Bolster’s Quarterly

1826-30; organ of“the Anchorites of the Hermitage”, ed. John Windele; contribs. incl. J J Callanan and Thomas Crofton Croker.

Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period, 1789-1850, Vol 1 (1980): Bolster’s Magazine (1826- ), commencing with a editorial lamenting literary absenteeism: ‘The expatriation of native talent causes a positive decrease in the great fund of national intellect. In truth, it is a melancholy fact, that the talent for which this country is confessedly remarkable, seems to droop ‘till transplanted, and has become as it were exotic in the land which produced it.’ (p.1) [xxiv-v]; ALSO: [illustrating Irish conservatism: ‘The Poetry of Byron is like that beautiful corpse which Irving describes in his Tales of a Traveller [a student is fooled into marrying a beautiful corpse ‘animated by the devil’] So it is with the admirers of Byron, they see the beauty at first and it captivates them, and they see not until too late that a fiend has been winning their love, and at last makes them his own for ever.’ (Bolster’s Magazine, ‘The Poetry of Byron’, III, 12, March 1830, p.353.) [c.41].

Brian McKenna, Irish Literature, 1800-1875: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1978). [as in Notes, infra.]

Writers: Michael John O’Sullivan, His Prince of the Lake was publ. by Bolster, Cork (1815). Note also that Richard Alfred Millikin’s anthology Harmonica, printed by Bolster in Cork, 1811. T. C. Croker and Callanan wrote for Windele when he was ed. of Bolster’s Magazine (see Welch, Irish Poetry, 1980, p.50).

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