotism.

Of the Irish gentry there is not much to be said. They are divisible

into two classes--the one consists of the old Norman race commingled

with the Catholic gentlemen who either have been able to maintain their

patrimonies, or who have risen into affluence by their own industry;

the other, the descendants of Cromwell's or William's successful

soldiery.

This last is the most anti-Irish of all. They feel no personal

debasement in the dishonour of the country. Old prejudices, a barbarous

law, a sense of insecurity in the possessions they know were obtained

by plunder, combine to sink them into the mischievous and unholy belief

that it is their interest as well as their duty to degrade, and wrong,

and beggar the Irish people.

There are among them men fired by enthusiasm, men fed by fanaticism,

men influenced by sordidness; but, as a whole, they are earnest

thinkers and stern actors. There is a virtue in their unscrupulousness.

They speak, and act, and dare as men. There is a principle in their

unprincipledness. Their belief is a harsh and turbulent one, but they

profess it in a manly fashion.

We like them better than the other section of the same class. These

last are but sneaking echoes of the other's views. They are coward

patriots and criminal dandies. But they ought to be different from what

they are. We wish them so. We want their aid now--for the country, for

themselves, for all. Would that they understood the truth, that they

thought justly, and acted uprightly. They are wanted, one and all. Why

conceal it--they are obstacles in our way, shadows on our path.

These are called the representatives of the property of the country.

They are against the national cause, and therefore it is said that all

the wealth of Ireland is opposed to the Repeal of the Union.

It is an ignorant and a false boast.

The people of the country are its wealth. They till its soil, raise its

produce, ply its trade. They serve, sustain, support, save it. They

supply its armies--they are its farmers, its merchants, its tradesmen,

its artists, all that enrich and adorn it.

And, after all, each of them has a patrimony to spend, the honourable

earning of his sweat, or his intellect, or his industry, or his genius.

Taking them on an average, they must, to live, spend at least L5 each

by the year. Multiply it by seven millions, and see what it comes to.

Thirty-five millions annually--compare with that the rental of Ireland;

compare with it the wealth of the aristocracy spent in Ireland, and are

they not as nothing?

But a more important comparison may be made of the strength, the

fortitude, the patience, the bravery of those, the enrichers of the

country, with the meanness in mind and courage of those who are opposed

to them.

It is the last we shall suggest. It is sufficient for our purpose. To

those who do not think it of the highest value we have nothing to say.

THE STATE OF THE PEASANTRY.

In a climate soft as a mother's smile, on a soil fruitful as God's

love, the Irish peasant mourns.

He is not unconsoled. Faith in the joys of another world, heightened by

his woe in this, give him hours when he serenely looks down on the

torments that encircle him--the moon on a troubled sky. Domestic love,

almost morbid from external suffering, prevents him from becoming a

fanatic or a misanthrope, and reconciles him to life. Sometimes he

forgets all, and springs into a desperate glee or a scathing anger; and

latterly another feeling--the hope of better days--and another

exertion--the effort for redress--have shared his soul with religion,

love, mirth, and vengeance.

His consolations are those of a spirit--his misery includes all

physical sufferings, and many that strike the soul, not the senses.

Consider his griefs! They begin in the cradle--they end in the grave.

Suckled by a breast that is supplied from unwholesome or insufficient

food, and that is fevered with anxiety--reeking with the smoke of an

almost chimneyless cabin--assailed by wind and rain when the weather

rages--breathing, when it is calm, the exhalations of a rotten roof, of

clay walls, and of manure, which gives his only chance of food--he is

apt to perish in his infancy.

Or he survives all this (happy if he have escaped from gnawing scrofula

or familiar fever), and in the same cabin, with rags instead of his

mother's breast, and lumpers instead of his mother's milk, he spends

his childhood.

Advancing youth brings him labour, and manhood increases it; but youth

and manhood leave his roof rotten, his chimney one hole, his window

another, his clothes rags (at best muffled by a holiday _cotamore_)--his

furniture, a pot, a table, a few hay chairs and rickety stools--his

food, lumpers and water--his bedding, straw and a coverlet--his

enemies, the landlord, the tax-gatherer, and the law--his consolation,

the priest and his wife--his hope on earth, agitation--his hope

hereafter, the Lord God!

For such an existence his toil is hard--and so much the better--it

calms and occupies his mind; but bitter is his feeling that the toil

which gains for him this nauseous and scanty livelihood heaps dainties

and gay wines on the table of his distant landlord, clothes his

children or his harem in satin, lodges them in marble halls, and brings

all the arts of luxury to solicit their senses--bitter to him to feel

that this green land, which he loves and his landlord scorns, is

ravished by him of her fruits to pamper that landlord; twice bitter for

him to see his wife, with weariness in her breast of love, to see half

his little brood torn by the claws of want to undeserved graves, and to

know that to those who survive him he can only leave the inheritance to

which he was heir; and thrice bitter to him that even his hovel has not

the security of the wild beast's den--that Squalidness, and Hunger, and

Disease are insufficient guardians of his home--and that the puff of

the landlord's or the agent's breath may blow him off the land where he

has lived, and send him and his to a dyke, or to prolong wretchedness

in some desperate kennel in the next town, till the strong wings of

Death--unopposed lord of such suburb--bear them away.

Aristocracy of Ireland, will ye do nothing?--will ye do nothing for

fear? The body who best know Ireland--the body that keep Ireland within

the law--the Repeal Committee--declare that unless some great change

take place an agrarian war may ensue! Do ye know what that is, and how

it would come? The rapid multiplication of outrages, increased violence

by magistrates, collisions between the people and the police, coercive

laws and military force, the violation of houses, the suspension of

industry--the conflux of discontent, pillage, massacre, war--the gentry

shattered, the peasantry conquered and decimated, or victorious and

ruined (for who could rule them?)--there is an agrarian insurrection!

May Heaven guard us from it!--may the fear be vain!

We set aside the fear! Forget it! Think of the long, long patience of

the people--their toils supporting you--their virtues shaming

you--their huts, their hunger, their disease.

To whomsoever God had given a heart less cold than stone, these truths

must cry day and night. Oh! how they cross us like _Banshees when

we would range free on the mountain--how, as we walk in the evening

light amid flowers, they startle us from rest of mind! Ye nobles! whose

houses are as gorgeous as the mote's (who dwelleth in the sunbeam)--ye

strong and haughty squires--ye dames exuberant with tingling blood--ye

maidens, whom not splendour has yet spoiled, will ye not think of the

poor?--will ye not shudder in your couches to think how rain, wind, and

smoke dwell with the blanketless peasant?--will ye not turn from the

sumptuous board to look at those hard-won meals of black and slimy

roots on which man, woman, and child feed year after year?--will ye

never try to banish wringing hunger and ghastly disease from the home

of such piety and love?--will ye not give back its dance to the

village--its mountain play to boyhood--its serene hopes to manhood?

Will ye do nothing for pity--nothing for love? Will ye leave a foreign

Parliament to mitigate--will ye leave a native Parliament, gained in

your despite, to redress these miseries--will ye for ever abdicate the

duty and the joy of making the poor comfortable, and the peasant

attached and happy? Do--if so you prefer; but know that if you do, you

are a doomed race. Once more, Aristocracy of Ireland, we warn and

entreat you to consider the State of the Peasantry, and to save them

with your own hands.

HABITS AND CHARACTER OF THE PEASANTRY.[44]

There are (thank God!) four hundred thousand Irish children in the

National Schools. A few years, and _they will be the People of

Ireland--the farmers of its lands, the conductors of its traffic, the

adepts in its arts. How utterly unlike _that Ireland will be to the

Ireland of the Penal Laws, of the Volunteers, of the Union, or of the

Emancipation?

Well may Carleton say that we are in a transition state. The knowledge,

the customs, the superstitions, the hopes of the People are entirely

changing. There is neither use nor reason in lamenting what we must

infallibly lose. Our course is an open and a great one, and will try us

severely; but, be it well or ill, we cannot resemble our fathers. No

conceivable effort will get the people, twenty years hence, to regard

the Fairies but as a beautiful fiction to be cherished, not believed

in, and not a few real and human characters are perishing as fast as

the Fairies.

Let us be content to have the past chronicled wherever it cannot be

preserved.

Much may be saved--the Gaelic language and the music of the past may be

handed uncorrupted to the future; but whatever may be the substitutes,

the Fairies and the Banshees, the Poor Scholar and the Ribbonman, the

Orange Lodge, the Illicit Still, and the Faction Fight are vanishing

into history, and unless this generation paints them no other will know

what they were.

It is chiefly in this way we value the work before us. In it Carleton

is the historian of the peasantry rather than a dramatist. The fiddler

and piper, the seanachie and seer, the match-maker and dancing-master,

and a hundred characters beside are here brought before you, moving,

acting, playing, plotting, and gossiping! You are never wearied by an

inventory of wardrobes, as in short English descriptive fictions; yet

you see how every one is dressed; you hear the honey brogue of the

maiden, and the downy voice of the child, the managed accents of

flattery or traffic, the shrill tones of woman's fretting, and the

troubled gush of man's anger. The moory upland and the corn slopes, the

glen where the rocks jut through mantling heather, and bright brooks

gurgle amid the scented banks of wild herbs, the shivering cabin and

the rudely-lighted farm-house are as plain in Carleton's pages as if he

used canvas and colours with a skill varying from Wilson and Poussin to

Teniers and Wilkie.

But even in these sketches his power of external description is not his

greatest merit. Born and bred among the people--full of their animal

vehemence--skilled in their sports--as credulous and headlong in

boyhood, and as fitful and varied in manhood, as the wildest--he had

felt with them, and must ever sympathise with them. Endowed with the

highest dramatic genius, he has represented their love and generosity,

their wrath and negligence, their crimes and virtues, as a hearty

peasant--not a note-taking critic.

In others of his works he has created ideal characters that give him a

higher rank as a poet (some of them not surpassed by even Shakespeare

for originality, grandeur, and distinctness); but here he is a genuine

Seanachie, and brings you to dance and wake, to wedding and

christening--makes you romp with the girls, and race with the

boys--tremble at the ghosts, and frolic with the fairies of the whole

parish.

Come what change there may over Ireland, in these _Tales and Sketches_

the peasantry of the past hundred years can be for ever lived with.

---------------------------------------------------------------

[44] _Tales and Sketches illustrating the Irish Peasantry._ By

William Carleton. James Duffy, Dublin, 1845. 1 vol., 8vo., pp. 393.

IRISH SCENERY.

We no more see why Irish people should not visit the Continent than why

Germans or Frenchmen ought not to visit Ireland; but there is a

difference between them. A German rarely comes here who has not

trampled the heath of Tyrol, studied the museums of Dresden and the

frescoes of Munich, and shouted defiance on the bank of the Rhine; and

what Frenchman who has not seen the vineyards of Provence and the

bocages of Brittany, and the snows of Jura and the Pyrenees, ever drove

on an Irish jingle? But our nobles and country gentlemen, our

merchants, lawyers, and doctors--and what's worse, their wives and

daughters--penetrate Britain and the Continent without ever trying

whether they could not defy in Ireland the _ennui_ before which they

run over seas and mountains.

The cause of this, as of most of our grievances, was misgovernment,

producing poverty, discomfort, ignorance, and misrepresentation. The

people were ignorant and in rags, their houses miserable, the roads and

hotels shocking; we had no banks, few coaches, and, to crown all, the

English declared the people to be rude and turbulent, which they were

not, as well as drunken and poor, which they assuredly were. An Irish

landlord who had ill-treated his own tenants felt a conscientious dread

of all frieze-coats; others adopted his prejudices, and a people who

never were rude or unjust to strangers were considered unsafe to travel

amongst.

Most of these causes are removed. The people are sober, and are rapidly

advancing to knowledge, their political exertions and dignity have

broken away much of the prejudices against them, and a man passing

through any part of Ireland expects to find woeful poverty and strong

discontent, but he does not fear the abduction of his wife, or attempts

to assassinate him on every lonely road. The coaches, cars, and roads,

too, have become excellent, and the hotels are sufficient for any

reasonable traveller. One very marked discouragement to travelling was

the want of information; the maps were little daubs, and the

guide-books were few and inaccurate. As to maps we are now splendidly

off. The Railway Commissioners' Map of Ireland, aided by the Ordnance

Index Map of any county where a visitor makes a long stay, are ample.

We have got a good general guide-book in Fraser, but it could not hold

a twentieth of the information necessary to a leisurely tourist; nor,

till the Ordnance Memoir is out, shall we have thorough hand-books to

our counties. Meantime, let us not burn the little guides to Antrim,

Wicklow, and Killarney, though they are desperately dull and

inexact--let us not altogether prohibit Mrs. Hall's gossip, though she

knows less about our Celtic people than the Malays; and let us be even

thankful for Mr. O'Flanagan's volume of the Munster Blackwater (though

it is printed in London) for his valuable stories, for his minute,

picturesque, and full topography, for his antiquarian and historic

details, though he blunders into making Alaster M'Donnell a Scotchman,

and for his hearty love of the scenery and people he has undertaken to

guide us through.

And now, reader, in this fine soft summer, when the heather is

blooming, and the sky laughing and crying like a hysterical bride, full

of love, where will ye go--through your own land or a stranger's? If

you stay at home you can choose your own scenery, and have something to

see in the summer, and talk of in the winter, that will make your

friends from the Alps and Apennines respectful to you.

Did you propose to study economies among the metayers of Tuscany or the

artisans of Belgium, postpone the trip till the summer of '45 or '46,

when you may have the passport of an Irish office to get you a welcome,

and seek for the state of the linen weavers in the soft hamlets of

Ulster--compare the cattle herds of Meath with the safe little holdings

of Down and the well-found farms of Tipperary, or investigate the

statistics of our fisheries along the rivers and lakes and shores of

our island.

Had a strong desire come upon you to toil over the glacier, whose

centre froze when Adam courted Eve, or walk amid the brigand passes of

Italy or Spain--do not fancy that absolute size makes mountain

grandeur, or romance--to a mind full of passion and love of strength

(and with such only do the mountain spirits walk) the passes of

Glenmalure and Barnesmore are deep as Chamouni, and Carn Tual and

Slieve Donard are as near the lightning as Mount Blanc.

To the picture-hunter we can offer little, though Vandyke's finest

portrait is in Kilkenny, and there is no county without some

collection; but for the lover of living or sculptured forms--for the

artist, the antiquarian, and the natural philosopher, we have more than

five summers could exhaust. Every one can see the strength of outline,

the vigour of colour, and the effective grouping in every fair, and

wake, and chapel, and hurling-ground, from Donegal to Waterford, though

it may take the pen of Griffin or the pencil of Burton to represent

them. An Irishman, if he took the pains, would surely find something

not inferior in interest to Cologne or the Alhambra in study of the

monumental effigies which mat the floors of Jerpoint and Adare, or the

cross in a hundred consecrated grounds from Kells to Clonmacnoise--of

the round towers which spring in every barony--of the architectural

perfection of Holycross and Clare-Galway, and the strange fellowship of

every order in Athassel, or of the military keeps and earthen pyramids

and cairns, which tell of the wars of recent and the piety of distant

centuries. The Entomology, Botany, and Geology of Ireland are not half

explored; the structure and distinctions of its races are but just

attracting the eyes of philosophers from Mr. Wilde's tract, and the

country is actually full of airs never noted, history never written,

superstitions and romances never rescued from tradition; and why should

Irishmen go blundering in foreign researches when so much remains to be

done here, and when to do it would be more easy, more honourable, and

more useful?

In many kinds of scenery we can challenge comparison. Europe has no

lake so dreamily beautiful as Killarney; no bays where the boldness of

Norway unites with the colouring of Naples, as in Bantry; and you might

coast the world without finding cliffs so vast and so terrible as

Achill and Slieve League. Glorious, too, as the Rhine is, we doubt if

its warmest admirers would exclude from rivalry the Nore and the

Blackwater, if they had seen the tall cliffs, and the twisted slopes,

and the ruined aisles, and glancing mountains, and feudal castles

through which you boat up from Youghal to Mallow, or glide down from

Thomastown to Waterford harbour. Hear what Inglis says of this

Avondhu:--

"We have had descents of the Danube, and descents of the Rhine, and

the Rhone, and of many other rivers; but we have not in print, as

far as I know, any descent of the Blackwater; and yet, with all

these descents of foreign rivers in my recollection, _I think the

descent of the Blackwater not surpassed by any of them._ A detail

of all that is seen in gliding down the Blackwater from Cappoquin

to Youghal would fill a long chapter. There is every combination

that can be produced by the elements that enter into the

picturesque and the beautiful--deep shades, bold rocks, verdant

slopes, with the triumphs of art superadded, and made visible in

magnificent houses and beautiful villas with their decorated lawns

and pleasure grounds."

And now, reader, if these kaleidoscope glimpses we have given you have

made you doubt between a summer in Ireland and one abroad, give your

country "the benefit of the doubt," as the lawyers say, and boat on our

lake or dive into our glens and ruins, wonder at the basalt coast of

Antrim, and soften your heart between the banks of the Blackwater.

IRISH MUSIC AND POETRY.

No enemy speaks slightingly of Irish Music, and no friend need fear to

boast of it. It is without a rival.

Its antique war-tunes, such as those of O'Byrne, O'Donnell, Alestrom,

and Brian Boru, stream and crash upon the ear like the warriors of a

hundred glens meeting; and you are borne with them to battle, and they

and you charge and struggle amid cries and battle-axes and stinging

arrows. Did ever a wail make man's marrow quiver, and fill his nostrils

with the breath of the grave, like the ululu of the north or the

wirrasthrue of Munster? Stately are their slow, and recklessly splendid

their quick marches, their "Boyne Water," and "Sios agus sios liom,"

their "Michael Hoy," and "Gallant Tipperary." The Irish jigs and

planxties are not only the best dancing tunes, but the finest quick

marches in the world. Some of them would cure a paralytic and make the

marble-legged prince in the _Arabian Nights_ charge like a Fag-an-Bealach

boy. The hunter joins in every leap and yelp of the "Fox Chase"; the

historian hears the moan of the penal days in "Drimindhu," and sees the

embarkation of the Wild Geese in "Limerick's Lamentation"; and ask the

lover if his breath do not come and go with "Savourneen Deelish" and

"Lough Sheelin."

Varied and noble as our music is, the English-speaking people in

Ireland have been gradually losing their knowledge of it, and a number

of foreign tunes--paltry scented things from Italy, lively trifles from

Scotland, and German opera cries--are heard in our concerts, and what

is worse, from our Temperance bands. Yet we never doubted that "The

Sight Entrancing," or "The Memory of the Dead," would satisfy even the

most spoiled of our fashionables better than anything Balfe or Rossini

ever wrote; and, as it is, "Tow-row-row" is better than _poteen_ to the

teetotalers, wearied with overtures and insulted by "British

Grenadiers" and "Rule Brittannia."

A reprint of _Moore's Melodies_ on lower keys, and at _much_ lower

prices, would probably restore the sentimental music of Ireland to its

natural supremacy. There are in Bunting but two good sets of

words--"The Bonny Cuckoo," and poor Campbell's "Exile's of Erin." These

and a few of Lover's and Mahony's songs can alone compete with Moore.

But, save one or two by Lysaght and Drennan, almost all the Irish

political songs are too desponding or weak to content a people marching

to independence as proudly as if they had never been slaves.

The popularity and immense circulation of the _Spirit of the Nation_

proved that it represented the hopes and passions of the Irish people.

This looks like vanity; but as a corporation so numerous as the

contributors to that volume cannot blush, we shall say our say. For

instance, who did not admire "The Memory of the Dead"? The very Stamp

officers were galvanised by it, and the Attorney-General was repeatedly

urged to sing it for the jury. He refused--he had no music to sing it

to. We pitied and forgave him; but we vowed to leave him no such excuse

next time. If these songs were half so good as people called them, they

deserved to flow from a million throats to as noble music as ever

O'Neill or O'Connor heard.

Some of them were written to, and some freely combined with, old and

suitable airs. These we resolved to have printed with the music,

certain that, thus, the music would be given back to a people who had

been ungratefully neglecting it, and the words carried into circles

where they were still unknown.

Others of these poems, indeed the best of them, had no antetypes in our

ancient music. New music was, therefore, to be sought for them. Not on

their account only was it to be sought. We hoped they would be the

means of calling out and making known a contemporary music fresh with

the spirit of the time, and rooted in the country.

Since Carolan's death there had been no addition to the store. Not that

we were without composers, but those we have do not compose Irish-like

music, nor for Ireland. Their rewards are from a foreign public--their

fame, we fear, will suffer from alienage. Balfe is very sweet, and

Rooke very emphatic, but not one passion or association in Ireland's

heart would answer to their songs.

Fortunately there was one among us (perchance his example may light us

to others) who can smite upon our harp like a master, and make it sigh

with Irish memories, and speak sternly with Ireland's resolve. To him,

to his patriotism, to his genius, and, we may selfishly add, to his

friendship, we owe our ability now to give to Ireland music fit for

"The Memory of the Dead" and the "Hymn of Freedom," and whatever else

was marked out by popularity for such care as his.

In former editions of the _Spirit_[45] we had thrown in carelessly

several inferior verses and some positive trash, and neither paper nor

printing was any great honour to the Dublin press. Every improvement in

the power of the most enterprising publisher in Ireland has been made,

and every fault, within our reach or his, cured--and whether as the

first publication of original airs, as a selection of ancient music, or

as a specimen of what the Dublin press can do, in printing, paper, or

cheapness, we urge the public to support this work of Mr. James

Duffy's--and, in a pecuniary way, it is his altogether.

We had hoped to have added a recommendation to the first number of this

work, besides whatever attraction may lie in its music, its ballads, or

its mechanical beauty.

An artist, whom we shall not describe or he would be known,[46] sketched

a cover and title for it. The idea, composition, and drawing of that

design were such as Flaxman might have been proud of. It is a monument

to bardic power, to patriotism, to our music and our history. There is

at least as much poetry in it as in the best verses in the work it

illustrates. If it do nothing else, it will show our Irish artists that

refinement and strength, passion and dignity, are as practicable in

Irish as in German painting; and the lesson was needed sorely. But if

it lead him who drew it to see that our history and hopes present fit

forms to embody the highest feelings of beauty, wisdom, truth, and

glory in, irrespective of party politics, then, indeed, we shall have

served our country when we induced our gifted friend to condescend to

sketching a title-page. We need not describe that design now, as it

will appear on the cover of the second number, and on the title-page of

the finished volume.

---------------------------------------------------------------

[45] A splendid edition of this work, greatly enlarged, and printed

in The Irish Exhibition Buildings, was issued by Messrs. Duffy and

Sons, September, 1882.

[46] The artist referred to was Sir Frederick Burton. [Ed.]

BALLAD POETRY OF IRELAND.

How slow we have all been in coming to understand the meaning of Irish

Nationality!

Some, dazzled by visions of pagan splendour, and the pretensions of

pedigree, and won by the passions and romance of the olden races,

continued to speak in the nineteenth century of an Irish nation as they

might have done in the tenth. They forgot the English Pale, the Ulster

Settlement, and the filtered colonisation of men and ideas. A Celtic

kingdom with the old names and the old language, without the old

quarrels, was their hope; and though they would not repeat O'Neill's

comment as he passed Barrett's castle on his march to Kinsale, and

heard it belonged to a Strongbownian, that "he hated the Norman churl

as if he came yesterday"; yet they quietly assumed that the Norman and

Saxon elements would disappear under the Gaelic genius like the tracks

of cavalry under a fresh crop.

The Nationality of Swift and Grattan was equally partial. They saw that

the government and laws of the settlers had extended to the

island--that Donegal and Kerry were in the Pale; they heard the English

tongue in Dublin, and London opinions in Dublin--they mistook Ireland

for a colony wronged, and great enough to be a nation.

A lower form of nationhood was before the minds of those who saw in it

nothing but a parliament in College Green. They had not erred in

judging, for they had not tried to estimate the moral elements and

tendencies of the country. They were as narrow bigots to the

omnipotency of an institution as any Cockney Radical. Could they, by

any accumulation of English stupidity and Irish laziness, have got

possession of an Irish government, they would soon have distressed

every one by their laws, whom they had not provoked by their

administration, or disgusted by their dulness.

Far healthier, with all its defects, was the idea of those who saw in

Scotland a perfect model--who longed for a literary and artistic

nationality--who prized the oratory of Grattan and Curran, the novels

of Griffin and Carleton, the pictures of Maclise and Burton, the

ancient music, as much as any, and far more than most, of the political

nationalists, but who regarded political independence as a dangerous

dream. Unknowingly they fostered it. Their writings, their patronage,

their talk was of Ireland; yet it hardly occurred to them that the

ideal would flow into the practical, or that they, with their dread of

agitation, were forwarding a revolution.

At last we are beginning to see what we are, and what is our destiny.

Our duty arises where our knowledge begins. The elements of Irish

nationality are not only combining--in fact, they are growing confluent

in our minds. Such nationality as merits a good man's help and wakens a

true man's ambition--such nationality as could stand against internal

faction and foreign intrigue--such nationality as would make the Irish

hearth happy and the Irish name illustrious, is becoming understood. It

must contain and represent the races of Ireland. It must not be Celtic,

it must not be Saxon--it must be Irish. The Brehon law and the maxims

of Westminster, the cloudy and lightning genius of the Gael, the placid

strength of the Sasanach, the marshalling insight of the Norman--a

literature which shall exhibit in combination the passions and idioms

of all, and which shall equally express our mind in its romantic, its

religious, its forensic, and its practical tendencies--finally, a

native government, which shall know and rule by the might and right of

all; yet yield to the arrogance of none--these are components of

_such_ a nationality.

But what have these things to do with the "Ballad Poetry of Ireland"?

Much every way. It is the result of the elements we have named--it is

compounded of all; and never was there a book fitter to advance that

perfect nationality to which Ireland begins to aspire. That a country

is without national poetry proves its hopeless dulness or its utter

provincialism. National poetry is the very flowering of the soul--the

greatest evidence of its health, the greatest excellence of its beauty.

Its melody is balsam to the senses. It is the playfellow of childhood

ripens into the companion of his manhood, consoles his age. It presents

the most dramatic events, the largest characters, the most impressive

scenes, and the deepest passions in the language most familiar to us.

It shows us magnified, and ennobles our hearts, our intellects, our

country, and our countrymen--binds us to the land by its condensed and

gem-like history, to the future by examples and by aspirations. It

solaces us in travel, fires us in action, prompts our invention, sheds

a grace beyond the power of luxury round our homes, is the recognised

envoy of our minds among all mankind and to all time.

In possessing the powers and elements of a glorious nationality, we

owned the sources of a national poetry. In the combination and joint

development of the latter we find a pledge and a help to that of the

former.

This book of Mr. Duffy's,[47] true as it is to the wants of the time, is

not fortuitous. He has prefaced his admirable collection by an

Introduction, which proves his full consciousness of the worth of his

task, and proves equally his ability to execute it. In a space too

short for the most impatient to run by he has accurately investigated

the sources of Irish Ballad Poetry, vividly defined the qualities of

each, and laboured with perfect success to show that all naturally

combine towards one great end, as the brooks to a river, which marches

on clear, deep, and single, though they be wild, and shallow, and

turbid, flowing from unlike regions, and meeting after countless

windings.

Mr. Duffy maps out three main forces which unequally contribute to an

Irish Ballad Poetry.

The _first_ consists of the Gaelic ballads. True to the vehemence and

tendencies of the Celtic people, and representing equally their

vagueness and extravagance during slavish times, they nevertheless

remain locked from the middle and upper classes generally, and from the

peasantry of more than half Ireland, in an unknown language. Many of

them have been translated by rhymers--few indeed by poets. The editor

of the volume before us has brought into one house nearly all the

poetical translations from the Irish, and thus finely justifies the

ballad literature of the Gael from its calumnious friend:--

"With a few exceptions, all the translations we are acquainted

with, in addition to having abundance of minor faults, are

eminently un-Irish. They seem to have been made by persons to whom

one of the languages was not familiar. Many of them were

confessedly versified from prose translations, and are mere English

poems, without a tinge of the colour or character of the country.

Others, translated by sound Irish scholars, are bald and literal;

the writers sometimes wanting a facility of versification,

sometimes a mastery over the English language. The Irish scholars

of the last century were too exclusively national to study the

foreign tongue with the care essential to master its metrical

resources; and the flexible and weighty language which they had not

learned to wield hung heavily on them,

'Like Saul's plate armour on the shepherd boy,

Encumbering, and _not_ arming them.'

If it were just to estimate our bardic poetry by the specimens we

have received in this manner, it could not be rated highly. But it

would manifestly be most unjust. Noble and touching, and often

subtle and profound thoughts, which no translation could entirely

spoil, shine through the poverty of the style, and vindicate the

character of the originals. Like the costly arms and ornaments

found in our bogs, they are substantial witnesses of a distinct

civilisation; and their credit is no more diminished by the rubbish

in which they chance to be found than the authenticity of the

ancient _torques_ and _skians_ by their embedment in the mud.

When the entire collection of our Irish Percy--James Hardiman--shall

have been given to a public (and soon may such a one come) that can

relish them in their native dress, they will be entitled to

undisputed precedence in our national minstrelsy."

About a dozen of the ballads in the volume are derived from the Irish.

It is only in this way that Clarence Mangan (a name to which Mr. Duffy

does just honour) contributes to the volume. There are four

translations by him, exhibiting eminently his perfect mastery of

versification--his flexibility of passion, from loneliest grief to the

maddest humour. One of these, "The Lament for O'Neil and O'Donnell," is

the strongest, though it will not be the most popular, ballad in the

work.

Callanan's and Ferguson's translations, if not so daringly versified,

are simpler and more Irish in idiom.

Most, indeed, of Callanan's successful ballads are translations, and

well entitle him to what he passionately prays for--a minstrel of free

Erin to come to his grave,

"And plant a wild wreath from the banks of the river

O'er the heart and the harp that are sleeping for ever."

But we are wrong in speaking of Mr. Ferguson's translations in

precisely the same way. His "Wicklow War Song" is condensed,

epigrammatic, and crashing, as anything we know of, except the "Pibroch

of Donnil Dhu."

The _second_ source is--the common people's ballads. Most of these

"make no pretence to being true to Ireland, but only being true to the

_purlieus_ of Cork and Dublin"; yet now and then one meets a fine burst

of passion, and oftener a racy idiom. The "Drimin Dhu," "The Blackbird,"

"Peggy Bawn," "Irish Molly," "Willy Reilly," and the "Fair of

Turloughmore," are the specimens given here. Of these "Willy Reilly"

(an old and worthy favourite in Ulster, it seems, but quite unknown

elsewhere) is the best; but it is too long to quote, and we must limit

ourselves to the noble opening verse of "Turloughmore"--

"'Come, tell me, dearest mother, what makes my father stay,

Or what can be the reason that he's so long away?'

Oh! 'hold your tongue, my darling son, your tears do grieve me

sore;

I fear he has been murdered in the fair of Turloughmore.'"

The _third_ and principal source consists of the Anglo-Irish ballads,

written during the last twenty or thirty years.

Of this highest class, he who contributes most and, to our mind, best

is Mr. Ferguson. We have already spoken of his translations--his

original ballads are better. There is nothing in this volume--nothing

in _Percy's Relics_, or the _Border Minstrelsy_, to surpass,

perhaps to equal, "Willy Gilliland." It is as natural in structure as

"Kinmont Willie," as vigorous as "Otterbourne," and as complete as

"Lochinvar." Leaving his Irish idiom, we get in the "Forester's

Complaint" as harmonious versification, and in the "Forging of the

Anchor" as vigorous thoughts, mounted on bounding words, as anywhere in

the English literature.

We must quote some stray verses from "Willy Gilliland":--

"Up in the mountain solitudes, and in a rebel ring,

He has worshipped God upon the hill, in spite of church and king;

And sealed his treason with his blood on Bothwell bridge he hath;

So he must fly his father's land, or he must die the death;

For comely Claverhouse has come along with grim Dalzell,

And his smoking roof tree testifies they've done their errand well.

* * * * * * * * * *

"His blithe work done, upon a bank the outlaw rested now,

And laid the basket from his back, the bonnet from his brow;

And there, his hand upon the Book, his knee upon the sod,

He filled the lonely valley with the gladsome word of God;

And for a persecuted kirk, and for her martyrs dear,

And against a godless church and king he spoke up loud and clear.

* * * * * * * * * *

"'My bonny mare! I've ridden you when Claver'se rode behind,

And from the thumbscrew and the boot you bore me like the wind;

And while I have the life you saved, on your sleek flank, I swear,

Episcopalian rowel shall never ruffle hair!

Though sword to wield they've left me none--yet Wallace wight I wis,

Good battle did, on Irvine side, wi' waur weapon than this.'--

"His fishing-rod with both his hands he gripped it as he spoke,

And, where the butt and top were spliced, in pieces twain he broke;

The limber top he cast away, with all its gear abroad,

But, grasping the tough hickory butt, with spike of iron shod,

He ground the sharp spear to a point; then pulled his bonnet down,

And, meditating black revenge, set forth for Carrick town."

The only ballad equally racy is "The Croppy Boy," by some anonymous but

most promising writer.

Griffin's "Gille Machree"--of another class--is perfect--"striking on

the heart," as Mr. Duffy finely says, "like the cry of a woman"; but

his "Orange and Green," and his "Bridal of Malahide," belong to the

same class, and suffer by comparison, with Mr. Ferguson's ballads.

Banim's greatest ballad, the "Soggarth Aroon," possesses even deeper

tenderness and more perfect Irish idiom than anything in the volume.

Among the Collection are Colonel Blacker's famous Orange ballad,

"Oliver's Advice" ("Put your trust in God, my boys, but keep your

powder dry"), and two versions of the "Boyne Water." The latter and

older one, given in the appendix, is by far the finest, and contains

two unrivalled stanzas:--

"Both foot and horse they marched on, intending them to batter, But

the brave Duke Schomberg he was shot as he crossed over the water.

When that King William he observed the brave Duke Schomberg

falling, He rein'd his horse, with a heavy heart, on the

Enniskilleners calling; 'What will you do for me, brave boys? see

yonder men retreating, Our enemies encouraged are--and English

drums are beating'; He says 'My boys, feel no dismay at the losing

of one commander, For God shall be our King this day, and I'll be

general under.'"

Nor less welcome is the comment:--

"Some of the Ulster ballads, of a restricted and provincial spirit,

having less in common with Ireland than with Scotland; two or three

Orange ballads, altogether ferocious or foreign in their tendencies

(preaching murder, or deifying an alien), will be no less valuable

to the patriot or the poet on this account. They echo faithfully

the sentiments of a strong, vehement, and indomitable body of

Irishmen, who may come to battle for their country better than they

ever battled for prejudices or their bigotries. At all events, to

know what they love and believe is a precious knowledge."

On the language of most of the ballads Mr. Duffy says:--

"Many of them, and generally the best, are just as essentially

Irish as if they were written in Gaelic. They could have grown

among no other people, perhaps under no other sky or scenery. To an

Englishman, to any Irishman educated out of the country, or to a

dreamer asleep to impressions of scenery and character, they would

be achievements as impossible as the Swedish _Skalds_ or the

_Arabian Nights_. They are as Irish as Ossian or Carolan, and

unconsciously reproduce the spirit of those poets better than any

translator can hope to do. They revive and perpetuate the vehement

native songs that gladdened the halls of our princes in their

triumphs, and wailed over their ruined hopes or murdered bodies. In

everything but language, and almost in language, they are

identical. That strange tenacity of the Celtic race, which makes a

description of their habits and propensities when Caesar was still a

Proconsul in Gaul true in essentials of the Irish people to this

day, has enabled them to infuse the ancient and hereditary spirit

of the country into all that is genuine of our modern poetry. And

even the language grew almost Irish. The soul of the country,

stammering its passionate grief and hatred in a strange tongue,

loved still to utter them in its old familiar idioms and cadences.

Uttering them, perhaps, with more piercing earnestness, because of

the impediment; and winning out of the very difficulty a grace and

a triumph."

How often have we wished for such a companion as this volume! Worse

than meeting unclean beds, or drenching mists, or Cockney opinions, was

it to have to take the mountains with a book of Scottish ballads. They

were glorious, to be sure, but they were not ours--they had not the

brown of the climate on their cheek, they spoke of places afar, and

ways which are not our country's ways, and hopes which were not

Ireland's, and their tongue was not that we first made sport and love

with. Yet how mountaineer without ballads any more than without a

shillelagh? No; we took the Scots ballads, and felt our souls rubbing

away with envy and alienage amid their attractions; but now, Brighid,

be praised! we can have all Irish thoughts on Irish hills, true to them

as the music, or the wind, or the sky.

Happy boys! who may grow up with such ballads in your memories. Happy

men! who will find your hearts not only doubtful but joyous in serving

and sacrificing for the country you thus learned in childhood to love.

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[47] _Ballad Poetry of Ireland_,--Library of Ireland, No. II.

A BALLAD HISTORY OF IRELAND.

Of course the first _object_ of the work we project[48] will be to make

Irish History familiar to the minds, pleasant to the ears, dear to the

passions, and powerful over the taste and conduct of the Irish people

in times to come. More _events_ could be put into a prose history.

Exact dates, subtle plots, minute connections and motives rarely appear

in Ballads, and for these ends the worst prose history is superior to

the best ballad series; but these are not the highest ends of history.

To hallow or accurse the scenes of glory and honour, or of shame and

sorrow; to give to the imagination the arms, and homes, and senates,

and battles of other days; to rouse, and soften, and strengthen, and

enlarge us with the passions of great periods; to lead us into love of

self-denial, of justice, of beauty, of valour, of generous life and

proud death; and to set up in our souls the memory of great men, who

shall then be as models and judges of our actions--these are the

highest duties of history, and these are best taught by a Ballad

History.

A Ballad History is welcome to childhood, from its rhymes, its high

colouring, and its aptness to memory. As we grow into boyhood, the

violent passions, the vague hopes, the romantic sorrow of patriot

ballads are in tune with our fitful and luxuriant feelings. In manhood

we prize the condensed narrative, the grave firmness, the critical art,

and the political sway of ballads. And in old age they are doubly dear;

the companions and reminders of our life, the toys and teachers of our

children and grand-children. Every generation finds its account in

them. They pass from mouth to mouth like salutations; and even the

minds which lose their words are under their influence, as one can

recall the starry heavens who cannot revive the form of a single

constellation.

In olden times all ballads were made to music, and the minstrel sang

them to his harp or screamed them in recitative. Thus they reached

farther, were welcomer guests in feast and camp, and were better

preserved. We shall have more to say on this in speaking of our

proposed song collection. Printing so multiplies copies of ballads, and

intercourse is so general, that there is less need of this adaptation

to music now. Moreover, it may be disputed whether the dramatic effect

in the more solemn ballads is not injured by lyrical forms. In such

streaming exhortations and laments as we find in the Greek choruses and

in the adjurations and caoines of the Irish, the breaks and parallel

repetitions of a song might lower the passion. Were we free to do so,

we could point out instances in the _Spirit of the Nation_ in which the

rejection of song-forms seems to have been essential to the awfulness

of the occasion.

In pure narratives and in the gayer and more splendid, though less

stern ballads, the song-forms and adaptation to music are clear gains.

In the Scotch ballads this is usual, in the English rare. We look in

vain through Southey's admirable ballads--"Mary the Maid of the Inn,"

"Jaspar," "Inchcape Rock," "Bishop Hatto," "King Henry V. and the

Hermit of Dreux"--for either burden, chorus, or adaptation to music. In

the "Battle of Blenheim" there is, however, an occasional burden line;

and in the smashing "March to Moscow" there is a great chorusing about--

"Morbleu! Parbleu!

What a pleasant excursion to Moscow."

Coleridge has some skilful repetitions and exquisite versification in

his "Ancient Mariner," "Genevieve," "Alice du Clos," but nowhere a

systematic burden. Campbell has no burdens in his finest lyric ballads,

though the subjects were fitted for them. The burden of the "Exile of

Erin" belongs very doubtfully to him.

Macaulay's best ballad, the "Battle of Ivry," is greatly aided by the

even burden line; but he has not repeated the experiment, though he,

too, makes much use of repeating lines in his Roman Lays and other

ballads.

While, then, we counsel burdens in Historical Ballads, we would

recognise excepted cases where they may be injurious, and treat them as

in _no case_ essential to perfect ballad success. In songs, we would

almost always insist either on a chorus, verse, or a burden of some

sort. A burden need not be at the end of the verse; but may, with quite

equal success, be at the beginning or in the body of it, as may be seen

in the Scotch Ballads, and in some of those in the _Spirit of the

Nation_.

The old Scotch and English ballads, and Lockhart's translations from

the Spanish, are mostly composed in one metre, though written down in

either of two ways. Macaulay's Roman Lays and "Ivry" are in this metre.

Take an example from the last:--

"Press where ye see my white plume shine, amid the ranks of war,

And be your Oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre."

In the old ballads this would be printed in four lines, of eight

syllables and six alternately, and rhyming only alternately, thus:--

"Press where ye see my white plume shine,

Amid the ranks of war,

And be your Oriflamme to-day

The helmet of Navarre."

So Macaulay himself prints this metre in some of his Roman Lays.

But the student should rather avoid than seek this metre. The uniform

old beat of eight and six is apt to fall monotonously on the ear, and

some of the most startling effects are lost in it. In the _Spirit of

the Nation_ the student will find many other ballad metres. Campbell's

metres, though new and glorious things, are terrible traps to

imitation, and should be warily used. The German ballads, and, still

more, Mr. Mangan's translations of them, contain great variety of new

and safe, though difficult, metres. Next in frequency to the

fourteen-syllable line is that in eleven syllables, such as "Mary

Ambree" and "Lochinvar"; and for a rolling brave ballad 'tis a fine

metre. The metre of fifteen syllables with double rhymes, (or accents)

in the middle, and that of thirteen, with double rhymes at the end, is

tolerably frequent, and the metre used by Father Prout, in his noble

translation of "Duke D'Alencon," is admirable, and easier than it

seems. By the way, what a grand burden runs through that ballad:--

"Fools! to believe the sword could give to the children of the Rhine,

Our Gallic fields--the land that yields the Olive and the Vine!"

The syllables are as in the common metre, but it has thrice the rhymes.

We have seen great materials wasted in a struggle with a crotchety

metre; therefore, though we counsel the invention of metres, we would

add that unless a metre come out racily and appropriately in the first

couple of verses, it should be abandoned, and some of those easily

marked metres taken up.

A historical ballad will commonly be narrative in its form, but not

necessarily so. A hymn of exultation--a call to a council, an army, or

a people--a prophecy--a lament--or a dramatic scene (as in Lochiel),

may give as much of event, costume, character, and even scenery as a

mere narration. The varieties of form are infinite, and it argues lack

of force in a writer to keep always to mere narration, though when

exact events are to be told that may be the best mode.

One of the essential qualities of a good historical ballad is truth. To

pervert history--to violate nature, in order to make a fine clatter,

has been the aim in too many of the ballads sent us. He who goes to

write a historical ballad should master the main facts of the time, and

state them truly. It may be well for those perhaps either not to study

or to half-forget minute circumstances until after his ballad is

drafted out, lest he write a chronicle, not a ballad; but he will do

well, ere he suffers it to leave his study, to reconsider the facts of

the time or man, or act of which he writes, and see if he cannot add

force to his statements, an antique grace to his phrases, and colour to

his language.

Truth and appropriateness in ballads require great knowledge and taste.

To write an Irish historical ballad, one should know the events which

he would describe, and know them not merely from an isolated study of

his subject, but from old familiarity, which shall have associated them

with his tastes and passions, and connected them with other parts of

history. How miserable a thing is to put forward a piece of vehement

declamation and vague description, which might be uttered of any event,

or by the man of any time, as a historical ballad. We have had battle

ballads sent us that would be as characteristic of Marathon or Waterloo

as of Clontarf--laments that might have been uttered by a German or a

Hindu--and romances equally true to love all the world over.

Such historical study extends not merely to the events. A ballad writer

should try to find the voice, colour, stature, passions, and peculiar

faculties of his hero--the arms, furniture, and dress of the congress,

or the champions, or the troops he tells of--the rites wherewith the

youth were married--the dead interred, and God worshipped; and the

architecture--previous history and pursuits (and, therefore, probable

ideas and phrases) of the men he describes.

Many of these things he will get in books. He should shun compilations,

and take up original journals, letters, state papers, statutes, and

cotemporary fictions and narratives as much as possible. Let him not

much mind Leland or Curry (after he has run over them), but work like

fury at the Archaeological Society's books--at Harris's Hibernica, at

Lodge's Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica, at Strafford's Pacata, Spencer's

View, Giraldus's Narrative, Fynes Moryson's Itinerary, the Ormond

Papers, the State Papers of Henry the Eighth, Stafford's and Cromwell's

and Rinuccini's Letters, and the correspondence and journals, from

Donald O'Neill's letter to the Pope down to Wolfe Tone's glorious

memoirs.

In the songs, and even their names, many a fine hint can be got; and he

is not likely to be a perfect Balladist of Ireland who has not felt to

tears and laughter the deathless passions of Irish music.

We have condemned compilations; but the ballad student may well labour

at Ware's Antiquities. He will find in the History of British Costume,

published by the Useful Knowledge Society, and in the illustrated work

now in progress called Old England, but beyond all other books, in the

historical works of Thierry, most valuable materials. Nothing, not even

the Border Minstrelsy, Percy's Relics, the Jacobite Ballads, or the

Archaeological Tracts, can be of such service as a repeated study of the

Norman Conquest, the Ten Years' Study, and the Merovingian Times of

Augustine Thierry.

We know he has rashly stated some events on insufficient authority, and

drawn conclusions beyond the warrant of his promises; but there is more

deep dramatic skill, more picturesque and coloured scenery, more

distinct and characteristic grouping, and more lively faith to the look

and spirit of the men and times and feelings of which he writes, in

Thierry, than in any other historian that ever lived. He has almost an

intuition in favour of liberty, and his vindication of the "men of '98"

out of the slanderous pages of Musgrave is a miracle of historical

skill and depth of judgment.

In the Irish Academy in Dublin there is a collection (now arranged and

rapidly increasing) of ancient arms and utensils. Private collections

exist in many provincial towns, especially in Ulster. Indeed, we know

an Orange painter in a northern village who has a finer collection of

Irish antiquities than all of the Munster cities put together. Accurate

observation of, and discussion on, such collections will be of vast

service to a writer of historical Ballads.

Topography is also essential to a ballad, or to any Historian. This is

not only necessary to save a writer from such gross blunder as we met

the other day in Wharton's Ballad, called "The Grave of King Arthur,"

where he talks of "the steeps of rough Kildare," but to give accuracy

and force to both general references and local description.

Ireland must be known to her Ballad Historians, not by flat, but by

shaded maps, and topographical and scenic descriptions; not by maps of

to-day only, but by maps (such as Ortelius and the maps in the State

Papers) of Ireland in time past; and, finally, it must be known by the

_eye_. A man who has not raced on our hills, panted on our mountains,

waded our rivers in drought and flood, pierced our passes, skirted our

coast, noted our old towns, and learned the shape and colour of ground

and tree and sky, is not master of all a Balladist's art. Scott knew

Scotland thus, and, moreover, he seems never to have laid a scene in a

place that he had not studied closely and alone.

What we have heretofore advised relates to the Structure, Truth, and

Colouring of ballads; but there is something more needed to raise a

ballad above the beautiful--it must have Force. Strong passions, daring

invention, vivid sympathy for great acts--these are the result of one's

whole life and nature. Into the temper and training of "A Poet," we do

not presume to speak. Few have spoken wisely of them. Emerson, in his

recent essay, has spoken like an angel on the mission of "The Poet."

Ambition for pure power (not applause); passionate sympathy with the

good, and strong, and beautiful; insight into nature, and such loving

mastery over its secrets as a husband hath over a wife's mind, are the

surest tests of one "called" by destiny to tell to men the past,

present, and future, in words so perfect that generations shall feel

and remember.

We merely meant to give some "Hints on the Properties of Historical

Ballads"--they will be idle save to him who has the mind of a Poet.

---------------------------------------------------------------

[48] A "Ballad History of Ireland."

THE SONGS OF IRELAND.[49]

There are great gaps in Irish song to be filled up. This is true even

of the songs of the Irish-speaking people. Many of the short snatches

preserved among them from olden times are sweet and noble; but the bulk

of the songs are very defective. Most of those hitherto in use were

composed during the last century, and therefore their structure is

irregular, their grief slavish and despairing, their joy reckless and

bombastic, their religion bitter and sectarian, their politics Jacobite

and concealed by extravagant and tiresome allegory. Ignorance,

disorder, and every kind of oppression weakened and darkened the lyric

genius of Ireland. Even these, such as they are, diminish daily in the

country, and a lower class comes in. We have before us a number of the

ballads now printed at Cork, in Irish, and English and Irish mixed.

They are little above the street ballads in the English tongue. If

Hardiman's and Daly's collections be fair specimens (as we believe they

are) of the Irish Jacobite songs, we should not care to have more than

a few of them given to the people; but, perhaps, there may be twenty,

which, if printed clearly in slips, would sell as ballads in the Irish

districts.

Assuming that the morsels given in O'Reilly's catalogue of Irish

writers do not exaggerate the merits of the older bards, their works

would supply numberless pastoral, love, joy, wailing, and war songs. A

popular editor of these could condense them into three or four verses

each--cut them so as exactly to suit the airs, preserve the local and

broad historical allusions, but remove the clumsy ornaments and

exaggerations. This is what Ramsay, Burns, and Cunningham did with the

Lowland Scotch songs, and thus made them what they are--the best in

Europe. This need not prevent complete editions of these songs in

learned books; but such books are for libraries, not cabins.

There is one want, however, in _all_ the Irish songs--it is of strictly

national lyrics. They are national in form and colour, but clannish in

opinion. In fact, from Brian's death, there was no thought of an Irish

nation, save when some great event, like Aodh O'Neill's march to

Munster, or Owen Roe's victory at Beinnburb, flashed and vanished.

These songs celebrate M'Carthy or O'More, O'Connor or O'Neill--_his_

prowess, _his_ following, _his_ hospitality; but they cry down his

Irish or "more than Irish" neighbour as fiercely as they do the foreign

oppressor. True it is, you will find amid the flight of minstrels one

bolder than the rest, who mourns for the time when the Milesians

swayed, and tells that "a soul has come into Eire," and summons all the

Milesian tribes to battle for Ireland. But even in the seventeenth

century, when the footing of the Norman and Saxon in Ireland was as

sure as that of the once-invading Milesians themselves, we find the cry

purely to the older Irish races, and the bounds of the nation made, not

by the island, but by genealogy.

We may remark, in passing, that on no hypothesis did these same

Milesians form more than the aristocracy of ancient Ireland--a class--a

race of conquerors.

Dr. MacHale has made a noble attempt to supply this deficiency by his

translation of Moore into Irish; but we are told that the language of

his translation is too literary, and that the people do not relish

these songs. A stronger reason for their failure (if in so short a time

their fate can be judged) is, that the originals want the idiom and

colour of the country, and are too subtle in thought. This remark does

not apply to Moore's love songs, not to some, at least, of his

political lyrics, and we cannot doubt that, if translated into

vernacular Irish, and printed as ballads, they would succeed. For the

present nothing better can be done than to paraphrase the _Songs of the

Nation_ into racy and musical Irish; though a time may come when

someone born amid the Irish tongue, reared amid Gaelic associations,

instructed in the state of modern Ireland, and filled with passion and

prophecy, shall sing the union and destiny of all the races settled on

Irish ground, till the vales of Munster and the cliffs of Connaught

ring with the words of Nationality.

But whatever may be done by translation and editing for the songs of

the Irish-speaking race, those of our English-speaking countrymen are

to be written. Moore, Griffin, Banim, and Callanan have written plenty

of songs. Those of Moore have reached the drawing rooms; but what do

the People know even of his? Buy a ballad in any street in Ireland,

from the metropolis to the village, and you will find in it, perhaps,

some humour, some tenderness, and some sweetness of sound; but you will

certainly find bombast, or slander, or coarseness, united in all cases

with false rhythm, false rhyme, conceited imagery, black paper, and

blotted printing. A high class of ballads would do immense good--the

present race demean and mislead the people as much as they stimulate

them; for the sale of these ballads is immense, and printers in Dublin,

Drogheda, Cork, and Belfast live by their sale exclusively. Were an

enterprising man to issue the choice songs of Drennan, Griffin, Moore,

on good paper, and well printed, he would make a fortune of "halfpenny

ballads."

The Anglo-Irish songs, though most of the last century, are generally

indecent or factious. The cadets of the Munster Protestants, living

like garrison soldiers, drinking, racing, and dancing, wrote the one

class. The clergy of the Ulster Presbyterians wrote the other. "The

Rakes of Mallow" and "The Protestant Boys" are choice specimens of the

two classes--vigorous, and musical, and Irish, no doubt, but surely not

fit for this generation.

Great opportunities came with the Volunteers and United Irishmen, but

the men were wanting. We have but one good Volunteer song. It was

written by Lysaght, after that illustrious militia was dissolved.

Drennan's "Wake of William Orr" is not a song; but he gave the United

Men the only good song they had--"When Erin First Rose." In "Paddy's

Resource," the text-book of the men who were "up," there is but one

tolerable song--"God Save the Rights of Man;" nor, looking beyond

these, can we think of anything of a high class but "The Sean Bhean

Bhochd," "The Wearing of the Green," Lysaght's "Island," and Reynolds'

"Erin-go-bragh," if it be his.

Two of Lady Morgan's songs, "Savournah Dilis" and "Kate Kearney," have

certainly gone through all classes; and perhaps we might add a little

to these exceptions; but it is a sad fact that most of the few good

songs we have described are scarce, and are never printed in a ballad

shape.

There is plenty, then, for the present race of Irish lyrists to do.

They have a great heritage in the national music. It has every

excellence and every variety. It is not needful for a writer of our

songs to be a musician, though he will certainly gain much accuracy and

save much labour to others and himself by being so. Moore is a musician

of great attainments, and Burns used to compose his songs when going

over, and over, and over the tune with or without words. But constantly

listening to the playing of Irish airs will enable any man with a

tolerable ear, and otherwise qualified, to write words to them.

Here, we would give two cautions. First--that the airs in Moore's

Melodies are very corrupt, and should never be used for the study of

Irish music. This is even more true of Lover's tunes. There is no need

of using them, for Bunting's and Holden's collections are cheaper, and

contain pure settings. Secondly--that as there are hundreds of the

finest airs to which no English words have been written, and as the

effect of a song is greatly increased by having one set of words always

joined with one tune, our versifiers should carefully avoid the airs to

which Moore, Griffin, or any other Irishman has written even moderately

good words.

In endeavouring to learn an air for the purpose of writing words to it,

the first care should, of course, be to get at its character--as gay,

hopeful, loving, sentimental, lively, hesitating, woeful, despairing,

resolute, fiery, or variable. Many Irish airs take a different

character when played fast or slow, lightly or strongly; but there is

some one mode of playing which is best of all, and the character

expressed by it must determine the character of the words. For nothing

can be worse than a gay song to calm music, or massive words to a

delicate air; in all cases _the tune must suggest, and will suggest, to

the lyrist the sentiment of the words_.

The tune will, of course, fix the number of lines in a verse.

Frequently the number and order of the lines can be varied. Three

rhymes and a fall, or couplets, or alternate rhymes, may answer the

same set of notes; or rhymes, if too numerous, may be got rid of by

making one long, instead of two short lines. Where the same notes come

with emphasis at the ends of musical phrases, the words should rhyme,

in order to secure the full effect. The doubling two lines into one is

most convenient where the first has accents on both the last syllables,

for you thus escape the necessity of double rhyming. In the softer airs

the effect of this is rather agreeable than otherwise.

Talking of double rhymes, they are peculiarly fitted for strong

political and didactic songs, for the abstract and political words in

English are chiefly of Latin origin, of considerable length and

gravity, and have double accents. The more familiar English words

(which best suit most songs) contain few doubly-accented terminations,

and are, therefore, little fitted for double rhyming.

Expletive syllables in the beginning of lines where the tune is sharp

and gay are often an improvement, but they should never follow a double

rhyme.

In strong and firm tunes, having a syllable for every note is a

perfection, though one hard to be attained without harshness, from the

crowd of consonants in English. With soft tunes, on the other hand, it

is commonly better to have in most lines two or more light notes to one

syllable, so that the words may be dwelt on and softly sounded; but

where and how must be determined by the taste of the writer.

The sound of the air will always show the current of thought, its

pauses and changes; and a nice attention and bold sympathy with these

properties of a tune is necessary to lyrical success.

A great advantage, too, of writing for existing airs is the variety of

metres thus gained, and the naturally greater variety of thought and

expression thus suggested.

We have spoken, in reference to Ballads, of the use of Choruses and

Burdens, and said that we thought there were some Ballads which were

injured by them; but all songs, save (perhaps) those of desperate

sorrow, gain by burden lines and choruses. They are almost universal in

the Native Irish and Lowland Scotch. Beranger has employed them in most

of his songs, and Moore in many of his. A chorus should, of course,

contain the very spirit of the song--bounding, if it be gay; fierce, if

it be bold; doting, if it loves. Merely repeating one verse between, or

at the head or tail of another, is not putting a chorus; it must be

_the_ verse which beats the best on your ear, and has the most echo in

your heart. So, too, of burdens; they are not made merely by bringing

in the same words in like places. They must be marked words forcibly

brought in.

Irish choruses have often a glorious effect in English songs, nor need

anyone familiar with the peasantry, or with Edward O'Reilly's Irish

Writers, published as the first part of the _Transactions of the

Iberno-Celtic Society_ be at any loss for them.

These are some of the minutiae of song-writing, which we note for the

consideration of our young writers, leaving them to add to or modify

these, according to their observation.

Of course, different men and different moods will produce various

classes of songs. We shall have places for all, Songs for the Street

and Field require simple words, bold, strong imagery, plain, deep

passions (love, patriotism, conciliation, glory, indignation, resolve),

daring humour, broad narrative, highest morals. In songs for the

wealthier classes, greater subtlety, remoter allusion, less obvious

idiom and construction, will be tolerable, though in all cases we think

simplicity and heartiness needful to the perfect success of a song.

If men able to write will fling themselves gallantly and faithfully on

the work we have here plotted for them, we shall soon have Fair and

Theatre, Concert and Drawing-room, Road and Shop, echoing with Songs

bringing home Love, Courage, and Patriotism to every heart.

---------------------------------------------------------------

[49] This essay, together with another of less value, was reprinted

from _The Nation_ by M. J. Barry as an introduction to his "Songs

of Ireland" 1845. [Ed.]

INFLUENCES OF EDUCATION.

"Educate, that you may be free." We are most anxious to get the quiet,

strong-minded People who are scattered through the country to see the

force of this great truth; and we therefore ask them to listen soberly

to us for a few minutes, and when they have done to think and talk

again and again over what we say.

If Ireland had all the elements of a nation, she might, and surely

would, at once assume the forms of one, and proclaim her independence.

Wherein does she now differ from Prussia? She has a strong and compact

territory, girt by the sea; Prussia's lands are open and flat, and

flung loosely through Europe, without mountain or river, breed or

tongue, to bound them. Ireland has a military population equal to the

recruitment of, and a produce able to pay, a first-rate army. Her

harbours, her soil, and her fisheries are not surpassed in Europe.

Wherein, we ask again, does Ireland now differ from Prussia? Why can

Prussia wave her flag among the proudest in Europe, while Ireland is a

farm?

It is not in the name of a kingdom, nor in the formalities of

independence. We could assume them to-morrow--we could assume them with

better warrants from history and nature than Prussia holds; but the

result of such assumption would perchance be a miserable defeat.

The difference is in Knowledge. Were the offices of Prussia abolished

to-morrow--her colleges and schools levelled--her troops disarmed and

disbanded, she would within six months regain her whole civil and

military institutions. Ireland has been struggling for years, and may

have to struggle many more, to acquire liberty to form institutions.

Whence is the difference? Knowledge!

The Prussians could, at a week's notice, have their central offices at

full work in any village in the kingdom, so exactly known are their

statistics, and so general is official skill. Minds make

administration--all the desks, and ledgers, and powers of Downing

Street or the Castle would be handed in vain to the ignorants of ----

any untaught district in Ireland. The Prussians could open their

collegiate classes and their professional and elementary schools as

fast as the order therefor, from any authority recognised by the

People, reached town after town--we can hardly in ten years get a few

schools open for our people, craving for knowledge as they are. The

Prussians could re-arm their glorious militia in a month, and

re-organise it in three days; for the mechanical arts are very

generally known, military science is familiar to most of the wealthier

men, discipline and a soldier's skill are universal. If we had been

offered arms to defend Ireland by Lord Heytesbury, as the Volunteers

were by Lord Buckinghamshire, we would have had to seek for officers

and drill-sergeants--though probably we could more rapidly advance in

arms than anything else, from the military taste and aptness for war of

the Irish People.

Would it not be better for us to be like the Prussians than as we

are--better to have religious squabbles unknown, education universal,

the People fed, and clad, and housed, and independent as becomes men;

the army patriotic and strong; the public offices ably administered;

the nation honoured and powerful? Are not these to be desired and

sought by Protestant and Catholic? Are not these things _to be done_,

if we are good and brave men? And is it not _plain_, from what we have

said, that the reason for our not being all that Prussia is, and

something more, is ignorance--want of civil and military and general

knowledge amongst all classes?

This ignorance has not been our fault, but our misfortune. It was the

interest of our ruler to keep us ignorant, that we might be weak; and

she did so--first by laws, prohibiting education; then by refusing any

provision for it; next, by perverting it into an engine of bigotry; and

now, by giving it in a stunted, partial, anti-national way. Practice is

the great teacher, and the possession of independence is the natural

and best way for a People to learn all that pertains to freedom and

happiness. Our greatest voluntary efforts, aided by the amplest

provincial institutions, would teach us less in a century than we would

learn in five years of Liberty.

In insisting on education we do not argue against the value of

_immediate independence_. _That would be our best teacher._ An Irish

Government and a national ambition would be to our minds as soft rains

and rich sun to a growing crop. But we insist on education for the

People, whether we get it from the Government or give it to themselves

as a round-about, and yet the only, means of getting strength enough to

gain freedom.

Do our readers understand this? Is what we have said _clear_ to _you_,

reader!--whether you are a shopkeeper or a lawyer, a farmer or a

doctor? If not, read it over again, for it is your own fault if it be

not clear. If you now know our meaning, you must feel that it is your

duty to your family and to yourself, to your country and to God, to

_act_ upon it, to go and remove some of that ignorance which makes you

and your neighbours weak, and therefore makes Ireland a poor province.

All of us have much to learn, but some of us have much to teach.

To those who, from superior energy and ability, can teach the People,

we now address ourselves.

We have often before and shall often again repeat, that the majority of

our population can neither read nor write, and therefore that from the

small minority must come those fitted to be of any civil or military

use beyond the lowest rank. The People may be and are honest, brave,

and intelligent; but a man could as well dig with his hands as govern,

or teach, or lead without the elements of Knowledge.

This however, is a defect which time and the National Schools must

cure; and the duty of the class to which we speak is to urge the

establishment of such Schools, the attendance of the children at them,

and occasionally to observe and report, either directly or through the

Press, whether the admirable rules of the Board are attended to. In

most cases, too, the expenditure of a pound-note and a little time and

advice would give the children of a school that instruction in national

history and in statistics so shamefully omitted by the Board. Reader!

will you do this?

Then of the three hundred Repeal Reading-rooms we know that some, and

fear that many, are ill-managed, have few or no books, and are mere

gossiping-rooms. Such a room is useless; such a room is a disgrace to

its members and their educated neighbours. The expense having been gone

to of getting a room, it only remains for the members to establish

fixed rules, and they will be supplied with the Association Reports

(political reading enough for them), and it will be the plain duty of

the Repeal Wardens to bring to such a room the newspapers supplied by

the Association. If such a body continue and give proofs of being in

earnest, the Repeal Association will aid it by gifts of books, maps,

etc., and thus a library, the centre of knowledge and nursery of useful

and strong minds, will be made in that district. So miserably off is

the country for books, that we have it before us on some authority that

there are _ten counties in Ireland without a single book-seller in

them_. We blush for the fact; it is a disgrace to us; but we must have

no lying or flinching. There is the hard fact; let us face it like men

who are able for a difficulty--not as children putting their heads

under the clothes when there is danger. Reader! cannot you do something

to remedy this great, this disabling misery of Ireland? Will not you

_now_ try to get up a Repeal Reading-room, and when one is established

get for it good rules, books from the Association, and make it a centre

of thought and power?

These are but some of the ways in which such service can be done by the

more for the less educated. They have other duties often pointed out by

us. They can sustain and advance the different societies for promoting

agriculture, manufactures, art, and literature in Dublin and the

country. They can set on foot and guide the establishment of Temperance

Bands, and Mechanics' Institutes, and Mutual Instruction Societies.

They can give advice and facilities for improvement to young men of

promise; and they can make their circles studious, refined, and

ambitious, instead of being, like too many in Ireland, ignorant,

coarse, and lazy. The cheapness of books is now such that even Irish

poverty is no excuse for Irish ignorance--that ignorance which

prostrates us before England. We must help ourselves, and therefore we

must educate ourselves.

FOREIGN TRAVEL.

We lately strove to induce our wealthier countrymen to explore Ireland

before they left her shores in search of the beautiful and curious. We

bid the economist search our towns and farms, our decayed manufactures,

and improving tillage. Waving our shillelagh, we shouted the cragsman

to Glenmalure and Carn Tual, and Achill and Slieve League. Manuscript

in hand, we pointed the antiquary to the hundred abbeys of North

Munster, the castles of the Pale, the palaces and sepulchres of

Dunalin, Aileach, Rath Croghan, and Loughcrew, and we whispered to our

countrywomen that the sun rose grandly on Adragool, that the moon was

soft on Lough Erne ("The Rural Venice"), and that the Nore and

Blackwater ran by castled crags like their sweet voices over old songs.

But there are some who had not waited for our call, but had dutifully

grown up amid the sights and sounds of Ireland, and knew the yellow

fields of Tipperary, and the crash of Moher's wave, and the basalt

barriers of Antrim, and the moan or frown of Wexford over the graves of

'98, and there are others not yet sufficiently educated to prize home

excellence. To such, then, and to all our brethren and sisters going

abroad, we have to say a friendly word.

We shall presume them to have visited London, Woolwich, the factories

of Lancashire and Warwick, and to have seen the Cumberland lakes, and

therefore to have seen all worth seeing in England, and that they are

bound for somewhere else. For a pedestrian not rich there is Wales--the

soft vales of the far North and South Clwyd, and the Wye and Llanrwst,

and the central mountain groups of Snowdon, and still finer of Cader

Idris. But if he go there we pray him not to return without having

heard and, so far as he could, noted down a few airs from the harp and

cruit, collected specimens of the plants and minerals of Wales for the

museum (existing or to be) of his native town, studied the statistics

of their great iron works or their little home-weaving; nor, if he has

had the sense and spirit to take a Welsh and an Irish vocabulary,

without some observations on the disputed analogy of the two languages,

and how far it exists in general terms, as it certainly does in names

of places. By the way, we warn him that he will know little of the

peasantry, and come home in the dark about Rebecca, unless he can speak

Welsh. The Welsh have been truer to their language than we were to

ours; their clergy ministered in it; their people refused their tongues

to the Saxon as if 'twere poison; and even their nobles, though tempted

by England, welcomed the bard who lamented the defeat of Rhuddlan, and

gloried in the frequent triumphs of Glendower.

But let us rather classify pursuits than countries.

We want the Irish who go abroad to bring something back besides the

weary tale of the Louvre and Munich, and the cliffs of the Rhine, and

the soft airs of Italy. We have heard of a patriot adventurer who

carried a handful of his native soil through the world. We want our

friends to carry a purpose for Ireland in their hearts, to study other

lands wisely, and to bring back all knowledge for the sustenance and

decoration of their dear home.

How pleasantly and profitably for the traveller this can be done. There

is no taste but may be interested, no capacity but can be matched, no

country but can be made tributary to our own. The historian, the

linguist, the farmer, the economist, the musician, the statesman, and

the man of science can equally augment their pleasure and make it

minister to Ireland.

Is a man curious upon our language? He can (not unread in Neilson, nor

unaccompanied by O'Reilly's Dictionary) trace how far the Celtic words

mixed in the classical French, or in the patois of Bretagne or Gascony,

coincide with the Irish; he can search in the mountains of North Spain,

whether in proper names or country words there be any analogy to the

Gaelic of the opposite coast of Ireland.

The proper names are the most permanent, and if there be any truth in

Sir William Betham's theories, the names of many a hill and stream in

Tuscany, North Africa, and Syria ought to be traceable to an Irish

root. Nor need this language-search be limited to the south. Beginning

at the Isle of Man, up by Cumberland (the kingdom of Strath Clyde),

through Scotland, Denmark, Norway, to Ireland, the constant intercourse

in trade and war with Ireland, and in many instances the early

occupation by a Celtic race, must have left indelible marks in the

local names, if not the traditions, of the country. To the tourist in

France we particularly recommend a close study of the _History of the

Gauls_, by Amadeus Thierry.

The student of our ecclesiastical history, whether he hold with Dr.

Smiles that the Irish Church was independent, or with Dr. Miley, that

it paid allegiance to Rome, may delight in following the tracks of the

Irish saints, from Iona of the Culdees to Luxieu and Boia (founded by

Columbanus), and St. Gall, founded by an Irishman of that name. Rumold

can be heard of in Mechlin, Albhuin in Saxony, Kilian in Bavaria,

Fursey in Peronne, and in far Tarentum the traveller will find more

than one trace of the reformer of that city--the Irishman, St.

Cathaldus. We cannot suppose that any man will stray from Stackallen,

or Maynooth at least, without keeping this purpose in mind, nor would

it misbecome a divine from that Trinity College of which Ussher was a

first Fellow.

Our military history could also receive much illustration from Irish

travellers going with some previous knowledge and studying the

traditions and ground, and using the libraries in the neighbourhood of

those places where Irishmen fought. Not to go back to the Irish who (if

we believe O'Halloran) stormed the Roman Capital as the allies of

Brennus of Gaul, nor insisting upon too minute a search for that Alpine

valley where, says MacGeoghegan, they still have a tradition of Dathy's

death by lightning, there are plenty of places worth investigating in

connection with Irish military history. In Scotland, for example,

'twere worth while tracking the march of Alaster MacDomhnall and his

1,500 Antrim men from their first landing at Ardnamurchan through

Tippermiur, Aberdeen, Fivy, Inverlochy, and Aulderne, to

Kilsyth--victories, won by Irish soldiers and chiefs, given to them by

tradition, as even Scott admits, though he tries to displace its value

for Montrose's sake, and given to them by the highest cotemporary

authorities--such as the Ormond papers.

Then there is the Irish Brigade. From Almanza to Fontenoy, from

Ramillies to Cremona, we have the names of their achievements, but the

register of them is in the libraries and war offices and private papers

of France, and Spain, and Austria, and Savoy. A set of visits to Irish

battle-fields abroad, illustrated from the manuscripts of Paris,

Vienna, and Madrid, would be a welcomer book than the reiterated

assurances that the Rhone was rapid, the Alps high, and Florence rich

in sculpture, wherewith we have been dinned.

We have no lives of our most illustrious Irish generals in foreign

services--Marshal Brown, the Lacys, Montgomery of Donegal, the rival of

Washington; and yet the materials must exist in the offices and

libraries of Austria, Russia, and America.

Talking of libraries, there is one labour in particular we wish our

countrymen to undertake. The constant emigration of the princes,

nobles, and ecclesiastics of Ireland, from the Reformation downwards,

scattered through the Continent many of our choicest collections. The

manuscripts from these have been dispersed by gift and sale among

hundreds of foreign libraries. The Escurial, Vienna, Rome, Paris, and

Copenhagen are said to be particularly rich in them, and it cannot be

doubted that in every considerable library (religious, official, or

private) on the Continent some MSS. valuable to Ireland would be found.

In many cases these could be purchased, in some copied, in all listed.

The last is the most practical and essential labour. It would check and

guide our inquiries now, and would prepare for the better day, when we

can negotiate the restoration of our old muniments from the governments

of Europe.

A study of the monuments and museums throughout France, Spain, Italy,

and Scandinavia, in reference to the forts, tombs, altars, and weapons

of ancient Ireland, would make a summer pleasant and profitable.

But we would not limit men to the study of the past.

Our agriculture is defective, and our tenures are abominable. It were

well worth the attention of the travelling members of the Irish

Agricultural Society to bring home accurate written accounts of the

tenures of land, the breeds of cattle, draining, rotation, crops,

manures, and farm-houses, from Belgium or Norway, Tuscany or Prussia.

Our mineral resources and water-power are unused. A collection of

models or drawings, or descriptions of the mining, quarrying, and

hydraulic works of Germany, England, or France, might be found most

useful for the Irish capitalist who made it, and for his country which

so needs instruction. Besides, even though many of these things be

described already, yet how much more vivid and practical were the

knowledge to be got from observation.

Our fine or useful arts are rude or decayed, and our industrial and

general education very inferior. The schools and galleries, museums and

educational systems of Germany deserve the closest examination with

reference to the knowledge and taste required in Ireland, and the means

of giving them. One second-rate book of such observations, with special

reference to Ireland, were worth many greater performances unapplied to

the means and need of our country.

Ireland wants all these things. Before this generation dies, it must

have made Ireland's rivers navigable, and its hundred harbours secure

with beacon and pier, and thronged with seamen educated in naval

schools, and familiar with every rig and every ocean. Arigna must be

pierced with shafts, and Bonmahon flaming with smelting-houses. Our

bogs must have become turf-factories, where fuel will be husbanded, and

prepared for the smelting-house. Our coal must move a thousand engines,

our rivers ten thousand wheels.