Samuel Ferguson: Commentary

W. B. Yeats, ‘The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson’ (I), in The Irish Fireside [Irish Poets and Irish Poetry series] (9 Oct., 1886): ‘[…] now that his feet have worn that pathway, many others will follow, and bring thence living waters for the healing of our nation, helping us to live the larger life of the Spirit [...].’ Further, ‘[...] Sir Samuel Ferguson’s special claim to our attention is that he went back to the Irish cycle, finding it, in truth, a foundation that, in the passage of centuries, [...] was forgotten of the poets; but now that his feet have worn the pathway, many others will follow, and bring thence living waters of healing of our nation, helping us to live a larger life of the Spirit, and lifting our souls away from their selfish joys and sorrows to be the companions of those who lived among the woods and hills when the world was young.’ Further, ‘[T]he lyric nature loves to linger on what is strange and fantastical calls Ferguson ‘the greatest Irish poet, because in his poems and legends, they [?sic] embody more completely than in any other man’s writings, the Irish character, its unflinching devotion to some single aim, its passion [...] And this faithfulness to things tragic and bitter, to thoughts that wear one’s life out and scatter one’s joy, the Celt has above all others. Those who have it, alone are capable of great causes.’ (John Frayne, Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1, pp.81-87; p.82, 87; also given in Yeats & Thomas Kinsella, Davis, Mangan, Ferguson?: Tradition and the Irish Writer, Dublin: Dolmen Press 1970) [end Pt. I - cont.]

Yeats on Ferguson: “Many in Ireland consider Sir Samuel Ferguson their greatest poet. The English reader will most likely never have heard his name, for Anglo-Irish critics, who have found English audience, being more Anglo than Irish, have been content to follow English opinion instead of leading it, in all matters concerning Ireland.” (Yeats, ed., Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 1888 - Notes, p.320. [The anthology incls. “The Fair Well of Lagnanay” and “The Fairy Thorn” by Ferguson.)

Note that Yeats mistakenly attributed “Father Tom and the Pope” to Samuel Ferguson in Representative Tales (1891) and silent corrected that error in his essay on “National Literature” on the basis of Lady Ferguson’s attribution of the story to her husband (viz., in Sir Samuel Ferguson and the Ireland of his Day, 1895).

W. B. Yeats, ‘The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson - II’, in Dublin University Review (Nov. 1886) - cont.: ‘[...] The author of these poems is the greatest poet Ireland has produced, because the most central and most Celtic. Whatever the future may bring in the way of a truly great and national literature and now that the race is so large, so widely spread, and so conscious of its unity, the years are ripe - will find its morning in these three volumes of one who was made by the purifying flame of National sentiment the one man of his time who wrote heroic poetry - one who, among the somewhat sybaritic singers of his day, was like some aged sea-king sitting among the inland wheat and poppies - the savour of the sea about him, and its strength. / In these poems and the legends the contain lies the refutation of the calumnies of England and those amongst us who are false to their country.’ (Quoted in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, Poets from Northern Ireland, 1975, p.34; also printed in Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature, 1904, and quoted in A. P. Graves, Introduction, Poems of Ferguson [1918], pp.xxxv-vi. as supra; Rep. in John P. Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, 1970, p.103; see further under W. B. Yeats [q.v.], Quotations [infra].)

W. B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Patriot’ (Bookman, May 1896): ‘[Ferguson] lived in a class which, through a misunderstanding of the necessities of Irish Unionism, hated all Irish things, or felt for them at best a contemptuous, and patronising affection ...’ (p.50.) See also Yeats’s review of Lady Ferguson’s Sir Samuel Ferguson in the Ireland of His Day (in Dublin University Review, Nov. 1886), condemning the later Ferguson of ‘professors and members of learned societies’ and noting that ‘a hardness crept into his rhythm and his language from the dead world about him, marring the barbaric power of “Conary, still, with all its defects, the most characteristic of the Irish poems, and making, as I can but think, the Homeric imagination of Congal without avail.’ (Rep. in John Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose, Vol. 1, p.104).

John O’Leary wrote, ‘Sir Samuel Ferguson is, as I understand, a Unionist, but he is a better patriot than I am; he had done more for Ireland than I have ever done or ever hope to do.’ (See John Frayne, Uncollected Prose, 1970, Vol. 1, p.405; cited by Richard Mitchell, BA Diss., Univ. of Ulster, 1997.)

Edmund Dowden (letter to Samuel Ferguson): ‘What seems to me most noteworthy in your poems is the union of culture with simplicity and strength. Their refinement is large and strong, not curious and diseased; and they have spaces and movements which give one a feeling like the sea or the air on a headland. I had not meant to say anything of Congal, but somehow this came and said itself.’ (Quoted in Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, Catholic Univ. of America 1904, p.1170.)

Aubrey de Vere on Ferguson’s poetry, ‘Its qualities are those characteristic of the noble, not the ignoble poetry - viz, passion, imagination, vigour, an epic largeness of conception, wide human wympathies, vivid and truthful description -while with them it unites none of the vulgar stimulants for exhausted or morbid poetic appetite, whether the epicurean seasoning, the skeptical, or the revolutionary.’ (cited Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, Catholic Univ. of America 1904, p.1169.)

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A. P. Graves, in T. W. Rolleston and Stopford Augustus Brooke, eds., A Treasury of Irish Verse in the English Language (1900; 1905): ‘Ferguson was deliberately facing the fact that the Irish themes he had set his heart upon had no public to greet them. A generation before, they would have had the support of a cultured and unprovincialised Irish upper-class; a generation later they would have claimed attention, in Ferguson’s hands, as the noblest outcome of the Irish literary revival. He was therefore both before and after his time.’ (Op. cit., p.278); also Brooke, ‘the leader of the choir was Sir Samuel Ferguson, whose Lays of the Western Gael, 1867, established the Celtic movement ...’ (idem, p.xv). Further (from same; cited in Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, 1904), ‘Omitting living writers, of whom it is too early to speak with confidence, Ferguson was unquestionably the Irish poet of the past century who has most powerfully influenced the literary history of his country. It was in his writings that the great work of restoring to Ireland the spiritual treasure it had lost in parting with the Gaelic tongue was decisively begun.’ [q.d.]

A. P Graves, ‘Introduction’, Poems of Sir Samuel Ferguson (Dublin: Talbot; London: R. Fisher Unwin [1918]): Graves’s introduction quotes Yeats on Ferguson: ‘He was wiser than Young Ireland in the choice of his models; for while drawing not less than they from purely Irish sources, he turned to the great poets of the world for his style’; also cites encomia from Aubrey de Vere (on xviii and xxxxv) and from Noel, as well as a passage from Edward Dowden explaining why Congal did not hit popular taste (‘a poem with epic breadth and views is not likely to be popular now. A diseased and over-sensitive nerve is a qualification for writing of poetry at present ... What seems to me most noteworthy in your poems is the union of culture with simplicity and strength. Their refinement is large and strong, not curious and diseased; and they have spaces and movements which give one a feeling like the sea or the air on a headland. I had not meant to say anything of Congal, but somehow this came and said itself.’) [cf. ‘space … &c.’ in quotations, infra]; Graves further quotes Ferguson on George Fox: ‘His discourse possessed a fascination equal to all that I have heard [...&c.]; cites Charles Gavan Duffy’s account: ‘Ferguson, who lay on a bed of sickness when Davis died, impatient that for the moment he could not declare it in public, asked me to come to him, that he might ease his hear by expressing in private his sense of what he had lost. He read me fragments of a poem written under these circumstances, the most Celtic in structure and spirit of all the elegies laid on the tomb of Davis. The last verse sounded like a prophecy; it was, at any rate, a powerful incentive to take up our task anew’ [for ‘Lament’, see under Davis]. (Cont.)

A. P Graves, Poems of Sir Samuel Ferguson ([1918]) - cont.: Graves quotes the judgement of Thomas Aird, Scottish poet, in telling Ferguson, ‘Surely you spoil the grand close, and the whole piece [“The Tain Quest”], by appending your own personality of interference as a commentator on the malediction’ [xxxii]; Graves adds; ‘Ferguson has been similarly unlucky in the ‘The Welshmen of Tirawley’ in this attempt to tag a comment on to the end of a tale which he has so nobly adorned’, and remarks that he has got rid of these two ‘moralising tags’ in the exercise of his ‘editorial discretion’ [idem]. Graves counts the tendency to ‘act at times as commentator on his own work’, as well as ‘a too ponderously Latinised form’ and ‘the careless, not so say bluff, disregard for verbal delicacies’ as his only lapses; Graves praised him as the author of epic poetry: ‘He is manly.... He has vision’ [xxxiii]. Also quotes Yeats: ‘The author of these poems is the greatest poet Ireland has produced, because the most central and most Celtic. Whatever the future may bring in the way of a truly great and national literature - and not that the race is so [xxxv] large, so widely spread, and so conscious of its unity, the years are ripe - will find its morning in these three volumes of one who was made by the purifying flame of national sentiment the one man of his time who wrote heroic poetry [… &c.; as supra]; admits to condensing Congal and cutting down Tain Quest; acknowledgements to Smith, Elder, & Co., and Elkin Mathews, as well as H. S. H. Guinness (copyright holder).

A. P. Graves (Centenary Address, 1910): ‘[...] Ferguson did not, like some of his successors, reproduce the verse technique of the old Irish bards exhibited by Dr. Douglas Hyde and others in their works on Irish Gaelic metres. He struck out a line of his own, and a strong and significant one, of which perhaps the most original was to be found in the “Welshman of Tirawley”. It was only when he was translating from the Irish that Ferguson felt himself constrained to adopt Gaelic measures. Ferguson had made up his mind to turn his back upon modern’ themes, or at any rate only to give them a by-the-way attention. He was persuaded of the nobility of heroic Irish subjects. He was equally persuaded that at the time they had no public behind them. A generation before, they would have had the support of a cultured and unprovincialised upper class; a generation later they would have claimed attention in his hands as the noblest outcome of the Irish literary revival. He was therefore both before and after his time, and he realised his position to the full.’ (“The Ferguson Centenary”, in The Irish Book Lover , Vol. I, No. 9, April, 1910.)

Padraic Colum, ed. & intro., Poems of Samuel Ferguson [Comhairle Ealaíon ser. of Irish Authors, No. 2] (Dublin: Allen Figgis 1963), Introduction, pp.1-10: ‘In politics Samuel Ferguson was a Unionist, but to the Unionists of TCD of his day he must have seemed a crypto-nationalists. Anyone who reads a certain essay of his will know how strongly, even passionately, he felt about self-determination for Ireland, culturally and economically [5]. Of the poems, ‘If we compare any of them with a lay by a modern poet, Yeats’s “the Death of Cuchullain”, the poem, not the drama - we notice something very necessary in poetry that evokes the ancient world is absent from these collections. There is nothing in them that characterises a personage ... they are separated from the age of the heroes, they read as elegiac poems’ [6]. (Cont.)

Padraic Colum, ed. & intro., Poems of Samuel Ferguson (1963) - cont.: Colum praises the poems such as “Vengeance of the Welshmen of Tirawley” in which Ferguson put aside the standards of conduct he thought becoming to national heroes and became ‘the impressive poet of rapes, robberies, and murders’ [8] He ends his intro. by quoting Ferguson’s late letter to the editor of the Irish Monthly Magazine, Fr. Russell, saying that ‘the great centres of criticism in England [have] paid little attention’ to his work, and that ‘my business is, regardless of such discouragement, to do what I can in the formation of a characteristic school of letters for my own country.’ Colum adds, ‘We must honour him for his declaration.

Poems [Colum’s edition] includes “The Tain-Quest”, &c. under ‘Narrative Poems”; “Love Songs of Outlaws”; “Other Translations and Original Poems”, incl. “Thomas Davis”, “Fair Hills of Ireland”. An Appendix incl. “Loyal Orangemen” and “Epitaph on Archbishop Whateley”. Further, Padraic Colum, writing on Ferguson in the Freeman’s Journal at the poet’s centenary, recalled James Joyce’s comment when he met Colum carrying the poet’s works: ‘I couldn’t read this’. (See also Colum’s piece in Ulick O’Connor, ed., The Joyce that We Knew, Cork: Mercier 1967, p.76.)

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Padraic Colum, ed., Anthology of Irish Verse (1922): Introduction: ‘After Moore there came another poet who reached a distinctive metrical achievement through his study of the music that Bunting had published. This poet was Samuel Ferguson. He took the trouble to learn Gaelic, and when he translated the words of Irish folk-songs to the music that they were sung to, he created, in half a dozen instances, poems that have a racial distinctiveness. Ferguson had what Moore had not - the ability to convey the Gaelic spirit. [Quotes “Cashel of Munster”]. [...] Ferguson’s translation of “Cean Dubh Dilis”, “Dear Dark Head”, makes one of the most beautiful of Irish love songs; it is a poem that carries into English the Gaelic music and the Gaelic feeling; the translation, moreover, is more of a poem than is the original. / Sir Samuel Ferguson was the first Irish poet to attempt a re-telling of any of the ancient sagas. He aimed at doing for “The Táin Bó Cuiligne” [sic for Cuailgne], the Irish epic cycle, what Tennyson at the time was doing for the Arthurian cycle, presenting it, not as a continuous narrative, but as a series of poetic studies. The figures of the heroic cycle, however, were too primitive, too elemental, too full of their own sort of humour for Ferguson to take them on their own terms. He made them conform a good deal to Victorian rectitudes. And yet, it has to be said that he blazed a trail in the trackless region of Celtic romance; the prelude to his studies, “The Tain Quest”, written in a heady ballad metre, is quite a stirring poem, and his “Conairy” manages to convey a sense of vast and mysterious action. It was to Ferguson that W. B. Yeats turned when he began his deliberate task of creating a national literature for Ireland.’ [For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Critical Classics” > Anglo-Irish, infra.]

James Joyce: Writing on Ferguson in the Freeman’s Journal at the poet’s centenary, Padraic Colum recalled James Joyce’s comment when he met Colum carrying the poet’s works: ‘I couldn’t read this’. (See Colum’s piece in Ulick O’Connor, ed., The Joyce that We Knew, Cork: Mercier 1967, p.76.)

George A Little, Dublin Before the Vikings (1957), writes: ‘In Mesgedra, Ferguson was misled about Dublin in the third century for he wrote, “When glades were green where Dublin stands today, / And limpid Liffey, fresh from wood and wold, / Bridgeless and fordless, in the lonely Bay, / sank to her rest on sands of stainless gold ...” [...] How glad Ferguson would have been to have known his error - how proud of the opposing truth!’ (p.148.)

Frank O’Connor, The Backward Look, A Survey of Irish Literature (London: Macmillan 1967), which makes use of Ferguson’s notion of ‘living back in the country we live in’ in the title, being taken from Ferguson’s DUM his review of 1840 [infra] which O’Connor quotes extensively. Note that O’Connor selects on “Ceann Dilis/Dear Dark Head” in his anthology, The Book of Ireland (London: Nelson 1979).

Robert O’Driscoll, ‘Ferguson and the Idea of an Irish National Literature’, in Éire-Ireland, 6, 1 (Spring 1971), pp.82-95, remarks that ‘despite the influences of the Belfast Academical Institution Ferguson expresses in his early writings intolerance for his Roman Catholic countrymen and a deep distrust of the motives of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. The Roman catholic, he believed at this time, was simply a mixture of error and superstition: “between the outworks of trick and legerdemain, and the citadel of church supremacy what a wilderness of error inexplicable - what pitfalls, traps, and labyrinths - what sloughs and stenches of superstition! But, above all and beyond all, what a rampart in the deluded people’s love? For the Irish priesthood holds dear the hearts of their secluded victims in even firmer bondage than their minds.” // Yet though Ferguson’s dislike of Catholicism was great, his love of Ireland was greater: “I am an Irishman and a Protestant” he writes in (p.83) in an unpublished letter, but “I was an Irishman before I was a Protestant.“’ (pp.83-84.)

Thomas Kinsella, ‘The Divided Mind’ (1973): ‘With Ferguson we are again in the presence of the real thing; his nature, against Mangan’s, may seem dispassionate and slow, but it is almost as deep. And again the whole process is characterised by waste and randomness, by the funnelling away of great energies. If Mangan spent his frivolously, it seems to be that Ferguson spent his solemnly - and just as lavishly - in the service of an imposed plan ... part of the heroic attempt to recreate Ireland’s past in modern verse.’ Kinsella quotes Yeats on Ferguson, ‘the greatest poet Ireland has produced, because the most central and the most Celtic ..’, and comments, ‘it is gratitude rather than strict judgement that is involved ... a great personal poetic debt.’ Kinsella calls ‘The Lament for the Death of Thomas Davis ‘one of our indispensable poems, of a simple and stubborn structure and a loose rich rhythm that equals anything by Mangan.’ (Rep. in Sean Lucy, Irish Poets in English, 1973, pp.212-13.)

Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde: The Dawn of the Irish Revolution and Renaissance, 1874-1893 (Shannon: IUP 1974): writes of Ferguson, ‘At present the cultured criticism of the day is averse to the Irish subject in any form, and the uncultured will not have it save in that form of helotism in which I at least will not present it.’ ‘My business is, regardless of such discouragements, to do what I can in the formation of a characteristic school of letters for my own country.’ Quoted in Lady Ferguson, Sir Samuel Ferguson and [recte in] the Ireland of His Day (Edin. & Lon. 1896), vol. II, pp.291, 292. ALSO, Daly notices in passing that Hyde seems uninfluenced by Ferguson, and that none of his publications are on Hyde’s booklists. [215] He later notes that Ferguson’s ‘Cashel of Munster’, ‘The Coolun’, and ‘Paistin Fionn; anticipate the simple directness of the Love Songs. [See Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, 1974, p.132].

Richard Ellmann: ‘Sir Samuel Ferguson had been writing dull narratives based on Irish subjects for many years [...]’ (Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Faber 1948).

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Máire Mac an tSaoi, Introduction to Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy (Shannon: IUP 1971), pp.v-xii [on Ferguson’s critique of Hardiman in the Dublin University Magazine]: ‘Ferguson writes as part of the ascendant nation; his natural youthful pomposity and self-righteousness are intensified to an almost claustrophic degree by his inherited fear of the helot people and a deeply inculcated loathing of the,m as he sees them, superstitious and pernicious doctrines to whcih they so stubbornly adhere - doctrines to no small extent responsible for the debasement of their natures and the degradation of their condition. Yet such is the power of intellectual curiosity and the persuasive constraint of common childhood surroundings - the innumerable shared experiences of master and serf - that Ferguson has ventured already a long way into enemy country and comes closer to them in his heart than clearly, as an enlightened Protestant gentleman of the day, he cares to admit. Language and antiquarianism have betrayed him; the material he approached as a scholarly pastime - made fashionable in the preceding generation by Bishop Percy and Miss Brooke - has captured his imagination and will dominated all his [v] subsequent literary achievement. Meanwhile he writes of the pieces in the anthology [i.e., Irish Minstrelsy] as “the pious labours of a man, who, however politically malignant and religiously fanatical, has yet done such good service to his country in their collection and preservation, that for her sake we half forgive him our quarrel.” / Of this meeting of minds, overtly hostile at so many points, our own present-day concept of our native cultural heritage is in great measure the outcome.’ (pp.v-vi; see futher under Hardiman, infra.)

Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1983): ‘During several decades, 1857-1880, Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886) published sprightly volumes of “versions from the Irish” which had an effect, though many no longer sound Irish at all. Ferguson tantalises. Away from Irish he can seem to parody Gray: “Delicious Liffey! from thy bosoming hills, / What man who sees thee issuing strong and pure, / But with some wistful, fresh emotion fills, / Akin to Nature’s own clear temperature?” Close to Irish, he can be stage-Irish jaunty, as in the version of “Pastheen Finn” Yeats twice rewrote - “Oh, my fair Pastheen is my heart’s delight, / Her gay heart laughs in her blue eye bright, / Like the apple blossom her bosom white / And her neck like the swan’s on a March morn bright! / Then, Oro, come with me, come with me, come with me! / Oro, come with me, brown girl sweet! / And oh, I would go through snow and sleet, / If you would come with me, brown girl sweet! ...”. / But once, in “The Fairy Thorn” - written, so Malcolm Brown tells us, in his twenty-third year - Ferguson virtually invented what soon passed on Yeats’s page for the verse effects peculiar to an Irish soul. Though Yeats for some reason omitted “The Fairy Thorn” from his 1900 Book of Irish Verse, he had quoted it with enthusiasm, almost entire, in his first published piece of prose, an appreciation of Ferguson he did for The Irish Fireside when he was twenty-one and Sir Samuel Ferguson just two months dead. Both he and AE (so Austin Clarke reported on AE’s authority) got their best music from the way of its “internal assonances”, in which Ferguson was imitating a complex of Irish verse effects: “Get up, our Anna dear, from the weary spinning-wheel; / For your father’s on the hill, and your mother is asleep; [93] Come above the crags, and we’ll dance a Highland reel / Around the Fair Thorn on the steep.’ [Cont.]

Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (1983) - cont.: ‘This haunts with its density of consonance and assonance - hill for instance is part of the wheel-reel cluster, and of dear and weary echo one another from the second and fourth strong beats in their line, so do, less obviously, crags and dance. Later Fairy remembers dear and weary. And that hypnotic, elusive rhythm with its arrested fourth line - has anything like it been heard in English before? Only music can explain such seeming invention on the part of a minor though industrious poet. Ferguson had, as the Celts say, “a chune in his head”, not anything counted by syllables. More than once he lost its spell and lapsed into doggerel but not in a stanza like this: “The enchantment seizes them; the four girls all in green stay entranced through the night, immobile, bowed beside the Fairy Hawthorn in its lonely rowan grove. By morning the four are three. No more than the child in W. B. Yeats’s The Land Heart’s Desire will gay truant Anna be seen by mortals again.” Yet as such versification can elide into doggerel (and Ferguson’s more than once does, within this very poem), so such ma[y “]glancing through the glimmer of the quiet eve, / Away in milky wavings of neck and ankle bare; / The heavy-sliding stream in its sleepy song they leave, / And the crags in the ghostly air [...].”’ (pp.93-94.)

Sean Lucy: Lucy remarks that Ferguson’s Congal uses what he calls ‘the word cataracts of medieval Irish’, ‘the deep-clear-watered, foamy crested, terribly-resounding, / Lofty leaping, prone descending, ocean-calf-abounding, / Fishy fruitful, salmon-teeming, many coloured, sunny beaming, / Heady-eddied, horrid thund’ring, ocean-progeny-engend’ring, / Billow-raging, battle-waging, merman-haunted, poet-vaunted, / Royal, patrimonial, old torrent of Eas-Roe.’ (Congal, 1872). (Q. source; quoted in Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature, 1989.)

Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson 1986) - calls Ferguson: ‘A nationalist who was also a unionist, a Protestant preaching intellectual freedom to the Papists whom he held in contempt, a nrilionian who wished to revive a version of romantic Ireland, a believer in the people who defended the supremacy of a caire. But the case is more complex than this array of contradictions would imply. In the first place, cultural nationalism and the defence either of the Union or, before 1800, of the link with Britain, were not all anomalous. The patriot movement of the eighteenth century, of which Ferguson was an inheritor, had given its fidelity to this combination. And the expatriate groups, the absentee intellectuals, led by Burke, had looked to the conciliation of Catholic and Protestant through a policy of voluntary concession to Catholic claims as the only means of preserving the integrity of the British imperial system, with Ireland as a natural and central part of it.’ (pp.67-68; quoted in Eve Patten, Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2004, p.26.)

Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Allen Lane 1988), p.315, ‘A bridge between the flowering of national studies in the 1830s and the literary renaissance of the 1890s.’

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David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland, colonialism, nationalism and culture (Manchester UP 1988), 26-33, ‘Lady Ferguson stated that ‘Ferguson was not at any period of his life a “party”-man. As an intelligent student of history, past and present, he held definite views as to the policy, foreign and domestic of the empire ... The foremost place in his love belonged, however, to Ireland (Ferguson, vol. 1 1896, p.237). An anonymous article probably by him in Blackwood’s (Jan. 1833) called ‘Ireland No. 1’, is Protestant propagandist in character [‘prey to its own furious and ungovernable passions; ruled by an ignorant and ambitious priesthood; seduced by frantic and unprincipled demagogues’]; ‘The Good Old Cause’ (Dublin University Magazine, Vol. II, IX, Sept. 1833, pp.241-47), envisages the State being ‘buried in the quicksands of rebellion, anarchy, and irreligion’ (p.247); others such as ‘The Present Crisis’, from the first edition of Dublin Magazine (Jan. 1833), or ‘The Coming Crisis’ (July 1833) rehearse the idea that Protestantism is threatened. Authors quotes “Dialogue -... &c.’] ( Dublin University Magazine, Vol. II, no. XI, November 1833, pp.586-93) ‘[as above] for if Catholic Emancipation produce repeal, so surely will repeal produce ultimate separation; and so sure as we have a separation, so surely will there be war levied, estates confiscated, and the Popish church established (p.588). What exercises Ferguson is the position of the Anglo-Irish who are described as ‘the acknowledged possessors of nine-tenths of the property’ but ‘plundered in our country seats, robbed in our town houses’ (p.591). [Cont.]

David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland, colonialism, nationalism and culture (1988) cont. - further quots: ‘Our opponents have, in their Irish blood, a stronger claim to credit for disinterested nationality than we who are, generally speaking, comparatively “strangers” [the reference is to Davis’s term in The Nation, Prospectus]’ (p.589); of invaders, ‘They were all Irishman in turn, and WE are Irishman now’ (p.589); envisages native Irish joining with Anglo-Irish as ‘free, loyal, and united Protestants’ (p.593); remarks repeatedly on the state of ‘tyranny and blind savage levity’ (p.92) of the Irish; ‘We must fight our battle now with a handful of types and a composing-stick, pages like these our field, and the reading public our arbiter of war’ (p.592) [also quoted in Neil Corcoran, ‘Strange Letters, Reading and Writing in Recent Irish Poetry’, in Irish Writing, Exile and Subversion ed. Paul Hyland & Neil Sammells (Macmillan 1991), pp.234-57; p.246].

Incls. remarks on 4-part review of Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy, or Bardic Remains of Ireland (1831), published in DUM during April, August, October & November 1834: ‘As in the Dialogue, the proof of Irishness is emotional attachment - the first opens, ‘Oh, ye fair hills of holy Ireland, who dares sustain the strangled calumny that you are not the land of our love? ... Who is he who ventures to stand between us and your Catholic sons’ good-will?’ (‘Hardiman’, Part I; Dublin University Magazine III, xvi, [pp.456]).

Cairns & Richards (Writing Ireland [... &c.] 1988) - cont.: ‘Ferguson describes the translations as ‘spurious, puerile, unclassical - lamentably bad’, but is more incensed by the annotations which suggest that the poetry is only available to those of indigenous Gaelic stock (p.453). Seeks ‘a green point of neutral ground, where all parties may meet in kindness and in peace’ (p.467). Lady Ferguson prints his view of the promise of the Ordnance Survey, ‘may we not take it as an auspicious omen of the happiness and peace year in store for us, and which must follow as inevitable result of the continuance of a unity thus happily begun?’ (Ferguson, vol. I 1896, p.66). He believed that the antiquarian research of the Ordnance ‘will enable us to know one another and the land we live in, and every spot of it; that such knowledge may beget mutual confidence and united labour’ (Ferguson, 1848 [no such ref. in bibl.]). Ferguson appealed to the self-interest of the Protestant, ‘their wealth has hitherto been insecure, because their intelligence has not embraced a thorough knowledge of the genius and disposition of their Catholic fellow-citizens’ (‘Hardiman’, Part 1, Dublin University Magazine, III xvi, pp.457). He reads Hardiman’s sequestration of national culture as ‘politically malignant and religiously fanatical (Pt. II, p.153), motivated by ‘the spirit of petty anti-Anglicism (‘Hardiman &c.’, Pt. IV, Dublin University Magazine IV, xxiii, 1834, p.515). Ferguson goes on the attack in disputing the Jacobite reading of “Roisín Dubh” which he seems as clearly ‘fictitious’, and offers instead an interpretation of the poem as ‘the song of a priest in love, of a priest in love, too, who had broken his vow.’ He adds, ‘We sympathise with the priest’s passion, we pity his predicament; but we despise his dispensatory expedients, and give him one parting advice, to pitch his vows to the Pope, the Pope to purgatory, marry his black rose-bud, and take a curacy from the next Protestant rector.’ (‘Hardiman &c.’, Pt. 2, Dublin University Magazine IV, xx (1834), p.158-59).

Cairns & Richards (Writing Ireland [... &c.] 1988) - cont.: ‘Authors conclude, Ferguson’s interventions were founded on the notion that to counter Catholic political mobilisation the Anglo-Irish must embrace the genius of their fellow countrymen’; once this was done the Irish masses could be successfully prosletyzed [~31]. From ‘Attractions of Ireland III’, Dublin University Magazine, Vol. VIII (December 1836), pp.658-75, ‘On one side [you can lay your hand on] barbarism, on the other on the perfection of civilisation’ (p.658); the Protestant, civilised side was the only hope of seeing ‘the sour berry of savage life ... mellow into the sweet fruits of art and industry’ (p.658). Of the Anglo-Irish, ‘there was never a time when all-important body were so deeply, so devotedly engage’ (p.675). Also quotes: ‘Race after race has been transplanted into our social garden, and all now is ready for the final engraftment’; ‘Extermination, in process of time, came to be no longer the necessary concomitant of civilisation’ (both p.658). Note also the propagandist poem, “An Irish Garland” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. XXXIII, No. CCIII, Jan. 1833, pp.87-8), [the Gentlemen] ‘Whose honour’d flag in ninety-eight / Put foul rebellion down’, ranged against the Jackasses ‘[w]hose ears, though cropp’d in ninety-eight / Now flout our skies again’.

Chris Morash, ed., The Hungry Voice (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1989), Morash comments in his preface, ‘[Ferguson’s] two long satires of 1849, “Inheritor and Economist” and “Dublin”, are virtually unique ... in their attempt to comprehend the state of Famine Ireland in a verse form that takes account of the wider network of social and economic relationships in which any individual is necessarily enmeshed.’ When the famine broke out in 1845 ‘Ferguson ... was on the continent, researching manuscript sources of early Irish history. His verse translations of these ancient Gaelic epics in the years after the Famine were to earn him the respect of Yeats and to secure for him a place in the history of Irish literature. However, when he returned to Ireland in 1846 to find the country in a state of crisis, he not only laid aside the legendary material on which he had been working, he also began to modify his political views. As a younger man ... a strong supporter of the Union ... had published anti-nationalist poetry, such as “An Irish Garland” ... in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1833’ (p.18-19).

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Robert Welch, ‘Language and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century’, in Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (London: Routledge 1993) [Chap. 2]: ‘Ferguson was a Protestant Unionist, with strong nationalist sympathies [...] He tried, in the 1830s, with all the energy of his youthful enthusiasm, to create a cultural space in which the Gaelic past would collaborate with the modern British imperial present, where Irish Catholic and Protestant could come to an accommodation through a better understanding of their respective traditions. At the root of his thinking in the 1830s is the concern to find a way of being in Ireland for Irish people, Catholic and Protestant, so that they can feel at home in the present and attached to the past. He is very conscious that Ireland does not have an adequate system whereby it can represent itself to itself. There has not been a civil evolution, as in England , of the kind described by Burke in the Reflections, when he reflects upon what was tested and sustained in the seventeenth century. The Irish Protestants, Ferguson says, have forgotten the liberty to which they are attached as part of the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; but the native Irish did not participate in this civil evolution in any way. Protestant and native Irish are “unable to amalgamate from the want of these intermediate steps upon the civil scale - steps forgotten by the one and never taken by the other”. (‘Hardiman’s Irish Ministrelsy – No. III’, in Dublin University Magazine, Vol. IV, 1834, p.448.) / Now the Protestants must show the lead. The responsibility is all the greater in that the opportunism of Rome has shown itself in the way the Catholic priests have allied themselves with O’Connell. The Protestants must, if the country is not to be taken over by another Bonaparte, another meddling Jacobinical democratizing tyrant, present their case, and show their countrymen a way of thinking about Ireland which will be inclusive and significant - that is, capable of signifying for now, for the present. Protestant industry must develop a method of enquiry which will have for its object a system of signs, rooted in the country’s past, whereby Irish people can “live back in the land they live in” [Later quotes this passage fully, as in Quotations, infra.] In the passage from which this is taken, from the Dublin University Magazine in 1840, he is speaking of the enlargement of our “portion of space, of time, of feeling” that is “the true source of intellectual pleasure”.’ [ 26; cont.]

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Robert Welch, ‘Language and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century’ (in Changing States, 1993) - cont.: comments on “On the fair hills of holy Ireland”: ‘Ireland is holy to him, because it has the possibility of wholeness. {27}. It is holy because in the small system of this poem the little things, the fruit, the ear of barley, acquire a sacral quality as they link into the expansion of spirit the poem charts in its loving enumeration. The language is renovating the relationships between individual history, place and “fact”. The things before the eyes of the mind acquire more resonance because of the sacral activity of the poem’s language. This is Ferguson ’s achievement, and it led him to much larger enterprises in poetry and scholarship. / Throughout his life he continued to work to make Irish tradition more of an effective presence in the minds of his contemporaries. His work is full of wild images, huge brooding forms, savage action, declamation. In Ferguson’s handling the Gaelic materials, the historical facts of the Gaelic world as well as the insights into the emotions and world view that inform Gaelic literature are transposed into an Irish Victorian idiom. It is an unlikely accommodation [...].’ [Cont.]

Robert Welch (‘Language and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century’ (in Changing States, 1993) - cont.: ‘‘Ferguson cannot see Ireland simply as a place to be, and his language is agitated by so many considerations, political, cultural, propagandist, sectarian, that it cannot open out to become a system of representation for a mind fully engaged with, fully informed by, life. This is not to deny that he wrote some very fine poems, but simply to recollect that with Ferguson we are with one of the major figures of nineteenth century Irish literature, and yet we cannot even begin to compare him with, say, Victorian writers and cultural commentators such as Ruskin, Carlyle or Tennyson. He simply does not have access to a language capable of representing the broad conspectus of experience and of relating past and present in a confident assumption that there is such a thing as a coherent tradition. It is in these assumptions and confidences that Victorian authority is grounded, but for an Irish Victorian there would be, continually, for all the desire to anneal and compromise, a profound sense of rupture, unease and strain. In the twentieth century, ironically, artistic authority is grounded in just these discontinuities: “we sing in our uncertainty”, wrote Yeats.’ (See full text, in RICORSO Library, “Critical Classics”, infra.)

P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland (1994) remarks on Furlong, Mangan, and Ferguson’s versions of Seán Ó Coileáin’s “Musings of a Melancholy Man”, rendered by Mangan as “Lament over the Ruins of the Abbey of Teach Molaga”, given by Ferguson as “... Timoleague” (though based on an earlier version by Furlong). Kavanagh goes on to mention Ferguson’s objection to the tenor of Mangan’s version and Hardiman’s ‘sectarian’ footnotes: ‘He does not bate a jot of his most indignity obstinacy, he does not expunge an expression of his most inveterate and unchangeable hatred for Clan Luther, and the Saxon, but disfigures his book and disgraces himself by flinging in the teeth of his manumission, the whole miserly hoardings of his hatred when a slave [...]’. Further notes that the original by Ó Coileáin makes no mention of England at all (p.170-71; quotes text from The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991).

Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representations of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork UP/Field Day 1996) - on Ferguson’s review of Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy (1831): Leerssen discusses the tendency of conservative politics to criticize the persistence of historical memory on the part of beaten peoples and espec. Edmund Burke’a view that ‘collective guilt cannot [...] outlast the lifetime of the individuals concerned ’ (Leersson dixit, p.180): ‘In Hardiman ’s case, that view is emphatically set aside. Collective guilt is remembered, shared oppression held up as an example, and an ethical debit­credit relation is used to establish continuity between past and present. This tendency was to be an indispensable ingredient in Irish nationalism, right down to the invocation of the dead generations, quoted, under God, as the most important legitimizing authority in Pearse ’s 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. [181]

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Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures (Cork UP 1996), rebukes David Lloyd for attributing ‘an ideal of transparent translation’ to Ferguson, adding: ‘For Ferguson, translation between the two languages was never straightforward, and the presence of irreducible difference stalked the conscientious translator from Irish into English’ (p.110), quoting: ‘idiomatic differences of the two languages give to the translation an uncouth and difficult hesitation not in the original’ (‘Irish Minstrelsy’ [review], No. III, p.460; here p.110.) Further quotes remarks on ‘perplexing vices of grotesqueness on the one hand, and of colloquial tameness on the other’ ([Idem.]) Also: ‘The classic language of Pope will not answer to the homely phrase of Carolan; but the slang of Donnybrook is equally inconsistent with the Bard’s legacy’ ([Idem.]) Also: ‘the accompanying words, in whatever English dress they may be invested, present a contrast of low and ludicrous images as well as of an incondite simplicity of construction the most striking and apparently absurd.’ (Idem; Cronin, p.110.) Cronin later quotes: ‘subdued by a people so far in advance of her own, that after centuries of fellow-citizenship, the two races are still unable to amalgamate from the want of these intermediate steps upon the civil state - steps forgotten by the one and never taken by the other’ (‘Irish Minstrelsy’, Pt. III, p.451; Cronin, p.118.)

Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures (Cork UP 1996): Cronin comments in summary, ‘Ferguson’s translations, later published in book form as Lays of the Western Gael, were highly praised and influential. Their success was due to those very uncertainties that compromised Ferguson’s estimation of their poetic worth. It was precisely the metaphorical otherness, the metrical differences, the tension between prosody and image that attracted the makers of a new literature in English such as James Clarence Mangan to the translations. The translations were appreciated less for their insights into putative Irish emotional dispositions than for their destabilising effect on English. Unlike many of the translations in the volumes by Brooke and Hardiman, which opted for fluent strategies, making the texts acceptable to the literary tastes of English readers, Ferguson’s unyielding empiricism produced translations that were distinct and different. An ironic political consequence for Ferguson is that it was the claims to difference as exemplified by translation that would provide an important impetus for cultural nationalists, the opponents of the “imperial confederacy”.’ (p.111)

Thomas Hofheinz, James Joyce and the Invention of Irish History (Cambridge UP 1995): examines Ferguson’s The Cromlech on Howth (1861) [unpag. with interleaved blank pages and copious notes at the end, ill. by Margaret Stokes and lettering initials from the Book of Kells]. Hofheinz glosses: In Ferguson’s historical scheme throughout The Cromlech on Howth, the landscape of Howth promontory and environs and the ancient ruins on it are of primary importance: all historical and legendary [76] narrative comes from memory of the land or contemplation of the voices encoded in the land when memory is gone. The past is encrypted and entombed: by symbolic extension, the land’s features mirror the features of those who are lost. Ossian the poet/Ferguson the antiquarian keen over the dead, incanting the past through song. Ferguson’s poem concludes with a stanza that combines topographical vividness, cultural interment, and historical alienation: “Farewell, the strength of men is worn, / The night approaches dark and chill. / Sleep, till perchance an endless morn/Descend the glittering hill. / Of Oscar and Aideen bereft, / So Ossian sang. The Fenians sped / Three might shouts to heaven: and left / Ben Edar to the dead.’ / Ossian/Ferguson’s hymn to historical transcendence dissolges into the darkness that obliterates the heroic age of Gaelic Ireland, leaving behind only the promontary of Howth and the cairn at its crown. Aideen and the other Fenians are asleep as well as interred, both dead and alive, waiting for a morning that will wake them from their living death. Behind the production of The Cromlech on Howth is the real-world endeavour by Ferguson, Petrie, Davis, O’Donovan, and others to claim the Irish past through names, to discover Irish history from cultural artifacts.’ (pp.75-78.)

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Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press 1998), pp.65-67: ‘[Ferguson thought that] Hardiman has attempted to appropriate the quality of Irishness to construct an exclusivist, antagonistic position which would deny Anglo-Ireland a role in the national history. At the same time, Ferguson is aware of the reasons for such a manoeuvre, and is both emotionally and intellectually attracted by the historical and aesthetic arguments underpinning it. [...; He] made use of whatever was to hand … to construct a powerful position for the national fraction he represented … in spite of Catholic Irish agitation and English reform.’ (p.66.) ‘Ferguson’s criticism of James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy … represents a comprehensive statement of Anglo-Irishness while also constituting one of the most skilful attempts to square the circle of modern (Anglo-)Irish critical theory (p.65; …. &c.) Further: ‘[I]t is with the 300-word coda inserted at the end as a technical addendum to the opening critique that Ferguson attempts to insinuate the Anglo-Irish into a leading role in national discourse [quoting:] “The main difficulty, and one which is in some cases insurmountable, consists in the multitude of words in the original forming a measure which frequently does not afford room for more than half the English expressions requisite for their adequate translation.” [&c.; see further under Quotations, infra.] This arises from the ellipsis of aspirated consonants and concurrent vowels, which frequently slurs three or four words into a single dactyl, and compresses the meanings into so small bounds, that the translator is driven either to lengthen the measure, and thus make his version incompatible with the tune of the original, if a song, and indeed with its spirit and character in any case, or else to double each stanza, and by a dilation as prejudicial to the genius of his subject as the over compression of too strict adherence, to lose the raciness of translation in the effete expansion of a paraphrase.” (‘Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy’, DUM, Nov. 1834, p.529; Smyth, p.67.) [Cont.]

Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (1998) - cont.: [Smyth:] ‘It is immediately clear that the critic is operating in a different register in this passage, with the employment of a technical vocabulary signalling his complete command of the subject matter. As with Preston and Walker, this is significant in itself, demonstrating as it does both Anglo-Irish power when confronted with Irish history and Anglo-Irish validity in the face of English ignorance. Just as important in this instance, however, is the argument itself. In this passage Ferguson describes the danger of an Irish/English cultural confrontation without the mediating hand of the AngloIrish translator. Irish poetry has inherent value with its plenitude and complexity, its spirit and character and raciness. What it risks, however, in a straightforward encounter with English cultural discourse is the silence to which it had been condemned during the eighteenth century, or the misrepresentation which had ever been its fate at the hands of unsympathetic English translators. At the same time, the English language alone is seen as inadequate to the task of representing or containing this valuable experience; as long as it remains outside English discursive control, Irish cultural experience (in this case poetry and song) remains a real, though temporarily dormant, threat. Thus, a translator with access to both linguistic domains is necessary to resolve the misunderstanding and contempt on the one side, and the dissension and rancour on the [67] other. Transposed into political terms, an inadequate translation is any English/Irish solution which ignores the Anglo-Irish impact on modern history; an adequate translation, on the other hand, will see the Anglo-Irish offering themselves as a sort of buffer between Irish demands and English expectations, with their own internal dominion confirmed and consolidated by their new central role. / In this way, Ferguson constructed a new position for the Anglo-Irish which assured them a crucial role in the history of colonial relations between Ireland and England. As an Irishman he defends a discourse - Irish literature in the English language - with which Ireland can begin to assert its cultural validity; as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, he is on hand to lead this new Ireland, for without him Gaelic Ireland will continue to suffer the silence which marked its former confrontations with the modern world. Ferguson thus uses his critical discourse to validate Anglo-Irish identity and, in a reciprocal motion, achieves critical closure in terms of his political agenda. Nation (politics) and literature (culture) are explicitly linked; however, it is the unacknowledged relationship - that which exists between the critical text and Ferguson’s political agenda which in fact creates and enables the ideology of a ‘natural’ culture/nation nexus.’ (pp.67-68.)

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Eve Patten, Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2004) - Introduction: ‘[...] The identification of Ferguson with the Anglo-Irish ascendancy [...], largely on the basis of his 1848 marriage into [sic] a scion of the Guinness family, completely by-passes the co-ordinates of his background, economic position and career path, none of which conformed neatly to any decided social profile. The political heterogeneity of his peer group militates against the idea that he was simply an Ascendancy evangelist ruthlessly engaged in a sustained project of cultural indoctrination. While he frequently had difficulty in defining his own audience, his instinctive feel was for the urban professional activist, and for a civic confederacy which, while he might very well maintian necessary relationships with the landed aristocracy or the Castle, was nonetheless a new and pragmatic voice in Irish political and cultural life. / Recovery of Ferguson is a means of recovering aspects of this social element in nineteeth-century Ireland, and of revealing the complex class dynamics so frequently obscured in popular historical accounts by the sustaining image of an enervated “Protestant Ascendancy”. [...] In particular, attention has been distracted from the consolidation in the period of a Protestant urban middle class, an oversight compounded by the traditional profiling of the Protestant population as a monolithic landed élite and the identification of a rising, urban middle class exclusively with Catholicism.’ (p.12.) [Cont.]

Eve Patten, Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2004), Intro. - cont.: ‘While the chimera of the “Protestant Ascendancy” still looms in the background, the foreground has begun to shift [...] to what W. J. McCormack demarcates as “the Protestant gentry and professional middle-class” of nineteenth-century Dublin, a small but active, self-regulating group who provided the essence of a “public sphere” at the heart of Irish intellectual life.’ (p.13; ref. to McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish History, 1985, pp.229-30.) [Patten goes on juxtapose the Ciceronian conception of civic idealism with that of the Scottish Enlightenment, and asks:] ‘How might the civic impulse, derived from classical and Scottish models, both reinforce and, when necessary, counter, the pull of an imperial hegemony? And through what kind of rhetoric was a civic incentive attached to the pursuit of literary, antiquarian or scientific engagement amongst the membership of Irelaned’s scholarly societies and academies? Answering these questios bring into play a social profile of the Irish capital as an archetypal Victorian city, and, simultaneously, as a highly volatile environment in whihc political and cultural identities were part of a fluid system of brokerage.’ (p.15; see further remarks under Francis Hutcheson, q.v., infra.)

Eve Patten, Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2004), Intro. - cont.: ‘A further misconception in critiques of Ferguson, career is that he dedicated himself consciously and consistently to a cultural objective formatively expressed in his aggressive review of James Harriman,, Irish Minstrelsy, or bardic remains of Ireland, a collection of translations from Gaelic verse, published in 1834. From a literary perspective Ferguson’s attack was certainly justified; even Thomas Davis later agreed that such translations from the Irish were “slavish and despairing”. But the review itself smacks of insecurity - the young critic playing to a hard-line unionist gallery - in its foregrounding of a polarized Irish cultural landscape. In fact the Hardiman review is by no means reliable as an authoritative and definitive manifesto for Ferguson or the DUM, in which it was published. The adept translations which Ferguson appended to his four articles of 1834 are prefaced not by a decisive agenda, but by a bombastic collage drawn from a wide currency of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political and historical philosophy, exemplifying the writer’s susceptibility to trends, in contemporary intellectual discourse rather than any great depths of original insight. / Nonetheless, strategic critical interest in the 1834 review, together with a concentration on Ferguson’s poetic reputation at the expense of his prose writings, has been a marked deficiency in the evaluation of his career as a whole. If the focus is shifted from his (Yeatsian-driven) reputation as a poet to his achievements in prose, including his literary criticism, historical romance, writings on landscape, antiquities, political economy and architecture, and the texts of public speeches and lectures, what emerges is an archetypal Victorian man-of-letters who functioned neither as an isolated cultural missionary nor as an Ascendancy agent, but as a semi-professional writer obliged to adapt and react to the variegations of contemporary critical and cultural discourse. Static images of Ferguson created by previous studies might thus be replaced by a sense of the writer as a pragmatist, frequently subject to stylistic and political fashion. [...]

Brendan Ó Cathair, review of Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of 19th-century Ireland, by Eve Patten, in The Irish Times (26 Feb. 2005), Weekend: ‘Samuel Ferguson wrote not “to sweeten Ireland’s wrong”, pace Yeats, but to enlarge the Irish mind. Eve Patten [...] explores the complex ideological make-up of this influential 19th-century writer. Underlying his cultural politics - temporary diversions into Repeal, on the one hand, or hardline unionism on the other - was an enduring affiliation to traditions of civic virtue and patriotism. While ingratiating himself into the Dublin literary scene, he retained. the proclivities of his Northern liberal heritage. / His flirtation with Young Ireland - although he never wrote for the Nation - was a protest against the process of centralisation under the Union. / The Dublin Castle administration was dominated by English bureaucrats, who lacked commitment to Ireland. Their catastrophic neglect reached its apogee during the Famine. / Symbolically, Ferguson’s marriage to a scion of the Guinness family in August 1848 coincided with the dispersal of his Young Ireland associates. Ultimately, his quest for cultural unity foundered in the slough of Protestant insecurity and Catholic assertiveness.’

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