"1! 
 
 i 
 
 llll' 1 
 
 iiiiii
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 
 Ex Libris 
 ISAAC FOOT
 
 NOVA HIBERNIA
 
 BY MICHAEL M ON AH AN 
 
 AT THE SIGN OF THE VAN 
 ADVENTURES IN LIFE AND LETTERS 
 HEINRICH HEINE 
 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 
 NOVA H1BERNIA
 
 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 IRISH POETS AND DRAMATISTS 
 OF TODAY AND YESTERDAY 
 
 BY 
 MICHAEL MONAHAN 
 
 in 
 
 m 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
 
 1914
 
 COPYRIGHT 1914, BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
 
 %' 
 
 TRK n.IMrTON TRESS 
 NORWOODMASSU-S-A
 
 TO 
 
 CAPTAIN MITCHELL McDONALD 
 
 A man out of Plutarch, who in our day has 
 revived the heroic legend of friendship, 
 this book of Irish heroes is in- 
 scribed, with every senti- 
 ment of honour and 
 affection by his 
 friend 
 
 The Author 
 New York, January, 1914
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 page 
 
 Nova Hibernia 
 
 3 
 
 Yeats and Synge 
 
 13 
 
 The Matter with the " Playboy " 
 
 30 
 
 Thomas Moore 
 
 38 
 
 Poet and Patriot 
 
 45 
 
 The Poet's Censors 
 
 53 
 
 The Lyrist 
 
 61 
 
 Lalla Rookh 
 
 78 
 
 His Prose 
 
 90 
 
 Critical Depreciation 
 
 96 
 
 A Famous Duel 
 
 105 
 
 His Personality 
 
 "3 
 
 Irish Prejudice against Moore 
 
 121 
 
 James Clarence Mangan 
 
 125 
 
 A Militant Poet 
 
 135 
 
 Thomas Osborne Davis 
 
 149 
 
 Gerald Griffin 
 
 168 
 
 Callanan, the Bard of Gougaune Barra 
 
 186 
 
 Irish Balladry 
 
 197 
 
 Doctor Maginn 
 
 203 
 
 Note on Grantley Berkley 
 
 232 
 
 Father Prout 
 
 236 
 
 Richard Brinsley Sheridan 
 
 267
 
 NOVA HIBERNIA
 
 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 THE first hint we had of it was in a 
 manner unlooked-for enough. My old 
 friend, Captain Costigan, looked in at the 
 Cave of Harmony the other night, after see- 
 ing the Fotheringay home from one of her 
 undoubted triumphs. I should mention that 
 she had just come in from the provinces and 
 had made a brilliant rentree. The London 
 critics still hesitated as to the true value of her 
 acting, — blinded by the very splendour of her 
 "janius," as Costigan would have it, — but in 
 spite of their flimsy reservations, she went on 
 her conquering way. 
 
 The metropolis was now at her feet. 
 Never did she seem more beautiful; never 
 was her impassive self-content more strikingly 
 manifest. Her admirers, enviously dubbed 
 the Costigan claque, called it a divine Ian-
 
 4 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 guor, the repose of genius and conscious 
 power. Her detractors affirmed that it was 
 mere animal stupidity; that she continued to 
 act, as in the days of Mr. Thackeray, with an 
 utter incapability of real passion — some of 
 them even said, with a very slight degree of 
 common intelligence. Howbeit, the Siddons 
 herself did not compel all suffrages, and as the 
 Captain finely said, there is always a skulking 
 cloud whose office it is to shut out the sun — 
 though, perhaps, the moon would be a neater 
 simile. 
 
 On this night of my story the Fotheringay 
 had played Juliet in a manner worthy of the 
 best traditions of the stage. I myself had it 
 on the excellent authority of the Captain, 
 whose eyes moistened and whose tongue 
 tripped a little as he recounted for us the fer- 
 vid encomiums of the foyer. A whisper went 
 round the company that a certain young gen- 
 tleman of good family — a Mr. Pendennis, I 
 think, and a nephew of the famous clubman 
 — had been hard hit by the Fotheringay; and
 
 NOVA HIBERNIA 5 
 
 it was added that the eclat of this night's 
 performance would probably clinch the con- 
 quest. Captain Costigan hears well when he 
 likes, but of this piece of gossip he seemed 
 discreetly oblivious. 
 
 Something in my old friend's manner be- 
 tokened that there was more on his mind than 
 the latest triumph of his gifted daughter, and 
 we were soon to learn what it was. I may 
 say that the late Mr. Thackeray, in his me- 
 moirs of Captain Costigan, has hinted ob- 
 scurely at the alleged bibulous propensities of 
 that gallant gentleman and soldier. In this I 
 am afraid Mr. Thackeray, with all his genius, 
 betrayed the insular prejudice of his nation. 
 It is also true that in his printed recollections 
 Mr. Thackeray (who wrote much on high life 
 and plumed himself on his acquaintance with 
 gentility), sometimes fell into the vulgar 
 habit of referring to the Captain as "Cos." 
 The familiarity is one of which I was never a 
 witness, and I doubt if Mr. Thackeray would 
 have taken the liberty with his living sub-
 
 6 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 ject which he has ventured upon in the me- 
 moirs aforesaid. 
 
 As for the Captain's drinking, no friend to 
 his memory would dispute that he took his 
 negus like a man and a gentleman to boot. 
 Captain Costigan was of an extreme sensibil- 
 ity (which, indeed, is common to his race), 
 and his tears flowed easily when he was in the 
 drink. But if this is to form an indictment 
 against him, you will be making a sad busi- 
 ness of history. 
 
 The word recalls me. Captain Costigan, 
 after comforting himself with a mixture 
 steaming hot and fragrant, coughed with a 
 slight emphasis that the company might note 
 him, and then, laying a hand on his breast, 
 said in a tone of strong feeling: 
 
 "Gentlemen, to-night at least it shall not be 
 said of me, as of Polonius in the play, 'still 
 harping on his daughter.' Gratifying to my 
 pathernal pride as are these testimonies to the 
 histhrionic janius of her who is the light of my 
 life" — here the Captain was overcome by a
 
 NOVA HIBERNIA 7 
 
 natural emotion, but gathering himself to- 
 gether, went on bravely — "and whose tinder 
 feet I have guided up the steep iminence of 
 fame, my bosom now swells with a weightier 
 cause of joy. It is not for Jack Costigan to 
 boast, gentlemen, but the pathriot comes be- 
 fore the father. Less than a half hour ago I 
 had it from my brilliant young friend 'Boz' 
 — I should say Mr. Charles Dickens of the 
 press — that the Ministry has brought in a bill 
 of Home Rule for Ireland, which is accept- 
 able to all factions of my countrymen at 
 Westminster save the few who can pipe to no 
 tune less thruculent than the 'Boyne Water.' 
 Gentlemen, the imperishable glory of render- 
 ing long delayed justice to my counthry has 
 fallen to the Tories, in spite of nearly two 
 centuries of hollow profession by the Whigs.* 
 The distinies of the Briiish Empire are se- 
 cured by this act of a magnanimous policy. 
 
 * In view of history now in the making, this trifling error 
 may be pardoned the speaker, should the major event be 
 fulfilled.
 
 8 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 I call on you to fill your glasses and drink, 
 without heel-taps, to Nova Hibernia!" 
 
 A burst of applause followed the Captain's 
 speech, and as with our gallant and lamented 
 friend, it was always a word and a song, you 
 may be sure it wasn't long before he gave us 
 in his best voice Ned Lysaght's fervid ditty, 
 "Our Island." And how the glasses rang 
 and the lights tipped at us as he intoned the 
 sentiment 1 — 
 
 For, ah! 'tis our dear native island, 
 A fertile and fine little island. 
 
 May Orange and Green 
 
 No longer be seen 
 Bestained with the blood of our island! 
 
 Nor did we let him off with that. Indeed 
 before the party broke up, the honest Cap- 
 tain had quite sung himself out. But I shall 
 not soon forget how he trolled the "Monks of 
 the Screw," and we made a chorus of it that 
 would have gladdened the heart of Prior 
 Jack Curran himself.
 
 NOVA HIBERNIA 9 
 
 Ah, me! was it a dream what the Captain 
 said and the merry company pledged in the 
 Cave of Harmony, — a whimsical dream turn- 
 ing a fair hope, as so often before, into loss 
 and derision? God forbid! It is something 
 to have lived for if we shall see that People 
 take its rightful place after how much oppres- 
 sion and scorn and weary misdirected effort! 
 If this thing shall be, of a truth, I shall hail 
 as its first sign the passing of that species of 
 Irishman whose few good qualities have not 
 weighed with the amount of shame he has 
 brought upon us. He does not show himself 
 so often in real life to-day; is not so busy pos- 
 ing and sentimentalising as of yore; now play- 
 ing the buffoon covetous of laughter and care- 
 less of ridicule, and anon making a pitiful 
 display of touched dignity or wounded pride. 
 I hope it may not be long ere it will be a 
 genuine curiosity to find him slobbering, hec- 
 toring, bragging and begging in the merciless 
 pages of Thackeray. 
 
 It seems to me an added touch of mockery
 
 io NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 to the misfortunes of Ireland that a maudlin 
 patriotism has at all times existed as a libel 
 on the national character. The professional 
 aspect which it has often assumed, the postur- 
 ing, bad taste and rhetorical extravagance 
 which have always marked it, have never 
 failed to draw the shafts of a hostile criticism, 
 and to offer a fair mark for the humours of 
 caricature. Both have overdone their work, 
 but it cannot be denied that there has been a 
 basis of truth for the libel. No Englishman 
 ever understood the Irish character better 
 than the creator of Costigan — who, by the 
 way, is not offensive on the score of patriotism. 
 Few writers have dealt with us more unspar- 
 ingly, though he was too great not to mingle a 
 certain saving kindness with his sharpest 
 satire. He might have been more kind and 
 more just. The mind which conceived Colonel 
 Newcome, the "best gentleman in fiction," 
 was easily capable of it. Major O'Dowd 
 will hardly serve us instead, though as little
 
 NOVA HIBERNIA u 
 
 pains as Thackeray took with him, he is worth 
 most of the Irishmen in fiction. 
 
 Since the Celtic Renaissance began, with 
 its deep spiritual and patriotic motive, with 
 its literary marvels as if owing to a new de- 
 scent of Fiery Tongues, — the one troubling of 
 the pool in these latter years so barren of faith 
 and wonder, — the critics, so long hostile or 
 merely contemptuous, have taken to con- 
 sidering us more seriously. This rebirth of 
 genius and spirituality has served Ireland 
 well. More true light, more education 
 will do the rest. The pitiable subjection 
 in which this people has so long been held, 
 — of its own loving, ignorant choice, it must 
 be said, — by a power which has too often 
 mingled politics with religion, is fast giving 
 way. Nay, in a vital sense it is already dis- 
 solved. Neither this power, strong in the 
 grace of age-long reverence and fidelity, nor 
 any other on the earth, will ever again dare 
 dictate a backward step to a people pressing
 
 12 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 forward to the goal of liberty. History will 
 not repeat itself in this regard for the Irish 
 people. 
 
 • •••••* 
 
 So, whether you call it a dream or not, I'll 
 believe it — yes, as though Tim Healy, M. P., 
 instead of Costigan, had told me. The re- 
 frain of Ned Lysaght's ditty is still with me — 
 would that he might hear it, set to the new 
 tune of hope and promise! And so to con- 
 clude, Sir — asking a fair pardon for the 
 few political observations above injected — I 
 pledge you Captain Costigan's toast, 
 
 Nova Hibernia! 
 
 With this addition, 
 
 Esto perpetual
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 
 
 THAT the truest and deepest poetry must 
 often seem a vanity and a foolishness to 
 the world not intimately concerned or spirit- 
 ually indifferent, needs not to be proven: — it 
 is an axiom that instantly recalls Wordsworth 
 in his earlier period, and even more aptly, 
 Blake; and in these latter days, the Irish poets 
 Yeats and Synge. 
 
 Yeats is the poet of the banshee, of the lep- 
 rechaun, of the lonesome Irish wind, of the 
 mystery of the swaying reeds, the murmuring 
 pool, and of all that uncharted realm of the 
 imagination "where there is nothing." But 
 he is a poet, don't forget that, and he has the 
 real frenzy, instead of a literary attachment 
 and a facility of making rhymes. Poetry 
 may be mere moonshine, and in the case of 
 Yeats, it is perhaps only the shadow of moon- 
 
 13
 
 14 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 shine: — still is it the miracle of the human 
 mind, the most authentic proof of the god 
 within us. This the world has ever felt, for 
 the bearer of the sacred fire, the possessor of 
 the true poetical gift, has always held the 
 highest place in the intellectual sphere. 
 
 It is, however, true that the poet threatens 
 to become extinct, like the dodo, and that is 
 the best possible reason why you should make 
 a point of seeing one of the last of the race. 
 An Irish poet, too, for in spite of his English 
 preciosity of style, Yeats has more deeply ex- 
 plored the sources of Irish poetical inspira- 
 tion than any of his forerunners, and he is 
 without a living rival. I do not agree with 
 the too fervid admirers of Mr. Yeats, who 
 would place him even above Moore, one of 
 the world's great lyrists; but I will grant that 
 he often seems more spiritually Irish. His 
 distinction is so rare indeed and the quality of 
 his work so far removed from general appre- 
 ciation, that one is puzzled to account for his 
 extraordinary vogue among his compatriots.
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 15 
 
 Something of it is no doubt referable to the 
 present Celtic renaissance in which Mr. Yeats 
 has borne a foremost part that, even more than 
 his poetry, commends him to the esteem and 
 gratitude of Ireland. 
 
 But it is as a poet that I like to think of 
 him, and it is as a poet that you will be glad 
 to hear and see him. Should you require an 
 introduction to his work, read his verses about 
 "the old priest Peter Gilligan," and if there 
 be a soul in you, it will respond to the awe and 
 mystery of human life, the deep spiritual 
 sense of common things, which this poet is 
 charged to interpret. 
 
 Both Yeats and Synge have left the beaten 
 path in quest of themes congenial to their 
 talent. They have intellectually gone far 
 afield, while actually remaining amongst and 
 taking their subject-matter from their own 
 people. Yet there is nothing unfamiliar, at a 
 first glance, in the material employed by Yeats 
 and Synge, — fairies and leprechauns and all
 
 16 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 manner of "little people'' from the ancient 
 popular mythology; legendary ladies, princes, 
 heroes and champions; fisher folk, farmers, 
 herds, beggars, tinkers, the wayfarers of the 
 road. It is the use they have made of this 
 material, itself a trite and oft turned over 
 stock, that has dignified their productions 
 with the sober name of art. And surely if 
 literature has any miracle to show in these 
 days, lacking which it is not literature but a 
 degraded counterfeit, — it need not go beyond 
 the work of Yeats and Synge. What both 
 men have had the courage to do is (in the 
 words of the former) to "speak of their emo- 
 tions without fear or moral ambition, to come 
 out from under the shadow of other men's 
 minds, to be utterly themselves." Of the two, 
 Yeats is the longer and better known to us as 
 a poet of very rare spiritual distinction: — 
 years ago Arthur Symons praised his work as 
 more thoroughly fulfilling an austere defini- 
 tion of poetry than that of any contemporary. 
 He began an artist and it would be hard to
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 17 
 
 name a modern poet who has so little inferior 
 work to reproach him. He has visited and 
 lectured us, and his work is known to the culti- 
 vated in this country. 
 
 As I have said, Yeats is avowedly given to 
 the mystic and the spiritual, to which his 
 Celtic heritage naturally inclines him; and he 
 has made more of these elements than any pre- 
 ceding Irish poet. Moore, who remains un- 
 rivaled as a lyric melodist singing of love and 
 patriotism and the past glories of Erin, 
 scarcely touched these rich sources of the new 
 Irish poetry: — he lived three-fourths of his 
 life out of Ireland and inevitably his work 
 was conceived mainly in the English literary 
 tradition. There were rarer treasures at 
 home, as we have since discovered, than he 
 went questing for in Khorassan and Cashmere. 
 
 Yeats is easily first in this old but unworked 
 province. He has "staked out his claim," as 
 we say, and made it his own. The discern- 
 ment which he thus evinced as a very young 
 man, no less than the fine confidence in his
 
 i8 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 own powers to make the best of his chosen 
 poetical domain, is not the least notable thing 
 in the story. There is something alien and 
 un-Irish in the calm, consistent, matter-of-fact 
 way that Yeats has gone to work to realise 
 upon his poetical heritage; but this is doubt- 
 less to be laid to the account of early English 
 influences and associations. Both England 
 and Ireland, though not of course in equal 
 measure, went to the making of the poet and 
 artist in Yeats. Ireland, it may be said, gave 
 the vision of things invisible and England the 
 discipline and restraint without which the 
 poet's rarest findings were frittered away in a 
 waste of words. 
 
 Rare poet as is Yeats, he is always the 
 conscious artist, in his prose as in his verse. 
 One could scarcely name another living 
 writer of English whose prose is all that 
 prose should be and yet so worthy of a poet. 
 And prose, he would have us believe, is his 
 left hand. Take this censure upon the de- 
 criers of Synge's first play: — "Some spontane-
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 19 
 
 ous dislike had been but natural, for genius 
 like his can but slowly, amid what it has of 
 harsh and strange, set forth the nobility of its 
 beauty and the depth of its compassion; but 
 the frenzy that would have silenced his 
 master-work was, like most violent things, 
 artificial, the defense of virtue by those that 
 have but little, which is the pomp and gal- 
 lantry of journalism and its right to govern 
 the word." — 
 
 Or this exquisite rebuke to moral partisans 
 and casuists, the plague of Ireland: — "How 
 can one, if one's mind be full of obstructions 
 and images created not for their own sake but 
 for the sake of party, even if there were still 
 the need, find words that delight the ear, make 
 pictures to the mind's eye, discover thoughts 
 that tighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle 
 in the flesh, and stand like St. Michael with 
 the trumpet that calls the body to resurrec- 
 tion?" . . . 
 
 Yeats, though a Protestant or at least a non- 
 Catholic (as also was Synge), has had to
 
 20 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 battle with the mighty prejudice that in Ire- 
 land will not tolerate a man's taking original 
 ground as against the traditional or uni- 
 versally sanctioned position. Nobly he refers 
 to this when he says that "though I was never 
 convinced that the anatomies of last year's 
 leaves are a living forest, or thought a con- 
 tinual apologetic could do other than make 
 the soul a vapour and the body a stone, or be- 
 lieved that literature can be made by anything 
 but by what is still blind and dumb within 
 ourselves, I have had to learn how hard in one 
 who lives where forms of expression and 
 habits of thought have been born, not for the 
 pleasure of begetting, but for the public good, 
 is that purification from insincerity, vanity, 
 malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery 
 of style." 
 
 In Ireland the religion and the moral atti- 
 tude of the great majority, as well as the his- 
 torical position sustaining or thought to be sus- 
 taining these, are against experiments in art 
 that involve any cleavage with "things settled
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 21 
 
 for good and all," and especially for the good 
 of the Catholic laity. Moore, although a 
 loyal Catholic, was never entirely comfortable 
 with this sentiment, and he has suffered from 
 it; Gerald Griffin, rather than take issue with 
 it, hid his great powers in a monastery; Banim 
 became the object of its anathema and aver- 
 sion. These are but a few instances snatched 
 at random. Hence Yeats tells us that the 
 man who doubted the fabulous ancient 
 (Irish) kings running up to Adam, or found 
 but mythology in some old tale, was as hated 
 as if he had doubted the authority of Scrip- 
 ture. Another instance was the riot in the 
 Dublin theatre over the use of the word 
 "shift" (shirt) in Synge's play, as a slander 
 upon Ireland's womanhood! 
 
 Yeats is a good fighter himself, as may be 
 surmised from the extracts given, ready in the 
 furtherance of his ideals to "attack things 
 that are as dear to many as some holy image 
 carried hither and thither by some broken 
 clan." I think it was well for him all the
 
 22 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 same that he was not born and bred in the 
 Catholic majority, where the heart of him 
 might have been broken in his efforts to prove 
 that there is any real source of poetical in- 
 spiration or literary enterprise or historical 
 pride than the Church and the Saints and the 
 legendary kings in Ireland. 
 
 In his poetical one-act drama, "The Green 
 Helmet," full of power and wizardry, Yeats 
 exhibits that divine folly of the poet which 
 transcends the best wisdom of the world. Its 
 lesson should be close taken to heart in Ire- 
 land, maugre the Church, the moral attitude 
 and the historical position: — in Ireland where 
 the poet tells us. 
 
 Neighbour wars on neighbour, and why there is no man 
 
 knows, 
 And if a man is lucky, all wish his luck away, 
 And take his good name from him between a day and a 
 
 day! 
 
 Mr. Yeats is, of course, speaking of a leg- 
 endary Ireland, not later, it may be supposed,
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 23 
 
 than the Tuatha-da-Danaan, those fine old 
 contemporaries of Pharaoh! . . . 
 
 In "Kathleen-ni-Houlihan" Yeats has ex- 
 pressed the destiny of Ireland with the sim- 
 plicity of genius and at the same time a poetic 
 power of vision and feeling which lifts it far 
 above the current dramatic literature of our 
 day. This Playlet would alone justify the 
 Irish literary movement which has caused 
 priests and "patriots" so much anxiety. It is a 
 spiritual treasure, immortal as anything that 
 has come out of Ireland! 
 
 Of Synge, friend and co-worker of Yeats, 
 one must speak less confidently to an Amer- 
 ican audience. Just now attention is fixed 
 upon him by reason of his recent, untimely 
 death, and in no small degree by the splendid 
 tribute of his surviving friend and peer. 
 Yet of the two, waiving the specific gifts of 
 poetry and craftsmanship, I am not sure but 
 that Synge has achieved the more difficult and
 
 24 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 original work. He has certainly startled 
 Irishmen far more and is a tougher bone of 
 contention amongst them. Perhaps also it 
 must be admitted that few besides Irishmen 
 will trouble to try and understand him. For 
 his work involves a reading and comprehen- 
 sion of the Irish peasant character which goes 
 deep under the surface — is, in truth, to all in- 
 tents and purposes, a new reading. A thing 
 both new and true is very rare indeed, and 
 the finding of such a treasure-trove has been 
 the literary fortune of J. M. Synge. 
 
 Nobody ever wrote Irish peasant dialect 
 like Synge, and yet, reading it, one is pene- 
 trated with a sense of its verity, as well as 
 amazed at its lyric beauty, passion, tenderness, 
 hatred, scorn, invective, — the entire gamut of 
 human feeling. That the Irish are a fanci- 
 ful people is tolerably well known, and 
 Synge's work will bring home to many the 
 regrettable fact that they lose much by trans- 
 plantation; while the critic will be forced to 
 admit that a fiery, sincere, passionate and
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 25 
 
 spiritual people, who have remained simple 
 by the grace of God, can speak a natural 
 poetry in their daily lives that owes nothing to 
 literary forms or traditions. No Irish writer 
 has ever made us understand this like Synge, 
 and so completely has he succeeded that we 
 are apt to forget the genius that stands behind 
 his puppets, and in the reading we go back 
 again and again to marvel at this wonderful 
 peasant speech — this dialect that in the essen- 
 tials of true poetry puts to blush so many 
 pages of "fine literature!" So deep is the 
 illusion produced that we take his word for it 
 when the artist assures us that the wildest 
 sayings in his "Playboy of the Western 
 World" are tame indeed compared with the 
 fancies one may hear at any little hillside cot- 
 tage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. 
 On reflection, we see that the originality of 
 the artist is in no wise questioned — everything 
 has undergone the transmuting touch of 
 genius. 
 
 Mr. Yeats pronounces this play "the
 
 26 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 strangest, the most beautiful expression in 
 drama of that Irish fantasy which, overflow- 
 ing through all Irish literature that has come 
 out of Ireland itself, is the unbroken charac- 
 ter of Irish genius." 
 
 This is high praise and less competent 
 critics than Yeats are even more eulogistic. 
 I believe, however, that Synge was but find- 
 ing himself and that we should have had 
 greater work from him had he not been cut 
 off under his fortieth year. So I think highly 
 of the sombre little drama, "Riders to the 
 Sea," but I should hesitate to call it, in the 
 language of an Irish eulogist, "a tragedy 
 which, for dramatic irony and noble pity, has 
 no equal among its contemporaries." That it 
 is a masterpiece of its kind and one of the 
 finest fruits of modern Irish literary genius, 
 may be granted without difficulty. The true 
 tragic note has seldom been more effectively 
 struck than in the final scene, with the old 
 mother mourning the last of her sons taken by 
 the cruel sea.
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 27 
 
 MAURYA 
 
 [Drops Michael's clothes across Bartley's feet, and 
 sprinkles the Holy Water over him.] 
 It isn't, that I haven't prayed for you, Bartley, to the 
 Almighty God. It isn't that I haven't said prayers in 
 the dark night till you wouldn't know what I'd be say- 
 ing; but it's a great rest I'll have now and great sleep- 
 ing in the long nights after Samhain, if it's only a bit 
 of wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a fish that's 
 stinking. 
 
 CATHLEEN 
 
 It's getting old she is, and broken. 
 
 NORA [In a whisper to Cathleen] 
 
 She's quiet now and easy; but the day Michael was 
 drowned you could hear her crying out from this to the 
 spring well. It's fonder she was of Michael, and would 
 anyone have thought that? 
 
 CATHLEEN [Slowly and clearly] 
 
 An old woman will soon be tired with anything she 
 will do, and isn't it nine days herself is after crying and 
 keening, and making great sorrow in the house? 
 
 MAURYA 
 
 [Puts the empty cup mouth downwards on the table, 
 and lays her hands together on Bartley's feet] 
 They're all together this time, and the end is come.
 
 28 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 May the Almighty God have mercy on Bartley's soul, 
 and on Michael's soul, and on the souls of Shaemas and 
 Patch, and Stephen and Shawn (bending her head) ; 
 and may He have mercy on my soul, Nora, and on the 
 soul of everyone is left living in the world. 
 
 [She pauses, and the keen rises a little more loudly 
 from the women, then sinks away] 
 
 maurya [Continuing] 
 
 Michael has a clean burial in the far north by the grace 
 of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin 
 out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What 
 more can we want than that? No man at all can be 
 living for ever, and we must be satisfied. 
 
 Synge was in Yeats's description of him "a 
 shifting, silent man, full of hidden passion, 
 who loved wild islands because there, set out 
 in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in 
 himself." There is a pathos in his own life- 
 story, — bitter and lonely and sad, with the 
 blighting presage of early death upon it, — 
 that strangely contrasts with the wild and 
 boisterous humour of his plays. This, how- 
 ever, is but to say that he was truly of the soil 
 himself and one with his people.
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 29 
 
 For the moment the world is extraordi- 
 narily moved and curious about Synge: as is 
 usually seen when it loses unwittingly a gen- 
 ius.
 
 3 o NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 II 
 
 THE row over Synge's "Playboy" in New 
 York and elsewhere called forth a great 
 deal of newspaper discussion, but I have seen 
 nothing that went to the root of the matter. 
 There was much calling of names, as proper 
 to an Irish dispute, and an apparent sophisti- 
 cation of the argument on both sides. The 
 debate elicited a characteristic tirade from 
 Bernard Shaw, the best part of which was his 
 fling at the pseudo-Irish of America who, ut- 
 terly unqualified to judge themselves, protest 
 against Synge's dramatic picture of native 
 Irish character and conduct. But even Mr. 
 Shaw missed or purposely evaded the under- 
 lying motive of the hue-and-cry against Synge 
 and the ultimate point at issue. 
 
 That motive is religious, or rather eccle- 
 siastical in its nature, and it has been pro-
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 31 
 
 nounced from the very beginning against the 
 whole literary movement of which Synge was 
 a part. Such of my readers as are familiar 
 with that movement, more properly described 
 as a spiritual and intellectual ferment, or who 
 have looked into George Moore's lately pub- 
 lished book, "Hail and Farewell," need no in- 
 formation on this head. The trouble with 
 the "Playboy" is the trouble with everything 
 Irish which is so unfortunate as to come under 
 the ban of priestly censure. Nowhere in the 
 world are priestly sensibilities so acute and 
 easily wounded as in Ireland, and justly so, 
 since nowhere in the world has the priest so 
 complete a dominion over the popular mind. 
 Be it remembered also that there is no 
 jealousy like Irish jealousy, so cordial and 
 implacable, so cheerfully dissembled, open as 
 the sun and hidden as the grave. (Paradoxi- 
 cally, it is no less true that there is no gener- 
 osity like Irish generosity: that is why it is so 
 hard to understand us!) But of all kinds of 
 Irish jealousy the most formidable is that of
 
 32 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 the priests, in any matter affecting their spirit- 
 ual leadership and control of the Irish people. 
 Not to have grasped this fact is to have missed 
 the chief clue to that perplexed and checkered 
 history. 
 
 Every Irishman is an aristocrat, says Lecky. 
 The Roman Catholic hierarchy are the true 
 aristocracy of Ireland, congenial because 
 sprung from the soil, naturally intolerant be- 
 cause of their lowly origin, and venerable 
 from ages of undisputed supremacy. The 
 Irish people have wandered their full stint in 
 the deserts of misery and oppression, solaced 
 like Israel, with the belief that they were ful- 
 filling a peculiar providence of God. To 
 weep by the waters of Babylon, to wear the 
 chains of foreign taskmasters, such was the 
 destiny of that older Chosen People to whom 
 the Irish have been so fond of likening them- 
 selves. Heaven knows they were richly jus- 
 tified in making the sad parallel. For cen- 
 turies the faithful Irish have dreamed only of
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 33 
 
 the Kingdom of God, looking away with the 
 eyes of the spirit from the unhappy, beautiful 
 land of their earthly exile to their assured in- 
 heritance beyond the skies. Ireland has for- 
 tified her hope with dreams, and visions, and 
 prophecies, all in the inspired Jewish man- 
 ner and all, it would seem, speaking without 
 sanctification, to as vain purpose. It was a 
 kind of national plagiarism induced by the 
 ecclesiastical habit that has so rooted itself in 
 the blood of the Irish people. So it has been 
 said that the religion of the Jews was not so 
 much a religion as a national misfortune. In 
 no country in the world is the ecclesiastical 
 spirit so strong — it has killed off patriotism, 
 literature, enterprise and initiative of every 
 kind in the least degree incompatible with its 
 claims and prerogatives. Since the Act of 
 Union the priests have been the strongest part 
 of the British garrison in Ireland, content that 
 England should govern the country pro 
 forma, while they were suffered to rule the
 
 34 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Irish people de facto. And the Church has 
 flourished in Ireland, though the people have 
 dwindled and decayed or fled beyond seas, so 
 that old prophecies as to the country ever 
 being freed and made a nation again are little 
 now regarded. There is scarce a smoulder- 
 ing hint of the glorious flame of 'Forty-eight, 
 the last genuine outburst of the long vaunted 
 national spirit, and the people seem about to 
 be reconciled to their destiny. The destiny 
 of everlasting union with England? Oh, no! 
 — the true destiny of Ireland, say the pious 
 ones, and those who rule opinion, is to remain 
 the Chief Seminary of the Catholic Church — 
 a distinction which she may well claim to-day. 
 And there is hardly enough of the old fiery 
 but futile patriotism left in the country to 
 raise a protest. The priests are suffered to 
 have their way — and the people emigrate! 
 Yet all may well be, in that phrase so conse- 
 crated by Irish usage, "for the greater glory of 
 God." 
 
 Synge was neither a Catholic nor a Protes-
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 35 
 
 tant! — he was an artist, and he did his work 
 like an artist, not like a Protestant or a Cath- 
 olic, in a country where religion dominates 
 the humblest mind. The result was astonish- 
 ing: Ireland had produced a genius unawares, 
 but as is customary where mediocrity has 
 long been the rule, opinion was divided as to 
 whether he merited praise or a halter. In 
 the heat of the contention he died suddenly — 
 one may be allowed to say most lamentably — 
 and the battle is going on over his bones. 
 
 Now it will be asked, how did Synge run 
 foul of Irish ecclesiasticism in his plays? 
 Simply by departing from the long prevalent 
 caricatures of fiction and comedy, the Larry 
 Brannigans and Pat Molloys, and making 
 his studies with artistic severity from the life. 
 The Irishman, — the commonest Irishman, 
 since Mr. Shaw will not allow us the term 
 "peasant," — is far more complex and there- 
 fore less easily characterised than we might 
 believe from accepted types in play and 
 novel. He is not at all the invariably good-
 
 36 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 natured clown or Handy Andy as therein 
 depicted; but quite the contrary, is a being of 
 moods and passions, of contrasting yet hu- 
 manly consistent traits, simple yet shrewd, 
 candid yet cunning, kind yet vindictive, 
 drunken maybe, yet devout, such as Synge has 
 observed and painted him. Had he been 
 content merely to revamp the old scarecrows 
 of Irish comedy, his name had perhaps never 
 crossed the Channel, not to say the Atlantic. 
 In one of Synge's plays a drunken tinker, 
 his mistress and his hag of a mother do some 
 irreverence to a priest who reflects no great 
 honour upon the Order of Melchizedek. 
 The whole scene and conception are "low," 
 it may be granted, but strictly within the 
 province of dramatic art. Synge has as valid 
 a right to his Michael Byrne as Shakespeare 
 to his Christopher Sly. So in the "Playboy" 
 a simpleton of a fellow has some speeches in 
 which he invokes the "Holy Father" and the 
 "Scarlet Cardinals of the Court of Rome." 
 In the given situation nothing could be more
 
 YEATS AND SYNGE 37 
 
 exquisitely comic and at the same time, more 
 natural in the mouth of an omadhawn. 
 There is also in this, as in other plays by 
 Synge, much loose talk of God and the Virgin 
 and the Saints, not as intended irreverence 
 but as a transcript of the popular speech. 
 Poetic beauty is scarcely ever absent from 
 these speeches and only an ear sharpened for 
 offence would take umbrage at them. Synge 
 never appears in his plays as a scoffer at 
 things sacred or religious, nor is there a trace 
 of polemics in any of them. He limited him- 
 self strictly to his artistic province, reproduc- 
 ing life and character as he found them in 
 years of the most familiar association with the 
 people. His little book on the Arran Islands 
 fully reveals his method in all its anxious in- 
 tegrity, and it contains the germ of his plays. 
 Thus we have the head and front of Synge's 
 offending before us. His plays do not flatter 
 priestly sensibilities — they even wound ec- 
 clesiastical coquetry in a land where the 
 priest is supreme.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 
 
 Oh, forgive, if while list'ning to music whose breath 
 Seemed to circle his name with a charm against death, 
 He should feel a proud Spirit within him proclaim — 
 "Ev'n so shalt thou live in the echoes of Fame: 
 
 "Ev'n so, tho' thy memory should now die away, 
 'Tiuill be caught up again in some happier day; 
 And the hearts and the voices of Erin prolong 
 Thro' the answering future thy NAME and thy song!" 
 
 — Irish Melody. 
 
 THE usage of biography requires me to 
 state, at the outset, that the sweetest of 
 all Irish poets and English lyrists, Thomas 
 Moore, was born in Dublin on May 28, 1779, 
 and died at Sloperton Cottage, Wiltshire, in 
 England, in the year 1852. 
 
 A charming story is preserved of a grand 
 reception held at the Lord Lieutenant's house 
 
 38
 
 THOMAS MOORE 39 
 
 in Dublin when the last century was still in 
 its teens. Among the guests was a lady whose 
 husband, a British military officer, had been 
 ordered on that very evening to rejoin his 
 regiment for active service. Europe was 
 filled with the alarum of war. The forces of 
 fate were closing in upon the Corsican and 
 the terrific struggle of the "last days" was at 
 hand. Many were the gentle hearts that 
 shared a dumb sense of dread, a fear that 
 shrank from expression, with her who amid 
 the brilliant throng in the Viceroy's palace 
 sate preoccupied with her own sadness. And 
 you will not marvel at this — a common inci- 
 dent of the time — knowing how they danced 
 and revelled on the very eve of Waterloo. 
 
 In such a mood, we are told, the lady thus 
 suddenly bereaved, wondered pettishly at the 
 extraordinary deference which the whole 
 company united in paying to a little gentle- 
 man who came late in the evening, and whose 
 simple black dress contrasted strongly with 
 the gold lace of the viceregal staff and the
 
 40 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 garish splendour of the military corps. Pres- 
 ently the little gentleman was led to the piano. 
 After preluding a moment he struck the keys 
 with resounding harmony — 
 
 Go where glory waits thee, 
 
 But while fame elates thee, 
 
 Oh, still remember me! 
 
 Ah, she listened now with a flying heart to 
 words that made poignantly real for her the 
 sentence of separation. Then the matchless 
 voice, thrilling with power and sweetness, 
 sank to the softest note of sympathy: — 
 
 When around thee dying, 
 Autumn leaves are lying, 
 
 Oh ! then remember me. 
 And at night when gazing 
 On the gay hearth blazing, 
 
 Oh ! still remember me. 
 
 Still the wondrous voice sang on, a mur- 
 mur of polite applause rising at each cessa- 
 tion of the music. But ere the final bravos 
 came, one overburthened heart had given
 
 THOMAS MOORE 41 
 
 such token of its emotion as to gain a lasting 
 place in the bright tradition of the poet-min- 
 strel. 
 
 The singer was Thomas Moore; the song 
 one of the earliest, in point of time, of the 
 immortal Irish Melodies. Many years after- 
 ward the clever American, N. P. Willis, fell 
 under the same spell at the house of Lady 
 Blessington in London. Willis tells us that 
 he had heard of women fainting at a song of 
 Tom Moore's, but, judging from the effect on 
 an old stager like himself, he thought a 
 gentler heart should have broken. A more 
 illustrious witness, the author of "Childe 
 Harold," was wont to weep over the Irish 
 Melodies quite as sincerely as did the lady at 
 the Lord Lieutenant's whose story has come 
 down to us. 
 
 There was in truth a vast deal of sentiment 
 in the world when George the Third was 
 king and even up to the accession of the 
 Fourth of that august line. A great English 
 writer has described Moore as twittering
 
 42 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 away in anger from the latter royal personage 
 upon his recanting the liberal views which he 
 had formerly professed and which had given 
 a fallacious hope to the friends of Ireland. 
 The touch is one of the neatest of Mr. Thack- 
 eray's satirical humour, but it is scarcely a half 
 truth. Moore himself tells us: 
 
 "Luckily the list of benefits showered upon 
 me from that high quarter may be despatched 
 in a few sentences. At the request of the 
 Earl of Moira, one of my earliest and best 
 friends, His Royal Highness graciously per- 
 mitted me to dedicate to him my translation 
 of the Odes of Anacreon. I was twice, I 
 think, admitted to the honour of dining at 
 Carlton House; and when the Prince, on his 
 being made Regent in 1811, gave his memor- 
 able fete, I was one of the crowd — about 
 fifteen hundred I believe — who enjoyed the 
 privilege of being his guests on that occasion." 
 
 So the story of Moore's intimacy with 
 Brummel's "fat friend," whom he has so pun- 
 gently satirised in "The Twopenny Post
 
 THOMAS MOORE 43 
 
 Bag," must be dismissed, malgre Mr. Thack- 
 eray, as a myth. Yet it is in a degree true to 
 the sentiment or, rather, bathos of that queer 
 Georgian period. The French Revolution 
 had been followed by an aftermath of hyste- 
 ria which was fearfully prolonged. In all 
 the literature of the time there is an overplus 
 of sentiment and declamation. The advo- 
 cates of reaction, including such contrasted 
 types as the great Burke and "Carotid-artery- 
 cutting" Castlereagh, are quite as strenuous 
 in this regard as the upholders of liberty and 
 equality. Even the all-conquering Napo- 
 leon writes his bulletins in the manner and al- 
 most in the measure of the long since dis- 
 credited Ossian. 
 
 Barrington's vivid sketches of society in 
 the Irish Capital show how powerfully the 
 emotional Celtic temperament was acted 
 upon by the prevailing spirit. (Alas! was 
 there not a bloody and abortive revolution 
 to be traced to the same influence?) So we 
 may be sure that for such a rara avis as a
 
 44 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 poet who could sing his own verses, there 
 were triumphs to be snatched in this fervid 
 Irish society, as well as in the grander circles 
 across the Channel, which at the moment of 
 their winning must have seemed more en- 
 viable than all the awards of gods and col- 
 umns. Never was a poet so popular with 
 the gentler sex. Even the Quaker women, 
 with their natural and acquired distaste for 
 the erotic Muse, quite fell in love with him, 
 and paid him the unheard of compliment of 
 soliciting "a line of thine with thy name to 
 it." The women on the Dublin Packet — I 
 think most of them were Irish, however, — 
 kissed him almost to death, on a certain occa- 
 sion. Small blame to them! The grand 
 dames of the English aristocracy, duchesses 
 and countesses galore, if you care for them — 
 went mad over the Irish Anacreon. Read 
 his Journal if you wish to know how they 
 pursued him with invitations which even Mr. 
 Brummel might have envied before his fatal 
 rupture with George the Admired.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 45 
 
 We look back now upon that Era of Senti- 
 ment with a curious mixture of contempt and 
 wonder, and the critics have got into a habit 
 of unduly depreciating its literary product. 
 I think I hear these learned gentry exclaim 
 that stories of Tom Moore's strumming and 
 humming have little to do with a serious es- 
 timate of the poet. Granted, but to be se- 
 rious is not wholly our concern; and so I 
 think these testimonies are worth recounting, 
 for they help us to realise in some sort the liv- 
 ing magic of that wonderful minstrelsy, the 
 exquisite union of poesy and music in the 
 genius of Thomas Moore. 
 
 II 
 
 POET AND PATRIOT 
 
 THE wise Greeks fabled of one of their 
 poets that, while yet an infant in the 
 cradle, a swarm of bees settled on his lips, at- 
 testing the lyric gift with which the Muses 
 had endowed the happy babe. It is easy for
 
 46 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 us who have known the spell of that witch- 
 ing Irish minstrelsy, to believe that the fairies 
 did their portion at the cradle of Tom 
 Moore. One brought the gift of music, 
 another whispered the strange secret of poesy, 
 and a third fairy that, with the loss of 
 many things, has never left the Green Isle — 
 gave him the infallible recipe of Irish wit. 
 And the fairy that came last was not least, as 
 our poet himself well knew when he wrote — 
 
 Wit a diamond brought, 
 Which cut his bright way through. 
 
 Literary fashions have doubtless changed 
 since the early years of the last century when 
 young ladies at boarding school, like Miss 
 Rebecca Sharp and Miss Amelia Sedley, 
 dreamed only of a lover with the "dear Cor- 
 sair expression, half savage, half soft," and 
 when Moore's Irish Melodies were the reign- 
 ing favourites in Belgravia and Bloomsbury. 
 Even in this country the strains of the newly 
 awakened harp of Erin were heard, and in-
 
 THOMAS MOORE 47 
 
 deed the poet had here preceded his song. 
 We read that the great Mr. Jefferson for- 
 gave our poet some sharp iambics, — which 
 Moore's visit to this country in 1803 had 
 elicited, — and that the first of American 
 statesmen often refreshed his leisure with the 
 riper and better work of his critic. We have 
 long since detected the error of taste in the 
 pseudo-Oriental school of English poetry, so 
 greatly the vogue in the first quarter of the 
 last century, but it must fairly be said, that 
 the best critical opinion has varied little, if 
 at all, as to the high and enduring merits of 
 the Irish Melodies. Byron's praise, that 
 they are worth all the epics which have ever 
 been written, may easily be granted a hyper- 
 bole; but surely they have added more to the 
 delight of mankind. It was happily said of 
 our poet, that he would go down to posterity 
 with the Rose in his button-hole — the rose of 
 his perfect song, let me say, which receives 
 new beauty and lustre with every gifted 
 voice that is born into the world.
 
 48 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 There are poets who have sung to the peo- 
 ple, and there are poets who have sung only 
 for poets. These may well be deemed the 
 rarest singers whose every auditor bears him- 
 self the laurel and the lyre. It is of one who 
 in his highest moments of rapture sang to 
 both, — poets and people, the vocal and the 
 voiceless, — that I propose to speak in the fol- 
 lowing pages. 
 
 Also it seems needful to say that no poetic 
 fame holds so ardent and secure as that which 
 is entwined with the spirit of an oppressed 
 nationality. The man whom old Fletcher of 
 Saltoun knew was wiser, in our reckoning, 
 than some sages whose names are remem- 
 bered. For the songs are ever more than the 
 laws of a people. 
 
 To him who reads history aright, Rouget 
 de Lisle was a greater general than the victor 
 of Hohenlinden, a mightier conqueror than 
 the Man of Austerlitz. The assemblies that 
 followed the convocation of the States-Gen- 
 eral of France in the memorable year 1789,
 
 THOMAS MOORE 49 
 
 debated the rights of man. History- making 
 did not fairly begin until, coming up from 
 the South, the gaunt soldiers of Barbaroux 
 fiercely chanted those rights in the streets of 
 Paris. The greater the measure of tyranny, 
 the more heroic and unconquerable the spirit 
 of an oppressed people, the nobler is the 
 fame and the loftier the inspiration of the 
 poet who feeds the hatred of that tyranny till 
 "time at last sets all things even," and sancti- 
 fies the zeal of that spirit unto liberty and re- 
 generation. 
 
 And though the greatest poet may be he 
 whose song is poured out for all mankind, yet 
 dearer is the strain breathed to one votive 
 altar of patriotism. The fame of Thomas 
 Moore, like the "light in Kildare's holy 
 fane, which burned thro' long ages of darkness 
 and storm," glows unquenchably in the eternal 
 aspiration of the Irish heart. Not vainly has 
 he sung: — 
 
 Dear Harp of my Country! in darkness I found thee, 
 The cold chain of silence had hung o'er thee long,
 
 50 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 When proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee, 
 And gave all thy chords to light, freedom, and song! 
 
 The warm lay of love and the light note of gladness 
 Have walcen'd thy fondest, thy liveliest thrill ; 
 
 But so oft hast thou echo'd the deep sigh of sadness, 
 That ev'n in thy mirth it will steal from thee still. 
 
 Dear Harp of my Country! farewell to thy numbers, 
 
 This sweet wreath of song is the last we shall twine ! 
 Go, sleep with the sunshine of Fame on thy slumbers, 
 
 Till touch'd by some hand less unworthy than mine. 
 If the pulse of the patriot, soldier or lover, 
 
 Have throbb'd at our lay, 'tis thy glory alone; 
 I was but as the wind, passing heedlessly over, 
 
 And all the wild sweetness I waked was thy own. 
 
 Viewed simply in their relation to litera- 
 ture, we shall easily tolerate even the more 
 violent aspects of Irish patriotism. Because 
 John Mitchel felt strongly he wrote words 
 which hold us yet with a compelling power. 
 Because Clarence Mangan's heart yearned 
 for the Eire of his visions, — 
 
 "the clime and land 
 Of Cahal-M6r of the wine-red hand," —
 
 THOMAS MOORE 51 
 
 he has gained a place unique among Irish 
 poets. The note of revolt made possible 
 that splendid efflorescence of genius which 
 we call the "New Ireland movement." So 
 the passing of the "force men" from the 
 scene of nationalist endeavour may be regret- 
 ted on good poetical grounds, even though it 
 be hailed by the lovers of peace (some of 
 whom, it need not be gainsaid, love Ireland 
 too) as a sign of the better era that is always 
 just dawning for the unhappy island. And, 
 truly, in the cold decline of that fervid pa- 
 triotism which once united the "sea-divided 
 Gael," and which poured itself out in lavish 
 aid of every Fenian plot, of every hare- 
 brained project of liberation or agitation, — 
 in this altered feeling, let me say, may we not 
 fear the progressive decadence and ultimate 
 death of that which has seemed most vital in 
 the Irish character, and which has thrown 
 around the race in its periods of darkest op- 
 pression a glory that has ever sustained and 
 exalted the national hope? Consider the
 
 52 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 men of 'Forty-eight and the parliamentary 
 patriots of a later day! What a falling off 
 from that high spirit, that unselfish devotion 
 which .breathed in the songs of Thomas 
 Davis, sweeping away every barrier before 
 them with the irresistible attack of Celtic 
 genius! What a change from the heroic, if 
 illusory, ideals of patriotism that inspired 
 the clanging speech of Meagher of the 
 Sword! One grows old and the world seems 
 to shrink and fade in thinking of it. 
 
 There was something so warm and sublime in the core 
 Of an Irishman's heart that I envied thy dead! 
 
 Alas! the new Irish Avatar is different 
 enough from that which provoked the fierce 
 anger of Byron. It asks for tears rather than 
 condemnation. It signifies an exhausted pa- 
 triotism; a people still faithful indeed, but 
 weary of promises; more willing than ever 
 to be guided by moderate counsels; no longer 
 breaking out into those sudden fits of rage or 
 frenzy that startled the oppressor in an
 
 THOMAS MOORE 53 
 
 earlier day; shaping themselves, as some 
 would say, for the hour when British mag- 
 nanimity shall endow them with a measure 
 of justice. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THE POET'S CENSORS 
 
 I KNOW full well there are those who 
 will utterly dissent from my deliberate 
 conviction that Moore ranks with the best and 
 purest patriots of his country. Many have 
 been influenced by the cant which has gath- 
 ered about the subject, and have been induced 
 to form a judgment as superficial as it is false. 
 Perhaps the true explanation of this prejudice 
 which has ever insidiously sought to withhold 
 the most precious part of our poet's glory, lies 
 deeper. The curse of jealousy and mistrust 
 somehow clings to the most generous and 
 gifted people under the sun. It is the dark 
 thread that runs through all their history of 
 glory and sorrow. Sometimes the national
 
 54 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 defect is not without humorous expression, as 
 when Gavan Duffy naively tells us that the 
 great O'Connell was never quite able to mas- 
 ter his envy of Brian Boru! In very recent 
 years we have seen this racial curse blighting 
 the fame and life itself of the man who, since 
 Henry Grattan, brought his country nearest 
 to the portals of freedom. History has al- 
 ready written her verdict on that great trag- 
 edy, but no one deeply acquainted with the 
 Irish character, w r ill take it to be the last ex- 
 ample. "How oft has the Banshee cried!" 
 So, as an Irishman, I regret, while I do not 
 wonder, that it is the fashion among literary 
 men of my own race to disparage the patriot- 
 ism of Moore. Some of them, indeed, would 
 appear to belittle his poetry, and for the fairest 
 as well as kindliest judgments on both, we 
 must look to un-Irish sources. The centenary 
 of Moore's birth occurred in 1879 and there 
 is not yet an adequate biography of him by an 
 Irish hand. I find, on the contrary, that 
 every petty and unworthy thing which could
 
 THOMAS MOORE 55 
 
 be said of him — the small change of malice 
 and envy — has been carefully collected and 
 preserved by Irish chroniclers. His patriot- 
 ism, which gave to the Irish people a legacy 
 of song that has not its like in literature, has 
 been viciously impugned on no better ground 
 than that his genius, education, wit and social 
 qualities caused him to be honourably courted 
 by the proudest aristocracy in the world. Yet 
 not an iota of proof can be adduced that 
 Moore held this position by the slightest com- 
 promise of his always intense but thoroughly 
 reasoned patriotism. 
 
 For a literary sign of this national jealousy, 
 note how Father Prout and Dr. Maginn lam- 
 pooned Moore with less wit than severity, and 
 indeed conducted themselves with a show of 
 something very like blackguardism. There 
 are also hints of the rancour ecclesiastical — 
 referable perhaps to a certain Letter ad- 
 dressed to the Catholics of Dublin, or to the 
 fact that Moore suffered his Protestant wife 
 to bring up their children in the Established
 
 56 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Church — but I pass them by in silence. I 
 may say here that Moore's theology was good 
 enough for the great Archbishop McHale, 
 and he wrote a book in defence of his religion, 
 which may perhaps atone for his compliance 
 with his wife's scruples. 
 
 The favourite text with all who cry down 
 Moore's sterling patriotism and disparage the 
 solid worth of his character, is the idle sar- 
 casm attributed to Byron, — "Tommy dearly 
 loves a lord." It is hard to kill the lie in an 
 epigram, but let us at least set against this the 
 tribute of Samuel Carter Hall, who knew our 
 poet well : 
 
 "Amid privations and temptations, the al- 
 lurements of grandeur and the suggestions of 
 poverty, he preserved his self-respect; be- 
 queathing no property, but leaving no debts; 
 having had no testimonial of acknowledg- 
 ment or reward; seeking none, nay, avoiding 
 any; labouring ardently and honestly for his 
 political faith, but never lending to party 
 what was meant for mankind; proud and
 
 THOMAS MOORE 57 
 
 rightly proud of his self-obtained position, but 
 neither scorning nor slighting the humble root 
 from which he sprung." 
 
 The learned Dr. Parr in bequeathing a ring 
 to Moore commended his "original genius, in- 
 dependent spirit and incorruptible integrity." 
 
 Lord John Russell, the poet's literary exec- 
 utor, who was Premier of England, observed 
 of Moore that "a man who was courted and 
 esteemed by the Marquis of Lansdowne, Mr. 
 Canning, Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Rogers, Syd- 
 ney Smith, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, 
 — must have had social as well as literary 
 merits of no common order." And these 
 words may be taken to convey more than they 
 actually express, since while there is abun- 
 dant proof of Lord Russell's sincere friend- 
 ship for the poet, no evidence is lacking that 
 the noble lord utterly mistook his own taste 
 and capacity for the function with which 
 Moore intrusted him. 
 
 It is but a truism to say that the world is 
 not in the habit of applying the stern tests of
 
 58 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 political or even moral consistency to a great 
 poet. It laughs with Horace over his flight 
 from Philippi, — relicta non bene parmula. 
 It smiles indulgently at the trimming of 
 Dryden and easily condones the prostitution 
 of Addison's pen to the purposes of party. 
 Nay, it even compounds the felonies of Villon, 
 that immortal jailbird of old Paris. There- 
 fore, I would gladly hold a brief for Moore 
 on the score of moral or political delinquency, 
 if his critics and censors could make out a 
 case against him. This they cannot do. His 
 religion was, simply, that God is Love. His 
 life was blameless by the ordinary human 
 standards, and nothing in that life was more 
 admirable than his consistent patriotism. 
 
 Historians tell us that the Irish Melodies 
 had as large a share as O'Connell's mighty 
 influence in shaping British sentiment for the 
 grant of Catholic emancipation. If this be 
 so, the world has seen nothing like it since the 
 Sicilian conquerors struck the chains from 
 their Greek captives, as told in classic story.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 59 
 
 It gives a glory unique to the brow of the 
 Irish poet and ranks him with the benefactors 
 of his race. 
 
 I would cite the "Rebuke to the Neapoli- 
 tans" as marking the strength of Moore's 
 poetical expression and the vigour of his po- 
 litical creed. These verses speak well for the 
 fibre of the man whose patriotism is so often 
 slurred by ill-judging censors of his own race. 
 How many who lightly criticise Moore in his 
 character of patriot know that his "Fables for 
 the Holy Alliance," dedicated to Lord Byron, 
 elicited the threat of a government prosecu- 
 tion? It will easily be granted that John 
 Mitchel, that "last of the patriots," was not a 
 type of the rosewater revolutionist. Yet the 
 patriotism of our poet passed current with 
 Mitchel, who has recorded a significant trib- 
 ute to the effect of Moore's poetical satires 
 directed against British misgovernment in 
 Ireland. The English critic Hazlitt, who 
 was no lover of our poet, says of these poetic 
 arsenals of wit and sarcasm: —
 
 60 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 "He (Moore) has wit at will and of the 
 
 first quality. His satirical and burlesque 
 poetry is his best; it is first-rate. His light, 
 agreeable and polished style pierces through 
 the body of the court . . . shows up the little- 
 ness of the great, and spears a phalanx of 
 statesmen with its glittering point as with a 
 diamond." 
 
 Let us not forget that Byron wrote, while 
 the "loyal" Irish people and clergy, with 
 O'Connell at their head, were acclaiming 
 George the Fourth on his visit to the unhappy 
 island — 
 
 But if aught in my bosom could quench for an hour 
 My contempt for a nation which, servile tho' sore, 
 
 Which, tho' trod like the worm, will not turn upon power, 
 'Tis the glory of Grattan, the genius of Moore! 
 
 The truth is that Ireland has had few 
 patriots (of anything like equal prominence) 
 so consistent in high principle as her greatest 
 poet. It would be easy to name some, and 
 these eminent enough, who began with a
 
 THOMAS MOORE 61 
 
 dream of revolution, and, if they did not at- 
 tain the dubious distinction of hiding their 
 heads in a coronet (as Sheridan finely said), 
 at least acquired an honourary initial or two, 
 and anchored their old age in the secure Al- 
 satia of political conformity. I do not con- 
 demn them. The world may be as often 
 wrong about its heroes as about the victims of 
 its harshest judgments. I simply maintain 
 my position — which to the reader of Irish 
 sympathies should be worth maintaining — 
 that Anacreon Moore was as sound a patriot 
 as the Green Island has over produced, not 
 barring the great O'Connell, or even the 
 justly lamented Brian Boru. 
 
 IV 
 
 THE LYRIST 
 
 MOORE has long overpassed his cen- 
 tury, and he remains one of the most 
 popular of poets. I shall presume to set forth 
 my own humble views touching the value of
 
 62 NOVA HIBERXIA 
 
 his work, the sources of its unfading charm, 
 and the rank which he seems destined to hold 
 in literature. 
 
 In the first place, then, he is the prince of 
 English lyrists. In poetry we require the 
 miracle, says Emerson. To my mind the best 
 of Moore's lyrics never fail to fulfil this con- 
 dition. Our literature has nothing to com- 
 pare with their distinctive grace, tenderness, 
 pathos and joy, — and the singer himself 
 "singing as if he never could grow old." The 
 only adequate description of these songs must 
 be sought in themselves, with the heart- 
 searching commentary of their own music. 
 
 Music, oh how faint, how weak 
 
 Language fades before thy spell! 
 Why should Feeling ever speak 
 
 When thou canst breathe her soul so well? 
 
 It would not be easy, indeed, to account for 
 the singular superiority of Moore as a lyrical 
 poet — a superiority often only to be felt, not 
 put into words — without the clue which his
 
 THOMAS MOORE 63 
 
 gifts of music supply. He had, as Balfe * the 
 composer testifies, an endowment of music pe- 
 culiarly his own ; a delicacy of ear rarely found 
 even among professed virtuosi, which, with 
 his exquisite poetical genius, enabled him to 
 make such adaptation of verse to melody as 
 had never been known before, and, as the 
 highest artistic achievement in kind, is not 
 likely to be repeated. He himself tells us: 
 "I only know that in a strong and inborn feel- 
 ing for music lies the source of whatever 
 talent I may have shown for poetical compo- 
 sition; and that it was the effort to translate 
 into language the emotions and passions which 
 music appeared to me to express, that first led 
 to my writing any poetry at all deserving of 
 the name." 
 
 But, after all, I regard Moore's gift of mu- 
 sic as merely supplementary to his poetical en- 
 dowment. During his life, indeed, it counted 
 for much more than would be considered in a 
 critical estimate of his work to-day. A cloud 
 
 •Author of "The Bohemian Girl," etc.
 
 64 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 of witnesses, many of them among the bright- 
 est names of the last century, record the charm 
 and delight of the poet's own singing. Byron 
 pointed out that "Moore has a peculiarity of 
 talent, or rather, talents, — poetry, music, voice, 
 all his own, and an expression in each which 
 never was or will be possessed by another." 
 No one could hope to write songs like Moore, 
 he said. Shelley proudly confessed his inferi- 
 ority to Moore, and happily called him "the 
 sweetest lyrist of Ierne's saddest wrong." And 
 glorious old Kit North (Prof. John Wilson) 
 with a generosity rare in a Scotchman, ad- 
 mitted that "of all the song-writers that ever 
 warbled or chanted or sung, the best, in our 
 estimation, is verily none other than Thomas 
 Moore." Coleridge allowed that Moore had 
 written more beautiful lyrics than any poet 
 who had ever lived. "It would be a delight- 
 ful addition to life," wrote the great Walter 
 Scott, after a visit from our Irish song bird, 
 "if Thomas Moore had a cottage within two 
 miles of me." And the poet's gifted coun-
 
 THOMAS MOORE 65 
 
 tryman, Samuel Lover, fitly described the 
 Irish Melodies as "that work, not only the 
 crowning wreath of its author, but among the 
 glories of the land which gave him birth." 
 
 The purest and most perfect, then, of 
 Moore's lyrics can be fully interpreted only 
 through the medium of their own Irish mu- 
 sic. — 
 
 Sweet air, how every note brings back 
 Some sunny hope, some day-dream bright 
 
 That shining o'er life's early track, 
 Filled even its tears with light. 
 
 The secret of Moore is in these perfect lines, 
 a secret that I believe died with him. This 
 truth, that the poetry of the Melodies is 
 rightly inseparable from the music, — a truth 
 little appreciated by the casual reader, has led 
 our poet to say: 
 
 "Accustomed as I have always been to con- 
 sider my songs as a sort of compound crea- 
 tions, in which the music forms no less essen- 
 tial a part than the verses, it is with a feeling 
 which I can hardly expect my un-lyrical read-
 
 66 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 ers to understand, that I see such a swarm of 
 songs as crowd these pages all separated from 
 the beautiful airs which have formed, hitherto, 
 their chief ornament and defence — their decus 
 et tutamen. . . . Those occasional breaches 
 of the laws of rhythm which the task of adapt- 
 ing words to airs demands of the poet, though 
 frequently one of the happiest results of his 
 skill, become blemishes when the verse is sep- 
 arated from the melody." 
 
 Yet I would point out that, rich as are the 
 Irish lyrics, divested of the harmonies with 
 w r hich they are endued by the genius of that 
 unrivalled music, it is thus we may better ap- 
 preciate the poetic miracle, unheightened by 
 the spell of that kindred art to which our poet 
 owed so much of his inspiration. 
 
 I have already given my estimate of 
 Moore's sterling patriotism — it actually seems 
 a good Irish bull that the author of the Mel- 
 odies should require a character in this respect 
 — and I have noted the bad taste of some of 
 his scribbling countrymen in aspersing the
 
 THOMAS MOORE 67 
 
 motives of a man who might have commanded 
 the riches of the great and honoured, yet died 
 in a simple poverty, leaving, as was said, 
 neither wealth nor debts behind him. 
 
 In this little poem the national fate, the Evil 
 Genius of Ireland, usually invoked by his- 
 torians to point the moral of her sad history, is 
 touched with words that burn as they fall 
 from the poet's pen: 
 
 Weep on, weep on, your hour is past, 
 
 Your dreams of pride are o'er; 
 The fatal chain is round you cast, 
 
 And you are men no more. 
 In vain the hero's heart hath bled, 
 
 The sage's tongue hath warned in vain: 
 Oh, Freedom! once thy flame hath fled, 
 
 It never lights again! 
 
 Weep on, — perhaps in after days, 
 
 They'll learn to love your name; 
 While many a deed may wake in praise, 
 
 That long hath slept in blame. 
 And when they tread the ruin'd Isle 
 
 Where rest at length the lord and slave,
 
 68 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 They'll wondering ask, how hands so vile 
 Could conquer hearts so brave. 
 
 " 'Twas fate," they'll say, "a wayward fate 
 
 "Your web of discord wove; 
 "And while your tyrants joined in hate, 
 
 "You never joined in love: 
 "But hearts fell off, that ought to twine, 
 
 "And man profaned what God had given, 
 "Till some were heard to curse the shrine 
 
 "Where others knelt to heaven !" 
 
 Nothing in the history of the Irish people 
 is so remarkable as their attachment to the 
 faith which Patrick gave them. They have 
 clung to it as even a more precious thing than 
 liberty itself, and indeed there are not wanting 
 historians to tell us that in rejecting the Refor- 
 mation,* the Irish people ignorantly threw 
 away their chance of national salvation. 
 However that may be — and there is really not 
 much room to dispute it — the world must yield 
 its tribute of admiration to such heroic con- 
 stancy. It is this high sentiment of un- 
 
 * Rejecting it from England, bien entendu.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 69 
 
 changed and unchangeable devotion that 
 breathes in one of the noblest of the Melodies, 
 "The Irish Peasant to His Mistress," — signi- 
 fying allegorically the ancient faith of Ire- 
 land, and summing up in a few lines the story 
 of ages of persecution. 
 
 Through grief and through danger thy smile hath cheer'd 
 
 my way, 
 Till hope seemed to bud from each thorn that round me 
 
 lay; 
 The darker our fortune, the brighter our pure love burned, 
 Till shame into glory, till fear into zeal was turned ; 
 Yes, slave as I was, in thy arms my spirit felt free, 
 And bless'd even the sorrows that made thee more dear to 
 
 me. 
 
 Thy rival was honor'd while thou wert wrong'd and 
 
 scorn'd, 
 Thy crown was of briers, while gold her brows adorn'd ; 
 She woo'd me to temples while thou lay'st hid in caves, 
 Her friends were all masters, while thine, alas, were 
 
 slaves ; 
 Yet cold in the earth, at thy feet, I would rather be, 
 Than wed what I loved not, or turn one thought from 
 
 thee !
 
 Jo NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 They slander thee sorely who say thy vows are frail — 
 Hadst thou been a false one thy cheek had been less pale. 
 They say, too, so long thou hast worn those lingering 
 
 chains, 
 That deep in thy heart they have printed their servile 
 
 stains. 
 Oh ! foul is the slander — no chain could that soul subdue — 
 Where shineth thy spirit, there liberty shineth too! 
 
 The beauty of Moore's similes, springing 
 up ever new, like the almond flower in the 
 Eastern legend, is, after the music of his verse, 
 his most distinctive excellence. No other 
 poet is so happy and rich in this the rarest 
 treasure-trove of poetic fancy. "I had rather 
 have a new symbol for my thought," says 
 Emerson, "than the suffrage of Kant or 
 Plato." Moore has hardly a verse without a 
 simile, and he never rides a jaded metaphor. 
 
 An admirable instance is furnished by the 
 following Irish Melody, which we shall search 
 the more deeply for the secret of its beauty and 
 charm that we know it to have been a prime 
 favourite of Lord Byron's.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 71 
 
 As a beam o'er the face of the waters may glow, 
 While the tide runs in darkness and coldness, below, 
 So the cheek may be tinged with a warm sunny smile, 
 Tho' the cold heart to ruin runs darkly the while. 
 
 One fatal remembrance, one sorrow that throws 
 Its bleak shade alike o'er our joys and our woes, 
 To which life nothing darker or brighter can bring, 
 For which joy has no balm and affliction no sting — 
 
 Oh! this thought in the midst of enjoyment will stay 
 Like a dead, leafless branch in the summer's bright ray; 
 The beams of the warm sun play round it in vain, 
 It may smile in his light, but it blooms not again. 
 
 Even his prose sparkles with this sort of 
 ornament, though one feels sometimes that it 
 were better reserved for his poetry. In this, 
 one of the most delicate and beautiful of Irish 
 love songs, the poet plays with his images, — 
 one in every line — as if such rare Parnassian 
 mintings were the current coin of all rhymers. 
 
 Lesbia hath a beaming eye, 
 
 But no one knows from whom it beameth ; 
 Right and left its arrows fly, 
 
 But what they aim at no one dreameth.
 
 72 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Sweeter 'tis to gaze upon 
 
 My Nora's lid that seldom rises; 
 
 Few its looks, but every one, 
 Like unexpected light, surprises! 
 
 Oh, my Nora Creina, dear, 
 My gentle, bashful Nora Creina, 
 Beauty lies 
 In: many eyes, 
 But love in yours, my Nora Creina. 
 
 Lesbia wears a robe of gold, 
 
 But all so close the nymph hath laced it, 
 Not a charm of beauty's mould 
 
 Presumes to stay where Nature placed it. 
 Oh ! my Nora's gown for me, 
 
 That floats as wild as mountain breezes, 
 Leaving every beauty free 
 
 To sink or swell as Heaven pleases. 
 
 Yes, my Nora Creina, dear, 
 My simple, graceful Nora Creina, 
 
 Nature's dress 
 
 Is loveliness — 
 The dress you wear, my Nora Creina.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 73 
 
 Lesbia hath a wit refined, 
 
 But when its points are gleaming round us, 
 Who can tell if they're designed 
 
 To dazzle merely, or to wound us? 
 Pillow'd on my Nora's heart 
 
 In safer slumber Love reposes — 
 Bed of peace! whose roughest part 
 
 Is but the crumpling of the roses. 
 
 Oh, my Nora Crcina, dear, 
 My mild, my artless Nora Creina! 
 
 Wit, though bright, 
 
 Hath no such light 
 As warms your eyes, my Nora Creina! 
 
 I am aware of a certain literary prejudice 
 against mere song-writing, but, though Moore 
 has suffered from it, especially in the present 
 generation, it in no way justly applies to him. 
 Before he came the songs were made for the 
 sound and never aimed at the sense, poetical 
 or otherwise. It remained for him who has 
 been called the "Rossini of musicians and the 
 humming bird of poets," to bring to the art 
 of the song-writer powers, I had almost said,
 
 74 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 unmatched before in poetry, and a musical 
 feeling and perception so refined as to evade 
 the analysis of words. 
 
 They called him Bacchus in his brilliant 
 prime, his fine head with its clustering tendrils 
 and his lustrous eyes alive with the fires of 
 genius, suggesting a likeness to the classic deity 
 of mirth and good fellowship no less than his 
 drinking songs, which I take to be the finest 
 in the world. In these "short swallow 
 flights" of lyric song Moore has never been 
 approached for lightness of touch, felicity of 
 phrase, and that liquid flow of versification, 
 at once metre and music, of which he alone 
 among poets possessed the secret. To these 
 virtues and qualities may be added such an ex- 
 pression of the festive spirit, classic without 
 being coarse, Bacchanalian without running 
 into excess, which is also a peculiar attribute 
 of Moore's. The delighted reader, — or bet- 
 ter, hearer, for these poems should always be 
 sung in order to be felt at their full value, 
 yields willingly to the seductive spell of the
 
 THOMAS MOORE 75 
 
 minstrel, credulous even to believe and follow 
 when the latter promises him — 
 
 "We'll take a flight to Heaven to-night 
 And leave dull earth behind us/" 
 
 There are no happier examples of Moore's 
 unrivalled genius as a song-writer than these 
 lyrics of a refined conviviality, but I shall not 
 cite any of them here, — I choose rather to 
 
 1 
 
 show him in graver mood, a mood which is 
 often ignorantly or invidiously denied to his 
 scope as an artist. The poem — the song — is 
 such as only Moore could have written. 
 
 Oh, banquet not in those shining bowers 
 
 Where Youth resorts, but come to me: 
 For mine's a garden of faded flowers, 
 
 More fit for sorrow, for age and thee. 
 And there we shall have our feasts of tears, 
 
 And many a cup in silence pour: 
 Our guests, the shades of former years, 
 
 Our toasts, to lips that bloom no more. 
 
 There, while the myrtle's withering boughs 
 Their lifeless leaves around us shed,
 
 76 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 We'll brim the bowl to broken vows, 
 
 To friends long lost, the changed, the dead. 
 
 Or while some blighted laurel waves 
 Its branches o'er the dreary spot, 
 
 We'll drink to those neglected graves 
 Where valor sleeps, unnamed, forgot. 
 
 Joyous as was that spirit, its tenderness and 
 sensibility were yet true to the mother that 
 bore him. The sadness native to the true 
 Irish temperament is like the haunting pathos 
 of those wonderful melodies, breathing in the 
 most frolic moment of the near-by fountain 
 of tears. So perfect is the marriage of 
 Moore's verse to the music of his country 
 that the sub-note of sorrow in the one is in- 
 stantly struck in the other, as if they were both 
 of a birth, twinned in the same soul and in- 
 spiration. 
 
 Such devotion coupled with such genius 
 could not fail to achieve the most precious re- 
 sults. In the present estate of political sen- 
 timent with regard to Ireland, in the apathy 
 with which her fortunes are regarded by too
 
 THOMAS MOORE 77 
 
 many of her kin in this country, in the appar- 
 ent decay of the national hope "at home" — a 
 phrase no longer intelligible — one cannot read 
 over these poems, full of fresh and passionate 
 aspiration, without a feeling of wonder at the 
 intensity of that patriotism which alas! seems 
 destined to pass into a tradition.* Yet, in one 
 of his highest moments of power and proph- 
 ecy, our poet forbids such a thought: 
 
 Like the bright lamp that shone in Kildare's holy fane, 
 And burn'd thro' long ages of darkness and storm, 
 
 Is the heart that sorrows have frown'd on in vain, 
 Whose spirit outlives them, unfading and warm. 
 
 Erin, oh Erin, thus bright thro' the tears 
 
 Of a long night of bondage, thy spirit appears. 
 
 The nations have fallen, and thou still art young, 
 Thy sun is but rising when others are set ; 
 
 And tho' slavery's cloud o'er thy morning hath hung, 
 The full noon of freedom shall beam round thee yet! 
 
 ♦This was written some years ago: — the present moment is 
 more hopeful.
 
 78 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 V 
 
 LALLA ROOKH 
 
 I NOW pass to a consideration of the most 
 elaborate poetical work which Moore 
 has given us — the wide-famed and variously 
 judged and misjudged "Lalla Rookh." One 
 of the wisest men of this country, whose lit- 
 erary judgments are declared to be without 
 appeal, has written: "The test or measure 
 of poetic genius is the power to read the 
 poetry of affairs — to fuse the circumstances 
 of to-day. I know there is entertainment and 
 room for talent in the artist's selection of an- 
 cient or remote subjects; as when the poet 
 goes to India, or to Rome, or Persia, for his 
 fable. But I believe nobody knows better 
 than he that herein he consults his ease rather 
 than his strength or his desire." 
 
 This truth is better apprehended to-day than 
 it was in the epoch which gave to a ravished 
 world such productions as "The Giaour" and
 
 THOMAS MOORE 79 
 
 "Lalla Rookh"; and it is this which, if I 
 may be allowed the phrase, discounts the 
 value of the most strenuous work of Moore's 
 creative faculty. Perhaps Taine touches 
 the point more acutely where he inti- 
 mates that Moore was not pantheistical 
 enough to wear the singing robes of Firdousi. 
 It is a strange fact in literature that the things 
 which one writer neglects as unfit material, 
 may be employed by another to that vital pur- 
 pose which is the enduring life of art in any 
 of its forms. In the beautiful English coun- 
 try, where the Irish poet had fixed his home, 
 lay most of those sources of thought and in- 
 spiration from which Tennyson was to draw 
 the sustaining food of a more exquisitely true 
 and natural poetry than had yet been written. 
 But the talking oak had no message for the 
 ears of the Minstrel of Tara; the brook bab- 
 bled for him no secrets worthy to flow on for- 
 ever in the thoughts of men. Philip's farm 
 was like any one of a dozen about Sloperton; 
 but our poet looked on it with alien eyes.
 
 80 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Moore had no mind to ponder the poetic pos- 
 sibilities of a dusty English miller, nor would 
 he give a sigh to the miller's daughter who 
 
 — "is grown so dear, so dear, 
 That I would be the jewel that trembles at her ear." 
 
 Indeed he had married his Irish Bessie be- 
 fore ever he knew Wilts or Derbyshire. Yet 
 it seems certain that Lady Clara Vere de Vere 
 was on his visiting list — how could he escape 
 her and she the daughter of a hundred 
 earls! . . . 
 
 All this is not to disparage "Lalla Rookh," 
 of which indeed I am too fond to attempt a 
 critical estimate. Considered merely as 
 verse-building, imagery — without reference 
 to true and deep spiritualities — most modern 
 English metre shows poor and crude beside 
 the gorgeous Arabesque of the Irish poet's 
 fancy. Moore has out-Persianed the Persian : 
 compared to him, Hafiz is a child lisping in 
 numbers; Firdousi shames the Orient that has 
 literally adopted the foreign changeling in his 
 stead; the Irish thrush has deceived the world
 
 THOMAS MOORE 81 
 
 with its mock notes borrowed from the bulbul 
 of the enchanted gardens. 
 
 It was a wonderful feat, but looking back 
 over the completed literary cycle, we see that 
 Moore might have turned his powers to bet- 
 ter account. "Lalla Rookh" is a charming 
 romance whose gossamer web, shot with the 
 splendours of the Orient, a child may blow 
 away with its breath. Its passion seldom con- 
 vinces, and, in spite of the amazing industry 
 of the poet, too much in evidence, its fidelity 
 to sentiment and scene is always in question. 
 Six months in the East would have served 
 Moore better than all his books of reference. 
 But in that event it is possible that "Lalla 
 Rookh" would never have been written, — a 
 contingency which you and I would not care 
 to contemplate. Tricked out as it is with all 
 the graces and seductions of a bayadere, it may 
 not bear comparison with the severe master- 
 pieces of English verse. 
 
 Vastly more ingenuity and resource and 
 poetical talent were expended upon "Lalla
 
 82 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Rookh" than are shown in Fitzgerald's para- 
 phrase of Omar, yet the poem of the Rubaiyat 
 is in some quarters critically esteemed to bear 
 the palm by virtue of its more convincing 
 orientalism. 
 
 Beautiful then, as "Lalla Rookh" is, with 
 measures that seem naturally adapted to mu- 
 sic — the four long poems of which it is made 
 up, have been called four extended Irish Mel- 
 odies, which is not quite just to the Melodies 
 — it does not offer such food to the spirit as 
 "In Memoriam"; it does not stimulate the 
 thought like the best cantos of "Childe Har- 
 old," or the nobler effort of Wordsworth. 
 
 Obviously this is a mixing of opposites, but 
 the greatest poem must be that which claims 
 the suffrage of the highest human interest; 
 and it is in the latter works cited we shall 
 find the ranking quality denied to "Lalla 
 Rookh." Yet the world is not always willing 
 to accept so stern a poetical canon. If, as 
 was believed of old, the birth of a poet be a 
 joy to the world, might not the world soon
 
 THOMAS MOORE 83 
 
 turn the joy into a curse by imposing such 
 conditions as would fetter the wings of the 
 poetic soul and cast a baulking spell across 
 the rare moments of fullest inspiration? 
 Moore himself has delightfully anticipated 
 such criticism by putting it into the mouth of 
 his Fadladeen — and I may say that I think 
 better of Fadladeen than of some others, his 
 poetical personae. 
 
 It is not easy to offer extracts from "Lalla 
 Rookh," for the reason that too much of it 
 tempts quotation. I may ask your indulgence 
 while I mark a few passages where the thrush 
 and the bulbul sing one note, and that the 
 note of beauty and rapture which men have 
 agreed to call poetry. 
 
 The chief reproach which the critics bring 
 against our poet is, humorously enough, that 
 he has a seemingly inexhaustible store of that 
 poetical capital of which less gifted rhyme- 
 sters are deuced glad to have a very small 
 portion, — namely, fancy, felicity of illustration 
 and that happiness of spirit, that divine con-
 
 84 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 fidence, by which the poet is enabled to rise 
 unto the pure ether. "Paradise and the 
 Peri" exemplifies this fortunate estate of the 
 poet as I believe does no other poem in the 
 English tongue. It is so familiar to us all 
 that I may not quote, — yet I beg for this one 
 glorious piece of descriptive verse in which 
 are assembled such images of beauty as give 
 a dazzling richness to the lines, and which, it 
 is pleasing to remember (in spite of Taine and 
 Emerson) have been hailed as native to the 
 East: — 
 
 Now upon Syria's land of roses 
 Softly the light of Eve reposes, 
 And, like a glory, the broad sun 
 Hangs over sainted Lebanon ; 
 Whose head in wintry grandeur tow'rs 
 
 And whitens with eternal sleet, 
 While summer in a vale of flow'rs, 
 
 Is sleeping rosy at his feet. 
 
 To one who looked from upper air 
 O'er all the enchanted region there, 
 How beauteous mi'.st have been the glow, 
 The life, the sparkling from below !
 
 THOMAS MOORE 85 
 
 Fair gardens, shining streams, with ranks 
 Of golden melons on their banks, 
 More golden where the sunlight falls; — 
 Gay lizards, glittering on the walls 
 Of ruined shrines, busy and bright, 
 As they were all alive with light; 
 And yet, more splendid, numerous flocks 
 Of pigeons settling on the rocks, 
 With their rich restless wings, that gleam 
 Variously in the crimson beam 
 Of the warm West, — as if inlaid 
 With brilliants from the mine, or made 
 Of tearless rainbows, such as span 
 The unclouded skies of Peristan. 
 And then the mingling sounds that come 
 Of shepherd's ancient reed, with hum 
 Of the wild bees of Palestine, 
 Banqueting through the flow'ry vales ; 
 And, Jordan, those sweet banks of thine, 
 And woods so full of nightingales. 
 
 The poem of "The Fire Worshippers," in 
 which Moore receives an access of earnestness 
 from identifying the cause of Mithra with the 
 unconquered national spirit of Ireland — Iran
 
 86 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 is easily read Erin — is critically esteemed the 
 best in "Lalla Rookh." It was honoured with 
 the preference of Lord Byron, who himself 
 liked a good story in verse better than he could 
 or would tell it. Certainly the poet is here 
 in thorough touch with his theme, and if there 
 be objection to Hafed as a scarcely disguised 
 Fenian, we are not disposed to quarrel with 
 the inconsistency, since on this very account 
 Moore writes with intense feeling, which is 
 usually the mother of good poetry. The 
 whole story is finely imagined, and the catas- 
 trophe worked out with a high degree of 
 dramatic strength and skill. 
 
 I shall cite only a few lines from this, the 
 finest work of Moore's creative power. 
 Hinda is thus described, yet beautifully as it 
 is done, I fancy Byron knew his fair pagan 
 better when he gave us Haidee: 
 
 Light as the angel shapes that bless 
 An infant's dream, yet not the less 
 Rich in all woman's loveliness; — 
 With eyes so pure, that from their ray
 
 THOMAS MOORE 87 
 
 Dark Vice would turn abash'd away, 
 Blinded like serpents when they gaze 
 Upon the em'rald's virgin blaze ; — 
 Yet fill'd with all youth's sweet desires, 
 Mingling the meek and vestal fires 
 Of other worlds with all the bliss, 
 The fond, weak tenderness of this. 
 
 Poetry more chaste is not frequent in the 
 anthologies, but it leaves Hinda a lovely ab- 
 straction. We think of Haidee's 
 
 Short upper lip — sweet lips that make us sigh 
 E'er to have seen such ; 
 
 and of that ominous fact in her brief story of 
 love and passion — 
 
 Her mother was a Moorish maid from Fez 
 Where all is Allah — or a wilderness! 
 
 In 'The Light of the Harem" our Poet il- 
 lustrates the musical possibilities of the Eng- 
 lish language more happily perhaps than he 
 has done in any other poem — save, of course, 
 the Irish lyrics. It is pure joy, sheer wanton-
 
 88 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 ness of delightful fancy. Every line sings 
 itself. Compare it with some of the standard 
 things that are dubbed poetry by the school- 
 men, and the brain aches out of sympathy. 
 But "Lalla Rookh" has already detained me 
 too long, and I must content myself with these 
 few exquisite lines in which the poet naively, 
 yet truly, describes the charm of his own 
 verse: 
 
 For mine is the lay that lightly floats, 
 And mine are the murmuring, dying notes 
 That fall as soft as snow on the sea, 
 And melt in the wave as instantly; — 
 And the passionate strain that, deeply going, 
 
 Refines the bosom it trembles through, 
 As the musk-wind, over the water blowing, 
 
 Ruffles the wave, but sweetens it too. 
 
 I wonder if the lightness of this frolic fancy, 
 wantoning in images of roses and wine, this 
 poet of Love's summer heaven, will ever cease 
 to be admirable among men. And yet the 
 Dryasdusts who presume to sit in judgment 
 on these delicate creations which, for any-
 
 THOMAS MOORE 89 
 
 thing like an adequate likeness of similar ex- 
 cellence, beggar the whole antecedent tribe of 
 rhymers, will dismiss them for you with a 
 wave of the hand as "light" poetry. Light in- 
 deed! As if dulness and heaviness were not 
 the curse of the human intellect, and it were 
 a reproach that our Irish Ariel alone es- 
 capes it! 
 
 I may not dismiss the subject of "Lalla 
 Rookh" without a word on "The Loves of the 
 Angels," which nearly followed the more fa- 
 mous Orientalism in point of time, and is not 
 greatly inferior to it in the essentials of poet- 
 ical performance. But, although the poem 
 cannot be pronounced a failure, it is evident 
 that Moore had taken his pitcher once too 
 often to the well of Eastern legend. Besides, 
 the conditions of composition were different. 
 "Lalla Rookh" was created, as the poet tells 
 us, amid the snows of two or three Derbyshire 
 winters. The "Loves" was written during a 
 pleasant exile, amid overmuch distraction, at 
 Paris. The result proves that even a poet who
 
 90 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 seems to have been made for society, had some- 
 times to take off his door-knocker and be at 
 home to none but the Muses. 
 
 VI 
 
 HIS PROSE 
 
 OF Moore's works in prose I have not 
 room to speak at length, but some of 
 them are of deservedly high reputation and 
 will live as long as his poetry. One is moved 
 to wonder how he was able to do such a mass 
 of work and to do it so well — he was always 
 singularly thorough and painstaking — and 
 still give so much of himself to the pleasing 
 exactions of fashionable society. Well might 
 he sing: — 
 
 They may rail at this life — from the hour I began it, 
 I've found it a world full of kindness and bliss; 
 
 And until they can show me some happier planet, 
 More social and bright, I'll content me with this. 
 
 But his biographer, Lord John Russell,
 
 THOMAS MOORE 91 
 
 bids us take note that the poet did not allow 
 his social tastes to interfere with the business 
 of authorship. There were for him in every 
 year long periods of rest, thought and study 
 at his Sloperton retreat, and from these re- 
 tirements came the fruit of his more earnest 
 labour. 
 
 Among the prose works of Moore the Life 
 of Byron seems to me the most important. 
 So eminent a critic as Macaulay ranks it with 
 the finest prose compositions which any age 
 has produced. The singular good taste with 
 which Moore executed this task, touching 
 himself at so many points; the courage and 
 manliness which he evinced in the trying rela- 
 tions produced by the noble poet's trust, and 
 the final judgment which the world, at first 
 inclined to impugn his motives, has pro- 
 nounced on the whole affair — render it the 
 proudest as it is the most remarkable episode 
 in Moore's literary career. 
 
 "The Epicurean" done in poetic prose, has 
 been called the "highest and best sustained
 
 92 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 flight in the regions of pure romance." I 
 think it smells a little too much of the lamp, 
 but it is surely a most finished piece of work, 
 with passages of great beauty and eloquence. 
 Perhaps I ought to be ashamed to confess that 
 I find a more genuine pleasure in reading that 
 delightful fragment which even the sly his- 
 torian of the abbeys of Touraine might have 
 envied — "The Chapter of the Blanket." The 
 Lives of Sheridan and Lord Edward Fitz- 
 gerald are not proposed as perfect models of 
 biography, neither are they of merely medi- 
 ocre value. The "Sheridan" is enriched with 
 some of Moore's most brilliant prose and the 
 Life of Lord Edward does justice to a beau- 
 tiful and heroic character. I have never been 
 able to read Moore's History of Ireland, and 
 I suspect the poet had not much natural fit- 
 ness for the task. But his glory appears to me 
 the more genuine that we are able to score an 
 occasional failure against him. 
 
 As a reviewer Moore set a far higher mark 
 than as a historian. Mr. Richard Henry
 
 THOMAS MOORE 93 
 
 Stoddard declares himself amazed at the 
 cleverness of Moore's critical papers and the 
 immense versatility of their author. "His 
 contributions to The Edinburgh Review," says 
 the American scholar, "were astonishingly 
 good of their kind; critically acute, thor- 
 oughly learned and politically sagacious." 
 Mr. Richard Heme Shepherd, the competent 
 English critic, allots our poet an honourable 
 place in the brilliant constellation of contrib- 
 utors which the famous Review numbered in 
 those years — Sydney Smith, Brougham, Ma- 
 caulay, Carlyle, Hallam, and Jeffrey himself. 
 These are splendid testimonies to the intel- 
 lectual calibre of a man who is often ignor- 
 antly put down as a mere trifler in poetry — a 
 writer of vers de societe. 
 
 The visit which our poet made to America 
 in 1803, when he was a young man of twenty- 
 four, gave birth to some very keen poetical 
 satire touching social and political conditions 
 in this country, for which the biographers of 
 Moore are in the habit of offering apology.
 
 94 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 It does not seem to me that the incident is of 
 much moment. Moore was honestly shocked 
 at some things which he saw in the infant Re- 
 public, and there is no reason to doubt that 
 he honestly reported his impressions. He 
 was little more than a boy in years, and he 
 lived to see the Republic grow great in spite 
 of the evils which attended its early founda- 
 tion. Be it remembered that a generation 
 afterward there were American poets whom 
 the brutalities of slavery roused to as fierce a 
 pitch of moral indignation — if not to as tell- 
 ing literary purpose — as the author of these 
 spirited lines: 
 
 Oh! Freedom! Freedom! how I hate thy cant! 
 Not Eastern bombast, not the savage rant 
 Of purpled madmen, were they numbered all 
 From Roman Nero down to Russian Paul, 
 Could grate upon my ear, so mean, so base, 
 As the rank jargon of that factious race, 
 Who, poor of heart and prodigal of words, 
 Formed to be slaves, yet struggling to be lords, 
 Strut forth as patriots, from their negro marts, 
 And shout for rights, with rapine in their hearts!
 
 THOMAS MOORE 95 
 
 Speaking as a humble student of literature, 
 I am rather glad than otherwise that Moore's 
 feelings were excited to such excellent poet- 
 ical effect. Bad politics is always a thing 
 easier mended than bad poetry. If our poet 
 had not been disillusioned of some of his 
 dreams — as Charles Dickens professed to be 
 some thirty odd years later — he would have 
 kept his temper and would probably not have 
 risen, poetically, above the elegant trifling of 
 most of these American pieces. 
 
 Before leaving the American episode it is 
 proper to set down here the memorable words 
 which the poet wrote many years afterward, 
 recalling the storm of censure that his criti- 
 cisms had provoked: "The good will I have 
 experienced from more than one distinguished 
 American sufficiently assures me that any in- 
 justice I may have done to that land of free- 
 men, if not long since wholly forgotten, is 
 remembered only to be forgiven."
 
 96 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 VII 
 
 CRITICAL DEPRECIATION 
 
 SINCE the foregoing pages were written, 
 I have turned over the "Treasury of 
 Irish Poetry," edited by Stopford A. Brooke 
 and T. W. Rolleston, and it is but fair to say, 
 a compilation admirable in most respects. I 
 should, however, like to mark some exception 
 to Mr. Brooke's disparaging estimate of 
 Moore. 
 
 To speak with due candour, the worst thing 
 in this book of Irish poetry is the Rev. Mr. 
 Brooke's prose Had that been omitted, or, 
 at least, the section dealing critically with 
 Moore, the present anthology would offer 
 no serious blemish. Mr. Brooke is a dis- 
 tinctly minor poet himself, as this collec- 
 tion bears evidence, but as a critic and com- 
 mentator, he is not without honour; and in a 
 long life of literary plodding it is only fair 
 to say that he has done some respectable work.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 97 
 
 It is true also that he is not without feeling for 
 Irish poetry; many of his observations in the 
 preface to this volume are in a high degree 
 illuminating. But in his treatment of the 
 largest figure in Irish poetical literature (who 
 is also a true world-poet), he reveals all the 
 one-sidedness of a small-beer critic. In his 
 attempted belittling of Moore he offers noth- 
 ing new, and there is a note of personal 
 acerbity in his writing which is difficult to un- 
 derstand, except on the trite theory that the 
 mere critic who cannot create literature usu- 
 ally hates the man who can. Allowance 
 should also be made for the fact that Mr. 
 Brooke is an Irishman — an observation not in 
 the least enigmatical, in view of certain pain- 
 ful truths already touched upon. 
 
 "No one dreams," says the Rev. Mr. 
 Brooke, — "of comparing Moore with the 
 greater men, or of giving his poetry too im- 
 portant a place in the history of English song; 
 but the man whose work Byron frankly ad- 
 mired, whom Scott did not dispraise, who
 
 98 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 received letters of thanks and appreciation 
 from readers in America, Europe and Asia; 
 who fulfilled Matthew Arnold's somewhat 
 foolish criterion of greatness by being known 
 and accepted on the Continent; whom the 
 Italians, French, Germans, Russians, Swedes 
 and Dutch translated; whose 'Lalla Rookh' 
 was partly put into Persian and became the 
 companion of Persians in their travels and in 
 the streets of Ispahan; to whom publishers 
 like Longmans gave three thousand pounds 
 for a poem before they had even seen it — as a 
 tribute to reputation already acquired — can- 
 not surely be treated with the indifferent con- 
 tempt which some have lavished upon 
 him." 
 
 I have italicised the last quoted words in 
 order the more strongly to mark the dishon- 
 esty of Mr. Brooke's critical method. Here 
 he would have you believe he is making a 
 great show of liberality before he proceeds to 
 his own inept and unwarranted disparage- 
 ment of Moore.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 99 
 
 Mr. Brooke is at least a practised literary 
 hand, with a good share of the knowledge that 
 goes with the craft. One is therefore sur- 
 prised to find him guilty of such a stroke of 
 bungling malice as the statement that Scott 
 did not dispraise Moore! Is not Sir Walter's 
 Journal open to us as to the Rev. Brooke? 
 Do we not read therein the noble Scot's trib- 
 ute to the Irish lyrist — to that union of 
 genius, versatility and learning, the most bril- 
 liant with the most solid parts, which aston- 
 ished Byron — and on many a page the record 
 of his sincere friendship and profound ad- 
 miration? 
 
 But pray, Mr. Brooke, what critic of de- 
 cent reputation ever ventured to treat Moore 
 with indifferent contempt? Did Jeffrey or 
 Gifford, did Hazlitt or Macaulay? Was he 
 not loved and admired by Sydney Smith and 
 Dr. Parr — by even the captious Leigh Hunt 
 and the learned Mackintosh? How were 
 those acute and powerful minds deceived 
 since it falls to Stopford Brooke to assign
 
 ioo NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Moore his true status in literature? 
 
 Mr. Brooke emits the invidious opinion 
 that Moore's "poetry is the translation of mu- 
 sic into as pretty and melodious words as 
 possible." "Music was first, and poetry fol- 
 lowed," observes Mr. Brooke; and he adds, 
 with seeming profundity, "This is not the case 
 with a great poet." 
 
 The truth is, Moore's unexampled blend of 
 musical and poetical genius has confounded 
 the critics. Pragmatical persons like the 
 Rev. Brooke resent the intrusion into Moore's 
 work of a quality with which they know not 
 how to deal, and yet which, in some indefin- 
 able way, imparts a most rare and distinctive 
 excellence to his poetry. It never seems to 
 occur to such myopic critics that Moore's gift 
 of music supplies a clue to his singular supe- 
 riority as a lyrical poet. Yet the poet himself 
 puts the clue into their hands, for he tells us, 
 as I have already quoted: "I only know that 
 in a strong and inborn feeling for music lies 
 the source of whatever talent I may have
 
 THOMAS MOORE 101 
 
 shown for poetical composition, and that it 
 was the effort to translate into language the 
 emotions and passions which music appeared 
 to me to express, that first led to my writing 
 any poetry at all deserving of the name." 
 
 Of course, we should have expected the 
 shallow Brooke to tell us that Moore had 
 fancy, but no imagination. This is one of the 
 stock criticisms formulated against him by 
 writers who are incapable of appreciating the 
 poet's genius. Like Heine, the Irish poet had 
 too much fancy, — so they allege! "I have 
 myself experienced what such critics say," re- 
 marks Heine; "the fowl stands upon one leg 
 and clucks that the singer has no soul; the 
 turkey-cock gobbles that he has no earnest- 
 ness; the dove coos that he does not know true 
 love; the goose cackles that he is not suffi- 
 ciently wise; the capon chirps that he is not 
 moral; the wren twitters that he, alas! has no 
 religion; the sparrow pipes that he is not pro- 
 lific enough; lapwings, magpies, owls, all 
 these croak, chirp and chatter."
 
 102 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 The Brooke babbles that Moore has no 
 depth! 
 
 But at least he had fancy — that is conceded 
 as a species of reproach to our unrivalled 
 Irish Ariel. Now this very quality is almost 
 wholly lacking in English verse, and Moore 
 is hated and disparaged for possessing so 
 much of it. By this gift of fancy, as Lord 
 Byron finely said, he proved his Oriental de- 
 scent better than the most zealous of his coun- 
 try's antiquarians. Moore is the most French 
 of all the English writers, says Taine — a re- 
 mark easily interpreted. And it is for this 
 reason Moore "stands curiously alone," — to 
 quote Mr. Brooke's invidious phrase, — not 
 because he failed of imaginative power, but 
 rather because in his peculiar province he has 
 not a serious rival. 
 
 We do not now regard the Miltonic dumps 
 as a great proof of imagination — at least 
 Taine did not — and we are very sure that dul- 
 ness and heaviness are the clogging curse of 
 the human intellect, never more thoroughly
 
 THOMAS MOORE 103 
 
 naturalised than in the English literary at- 
 mosphere. Upon the ground that Moore is 
 never dull or heavy (and therefore never 
 English) critics like the Rev. Brooke have 
 indicted him for lack of imagination. 
 
 It will not be disputed that Edgar Allan 
 Poe was a better poet than the Rev. Stopford 
 Brooke, and at least as good a critic. I beg 
 to quote here what he says concerning this 
 hackneyed stricture upon Moore: 
 
 "It has been the fashion of late days to deny 
 Moore imagination, while granting him fancy 
 — a distinction originating with Coleridge, 
 than whom no man more fully comprehended 
 the great powers of Moore. The fact is that 
 the fancy of this poet so far predominated 
 over all his other faculties, and over the fancy 
 of all other men, as to have induced very nat- 
 urally the idea that he is fanciful only. 
 
 "But never was there a greater mistake; 
 never was a grosser wrong done the fame of 
 a true poet. In the compass of the English 
 language I can call to mind no poem more
 
 io 4 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 profound or more weirdly imaginative, in the 
 best sense, than the lines commencing, 'I 
 would I were by that dim lake,' which are 
 the composition of Thomas Moore." 
 
 Mr. Brooke thinks that he scores pro- 
 foundly against Moore when he intimates that 
 the latter neglected, as a source of poetical in- 
 spiration, the fairies and leprechauns so much 
 in favour with the neo-Celtic school of latter- 
 day poets. Be it understood that I greatly 
 admire the work of these poets, and especially 
 the delicate, mystical genius of Yeats, the most 
 authentic voice among them all. But I ven- 
 ture to submit, the neo-Celts have not yet 
 given us better poetry than Moore's; and, 
 charming as their poetry often is, I do not 
 suppose it will ever drive the Melodies out 
 of favour.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 105 
 
 VIII 
 
 A FAMOUS DUEL 
 
 THAT the Muse of Literary History 
 likes her joke was pretty well estab- 
 lished even before she dismissed Moore and 
 Jeffrey from their grey goose quills to do bat- 
 tle on the field of honour. Shall we cry alas! 
 with Burke, over the decline of chivalry? 
 For it is too certain that the spirit which once 
 presided over these affairs is gone out, — "with 
 sighing sent," — and the uncanny elf that we 
 are calling, in this evil latter time, the Spirit 
 of Commercialism, is come in. Poets do not 
 now challenge their critics to mortal combat. 
 Nay, your poet knows a trick worth two of 
 that, being to-day primarily a man of business, 
 shrewdly aware that the "chorus of indolent 
 reviewers" can do him no greater damage 
 than to advertise his works. For the com- 
 mercialist is keeping literary shop. Criti- 
 cism is become a parrot cry. Parnassus is
 
 106 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 covered with bizarre inscriptions, like an 
 American landscape. Even the sad consola- 
 tion of ifcneas is denied to us who would fain 
 hope for better things — 
 
 O passi graviora dabit deus his quoque fineml 
 
 Tom Moore, although a very small man 
 physically — Theodore Hook savagely de- 
 scribed him as a cross between a toad and a 
 cupid — was a firm believer in the code duello. 
 More than thirty years after his bloodless en- 
 counter with Jeffrey, the American Willis 
 reports for us a conversation at Lady Blessing- 
 ton's in London, in which the poet reaffirmed 
 the fire-eating principles of his youth. 
 
 In spite of Moore's pacific character, there 
 is no doubt that he was always ready, upon 
 due occasion, to call out and even pink an ad- 
 versary on the field of honour. We may be 
 glad that his courage was only once put to so 
 mortal a proof. It is not easy to overcome the 
 comic suggestion of "Anacreon Moore" with 
 a pistol, ready to go off, like a premature ode,
 
 THOMAS MOORE 107 
 
 before its appointed time, and tolerably cer- 
 tain — such is the genius of accident — to 
 wound something more palpable than the 
 "casing air." 
 
 Our poet had so keen a perception of the 
 ludicrous that I half suspect him of laughing 
 slyly with us over that which is portentously 
 set down in his diary as "Particulars of My 
 Hostile Meeting with Jeffrey in the year 
 1806." The great Jeffrey, whose once fa- 
 mous and dreaded criticisms refuse to read 
 like literature to-day, had gone so far as to 
 accuse the poet of a purpose to corrupt the 
 morals of youth, in some of his earlier 
 amatory pieces, written over the pen-name of 
 Thomas Little. Even my Lord Byron, whose 
 chaste muse was yet to produce "Beppo" and 
 "Don Juan," mingled his censure with that of 
 the Edinburgh reviewer: 
 
 Who, in soft guise, surrounded by a choir 
 Of virgins melting, not with Vesta's fire? 
 'Tis Little, young Catullus of his day.
 
 108 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Nothing better fixes the status of Jeffrey 
 than his absurd criticism upon the amorous 
 breathings of Moore. Truth is, the poetry 
 upon which it was founded is marked by the 
 utter absence of anything like real passion. 
 Moore was merely platonising, and the im- 
 practical, rather than unpoetical, Jeffrey 
 charged him with a devilish lubricity. The 
 affair should have ended in a laugh, instead 
 of a duel. It ended in both, and there are 
 some echoes of that laughter yet lingering in 
 the eternal shades. 
 
 However, Moore was hot for a deadly 
 reprisal, and, by the hand of his trusty, 
 though eccentric, friend, Hume, he dis- 
 patched to Jeffrey a fiery cartel, demanding 
 a plenary apology, or that condign satisfac- 
 tion which one gentleman is bound to accord 
 another, etc. It may be conceived that Jef- 
 frey — a slight, bookish man, with a Scotch 
 melancholy — had no taste for this business; 
 but there was clearly no evading it. The 
 Muses were bent on a mortal arbitrament, and
 
 THOMAS MOORE 109 
 
 hastened on the preliminaries. "We had 
 agreed," says Moore, "that it would not be 
 prudent for me to sleep at home (for fear of 
 the constabulary, no doubt), and as Hume was 
 not the man, either then or at any other pe- 
 riod of his life, to be able to furnish a friend 
 with a clean pair of sheets, I took the sheets 
 off my own bed, and, holding them up as well 
 as I could, bore them away with us in the 
 coach." 
 
 Arrived at Chalk Farm bright and early, 
 the two famous principals saw each other for 
 the first time. Such is the futility of paper 
 warfare that Jeffrey afterward said he liked 
 Moore from the first glimpse he had of him. 
 "The first words I recollect to have passed 
 between us," says Moore — and what effort of 
 drollery could better this naive description — 
 "was Jeffrey's observing, on our being left 
 alone together, 'what a beautiful morning it 
 is.' 'Yes,' I answered with a slight smile — 
 (note that smile on the roguish Irish mouth) 
 — 'a morning made for better purposes.' To
 
 no NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 which his only response was a sort of assent- 
 ing sigh." 
 
 This pleasing and decorous sensibility on 
 the part of Jeffrey, as of one prepared to put 
 on his immortality, was certainly not echoed 
 by his antagonist. While the seconds were 
 loading (or unloading) the pistols, Moore 
 improved at once the opportunity and the 
 amenities of the code by telling his Scotch 
 friend a story of one Billy Egan, Irish bar- 
 rister, in a like encounter. If Jeffrey 
 laughed at it we are not told. An accurately 
 timed sortie of Bow-street myrmidons here 
 ended the meeting; and "Little's leadless pis- 
 tol" threatens vainly forever in the pasquin- 
 ade of Byron. 
 
 It is, perhaps, not so well known that 
 Moore, deeming Byron's satirical verses a 
 sufficient casus belli, in due course sent the 
 noble lord a challenge. Byron, who was or- 
 dinarily as ready for a row as for a woman, 
 made his brother poet a generous amende, 
 and — what is more important to literature
 
 THOMAS MOORE in 
 
 -sent him the famous song, beginning — 
 
 My boat is on the shore, 
 
 And my barque is on the sea; 
 
 But before I go, Tom Moore, 
 Here's a double health to thee! 
 
 Tho' the ocean roar around me, 
 Yet it still shall bear me on ; 
 
 Tho' a desert should surround me, 
 It hath springs that may be won. 
 
 Were it the last drop in the well, 
 
 As I gasped upon the brink, 
 Ere my fainting spirit fell, 
 
 'Tis to thee that I would drink. 
 
 With that water, as this wine, 
 
 The libation I would pour 
 Should be — Peace with mine and thine, 
 
 And a health to thee, Tom Moore! 
 
 The friendship, thus formed, continued un- 
 broken until the untimely death of Byron and 
 remains one of the most interesting in the his-
 
 ii2 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 tory of literary intimacies. Jeffrey also became 
 a firm friend of Moore's, and many years after 
 their meeting at Chalk Farm, he paid the 
 Irish poet this tribute, which is quite as strik- 
 ing for a Scotch incapacity of humour as for 
 an equally Scotch article of magnanimity: 
 
 "He has long ago redeemed his error; in 
 all his later works he appears as the eloquent 
 champion of purity, fidelity and delicacy, not 
 less than of justice, liberty and honour."
 
 THOMAS MOORE 113 
 
 IX 
 
 his personality; 
 
 WE have plenty of material from which to 
 relimn the personal portrait of the 
 Irish Anacreon. The difficulty is only in the 
 selection. Jeffrey speaks of the inward light 
 of his mind and happily describes him as the 
 "sweetest-blooded, hopefullest creature that 
 ever set fortune at defiance." "I never re- 
 ceived a visit from him," says the keen and 
 captious Leigh Hunt, "but I felt as if I had 
 been talking with Prior or Sir Charles Sed- 
 ley." From Hunt also we get this illuminat- 
 ing touch: "His eyes are as dark and fine 
 as you would wish to see under a set of vine 
 leaves; his mouth generous and good-hu- 
 moured with dimples." "Moore is the only 
 poet," says Byron, "whose conversation equals 
 his writings." The author of "Beppo" and 
 "Don Juan" was too fond of epigram to be 
 uniformly just or kind, but he allows the
 
 ii4 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Irish poet to share with Lord Clare the mel- 
 ancholy distinction of his nearest friendship 
 — excluding Hobhouse, Shelley and the rest. 
 
 Jane Welsh Carlyle, who was privileged 
 beyond most women to speak, used to say, 
 "My dear, never marry a man of genius." 
 It is pleasant to turn from the conjugal in- 
 felicities suggested by some famous names to 
 the simple happiness that inspired this entry 
 in Moore's diary, under date of 1844, when 
 the poet was sixty-five years old : "A strange 
 life mine, but the best as well as pleasantest 
 part of it lies at home. I told my dear Bessie 
 this morning that while I stood at my study 
 window, looking out at her as she crossed the 
 field, I sent a blessing after her. 'Thank 
 you, bird,' she replied, 'that's better than 
 money'; and so it is. Bird is a pet name she 
 gave me in our younger days." 
 
 "Moore's domestic life," says Lord John 
 Russell, "gave scope to the best parts of his 
 character. His beautiful wife (she was so 
 beautiful that Rogers called her Psyche) was
 
 THOMAS MOORE 115 
 
 a treasure of inestimable value to his happi- 
 ness." And the same hand testifies that to the 
 day of the poet's death she received from her 
 husband the homage of a lover. 
 
 I'd mourn the hopes that leave me 
 
 If thy smiles had left me too; 
 I'd weep when friends deceive me, 
 
 If thou wert, like them, untrue; 
 But while I've thee before me, 
 
 With heart so warm and eyes so bright, 
 No clouds can linger o'er me — 
 
 That smile turns them all to light. 
 
 "Three women have loved me," writes 
 Renan; "my mother, my sister, my wife." 
 Moore felt that he owed all to his mother, an 
 Irish woman of the best though humble type, 
 shrewd, provident, and passionately devoted 
 to her gifted son. Out of very small means 
 she managed to procure for him every advan- 
 tage of education. His success was, in large 
 measure, the fruit of her intelligent thought 
 and sacrifice. To his honor be it set down 
 that he never regarded this debt of gratitude
 
 u6 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 as paid by the zealous and affectionate return 
 which, so long as she lived, he did not cease to 
 make her. 
 
 Washington Irving used to say it was easier 
 to get a new book than a letter from our poet. 
 My Lady Bessington solicited correspond- 
 ence with most of the famous men of the day. 
 They were all glad to write to her — Bulwer, 
 Disraeli, Savage Landor, Dickens and no end 
 of celebrities. She was, no doubt, a charm- 
 ing woman, with a personal fascination which 
 does not survive in her literary remains. 
 Her biographer is unable to offer any letters 
 from Tom Moore to the Countess, though he 
 was assiduously courted to Gore House. 
 When Moore's mother died at a ripe old age, 
 happy in seeing her Tom higher in fame and 
 worldly esteem than her fond heart could 
 ever have hoped for him in those early, hum- 
 ble days at 12 Aungier street, Dublin, — she 
 had four thousand letters from her son! 
 
 If I have been at all successful in gather-
 
 THOMAS MOORE 117 
 
 ing here and there a hint or a feature to make 
 up the portrait of our poet, I shall be happy 
 should the reader carry away from these 
 pages such a likeness as presents itself to my 
 own mind. It is that of a poet whose genius 
 — the rarest and purest ever given to an Irish 
 Celt — is, I believe, in its essential quality and 
 message, without a peer in these English 
 centuries. It is that of a patriot who amid 
 strong temptations preserved the freedom of 
 his mind; who kept his principles alike in the 
 tumult of popular clamour and the polite 
 sarcasm of the drawing room ; who was never 
 ashamed of his country — a luxury that has 
 been indulged in by many Irishmen, immeas- 
 urably inferior to him in character and 
 talents; who gave to his country his best 
 thought, his highest inspiration, and laboured 
 for her all the days of his life. We have 
 glanced at those qualities which made him 
 beloved in his home and in the near circle of 
 his friends. As to the rest, he stood in the 
 full centre of the world's admiring regard
 
 u8 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 and was the idol of two generations of a so- 
 ciety as brilliant as has ever existed: — 
 
 Whose humor as gay as the firefly's light, 
 Played round every subject and shone as it played ; 
 
 Whose wit in the combat, as gentle as bright, 
 Ne'er carried a heart-stain away on its blade. 
 
 Finally, I take him to illustrate the best 
 possibilities of the Irish character, — a gentle- 
 man, the finest, maybe, that his race has pro- 
 duced. The more I think of it, the more I 
 am convinced that his gentility — the poise 
 and worth and true integrity of his character 
 — was only a less admirable thing than his 
 poetry; and, as being more susceptible of 
 worthy imitation, I commend it to some per- 
 sons of his own nationality who have put a 
 libel and a stigma upon their race in the 
 graceless labour of disparaging him. 
 
 "Of two things all who knew him must 
 have been persuaded," says his noble friend 
 and biographer, "the one, his strong feelings 
 of devotion, his aspirations, his longing for 
 immortality and his submission to the will of
 
 THOMAS MOORE 119 
 
 God; the other, his love of his neighbour, his 
 Samaritan kindness to the distressed, his good 
 will to all men." 
 
 I think we may leave him in the light of 
 this true and simple judgment drawn by one 
 who was far better qualified to estimate the 
 worth of Moore as a man than to define the 
 message of his genius, the abiding value of 
 his poetical achievement. That in just and 
 satisfactory measure is yet to be done. Mine 
 shall not be the hand to lift the veil from the 
 sorrows that darkened his last years. The 
 nightingale drooped in the heart of the rose. 
 I know of few things more pathetic than the 
 poet's own account, in his Diary, of how he 
 struggled to maintain his wonderful buoyancy 
 amid the coming-on of age, the slow turning 
 down of the lights, the fading of his enchanted 
 world. 
 
 So soon may I follow 
 
 When friendships decay, 
 And from love's shining circle 
 
 The gems drop away.
 
 120 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 When true hearts lie wither'd, 
 And warm ones are flown, 
 
 Oh, who would inhabit 
 This bleak world alone! 
 
 He had done his best work long before old 
 age came upon him; and all ensuing time, I 
 verily believe, will take little from his fame.
 
 THOMAS MOORE 121 
 
 IRISH PREJUDICE AGAINST MOORE— A 
 FOOTNOTE 
 
 THE truth as to this rather obscure matter 
 is, that Moore has long suffered from 
 what the French call le rancune ecclesias- 
 tique, which we may translate simply as 
 priestly spite, because, although he wrote a 
 book in defence of the Roman Catholic re- 
 ligion, his personal relations toward it during 
 the greater part of his life were never clearly 
 defined. Then it is not forgotten that he 
 failed to convert his Protestant wife and suf- 
 fered his children to be brought up in the 
 English church. 
 
 The rancor ecclesiastical has a long mem- 
 ory and it doubtless recalls the letter which 
 Moore, then a young man enjoying the friend- 
 ship of Lord Moira, addressed to the Catho- 
 lics of Dublin anent some proposals of the 
 Whig party with regard to the nomination of
 
 122 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Irish bishops. Moore's advice was practi- 
 cally to throw the Pope overboard, in view of 
 the compensating advantages which were 
 promised to Ireland. It is likely that the 
 letter had small influence, although it was ad- 
 mirably written and sprinkled with the 
 choicest Greek and Latin quotations. Moore 
 was then fresh from college and not averse to 
 airing his acquirements. In short, the letter 
 fell flat, as a far abler document would have 
 done, carrying the same propositions. Cu- 
 rious persons will find it in the supplementary 
 volume of Moore's prose writings which was 
 brought out in this country some years ago, 
 under the editorship of the late Richard 
 Henry Stoddard. (The same volume has 
 even better things than this Dublin letter, — 
 I have already referred to that delicious frag- 
 ment, "The Chapter of the Blanket," which 
 is very much more interesting than the poet's 
 "History of Ireland.") 
 
 It seems there has always been a slight
 
 THOMAS MOORE 123 
 
 doubt whether Moore died in the Roman 
 Catholic faith, the faith to which he dedicated 
 some of his finest poems and his most eloquent 
 prose. S. C. Hall asserted that the poet 
 changed his religion towards the close of his 
 life, but Hall was not a competent witness, 
 owing to his notorious love of gossip. How- 
 beit, it is good to learn that the Committee 
 having the Dublin memorial in charge 
 cleared up this vexatious point to its own sat- 
 isfaction, relieving Moore of the imputation 
 noted. The gravity of such a doubt, in Ire- 
 land, can hardly be overestimated. 
 
 That spirit of jealous envy of talent or suc- 
 cess, which has been always a marked Irish 
 characteristic, is also traceable in the depre- 
 ciation of Moore. So you will find most 
 fifth-rate Irish literary men and journalists 
 agreed that Moore was not a first-rater. In 
 fact, they try to diminish him by proposing 
 as his equal or his superior such a poet as 
 Mangan who, whatever his merits, — and they
 
 i2 4 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 are occasionally great, — is scarcely to be con- 
 sidered in the same class with Moore. 
 
 My own opinion is that two or three of 
 Moore's melodies are worth half the theology 
 in the world, and that all the wealth of Ire- 
 land could not furnish a monument to equal 
 his just poetic fame. But I am glad that Ire- 
 land has accorded this recognition signalised 
 by the Dublin memorial, however dilatory 
 and inadequate, to the greatest of her poets, 
 the most finished of her literary men, and one 
 of the best and sanest of her patriots.
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 
 
 I AM to speak in this and the following 
 essays of a group of Irish poets and 
 balladists who lived and suffered and had 
 their earthly portion toward the middle of 
 the nineteenth century. There are many 
 greater and prouder names than theirs on the 
 roll of literary renown. Even the passionate 
 love of country which inspired them is not 
 perhaps so sure of appreciation now as it was 
 in their own day. I have not been repelled 
 from my choice of subject by the fact that 
 Irish patriotism has been occasionally vul- 
 garised here and abroad. No nation is al- 
 ways fortunate in its exponents, but the re- 
 proach will lie heaviest on that unfriended 
 and oppressed nation which has never ceased 
 to struggle during more than seven hundred 
 
 years for its lost birthright of freedom. The 
 
 125
 
 126 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 men of whom I am to speak, with their gift 
 of poesy, expressed the devoted aspiration of 
 Irish patriotism. That word may not ring 
 as true as once it did, — but no matter: I be- 
 lieve they voiced the sacred hope of many 
 thousands of their race, of whom the earth 
 was not worthy. We shall do well to honour 
 that hope, of whatever race we may be, 
 though we need not share it. 
 
 It has been said that Carlyle's "French Rev- 
 olution" gives the effect of reading history by 
 flashes of lightning. An obscure and genius- 
 cursed Irishman, who walked the streets of 
 Dublin some sixty years ago, does the like for 
 us with his poetry. 
 
 Recently a reviewer in the London Spec- 
 tator called James Clarence Mangan the 
 greatest Irish poet of modern times. Com- 
 paring the adjective "great 1 ' is the idlest oc- 
 cupation of literary criticism. But it is cer- 
 tain that Mangan has left some things which 
 evince extraordinary power and a quality of
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 127 
 
 imagination rare among Irish poets. His 
 poems send you to Irish history, seeking the 
 materials with which he wrought his strange 
 alembic of passion and power. They are 
 alive with the genuine spirit of Celtic patriot- 
 ism and have the elemental quality which is 
 sure of its effect so long as fire burns. With 
 Mangan, indeed, patriotism is a passionate, 
 present actuality; with Moore too often a 
 graceful reminiscence. What the former 
 lacks in music is more than made up in vigour 
 and earnestness, also in what I may call the 
 sense of consecration. He is the last of the 
 Irish bards. Had he lived in the spacious 
 times of the gentle Elizabeth, a price would 
 have been set on his head. The statute of Kil- 
 kenny was framed for such as he, and it was 
 with his prototypes in mind that the humane 
 author of the "Faery Queene" advocated the 
 extermination of the whole race of Irish bards ! 
 I have said that Mangan's poems send you 
 to reading Irish history. Perhaps it were 
 better to take your history lesson first. And
 
 128 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 for the text here is a picture of Ireland at the 
 close of the Desmond rebellion, in the six- 
 teenth century. It is by the hand of Edmund 
 Spenser who, in spite of his evident sympathy, 
 was not averse from sharing in the plunder of 
 a people given over to the Furies of that cruel 
 age: 
 
 "For, notwithstanding that Munster was a 
 most rich and plentiful country, full of corn 
 and cattle, yet after one year and one half, 
 they were brought to such wretchedness that 
 any stony heart would rue the same. Out of 
 every corner of the woods and glens they 
 came, creeping forth upon their hands, for 
 their legs could not bear them. They looked 
 like anatomies of death; they spoke like 
 ghosts crying out of their graves. They did 
 eat the dead carrions where they did find 
 them, yea, and one another soon after, in as 
 much as the very carcasses they spared not to 
 dig out of the graves ; and if they found a plot 
 of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they 
 thronged as to a feast for the time, yet not
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 129 
 
 able to continue there withal; that in short 
 space there were none almost left; and a most 
 populous and plentiful country left void of 
 man and beast." 
 
 One should, I repeat, take a course in Irish 
 history — or English history as applied to Ire- 
 land — before reading the poems of Clarence 
 Mangan. It is, perhaps, a little trouble- 
 some, sympathy with the Irish patriotic idea 
 having fallen off painfully during late years; 
 but this poet is well worth your trying to 
 realise his "atmosphere." So, read that sad- 
 dest of all histories, for the sake of its poetical 
 commentary. Read of the foulest crimes 
 against liberty and humanity that the earth 
 has ever known; read how the cause of Chris- 
 tianity was invoked to destroy a free people; 
 read how the Ireland of Saints was turned 
 into a vast shambles; how during years of 
 slaughter nor man nor woman nor prattling 
 child nor babe at breast — yes, nor the un- 
 conscious life of the womb! — was spared by 
 the ruthless invader. Read how the treaty
 
 130 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 was broken ere the ink could dry; how the 
 fealty of this devoted people in their ancient 
 faith, identified through the fatal policy of 
 their oppressors with the spirit of nationality 
 itself, was made the pretext for their utter 
 ruin. Read how the flower of Irish woman- 
 hood was driven from the land to a fate worse 
 than death itself in the West Indies; how the 
 strong young men, the best blood of the na- 
 tion, chose for themselves a perpetual exile 
 rather than look upon the desolation of their 
 country; how the rest might go "to Hell or 
 Connaught," as they chose! 
 
 After struggling through the horrors of 
 each English "settlement," from Strongbow 
 to Cromwell, through the long night of bond- 
 age relieved here and there by ebullitions of 
 the national spirit or flashes of Irish valor, 
 such as the splendid story of Limerick and 
 the heroism of Sarsfield, — from Cromwell to 
 Grattan and the Volunteers, the brief dream 
 of a free Parliament, the revolt of 'Ninety- 
 eight stamped out in a delirium of frenzy and
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 131 
 
 blood, and the crowning curse of the Union, 
 — after this gentle course in the conquest of 
 Ireland, beginning with Adrian's Bull and 
 ending — but the end is not yet! — we are pre- 
 pared for the fierce burst of lyrical passion, 
 the most remarkable thing in the " 'Forty- 
 eight Movement," which was indeed, from 
 the standpoint of insurrection, less than a 
 flash in the pan. 
 
 Such is the annulling lapse of time that 
 even Irishmen are now prone to look back 
 upon these things with a calm regard. But 
 that is not the mood to bring to the poetry of 
 Clarence Mangan, whose melancholy genius 
 fed on the wrongs of his beloved Ierne until 
 its one strain was that of vengeance against 
 the hereditary oppressor. It is this un- 
 quenchable hatred of the tyrant, this immor- 
 tal aspiration of the patriot, that finds its 
 freest and noblest utterance in "Dark Rosa- 
 leen," which, if Mangan had written nothing 
 else, would still entitle him to a high place in 
 Ireland's pantheon of glory. To the rhythm
 
 132 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 of these lines the terrible drama of Irish his- 
 tory unrolls. The twentieth century gives 
 place to the sixteenth. The O'Neil and the 
 O'Donnel come upon the stage and fight once 
 more their glorious but losing battle. And 
 it requires no stretch of fancy to hear the 
 dauntless Red Hugh himself, in the dread 
 moment of defeat, speaking this message of 
 hope to his unhappy country: 
 
 O, my dark Rosaleen, 
 
 Do not sigh, do not weep! 
 The priests are on the ocean green, 
 
 They march along the deep: 
 There's wine from the Royal Pope 
 
 Upon the ocean green, 
 And Spanish ale shall give you hope, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen! 
 
 My own Rosaleen ! 
 Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope, 
 Shall give you health, and help, and hope, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen ! 
 
 Over hills and thro' dales, 
 
 Have I roamed for your sake;
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 133 
 
 All yesterday I sailed with sails 
 
 On river and on lake. 
 The Erne at its highest flood, 
 
 I dashed across unseen, 
 For there was lightning in my blood, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen! 
 
 My own Rosaleen ! 
 O, there was lightning in my blood, 
 Red lightning lightened thro' my blood, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen! 
 
 All day long, in unrest, 
 
 To and fro do I move* 
 The very soul within my breast 
 
 Is wasted for you, love! 
 The heart in my bosom faints 
 
 To think of you, my queen, 
 My life of life, my saint of saints, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen! 
 
 My own Rosaleen! 
 To hear your sweet and sad complaints, 
 My life, my love, my saint of saints, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen! 
 
 I could scale the blue air, 
 
 I could plough the high hills,
 
 i 3 4 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 O, I could kneel all night in prayer, 
 
 To heal your many ills; 
 And one beamy smile from you 
 
 Would float like light between 
 My toils and me, my own, my true, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen ! 
 
 My own Rosaleen! 
 Would give me life and soul anew, 
 A second life, a soul anew, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen! 
 
 O! the Erne shall run red 
 
 With redundancy of blood, 
 The earth shall rock beneath our feet 
 
 And flames wrap hill and wood, 
 And gun-peal and slogan-cry 
 
 Wake many a glen serene, 
 Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen! 
 
 My own Rosaleen! 
 The Judgment Hour must first be nigh, 
 Ere you can fade, ere you can die, 
 
 My dark Rosaleen !
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 135 
 
 II 
 
 A MILITANT POET 
 
 I NEED not here recall the effect of Man- 
 gan's fiercely militant verse in the crises of 
 sentiment that led up to the glorious though 
 defeated movement of '48. When he is at his 
 best, he typifies and enforces the undying 
 hope of Irish patriotism. He has no idea of 
 placating the alien oppressor or his patronis- 
 ing descendant. The "sigh of his harp" shall 
 not be "sent o'er the deep," but the fierce note 
 of unconquerable hatred shall be struck for 
 all who care to hear. If he laments at all, it 
 is that the stern fight cannot be fought over 
 again, that vainly he conjures the names and 
 deeds of the hero brave. 
 
 The high house of O'Neil 
 
 Is gone down to the dust, 
 The O'Brien is clanless and banned: 
 
 And the steel, the red steel, 
 May no more be the trust 
 
 Of the faithful and brave in the land!
 
 136 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Patriotism is, in truth, the grand passion of 
 this poet. Unlike most of his rhyming 
 brethren, he has hardly a love song, and what 
 he has is none of his best. Erin is his mis- 
 tress and, addressing her, as in "Dark Rosa- 
 leen," he strikes the highest note of his harp. 
 Nothing languid or factitious about the senti- 
 ment, but an impassioned earnestness that 
 challenges the blood even where sympathy is 
 lacking. 
 
 No Irish poet before Mangan rivals him in 
 the use which he has made of the wild ro- 
 mance and legend of his country. It is true 
 his work is but fragmentary — a series of 
 poetical sketches scarcely to be equalled for 
 vivid colour and genuine feeling. There is 
 no orderly whole, like the cycle of Arthurian 
 fables that grew into immortal poetic form 
 under the perfect art of Tennyson — so per- 
 fect in nothing as in its patience. Mangan, 
 whose own life was a tragedy, never at- 
 tempted epic or idyl. Yet the poor hack of 
 the Dublin publishing offices, with his fatal
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 137 
 
 appetite for drink and drugs, was in original 
 genius the peer of any man of his time. For 
 genius must be gauged by quality rather than 
 quantity of performance; and art is second in 
 order. 
 
 Swinburne has said that, judged by epi- 
 sodes solely and not by the whole of any 
 work, the author of the "Cloister and the 
 Hearth" is the first of English novelists. In 
 like manner, estimating Mangan by a few 
 poems, his rank would be of the highest. 
 But consistent effort and that atmosphere of 
 tranquil thought which alone matures the fruit 
 of the poetical conception, were not for the 
 gifted Irishman. Intervals of study and la- 
 bour were followed by such squalid dissipa- 
 tion — always accompanied, perhaps often 
 induced, by poverty which more than once 
 drew him to the verge of starving — that the 
 annals of Grub Street might be searched in 
 vain for a story of equal misery. Poor Man- 
 gan's feasts were not seldom of the Barmecide 
 order; but, as genius sometimes draws its
 
 138 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 most precious food from privation and pain, 
 so if our poet had lived a contented, reputable 
 life, he would most likely have made a less 
 durable mark in literature. Assuredly we 
 should not have had that fearful poem "The 
 Nameless One," in which the poet bares his 
 own soul and shows the fiends with which his 
 half-crazed imagination — yet sane enough for 
 the purposes of art — had peopled it. This is 
 not a pose. It is a true confession, as pathetic 
 as ever was penned by a man of genius. 
 
 Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river 
 
 That sweeps along to the mighty sea; 
 God will inspire me while I deliver 
 
 My soul of thee. 
 
 * * # 
 
 And tell how trampled, derided, hated, 
 
 And worn by weakness, disease and wrong, 
 He fled for shelter to God, who mated 
 
 His soul with song. 
 
 * * * 
 
 And he fell far thro' that pit abysmal, 
 The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns, 
 
 And pawned his soul for the devil's dismal 
 Stock of returns.
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 139 
 
 But yet redeemed it in days of darkness, 
 And shapes and signs of the final wrath, 
 
 When death, in hideous and ghastly starkness, 
 Stood in his path. 
 
 And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow, 
 And want, and sickness, and houseless nights, 
 
 He bides in calmness the silent morrow 
 That no ray lights! 
 
 There is a strange likeness between the 
 lives of James Clarence Mangan and Edgar 
 Allan Poe; but that of the Irishman was one 
 of more unredeemed wretchedness. Some 
 critics have traced a curious identity in the 
 genius of the men. Taking into account only 
 the verse of Poe, I shall make bold to hold 
 the Irishman the greater poet. He has less 
 artifice in matching rhymes, but he has vastly 
 more power and a far larger share of natural 
 feeling. Mangan's sincerity is his distin- 
 guishing note, and it is not the least estimable 
 of poetic qualities. 
 
 Under the Moresque work of the Irish 
 singer, with its rune-like cadences, its haunt-
 
 i 4 o NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 ing strains of elegy and battle, its crooning 
 tenderness or blighting messages of anger, 
 there glows as noble a passion as ever conse- 
 crated poet to its theme. Never was crowned 
 monarch better sung than Con of the Hun- 
 dred Fights; never have heroic valour and 
 devotion received grander tribute than he 
 pays to the knightly Tyrone and the Red 
 Prince of the North, twinned with him in 
 immortal memory. 
 
 I have spoken of the fidelity with which 
 Mangan realises the lurid yet heroic past of 
 Ireland. In this respect, he seems at times 
 the greatest of her poets and the most vivid of 
 her historians. It is impossible that any fu- 
 ture poet shall better his work; it is indeed 
 more likely that none will ever approach it. 
 The bardic spirit of ancient Erin breathes in 
 these thrilling songs, though it may be 
 doubted that he owed much to the forgotten 
 minstrels, some of whom he affected to render 
 into an alien tongue. 
 
 Mangan rarely sounded the high note which
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 141 
 
 he struck in "Dark Rosaleen," or perhaps it is 
 truer to say that he often essayed, sometimes 
 touched, the note, but the perfection of form, 
 so victorious in the poem cited, failed his 
 hand. Yet "Dark Rosaleen" is not to be ac- 
 counted the single success of a minor poet. 
 Mangan tells us in one of his poems, with the 
 fine exaggeration of the Celt, that his "veins 
 ran lightning." Thomas Davis, worthy to be 
 ranked with him, speaks of the "cloudy and 
 lightning genius of the Gael." Davis, a poet 
 of splendid inspiration, though not a pure 
 Celt, exemplifies in his own work the quality 
 which he has so happily characterised. But 
 the palm goes to Mangan. By virtue of his 
 purely Celtic genius — which so signally dis- 
 criminates him from the body of Anglo-Irish 
 versifiers and even from most poets of un- 
 mixed Irish lineage who have written in the 
 English tongue, — the fame of Clarence Man- 
 gan is constantly rising. Within a few years 
 there has been witnessed an extraordinary re- 
 crudescence of interest in the poor starveling,
 
 i 4 2 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 drunken, opium-eating, inspired visionary of 
 the Dublin garrets. It must in fairness be 
 allowed that Mangan stands indebted for his 
 recent great increase of literary reputation to 
 the authority of a small group of critics in 
 England — where due tribute is always paid 
 the virtues of an enemy when he is well and 
 surely dead. 
 
 One of the very finest of Clarence Man- 
 gan's truly Irish poems, in which the poet 
 paints a vision of Connaught in the thirteenth 
 century and at the same time allegorises the 
 great tragedy of Ireland, the loss of her 
 ancient freedom, — is "Cahal Mor of the 
 Wine-Red Hand." Indeed, it might not be 
 easy to cite another poem from the Irish an- 
 thology, matching this in the strong spell cast 
 by the poet's imagination. 
 
 I walked entranced 
 
 Thro' a land of morn; 
 The sun, with wondrous excess of light, 
 Shone down and glanced 
 
 Over seas of corn,
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 143 
 
 And lustrous gardens a-left and right. 
 Even in the clime 
 Of resplendent Spain 
 Beams no such sun upon such a land; 
 But it was the time, 
 'Twas in the reign, 
 Of Cahal Mor of the Wine-red Hand. 
 
 Anon stood nigh 
 By my side a man 
 Of princely aspect and port sublime. 
 Him queried I, 
 
 "O, my lord and khan, 
 What clime is this, and what golden time?" 
 When he — "The clime 
 Is a clime to praise, 
 The clime is Erin's, the green, the bland; 
 And it is the time, 
 These be the days 
 Of Cahal Mor of the Wine-red Hand!" 
 
 Then I saw thrones 
 And circling fires, 
 And a dome rose near me, as by a spell, 
 Whence flowed the tones 
 Of silver lyres 
 And many voices in wreathed swell;
 
 144 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 And their thrilling chime 
 Fell on mine ears 
 As the heavenly hymn of an angel-band — 
 "It is now the time, 
 These be the years, 
 Of Cahal Mor of the Wine-red Hand !" 
 
 I sought the hall, 
 
 And behold! — a change 
 From light to darkness, from joy to woe! 
 Kings, nobles, all, 
 
 Looked aghast and strange; 
 The minstrel-group sate in dumbest show! 
 Had some great crime 
 
 Wrought this dread amaze, 
 This terror? None seemed to understand. 
 'Twas then the time, 
 We were in the days, 
 Of Cahal Mor of the Wine-red Hand. 
 
 I again walked forth; 
 But lo, the sky 
 Showed flecked with blood, and an alien sun 
 Glared from the north, 
 
 And there stood on high, 
 Amid his shorn beams, a skeleton!
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 145 
 
 It was by the stream 
 Of the castled Main, 
 One autumn-eve, in the Teuton's land, 
 That I dreamed this dream 
 Of the time and reign 
 Of Cahal Mor of the Wine-red Hand ! 
 
 Reading these poems now, in the present 
 dead lull of indifference which marks the 
 state of Irish patriotic sentiment, one is 
 moved to a deeper interest than if the national 
 hope were marching on irresistibly to that 
 full fruition of freedom, so often promised 
 by poet and seer. It is not that the cause is 
 lost, but that it appears more often now than 
 formerly as not worth a struggle. 
 
 We have fallen upon evil days, 
 Star after star decays. 
 
 Yet it may be that history has but reached 
 a breathing place, and that from this seeming 
 decadence of the national aspiration of Ire- 
 land shall spring forth a new and richer 
 birth of patriotism than even this devoted
 
 146 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 people have ever known. God grant it! — 
 and God knows He has never been so trusted 
 as by this people. Though the words of 
 Walt Whitman are true, and that which the 
 sorrowing ancient mother seeks, 
 
 "with rosy and new blood, 
 Moves to-day in a new country," — 
 
 yet the sons of the Gael here in this broad, 
 free land, and all of them scattered the world 
 over, will not cease to look back to Ireland 
 for the final proof of God's justice. And 
 pending that solemn act for which the weary 
 centuries have waited, what son of the Gael 
 will not join with the poet, whose feet never 
 strayed from her enchanted shore, in these 
 tender greetings to "old Erin in the sea": — 
 
 Take a blessing from my heart to the land of my birth, 
 
 And the fair Hills of Eire, O! 
 And to all that yet survive of Ebhear's tribe on earth, 
 
 On the fair Hills of Eire, O! 
 In that land so delightful the wild thrush's lay 
 Seems to pour a lament forth for Eire's decay —
 
 JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN 147 
 
 Alas! Alas! why pine I a thousand miles away 
 From the fair Hills of Eire, O! 
 
 The soil is rich and soft — the air is mild and bland, 
 
 Of the fair Hills of Eire, O! 
 Her barest rock is greener to me than this rude land — 
 
 O, the fair Hills of Eire, O ! 
 Her woods are tall and straight, grove rising over grove ; 
 Trees flourish in her glens below, and on her heights 
 
 above ; — 
 O, in heart and in soul, I shall ever, ever love 
 
 The fair Hills of Eire, O! 
 
 "> 
 
 The dewdrops lie bright 'mid the grass and yellow corn, 
 
 On the fair Hills of Eire, O! 
 The sweet-scented apples blush redly in the morn, 
 
 On the fair Hills of Eire, O! 
 The watercress and sorrel fill the vales below; 
 The streamlets are hushed till the evening breezes blow; 
 While the waves of the Suir, noble river! ever flow 
 
 Near the fair Hills of Eire, O! 
 
 A fruitful clime is Eire's, thro' valley, meadow, plain, 
 
 And the fair land of Eire, O! 
 The very "Bread of Life" is in the yellow grain, 
 
 On the fair Hills of Eire, O!
 
 148 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Far dearer unto me than the tone music yields, 
 Is the lowing of the kine and the calves in her fields, 
 And the sunlight that shone long ago on the shields 
 Of the Gaels, on the fair Hills of Eire!
 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 
 
 HpO the revolutionary spirit which filled 
 -*■ Europe during the 'zj-o's and which in 
 Ireland culminated in what is known as the 
 " 'Forty-eight Movement," is to be ascribed 
 some of the most spirited verse of the last 
 century. Happily perhaps for Ireland, the 
 interest which now centres in that period is 
 largely of a literary character, as indeed its 
 results were rather literary than political. 
 There was good poetry written, but no revo- 
 lution had to be stamped out in blood, as in 
 the memorable year of 1798. "Meagher of 
 the Sword" (as Thackeray named him) and 
 others gave proof of a new birth of Irish elo- 
 quence, while the great O'Connell, who would 
 not purchase the liberty of his country at the 
 cost of a single drop of blood, began to de- 
 cline in his marvellous popularity. 
 
 149
 
 150 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 For a time the Government suffered this 
 patriotic and literary recrudescence to go on, 
 and then when, in the phrase of the patriots, 
 the "country was ripe for revolution," the 
 machinery of suppression was put to work. 
 There was very little blood-letting. What- 
 ever the bitter regret then, we may be glad of 
 it now. A few summary trials and transpor- 
 tations, and it was all over. "New Ireland" 
 was discovered to be a euphemism for Botany 
 Bay. The fatalism of Irish history had 
 again asserted itself. In less figurative lan- 
 guage, it was demonstrated that you cannot 
 make successful revolution on paper, and 
 that something more than sentiment is re- 
 quired with which to arm a whole people for 
 a war of liberation. John Mitchel had said 
 with fierce scorn that there were men who 
 would not fight if Heaven were to send them 
 muskets and angels to pull the triggers! 
 The truth was that a rebel Irish army could 
 hardly have been equipped on any other 
 terms.
 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 151 
 
 A brief space before this revolutionary 
 fever flickered out, there died untimely a 
 man who had created much of its patriotic 
 ardour, much of its generous and devoted en- 
 thusiasm. Had he lived, Thomas Davis 
 would have found a place beside Mitchel in 
 the dock — it may be the tragedy of the "last 
 of the Geraldines" * had been repeated. Dy- 
 ing at thirty-one, the grave closed over one 
 of the noblest of Irish patriots, one of the 
 most memorable of Irish singers. 
 
 It is true Davis would not have been con- 
 tent to be reckoned merely a poet, vital and 
 authentic as was his literary vocation. His 
 poems were written in hot haste to serve the 
 propaganda of revolution. There is about 
 them no smell of the lamp, no anxious striv- 
 ing for effect, no conscious artifice or allitera- 
 tion. The burning sincerity of the senti- 
 ment, the full outpouring of passionate pa- 
 triotism left little leisure to the poet for the 
 
 •Lord Edward Fitzgerald, concerned in the rising of 1798. 
 Died from a wound in prison at Dublin.
 
 152 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 labours of the file. Davis's inspiration is that 
 of a true poet of revolution. Mere blemishes 
 of form are not far to seek in the body of his 
 work, but in the "imperishable excellence of 
 sincerity and strength," much of this verse is 
 not to be surpassed in the whole range of 
 poetry. 
 
 Davis has at least one glorious ballad of 
 battle — the finest I dare say since that of 
 "Chevy Chase" — which I would beg you to 
 compare with the best performances of Mr. 
 Kipling and his imitators. It was nobly 
 said that the old ballad of "Chevy Chase" 
 "stirred the heart like a trumpet": for the 
 splendid rush of Davis's verse, you must pick 
 a simile from the poem itself, in the lightning 
 charge of the Irish Brigade at Fontenoy — 
 his own Fontenoy, the fiercest, truest song of 
 battle that ever sprang from the heart of 
 poet. 
 
 Thrice, at the huts of Fontenoy, the English column failed, 
 And, twice, the lines of Saint Antoine, the Dutch in vain 
 assailed ;
 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 153 
 
 For town and slope were filled with fort and flanking bat- 
 tery, 
 
 And well they swept the English ranks, and Dutch auxil- 
 iary. 
 
 As vainly through De Berri's woods, the British soldiers 
 burst, 
 
 The French artillery drove them back, diminished and dis- 
 persed, 
 
 The bloody Duke of Cumberland beheld with anxious eye, 
 
 And ordered up his last reserve, his latest chance to try. 
 
 On Fontenoy — on Fontenoy, how fast his generals ride! 
 
 And mustering come his chosen troops, like clouds at even- 
 tide. 
 
 Six thousand English veterans in stately column tread, 
 Their cannon blaze in front and flank, Lord Hay is at 
 
 their head ; 
 Steady they step adown the slope — steady they climb the 
 
 hill ; 
 Steady they load — steady they fire, moving right onward 
 
 still, 
 Betwixt the wood and Fontenoy, as thro' a furnace blast, 
 Thro' rampart, trench and palisade, and bullets showering 
 
 fast ; 
 And on the open plain above they rose and kept their 
 
 course,
 
 154 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 With ready fire and grim resolve, that mocked at hostile 
 
 force : 
 Past Fontenoy — past Fontenoy, while thinner grow their 
 
 ranks — 
 They break as broke the Zuyder Zee thro' Holland's 
 
 ocean banks. 
 
 More idly than the summer flies, French tirailleurs rush 
 
 round : 
 As stubble to the lava tide, French squadrons strew the 
 
 ground ; 
 Bomb-shell and grape, and round-shot tore, still on they 
 
 marched and fired — 
 Fast from each volley, grenadier and voltigeur retired. 
 "Push on my household cavalry!" King Louis madly 
 
 cried; 
 To death they rush, but rude their shock — not unavenged 
 
 they died. 
 On thro' the camp the column trod — King Louis turns 
 
 his rein: 
 "Not yet, my liege," Saxe interposed, "the Irish troops 
 
 remain I" 
 And Fontenoy, famed Fontenoy, had been a Waterloo, 
 Were not these exiles ready then, fresh, vehement and 
 
 true.
 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 155 
 
 "Lord Clare," he says, "you have your wish, there are 
 your Saxon foes": — 
 
 The Marshal almost smiles to see, so furiously he goes. 
 
 How fierce the look these exiles wear who're wont to be 
 so gay, 
 
 The treasured wrongs of fifty years are in their hearts, 
 to-day : — 
 
 The treaty broken ere the ink wherewith 'twas writ could 
 dry, — 
 
 Their plundered homes, their ruined shrines, their 
 women's parting cry, — 
 
 Their priesthood hunted down like wolves, their coun- 
 try overthrown, — 
 
 Each looks as if revenge for all were staked on him alone. 
 
 On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, hark to that fierce huzza — 
 
 "Revenge! — Remember Limerick! — Dash down the Sas- 
 senach !" 
 
 Like lions leaping at a fold when mad with hunger's 
 
 pang, 
 
 t 
 
 Right up against the English line the Irish exiles sprang; 
 Bright was their steel, 'tis bloody now, their guns are 
 
 filled with gore; 
 Thro' shattered ranks, and severed files, and trampled 
 
 flags they tore;
 
 156 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 The English strove with desperate strength, paused, ral- 
 lied, staggered, fled — 
 
 The green hillside is matted close with dying and with 
 dead; 
 
 Across the plain, and far away passed on that hideous 
 wrack, 
 
 While cavalier and fantassin dash in upon their track. 
 
 On Fontenoy, — on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun, 
 
 With bloody plumes the Irish stand — the field is fought 
 and won! 
 
 It is small matter for wonder that, as to 
 Davis, the sword soon wore out the scabbard. 
 "I have taken too many crops out of the 
 brain," said Thackeray. The young Irish- 
 man needed a frame of iron to withstand the 
 wear and tear of his passionate thought seek- 
 ing ever, in Byron's phrase, to wreak itself 
 upon expression. It was said that Shelley 
 had fancy enough to portion out a whole gen- 
 eration of poets. The poem which we have 
 just read might supply them with motive 
 energy. 
 
 Poor Davis! His short life was filled with
 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 157 
 
 the joy of creation. If we might question 
 the eternities, perchance we should learn that 
 herein lies the highest compensation. The 
 "precious porcelain of human clay" is easily 
 shattered; but the spirit that could feel so 
 ardently, the heart that throbbed with such 
 rare devotion, the soul that dreamed such 
 dreams of freedom for his loved country 
 and shrank not from a generous martyr- 
 dom — these were of the essence of immor- 
 tality. 
 
 The melancholy of Davis — that unfailing 
 mark of the Irish poetical temperament — was 
 twin-born with his poetic soul. Though he 
 stands ready, like another Emmet, to offer 
 himself as a sacrifice for his country — though 
 the clink of the sabre is heard in many of his 
 pieces and the fierce rush of battle in "Fon- 
 tenoy" — yet that haunting sub-note of sorrow 
 is never far absent, as the shower too closely 
 attends the sunshine of the soft Irish skies. 
 While his countrymen are drinking in the 
 fiery songs with which he sought to rekindle
 
 158 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 the national spirit, crushed under age-long 
 oppression, the poet puts aside the martial 
 lyre to tell this secret of his heart: 
 
 Shall they bury me in the deep, 
 Where wind-forgetting waters sleep? 
 Shall they dig a grave for me 
 Under the greenwood tree, 
 Or on the wild heath 
 Where the wilder breath 
 Of the storm doth blow? 
 Oh no!— Oh no! 
 
 No, on an Irish green hill-side, 
 On an opening lawn — but not too wide; 
 For I love the drip of the wetted trees — 
 I love not the gales, but a gentle breeze 
 To freshen the turf — put no tombstone there, 
 But green sods decked with daisies fair, 
 Nor sods too deep; but so that the dew 
 The matted grass-roots may trickle thro'. 
 Be my epitaph writ on my country's mind — 
 "He served his country and loved his kind." 
 
 Davis often seems a sort of poetic Sarsfield. 
 He has the dash of the hero cavalryman, — that 
 Murat of the ill-fated wars for James the Un-
 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 159 
 
 worthy, — the fierce onslaught of his attack, 
 and the fanciful likeness may be carried out in 
 the touches of tenderness common to both. 
 The martial poet can plan a sortie, like the 
 famous night ride of Lucan through the 
 Kieper mountains; and when he falls on the 
 enemy the surprise rivals that of the capture 
 and explosion of William's siege-train — "Sars- 
 field is the word and Sarsfield is the man!" 
 
 It was fit that this Anglo-Irish poet should 
 sing in matchless verse the glory of that proud 
 race who were "more Irish than the Irish 
 themselves"; whose mournful yet inspiring 
 history, extending over many ruin-marked 
 centuries, forms part of the chief tragedy of 
 Ireland. The poet was worthy of his theme, 
 and never did he strike grander notes than 
 when he chanted the splendid lay of "The 
 Geraldines." 
 
 The Geraldines — the Geraldines! 'tis full a thousand 
 
 years 
 Since, 'mid the Tuscan vineyards, bright flashed their 
 
 battle spears ;
 
 160 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 When Capet seized the crown of France, their iron 
 
 shields were known, 
 And their sabre-dint struck terror on the banks of the 
 
 Garonne ; 
 Across the downs of Hastings they spurred by William's 
 
 side, 
 And the grey sands of Palestine with Moslem blood they 
 
 dyed ; 
 But never then, nor thence, till now, has falsehood or 
 
 disgrace 
 Been seen to soil Fitzgerald's plume, or mantle in his 
 
 face. 
 
 Ye Geraldines — ye Geraldines! — how royally ye reigned 
 O'er Desmond broad, and rich Kildare, and English arts 
 
 disdained. 
 Your sword made knights, your banner saved, free was 
 
 your bugle call 
 By Glyn's green slopes, and Dingle's tide, from Barrow's 
 
 banks to Youghal. 
 What gorgeous shrines, what brehon lore, what minstrel 
 
 feats there were 
 In and around Maynooth's grey keep, and palace-filled 
 
 Adare! 
 But not for rite or feast ye stayed, when friend or kin 
 
 were press'd ;
 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 161 
 
 And foeman fled, when "Crom abo" bespoke your lance 
 in rest. 
 
 True Geraldine! brave Geraldine! — as torrents mould 
 
 the earth, 
 You channelled deep old Ireland's heart by constancy 
 
 and worth ; 
 When Ginckle 'leaguered Limerick, the Irish soldiers 
 
 gazed 
 To see if in the setting sun dead Desmond's banner 
 
 blazed! 
 
 And still it is the peasant's hope upon the Curragh's mere, 
 
 "They live, who'll see ten thousand men with good Lord 
 Edward here" — 
 
 So let them dream till brighter days, when, not by Ed- 
 ward's shade, 
 
 But by some leader true as he, their lines shall be arrayed ! 
 
 Davis has tenderness as well as strength, 
 else he could not be the truly Irish poet he is. 
 It is indeed a tragic pathos that overflows in 
 the "Lament on the Death of Owen Roe," the 
 simplest yet most passionate elegy in the lan- 
 guage.
 
 1 62 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 I am tempted to revert to history for a mo- 
 ment, to that black page seared with the curse 
 of Cromwell. The man who was a liberator 
 as well as a regicide in England, played the 
 triple part of butcher, bigot and enslaver in 
 Ireland. Mark his words: "I meddle with 
 no man's conscience. But if by liberty of 
 conscience you mean liberty to exercise the 
 Mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing with 
 you, and to let you know where the Parlia- 
 ment of England has power, that will not be 
 allowed." 
 
 And Oliver was better than his word. 
 When he took Drogheda he ordered nearly 
 the entire garrison hacked to pieces in cold 
 blood, together with all the friars in the town. 
 But that was hardly enough to warrant him 
 in piously returning thanks to God, accord- 
 ing to his wont. There was also a wholesale 
 butchery of the women and children, and, 
 without claiming specific credit for this, "it 
 is good," as Cromwell modestly observed, 
 "that God above have all the glory." Wex-
 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 163 
 
 ford was served in like fashion — "a mar- 
 vellous great mercy," he called it — no quarter 
 being given and nearly three thousand sol- 
 diers and citizens slaughtered like sheep. 
 
 These items may persuade us that the 
 doomed Irish people had good and sufficient 
 cause to mourn the loss of Owen Roe O'Neil, 
 the only man in their army at all capable of 
 opposing the iron puritan in the field. 
 
 Long as the heroic O'Neil has been sleep- 
 ing, it will be longer yet ere such lines as 
 these shall lose their power to move the Irish 
 heart. 
 
 Wail — wail ye for the Mighty One! Wail — wail ye 
 
 for the Dead! 
 Quench the hearth, and hold the breath — with ashes 
 
 strew the head! 
 How tenderly we loved him! How deeply we deplore! 
 Holy Saviour! but to think we shall never see him more. 
 
 Sagest in the council was he, — kindest in the hall, 
 Sure we never won a battle — 'twas Owen won them all. 
 Had he lived — had he lived, our dear country had been 
 free ;
 
 1 64 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 But he's dead — but he's dead, and 'tis slaves we'll ever be! 
 
 Wail — wail him thro' the Island ! Weep — weep for our 
 
 pride! 
 Would that on the battle-field our gallant Chief had died ! 
 Weep the Victor of Benburb — weep him, young men and 
 
 old; 
 Weep for him, ye women — your beautiful lies cold. 
 
 We thought you would not die — we were sure you could 
 
 not go, 
 And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell's cruel 
 
 blow : 
 Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the 
 
 sky — 
 O! why did you leave us, Owen? Why did you die? 
 
 Soft as a woman's was your voice, O'Neil ! — bright was 
 
 your eye: 
 O, why did you leave us, Owen? why did you die? 
 Your troubles are all over, you're at rest with God on 
 
 high, 
 But we're slaves and we're orphans, Owen — why did you 
 
 die? 
 
 In the columns of the Nation, that bril- 
 liant and daring organ of the New-Ireland- 
 ers, poetry like "Fontenoy" and "The Gerald-
 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 165 
 
 ines" was rightly held to make proselytes to 
 the cause of revolution; but little dalliance 
 with the softer muses might be encouraged — 
 as diverting attention from the stern business 
 in hand. However, God in His wisdom has 
 rarely made an Irishman — not to say, an Irish 
 poet — without the capacity of loving; and so 
 Davis has at least one love song which may 
 well persuade us that his poet nature was 
 complete. Humble though it be and born of 
 the refrain of many a simple ballad, it has yet 
 the pure pearl of sentiment, the fine gold of 
 sterling poetry. 
 
 Come in the evening, or come in the morning, 
 Come when you're looked for, or come without warning ; 
 Kisses and welcome you'll find here before you, 
 And the oftener you come here the more I'll adore you. 
 Light is my heart since the day we were plighted, 
 Red is my cheek that they told me was blighted ; 
 The green of the trees looks far greener than ever, 
 And the linnets are singing, "True lovers, don't sever!" 
 
 I'll pull you sweet flowers, to wear if you choose them; 
 Or, after you've kissed them, they'll lie on my bosom. 
 I'll fetch from the mountain its breeze to inspire you;
 
 1 66 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 I'll fetch from my fancy a tale that won't tire you. 
 
 O, your step's like the rain to the summer-vexed 
 
 farmer, 
 Or sabre and shield to a knight without armor; 
 I'll sing you sweet songs till the stars rise above me, 
 Then, wandering, I'll wish you, in silence, to love me. 
 So come in the evening, etc. 
 
 Something in the Irish character — some- 
 thing of the genius of the race — seems to have 
 died with the brilliant fiasco of New Ireland. 
 There have been patriots since, but few of the 
 fellowship of Mitchel. As for the poets of 
 'Forty-eight, we shall not look upon their like 
 again. A certain impatience of Irish poetry, 
 patriotism, sentiment, is manifest after that 
 period, as if the world resented having had 
 its sympathies too warmly engaged, to no pur- 
 pose, and was bound it should not be so taken 
 in again. For the world, like the individual, 
 is selfish, and does not care to spend its grace 
 with no prospect of return. 
 
 The revolutionary spirit which animated 
 those "high sons of the lyre" has long since 
 died out (the Fenian fever of a later day was 

 
 THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS 167 
 
 hardly a heroic symptom), and although one 
 may not safely predicate either of Irish pa- 
 triotism or Irish temperament, it is improb- 
 able that we of this generation shall live to 
 see a flame rekindled from its ashes. The 
 paltering ways of parliamentary reform, the 
 doctrine of mortal suasion, the "paradise of 
 cold hearts" — to apply a phrase from Ma- 
 caulay — will not give us another Davis, an- 
 other Mangan. 
 
 Now and then, mayhap, a fierce note shall 
 be struck out of the sullen apathy of the peo- 
 ple, recalling that splendid burst of poetry, 
 that rapture of patriotism, which marked the 
 magic era of 'Forty-eight. But the lover of 
 "Dark Rosaleen" shall lie quiet in his obscure 
 grave; the elegist of O'Neil shall not waken 
 from his dreamless sleep. If consciousness 
 shall ever come to these, under the weeping 
 dews, the caressing shamrocks, it must be in 
 that day for which the children of Erin cease 
 not to cry, like the Psalmist; and in which 
 their faith is as enduring as the mercy of their 
 God.
 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 
 
 THE love of poetry is given unto most of 
 the children of men, but the literary con- 
 cept of the thing is too often a pain and a 
 weariness. The critics and the professors of 
 poetry are evermore bandying their apple of 
 discord. The great public, — as the newspa- 
 pers phrase it, — the vulgar many, if you will, 
 are not seldom a unit and cast a single suffrage. 
 The many are in the wrong, of course, but I am 
 not always sure of it. After much critical 
 reading, one recurs with a refreshing sense to 
 those sources of pleasure about which even 
 the critics are agreed that it is not worth 
 while to dispute. The mental ache is gone; 
 the tension of thought which latter-day 
 poetry induces is instantly relieved. There is 
 hardly any artifice in these rhymes; an occa- 
 
 168
 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 169 
 
 sional false quantity does not displease us; the 
 poet cannot tell his tale simply enough and his 
 words are the gold of common speech — we are 
 very far from the Browningesque conviction 
 that to be great is to be turgid and obscure. 
 Here is passion enough, but of a natural sort, 
 without a damnable complexity of motive and 
 refinements that are super-sexual. Here is 
 patriotism that shames the diluted article of 
 our day. Here is love that does not lack the 
 essentials of human interest because it is pure 
 and Innocence may hold the page, unharmed 
 of any lurking satyr. 
 
 It is told of Handel that he once said he 
 would rather have composed the tender mel- 
 ody of "Eileen Aroon" than all the elaborate 
 works of his genius. Simplicity, the first 
 note in nature, is the last result in art. After 
 a strong course of the reigning Muscovite or 
 Slavic fiction, even after the more delicate 
 and artistic pruriencies of the French realists, 
 we think better of Doctor Primrose, take 
 down the little volume reverently and follow
 
 170 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 with a chastened heart the simple fortunes of 
 the good vicar. And against the judgment 
 of the critics who have in our day discounted 
 Dickens, who have told us that one generation 
 is enough to weep over Tiny Tim and Little 
 Nell — against this chilling decree may be set 
 the fact — reassuring to some of us who have 
 felt the spell of the wizard — that "David Cop- 
 perfield" is still the high water mark by which 
 we measure the popular sense of the good, 
 the true and the beautiful in fiction. 
 
 In a lately published volume of Irish songs, 
 compiled by Mr. Charles MacCarthy Col- 
 lins, M.R.I.A., the editor makes it a subject 
 of lament that Irish poetry offers "no epics 
 with a trace of the fire of Homer, of the 
 grandeur of Dante, of the majesty of Milton; 
 no descriptive poems like 'Childe Harold,' no 
 satires like the 'Dunciad.' " Truly, I do not 
 think the Irish are greatly to be pitied for 
 their lack of epics. Ancient Irish nomencla- 
 ture, to say the least, raises such difficulties 
 that the reading of them might perforce be left
 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 171 
 
 to the antiquarians. Even the exquisite art of 
 Tennyson does not save the Arthurian legends 
 from palling. Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere 
 and the rest "come like shadows, so depart," 
 with no relation to the living world. If this 
 be poetry — and it would be daring to doubt — 
 we are perhaps unfit for the message. Our 
 ears have not been touched that we may hear, 
 our eyes that we may see. Too easily the fairy 
 gift escapes our gross perception, nor may we 
 follow it with the chastened vision of Sir Gal- 
 ahad, as he traces the mystic flight of the 
 Holy Grail. Only we know, despairing of 
 the beauty and the mystery, that it is lost to 
 us — 
 
 Adown dark tides of glory slides 
 And star-like mingles with the stars! 
 
 The world is, indeed, greatly blessed with 
 epics which it seldom takes down from the 
 upper shelf. But this is, in a sense, to apply 
 the yard-measure to poetry. A single line 
 becomes unforgettable. A book sinks into 
 oblivion. We have broken with the old
 
 172 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 gods, who were, perhaps, no great gods after 
 all. There shall be no more epics. For it is 
 now an article of perfect faith that a man 
 shall fittingly waste his whole life, heart, pas- 
 sion, the very inmost flame of him, for some 
 dozen lines of real poetry. 
 
 The best of Irish songs are peerless in the 
 respects of natural sentiment, tenderness, 
 pathos and delicacy — and what else is there 
 to put into a song? I do not limit this ob- 
 servation to the Irish Melodies of Thomas 
 Moore, who stands by himself and whose 
 songs, in their union of music and poetry, are 
 in my view beyond comparison, either with 
 those of any other nation or even with the 
 happiest efforts of his gifted countrymen. 
 Some of these latter seem at times to excel him 
 in point of vigour and natural freedom, but 
 not one of the few who are often ignorantly 
 cited as his peers, is able to maintain, as he 
 always is, the high level of the classic. If 
 Moore have a fault, it is, perhaps, that he 
 refines too much. The diamond of his Irish
 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 173 
 
 song is the brightest in the world, but it is also 
 the most artfully polished. Granting him all 
 he deserves, the poetic genius of his race is yet 
 fully exemplified by turning to all that is not 
 his, and finding so much of the rarest value, 
 "which mankind will not willingly let die." 
 
 There is no name in the literature of the 
 last century dearer to Irishmen than that of 
 Gerald Griffin. He lived fewer years than 
 Mangan, and his, too, was an ill-starred 
 genius. If misfortune be the true badge 
 of the poet, either of these brilliant men 
 may pass unchallenged on that score. 
 Like Mangan, the author of "The Collegians" 
 had to contend with poverty, and he did his 
 share of starving in London, whither he had 
 gone from Limerick at the age of eighteen to 
 begin a literary career. 
 
 But the moral fibre of Griffin was of 
 sterner stufY than that of the erratic Barme- 
 cide. With a nature deeply, even morbidly 
 religious, he was proof against those Bohc-
 
 174 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 mian temptations which attend failure even 
 more than success. He took his short com- 
 mons patiently enough, and between intervals 
 of hack-work for the newspapers, managed to 
 write a tragedy in the regulation classic 
 mould, which convinces us that he was not 
 likely to carry out his threat of "throwing 
 Shakespeare in the shade." 
 
 Quitting London in despair after a few 
 years, Griffin returned to his native Limerick. 
 Who can forget the lines in which his sorely 
 tried heart, his wounded spirit, too proud and 
 tender for the sordid struggle, spoke his love 
 and thankfulness at seeing old Ireland again 
 after his weary travail in an alien world? 
 
 'Tis, it is the Shannon's stream, 
 
 Brightly glancing, brightly glancing, 
 
 See, O see the ruddy beam 
 Upon its waters dancing. 
 
 Thus returned from travel vain, 
 
 Years of exile, years of pain, 
 To see old Shannon's face again, — 
 
 O, the bliss entrancing!
 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 175 
 
 Hail, our own majestic stream, 
 
 Flowing ever, flowing ever; 
 Silent in the morning beam, 
 
 Our own beloved river! 
 
 Here amid the scenes of his youth he drew 
 the inspiration which has made his name im- 
 mortal. The "Hallowtide Tales" and the 
 ''Tales of the Munster Festivals," appearing 
 in quick succession, were an earnest that the 
 young Irishman was capable of great things in 
 prose fiction, if not in classic tragedy. And in 
 1828 when, on the occasion of his second and 
 last visit to the metropolis of Gog and Magog, 
 the famous novel of "The Collegians" was 
 given to the world, Griffin at once sprang into 
 a brilliant reputation, which the lapse of 
 nearly a century has but widened and con- 
 firmed. 
 
 Boucicaulfs stage version, "The Colleen 
 Bawn," has helped to make this novel one of 
 the best known in the range of English fic- 
 tion. It was a remarkable performance for 
 a young man under twenty-five, and it con-
 
 i/6 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 tains the promise, annulled by Griffin's retire- 
 ment from the world and untimely death, 
 that the author would write his name with the 
 masters of the English novel. The great and 
 kindly Sir Walter Scott had an approving 
 eye on the young Irishman. Scattered 
 through the volumes of his Diary, we find 
 references to Griffin and his work, always 
 couched in terms of high appreciation. 
 
 It is, of course, impossible to say what 
 Griffin might have done had he lived to fulfil 
 the earnest of his first success. Excepting 
 Scott's, none of the great novels of the century 
 had been written when the "Tale of Garry- 
 owen" saw the light. Dickens was to come. 
 More than a decade was to pass before 
 Thackeray should challenge his "pride o' 
 place." Mary Ann Evans, better known as 
 George Eliot, was still in pinafores. In fact, 
 the splendid cycle of Victorian fiction had not 
 begun to unfold. That is almost to say, the 
 Art of Fiction, as now understood, had not 
 been formulated. Sometimes the man seems
 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 177 
 
 to make the epoch and then again the epoch 
 seems to make the man. Mr. Howells has 
 told us, with unconscious humour, perhaps, 
 how much he is the gainer by coming after 
 Dickens and Thackeray. Be it remembered 
 that Griffin went before either of those giants 
 of the Victorian age; and, therefore, on the 
 score of literary obligation a balance is to be 
 struck in his favour. 
 
 In the first dayspring of his rich fancy 
 teeming with the legend, the lore and the ro- 
 mance of his native Mononia, our poet might 
 well have said, "Time and I against any other 
 two" — evermore the challenge of genius con- 
 fident to art inexorable. Oh, that tale of 
 Garryowen! how the truth and the pathos of 
 it grip the heart of one who, like myself, 
 must make the response that nature demands 
 and prove the deep kinship of race by an au- 
 thentic sympathy! In a day when we scan 
 the newest author's style for evidence of de- 
 generacy, and even dramatize the gruesome 
 findings of pathology, what a delight to turn to
 
 178 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 that incomparable chapter which rehearses 
 the rise and fall of Owen's Garden! To me 
 there seems a pathos truly epical, not un- 
 mingled with a rich suggestion of Irish hu- 
 mour, in the immortal stanza that epitomises 
 the story of how Garryowen rose and how 
 Garryowen fell: 
 
 'Tis there we'll drink the nutbrown ale, 
 We'll pay the reckoning on the nail, 
 No man for debt shall go to jail 
 In Garryowen na-gloria! 
 
 With some of the faults of a young man's 
 book, "The Collegians" is a story of the highest 
 power. No other Irish writer has drawn the 
 Irish peasant with anything like the fidelity 
 of Griffin. 
 
 There are many passages in "The Col- 
 legians" and in "Tracy's Ambition" which you 
 will hardly better with the best in Thack- 
 eray and Dickens. Has the biographer of 
 Barry Lyndon given us anything truer to the 
 life than the sketch of "Fireball" Creagh?
 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 179 
 
 Has he a scene in which the tragic and the 
 grotesque are more strongly mingled than in 
 the death of poor Dalton? And is not Dick- 
 ens matched on his own chosen ground of 
 dramatic, highly wrought circumstance by 
 the powerful episode of the finding of Eily 
 O'Connor's corpse, or the accusation of the 
 guilty lover by Danny Mann, or the remorse, 
 grief and shame of the "little Lord" when he 
 hears the accusing ballad from behind his 
 prison door: 
 
 As for that false and cruel knave 
 
 Who stole my life away, 
 I leave h!m to the Judge of Heaven 
 
 And to the Judgment Day. 
 
 The truth of Griffin's pictures of Irish 
 peasant life is not their only artistic merit. 
 He had the genuine creative gift, that inform- 
 ing faculty which goes before everything 
 else in the equipment of the novelist. With 
 what truth of nature he discriminates a score 
 of Irish peasants! The dialect may be un-
 
 180 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 varied for all, but in each case the expression 
 of character is defined with the valid touch of 
 the artist. Loyal as I am to Dickens, I shall 
 not give you Lowry Looby for Sam Weller: 
 the one is flesh and blood; the other, accord- 
 ing to Mr. Saintsbury, is "extra-human!" 
 
 But I am to speak of Gerald Griffin as a 
 poet rather than as a novelist, although some 
 of the best of his poetry is to be found in his 
 prose — which indeed has led me to say so 
 much of the latter. He has little of the 
 bardic spirit which animates Mangan. No 
 line of his recalls the ancient sennachie. But 
 he excels the author of "Dark Rosaleen" in ten- 
 derness even as the latter surpasses him in 
 strength. He has given us two or three of 
 the very finest in the whole compass of Irish 
 love songs. And, as an Irishman, I may be 
 pardoned for believing that "My Mary of the 
 Curling Hair" is one of the sweetest love 
 songs in the world. 
 
 My Mary of the curling hair, 
 
 The laughing teeth and bashful air,
 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 181 
 
 Our bridal morn is dawning fair, 
 With blushes in the skies. 
 
 Shule, shule, shule, agra! 
 
 My love! my pearl! 
 
 My own dear girl ! 
 My mountain maid, arise! 
 
 Wake, linnet of the osier grove! 
 Wake, trembling, stainless, virgin dove! 
 Wake, nestling of a parent's love! 
 Let Moran see thine eyes. 
 
 I am no stranger proud and gay, 
 To win thee from thy home away, 
 And find thee, for a distant day, 
 A theme for wasting sighs. 
 
 But we were known from infancy, 
 Thy father's hearth was home to me, 
 No selfish love was mine for thee, 
 Unholy and unwise. 
 
 And yet (to see what love can do) 
 Though calm my hope has burned and true, 
 My cheek is pale and worn for you, 
 And sunken are mine eyes!
 
 182 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 But soon my love shall be my bride, 
 And, happy by our own fireside, 
 My veins shall feel the rosy tide 
 That lingering hope denies. 
 
 My Mary of the curling hair, 
 The laughing teeth and bashful air, 
 Our bridal morn is dawning fair, 
 With blushes in the sky. 
 
 Shule, shule! shule, agra! etc. 
 
 Purity, no less than tenderness, marks the 
 love songs of Gerald Griffin, and indeed both 
 these qualities are characteristic of most Irish 
 poetry of the affections. A chivalrous re- 
 spect for womanhood and a certain delicacy 
 of feeling in the warmest utterance of passion, 
 are proper to the poets of a people who have 
 in all times been distinguished by a genuine 
 morality. The statisticians are here com- 
 pelled to agree with the eulogists of the Irish 
 character. And although virtue in the 
 amatory relation has been sufficiently dis- 
 counted by the practice of some poets greater
 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 183 
 
 than Gerald Griffin, we are not the less 
 beholden to the chaste muse of the Irish 
 singer. 
 
 A common fatalism no less than a common 
 genius marks this group of Irish poets. 
 "Whom the gods love die young" — the ten- 
 derest truth caught from the antique world 
 — tells the destiny of Griffin and Davis. 
 Mangan, too, passed untimely — shattered, 
 broken, aged, by the torments of a wrecked 
 spirit. All had eaten "that bread which is 
 the bitterest of all food"; all had climbed 
 those "stairs which are the hardest to climb"; 
 all had tasted that "deferred hope which 
 maketh the heart sick." None attained to 
 more than a half measure of years. Griffin, 
 Davis and one more of whom I am to speak, 
 were possessed with the boding of early 
 death. I have already marked the morbid 
 piety of Griffin, linked as it was with a 
 presage of untimely decay, a feeling which 
 had haunted him from boyhood, as he tells 
 us in those simple and affecting verses:
 
 1 84 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 In the time of my boyhood I had a strange feeling 
 That I was to die in the noon of my day, 
 
 Not quietly into the silent grave stealing, 
 But torn, like a blasted oak, sudden away. 
 
 That even in the hour when enjoyment was keenest, 
 My lamp should quench suddenly, hissing in gloom; 
 
 That even when mine honours were freshest and greenest, 
 A blight should rush over and scatter their bloom. 
 
 But be it a dream or a mystic revealing, 
 
 The bodement has haunted me year after year, 
 
 And whenever my bosom with rapture was filling, 
 I paused for the football of fate at mine ear. 
 
 With this feeling upon me, all feverish and glowing, 
 I rushed up the rugged way pointing to fame; 
 
 I snatched at my laurels while yet they were growing, 
 And won for my guerdon the half of a name! 
 
 Doubtless the poet's gloomy presentiment 
 offers nothing of deeper psychologic import 
 than the native sadness of the true Irish tem- 
 perament, shadowed by an intense poetic sen- 
 sibility. But however we may speculate 
 about it, we know that it drove Griffin from 

 
 GERALD GRIFFIN 185 
 
 his literary successes into an Irish monastery, 
 where he turned, like Chatterton in the play, 
 upon his precious manuscripts, and destroyed 
 them that his soul might have peace. Byron 
 standing beside 
 
 "the grave of him who blazed 
 The comet of a season," 
 
 teaches not the vanity of literary ambition 
 more impressively than the single slab which 
 bears the name of Brother Gerald Griffin.
 
 CALLANAN, 
 
 THE BARD OF GOUGAUNE BARRA 
 
 TN beginning these papers I observed that 
 ■*■ my task should be to bring to your notice 
 much with which the critic has no concern. 
 Therefore, I shall make no apology for intro- 
 ducing into this group of Irish poets one so 
 little known to the world of letters as the poet 
 above named. We are, I trust, better in- 
 formed in our judgment and sympathy. 
 Poor Callanan of "Gougaune Barra," — which 
 remains one of the most memorable of Irish 
 poems, — was in truth a humble singer, yet 
 not unworthy of the comradeship in which I 
 have ventured to place him. No poet has re- 
 ported the characteristics of Irish scenery, the 
 heartbeats of Irish patriotism, with a more 
 instructed vision for the one, or a more pas- 
 sionate feeling for the other. Earth hues 
 and sky tints float in his verse as if reflected 
 
 186
 
 C ALLAN AN 187 
 
 by the crystal wave of the Shannon or Suir. 
 His were the eyes that saw, his were the ears 
 that heard ; and however slight the body of his 
 work, it entitles him to a proud place and 
 enduring fame in the Irish anthology. 
 
 Like Griffin, this poet is virginal in pas- 
 sion ; a devout dreamer, a tender ascetic. And 
 as did the mythical Kevin, he will flee from 
 the blue eyes of Kathleen, "eyes of most un- 
 holy blue." Nay, if she pursue him too far, 
 seeking to tempt his sacred vows, let her be- 
 ware the anger of the mystic solitary, guard- 
 ing his treasure of holiness with a fearful care. 
 Let her think on Glendalough and its gloomy 
 wave ! 
 
 The poetry of Callanan and Griffin calls 
 up many a haunting vision of Innisfail, the 
 Sacred Isle. This is one I often see at the 
 bidding of the gentle poet: It is a green 
 land, of a greenness unmatched elsewhere, 
 and over it the peace of the Sabbath is brood- 
 ing. Yonder is a grey ruin, its garniture of 
 ivy and climbing wild-flowers hiding old
 
 188 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 wounds that mutely tell some glorious story 
 of the long ago — perchance of blood that was 
 shed in vain, of heroes who sleep unnamed, 
 forgotten. See, there is a modest church, 
 with its low spire and simple black cross, that 
 most speaking emblem of human faith, cher- 
 ished by this people as I believe by no other. 
 A bell is slowly ringing to Mass, and there is 
 a whisper at my heart that if I wait and watch 
 with faith like unto theirs, mayhap I shall see 
 among those quiet faces one whom I too early 
 lost and whose anxious love shines upon me 
 from the mists of childhood. 
 
 Ah, me! The Irish Muse was indeed a 
 saint, and the poet offered at her shrine the 
 homage of his purity and flawless faith. 
 These minstrels often sang of love and 
 touched the higher chords, but of that earthly 
 love which is fiercer than fire, yea, which is 
 sometimes more bitter than death, they knew 
 nothing. I believe this acrid human passion 
 too is needful, and greater poets than they 
 have enforced the tragic truth. Yet the rare
 
 CALLANAN 189 
 
 purity of these elect singers touches with in- 
 finite pathos. It is of a like strain with the 
 sadness of their lives, their idealised patriot- 
 ism, their untimely decline. 
 
 It is distinction enough for poor Callanan, 
 if no more might be claimed for him, that he 
 has given us "Gougaune Barra," which has a 
 charm for me that I cannot hope to convey to 
 my readers. Born in the land whose living 
 breast nurtured the poets we have been study- 
 ing, I was so early removed as to be unable 
 to retain any impressions save those which are 
 stamped on the memory of childhood. The 
 effort to combine these images into a picture 
 intelligible to my mature sense — to find the 
 magic sesame to that enchanted period — has, 
 I confess, often occupied me, since the natural 
 interest in one's birthright may plead for such 
 a vanity. I have had only partial success in 
 this attempt to recreate a child's paradise, — 
 for the poorest environment may be that — and 
 have therefore had recourse to Irish poetry of 
 the familiar sort, in quest of some clue to
 
 i 9 o NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 these broken memories. This was, of course, 
 to part with my earliest faith, since no poetry, 
 the work of ripened minds, can hope to bear 
 the least resemblance to that divine quality 
 which makes the vision of the child. After 
 one has ceased to believe in the gold at the 
 foot of the rainbow, there is an end to one's 
 first poetry. 
 
 For some reason growing vaguely out of 
 these early and disjointed associations, I have 
 always been especially fond of some pieces of 
 Callanan's. Nor (I should hope) am I to be 
 suspected of an undue preference on the 
 ground that the poet was himself a native of 
 the noble county of Cork. My Irish citizen- 
 ship is scarcely vivid enough for that. Yet, 
 as I would say, Callanan has done much in 
 helping me to realise the birthright of ro- 
 mance to which I fell heir unwittingly, and 
 of which an untoward fate has suffered me to 
 make nothing; and so "Gougaune Barra" em- 
 bodies for me the wildness and sweetness of 
 the Irish poetical inspiration.
 
 CALLANAN 191 
 
 There is a green island in lone Gougaune Barra 
 Whence Allua of songs rushes forth like an arrow; 
 In deep- valley ed Desmond a thousand wild fountains 
 Come down to that lake from their home in the moun- 
 tains. 
 There grows the wild ash ; and a time-stricken willow 
 Looks chidingly down on the mirth of the billow, 
 As like some gay child that sad monitor scorning, 
 It lightly laughs back to the laugh of the morning. 
 
 And its zone of dark hills — O! to see them all bright- 
 
 'ning, 
 When the tempest flings out its red banner of lightning, 
 And the waters come down, 'mid the thunder's deep rat- 
 tle, 
 Like clans from their hill at the voice of the battle; 
 And biightly the fire-crested billows are gleaming, 
 And wildly from Mallow the eagles are screaming; — 
 ( ), where is the dwelling, in valley or highland, 
 So meet for a bard as this lone little island ! 
 
 High sons of the lyre! O, how proud was the feeling 
 To dream while alone through that solitude stealing; 
 Though loftier minstrels green Erin can number, 
 I alone waked the strain of her harp from its slumber, 
 And glean'd the grey legend that long had been sleeping, 
 Where oblivion's dull mist o'er its beauty was creeping,
 
 192 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 From the love which I felt for my country's sad story, 
 When to love her was shame, to revile her was glory! 
 
 Least bard of the free! were it mine to inherit 
 The fire of thy harp and the wing of thy spirit, 
 With the wrongs which, like thee, to my own land have 
 
 bound me, 
 Did thy mantle of song throw its radiance around me; 
 Yet, yet on those bold cliffs might Liberty rally, 
 And abroad send her cry o'er the deep of each valley. 
 But rouse thee, vain dreamer! no fond fancy cherish; 
 Thy vision of Freedom in bloodshed must perish. 
 
 I, too, shall be gone — though my name may be spoken 
 When Erin awakes, and her fetters are broken : — 
 Some minstrel will come in the summer eve's gleaming, 
 When Freedom's young light on his spirit is beaming, 
 To bend o'er my grave with a tear of emotion, 
 Where calm Avonbuee seeks the kisses of ocean, 
 And plant a wild wreath from the banks of that river, 
 O'er the heart and the harp that are silent forever! 
 
 Thomas Davis's "Lament for Owen Roe" 
 has been called the most pathetic elegy in the 
 language. Callanan's "Dirge for O'Sullivan 
 Beare," purporting to be a translation out of
 
 CALLANAN 193 
 
 the original Irish, is assuredly the fiercest. 
 If you have read Mr. Froude's powerful 
 story, 'The Two Chiefs of Dunboy"— and if 
 not, I would urge you to read it — you require 
 no introduction to Morty Oge, the famous 
 smuggling patriot of the eighteenth century. 
 Mr. Froude has characterised this Irish rebel 
 with his usual force and, it must be added, his 
 usual animus in respect to an Irish subject. 
 There were critics who fell foul of Mr. 
 Froude when the novel was published, and 
 who did not scruple to remind him that his 
 forte was for writing fiction in the guise of 
 history. However that may be, "The Two 
 Chiefs of Dunboy" is literature, and though 
 the picture it presents of Ireland at the epoch 
 treated is often discoloured by the writer's 
 innate prejudice, I am thankful to Mr. 
 Froude for having done the book if for no 
 other reason than that it helps me to realise 
 the poetical motive of Callanan's "Dirge." It 
 would not be easy to cite from the whole range 
 of Irish ballad literature a piece that so viv-
 
 i 9 4 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 idly exhibits in little the tragic history of this 
 people. Alas! the dirge of Morty Oge, the 
 reckless darling of his people, betrayed to a 
 foul death by one of his own race whom he 
 had favoured and protected — is it not the 
 ground-note of all that sad history? Bearing 
 in mind the religious character of the Irish 
 peasantry — even more deeply emphasised then 
 than now — the maledictions of this poem take 
 on a fearful interest. Read Mr. Froude's 
 thrilling chapter on the "Death of O'Sullivan 
 Beare" (which I think is well worth most of 
 the fiction that has since appeared), and you 
 may then, in some slight degree, realise the 
 terrible pathos of Callanan's "Dirge." 
 
 The sun on Ivera 
 
 No longer shines brightly; 
 The voice of her music 
 
 No longer is sprightly; 
 No more to her maidens 
 
 The light dance is dear, 
 Since the death of our darling, 
 
 O'Sullivan Beare.
 
 CALLANAN 195 
 
 Had he died calmly, 
 
 I would not deplore him; 
 Or if the wild strife 
 
 Of the sea-war closed o'er him ; 
 But with ropes round his white limbs 
 
 Thro' ocean to trail him, 
 Like a fish after slaughter, — 
 
 Tis therefore I wail him. 
 
 Long may the curse 
 
 Of his people pursue them ; 
 Scully,* that sold him, 
 
 And soldiers that slew him! 
 One glimpse of Heaven's light 
 
 May they see never! 
 May the hearth-stone of hell 
 
 Be their best bed forever! 
 
 In the hole which the vile hands 
 
 Of soldiers had made thee; 
 Unhonoured, unshrouded, 
 
 And headless they laid thee. 
 No sigh to regret thee, 
 
 No eye to rain o'er thee, 
 No dirge to lament thee, 
 
 No friend to deplore thee! 
 * The informer.
 
 196 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Dear head of my darling, 
 
 How gory and pale 
 These aged eyes saw thee, 
 
 High spiked on their jail! 
 That cheek in the summer sun 
 
 Ne'er shall grow warm ; 
 Nor that eye e'er catch light, 
 
 But the flash of the storm! 
 
 A curse, blessed ocean, 
 
 Is on thy green water, 
 From the haven of Cork, 
 
 To Ivera of slaughter; 
 Since thy billows were dyed 
 
 With the red wounds of fear 
 Of Muiertach Oge, 
 
 OurO'SullivanO'Beare!
 
 IRISH BALLADRY 
 
 IN this paper and the preceding one I have 
 dealt with a group of Irish poets whose 
 lives offer a pathetic interest from resembling 
 causes, and who were filled with that spirit 
 which has given birth to an unique literature. 
 But you are not to think that even with these, 
 "high sons of the lyre" though they be, we 
 have done more than to open the book of Irish 
 balladry. I shall make bold to pronounce 
 that ballad literature the finest in the world. 
 The dominant note is one of lament for the 
 lost liberty of Erin. Often a single deathless 
 song is all that we have of the poet. Scat- 
 tered over a period of about three hundred 
 years, born of an oppression without parallel 
 and a resistance without precedent, of a strug- 
 gle ever renewed and ever defeated, this bal- 
 lad literature of Ireland, of the Irish soil and 
 
 197
 
 198 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 of the Irish heart, is the priceless treasure of 
 a people that has lost everything beside. No 
 literature in the world has more vitality than 
 this — to say that it is written in blood and 
 tears, is to speak without metaphor. Ireland 
 may well rejoice her sad heart with this glo- 
 rious possession — the testament of her mar- 
 tyrs, the pledge of her fealty, the witness of 
 her undying hope. 
 
 It has been finely said that a people who, 
 though subjugated, still cling to their native 
 language, hold as it were the key to their 
 prison. The bitter destiny of the Irish race 
 has willed it to lose in great part this most 
 precious inheritance; yet, out of a calamity so 
 profound, has the spirit of this people wrested 
 an unique triumph. For of the conqueror's 
 tongue it has forged a mighty weapon that 
 has prevailed more than armies and fleets; 
 out of his alien speech it has raised a witness 
 to confound him. In the magic legend, as 
 we read, the enchanted horn, object of all 
 men's desire, was awarded only to those of 

 
 IRISH BALLADRY 199 
 
 pure heart and noble purpose. So have the 
 Irish poets taken the oppressor's language as 
 worthier of it than he, and they have breathed 
 into it the genius of their race, and they have 
 built from it a literature whose glory far out- 
 shines his barren conquest. 
 
 Strange is the destiny of the Celtl Con- 
 quered, he is yet conquering by grace of that 
 native genius which could never bow to the 
 law of subjugation ; by virtue of that renascent 
 spirit which has survived the deadliest blows 
 of national misfortune. "You must not laugh 
 at us Celts," said our great kinsman Renan. 
 "We shall never build a Parthenon, for we 
 have not the marble; but we are skilled in 
 reading the heart and soul. We bury our 
 hands in the entrails of a man and withdraw 
 them full of the secrets of infinity." 
 
 This precious blue flower of Irish poesy is 
 not a blossom that blows but once in a hun- 
 dred years. True, it has its periods of vigour 
 and splendour, and again its seasons of appar- 
 ent decline. Through all it lives, as a thing
 
 200 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 that the finger of God has touched with im- 
 mortal life. Then one day, with a stirring at 
 the heart, the secret of its life is suddenly re- 
 vealed in fruitage and flower, as our own poet 
 has conceived: 
 
 Unchilled by the rain and umvaked by the wind, 
 The lily lies sleeping thro' Winter's cold hour, 
 
 Till Spring's light touch her fetters unbind, 
 And daylight and liberty bless the young flower. 
 
 For the sap is always at the root. And in 
 our late day, when it is sometimes charged 
 that Irishmen have begun to renounce their 
 age-long aspiration; when it is perhaps true 
 that they have less patience than of yore with 
 a literature that is effective chiefly for regret, 
 — even now have we not seen the wondrous 
 miracle appointed to this ever-faithful race? 
 The winter is over once more, the bare branch 
 again puts forth green leaves, and the dewy 
 Irish heaven is filled with the glory of song! 
 
 Ah, dear kinsfolk of that ever faithful yet
 
 IRISH BALLADRY 201 
 
 oft-divided race, as we listen with joyous 
 hearts to the choir of happy songsters that 
 have truly made spring in the winter of our 
 memories, let us not forget those earlier min- 
 strels who sang, faithful unto death, in darker 
 days. Let us often turn the page where is 
 written the story of their devotion, and where 
 is poured out the treasure of their genius. 
 No prejudice shall deprive us of this litera- 
 ture, since true culture makes its own all gifts 
 of the mind. 
 
 So I commend you, kind readers all, to a 
 study rich in spiritual profit, which in these 
 pages I have no more than suggested to you. 
 Glad am I to have been favoured to lead you 
 to the border of our ancient Eire of poets, 
 that enchanted realm of song and sacrifice; 
 and there I kiss your hands, with the devout 
 farewell of an ancient and well beloved Irish 
 minstrel : 
 
 For the sake of the dear little Isle where I send you, 
 For those who will welcome and speed and befriend you; •
 
 202 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 For the green hills of Erin that still hold my heart there, 
 Tho' stained with the blood of the patriot and martyr, 
 
 My blessing attend you! 
 
 My blessing attend you!
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 
 
 I AM to talk to you of two famous Irish- 
 men who lived merrily and in their 
 earthly course added much to the world's 
 stock of enjoyment. We shall not, I trust, be 
 the less interested in the story that, after mak- 
 ing the world largely their debtor, these two 
 died sadly enough, taking at last a tribute of 
 tears from thousands of hearts which they had 
 delighted with the frolic freedom of their 
 genius. And, in truth, what moral is more 
 trite than this — the merry man dropping at 
 the end of the play his humorous mask and 
 showing us his own tristful face behind the 
 antic visage of Harlequin? Perhaps the poor 
 mime was sad through it all — only the chil- 
 dren are entirely deceived by the patches and 
 
 paint. 
 
 203
 
 2o 4 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 In the change of literary fashions and the 
 clamour of new voices, some courage may be 
 required to attempt an hour's entertainment 
 with two commonly neglected writers. I say 
 neglected, although editions of their books 
 are printed from time to time, and the audi- 
 ence of elect minds never fails them. 
 
 It is enough that the men with whom we 
 have to deal have gained an honourable place 
 in the literature of the last century. If you 
 do not remark their books on every railway 
 stand, or in the catalogue of every circulating 
 library, you must not, therefore, conclude that 
 they have no warrant to speak to you. Nay, 
 I make bold to observe that they require you 
 to bring your best to them, and that one's best 
 is not, perhaps, always worthy of their ac- 
 ceptance. 
 
 Still it remains true that the vogue of many 
 more recent literary reputations, far less 
 worthy on grounds of high merit, is not for 
 the Doctor or the Padre, beloved though they 
 be of an appreciative and attached audience.
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 205 
 
 Whether indeed such a condition were de- 
 sirable, offers a basis for argument, had we 
 time and patience to go into it. Having long 
 since attained that Nirvana which awaits the 
 tired heart and brain, the Doctor and the 
 Padre rest indifferent to the awards of gods 
 and columns. Nor are they posthumously 
 pursued by the literary syndicates — so their 
 portion great or small of immortal fame is in 
 no danger of being vulgarised. The syndi- 
 cates may dissent, but I can see something to 
 be envied in this. 
 
 O'Connell used to say that you could kick 
 a better orator than himself out of any bush 
 in Ireland. Dr. Maginn and Father Prout, 
 on a similar principle, might be reckoned the 
 two wittiest Irishmen of the last century, if 
 wit were not so generally accredited to the 
 race which claims them. They were contem- 
 poraries, though Prout survived almost into 
 our own time and Maginn died twenty years 
 before him. There was a strange resemblance 
 in their mental gifts, their literary acquire-
 
 206 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 ments, even their mutual antipathies and 
 prejudices. The one was almost the analogue 
 of the other. Both were good Irishmen, yet 
 both were strong Tories. The one was a 
 priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and, 
 in spite of much that was uncanonical in his 
 character, remained true to the ancient faith 
 of his fathers. The other was as stout a 
 Protestant as Doctor Johnson. 
 
 Maginn used to quote with half-serious ap- 
 proval the proposition of a certain Sir Joseph 
 Yorke, to scuttle the Island of Sorrows and 
 leave it under water for twenty-four hours, 
 as an effectual cure for its political disorders. 
 It may be observed that the Doctor seldom 
 left himself under water for so long a period. 
 
 Prout was of the opinion that Tom Moore's 
 Melodies had done more to bring about Cath- 
 olic Emancipation than all the tremendous 
 moral suasion of O'Connell, and he affected 
 to hold the methods of the great agitator in 
 abhorrence. I suspect his Toryism was only 
 skin-deep, however, — not at all the robust
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 207 
 
 article of Maginn — for we know that he 
 (Prout) gloried in a Limerick ancestor. 
 The politics of both men is a curious study, 
 but it may not detain us, since we are chiefly 
 concerned with their literary significance. 
 And here, as already suggested, the analogy 
 between these two famous men is most striking. 
 There is no great disparity between the pro- 
 ductions of their genius. Nature almost 
 seems to have struck them both from the same 
 die. But let us begin with Maginn.
 
 2o8 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 II 
 
 "T T ERE, early to bed, lies kind William 
 A J. Maginn," wrote Lockhart, in 1842. 
 I wish you to keep in mind that simple obitu- 
 ary penned by the noble son-in-law of Walter 
 Scott. "Kind William Maginn!" Yes, it 
 was kind William Maginn who wrote: 
 "Great and wise men have loved laughter. 
 The vain, the ignorant and the uncivilised 
 alone have dreaded or despised it. Let us 
 imitate the wise where we may. Let our 
 Christmas laugh echo till Valentine's day; 
 our laugh of St. Valentine till the first of 
 April; our April humour till May-day, and 
 our merriment till midsummer. And so let 
 us go on from holiday to holiday, philoso- 
 phers in laughter, at least, till, at the end of our 
 century, we die the death of old Democritus 
 — cheerful, happy and contented, surrounded
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 209 
 
 by many a friend, but without an enemy, and 
 remembered principally because we have 
 never either in life or in death, given pain for 
 a moment to anyone that lived!" 
 
 Ireland is a very small country, to be sure, 
 as a matter of square miles, though we have 
 been obliged to hear so much of it; but it 
 does seem amazing that so many famous and 
 illustrious Irishmen should have to be cred- 
 ited to the city and county of Cork. A fair 
 city is Cork, with one of the most beautiful 
 sea-ways in the world leading to her doors. 
 Alas! many of those who have loved her and 
 owed to her their birth, have gone out upon 
 that shining track, never more to return, save 
 in their dreams. We shall hear presently of 
 one who carried a wistful memory of her dur- 
 ing years of exile in alien lands until at last it 
 found expression in a song which has wreathed 
 his name with hers in an unfading laurel. 
 
 Maginn and Father Prout were both born 
 in this delectable city of Cork. So was their 
 friend, Maclise, the painter, the Alfred
 
 210 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Croquis of Fraser's Magazine, and the 
 worthy associate of Maginn in making the 
 famous "Gallery of Literary Characters." 
 Maclise is also memorable as the friend of 
 William Makepeace Thackeray, greatest of 
 all who sate in the brilliant circle of Regina* 
 It would be easy, by the way, to draw up a 
 catalogue of eminent Corkonians. There 
 was "Honest Dick" Milliken, who wrote the 
 celebrated "Groves of Blarney," — now, alas! 
 unsung, yet still potent to keep his honest 
 name from oblivion. There was Barry, the 
 painter, and Sheridan Knowles, the drama- 
 tist; there was Thomas Davis, heart of fire' 
 and tongue of gold, and poor Callanan, bard 
 of Gougaune Barra. But, indeed, to rehearse 
 the roll of Cork's illustrious sons might, in 
 the end, become as tiresome as the catalogue 
 of the ships in Homer. Modesty forbids my 
 mentioning the name of a certain unimportant 
 person (here peeping over your shoulder) 
 
 * Fraser's Magazine.
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 211 
 
 who has the privilege of claiming Cork as his 
 birthplace. 
 
 So William Maginn was born in Cork, the 
 son of a schoolmaster who knew vastly more 
 than Goldsmith's immortal pedagogue, for he 
 taught the classics and other useful knowl- 
 edge, and conducted withal a flourishing 
 academy. But nothing about the academy 
 flourished at the rate that young Maginn did 
 in scholarship. The mere summary of his 
 acquirements before he was eighteen is appal- 
 ling. Maginn pere knew his son was a prod- 
 igy, and with true Irish pride set himself to 
 bring out all that was in him. You remem- 
 ber how Dr. Blimber used to "bring on" the 
 young gentlemen under his tutelage. It 
 probably wasn't a circumstance to the bring- 
 ing on of young Maginn. He graduated 
 from Trinity College, Dublin, before he was 
 eighteen. He died under fifty, and while 
 still a young man he had mastered the Latin, 
 Greek, German, Hebrew, Sanscrit, Syriac,
 
 212 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Irish or Gaelic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, 
 Swedish, Turkish and Magyar languages. 
 It is also certain, as we know from his works, 
 that he learned soundly and well the English 
 tongue: which is quite an accomplishment of 
 itself. But there is, incredible as it may 
 seem, no reason to doubt that his knowledge 
 of all the languages named was exact and pro- 
 found. His translations, serious and bur- 
 lesque, sufficiently attest his mastery of the 
 classic tongues. His essays on the plays and 
 learning of Shakespeare show his command 
 of the splendid resources of our English 
 speech. Edward Kenealy, who has left us a 
 touching memoir of Maginn, and who was 
 himself a linguist of great attainments, in a 
 letter to Sir Robert Peel characterised Ma- 
 ginn as "the most universal scholar of the 
 age." And Lockhart wrote of him: 
 
 "Be a Bentley, if you can, but omit the bru- 
 tality; rival Parr, eschewing all pomposity; 
 outlinguist old Magliabecchi, and yet be a 
 man of the world; emulate Swift in satire, but
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 213 
 
 suffer not one squeeze of his saeva indignatio 
 to eat your own heart; be and do all this — and 
 the Doctor will no longer be unique." 
 
 Unhappily for Maginn's status in litera- 
 ture, this enormous versatility was purchased 
 at the cost of more enduring performance. 
 The Doctor did too many things well to 
 achieve a surpassing success in any single line. 
 As he himself would have said, with whim- 
 sical pedantry, the labour was "too auto- 
 schediastical." It has been said that men 
 made good books out of his table talk — with- 
 out crediting him, of course. The possessor 
 of one talent is not seldom more fortunate than 
 he who has ten. Maginn wrote the first of the 
 iamous Nodes Ambrosianae papers, and many 
 of the succeeding series which through long 
 years delighted the cultivated readers of the 
 British Islands. They brought fame and for- 
 tune to Blackwood's Magazine, and more spe- 
 cifically, to John Wilson, better known under 
 the pen-name of Christopher North. When 
 Maginn's active brain was worn out and his
 
 214 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 generous heart stilled forever, the canny Scots- 
 man forgot to mention the obligation. 
 
 Grievous as the fact is to all who wish that 
 genius may receive its due, we may be sure 
 that it would not have been very distressful 
 to William Maginn. The carelessness with 
 which he regarded the fate of his productions, 
 may be paralleled only in the case of Shakes- 
 peare. He rarely gave the authority of his 
 name to any of his writings, which he threw 
 off with incredible ease and fertility. Yet 
 if only the pencil sketches accompanying the 
 "Gallery of Literary Characters" were to 
 survive, they would insure the fame of 
 Maginn as the most brilliant and audacious 
 wit of his generation. 
 
 Not long ago, Mr. Saintsbury, the eminent 
 English critic, paid a significant tribute to 
 the merits of Dr. Maginn, in tracing the early 
 work of Thackeray. Maginn was Thack- 
 eray's first editor. Many other notable liter- 
 ary men confessed the benefits of his kindly 
 word and helping hand. Careless of his own
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 215 
 
 fame and selfish interest, he was zealous for 
 those of others. They say Thackeray satir- 
 ised him in the character of Captain Shan- 
 don. I don't believe it. I prefer to believe, 
 instead, that the great English writer was 
 thinking rather of the erratic, brilliant 
 Maginn whom he knew so well, than of Gold- 
 smith, when he penned these words: 
 
 "Think of him, reckless, thriftless, vain if 
 you like, but merciful, gentle, generous, full 
 of love and pity. He passes out of our life 
 and goes to render his account beyond it. 
 . . . Think of the noble spirits that admired 
 and deplored him ... his humour delight- 
 ing us still ... his very weaknesses beloved 
 and familiar." 
 
 There is a story that Thackeray, in his 
 early period, long before he had himself 
 caught the ear of the town, loaned a goodish 
 sum of money to Maginn — which, of course, 
 was never repaid — and that the circumstance 
 aided materially in the dispersion of the 
 young man's fortune. Many years after-
 
 216 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 ward, when poor Maginn had passed away, 
 Father Prout gave the true history of the af- 
 fair to Blanchard Jerrold. Thackeray, he 
 said, was eager to found a magazine, which 
 should hold its own with the best. He 
 wanted an editor and Prout told him William 
 Maginn was his man. A meeting was 
 brought about at the Crown Head tavern in 
 Drury Lane — Maginn was always the better 
 for business after a lubrication. He stipu- 
 lated for five hundred pounds, to be expended 
 in preliminary operations — "clearing the 
 decks," was the Doctor's idiom. The money 
 was advanced, the new literary venture sent 
 forth, handseled with all the resource and 
 skill and brilliancy of Maginn. It lived just 
 six months and bequeathed an invaluable ex- 
 perience to the future author of "Pendennis." 
 After all, pecuniary debts lie easier, it may 
 be, than literary obligations among the tribe 
 of Scriblerus. I suspect that Barry Lyndon 
 has given a slight I. O. U. to Ensign Morgan 
 O'Doherty.
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 217 
 
 Maginn in his most surprising feats of 
 genius and scholarship must always remain 
 "caviare to the general." It is not difficult 
 to see that he could not have produced his 
 incomparable burlesques in the classic lan- 
 guages by simply swallowing lexicons through 
 a long course of years. You may have little 
 Latin, but, with a small share of trouble, you 
 can't miss the heroic effect of Maginn's ren- 
 dering of the famous old English ballad of 
 "Chevy Chase" into the tongue of Virgil. 
 Who that has ever read it, can forget the 
 opening lines? — 
 
 Perseus ex Northumbria 
 
 Vovebat Diis iratis, 
 Venare inter dies tres, 
 
 In montibus Cheviatis; 
 Contempt is forti Douglaso 
 
 Et omnibus cognatis. 
 
 Or this infinitely comic parody of what 
 Matthew Arnold was so fond ot calling the 
 grand style?
 
 218 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 O dies! dies! dies trux! 
 
 Sic finit cantus primus; 
 Si de venatu plura vis, 
 
 Plura narrare scimus.
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 219 
 
 III 
 
 THERE is a well defined Age of Drink in 
 the history of English letters and social 
 life. From the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury it persists well into the nineteenth. I 
 hasten to say that at no time has the great Eng- 
 lish nation been indifferent to strong drink. 
 Men drank hard when William Maginn went 
 up to London — they had drunk harder less 
 than a generation before. Thackeray glances 
 brilliantly at all this guzzling and profligacy 
 in his lecture on the fourth George. Princes 
 of the blood were not seldom as drunk as 
 Wapping soldiers. Of course the nobility 
 followed suit. The members of the honour- 
 able profession of the bar loved wine, we are 
 told, as well as the wool-sack. Ladies of 
 quality tippled and often had great need of 
 their sedan chairs. O temporal O mores/
 
 220 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 I wonder if all this be really changed in the 
 present year of grace, or doth Belgravia re- 
 main as a tinkling cymbal? . . . 
 
 Poor Maginn drank far more than was 
 good for him, on account of his delicate con- 
 stitution and the fact that he was, like Horace, 
 a Mercurial man. Charles Lamb, you re- 
 member, had the same weakness and wrote an 
 essay, "The Confessions of a Drunkard," 
 which he afterward tried to explain away, 
 but which I fear conveyed more truth than 
 poetry. 
 
 I say Maginn drank too much, but it would 
 be unjust to paint him as the Horrible Ex- 
 ample among literary men of that age. Other 
 men of his time and company drank more — 
 some men, you know, do this better than others 
 — and yet contrived to escape reproach. The 
 Homeric potations of Kit North and his 
 friends are not so much matters of literature 
 as they are matters of fact. Maginn wrote a 
 table of drinking maxims which had a famous 
 vogue in the clubs. Wine and wit are there,
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 221 
 
 contrary to the adage, in equal proportions. 
 He has done the trick for us in verse, too, and, 
 remembering how many good men have had 
 their moments of frailty since Father Noah 
 discovered the vine, we shall thank him for 
 his jolly song of 
 
 THE WINE-BIBBER'S GLORY. 
 
 Quo me Bacche rapis tui plenum? 
 
 — Horace. 
 
 If Horatius Flaccus made jolly old Bacchus 
 
 So often his favourite theme; 
 If in him it was classic to praise his old Massic 
 
 And Falernian to gulp in a stream ; 
 If Falstaff's vagaries 'bout sack and canaries 
 
 Have pleased us again and again ; 
 Shall we not make merry on Port, Claret or Sherry, 
 
 Madeira and sparkling Champagne? 
 
 First Port, the potation preferred by our nation 
 
 To all the small drink of the French; 
 'Tis the best standing liquor for layman or vicar, 
 
 The army, the navy, the bench ; 
 'Tis strong and substantial, — believe me, no man shall 
 
 Good port from my dining room send.
 
 222 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 In your soup — after cheese — every way it will please, 
 But most tete-a-tete with a friend. 
 
 Fair Sherry, Port's sister, for years they dismissed her 
 
 To the kitchen to flavor the jellies ; 
 There long she was banish'd and well nigh had vanish'd 
 
 To comfort the kitchen maids' bellies, — 
 Till his Majesty fixt, he thought Sherry when sixty 
 
 Years old like himself quite the thing: 
 So I think it but proper to fill a tip-topper 
 
 Of Sherry to drink to the King. 
 
 Though your delicate Claret by no means goes far, it 
 
 Is famed for its exquisite flavour; 
 'Tis a nice provocation to wise conversation, 
 
 Queer blarney or harmless palaver; 
 'Tis the bond of society — no inebriety 
 
 Follows a swig of the blue; 
 One may drink a whole ocean and ne'er feel commotion 
 
 Or headache from Chateau Margoux. 
 
 But though Claret is pleasant to take for the present, 
 
 On the stomach it sometimes feels cold; 
 So to keep it all clever and comfort your liver, 
 
 Take a glass of Madeira that's old. 
 When't has sailed for the Indies a cure for all wind 'tis, 
 
 And colic 'twill put to the rout;
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 223 
 
 All doctors declare a good glass of Madeira 
 The best of all things for the gout. 
 
 Then Champagne! dear Champagne! oh, how gladly I 
 drain a 
 
 Whole bottle of Oeil de Perdrix 
 To the eye of my charmer, to make my love warmer, 
 
 If cool that love ever could be. 
 I could toast her forever — but never, oh never 
 
 Would I her dear name so profane; 
 So if e'er when I'm tipsy, it slips to my lips, I 
 
 Wash it back to my heart with Champagne! 
 
 The gentle art of literary "roasting" seems 
 to have declined in virulence since the days 
 of Maginn. He was easily the first practi- 
 tioner of his time, and his slashing reviews 
 were long the feature of Fraser's Magazine, 
 and other periodicals. His editors have res- 
 cued a sufficient number of them to give us 
 a formidable idea of the Doctor's prowess. 
 The papers in which he pretended to expose 
 the plagiarisms of Tom Moore are among 
 the most learned and ingenious. Maginn 
 was a Tory of the Tories, and it was not to
 
 224 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 be expected that he would bate of his edge 
 for the warbler of Lansdowne House. 
 Moore was greatly annoyed by the Doctor's 
 roguish animadversions, but he did not pro- 
 ceed to the extreme of challenging him to 
 mortal combat, as in the memorable passage 
 with Jeffrey. I suspect Moore feared the 
 Doctor's terrible wit, his "paper pellets of the 
 brain," even more than his powder and ball. 
 As I have said, literary manners have some- 
 what improved since Maginn plied his merci- 
 less pen in Fraser's or Bentley's. His affair 
 with Mr. Grantley Berkley sets a mark upon 
 the time. It came near having as many ele- 
 ments of tragedy as sometimes attend the tak- 
 ing off of a Western or Southern editor in 
 this glad free land. Mr. Grantley Berkley, 
 the younger son of a noble house in whose 
 escutcheon there was a very recent and ugly 
 bar sinister, wrote and caused to be published 
 a novel of indifferent merit. The chief of- 
 fence of the author, to Maginn's mind, con- 
 sisted in his expatiating upon the ancestral
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 225 
 
 glories of the house of Berkley, in face of 
 the notorious fact alluded to. One cannot 
 read Maginn's review of the book even at 
 this distance of time without a shudder. 
 Father Prout glanced over the copy and re- 
 marked to James Fraser, publisher of the 
 magazine, "Jemmy, this means trouble!" 
 And it did. 
 
 A novelist of our day would accept such a 
 roast as a splendid advertisement. Or he 
 might defend himself anonymously and with 
 a heroic show of virtue. Mr. Berkley's noble 
 blood would brook no amende short of assault 
 and battery. Accordingly, backed by his 
 brother and a hired bruiser, he went to seek 
 "satisfaction." Finding Fraser alone at the 
 publishing office, the three set upon him and 
 so grievously injured him that he lived but 
 a short time afterward. He lived too long, 
 however, to admit of a charge of murder or 
 manslaughter. The affair and its subsequent 
 airing in the courts was the sensation of Lon- 
 don. Before the trial was ended Dr. Maginn
 
 226 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 had a hostile meeting with the aggrieved 
 author. Three shots were exchanged with- 
 out effect. Fraser's assailants were fined in 
 a small amount, and Maginn wrote a vigorous 
 account of the whole affair, which, to a pres- 
 ent-day reader, excels in curious interest the 
 bulk of his works. It will always occupy a 
 page in that pleasing history, so dear to Ad- 
 dison, of "Man and the Town."
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 227 
 
 IV 
 
 MAGINN had his bit of romance and a 
 sad one enough it was. Some who 
 have written upon him say it had much to do 
 in confirming the habits of dissipation which 
 helped him down the descent of Avernus. I 
 have my doubts as to that, but at least the the- 
 ory does no great violence to the Doctor's head 
 and heart. His own idea, as we know, was 
 that a man who would not go to the devil for a 
 woman was not good for much. The lady in 
 the case was Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an 
 English poetess of the thirties, whose verses 
 were once held in critical esteem, and whose 
 initials, "L. E. L.," were potent to thrill our 
 charming grandmothers in that far-off sen- 
 timental time. Miss Landon wrote and pub- 
 lished more poetry than the Sweet Singer of 
 Michigan, but she did not live long enough
 
 228 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 after marriage to take the world into her con- 
 fidence. Thus her passion has a vestal note 
 which is lacking to the later and more com- 
 petent lucubrations of the American Sappho. 
 But her marriage was a dreadful business to 
 Maginn, who admired her prodigiously and, 
 indeed, gave her a chance of immortality 
 which the lady's own works do not warrant, 
 by inserting a laudatory notice of her in the 
 famous "Gallery of Literary Characters." 
 
 Maginn was then able to make or unmake 
 a literary reputation. The lady, who really 
 rhymed well, was flattered by the great edi- 
 tor's praise. He called her the Tenth Muse 
 and proved it with a show of poetic imagina- 
 tion which, could the lady have claimed as 
 much, would have gone far to confirm her in 
 the title. But however Maginn might ad- 
 mire and belaud her and set her up in the 
 estimation of the literary world, he couldn't 
 marry her, for the excellent reason that there 
 was already a Mrs. Maginn, of whom we 
 know no more. So the Tenth Muse, weary-
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 229 
 
 ing at last of platonics, went in bravely like 
 every true daughter of Eve to have her 
 illusions shattered. She married a Scotch 
 captain with a furious temper, who took the 
 poor Muse away with him to Cape Coast 
 Castle in Africa, where he commanded. 
 There she lived only a few months, and the 
 circumstances of her death were so strange 
 that it was long believed she had made away 
 with herself to escape the violence of her hus- 
 band. 
 
 And William Maginn, who had been going 
 down for some time, but in an undecided way, 
 so that his friends indulged the hope that he 
 might think better of it and retrace his steps, 
 — William Maginn, after the death of this 
 woman, went on down hill like a man who 
 knew his road and would follow it to the end. 
 
 We may not dwell on the close of Maginn's 
 life, which was as gloomy as its meridian had 
 been brilliant. As Moore says of a more fa- 
 mous Irishman, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
 
 230 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 whom Maginn strongly resembled in his last 
 evil fortune, he "passed too often the Rubicon 
 of the cup." Dunned by bailiffs, dragged to 
 the Fleet prison for debt, reduced to the 
 meanest shifts to support existence — in read- 
 ing the last sad chapter, one is reminded of 
 the tragedy of Savage and that race of ill- 
 fated men of genius in whose misfortunes 
 Johnson shared and of whom Macaulay de- 
 scribes him as the last survivor. This melan- 
 choly distinction belongs rather to William 
 Maginn. Neglected by the great party 
 which he had served so ably and long with 
 his pen, shattered in health by privation and 
 disease, — he sank lower and lower. After 
 much troubling comes the great peace. It 
 came to poor William Maginn in the 48th 
 year of his age, in the year 1842, at the town 
 of Walton-on-Thames, to which he had re- 
 tired from the great Babel he loved so well. 
 Sad and untimely as was that death, and sor- 
 did as was the setting of the last scene of all, 
 we may not look upon it without a solemn
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 231 
 
 interest and pity. Nay, a beam of glory 
 lighted up the last hours of the broken man 
 of genius. The master passion strong even 
 in death, the courage of immortal mind, 
 strikes us mute in the presence of this tragedy. 
 Lying with his beloved Homer open upon his 
 breast and unconscious of the nearness of the 
 end, he dictated to his faithful friend Kenealy 
 a translation from the classic page. Thus, in 
 a manner thrilling with high emotion, the Si- 
 lence came to him: and so, with a reverent 
 thought, we may leave "kind William 
 Maginn."
 
 232 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 NOTE ON GRANTLEY BERKLEY 
 
 IN his third paper on "The Songs of Hor- 
 ace" (originally published, like the rest 
 of the series, in Fraser's Magazine), Father 
 Prout makes the following caustic reference 
 to the Berkley-Maginn affair: 
 
 "On a late occasion the unanimous expression of cor- 
 dial sympathy which burst from every organ of public 
 opinion, in reprobation of a brutal assault, has been to 
 us consolatory and gratifying. We shall hazard the 
 charge of vanity, perhaps, but we can not help replying 
 to such testimonies of fellow-feeling toward ourselves in 
 the language of a gifted Roman — Est mihi jucunda in 
 malis, et grata in dolore, vestra erga me voluntas; sed 
 curam de me quaeso deponite* — (Cicero). The inter- 
 ests of literature are still uppermost in our thoughts, 
 
 * Which may be Englished — 
 
 "Your good will toward myself is agreeable to me in mis- 
 fortunes and grateful in suffering, but I pray you have no 
 anxiety concerning me." 
 
 In those days no article was deemed "finished" without a 
 sprinkling of classical quotations. We have changed all that.
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 233 
 
 and take precedency of any selfish considerations. We 
 will ever be found at our post, intrepidly denouncing the 
 vulgar arrogance of booby scribblers, unsparingly cen- 
 suring the intrusion into literary circles of silly pretend- 
 ers, ignorant horse-jockeys and brainless bullies." 
 
 It is time to dismiss Mr. Grantley Berkley. 
 
 The Hon. Grantley Fitzhardinge Berkley 
 belongs to the category of famous bad authors. 
 His name is known of many who never saw 
 and never cared to see his paltry books. 
 Maginn and Prout have preserved him from 
 time's erasure in the mordant acid of their 
 wit. There most curious readers are content 
 to learn of him, leaving his "works" in the 
 limbo of the illustrious obscure. That Berk- 
 ley was a man of some spirit, it cannot be 
 gainsaid: he long survived his two terrible 
 enemies of "Fraser's," dying in 188 1 at a 
 patriarchal age. 
 
 In his "Life and Reminiscences," written 
 in his lying old age, Grantley Berkley took 
 the ass's privilege of kicking the dead lion, 
 and sought to cast unmerited obloquy upon
 
 234 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 the memory of Maginn. Berkley's account 
 of the latter's "persecution" of Miss Landon 
 and of his own chivalrous intervention, has 
 been totally discredited by honest critics. 
 The literary pretender is shown in Berkley's 
 laborious and far-fetched attempt to prove a 
 motive for Maginn's savage critique on his 
 novel "Berkley Castle." Enough of him. 
 
 Here is Lockhart's elegy on Maginn, mem- 
 orable enough for its mixture of wit and 
 truth and pathos: 
 
 Here, early to bed, lies kind William Maginn, 
 Who with genius, wit, learning, life's trophies to win, 
 Had neither great Lord nor rich cit of his kin, 
 Nor discretion to set himself up, as to tin; 
 So his portion soon spent, like the poor heir of Lynn, 
 He turned author while yet was no beard on his chin; 
 And whoever was out, or whoever was in, 
 For the Tories his fine Irish brains he would spin, 
 Who received prose and rhyme with a promising grin, 
 "Go ahead, you queer fish, and more power to your fin," 
 But to save from starvation, stirr'd never a pin. 
 Light for long was his heart, though his breeches were 
 thin,
 
 DOCTOR MAGINN 235 
 
 Else his acting for certain was equal to Quin ; 
 But at last he was beat and sought help from the bin, 
 (All the same to the Doctor, from claret to gin), 
 Which led swiftly to gaol with consumption therein. 
 It was much when the bones rattled loose in his skin, 
 He got leave to die here, out of Babylon's din. 
 Barring drink and the girls, I ne'er heard of a sin — 
 Many worse, better few, than bright, broken Maginn!
 
 FATHER PROUT 
 
 IN the beautiful and well-beloved city of 
 Cork, within the sound of those bells 
 whose music he has bidden us all to hear, was 
 born Francis Sylvester Mahony, famous in 
 the world of letters and dear to every Irish 
 heart as Father Prout. Let us in the short 
 space we may devote to him call often by 
 that name which he has made immortal. 
 
 I have noted the neglect into which Maginn 
 and Prout have fallen with regard to the 
 great body of readers. It is, however, true 
 that Prout's literary estate is in much better 
 case than that of his friend and contemporary. 
 
 Since its publication, over a half century 
 ago, the "Reliques" of Father Prout has 
 steadily advanced in literary favour. The 
 
 suffrages of all competent scholars award 
 
 236
 
 FATHER PROUT 237 
 
 Prout the rank of a classic. His love of Hor- 
 ace and profound acquaintance with that most 
 charming of poets; his exquisite and varied 
 culture; the expression of his native genius, 
 which has been defined as a "combination of 
 the Teian lyre and Irish bagpipe, of the 
 Ionian dialect and Cork brogue" ; the audacity 
 and fertility of his wit, — all concur in making 
 Prout the delight of the cultivated reader. 
 Another fortunate circumstance is, that he 
 does not carry too much baggage for immor- 
 tality. There he is for you, within the com- 
 pass of a tidy book, like Horace himself, whom 
 he has so helped us to love and understand. 
 Ah, they were kindred spirits, the little man 
 of Rome and the little man of Cork — but we 
 are to consider that later on. 
 
 Francis Mahony's vocation in life was 
 early determined for him, as has been the 
 laudable custom of pious Irish parents. Per- 
 haps the reverence for the priesthood is not 
 so marked in any other people. It must also 
 be said that this fine sentiment has never stood
 
 238 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 in need of the amplest justification. The 
 Irish priesthood have contributed no small 
 share to the glory of the Catholic church, and 
 every page of Irish history is illustrated with 
 their heroism and sacrifice. Hence, the fond 
 ambition to have "a priest in the family" has 
 sanctified many a humble hearth. Doubtless 
 it has had much to do in weaving the destiny 
 of the ill-fated island. Leave it out, and the 
 chequered story of Ireland is baffling in the 
 extreme. 
 
 It might have been expected that a lad of 
 such parts as young Mahony early displayed 
 would have fulfilled the fond hope of his 
 parents and become a credit to the Church. 
 The wise Jesuits, his first masters, knew bet- 
 ter. Trained in the perception of character 
 and motive, reading all the secrets of the 
 heart with wonderful subtlety, it was seldom 
 they erred in tracing the bent of a mind 
 which they had assisted to form. It is no 
 slight testimony to their acuteness in divining 
 character that they recognised in the young
 
 FATHER PROUT 239 
 
 postulant for the priesthood the future satirist, 
 and that they combated from the first his de- 
 cision to enter the sacred calling. 
 
 But they taught him well, and he never for- 
 got the debt he owed them. Careless as he 
 afterwards became in scattering the barbed 
 arrows of his wit, he never failed in affection 
 and respect for the great Order of Loyola un- 
 der whose tutelage he had drunk at the founts 
 of classic learning. One of the best works of 
 his pen is a vindication of the Society of Jesus 
 from the infamous charges hurled against it 
 by ignorant prejudice or deliberate malice. 
 The march of the Jesuits through Europe for 
 two centuries he has likened to the retreat of 
 Xenophon with his ten thousand. In a para- 
 graph worthy of Macaulay, he describes the 
 great Bossuet "coming forth from the College 
 of Dijon, in Burgundy, to rear his mitred 
 front at the court of a despot, and to fling the 
 bolts of his tremendous oratory among a 
 crowd of elegant voluptuaries." "They 
 cradled the genius of Corneille," he exclaims;
 
 240 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 "Moliere was the fruit of their classic guid- 
 ance. Scarcely a name known to literature 
 in the seventeenth century which does not 
 bear testimony to their prowess in the prov- 
 ince of education." And, with a caustic free- 
 dom, which his wise preceptors would have 
 deprecated, he scores the Franciscan Pope 
 Clement XIV for his act in issuing the famous 
 Bull of July, 1773, by which the great Society 
 of Jesus was suppressed. 
 
 Young Mahony's probation was a long one 
 and, as I have said, the end approved the wis- 
 dom of his masters. At 12 years of age he 
 was sent to the Jesuit College of Saint Acheul, 
 at Amiens, France; thence to the Parisian 
 seminary of the Order, and still later to the 
 country house at Montrouge. To the Jesuit 
 College at Rome he went for philosophy and 
 theology; and, for a final test, he was packed 
 off to the College of Clongowes, in his native 
 country, which was under the charge of the 
 same Order. 
 
 At this last-named institution, Mahony was
 
 FATHER PROUT 241 
 
 made prefect and master of rhetoric. What- 
 ever doubt there might be touching his voca- 
 tion for the priesthood, there could exist none 
 as to his attainments. After a brief but edi- 
 fying season of grace, the young prefect, with 
 some congenial spirits, took a day's outing. 
 Potheen somehow figured in the diversions, 
 and, as a result, all had to be carried on turf 
 loads to the college at midnight. The rev- 
 erend authorities were justly scandalised, 
 though, I think, they might have made more 
 allowance for the punch, the smoky devil in 
 which all the papal bulls since St. Patrick 
 might neither exorcise nor excommunicate. 
 The leader of misrule was sent back to the 
 continent, and spent two years more in Rome, 
 disciplining his restless spirit, but (I fear 
 much) forgetting to say mea culpa when the 
 bright world opened, at rare intervals, its 
 seduction before him. 
 
 At last Francis Sylvester Mahony obtained 
 his desire, and, with much misgiving on the 
 part of his spiritual fathers, he was ordained
 
 242 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 a priest of the Roman Catholic Church at 
 Lucca. In due time he saw and repented his 
 mistake, which cast a shadow over his whole 
 after life. With a nature intolerant of re- 
 straint and a pride of intellect that knew no 
 compromise, the humble and laborious sta- 
 tion of a simple priest was not for Francis 
 Mahony. A born man of letters, with the 
 need of expression came the need of freedom. 
 There was in Mahony no tincture of the 
 hypocrite. He refused to eat bread at the 
 cost of his self-respect, and, turning aside from 
 that which had been the cherished ambition 
 of his early life, he took up manfully the hard 
 portion of the literary worker. 
 
 But note this: He was never what is 
 called an "unfrocked priest," a term of re- 
 proach perhaps the most poignant among the 
 race from which he sprang. The act of sec- 
 ularisation was voluntary. Nor, in his freest 
 Bohemian moments, would he permit the 
 slightest aspersion upon the priestly character. 
 Though he felt himself spiritually without
 
 FATHER PROUT 243 
 
 the temple, he clung with a strange pride to 
 the mere empty name of that sacred calling 
 which had cost him so many weary years of 
 probation. Sacerdos in aeternum ordinem 
 Melchizedec. And to the last he read his 
 breviary as faithfully as he read his well-be- 
 loved Horace and Beranger.
 
 244 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 II 
 
 THERE is a droll story that Rome once 
 contemplated making a cardinal of 
 Father Prout, as a suitable recognition of his 
 eminent literary attainments. It is said that 
 some members of the Sacred College got hold 
 of Prout's polyglot version of a familiar Irish 
 song and were so delighted with it that they 
 instantly moved the Holy Father to confer 
 the red hat upon an author so deserving. A 
 little examination of the records spoiled the 
 most unique proposition in ecclesiastical his- 
 tory. Father Prout's comment is reported to 
 have been: "All roads, they say, lead to 
 Rome, but would it not have been droll if I 
 had got myself there through the Groves of 
 Blarney?" The reference is to writings 
 which have indeed brought him farther on his 
 way.
 
 FATHER PROUT 245 
 
 The great Archbishop McHale ("John of 
 Tuam") once rebuked a censor of Prout with 
 the remark: "The man who wrote the Prout 
 Papers is an honour to his country." These 
 famous essays, which form the corner-stone 
 of Prout's literary reputation, were contrib- 
 uted to Fraser's Magazine for the year 1834. 
 They have been happily described as a "mix- 
 ture of Toryism, classicism, sarcasm and 
 punch." Among scholarly readers the fame 
 of Prout has steadily appreciated, and to-day 
 the Prout Papers seem to occupy as secure a 
 place as the Essays of Elia, which they must 
 be allowed to surpass in variety of wit and 
 ingenious learning. 
 
 Father Prout was the friend of Dickens and 
 of Thackeray. He contributed to Bentley's 
 Miscellany, of which Dickens was editor, and 
 from Italy he sent a congratulatory ode to 
 Thackeray on the establishment of the Corn- 
 hill Magazine. Dr. Maginn and Father 
 Prout had so many things in common, as well 
 as an Irish temperament, that one looks for
 
 246 NOVA HIBERXTA 
 
 some trace of jealousy in their brilliant emu- 
 lation. I am glad to say, as an Irishman, that 
 there is not the least suggestion of an un- 
 worthy feeling between these famous men. 
 Maginn it was who introduced Prout to the 
 columns of Fraser's and gave him the place 
 of honour during twelve successive issues of 
 the magazine. There is not so much love 
 wasted among the literary fraternity as to ren- 
 der nugatory the circumstance of this gener- 
 ous friendship. When we remember the 
 quarrel between Thackeray and Dickens, 
 which divided the British nation into two hos- 
 tile camps, we may wonder the more at it. 
 Perhaps a falling out between the Doctor and 
 the Padre would have been so terrific in its 
 literary results — fancy the fulminations of 
 that polyglot armoury! — that both shrank 
 from the encounter. At any rate, these tre- 
 mendous wits, each a born fighter and spring- 
 ing from a race that never declines a fight, 
 met, saluted, smiled, and passed on their 
 earthly pilgrimage.
 
 FATHER PROUT 247 
 
 Prout took far better care of his literary 
 baggage than did poor Maginn, who wrote 
 for the day and the hour, caring nothing for 
 the future. Yet a simple song has been more 
 effective in preserving the memory of Prout 
 than the wittiest and most learned of his 
 writings. Such is the spell of true sympathy, 
 making the whole world kin. A wanderer 
 for years in many lands, singing the songs of 
 stranger peoples, he was equally at home on 
 the banks of the Tiber, the Arno, the Seine 
 and the Thames. Ah, it was to none of these 
 that he poured out the love of his heart when 
 he sang the song of the 
 
 "BELLS OF SHANDON" 
 
 With deep affection 
 And recollection 
 I often think of 
 
 Those Shandon Bells 
 Whose sounds so wild would 
 In days of childhood 
 Fling round my cradle 
 Their magic spells:
 
 248 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 On this I ponder 
 Where'er I wander, 
 And thus grow fonder 
 
 Sweet Cork, of thee, 
 With thy bells of Shandon 
 That sound so grand on 
 The pleasant waters 
 
 Of the river Lee. 
 
 I've heard bells chiming 
 Full many a clime in, 
 Tolling sublime in 
 
 Cathedral shrine; 
 While at a glib rate 
 Brass tongues would vibrate — 
 
 But all their music 
 
 Spoke naught like thine; 
 For memory dwelling 
 On each proud swelling 
 Of the belfry knelling 
 
 Its bold notes free, 
 Made the bells of Shandon 
 Sound far more grand on 
 
 The pleasant waters 
 Of the river Lee.
 
 FATHER PROUT 249 
 
 I've heard bells tolling 
 
 Old "Adrian's Mole" in, 
 Their thunder rolling 
 
 From the Vatican ; 
 And cymbals glorious 
 Swinging uproarious 
 In the gorgeous turrets 
 
 Of Notre Dame; 
 But thy sounds were sweeter 
 Than the dome of Peter 
 Flings o'er the Tiber, 
 
 Pealing solemnly: 
 O the bells of Shandon 
 Sound far more grand on 
 The pleasant waters 
 
 Of the river Lee. 
 
 There's a bell in Moscow, 
 While on tower and Kiosk, O! 
 In Saint Sophia 
 The Turkman gets, 
 And loud in air 
 Calls men to prayer 
 
 From the tapering summit 
 Of tall minarets.
 
 250 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Such empty phantom 
 I freely grant 'em, 
 But there's an anthem 
 
 More dear to me; 
 Tis the bells of Shandon 
 That sound so grand on 
 The pleasant waters 
 
 Of the river Lee.
 
 FATHER PROUT 251 
 
 III 
 
 P ROUT'S habit of "upsetting things into 
 English," from the modern as well as 
 the classic languages, has made the world his 
 debtor and greatly enriched his literary leg- 
 acy. Excellent as are his translations from 
 Beranger, Hugo and the Italian poets, it is to 
 his renderings from Horace that we must 
 award the palm. I have already noted his 
 keen sympathy with the most charming and 
 immortally young of classic writers. Some- 
 thing of the same fine touch is visible in Ma- 
 ginn's Homeric ballads, and perhaps these are 
 to be preferred for a rude vigour and fidelity 
 to the original. You do not always get what 
 you expect from the roguish Father Prout. 
 The surprise of his wit is as captivating and 
 unexpected as the famous Killarney echo: 
 
 "How do you do, Paddy Blake?"— 
 "Pretty well, I thank you."
 
 252 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Nevertheless, of the many hands that have 
 laboured at Horace — alas! the labour is too 
 often manifest — the most deft and skilful, I 
 believe, was the hand of Prout. The felicity 
 of his verse is no less admirable than the sure- 
 ness of his interpretation, and the occasional 
 familiarity which he takes with the classic 
 text only gives a zest to the reading. I should 
 add that the prose essays in which these 
 Horatian renderings are imbedded seem to 
 me among the best of their kind. 
 
 Mr. Andrew Lang, who can seldom resist 
 the temptation to say a smart thing, — an in- 
 dulgence which may easily be pardoned to a 
 North Briton, — remarks that Doctor Maginn 
 in his translations from the Greek does not 
 scruple to make Homer dance an Irish jig. 
 Whatever truth or point may lie in this ob- 
 servation, it is not to be gainsaid that Prout's 
 paraphrases of Horace are the better for their 
 Milesian flavour. Indeed, they have the 
 somewhat paradoxical merit of being at once 
 genuinely classical and unmistakably Irish.
 
 FATHER PROUT 253 
 
 However, when they are most Irish, it may 
 be suspected that the Padre is but having his 
 "game"' with us. That he could, when he 
 cared, translate both worthily and powerfully, 
 — like a scholar and a poet, — is sufficiently 
 attested by his unsurpassed rendering of Ode 
 II., Lib. I. Such of my readers as are not 
 acquainted with the original will thank me 
 for laying this fine version before them, — un- 
 questionably the tour de force of all Horatian 
 translations. 
 
 ODE II. 
 
 Jam satis terris nivis atque dirae grandinis, etc. 
 Since Jove decreed in storm to vent 
 The winter of his discontent, 
 Thundering o'er Rome impenitent 
 
 With red right hand, 
 The flood-gates of the firmament 
 
 Have drenched the land. 
 
 Terror hath seized the minds of men, 
 Who deemed the days had come again 
 When Proteus led, up mount and glen, 
 And verdant lawn,
 
 254 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Of teeming ocean's darksome den, 
 The monstrous spawn. 
 
 When Pyrrha saw the ringdove's nest 
 Harbour a strange unbidden guest, 
 And by the deluge dispossesst 
 
 Of glade and grove, 
 Deer down the tide with antler'd crest 
 
 Affrighted drove. 
 
 We saw the yellow Tiber, sped 
 Back to his Tuscan fountain-head, 
 O'erwhelm the sacred and the dead 
 
 In one fell doom, 
 And Vesta's pile in ruins spread, 
 
 And Numa's tomb. 
 * * * 
 
 Whom can our country call to aid? 
 Where must the patriot's vow be paid? 
 With orisons shall vestal maid 
 
 Fatigue the skies? 
 Or will not Vesta's frown upbraid 
 
 Her votaries? 
 
 Augur Apollo! shall we kneel 
 To thee, and for our commonweal
 
 FATHER PROUT 255 
 
 With humbled consciousness appeal? 
 
 Oh, quell the storm! 
 Come, though a silver vapor veil 
 
 Thy radiant form! 
 
 Will Venus from Mount Eryx stoop 
 And to our succor hie with troop 
 Of laughing Graces, and a group 
 
 Of cupids round her? 
 Or comest thou with wild war-whoop, 
 
 Dread Mars! our Founder? 
 
 Whose voice so long bade peace avaunt, 
 Whose war-dogs still for slaughter pant, 
 The tented field thy chosen haunt, 
 
 Thy child, the Roman, 
 Fierce legioner, whose visage gaunt 
 
 Scowls on the foeman. 
 
 Or hath young Hermes, Maia's son, 
 The graceful guise and form put on 
 Of thee, Augustus? and begun 
 
 ( Celestial stranger ! ) 
 To wear the name which thou hast won — ■ 
 
 "Cesar's Avenger"?
 
 256 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Blest be the days of thy sojourn, 
 
 Distant the hour when Rome shall mourn 
 
 The fatal sight of thy return 
 
 To Heaven again ; 
 Forced by a guilty age to spurn 
 
 The haunts of men. 
 
 Rather remain, beloved, adored, 
 Since Rome, reliant on thy sword, 
 To thee of Julius hath restored 
 
 The rich reversion: 
 Baffle Assyria's hovering horde 
 
 And smite the Persian! 
 
 Now, let us take, — and with this selection 
 we must be perforce content, — the most 
 charming song of all classical antiquity, the 
 famous Ode for Lalage, which Father Prout 
 has rendered with inimitable grace and fidel- 
 ity. 
 
 ODE XXII. 
 
 Integer vitae scelerisque purus. 
 Aristius! if thou canst secure 
 A conscience calm, with morals pure,
 
 FATHER PROUT 257 
 
 Look upward for defence! abjure 
 
 All meaner craft — 
 The bow and arrow of the Moor, 
 
 And poisoned shaft. 
 
 What tho' thy perilous path lie traced 
 O'er burning Afric's boundless waste, 
 Of rugged Caucasus the guest, 
 
 Or doomed to travel 
 Where fabulous rivers of the East 
 
 Their course unravel! 
 
 Under my Sabine woodland shade, 
 Musing upon my Grecian maid, 
 Unconsciously of late I strayed 
 
 Through glen and meadow, 
 When lo! a ravenous wolf, afraid, 
 
 Fled from my shadow. 
 
 No monster of such magnitude 
 Lurks in the depth of Daunia's wood, 
 Or roams through Lybia unsubdued, 
 
 The land to curse — 
 Land of a fearful lion-brood 
 
 The withered nurse.
 
 258 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Waft me away to deserts wild, 
 Where vegetation never smiled, 
 Where sunshine never once beguiled 
 
 The dreary day, 
 But winters upon winters piled 
 
 For aye delay: 
 
 Place me beneath the torrid zone 
 Where man to dwell was never known, 
 I'd cherish still one thought alone, 
 
 Maid of my choice, 
 The smile of thy sweet lip — the tone 
 
 Of thy sweet voice!
 
 FATHER PROUT 259 
 
 IV 
 
 BLANCHARD JERROLD has described 
 the author of the Prout papers as of a race 
 now extinct, "like the old breed of Irish wolf- 
 dogs." It is at least certain that the pattern 
 of his wit appears to have been lost. "An 
 odd, uncomfortable little man," says Jerrold 
 elsewhere, "with a roguish Hibernian mouth 
 and grey, piercing eyes." That is also a good 
 bit of description, showing the free touch of a 
 contemporary, which pictures for us the 
 "short, spare man, stooping as he went, with 
 the right arm clasped in the left hand behind 
 him; a sharp face — a mocking lip, and an 
 ecclesiastical garb of slovenly appearance. 
 Such was the old Fraserian," adds the writer, 
 "who would laugh outright at times, quite un- 
 conscious of bystanders, as he slouched toward 
 Temple Bar."
 
 260 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 Prout's letters from Italy, contributed to 
 the London Daily News during the brief pe- 
 riod of Dickens's editorship, have, as we 
 might naturally expect, rather a literary than 
 a journalistic value. Nevertheless, they are 
 worthy documents of the time, and the Padre 
 shows himself no Tory in recording the prog- 
 ress of Italian liberation. Meantime, Ireland 
 was struggling along in the old way (which 
 has not yet been entirely changed for a bet- 
 ter), and Prout evinced that his sympathies 
 were not with a majority of his own country- 
 men by inditing a fierce lampoon upon 
 O'Connell. Swift himself never dipped his 
 pen deeper in gall than did Prout when he 
 wrote the vitriolic stanzas of the "Lay of 
 Lazarus." Doubtless it was inspired by hon- 
 est feeling; but, as an Irishman, he might 
 have spared adding to his country's shame. 
 To this it may be cynically rejoined that, as 
 an Irishman, he couldn't help doing it. 
 
 Much has been written on the subject of 
 Prout's residence in Paris, where, during the
 
 FATHER PROUT 261 
 
 later years of his life, he was a marked figure. 
 Speaking the French language perfectly, he 
 came to be regarded by the Parisians as one 
 of their own notables. I need not here re- 
 mark that there was a truly Gallic lightness 
 in his wit, which has induced one of his biog- 
 raphers to describe his mental make-up as a 
 compound of Rabelais and Voltaire. It is 
 certain that he took kindly to the gay Paris- 
 ians, whose love of novelty and child-like 
 enthusiasms enchanted him. Among them 
 he passed his closing years happily enough, 
 earning, with his pen, as correspondent for 
 the London News or Globe sufficient for his 
 needs. He had his lodging, and a poor one 
 enough, in the Rue des Moulins, running out 
 of Thackeray's famous "New Street of the 
 Little Fields," forever associated with the 
 unctuous ballad of the "Bouillabaisse." 
 Here sometimes the solitary little man re- 
 ceived the few whom he admitted to the near 
 circle of his friendship. Ah, what would not 
 one give to have made one of a group about
 
 262 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 the chair of him who created the Rev. An- 
 drew Front, the lone incumbent of Water- 
 grasshill, in the delectable county of Cork; 
 the Rev. Father Magrath, elegiac poet, and 
 the Rev. Father Matt Horrogan, of Blarney I 
 When the wine flowed, and the little man, 
 sure of the sympathy of his audience, and 
 justly proud of his fame (non omnis moriar) 
 poured forth the treasures of his learning and 
 fancy, mingled with the lightnings of that wit 
 which scathed wherever it glanced — what a 
 privilege then to sit within the friendly beam 
 of his eye, glass to glass with the decoctor of 
 immortal punch, the wizard of many a night's 
 enchantment! Ah, kindly reader, let us not 
 forget that he lives and bids us ever to that 
 favoured audience. . . . 
 
 Thackeray, in his Parisian visits, never 
 failed to look up his old mentor of Fraser's. 
 Like Prout, the author of "Vanity Fair" had 
 served his turn as Paris correspondent for one 
 or other of the London dailies, and well he 
 knew the life with its gay Bohemianism, its
 
 
 FATHER PROUT 263 
 
 ill-regulated bounty and ever-recurring short 
 commons. His long and faithful friendship 
 with Prout, who was often trying with his 
 friends, bears out the truth of those fine lines 
 in which Tom Taylor repelled the charge of 
 cynicism directed at the historian of "Es- 
 mond." Thackeray had written a book about 
 Paris which the Padre pronounced vile, and, 
 indeed, it can hardly be reckoned among the 
 masterpieces of the great author. Sometimes, 
 as often chanced with Prout, no matter how 
 distinguished his company, a testy habit 
 which grew upon him with age, would break 
 out and the wit would come dangerously near 
 to rudeness. With all his fine scholarship, 
 Prout (to turn his own phrase against him- 
 self) too plainly revealed the "potato seasoned 
 with Attic salt." Jerrold employs a less del- 
 icate metaphor in remarking upon the social 
 errancies of Father Prout. "Prout, in his 
 convivial moments," he says — and I should 
 not quote this if he had not elsewhere written 
 nobly and appreciatively of our author — "re-
 
 264 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 minds one more of Cork than of Rome!" We 
 hear of the Padre and the creator of Colonel 
 Newcome hurling Latin objurgatives at each 
 other on an evening when Prout had mixed 
 too often his favourite concoction of cognac, 
 lemon and sugar. In such a learned battle 
 the Charterhouse boy would scarcely be 
 a match for the cunning pupil of the 
 Jesuits. 
 
 Taking a modest liberty with this legend, 
 we may conceive the Padre softening again, 
 what with the soothing influence of the "ele- 
 ments" and the honour of such comradeship, 
 and, at an hour which shall be nameless, in- 
 sisting upon seeing his great friend home to 
 his lodging hard by in the Place Vendome. 
 So, there they go at last, the big man and the 
 small — a sight worth seeing, you'll grant me 
 — somewhat deviously to be sure, but well 
 enough for all that — down the memorable 
 "Street of the Little Fields." One of the 
 things that make me love Thackeray is his 
 kind and steady friendship for the gifted
 
 FATHER PROUT 265 
 
 Irishman, so caustic and sensitive, yet with his 
 own heart filled with a great loneliness. 
 
 Now the gossips have much to say about the 
 doings of famous men, so we learn from more 
 than one source that less celebrated guests 
 than William Makepeace Thackeray were fa- 
 voured with an unpleasantly near view of the 
 Padre's infirmity and carried away an in- 
 tensely realised sense of the Proutian sarcasm. 
 But it seems the entertainment was well worth 
 the price, for few but pleasing records remain 
 of those nodes ccenceque deum in the Rue 
 des Moulins. 
 
 Here, near the famous "Street of the Little 
 Fields," the solitary little man died, in the 
 month of May, 1866. The date seems 
 strangely recent, for we naturally associate 
 with him the early thirties, the period of the 
 Prout papers. A priest of that faith to which, 
 in his heart of hearts, he had never been 
 recreant, knelt at his bedside and consoled his 
 last moments. And the good Abbe Rogerson 
 tells us: "He was as a child wearied and
 
 266 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 worn out after a day's wandering: when it 
 had been lost and was found; when it had 
 hungered and was fed again." 
 
 For many years he had lived among the 
 kindly French people, whom he loved as the 
 poet Heine loved them. But on his death 
 Cork claimed the ashes of her famous son. 
 How like the end was, after all, to the begin- 
 ning! For he lies at rest on the bank of that 
 pleasant river whose murmur mingled with 
 his childish dreams; under the shadow of the 
 solemn spire, where the bells of Shandon ring 
 down their benediction upon him.
 
 RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN 
 
 SHERIDAN stopped writing for the stage 
 at twenty-eight, as regards original work, 
 having surpassed the glory of Congreve at 
 that early age with "The Rivals" and "The 
 School for Scandal." It is curious, too, that 
 of this famous brace of successes the earlier 
 and first named is the better in the depiction 
 of character and the elements of true comedy. 
 Like Congreve, another though less typical 
 Irishman, Sheridan succumbed to the fascina- 
 tion of society; but he never became a glori- 
 fied snob, as did the former, who told Voltaire 
 that he wished to be met as a gentleman, not 
 as a poet! The superstition of society, with 
 its arbitrary, often unmerited cachet of rank 
 or distinction, no longer dominates the true 
 literary man — fancy Swinburne or even Kip- 
 ling giving up his work to dawdle at evening 
 
 267
 
 268 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 parties or to warm a chair at a Duchess's din- 
 ners. Congreve, by the way, who loved to do 
 such things, died a snob, leaving his very tidy 
 savings to the Duchess of Marlborough 
 (daughter of the terrible Sarah) who had no 
 need of the money, while he left but a pittance 
 to the once beautiful Bracegirdle (who had 
 given the cold creature her love) surviving in 
 neglect and poverty. Nothing dehumanises 
 a man like snobbery, and intellect carries no 
 immunity. 
 
 The parallel with Sheridan here divides, 
 for the later Irishman lacked none of the gen- 
 erous virtues. But it must be granted that, 
 even in a greater degree than Congreve (who 
 was vastly overrated by his contemporaries) 
 he gave to society and the bottle what was 
 meant for mankind. He lives by the glory 
 of his youth : — of the forty years following his 
 splendid, and as it proved, crowning success 
 with the "School for Scandal," there is not 
 much to be said, in his honour. His parlia- 
 mentary career was brilliant, yet left no solid
 
 SHERIDAN 269 
 
 fruits. Even the celebrated speech at Has- 
 tings's trial is as good as lost, and few now 
 believe that it merited the panegyrics of the 
 hour. The fate of this famous address has al- 
 ways seemed strange to me, for Sheridan was 
 known to take the greatest pains with his more 
 serious efforts, while he had the reputation of 
 anxiously rehearsing his careless after-dinner 
 epigrams. Perhaps when he refused the offer 
 of a thousand pounds for the copyright of the 
 speech that Burke pronounced "the most as- 
 tonishing effort of eloquence, argument and 
 wit united, of which there was any record or 
 tradition," — he deemed it wiser to leave a leg- 
 end rather than the performance itself behind 
 him. Dramatic values were never slurred in 
 the calculations of the manager of Drury 
 Lane. 
 
 Sheridan wrote no more original plays after 
 he had fully entered upon his political and 
 social career. Dissipation, so common among 
 the highest in that age of drunkenness, and 
 also the Irishman's hatred of application, had
 
 270 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 something to do with this abandonment of his 
 natural vocation. Besides, no doubt, he 
 feared to try conclusions with the author of 
 "The School for Scandal," for the factitious 
 talent of the man dreaded nothing so much as 
 to fall below his own mark. Yet I think the 
 controlling motive with Sheridan in these cir- 
 cumstances was the same as with Congreve, — 
 a feeling that the playwright was incompat- 
 ible with the man of society. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that in Sheridan's 
 day society exercised a greater tyranny than 
 in ours, and its authority descending from the 
 Throne, was absolute. (In the next genera- 
 tion it was able to make a pariah of Byron, 
 and he is still under sentence.) Sheridan 
 was an Irishman, with an Irishman's hatred 
 of being "set down" or depreciated — perhaps 
 the most sensitive nerve of his ultra-sensitive 
 race. He loved applause and admiration, as 
 was natural to the son of an actor. He pos- 
 sessed the "social virtues," as they were then 
 esteemed, in exaggeration; and he was mar-
 
 SHERIDAN 271 
 
 ried to a lovely and gifted woman whom he 
 fondly loved, and praise of whom was as dear 
 to him as his own. Account should be taken 
 of these things in judging him; yet when full 
 allowance has been made, it must still be re- 
 gretted that when he put on his dress-coat, 
 Sheridan put off his genius; that for the hon- 
 our of intimate association with the Prince 
 Regent and Beau Brummel, he abjured the 
 use of a talent that has not been given to a 
 half dozen men in the history of English com- 
 edy. 
 
 Vanity, the wish to shine, is inherent in the 
 type of Irish character that Sheridan exem- 
 plified, and it costs less effort to win the ap- 
 plause of a drawing-room or of a circle of 
 boon companions passing the bottle than to 
 burn the midnight oil by which laurels en- 
 during are gained. The choice was desper- 
 ately easy to poor Sheridan, who loved to 
 water his laurels in the fashion then approved, 
 as a poet somewhat late in that devil-may-care 
 day expressed it: —
 
 272 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 My Muse, too, when her wings are dry, 
 
 No frolic flights will take; 
 But round a bowl she'll dip and fly 
 
 Like swallows round a lake. 
 If then the nymph must have her share 
 
 Before she'll bless her swain, 
 Why, that's I think a reason fair 
 
 To fill my glass again ! 
 
 But as I have said, social vanity was doubt- 
 less his compelling motive. In our day we 
 have seen a scarcely less gifted countryman of 
 Sheridan's attempting to duplicate his role 
 with great brilliancy and succeeding in noth- 
 ing so admirably as in his character of society 
 wit and dandy. Oscar Wilde was indeed a 
 very clever rather than a great man, while 
 Sheridan had marked traits of greatness. But 
 Wilde's refusal to lampoon English high so- 
 ciety for a French newspaper, after that 
 society had cast him out as a leper with a 
 prison brand upon him, helps to fix the like- 
 ness between these two men of different gen- 
 erations. It is not less interesting from the
 
 SHERIDAN 273 
 
 fact that "The School for Scandal" was the 
 prototype of "Lady Windermere's Fan." 
 Each of these gifted men made too great a set 
 at society, plumed himself too much on such 
 success as he achieved, and paid a bitter price 
 for it in the end. And it is perfectly certain 
 that but for this fatal source of dissipation and 
 distraction, both would have done more and 
 better work; and, I suspect, each would have 
 escaped his catastrophe. . . . 
 
 Byron writing to Moore from Italy, recalls 
 the times when "we used to dine with Rogers, 
 and talk laxly, and go to parties, and hear poor 
 Sheridan now and then. Do you remember 
 one night he was so tipsy I was forced to put 
 his cocked hat on him — for he could not, — 
 and I let him down at Brookes's much as he 
 must since have been let down into his 
 grave." . . . 
 
 Poor Sheridan indeed! We get other 
 glimpses of him toward the close of what was 
 for a season the most brilliant and enviable 
 career in England. His debts and distresses
 
 274 NOVA HIBERNIA 
 
 which the factitious terrors of drink exag- 
 gerated; his tears and shame at being seized 
 and thrown into a sponging house for debt; 
 and finally the ironic grandeur of that funeral 
 which was followed by princes, dukes, earls, 
 viscounts and bishops, when his worn-out 
 body and broken heart were borne to West- 
 minster Abbey. 
 
 "Oh, it sickens the heart," cries Moore in a 
 fine burst of elegiac passion, — 
 
 Oh! it sickens the heart to see bosoms so hollow 
 And spirits so mean in the great and high-born ; 
 
 To think what a long line of titles may follow 
 The relics of him who died friendless and lorn ! 
 
 Yet one must believe that the spirit of Sher- 
 idan, if conscious, overlooked the funeral with 
 due satisfaction: — it was in truth for this sort 
 of thing that he had melted the pearl of his 
 genius in the wine-cup and survived his proper 
 self so many barren years. 
 
 THE END
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 UC .SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 642 442 8 
 
 •JWER 
 
 .Dili 
 
 57210 01276 6513