“What good were it for me to manufacture perfect iron while my own breast is full of dross? What would it stead me to put properties of land in order, while I am at variance with myself? To speak it in a word: the cultivation of my individual self, here as I am, has from my youth upwards been constantly though dimly my wish and my purpose.”

“Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect; that every one should study to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things by every method in his power. For no man can bear to be entirely deprived of such enjoyments; it is only because they are not used to taste of what is excellent, that the generality of people take delight in silly and insipid things, provided they be new. For this reason, he would add, ‘one ought at least every day to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.’” - Goethe.

We have been often asked by certain of the Temperance Societies to give them some advice on Self-Education. Lately we promised one of these bodies to write some hints as to how the members of it could use their association for their mental improvement.

We said, and say again, that the Temperance Societies can be made use of by the people for their instruction as well as pleasure. Assemblies of any kind are not the best places either for study or invention. Home or solitude are better - home is the great teacher. In domestic business we learn mechanical skill, the nature of those material bodies with which we have most to deal in life - we learn labour by example and by kindly precepts - we learn (in a prudent home) decorum, cleanliness, order - in a virtuous home we learn more than these: we learn reverence for the old, affection without passion, truth, piety, and justice. These are the greatest things man can know. Having these he is well; without them attainments of wealth or talent are of little worth. Home is the great teacher; and its teaching passes down in honest homes from generation to generation, and neither the generation that gives, nor the generation that takes it, lays down plans for bringing it to pass.

Again, to come to designed learning. We learn arts and professions by apprenticeships, that is, much after the fashion we learned walking, or stitching, or fire-making, or love-making at home - by example, precept, and practice combined. Apprentices at anything, from ditching, basket-work, or watch-making, to merchant-trading, legislation, or surgery, submit either to a nominal or an actual apprenticeship. They see other men do these things, they desire to do the same, and they learn to do so by watching how, and when, and asking, or guessing why each part of the business is done; and as fast as they know, or are supposed to know, any one part, whether it be sloping the ditch, or totting the accounts, or dressing the limb, they begin to do that, and, being directed when they fail, they learn at last to do it well, and are thereby prepared to attempt some other or harder part of the business.

Thus it is by experience - or trying to do, and often doing a thing - combined with teaching or seeing, and being told how and why other people more experienced do that thing, that most of the practical business of life is learned.

In some trades, formal apprenticeship and planned teaching exist as little as in ordinary home-teaching. Few men are of set purpose taught to dig; and just as few are taught to legislate.

Where formal teaching is usual, as in what are called learned professions, and in delicate trades, fewer men know anything of these businesses. Those who learn them at all do so exactly and fully, but commonly practise them in a formal and technical way, and invent and improve them little. In those occupations which most men take up casually - as book-writing, digging, singing, and legislation, and the like - there is much less exact knowledge, less form, more originality and progress, and more of the public know something about them in an unprofessional way.

The Caste system of India, Egypt, and Ancient Ireland carried out the formal apprenticeship plan to its full extent. The United States of America have very little of it. Modern Europe is between the two, as she has in most things abolished caste or hereditary professions (kings and nobles excepted), but has, in many things, retained exact apprenticeships.

Marriage, and the bringing up of children, the employment of dependants, travel, and daily sights and society, are our chief teachers of morals, sentiment, taste, prudence and manners. Mechanical and literary skill of all sorts, and most accomplishments, are usually picked up in this same way.

We have said all this lest our less-instructed readers should fall into a mistake common to all beginners in study, that books, and schooling, and lectures, are the chief teachers in life; whereas most of the things we learn here are learned from the experience of home, and of the practical parts of our trades and amusements.

We pray our humbler friends to think long and often on this.

But let them not suppose we undervalue or wish them to neglect other kinds of teaching; on the contrary, they should mark how much the influences of home, and business, and society, are affected by the quantity and sort of their scholarship.

Home life is obviously enough affected by education. Where the parents read and write, the children learn to do so too, early in life and with little trouble; where they know something of their religious creed they give its rites a higher meaning than mere forms; where they know the history of the country well, every field, every old tower or arch is a subject of amusement, of fine old stories, and fine young hopes; where they know the nature of other people and countries, their own country and people become texts to be commented on, and likewise supply a living comment on those peculiarities of which they have read.

Again, where the members of a family can read aloud, or play, or sing, they have a well of pleasant thoughts and good feelings which can hardly be dried or frozen up; and so of other things.

And in the trades and professions of life, to study in books the objects, customs, and rules of that trade or profession to which you are going saves time, enables you to improve your practice of it, and makes you less dependent on the teaching of other practitioners, who are often interested in delaying you.

In these, and a thousand ways besides, study and science produce the best effects upon the practical parts of life.

Besides, the first business of life is the improvement of one’s own heart and mind. The study of the thoughts and deeds of great men, the laws of human, and animal, and vegetable, and lifeless nature, the principles of fine and mechanical arts, and of morals, society, and religion - all directly give us nobler and greater desires, more wide and generous judgments, and more refined pleasures.

Learning in this latter sense may be got either at home or at school, by solitary study, or in associations. Home learning depends, of course, on the knowledge, good sense, and leisure of the parents. The German Jean Paul, the American Emerson, and others of an inferior sort, have written deep and fruitful truths on bringing up and teaching at home. Yet, considering its importance, it has not been sufficiently studied. Upon schools much has been written. Almost all the private schools in this country are bad. They merely cram the memories of pupils with facts or words, without developing their judgment, taste, or invention, or teaching them the application of any knowledge. Besides, the things taught are commonly those least worth learning. This is especially true of the middle and richer classes. Instead of being taught the nature, products, and history, first of their own, and then of other countries, they are buried in classical frivolities, languages which they never master, and manners and races which they cannot appreciate. Instead of being disciplined to think exactly, to speak and write accurately, they are crammed with rules and taught to repeat forms by rote.

The National Schools are a vast improvement on anything hitherto in this country, but still they have great faults. From the miserably small grant the teachers are badly paid, and, therefore, hastily and meagrely educated.

The maps, drawing, and musical instruments, museums and scientific apparatus, which should be in every school, are mostly wanting altogether. The books, also, are defective.

The information has the worst fault of the French system: it is too exclusively on physical science and natural history. Fancy a National School which teaches the children no more of the state and history of Ireland than of Belgium or Japan! We have spoken to pupils, nay, to masters of the National Schools, who were ignorant of the physical character of every part of Ireland except their native villages - who knew not how the people lived, or died, or sported, or fought - who had never heard of Tara, Clontarf, Limerick, or Dungannon - to whom the O’Neills and Sarsfields, the Swifts and Sternes, the Grattans and Barrys, our generals, statesmen, authors, orators, and artists, were alike and utterly unknown! Even the hedge schools kept up something of the romance, history, and music of the country.

Until the National Schools fall under national control, the people must take diligent care to procure books on the history, men, language, music, and manners of Ireland for their children. These schools are very good so far as they go, and the children should be sent to them; but they are not national, they do not use the Irish language, nor teach anything peculiarly Irish.

As to solitary study, lists of books, pictures, and maps can alone be given; and to do this usefully would exceed our space at present.

As it is, we find that we have no more room and have not said a word on what we proposed to write - namely, Self-Education through the Temperance Societies.

We do not regret having wandered from our professed subject, as, if treated exclusively, it might lead men into errors which no afterthought could cure.

What we chiefly desire is to set the people on making out plans for their own and their children’s education. Thinking cannot be done by deputy - they must think for themselves.

Something has been done to rescue Ireland from the reproach that she was a wailing and ignorant slave.

Brag as we like, the reproach was not undeserved, nor is it quite removed.

She is still a serf-nation, but she is struggling wisely and patiently, and is ready to struggle, with all the energy her advisers think politic, for liberty. She has ceased to wail - she is beginning to make up a record of English crime and Irish suffering, in order to explain the past, justify the present, and caution the future. She begins to study the past - not to acquire a beggar’s eloquence in petition, but a hero’s wrath in strife. She no longer tears and parades her wounds to win her smiter’s mercy; and now she should look upon her breast and say: - “That wound makes me distrust, and this makes me guard, and they all will make me steadier to resist, or, if all else fails, fiercer to avenge.”

Thus will Ireland do naturally and honourably.

Our spirit has increased - our liberty is not far off.

But to make our spirit lasting and wise as it is bold - to make our liberty an inheritance for our children, and a charter for our prosperity - we must study as well as strive, and learn as well as feel.

If we attempt to govern ourselves without statesmanship - to be a nation without a knowledge of the country’s history, and of the propensities to good and ill of the people - or to fight without generalship, we will fail in policy, society, and war. These - all these things - we, people of Ireland, must know if we would be a free, strong nation. A mockery of Irish independence is not what we want. The bauble of a powerless parliament does not lure us. We are not children. The office of supplying England with recruits, artizans, and corn, under the benign interpositions of an Irish Grand Jury, shall not be our destiny. By our deep conviction - by the power of mind over the people, we say, No!

We are true to our colour, “the green,” and true to our watchword, “Ireland for the Irish.” We want to win Ireland and keep it. If we win it, we will not lose it nor give it away to a bribing, a bullying, or a flattering minister. But, to be able to keep it, and use it, and govern it, the men of Ireland must know what it is, what it was, and what it can be made. They must study her history, perfectly know her present state, physical and moral - and train themselves up by science, poetry, music, industry, skill, and by all the studies and accomplishments of peace and war.

If Ireland were in national health, her history would be familiar by books, pictures, statuary, and music to every cabin and shop in the land - her resources as an agricultural, manufacturing, and trading people would be equally known - and every young man would be trained, and every grown man able to defend her coast, her plains, her towns, and her hills - not with his right arm merely, but by his disciplined habits and military accomplishments. These are the pillars of independence.

Academies of art, institutes of science, colleges of literature, schools and camps of war, are a nation’s means for teaching itself strength, and winning safety and honour; and when we are a nation, please God, we shall have them all. Till then we must work for ourselves. So far as we can study music in societies, art in schools, literature in institutes, science in our colleges, or soldiership in theory, we are bound as good citizens to learn. Where these are denied by power, or unattainable by clubbing the resources of neighbours, we must try and study for ourselves. We must visit museums and antiquities, and study, and buy, and assist books of history to know what the country and people were, how they fell, how they suffered, and how they arose again. We must read books of statistics - and let us pause to regret that there is no work on the statistics of Ireland except the scarce lithograph of Moreau, the papers in the second Report of the Railway Commission, and the chapters in M’Culloch’s Statistics of the British Empire - the Repeal Association ought to have a handbook first, and then an elaborate and vast account of Ireland’s statistics brought out.

To resume, we must read such statistics as we have, and try and get better; and we must get the best maps of the country - the Ordnance and County Index Maps, price 2s. 6d. each, and the Railway Map, price £1 - into our Mechanics’ Institutes, Temperance Reading-rooms, and schools. We must, in making our journeys of business and pleasure, observe and ask for the nature and amount of the agriculture, commerce, and manufactures of the place we are in, and its shape, population, scenery, antiquities, arts, music, dress, and capabilities for improvement. A large portion of our people travel a great deal within Ireland, and often return with no knowledge, save of the inns they slept in and the traders they dealt with.

We must give our children in schools the best knowledge of science, art, and literary elements possible. And at home they should see and hear as much of national pictures, music, poetry, and military science as possible.

And finally, we must keep our own souls, and try, by teaching and example, to lift up the souls of all our family and neighbours to that pitch of industry, courage, information, and wisdom necessary to enable an enslaved, dark, and starving people to become free, and rich, and rational.

Well, as to this National History - L’Abbé MacGeoghegan published a history of Ireland, in French, in 3 volumes, quarto, dedicated to the Irish Brigade. Writing in France he was free from the English censorship; writing for “The Brigade,” he avoided the impudence of Huguenot historians. The sneers of the Deist Voltaire, and the lies of the Catholic Cambrensis, receive a sharp chastisement in his preface, and a full answer in his text. He was a man of the most varied acquirements and an elegant writer. More full references and the correction of a few errors of detail would render his book more satisfactory to the professor of history, but for the student it is the best in the world. He is graphic, easy, and Irish. He is not a bigot, but apparently a genuine Catholic. His information as to the numbers of troops, and other facts of our Irish battles, is superior to any other general historian’s; and they who know it well need not blush, as most Irishmen must now, at their ignorance of Irish history.

But the Association for liberating Ireland has offered a prize for a new history of the country, and given ample time for preparation.

Let no man postpone the preparation who hopes the prize. An original and highly-finished work is what is demanded, and for the composition of such a work the time affords no leisure.

Few persons, we suppose, hitherto quite ignorant of Irish history, will compete; but we would not discourage even these. There is neither in theory nor fact any limit to the possible achievements of genius and energy. Some of the greatest works in existence were written rapidly, and many an old book-worm fails where a young book-thrasher succeeds.

Let us now consider some of the qualities which should belong to this history.

It should, in the first place, be written from the original authorities. We have some notion of giving a set of papers on these authorities, but there are reasons against such a course, and we counsel no man to rely on us - every one on himself; besides, such a historian should rather make himself able to teach us than need to learn from us.

However, no one can now be at a loss to know what these authorities are. A list of the choicest of them is printed on the back of the Volunteer’s card for this year, and was also printed in the Nation. [30] These authorities are not enough for a historian. The materials, since the Revolution especially, exist mainly in pamphlets, and even for the time previous only the leading authorities are in the list. The list is not faulty in this, as it was meant for learners, not teachers; but anyone using these authorities will readily learn from them what the others are, and can so track out for himself.

There are, however, three tracts specially on the subject of Irish writers. First is Bishop Nicholson’s “Irish Historical Library.” It gives accounts of numerous writers, but is wretchedly meagre. In Harris’s “Hibernica” is a short tract on the same subject; and in Harris’s edition of Ware’s works an ample treatise on Irish Writers. This treatise is most valuable, but must be read with caution, as Ware was slightly, and Harris enormously, prejudiced against the native Irish and against the later Catholic writers. The criticisms of Harris, indeed, on all books relative to the Religious Wars are partial and deceptious; but we repeat that the work is of great value.

The only more recent work on the subject is a volume written by Edward O’Reilly, for the Iberno-Celtic Society, on the Native Irish Poets: an interesting work, and containing morsels invaluable to a picturesque historian.

By the way, we may hope that the studies for this prize history will be fruitful for historical ballads.

Too many of the original works can only be bought at an expense beyond the means of most of those likely to compete. For instance, Harris’s “Ware,” “Fynes Moryson,” and “The State Papers of Henry the Eighth,” are very dear. The works of the Archæological Society can only be got by a member. The price of O’Connor’s “Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores Veteres” is eighteen guineas; and yet, in it alone the annals of Tigernach, Boyle, Innisfallen, and the early part of the “Four Masters” are to be found. The great majority of the books, however, are tolerably cheap; some of the dearer books might be got by combination among several persons, and afterwards given to the Repeal Reading-rooms.

However, persons resident in, or able to visit Dublin, Cork, or Belfast, can study all, even the scarcest of these works, without any real difficulty.

As to the qualities of such a history, they have been concisely enough intimated by the Committee.

It is to be A History. One of the most absurd pieces of cant going is that against history, because it is full of wars, and kings, and usurpers, and mobs. History describes, and is meant to describe, forces, not proprieties - the mights, the acted realities of men, bad and good - their historical importance depending on their mightiness, not their holiness. Let us by all means have, then, a “graphic” narrative of what was, not a set of moral disquisitions on what ought to have been.

Yet the man who would keep chronicling the dry events would miss writing a history. He must fathom the social condition of the peasantry, the townsmen, the middle-classes, the nobles, and the clergy (Christian or Pagan), in each period - how they fed, dressed, armed, and housed themselves. He must exhibit the nature of the government, the manners, the administration of law, the state of useful and fine arts, of commerce, of foreign relations. He must let us see the decay and rise of great principles and conditions - till we look on a tottering sovereignty, a rising creed, an incipient war, as distinctly as, by turning to the highway, we can see the old man, the vigorous youth, or the infant child. He must paint - the council robed in its hall - the priest in his temple - the conspirator - the outlaw - the judge - the general - the martyr. The arms must clash and shine with genuine, not romantic, likeness; and the brigades or clans join battle, or divide in flight, before the reader’s thought. Above all, a historian should be able to seize on character, not vaguely eulogising nor cursing; but feeling and expressing the pressure of a great mind on his time, and on after-times.

Such things may be done partly in disquisitions, as in Michelet’s “France”; but they must now be done in narrative; and nowhere, not even in Livy, is there a finer specimen of how all these things may be done by narrative than in Augustine Thierry’s “Norman Conquest” and “Merovingian Scenes.” The only danger to be avoided in dealing with so long a period in Thierry’s way is the continuing to attach importance to a once great influence, when it has sunk to be an exceptive power. He who thinks it possible to dash off a profoundly coloured and shaded narrative like this of Thierry’s will find himself bitterly wrong. Even a great philosophical view may much more easily be extemporised than this lasting and finished image of past times.

The greatest vice in such a work would be bigotry - bigotry of race or creed. We know a descendant of a great Milesian family who supports the Union, because he thinks the descendants of the Anglo-Irish - his ancestors’ foes - would mainly rule Ireland, were she independent. The opposite rage against the older races is still more usual. A religious bigot is altogether unfit, incurably unfit, for such a task; and the writer of such an Irish history must feel a love for all sects, a philosophical eye to the merits and demerits of all, and a solemn and haughty impartiality in speaking of all.

Need we say that a history, wherein glowing oratory appeared in place of historical painting, bold assertion instead of justified portraiture, flattery to the living instead of justice to the dead, clever plunder of other compilers instead of original research, or a cramped and scholastic instead of an idiomatic, “clear and graphic” style, would deserve rejection, and would, we cannot doubt, obtain it.

To give such a history to Ireland as is now sought will be a proud and illustrious deed. Such a work would have no passing influence, though its first political effect would be enormous; it would be read by every class and side; for there is no readable book on the subject; it would people our streets, and glens, and castles, and abbeys, and coasts with a hundred generations besides our own; it would clear up the grounds of our quarrels, and prepare reconciliation; it would unconsciously make us recognise the causes of our weakness; it would give us great examples of men and of events, and materially influence our destiny.

Shall we get such a history? Think, reader! has God given you the soul and perseverance to create this marvel?

There was once civilisation in Ireland. We never were very eminent, to be sure, for manufactures in metal, our houses were simple, our very palaces rude, our furniture scanty, our saffron shirts not often changed, and our foreign trade small. Yet was Ireland civilised. Strange thing! says someone whose ideas of civilisation are identical with carpets and cut-glass, fine masonry, and the steam engine; yet ‘tis true. For there was a time when learning was endowed by the rich and honoured by the poor, and taught all over our country. Not only did thousands of natives frequent our schools and colleges, but men of every rank came here from the Continent to study under the professors and system of Ireland, and we need not go beyond the testimonies of English antiquaries, from Bede to Camden, that these schools were regarded as the first in Europe. Ireland was equally remarkable for piety. In the Pagan times it was regarded as a sanctuary of the Magian or Druid creed. From the fifth century it became equally illustrious in Christendom. Without going into the disputed question of whether the Irish church was or was not independent of Rome, it is certain that Italy did not send out more apostles from the fifth to the ninth centuries than Ireland, and we find their names and achievements remembered through the Continent.

Of two names which Hallam thinks worth rescuing from the darkness of the dark ages, one is the Irish metaphysician, John Erigena. In a recent communication to the “Association” we had Bavarians acknowledging the Irish St. Killian as the apostle of their country.

Yet what, beyond a catalogue of names and a few marked events, do even the educated Irish know of the heroic pagans or the holy Christians of Old Ireland? These men have left libraries of biography, religion, philosophy, natural history, topography, history, and romance. They cannot all be worthless; yet, except the few volumes given us by the Archæological Society, which of their works have any of us read?

It is also certain that we possessed written laws with extensive and minute comments and reported decisions. These Brehon laws have been foully misrepresented by Sir John Davies. Their tenures were the gavelkind once prevalent over most of the world. The land belonged to the clan, and on the death of a clansman his share was re-apportioned according to the number and wants of his family. The system of erics or fines for offences has existed amongst every people from the Hebrews downwards, nor can anyone, knowing the multitude of crimes now punishable by fines or damages, think the people of this empire justified in calling the ancient Irish barbarous because they extended the system. There is in these laws, so far as they are known, minuteness and equity; and what is a better test of their goodness we learn from Sir John Davies himself, and from the still abler Baron Finglass, that the people reverenced, obeyed, and clung to these laws, though to decide by or obey them was a high crime by England’s code. Moreover, the Norman and Saxon settlers hastened to adopt these Irish laws, and used them more resolutely, if possible, than the Irish themselves.

Orderliness and hospitality were peculiarly cultivated. Public caravansarais were built for travellers in every district, and we have what would almost be legal evidence of the grant of vast tracts of land for the supply of provisions for these houses of hospitality. The private hospitality of the chiefs was equally marked; nor was it quite rude. Ceremony was united with great freedom of intercourse, age, and learning, and rank, and virtue were respected, and these men, whose cookery was probably as coarse as that of Homer’s heroes, had around their board harpers and bards who sang poetry as gallant and fiery, though not so grand, as the Homeric ballad-singers, and flung off a music which Greece never rivalled.

Shall a people, pious, hospitable, and brave, faithful observers of family ties, cultivators of learning, music, and poetry, be called less than civilised because mechanical arts were rude and “comfort” despised by them?

Scattered through the country in MS. are hundreds of books wherein the laws and achievements, the genealogies and possessions, the creeds and manners and poetry of these our predecessors in Ireland are set down. Their music lives in the traditional airs of every valley.

Yet mechanical civilisation, more cruel than time, is trying to exterminate them, and, therefore, it becomes us all who do not wish to lose the heritage of centuries, nor to feel ourselves living among nameless ruins, when we might have an ancestral home - it becomes all who love learning, poetry, or music, or are curious of human progress, to aid in or originate a series of efforts to save all that remains of the past.

It becomes them to lose no opportunity of instilling into the minds of their neighbours, whether they be corporators or peasants, that it is a brutal, mean, and sacrilegious thing to turn a castle, a church, a tomb, or a mound into a quarry or a gravel pit, or to break the least morsel of sculpture, or to take any old coin or ornament they may find to a jeweller, so long as there is an Irish Academy in Dublin to pay for it or accept it.

Before the year is out we hope to see A Society for The Preservation of Irish Music established in Dublin, under the joint patronage of the leading men of all politics, with branches in the provincial towns for the collection and diffusion of Irish airs. [31]

An effort - a great and decided one - must be made to have the Irish Academy so endowed out of the revenues of Ireland that it may be A National School of Irish History and Literature and a Museum of Irish Antiquities on the largest scale. In fact, the Academy should be a secular Irish College, with professors of our old language, literature, history, antiquities, and topography; with suitable schools, lecture-rooms, and museums.

We were a little struck the other day in taking up a new book by Merimée to see after his name the title of “Inspector-General of the Historical Monuments of France.” So then France, with the feeding, clothing, protecting, and humouring of thirty-six million people to attend to, has leisure to employ a Board and Inspector, and money to pay them for looking after the Historical Monuments of France, lest the Bayeux tapestry, which chronicles the conquest of England, or the Amphitheatre of Nimes, which marks the sojourn of the Romans, suffer any detriment.

And has Ireland no monuments of her history to guard; has she no tables of stone, no pictures, no temples, no weapons? Are there no Brehon’s chairs on her hills to tell more clearly than Vallancey or Davies how justice was administered here? Do not you meet the Druid’s altar and the Gueber’s tower in every barony almost, and the Ogham stones in many a sequestered spot, and shall we spend time and money to see, to guard, or to decipher Indian topes, and Tuscan graves, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and shall every nation in Europe shelter and study the remains of what it once was, even as one guards the tomb of a parent, and shall Ireland let all go to ruin?

We have seen pigs housed in the piled friezes of a broken church, cows stabled in the palaces of the Desmonds, and corn threshed on the floor of abbeys, and the sheep and the tearing wind tenant the corridors of Aileach.

Daily are more and more of our crosses broken, of our tombs effaced, of our abbeys shattered, of our castles torn down, of our cairns sacrilegiously pierced, of our urns broken up, and of our coins melted down. All classes, creeds and politics are to blame in this. The peasant lugs down a pillar for his sty, the farmer for his gate, the priest for his chapel, the minister for his glebe. A mill-stream runs through Lord Moore’s Castle,[32] and the Commissioners of Galway have shaken and threatened to remove the Warden’s house - that fine stone chronicle of Galway heroism.

How our children will despise us all for this! Why shall we seek for histories, why make museums, why study the manners of the dead, when we foully neglect or barbarously spoil their homes, their castles, their temples, their colleges, their courts, their graves? He who tramples on the past does not create for the future. The same ignorant and vagabond spirit which made him a destructive prohibits him from creating for posterity.

Does not a man, by examining a few castles and arms, know more of the peaceful and warrior life of the dead nobles and gentry of our island than from a library of books; and yet a man is stamped as unlettered and rude if he does not know and value such knowledge. Ware’s Antiquities, and Archdall, speak not half so clearly the taste, the habits, the everyday customs of the monks, as Adare Monastery,[33] for the fine preservation of which we owe so much to Lord Dunraven.

The state of civilisation among our Scotic or Milesian, or Norman, or Danish sires, is better seen from the Museum of the Irish Academy, and from a few raths, keeps, and old coast towns, than from all the prints and historical novels we have. An old castle in Kilkenny, a house in Galway give us a peep at the arts, the intercourse, the creed, the indoor and some of the outdoor ways of the gentry of the one, and of the merchants of the other, clearer than Scott could, were he to write, or Cattermole were he to paint, for forty years.

We cannot expect Government to do anything so honourable and liberal as to imitate the example of France, and pay men to describe and save these remains of dead ages. But we do ask it of the clergy, Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenting, if they would secure the character of men of education and taste - we call upon the gentry, if they have any pride of blood, and on the people, if they reverence Old Ireland, to spare and guard every remnant of antiquity. We ask them to find other quarries than churches, abbeys, castles and cairns - to bring rusted arms to a collector and coins to a museum, and not to iron or goldsmiths, and to take care that others do the like. We talk much of Old Ireland, and plunder and ruin all that remains of it - we neglect its language, fiddle with its ruins, and spoil its monuments. [34]

There is on the north (the left) bank of the Boyne, between Drogheda and Slane, a pile compared to which, in age, the Oldbridge obelisk is a thing of yesterday, and compared to which, in lasting interest, the Cathedrals of Dublin would be trivial. It is the Temple of Grange. History is too young to have noted its origin - Archæology knows not its time. It is a legacy from a forgotten ancestor, to prove that he, too, had art and religion. It may have marked the tomb of a hero who freed, or an invader who subdued - a Brian or a Strongbow. But whether or not a hero’s or a saint’s bones consecrated it at first, this is plain - it is a temple of nigh two thousand years, perfect as when the last Pagan sacrificed within it. [35]

It is a thing to be proud of, as a proof of Ireland’s antiquity, to be guarded as an illustration of her early creed and arts. It is one of a thousand muniments of our old nationality which a national government would keep safe.

What, then, will be the reader’s surprise and anger to hear that some people having legal power or corrupt influence in Meath are getting, or have got, a presentment for a road to run right through the Temple of Grange!

We do not know their names, nor, if the design be at once given up, as in deference to public opinion it must finally be, shall we take the trouble to find them out. But if they persist in this brutal outrage against so precious a landmark of Irish history and civilisation, then we frankly say if the law will not reach them public opinion shall, and they shall bitterly repent the desecration. These men who design, and those who consent to the act, may be Liberals or Tories, Protestants or Catholics, but beyond a doubt they are tasteless blockheads - poor devils without reverence or education - men, who, as Wordsworth says -

“Would peep and botanise
Upon their mothers’ graves.”

All over Europe the governments, the aristocracies, and the people have been combining to discover, gain, and guard every monument of what their dead countrymen had done or been. France has a permanent commission charged to watch over her antiquities. She annually spends more in publishing books, maps, and models, in filling her museums and shielding her monuments from the iron clutch of time, than all the roads in Leinster cost. It is only on time she needs to keep watch. A French peasant would blush to meet his neighbour had he levelled a Gaulish tomb, crammed the fair moulding of an abbey into his wall, or sold to a crucible the coins which tell that a Julius, a Charlemagne, or a Philip Augustus swayed his native land. And so it is everywhere. Republican Switzerland, despotic Austria, Prussia and Norway, Bavaria and Greece are all equally precious of everything that exhibits the architecture, sculpture, rites, dress, or manners of their ancestors - nay, each little commune would guard with arms these local proofs that they were not men of yesterday. And why should not Ireland be as precious of its ruins, its manuscripts, its antique vases, coins, and ornaments, as these French and German men - nay, as the English, for they, too, do not grudge princely grants to their museums and restoration funds.

This island has been for centuries either in part or altogether a province. Now and then above the mist we see the whirl of Sarsfield’s sword, the red battle-hand of O’Neill, and the points of O’Connor’s spears; but ‘tis a view through eight hundred years to recognise the Sunburst on a field of liberating victory. Reckoning back from Clontarf, our history grows ennobled (like that of a decayed house), and we see Lismore and Armagh centres of European learning; we see our missionaries seizing and taming the conquerors of Europe, and, farther still, rises the wizard pomp of Eman and Tara - the palace of the Irish Pentarchy. And are we the people to whom the English (whose fathers were painted savages when Tyre and Sidon traded with this land) can address reproaches for our rudeness and irreverence? So it seems. The Athenæum says: -

“It is much to be regretted that the society lately established in England, having for its object the preservation of British antiquities, did not extend its design over those of the sister island, which are daily becoming fewer and fewer in number. That the gold ornaments which are so frequently found in various parts of Ireland should be melted down for the sake of the very pure gold of which they are composed, is scarcely surprising; but that carved stones and even immense druidical remains should be destroyed is, indeed, greatly to be lamented. At one of the late meetings of the Royal Irish Academy a communication was made of the intention of the proprietor of the estate at New Grange to destroy that most gigantic relic of druidical times, which has justly been termed the Irish pyramid, merely because its vast size ‘cumbereth the ground.’ At Mellifont a modern cornmill of large size has been built out of the stones of the beautiful monastic buildings, some of which still adorn that charming spot. At Monasterboice, the churchyard of which contains one of the finest of the round towers, are the ruins of two of the little ancient stone Irish churches, and three most elaborately carved stone crosses, eighteen or twenty feet high. The churchyard itself is overrun with weeds, the sanctity of the place being its only safeguard. At Clonmacnoise, where, some forty years ago, several hundred inscriptions in the ancient Irish character were to be seen upon the gravestones, scarcely a dozen (and they the least interesting) are now to be found - the large flat stones on which they were carved forming excellent slabs for doorways, the copings of walls, etc.! It was the discovery of some of these carved stones in such a situation which had the effect of directing the attention of Mr. Petrie (then an artist in search of the picturesque, but now one of the most enlightened and conscientious of the Irish antiquaries) to the study of antiquities; and it is upon the careful series of drawings made by him that future antiquarians must rely for very much of ancient architectural detail now destroyed. As to Glendalough, it is so much a holiday place for the Dubliners that it is no wonder everything portable has disappeared. Two or three of the seven churches are levelled to the ground - all the characteristic carvings described by Ledwich, and which were ‘quite unique in Ireland,’ are gone. Some were removed and used as keystones for the arches of Derrybawn bridge. Part of the churchyard has been cleared of its gravestones, and forms a famous place, where the villagers play at ball against the old walls of the church. The little church, called ‘St. Kevin’s Kitchen,’ is given up to the sheep, and the font lies in one corner, and is used for the vilest purposes. The abbey church is choked up with trees and brambles, and being a little out of the way a very few of the carved stones still remain there, two of the most interesting of which I found used as coping-stones to the wall which surrounds it. The connection between the ancient churches of Ireland and the North of England renders the preservation of the Irish antiquities especially interesting to the English antiquarian; and it is with the hope of drawing attention to the destruction of those ancient Irish monuments that I have written these few lines. The Irish themselves are, unfortunately, so engrossed with political and religious controversies, that it can scarcely be hoped that single-handed they will be roused to the rescue even of these evidences of their former national greatness. Besides, a great obstacle exists against any interference with the religious antiquities of the country, from the strong feelings entertained by the people on the subject, although practically, as we have seen, of so little weight. Let us hope that the public attention directed to these objects will have a beneficial result and ensure a greater share of ‘justice to Ireland’; for will it be believed that the only establishment in Ireland for the propagation and diffusion of scientific and antiquarian knowledge - the Royal Irish Academy - receives annually the munificent sum of £300 from the Government! And yet, notwithstanding this pittance, the members of that society have made a step in the right direction by the purchase of the late Dean of St. Patrick’s Irish Archæological Collection, of which a fine series of drawings is now being made at the expense of the Academy, and of which they would, doubtless, allow copies to be made, so as to obtain a return of a portion of the expense to which they are now subjected. Small, moreover, as the collection is, it forms a striking contrast with our own National Museum, which, rich in foreign antiquities, is almost without a single object of native archæological interest, if we except the series of English and Anglo-Saxon coins and MSS.”

The Catholic clergy were long and naturally the guardians of our antiquities, and many of their archæological works testify their prodigious learning. Of late, too, the honourable and wise reverence brought back to England has reached the Irish Protestant clergy, and they no longer make antiquity a reproach, or make the maxims of the iconoclast part of their creed.

Is it extravagant to speculate on the possibility of the Episcopalian, Catholic, and Presbyterian clergy joining in an Antiquarian Society to preserve our ecclesiastical remains - our churches, our abbeys, our crosses, and our fathers’ tombs, from fellows like the Meath road-makers? It would be a politic and a noble emulation of the sects, restoring the temples wherein their sires worshipped for their children to pray in. There’s hardly a barony wherein we could not find an old parish or abbey church, capable of being restored to its former beauty and convenience at a less expense than some beastly barn is run up, as if to prove and confirm the fact that we have little art, learning, or imagination.

Nor do we see why some of these hundreds of half-spoiled buildings might not be used for civil purposes - as almshouses, schools, lecture-rooms, town-halls. It would always add another grace to an institution to have its home venerable with age and restored to beauty. We have seen men of all creeds join the Archæological Society to preserve and revive our ancient literature. Why may we not see, even without waiting for the aid of an Irish Parliament, an Antiquarian Society, equally embracing the chief civilians and divines, and charging itself with the duties performed in France by the Commission of Antiquities and Monuments?

The Irish antiquarians of the last century did much good. They called attention to the history and manners of our predecessors which we had forgotten. They gave a pedigree to nationhood, and created a faith that Ireland could and should be great again by magnifying what she had been. They excited the noblest passions - veneration, love of glory, beauty, and virtue. They awoke men’s fancy by their gorgeous pictures of the past, and imagination strove to surpass them by its creations. They believed what they wrote, and thus their wildest stories sank into men’s minds. To the exertions of Walker, O’Halloran, Vallancey, and a few other Irish academicians in the last century, we owe almost all the Irish knowledge possessed by our upper classes till very lately. It was small, but it was enough to give a dreamy renown to ancient Ireland; and if it did nothing else, it smoothed the reception of Bunting’s music, and identified Moore’s poetry with his native country.

While, therefore, we at once concede that Vallancey was a bad scholar, O’Halloran a credulous historian, and Walker a shallow antiquarian, we claim for them gratitude and attachment, and protest, once for all, against the indiscriminate abuse of them now going in our educated circles.

But no one should lie down under the belief that these were the deep and exact men their contemporaries thought them. They were not patient nor laborious. They were very graceful, very fanciful, and often very wrong in their statements and their guesses. How often they avoided painful research by gay guessing we are only now learning. O’Halloran and Keatinge have told us bardic romances with the same tone as true chronicles. Vallancey twisted language, towers, and traditions into his wicker-work theory of Pagan Ireland; and Walker built great facts and great blunders, granite blocks and rotten wood, into his antiquarian edifices. One of the commonest errors, attributing immense antiquity, oriental origin, and everything noble in Ireland to the Milesians, originated with these men; or, rather, was transferred from the adulatory songs of clan-bards to grave stories. Now, it is quite certain that several races flourished here before the Milesians, and that everything oriental, and much that was famous in Ireland, belonged to some of these elder races, and not to the Scoti or Milesians.

Premising this much of warning and defence as to the men who first made anything of ancient Ireland known to the mixed nation of modern Ireland, we turn with pure pleasure to their successors, the antiquarians and historians of our own time.

We liked for awhile bounding from tussuck to tussuck, or resting on a green esker in the domain of the old academicians of Grattan’s time; but ‘tis pleasanter, after all, to tread the firm ground of our own archæologists.

When valour becomes a reproach, when patriotism is thought a prejudice, and when a soldier’s sword is a sign of shame, the Irish Brigade will be forgotten or despised.

The Irish are a military people - strong, nimble, and hardy, fond of adventure, irascible, brotherly, and generous - they have all the qualities that tempt men to war and make them good soldiers. Dazzled by their great fame on the Continent, and hearing of their insular wars chiefly through the interested lies of England, Voltaire expressed his wonder that a nation which had behaved so gallantly abroad had “always fought badly at home.” It would have been most wonderful.

It may be conceded that the Irish performed more illustrious actions on the Continent. They fought with the advantages of French discipline and equipment; they fought as soldiers, with the rights of war, not “rebels, with halters round their necks”; they fought by the side of great rivals and amid the gaze of Europe.

In the most of their domestic wars they appeared as divided clans or abrupt insurgents; they were exposed to the treachery of a more instructed, of an unscrupulous and a compact enemy; they had neither discipline, nor generalship, nor arms; their victories were those of a mob; their defeats were followed by extermination.

We speak of their ordinary contests with England from the time of Roderick O’Connor to that of ‘98. Occasionally they had more opportunities, and their great qualities for war appeared. In Hugh (or, rather Aodh) O’Neill they found a leader who only wanted material resources to have made them an independent nation. Cautious, as became the heir of so long a strife, he spent years in acquiring military knowledge and nursing up his clan into the kernel for a nation; crafty as Bacon and Cecil, and every other man of his time, he learned war in Elizabeth’s armies, and got help from her store-houses. When the discontent of the Pale, religious tyranny, and the intrigues and hostility of Spain and Rome against England gave him an opening, he put his ordered clan into action, stormed the neighbouring garrisons, struck terror into his hereditary foes, and gave hope to all patriots; but finding that his ranks were too few for battle, he negotiated successfully for peace, but unavailingly for freedom; his grievances and designs remained, and he retired to repeat the same policy, till, after repeated guerillas and truces, he was strong enough to proclaim alliance with Spain and war with England, and to defeat and slay every deputy that assailed him, till at last he marched from the triumph of Beal-an-ath Buidhe[39] (where Marshal Bagenal and his army perished) to hold an almost royal court at Munster, and to reduce the Pale to the limits it had formed in the Wars of the Roses; and even when the neglect of Spain, the genius of Mountjoy, the resources and intrigues of England, and the exhaustion and divisions of Ireland had rendered success hopeless, the Irish under O’Ruarc, O’Sullivan, and O’Doherty vindicated their military character.

From that period they, whose foreign services, since Dathi’s time, had been limited to supplying feudatories to the English kings, began to fight under the flags of England’s enemies in every corner of Europe. The artifices of the Stuarts regained them, and in the reign of Charles the First they were extensively enlisted for the English allies and for the crown; but it was under the guidance of another O’Neill, and for Ireland,[40] they again exhibited the qualities which had sustained Tyrone. The battle of Benburb affords as great a proof of Irish soldiership as Fontenoy.

But it was when, with a formal government and in a regular war, they encountered the Dutch invader, they showed the full prowess of the Irish; and at the Boyne, Limerick, Athlone, and Aughrim, in victory or defeat, and always against immensely superior numbers and armaments, proved that they fought well at home.

Since the day when Sarsfield sailed the Irish have never had an opportunity of refuting the calumny of England which Voltaire accepted. In ‘98 they met enormous forces resting on all the magazines of England; they had no officers; their leaders, however brave, neither knew how to organise, provision, station, or manœuvre troops - their arms were casual - their ignorance profound - their intemperance unrestrainable. If they put English supremacy in peril (and had Arklow or Ballinahinch been attacked with skill, that supremacy was gone), they did so by mere valour.

It is, therefore, on the Continent that one must chiefly look for Irish trophies. It is a pious and noble search; but he who pursues it had need to guard against the error we have noticed in Voltaire, of disparaging Irish soldiership at home.

The materials for the history of the Irish Brigade are fast accumulating. We have before us the Military History of the Irish Nation, by the late Matthew O’Conor. He was a barrister, but studied military subjects (as became a gentleman and a citizen), peculiarly interested himself in the achievements of his countrymen, and prepared materials for a history of them. He died, leaving his work unfinished, yet, happily sufficiently advanced to offer a continuous narrative of Irish internal wars, from Hugh O’Neill to Sarsfield, and of their foreign services up to the Peace of Utrecht, in 1711. The style of the work is earnest and glowing, full of patriotism and liberality; but Mr. O’Conor was no blind partisan, and he neither hides the occasional excesses of the Irish, nor disparages their opponents. His descriptions of battles are very superior to what one ordinarily meets in the works of civilians, and any one reading them with a military atlas will be gratified and instructed.

The value of the work is vastly augmented by the appendix, which is a memoir of the Brigade, written in French, in 1749, and including the War Office orders, and all the changes in organisation, numbers, and pay of the Brigade to that date. This memoir is authenticated thus: -

“His Excellency, the Duke of Feltré, Minister of War, was so kind as to communicate to me the original memoir above cited, of which this is a perfect copy, which I attest.

“De Montmorency Morres (Hervé),
“Adjutant-Commandant, Colonel.
“Paris, 1st September, 1813.”

To give any account of the details of Mr. O’Conor’s book we should abridge it, and an abridgment of a military history is a catalogue of names. It contains accounts of Hugh O’Neill’s campaigns and of the wars of William and James in Ireland. It describes (certainly a new chapter in our knowledge) the services of the Irish in the Low Countries and France during the religious wars in Henri Quatre’s time, and the hitherto equally unknown actions abroad during Charles the Second’s exile and reign.

The wars of Mountcashel’s (the old) Brigade in 1690-91, under St. Ruth in Savoy, occupy many interesting pages, and the first campaigns of the New Brigade, with the death of Sarsfield and Mountcashel, are carefully narrated. The largest part of the work is occupied with the wars of the Spanish succession, and contains minute narratives of the battles and sieges of Cremona, Spire, Luzzaca, Blenheim, Cassano, Ramilies, Almanza, Alcira, Malplaquet, and Denain, with the actions of the Irish in them.

Here are great materials for our future History of Ireland.

Of the long line of Protestant patriots Grattan is the first in genius, and first in services. He had a more fervid and more Irish nature than Swift or Flood, and he accomplished what Swift hardly dreamed, and Flood failed in - an Irish constitution. He had immeasurably more imagination than Tone; and though he was far behind the great Founder of the United Irishmen in organising power, he surpassed him in inspiration. The statues of all shall be in our forums, and examples of all in our hearts, but that of Grattan shall be pre-eminent. The stubborn and advancing energy of Swift and Flood may teach us to bear up against wrong; the principles of Tone may end in liberation; but the splendid nationality of Grattan shall glorify us in every condition.

The speeches of Grattan were collected and his memoirs written by his son. The latter is an accessible and an invaluable account of his life; but the speeches were out of print, not purchasable under five or six guineas, and then were unmanageably numerous for any but a professed politician. Mr. Madden’s volume gives for a trifle all Grattan’s most valuable speeches, with a memoir sufficient to explain the man and the orator.

On the speeches of Grattan here published we have little to say. They are the finest specimens of imaginative eloquence in the English, or in any, language. There is not much pathos, and no humour in them, and in these respects Grattan is far less of an Irishman, and of an orator too, than Curran; but a philosophy, penetrating constitutions for their warnings, and human nature for its guides - a statesman’s (as distinguished from an antiquarian’s) use of history - a passionate scorn and invective for the base, tyrannical, and unjust - a fiery and copious zeal for liberty and for Ireland, and a diction and cadence almost lyrical, made Grattan the sudden achiever of a Revolution, and will make him for ever one of the very elements of Ireland.

No other orator is so uniformly animated. No other orator has brightened the depths of political philosophy with such vivid and lasting light. No writer in the language except Shakespeare has so sublime and suggestive a diction. His force and vehemence are amazing - far beyond Chatham, far beyond Fox, far beyond any orator we can recall.

To the student of oratory Grattan’s speeches are dangerously suggestive, overpowering spirits that will not leave when bid. Yet, with all this terrible potency, who would not bask in his genius, even at the hazard of having his light for ever in your eyes. The brave student will rather exult in his effulgence - not to rob, not to mimic it - but to catch its inspiration, and then go on his way resolved to create a glory of his own which, however small, being genuine, shall not pale within its sphere.

To give a just idea of Grattan’s rush and splendour to anyone not familiar with his speeches is impossible; but some glimmer may be got by one reading the extracts we shall add here. We shall take them at random, as we open the pages in the book, and leave the reader, untaught in our great orator, to judge, if chance is certain of finding such gems, what would not judicious care discover! Let him use that care again and again.

“Sir, we may hope to dazzle with illumination, and we may sicken with addresses, but the public imagination will never rest, nor will her heart be well at ease; never! so long as the parliament of England exercises or claims a legislation over this country: so long as this shall be the case, that very free trade, otherwise a perpetual attachment, will be the cause of new discontent; it will create a pride to feel the indignity of bondage; it will furnish a strength to bite your chain, and the liberty withheld will poison the good communicated.

“The British minister mistakes the Irish character; had he intended to make Ireland a slave he should have kept her a beggar; there is no middle policy; win her heart by the restoration of her right, or cut off the nation’s right hand; greatly emancipate, or fundamentally destroy. We may talk plausibly to England, but so long as she exercises a power to bind this country, so long are the nations in a state of war; the claims of the one go against the liberty of the other, and the sentiments of the latter go to oppose those claims to the last drop of her blood. The English opposition, therefore, are right; mere trade will not satisfy Ireland - they judge of us by other great nations, by the nation whose political life has been a struggle for liberty; they judge of us with a true knowledge and just deference for our character: that a country enlightened as Ireland, chartered as Ireland, armed as Ireland and injured as Ireland, will be satisfied with nothing less than liberty.

“Impracticable! impracticable! impracticable! a zealous divine will say; any alteration is beyond the power and wisdom of parliament; above the faculties of man to make adequate provision for 900 clergymen who despise riches. Were it to raise a new tax for their provision, or for that of a body less holy, how easy the task! how various the means! but when the proposal is to diminish a tax already established, an impossibility glares us in the face, of a measure so contrary to our practices both in church and state.”

We were wrong in saying there was no humour in Grattan. Here is a passage humorous enough, but it is scornful, rhetorical humour: -

“It does not affect the doctrine of our religion; it does not alter the church establishment; it does not affect the constitution of episcopacy. The modus does not even alter the mode of their provision, it only limits the quantum, and limits it on principles much less severe than that charity which they preach, or that abstinence which they inculcate. Is this innovation? - as if the Protestant religion was to be propagated in Ireland, like the influence of a minister, by bribery; or like the influence of a county candidate, by money; or like the cause of a potwalloping canvasser, by the weight of the purse; as if Christ could not prevail over the earth unless Mammon took him by the hand. Am I to understand that if you give the parson 12s. in the acre for potatoes and 10s. for wheat, the Protestant religion is safe on its rock? But if you reduce him to 6s. the acre for potatoes and wheat, then Jupiter shakes the heavens with his thunder, Neptune rakes up the deep with his trident, and Pluto leaps from his throne! See the curate - he rises at six to morning prayers; he leaves company at six for evening prayer; he baptises, he marries, he churches, he buries, he follows with pious offices his fellow creature from the cradle to the grave; for what immense income! what riches to reward these inestimable services? (Do not depend on the penury of the laity, let his own order value his deserts.) £50 a year! £50! for praying, for christening, for marrying, for churching, for burying, for following with Christian offices his fellow-creature from cradle to grave; so frugal a thing is devotion, so cheap religion, so easy the terms on which man may worship his Maker, and so small the income, in the opinion of ecclesiastics, sufficient for the duties of a clergyman, as far as he is connected at all with the Christian religion.

“By this trade of parliament the King is absolute; his will is signified by both houses of parliament, who are now as much an instrument in his hand as a bayonet in the hands of a regiment. Like a regiment we have our adjutant, who sends to the infirmary for the old and to the brothel for the young, and men thus carted, as it were, into this house, to vote for the minister, are called the representatives of the people! Suppose General Washington to ring his bell, and order his servants out of livery to take their seats in Congress - you can apply this instance.

“It is not life but the condition of living - the slave is not so likely to complain of the want of property as the proprietor of the want of privilege. The human mind is progressive - the child does not look back to the parent that gave him being, nor the proprietor to the people that gave him the power of acquisition, but both look forward - the one to provide for the comforts of life, and the other to obtain all the privileges of property.”

But we have fallen on one of his most marvellous passages, and we give it entire: -

“I will put this question to my country; I will suppose her at the bar, and I will ask her, Will you fight for a Union as you would for a constitution? Will you fight for that Lords and that Commons who, in the last century, took away your trade, and, in the present, your constitution, as for that King, Lords, and Commons who have restored both? Well, the minister has destroyed this constitution; to destroy is easy. The edifices of the mind, like the fabrics of marble, require an age to build, but ask only minutes to precipitate; and as the fall of both is an effort of no time, so neither is it a business of any strength - a pick-axe and a common labourer will do the one - a little lawyer, a little pimp, a wicked minister the other.

“The Constitution, which, with more or less violence, has been the inheritance of this country for six hundred years - that modus tenendi parliamentum, which lasted and outlasted of Plantagenet the wars, of Tudor the violence, and of Stuart the systematic falsehood - the condition of our connection - yes, the constitution he destroys is one of the pillars of the British Empire. He may walk round it and round it, and the more he contemplates the more must he admire it - such a one as had cost England of money millions and of blood a deluge, cheaply and nobly expended - whose restoration had cost Ireland her noblest efforts, and was the habitation of her loyalty - we are accustomed to behold the kings of these countries in the keeping of parliament - I say of her loyalty as well as of her liberty, where she had hung up the sword of the Volunteer - her temple of fame as well as of freedom - where she had seated herself, as she vainly thought, in modest security and in a long repose.

“I have done with the pile which the minister batters, I come to the Babel which he builds; and as he throws down without a principle, so does he construct without a foundation. This fabric he calls a Union, and to this, his fabric, there are two striking objections - first it is no Union; it is not an identification of people, for it excludes the Catholics; secondly, it is a consolidation of the Irish legislatures - that is to say, a merger of the Irish parliament, and incurs every objection to a Union, without obtaining the only object which a Union professes; it is an extinction of the constitution, and an exclusion of the people. Well! he has overlooked the people as he has overlooked the sea. I say he excludes the Catholics, and he destroys their best chance of admission - the relative consequence. Thus he reasons, that hereafter, in course of time (he does not say when), if they behave themselves (he does not say how), they may see their subjects submitted to a course of discussion (he does not say with what result or determination); and as the ground for this inane period, in which he promises nothing, and in which, if he did promise much, at so remote a period he could perform nothing, unless he, like the evil he has accomplished, be immortal. For this inane sentence, in which he can scarcely be said to deceive the Catholic, or suffer the Catholic to deceive himself, he exhibits no other ground than the physical inanity of the Catholic body accomplished by a Union, which, as it destroys the relative importance of Ireland, so it destroys the relative proportion of the Catholic inhabitants, and thus they become admissible, because they cease to be anything. Hence, according to him, their brilliant expectation: ‘You were,’ say his advocates, and so imports his argument, ‘before the Union as three to one, you will be by the Union as one to four.’ Thus he founds their hopes of political power on the extinction of physical consequence, and makes the inanity of their body and the nonentity of their country the pillars of their future ambition.”

We now return to the memoir by Mr. Madden. It is not the details of a life meagre for want of space, and confused for want of principles, as most little biographies are; it is an estimate - a profound one - of Grattan’s original nature, of the influences which acted on him from youth to manhood, of his purposes, his principles, and his influence on Ireland.

Henry Grattan was twenty-nine years of age when he entered on politics, and in seven years he was the triumphant leader of a people free and victorious after hereditary bondage. He entered parliament educated in the meta-physical and political philosophy of the time, injured by its cold and epigrammatic verse and its artificial tastes - familiar with every form of aristocratic life from Kilkenny to London - familiar, too, with Chatham’s oratory and principles, and with Flood’s views and example. He came when there were great forces rushing through the land - eloquence, love of liberty, thirst for commerce, hatred of English oppression, impatience, glory, and, above all, a military array. He combined these elements and used them to achieve the Revolution of ‘82. Be he for ever honoured!

Mr. Madden defends him against Flood on the question of Simple Repeal. Here is his reasoning: -

“It is an easy thing now to dispose of the idle question of simple repeal. In truth, there was nothing whatever deserving of attention in the point raised by Mr. Flood. The security for the continuance of Irish freedom did not depend upon an English act of parliament. It was by Irish will and not at English pleasure that the new constitution was to be supported. The transaction between the countries was of a high political nature, and it was to be judged by political reason, and by statesmanlike computation, and not by the petty technicalities of the court of law. The revolution of 1782, as carried by Ireland, and assented to by England (in repealing the 6th George the First), was a political compact - proposed by one country, and acknowledged by the other in the face of Europe; it was not (as Mr. Flood and his partisans construed the transaction) of the nature of municipal right, to be enforced or annulled by mere judicial exposition.”

This is unanswerable, but Grattan should have gone further. The Revolution was effected mainly by the Volunteers, whom he had inspired; arms could alone have preserved the constitution. Flood was wrong in setting value on one form - Grattan in relying on any; but both before and after ‘82 Flood seems to have had glimpses that the question was one of might, as well as of right, and that national laws could not last under such an alien army.

Taken as military representatives, the Convention at the Rotunda was even more valuable than as a civic display. Mr. Madden censures Grattan for having been an elaborate neutral during these Reform dissensions; but that the result of such neutrality ruined the Convention proves a comparative want of power in Flood, who could have governed that Convention in spite of the rascally English and the feeble Irish Whigs. Oh, had Tone been in that council!

In describing Grattan’s early and enthusiastic and ceaseless advocacy of Catholic liberty, Mr. Madden has a just subject for unmixed eulogy. Let no one imagine that the interest of these Emancipation speeches has died with the achievement of what they pleaded for; they will ever remain divinest protests against the vice and impolicy of religious ascendency, of sectarian bitterness, and of bigot separation.

For this admirable beginning of the design of giving Ireland its most glorious achievement - the speeches of its orators - to contemplate, the country should be grateful; but if there can be anything better for it to hear than can be had in Grattan’s speeches, it is such language as this from his eloquent editor: -

“Reader! if you be an Irish Protestant, and entertain harsh prejudices against your Catholic countrymen, study the works and life of Grattan - learn from him - for none can teach you better how to purify your nature from bigotry. Learn from him to look upon all your countrymen with a loving heart - to be tolerant of infirmities caused by their unhappy history - and, like Grattan, earnestly sympathise with all that is brave and generous in their character.

“Reader! if you be an Irish Catholic, and that you confound the Protestant religion with tyranny, learn from Grattan that it is possible to be a Protestant and have a heart for Ireland and its people. Think that the brightest age of Ireland was when Grattan - a steady Protestant - raised it to proud eminence; think also that in the hour of his triumph he did not forget the state of your oppressed fathers, but laboured through his virtuous life that both you and your children should enjoy unshackled liberty of conscience.

“But reader! whether you be Protestant or Catholic, or whatever be your party, you will do well as an Irishman to ponder upon the spirit and principles which governed the public and private life of Grattan. Learn from him how to regard your countrymen of all denominations. Observe, as he did, how very much that is excellent belongs to both the great parties into which Ireland is divided. If (as some do) you entertain dispiriting views of Ireland, recollect that any country containing such elements as those which roused the genius of Grattan never need despair. Sursum corda. Be not disheartened.

“Go - go - my countrymen - and, within your social sphere, carry into practice those moral principles which Grattan so eloquently taught, and which he so remarkably enforced by his well-spent life. He will teach you to avoid hating men on account of their religious professions or hereditary descent. From him you will learn principles which, if carried out, would generate a new state of society in Ireland.”

’Twixt Croghan-Kinshela and Hook Head, ’twixt Carnsore and Mount Leinster, there is as good a mass of men as ever sustained a state by honest franchises, by peace, virtue, and intelligent industry; and as stout a mass as ever tramped through a stubborn battle. There is a county where we might seek more of stormy romance, and there is a county where prospers a shrewder economy, but no county in Ireland is fitter for freedom than Wexford.

They are a peculiar people - these Wexford men. Their blood is for the most part English and Welsh, though mixed with the Danish and Gaelic, yet they are Irish in thought and feeling. They are a Catholic people, yet on excellent terms with their Protestant landlords. Outrages are unknown, for though the rents are high enough, they are not unbearable by a people so industrious and skilled in farming.

Go to the fair and you will meet honest dealing, and a look that heeds no lordling’s frown - for the Wexford men have neither the base bend nor the baser craft of slaves. Go to the hustings, and you will see open and honest voting; no man shrinking or crying for concealment, or extorting a bribe under the name of “his expenses.” Go to their farms and you will see a snug homestead, kept clean, prettily sheltered (much what you’d see in Down); more green crops than even in Ulster; the National School and the Repeal Reading-room well filled, and every religious duty regarded.

Wexford is not all it might be, or all that, with more education and the life-hope of nationality, it will be - there is something to blame and something to lament, here a vice sustained, and there a misfortune lazily borne; yet, take it for all in all, it is the most prosperous, it is the pattern county of the South; and when we see it coming forward in a mass to renew its demand for native government, it is an omen that the spirit of the people outlives quarrels and jealousies, and that it has a rude vitality which will wear out its oppressors.

Nor are we indifferent to the memories of Wexford. It owes much of its peace and prosperity to the war it sustained. It rose in ‘98 with little organisation against intolerable wrong; and though it was finally beaten by superior forces, it taught its aristocracy and the government a lesson not easily forgotten - a lesson that popular anger could strike hard as well as sigh deeply; and that it was better to conciliate than provoke those who even for an hour had felt their strength. The red rain made Wexford’s harvest grow. Theirs was no treacherous assassination - theirs no stupid riot - theirs no pale mutiny. They rose in mass and swept the country by sheer force.

Nor in their sinking fortunes is there anything to blush at. Scullabogue was not burned by the fighting men.

Yet nowhere did the copper sun of that July burn upon a more heart-piercing sight than a rebel camp. Scattered on a hill-top, or screened in a gap, were the grey-coated thousands, their memories mad at burned cabins, and military whips, and hanged friends; their hopes dimmed by partial defeat; their eyes lurid with care; their brows full of gloomy resignation. Some have short guns which the stern of a boat might bear, but which press through the shoulder of a marching man; and others have light fowling-pieces, with dandy locks - troublesome and dangerous toys. Most have pikes, stout weapons, too; and though some swell to hand-spikes, and others thin to knives, yet, for all that, fatal are they to dragoon or musketeer if they can meet him in a rush; but how shall they do so? The gunsmen have only a little powder in scraps of paper or bags, and their balls are few and rarely fit. They have no potatoes ripe, and they have no bread - their food is the worn cattle they have crowded there, and which the first skirmish may rend from them. There are women and children seeking shelter, seeking those they love; and there are leaders busier, feebler, less knowing, less resolved than the women and the children.

Great hearts! how faithful ye are! How ye bristled up when the foe came on, how ye set your teeth to die as his shells and round-shot fell steadily; and with how firm a cheer ye dashed at him, if he gave you any chance at all of a grapple! From the wild burst with which ye triumphed at Oulart Hill, down to the faint gasp wherewith the last of your last column died in the corn-fields of Meath, there is nothing to shame your valour, your faith, or your patriotism. You wanted arms, and you wanted leaders. Had you had them, you would have guarded a green flag in Dublin Castle a week after you beat Walpole. Isolated, unorganised, unofficered, half-armed, girt by a swarm of foes, you ceased to fight, but you neither betrayed nor repented. Your sons need not fear to speak of Ninety-eight.

You, people of Wexford, almost all Repealers, are the sons of the men of ‘98; prosperous and many, will you only shout for Repeal, and line roads and tie boughs for a holiday? Or will you press your organisation, work at your education, and increase your political power, so that your leaders may know and act on the knowledge that, come what may, there is trust in Wexford?

From 1793 to 1829 - for thirty-six years - the Irish Catholics struggled for Emancipation. That Emancipation was but admission to the Bench, the Inner Bar, and Parliament. It was won by self-denial, genius, vast and sustained labours, and, lastly, by the sacrifice of the forty-shilling freeholders - the poor veterans of the war - and by submission to insulting oaths; yet it was cheaply bought. Not so cheaply, perchance, as if won by the sword; for on it were expended more treasures, more griefs, more intellect, more passion, more of all which makes life welcome, than had been needed for war; still it was cheaply bought, and Ireland has glorified herself, and will through ages triumph in the victory of ‘29.

Yet what was Emancipation compared to Repeal?

The one put a silken badge on a few members of one profession; the other would give to all professions and all trades the rank and riches which resident proprietors, domestic legislation, and flourishing commerce infallibly create.

Emancipation made it possible for Catholics to sit on the judgment seat; but it left a foreign administration, which has excluded them, save in two or three cases, where over-topping eminence made the acceptance of a Judgeship no promotion; and it left the local Judges - those with whom the people have to deal - as partial, ignorant, bigoted as ever; while Repeal would give us an Irish code and Irish-hearted Judges in every Court, from the Chancery to the Petty Sessions.

Emancipation dignified a dozen Catholics with a senatorial name in a foreign and hostile Legislature. Repeal would give us a Senate, a Militia, an Administration, all our own.

The Penal Code, as it existed since 1793, insulted the faith of the Catholics, restrained their liberties, and violated the public Treaty of Limerick. The Union has destroyed our manufactures, prohibits our flag, prevents our commerce, drains our rental, crushes our genius, makes our taxation a tribute, our representation a shadow, our name a by-word. It were nobler to strive for Repeal than to get Emancipation.

Four years ago the form of Repeal agitation began - two years ago, its reality. Have we not cause to be proud of the labours of these two years? If life be counted, not by the rising of suns, or the idle turning of machinery, but by the growth of the will, and the progress of thoughts and passions in the soul, we Irishmen have spent an age since we raised our first cry for liberty. Consider what we were then, and what we have done since. We had a People unorganised - disgusted with a Whig alliance - beaten in a dishonourable struggle to sustain a faction - ignorant of each other’s will - without books, without song, without leaders (save one), without purposes, without strength, without hope. The Corn Exchange was the faint copy of the Catholic Association, with a few enthusiasts, a few loungers, and a few correspondents. Opposite to us was the great Conservative party, with a majority exceeding our whole representation, united, flushed, led by the craftiest of living statesmen, and the ablest of living generals. Oh, how disheartening it was then, when, day by day, we found prophecy and exhortation, lay and labour, flung idly before a distracted People! May we never pass through that icy ordeal again!

How different now! The People are united under the greatest system of organisation ever attempted in any country. They send in, by their Collectors, Wardens, and Inspectors, to the central office of Ireland, the contributions needed to carry on the Registration of Voters, the public meetings, the publications, the law expenses, and the organisation of the Association; and that in turn carries on registries, holds meetings, opens reading-rooms, sends newspapers, and books, and political instructions, back through the same channel; so that the Central Committee knows the state of every parish, and every parish receives the teaching and obeys the will of the Central Committee.

The Whig Alliance has melted, like ice before the sun, and the strong souls of our people will never again serve the purposes of a faction.

The Conservative party, without union and without principle, is breaking up. Its English section is dividing into the tools of expediency and the pioneers of a New Generation - its Irish section into Castle Hacks and National Conservatives.

Meantime, how much have the Irish people gained and done? They have received and grown rich under torrents of thought. Song and sermon and music, speech and pamphlet, novel and history, essay and map and picture, have made the dull thoughtful and the thoughtful studious, and will make the studious wise and powerful. They have begun a system of self-teaching in their reading-rooms. If they carry it we shall, before two years, have in every parish men able to manufacture, to trade, and to farm - men acquainted with all that Ireland was, is, and should be - men able to serve The Irish Nation in peace and war.

In the teeth, too, of the Government we held our meetings. They are not for this time, but they were right well in their own time. They showed our physical force to the Continent, to ourselves, to America, to our rulers. They showed that the people would come and go rapidly, silently, and at bidding, in numbers enough to recruit a dozen armies. These are literal facts. Any one monster meeting could have offered little resistance in the open country to a regular army, but it contained the materials - the numbers, intelligence, and obedience - of a conquering host. Whenever the impression of their power grows faint we shall revive them again.

The toleration of these meetings was the result of fear; the prosecution of their chiefs sprung from greater fear. That prosecution was begun audaciously, was carried on meanly and with virulence, and ended with a charge and a verdict which disgraced the law. An illegal imprisonment afforded glorious proof that the people could refrain from violence under the worst temptation; that their leaders were firm; and, better than all, that had these leaders been shot, not prisoned, their successors were ready. Such an imprisonment served Ireland more than an acquittal, for it tried her more; and then came the day of triumph, when the reluctant constitution liberated our chiefs and branded our oppressors.

This is a history of two years never surpassed in importance and honour. This is a history which our sons shall pant over and envy. This is a history which pledges us to perseverance. This is a history which guarantees success.

Energy, patience, generosity, skill, tolerance, enthusiasm created and decked the agitation. The world attended us with its thoughts and prayers. The graceful genius of Italy and the profound intellect of Germany paused to wish us well. The fiery heart of France tolerated our unarmed effort, and proffered its aid. America sent us money, thought, love - she made herself a part of Ireland in her passions and her organisation. From London to the wildest settlement which throbs in the tropics or shivers nigh the Pole, the empire of our misruler was shaken by our effort. To all earth we proclaimed our wrongs. To man and God we made oath that we would never cease to strive till an Irish nation stood supreme on this island. The genius which roused and organised us, the energy which laboured, the wisdom that taught, the manhood which rose up, the patience which obeyed, the faith which swore, and the valour that strained for action, are here still, experienced, recruited, resolute.

The future shall realise the promise of the past.

Bishop Berkeley put, as a query, could the Irish live and prosper if a brazen wall surrounded their island? The question has been often and vaguely replied to.

Dr. Kane has at length answered it, and proved the affirmative. Confining himself strictly to the land of our island (for he does not enter on the subjects of fisheries and foreign commerce), he has proved that we possess physical elements for every important art. Not that he sat down to prove this. Taste, duty, industry, and genius prompted and enabled him gradually to acquire a knowledge of the physical products and powers of Ireland, and his mastery of chemical and mechanical science enabled him to see how these could be used.

Thus qualified, he tried, in the lecture-room of the Dublin Society, to communicate his knowledge to the public. He was as successful as any man lecturing on subjects requiring accurate details could be; and now he has given, in the volume before us, all his lectures, and much more. He then is no party pamphleteer, pandering to the national vanity; but a philosopher, who garnered up his knowledge soberly and surely, and now gives us the result of his studies. There was undoubtedly a good deal of information on the subjects treated of by Dr. Kane scattered through our topographical works and parliamentary reports, but that information is, for the most part, vague, unapplied, and not tested by science. Dr. Kane’s work is full, clear, scientific, exact in stating places, extent, prices, and every other working detail, and is a manual of the whole subject.

In such interlaced subjects as industrial resources we must be content with practical classifications.

Dr. Kane proceeds in the following order: - First, he considers the mechanical powers of the country - viz., its fuel and its water powers. Secondly, its mineral resources - its iron, copper, lead, sulphur, marble, slates, etc. Thirdly, the agriculture of the country in its first function - the raising of food, and the modes of cropping, manuring, draining, and stacking. Fourthly, agriculture in its secondary use, as furnishing staples for the manufacture of woollens, linens, starch, sugar, spirits, etc. Fifthly, the modes of carrying internal trade by roads, canals, and railways. Sixthly, the cost and condition of skilled and unskilled labour in Ireland. Seventhly, our state as to capital. And he closes by some earnest and profound thoughts on the need of industrial education in Ireland.

Now, let us ask the reader what he knows upon any or all of these subjects; and whether he ought, as a citizen, or a man of education, or a man of business, to be ignorant of them? Such ignorance as exists here must be got rid of, or our cry of “Ireland for the Irish” will be a whine or a brag, and will be despised as it deserves. We must know Ireland from its history to its minerals, from its tillage to its antiquities, before we shall be an Irish nation, able to rescue and keep the country. And if we are too idle, too dull, or too capricious to learn the arts of strength, wealth, and liberty, let us not murmur at being slaves.

For the present we shall confine ourselves to the subjects of the mechanical powers and minerals of Ireland, as treated by Dr. Kane.

The first difference between manufactures now and in any former time is the substitution of machines for the hands of man. It may indeed be questioned whether the increased strength over matter thus given to man compensates for the ill effects of forcing people to work in crowds; of destroying small and pampering large capitalists, of lessening the distribution of wealth even by the very means which increases its production.

We sincerely lament, with Lord Wharncliffe, the loss of domestic manufactures; we would prefer one housewife skilled in the distaff and the dairy - home-bred, and home-taught, and home-faithful - to a factory full of creatures who live amid the eternal roll, and clash, and glimmer of spindles and rollers, watching with aching eyes the thousand twirls and capable of but one act - tying the broken threads. We abhor that state; we prefer the life of the old times, or of modern Norway.

But, situated as we are, so near a strong enemy, and in the new highway from Europe to America, it may be doubted whether we can retain our simple domestic life. There is but one chance for it. If the Prussian Tenure Code be introduced, and the people turned into small proprietors, there is much, perhaps every, hope of retaining our homestead habits; and such a population need fear no enemy.

If this do not come to pass, we must make the best of our state, join our chief towns with railways, put quays to our harbours, mills on our rivers, turbines on our coasts, and under restrictions and with guarantees set the steam engine to work at our flax, wool, and minerals.

The two great mechanical powers are fire and water. Ireland is nobly endowed with both.

We do not possess as ample fields of flaming coal as Britain; but even of that we have large quantities, which can be raised at about the same rate at which English coal can be landed on our coast.

The chief seats of flaming coal in Ireland are to the west of Lough Allen, in Connaught, and around Dungannon, in Tyrone. There is a small district of it in Antrim.

The stone coal, or anthracite, which, having little gas, does not blaze, and, having much sulphur, is disagreeable in a room, and has been thought unfit for smelting, is found - first, in the Kilkenny district, between the Nore and Barrow; secondly, from Freshford to Cashel; and thirdly, in the great Munster coal country, cropping up in every barony of Clare, Limerick, Cork, and Kerry. By the use of vapour with it, the anthracite appears to be freed from all its defects as a smelting and engine coal, and being a much more pure and powerful fuel than the flaming coal, there seems no reason to doubt that in it we have a manufacturing power that would supply us for generations.

Our bogs have not been done justice to. The use of turf in a damp state turns it into an inferior fuel. Dried under cover, or broken up and dried under pressure, it is more economical, because far more efficient. It is used now in the Shannon steamers, and its use is increasing in mills. For some purposes it is peculiarly good - thus, for the finer ironworks, turf and turf-charcoal are even better than wood, and Dr. Kane shows that the precious Baltic iron, for which from £15 to £35 per ton is given, could be equalled by Irish iron smelted by Irish turf for six guineas per ton.

Dr. Kane proves that the cost of fuel, even if greater in Ireland, by no means precludes us from competing with England; he does so by showing that the cost of fuel in English factories is only from 1 to 1½ per cent., while in Ireland it would be only 2½ to 3½ per cent., a difference greatly overbalanced by our cheaper labour - labour being over 33 per cent. of the whole expense of a factory.

Here is the analysis of the cost of producing cotton in England in 1830: -

In water-power we are still better off. Dr. Kane calculates the rain which falls on Ireland in a year at over 100 billion cubic yards; and of this he supposes two-thirds to pass off in evaporation, leaving one-third, equal to nearly a million and a half of horse-power, to reach the sea. His calculations of the water-power of the Shannon and other rivers are most interesting. The elements, of course, are the observed fall of rain by the gauge in the district, and the area of the catchment (or drainage) basins of each river and its tributaries. The chief objection to water-power is its irregularity. To remedy this he proposes to do what has increased the water-power on the Bann five-fold, and has made the wealth of Greenock - namely, to make mill-lakes by damming up valleys, and thus controlling and equalising the supply of water, and letting none go waste. His calculations of the relative merits of undershot, overshot, breast, and turbine wheels are most valuable, especially of the last, which is a late and successful French contrivance, acting by pressure. He proposes to use the turbine in coast mills, the tide being the motive-power; and, strange as it sounds, the experiments seem to decide in favour of this plan.

“The turbine was invented by M. Fourneyron. Coals being abundant, the steam engine is invented in England; coals being scarce, the water-pressure engine and the turbine are invented in France. It is thus the physical condition of each country directs its mechanical genius. The turbine is a horizontal wheel furnished with curved float-boards, on which the water presses from a cylinder which is suspended over the wheel, and the base of which is divided by curved partitions, that the water may be directed in issuing, so as to produce upon the curved float-boards of the wheel its greatest effect. The best curvature to be given to the fixed partitions and to the float-boards is a delicate problem, but practically it has been completely solved. The construction of the machine is simple, its parts not liable to go out of order; and as the action of the water is by pressure, the force is under the most favourable circumstances for being utilised.

“The effective economy of the turbine appears to equal that of the overshot wheel. But the economy in the turbine is accompanied by some conditions which render it peculiarly valuable. In a water-wheel you cannot have great economy of power without very slow motion, and hence where high velocity is required at the working point, a train of mechanism is necessary, which causes a material loss of force. Now, in the turbine the greatest economy is accompanied by rapid motion, and hence the connected machinery may be rendered much less complex. In the turbine also a change in the height of the head of water alters only the power of the machine in that proportion, but the whole quantity of water is economised to the same degree. Thus if a turbine be working with a force of ten horses, and that its supply of water be suddenly doubled, it becomes of twenty horse-power; if the supply be reduced to one-half, it still works five horse-power; whilst such sudden and extreme change would altogether disarrange water-wheels, which can only be constructed for the minimum, and allow the overplus to go to waste.”

Our own predilection being in favour of water-power - as cheaper, healthier, and more fit for Ireland than steam - gave the following peculiar interest in our eyes: -

“I have noticed at such length the question of the cost of fuel and of steam power, not from my own opinion of its ultimate importance, but that we might at once break down that barrier to all active exertion which indolent ignorance constantly retreats behind. The cry of ‘What can we do? consider England’s coal-mines,’ is answered by showing that we have available fuel enough. The lament that coals are so dear with us and so cheap in England, is, I trust, set at rest by the evidence of how little influential the price of fuel is. However, there are other sources of power besides coals; there are other motive-powers than steam. Of the 83,000 horse-power employed to give motion to mills in England, 21,000, even in the coal districts, are not moved by fire, but by water. The force of gravity in falling water can spin and weave as well as the elasticity of steam; and in this power we are not deficient. It is necessary to study its circumstances in detail, and I shall therefore next proceed to discuss the condition of Ireland with regard to water-power.”

Dr. Kane proves that we have at Arigna an inexhaustible supply of the richest iron ore, with coals to smelt it, lime to flux it, and infusible sand-stone and fire-clay to make furnaces of on the spot. Yet not a pig or bar is made there now. He also gives in great detail the extent, analysis, costs of working, and every other leading fact as to the copper mines of Wicklow, Knockmahon, and Allihies; the lead, gold, and sulphur mines of Wicklow; the silver mines of Ballylichey, and details of the building materials and marbles.

He is everywhere precise in his industrial and scientific statements, and beautifully clear in his style and arrangement.

Why, then, are we a poor province? Dr. Kane quotes Forbes, Quetelet, etc., to prove the physical strength of our people. He might have quoted every officer who commanded them to prove their courage and endurance; nor is there much doubt expressed even by their enemies of their being quick and inventive. Their soil is productive - the rivers and harbours good - their fishing opportunities great - so is their means of making internal communications across their great central plains. We have immense water and considerable fire power; and, besides the minerals necessary for the arts of peace, we are better supplied than almost any country with the finer sorts of iron, charcoal, and sulphur, wherewith war is now carried on. Why is it, with these means of amassing and guarding wealth, that we are so poor and paltry? Dr. Kane thinks we are so from want of industrial education. He is partly right. The remote causes were repeated foreign invasion, forfeiture, and tyrannous laws. Ignorance, disunion, self-distrust, quick credulity, and caprice were the weaknesses engendered in us by misfortune and misgovernment; and they were then the allies of oppression; for, had we been willing, we had long ago been rich and free. Knowledge is now within our reach if we work steadily; and strength of character will grow upon us by every month of perseverance and steadiness in politics, trade, and literature.

The Committee of 1824 was but meagrely supplied with evidence as to foreign surveys. They begin that subject with a notice of the Survey of England, made by order of William the Conqueror, and called the Doomsday Book. That book took six years to execute, and is most admirably analysed by Thierry.

The following is their summary account of some modern surveys: -

“In France the great territorial survey or cadastre has been in progress for many years. It was first suggested in 1763, and after an interval of thirty years, during which no progress was made, it was renewed by the government of that day, and individuals of the highest scientific reputation, MM. Lagrange, Laplace, and Delambre, were consulted with respect to the best mode of carrying into effect the intention of government. Subsequent events suspended any effectual operations in the French cadastre till the year 1802, when a school of topographical engineering was organised. The operations now in progress were fully commenced in 1808. The principle adopted is the formation of a central commission acting in conjunction with the local authorities; the classification of lands, according to an ascertained value, is made by three resident proprietors of land in each district, selected by the municipal council, and by the chief officer of revenue. ‘In the course of thirteen years, one-third only of each department had been surveyed, having cost the state £120,000 per annum. At the rate at which it is carried on, it may be computed as likely to require for its completion a total sum of £4,680,000, or an acreable charge of 8¾d.’ The delay of the work, as well as the increase of expense, seem to have been the result of the minuteness of the survey, which extends to every district field - a minuteness which, for many reasons, your committee consider both unnecessary and inexpedient to be sought for in the proposed Survey of Ireland.

“The survey of Bavaria is of modern date, but of equal minuteness. It is commenced by a primary triangulation, and principal and verification bases; it is carried on to a second triangulation, with very accurate instruments, so as to determine ‘all the principal points; the filling up the interior is completed by a peculiar species of plane table; and in order to do away with the inaccuracies of the common chain, the triangulation is carried down on paper to the most minute corners of fields.’ The map is laid down on a scale of twelve inches to the mile, or one-five-thousandth part of the real size; and as it contains all that is required in the most precise survey of property, it is used in the purchase and sale of real estates.

“The cadastre of Savoy and Piedmont began in 1729, and is stated to have at once afforded the government the means of apportioning justly all the territorial contributions, and to have put an end to litigations between individuals, by ascertaining, satisfactorily, the bounds of properties.

“The Neapolitan survey under Visconti, and that of the United States under Heslar, are both stated to be in progress; but your committee have not had the means of ascertaining on what principles they are conducted.”

The committee adopted a scale for the maps of six inches to a statute mile, believing, apparently with justice, that a six-inch scale map, if perfectly well executed, would be minute enough for buyers and sellers of land, especially as the larger holdings are generally townlands, the bounds of which they meant to include. And, wherever a greater scale was needed, the pentagraph afforded a sufficiently accurate plan of forming maps to it. They, in another point, proposed to differ from the Bavarian Survey, in omitting field boundaries, as requiring too much time and expense; but they stated that barony, parish, and townland boundaries were essential to the utility of the maps. They also seemed to think that for private purposes their utility would much depend on their being accompanied, as the Bavarian maps were, by a memoir of the number of families, houses, size, and description of farms, and a valuation. And for this purpose they printed all the forms. The valuation still goes on of the townlands, and classes of soil in each. The Statistical Memoir has, unfortunately, been stopped, and no survey or valuation of farms, or holdings as such, has been attempted. We would now only recall attention to the design of the Committee of 1824 on the subject.

They proposed to leave the whole Survey to the Board of Ordnance, and the Valuation to Civil Engineers.

The Valuation has been regulated by a series of Acts of Parliament, and we shall speak of it presently.

The Survey commenced in 1826, and has gone on under the superintendence of Colonel Colby, and the local control of Captain Larcom.

The following has been its progress: - First, a base line of about five miles was measured on the flat shore of Lough Foyle, and from thence triangular measurements were made by the theodolite and over the whole country, and all the chief points of mountain, coast, etc., ascertained. How accurately this was done has been proved by an astronomical measurement of the distance from Dublin to Armagh (about seventy miles), which only differed four feet from the distance calculated by the Ordnance triangles.

Having completed these large triangles, a detailed survey of the baronies, parishes, and townlands of each county followed. The field books were sent to the central station at Mountjoy, and sketched, engraved on copper, and printed there. The first county published was Derry, in 1833, and now the townland survey is finished, and all the counties have now been engraved and issued, except Limerick, Kerry, and Cork.

The Survey has also engraved a map of Dublin City on the enormous scale of five feet to a statute mile. This map represents the shape and space occupied by every house, garden, yard, and pump in Dublin. It contains antiquarian lettering. Every house, too, is numbered on the map. One of its sheets, representing the space from Trinity College to the Castle, is on sale, as we trust the rest of it will be.

Two other sets of maps remain to be executed. First - maps of the towns of Ireland, on a scale of five feet to a mile. Whatever may be said in reply to Sir Denham Norrey’s demand for a survey of holdings in rural districts does not apply to the case of towns, and we, therefore, trust that the holdings will be marked and separately valued in towns.

The other work is a general shaded map of Ireland, on a scale of one inch to the statute mile. At present, as we elsewhere remarked, the only tolerable shaded map of Ireland is that of the Railway Commission, which is on a scale of one inch to four statute miles. Captain Larcom proposes, and the Commission on the Ordnance Memoir recommend, that contour lines should be the skeleton of the shading. If this plan be adopted the publication cannot be for some years; but the shading will have the accuracy of machine-work instead of mere hand skill. Contours are lines representing series of levels through a country, and are inestimable for draining, road-making, and military movements. But though easily explained to the eye, we doubt our ability to teach their meaning by words only.

To return to the townland or six-inch survey. The names were corrected by Messrs. Petrie, O’Donovan, and Curry, from every source accessible in Ireland. Its maps contain the county, barony, parish, townland, and glebe boundaries, names and acreage; names and representations of all cities, towns, demesnes, farms, ruins, collieries, forges, limekilns, tanneries, bleach-greens, wells, etc., etc.; also of all roads, rivers, canals, bridges, locks, weirs, bogs, ruins, churches, chapels; they have also the number of feet of every little swell of land, and a mark for every cabin.

Of course these maps run to an immense number. Thus, for the county of Galway there are 137 double folio sheets, and for the small county of Dublin, 28. Where less than half the sheet is covered with engraving (as occurs towards the edges of a county) the sheet is sold, uncoloured, for 2s. 6d.; where more than half is covered the price is 5s.

In order to enable you to find any sheet so as to know the bearings of its ground on any other, there is printed for each county an index map, representing the whole county on one sheet. This sheet is on a small scale (from one to three miles to an inch), but contains in smaller type the baronies and parishes, roads, rivers, demesnes, and most of the information of general interest. This index map is divided by lines into as many oblong spaces as there are maps of the six-inch scale, and the spaces are numbered to correspond with the six-inch map. On the sides of the index maps are tables of the acreage of the baronies and parishes; and examples of the sort of marks and type used for each class of subjects in the six-inch maps. Uncoloured, the index map, representing a whole county, is sold for 2s. 6d.

Whenever those maps are re-engraved, the Irish words will, we trust, be spelled in an Irish and civilised orthography, and not barbarously, as at present.

It was proposed to print for each county one or more volumes, containing the history of the district and its antiquities, the numbers, and past and present state and occupations of the people, the state of its agriculture, manufactures, mines, and fisheries, and what means of extending these existed in the county, and its natural history, including geology, zoology, etc. All this was done for the town of Derry, much to the service and satisfaction of its people. All this ought to be as fully done for Armagh, Dublin, Cork, and every other part of Ireland.

The commissioners recommend that the geology of Ireland (and we would add natural history generally) should be investigated and published, not by the topographical surveyors nor in counties, but by a special board, and for the whole of Ireland; and they are right, for our plants, rocks, and animals are not within civil or even obvious topographical boundaries, and we have plenty of Irishmen qualified to execute it. They also advise that the statistics should be entrusted to a statistical staff, to be permanently kept up in Ireland. This staff would take the census every ten years, and would in the intervals between the beginning and ending of each census have plenty of statistical business to do for parliament (Irish or Imperial) and for public departments. If we are ever to have a registry of births, deaths (with the circumstances of each case), and marriages, some such staff will be essential to inspect the registry, and work up information from it. But the history, antiquities, and industrial resources, the commissioners recommend to have published in county volumes. They are too solicitous about keeping such volumes to small dimensions; but the rest of their plans are admirable.

The value of this to Ireland, whether she be a nation or a province, cannot be overrated. From the farmer and mechanic to the philosopher, general, and statesman, the benefit will extend, and yet so careless or so hostile are ministers that they have not conceded it, and so feeble by dulness or disunion are Irishmen and Irish members, that they cannot extort even this.

We now come to the last branch of the subject -

THE VALUATION.

The Committee of 1824 recommended only principles of Valuation. They were three, viz.: -

“§ 1. A fixed and uniform principle of valuation applicable throughout the whole work, and enabling the valuation not only of townlands, but that of counties to be compared by one common measure. § 2. A central authority, under the appointment of government, for direction and superintendence, and for the generalisation of the returns made in detail. § 3. Local assistance, regularly organised, furnishing information on the spot, and forming a check for the protection of private rights.”

Accordingly, on the 5th of July, 1825, an Act was passed requiring, in the first instance, the entry in all the grand jury records of the names and contents of all parishes, manors, townlands, and other divisions, and the proportionate assessments. It then went on to authorise the Lord Lieutenant to appoint surveyors to be paid out of the Consolidated Fund. These surveyors were empowered to require the attendance of cess collectors and other inhabitants, and with their help to examine, and ascertain, and mark the “reputed boundaries of all and every or any barony, half barony, townland parish, or other division or denomination of land,” howsoever called. The Act also inflicted penalties on persons removing or injuring any post, stone, or other mark made by the surveyors; but we believe there has been no occasion to enforce these clauses, the good sense and good feeling of the people being ample securities against such wanton crime. Such survey was not to affect the rights of owners; yet from it lay an appeal to the Quarter Sessions.

This, as we see, relates to civil boundaries, not valuations.

In May, 1820, another Act was passed directing the Ordnance officers to send copies of their maps, as fast as finished, to the Lord Lieutenant, who was to appoint “one Commissioner of Valuation for any counties”; and to give notice of such appointment to the grand jury of every such county. Each grand jury was then to appoint an Appeal Committee for each barony, and a Committee of Revision for the whole county. This Commission of Valuation was then to appoint from three to nine fit valuators in the county, who, after trial by the Commissioner, were to go in parties of three and examine all parts of their district, and value such portion of it, and set down such valuation in a parish field book, according to the following average prices: -

That is, having examined each tract - say a hill, a valley, an inch, a reclaimed bit, and by digging and looking at the soil, they were to consider what crop it could best produce, considering its soil, elevation, nearness to markets, and then estimating crops at the foregoing rate, they were to say how much per acre the tract was, in their opinion, worth.

From this Parish Field Book the Commissioner was to make out a table of the parishes and townlands, etc., in each barony, specifying the average and total value of houses in such sub-divisions, and to forward it to the high constable, who was to post copies thereof. A vestry of twenty-pound freeholders and twenty-shilling cesspayers was to be called in each parish to consider the table. If they did not appeal, the table was to stand confirmed; if they did appeal, the grand jury committee of appeal, with the valuation commissioner as chairman, were to decide upon the appeal; but if the assessor were dissatisfied, the appeal was to go to the committee of revision. The same committee were then to revise the proportionate liabilities of baronies, subject to an appeal to the Queen’s Bench. The valuation so settled was to be published in the Dublin Gazette, and thenceforward all grand jury and parish rates and cesses were to be levied in the proportions thereby fixed. But no land theretofore exempt from any rate was thereby made liable. The expenses were to be advanced from the consolidated fund, and repaid by presentment from the county.

It made the proportionate values of parishes and townlands, pending the baronial survey and the baronial valuation, to bind after revision and publication in some newspaper circulating in the county; but within three years there was to be a second revision, after which they were to be published in the Dublin Gazette, etc., and be final as to the proportions of all parish or grand jury rates to be paid by all baronies, parishes, and townlands. It also directed the annexation of detached bits to the counties respectively surrounding them, and it likewise provided for the use of the valuation maps and field books in applotting the grand jury cess charged on the holders of lands, but such valuation to be merely a guide and not final. From the varying size and value of holdings this caution was essential.

Under this last Act the valuation has been continued, as every reader of the country papers must have seen by Mr. Griffith’s Notices, and is now complete in twenty counties, forward in six, begun in two, and not yet begun in Cork, Kerry, Limerick, or Dublin.

Mr. Griffith’s instructions are clear and full, and we strongly recommend the study of them, and an adherence to their forms and classifications, to valuators of all private and public properties, so far as they go. He appointed two classes of valuators - Ordinary Valuators to make the first valuation all over each county, and Check Valuators to re-value patches in every district, to test the accuracy of the ordinary valuators.

The ordinary valuator was to have two copies of the Townland (or 6-inch) Survey. Taking a sheet with him into the district represented on it, he was to examine the quality of the soil in lots of from fifty to thirty acres, or still smaller bits, to mark the bounds of each lot on the survey map, and to enter in his field book the value thereof, with all the special circumstances specially stated. The examination was to include digging to ascertain the depth of the soil and the nature of the subsoil. All land was to be valued at its agricultural worth, supposing it liberally set, leaving out the value of timber, turf, etc. Reductions were to be made for elevation above the sea, steepness, exposure to bad winds, patchiness of soil, bad fences, and bad roads. Additions were to be made for neighbourhood of limestone, turf, sea, or other manure, roads, good climate and shelter, nearness to towns.

The following classification of soils was recommended: -

In describing in the field book the different qualities of soils, the following explanatory words may be used as occasion may require: -

The colours of soils may also be introduced, as brown, yellow, blue, grey, red, black, etc.

Also, where applicable, the words steep, level, shrubby, rocky, exposed, etc., may be used.”

Lists of market prices were sent with the field books, and the amounts then reduced to a uniform rate, which Mr. Griffith fixed at 2s. 6d. per pound over the prices of produce mentioned in the Act.

Rules were also given for valuation of houses, but we must refer to Mr. Griffith’s work for them.

While the Irish were excluded from English law and intercourse, England imposed no restrictions on our trade. The Pale spent its time tilling and fighting, and it was more sure of its bellyful of blows than of bread. It had nothing to sell; why tax its trade? The slight commerce of Dublin was needful to the comforts of the Norman Court in Dublin Castle. Why should it be taxed? The market of Kilkenny was guarded by the spears of the Butlers, and from Sligo to Cork the chiefs and towns of Munster and Connaught - the Burkes, O’Loghlens, O’Sullivans, Galway, Dingle, and Dunboy - carried on a trade with Spain, and piracy of war against England. How could they be taxed?

Commercial taxes, too, in those days were hard to be enforced, and more resembled toll to a robber than contribution to the state. Every great river and pass in Europe, from the Rhine and the Alps to Berwick and the Blackwater, was affectionately watched by royal and noble castles at their narrowest points, and the barge anchored and the caravan halted to be robbed, or, as the receivers called it, to be taxed.

At last the Pale was stretched round Ireland by art and force. Solitude and peace were in our plains; but the armed colonist settled in it, and the native came down from his hills as a tenant or a squatter, and a kind of prosperity arose.

Protestant and Catholic, native and colonist, had the same interest - namely, to turn this waste into a garden. They had not, nor could they have had, other things to export than Sydney or Canada have now - cattle, butter, hides, and wool. They had hardly corn enough for themselves; but pasture was plenty, and cows and their hides, sheep and their fleeces, were equally so. The natives had always been obliged to prepare their own clothing, and therefore every creaght and digger knew how to dress wool and skins, and they had found out, or preserved from a more civilised time, dyes which, to this day, are superior to any others. Small quantities of woollen goods were exported, but our assertion holds good that in our war-times there was no manufacture for export worth naming.

Black Tom Wentworth, the ablest of despots, came here 210 years ago, and found “small beginnings towards a clothing trade.” He at once resolved to discourage it. He wrote so to the king on July 25th, 1636, and he was a man true to his enmities. “But,” said he, “I’ll give them a linen manufacture instead.” Now, the Irish had raised flax and made and dyed linen from time immemorial. The saffron-coloured linen shirt was as national as the cloak and birred; so that Strafford rather introduced the linen manufacture among the new settlers than among the Irish. Certainly he encouraged it, by sending Irishmen to learn in Brabant, and by bringing French and Flemings to work in Ireland.

Charles the Second, doubtless to punish us for our most unwise loyalty to him and his father, assented to a series of Acts prohibiting the export of Irish wool, cattle, etc., to England or her colonies, and prohibiting the direct importation of several colonial products into Ireland. The chief Acts are 12 Charles, c. 4; 15 Charles, c. 7; and 22 and 23 Charles, c. 26. Thus were the value of land in Ireland, the revenue, and trade, and manufactures of Ireland - Protestant and Catholic - stricken by England.

Perhaps we ought to be grateful, though not to England, for these Acts. They plundered our pockets, but they guarded our souls from being anglicised. To France and Spain the produce was sent, and the woollen manufacture continued to increase.

England got alarmed, for Ireland was getting rich. The English lords addressed King William, stating that “the growth and increase of the woollen manufacture in Ireland had long been, and would be ever, looked upon with great jealousy by his English subjects, and praying him, by very strict laws, totally to prohibit and suppress the same.” The Commons said likewise; and William answered comfortably: - “I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen manufacture in Ireland, and to encourage the linen manufacture there, and to promote the trade of England.”

He was as good as his word, and even whipped and humbugged the unfortunate Irish Parliament to pass an Act, putting twenty per cent. duty on broad and ten per cent. on narrow cloths -

“But it did not satisfy the English parliament, where a perpetual law was made, prohibiting from the 20th of June, 1699, the exportation from Ireland of all goods made or mixed with wool, except to England and Wales, and with the licence of the commissioners of the revenue; duties had been before laid on the importation into England equal to a prohibition, therefore this Act has operated as a total prohibition of the exportation.”

There was nothing left but to send the wool raw to England; to smuggle it and cloths to France and Spain, or to leave the land unstocked. The first was worst. The export to England declined, smuggling prospered, “wild geese” for the Brigade and woollen goods were run in exchange for claret, brandy, and silks; but not much land was left waste. Our silks, cottons, malt, beer, and almost every other article was similarly prohibited. Striped linens were taxed thirty per cent., many other kinds of linen were also interfered with, and twenty-four embargoes in nineteen years straitened our foreign provision trade. Thus England kept her pledge of wrath, and broke her promise of service to Ireland.

A vigorous system of smuggling induced her to relax in some points, and the cannon of the Volunteers blew away the code.

By the Union we were so drained of money, and absentee rents and taxes, and of spirit in every way, that she no longer needs a prohibitory code to prevent our competing with her in any market, Irish or foreign. The Union is prohibition enough, and that England says she will maintain.

Whether it be now possible to create home manufactures, in the old sense of the word - that is, manufactures made in the homes of the workers - is doubted.

In favour of such a thing, if it be possible, the arguments are numberless. Such work is a source of ingenuity and enjoyment in the cabin of the peasant; it rather fills up time that would be otherwise idled than takes from other work. Our peasants’ wives and daughters could clothe themselves and their families by the winter night work, even as those of Norway do, if the peasants possessed the little estates that Norway’s peasants do. Clothes manufactured by hand-work are more lasting, comfortable, and handsome, and are more natural and national than factory goods. Besides, there is the strongest of all reasons in this, that the factory system seems everywhere a poison to virtue and happiness.

Some invention, which should bring the might of machinery in a wholesome and cheap form to the cabin, seems the only solution of the difficulty.

The hazards of the factory system, however, should be encountered, were it sure to feed our starving millions; but this is dubious.

A Native Parliament can alone judge or act usefully on this momentous subject. An absentee tax and a resident government, and the progress of public industry and education, would enable an Irish Parliament to create vast manufactures here by protecting duties in the first instance, and to maintain them by our general prosperity, or it could rely on its own adjustment of landed property as sufficient to put the people above the need of hazarding purity or content by embarking in great manufactures.

A peasant proprietary could have wealth enough to import wrought goods, or taste and firmness enough to prefer home-made manufactures.

But these are questions for other years. We wish the reader to take our word for nothing, but to consult the writers on Irish trade: - Laurence’s Interest of Ireland (1682); Browne’s Tracts (1728); Dobbs on “Trade” (1729); Hutchinson’s Commercial Restraints (1779); Sheffield on “Irish Trade” (1785); Wallace on “Irish Trade” (1798); the various “Parliamentary Reports,” and the very able articles on the same subject in the Citizen.

Do not be alarmed at the list, reader; a month’s study would carry you through all but the Reports, and it would be well spent. But if you still shrink, you can ease your conscience by reading Mr. John O’Connell’s Report on “The Commercial Injustices,” just issued by the Repeal Association. It is an elaborate, learned, and most useful tract.

No one doubts that if he sees a place or an action he knows more of it than if it had been described to him by a witness. The dullest man, who “put on his best attire” to welcome Cæsar, had a better notion of life in Rome than our ablest artist or antiquary.

Were painting, then, but a coloured chronicle, telling us facts by the eye instead of the ear, it would demand the Statesman’s care and the People’s love. It would preserve for us faces we worshipped, and the forms of men who led and instructed us. It would remind us, and teach our children, not only how these men looked, but, to some extent, what they were, for nature is consistent, and she has indexed her labours. It would carry down a pictorial history of our houses, arts, costume, and manners to other times, and show the dweller in a remote isle the appearance of countries and races of his cotemporaries.

As a register of facts - as a portrayer of men, singly, or assembled - and as a depicter of actual scenery, art is biography, history, and topography taught through the eye.

So far as it can express facts, it is superior to writing; and nothing but the scarcity of faithful artists, or the stupidity of the public, prevents us from having our pictorial libraries of men and places. There are some classes of scenes - as where continuous action is to be expressed - in which sculpture quite fails, and painting is but a shadowy narrator.

But this, after all, though the most obvious and easy use of Painting and Sculpture, is far indeed from being their highest end.

Art is a regenerator as well as a copyist. As the historian, who composes a history out of various materials, differs from a newspaper reporter, who sets down what he sees - as Plutarch differs from Mr. Grant, and the Abbé Barthelemy from the last traveller in India - so do the Historical Painter, the Landscape composer (such as Claude or Poussin) differ from the most faithful Portrait, Landscape, or Scene Drawer.

The Painter who is a master of composition makes his pencil cotemporary with all times and ubiquitous. Keeping strictly to nature and fact, Romulus sits for him and Paul preaches. He makes Attila charge, and Mohammed exhort, and Ephesus blaze when he likes. He tries not rashly, but by years of study of men’s character, and dress, and deeds, to make them and their acts come as in a vision before him. Having thus got a design, he attempts to realise the vision on his canvas. He pays the most minute attention to truth in his drawing, shading, and colouring, and by imitating the force of nature in his composition, all the clouds that ever floated by him, “the lights of other days,” and the forms of the dead, or the stranger, hover over him.

But Art in its higher stage is more than this. It is a creator. Great as Herodotus and Thierry are, Homer and Beranger are greater. The ideal has resources beyond the actual. It is infinite, and Art is indefinitely powerful. The Apollo is more than noble, and the Hercules mightier than man. The Moses of Michael Angelo is no likeness of the inspired law-giver, nor of any other that ever lived, and Raphael’s Madonnas are not the faces of women. As Reynolds says, “the effect of the capital works of Michael Angelo is that the observer feels his whole frame enlarged.” It is creation, it is representing beings and things different from our nature, but true to their own. In this self-consistency is the only nature requisite in works purely imaginative. Lear is true to his nature, and so are Mephistopheles, and Prometheus, and Achilles; but they are not true to human nature; they are beings created by the poets’ minds, and true to their laws of being. There is no commoner blunder in men, who are themselves mere critics, never creators, than to require consistency to the nature of us and our world in the works of poet or painter.

To create a mass of great pictures, statues, and buildings is of the same sort of ennoblement to a people as to create great poems or histories, or make great codes, or win great battles. The next best, though far inferior, blessing and power is to inherit such works and achievements. The lowest stage of all is neither to possess nor to create them.

Ireland has had some great Painters - Barry and Forde, for example, and many of inferior but great excellence; and now she boasts high names - Maclise, Hogan, and Mulready. But their works were seldom done for Ireland, and are rarely known in it. Our portrait and landscape Painters paint foreign men and scenes; and, at all events, the Irish people do not see, possess, nor receive knowledge from their works. Irish history has supplied no subjects for our greatest Artists; and though, as we repeat, Ireland possessed a Forde and Barry, creative Painters of the highest order, the pictures of the latter are mostly abroad; those of the former unseen and unknown. Alas! that they are so few.

To collect into, and make known, and publish in Ireland the best works of our living and dead Artists is one of the steps towards procuring for Ireland a recognised National Art. And this is essential to our civilisation and renown. The other is by giving education to students and rewards to Artists, to make many of this generation true representers, some of them great illustrators and composers, and, perchance, to facilitate the creation of some great spirit.

Something has been done - more remains.

There are schools in Dublin and Cork. But why are those so neglected and imperfect? and why are not similar or better institutions in Belfast, Derry, Galway, Waterford, and Kilkenny? Why is there not a decent collection of casts anywhere but in Cork, and why are they in a garret there? And why have we no gallery of Irishmen’s, or any other men’s, pictures in Ireland?

The Art Union has done a great deal. It has helped to support in Ireland artists who should otherwise have starved or emigrated; it has dispersed one (when, oh when, will it disperse another?) fine print of a fine Irish picture through the country, and to some extent interested as well as instructed thousands. Yet it could, and we believe will, do much more. It ought to have Corresponding Committees in the principal towns to preserve and rub up old schools of art and foster new ones, and it might by art and historical libraries, and by other ways, help the cause. We speak as friends, and suggest not as critics, for it has done good service.

The Repeal Association, too, in offering prizes for pictures and sculptures of Irish historical subjects, has taken its proper place as the patron of nationality in art; and its rewards for Building Designs may promote the comfort and taste of the people, and the reputation of the country. If artists will examine the rules by which the pictures, statues, and plates remain their property, they will find the prizes not so small as they might at first appear. Nor should they, from interest or just pride, be indifferent to the popularity and fame of success on national subjects, and with a People’s Prizes to be contended for. If those who are not Repealers will treat the Association’s design kindly and candidly, and if the Repealers will act in art upon principles of justice and conciliation, we shall not only advance national art, but gain another field of common exertion.

The Cork School of Art owes its existence to many causes.

The intense, genial, and Irish character of the people, the southern warmth and variety of clime, with its effects on animal and vegetable beings, are the natural causes.

The accident of Barry’s birth there, and his great fame, excited the ambition of the young artists. An Irishman and a Corkman had gone out from them, and amazed men by the grandeur and originality of his works of art. He had thrown the whole of the English painters into insignificance, for who would compare the luscious commonplace of the Stuart painters, or the melodramatic reality of Hogarth, or the imitative beauty of Reynolds, or the clumsy strength of West, with the overbearing grandeur of his works?

But the present glories of Cork, Maclise and Hogan, the greater, but buried might of Forde, and the rich promise which we know is springing there now, are mainly owing to another cause; and that is, that Cork possesses a gallery of the finest casts in the world.

These casts are not very many - 117 only; but they are perfect, they are the first from Canova’s moulds, and embrace the greatest works of Greek art. They are ill-placed in a dim and dirty room - more shame to the rich men of Cork for leaving them so - but there they are, and there studied Forde, and Maclise, and the rest, until they learned to draw better than any moderns, except Cornelius and his living brethren.

In the countries where art is permanent there are great collections - Tuscany and Rome, for example. But, as we have said before, the highest service done by success in art is not in the possession but in the creation of great works, the spirit, labour, sagacity, and instruction needed by the artists to succeed, and flung out by them on their country like rain from sunny clouds.

Indeed, there is some danger of a traditionary mediocrity following after a great epoch in art. Superstition of style, technical rules in composition, and all the pedantry of art, too often fill up the ranks vacated by veteran genius, and of this there are examples enough in Flanders, Spain, and even Italy. The schools may, and often do, make men scholastic and ungenial, and art remains an instructor and refiner, but creates no more.

Ireland, fortunately or unfortunately, has everything to do yet. We have had great artists - we have not their works - we own the nativity of great living artists - they live on the Tiber and the Thames. Our capital has no school of art - no facilities for acquiring it.

To be sure, there are rooms open in the Dublin Society, and they have not been useless, that is all. But a student here cannot learn anatomy, save at the same expense as a surgical student. He has no great works of art before him, no Pantheon, no Valhalla, not even a good museum or gallery.

We think it may be laid down as unalterably true that a student should never draw from a flat surface. He learns nothing by drawing from the lines of another man - he only mimics. Better for him to draw chairs and tables, bottles and glasses, rubbish, potatoes, cabins, or kitchen utensils, than draw from the lines laid down by other men.

Of those forms of nature which the student can originally consult - the sea, the sky, the earth - we would counsel him to draw from them in the first learning; for though he ought afterwards to analyse and mature his style by the study of works of art, from the first sketches to the finished picture, yet, by beginning with nature and his own suggestions, he will acquire a genuine and original style, superior to the finest imitation; and it is hard to acquire a master’s skill without his manner.

Were all men cast in a divine mould of strength and straightness and gallant bearing, and all women proportioned, graceful, and fair, the artist would need no gallery, at least to begin his studies with. He would have to persuade or snatch his models in daily life. Even then, as art creates greater and simpler combinations than ever exist in fact, he should finally study before the superhuman works of his predecessors.

But he has about him here an indifferently-made, ordinary, not very clean, nor picturesquely-clad people; though, doubtless, if they had the feeding, the dress, and the education (for mind beautifies the body) of the Greeks, they would not be inferior, for the Irish structure is of the noblest order.

To give him a multitude of fine natural models, to say nothing of ideal works, it is necessary to make a gallery of statues or casts. The statues will come in good time, and we hope, and are sure, that Ireland, a nation, will have a national gallery, combining the greatest works of the Celtic and Teutonic races. But at present the most that can be done is to form a gallery.

Our readers will be glad to hear that this great boon is about to be given to Irish Art. A society for the formation of a gallery of casts in Dublin has been founded.

It embraces men of every rank, class, creed, politics, and calling, thus forming another of those sanctuaries, now multiplying in Ireland, where one is safe from the polemic and the partisan.

Its purpose is to purchase casts of all the greatest works of Greece, Egypt, Etruria, ancient Rome, and Europe in the middle ages. This will embrace a sufficient variety of types, both natural and ideal, to prevent imitation, and will avoid the debateable ground of modern art. Wherever they can afford it the society will buy moulds, in order to assist provincial galleries, and therefore the provinces are immediately interested in its support.

When a few of these casts are got together, and a proper gallery procured, the public will be admitted to see, and artists to study, them without any charge. The annual subscription is but ten shillings, the object being to interest as many as possible in its support.

It has been suggested to us by an artist that Trinity College ought to establish a gallery and museum containing casts of all the ancient statues, models of their buildings, civil and military, and a collection of their implements of art, trade, and domestic life. A nobler institution, a more vivid and productive commentary on the classics, could not be. But if the Board will not do this of themselves, we trust they will see the propriety of assisting this public gallery, and procuring, therefore, special privileges for the students in using it.

But no matter what persons in authority may do or neglect, we trust the public - for the sake of their own pleasure, their children’s profit, and Ireland’s honour - will give it their instant and full support.

National art is conversant with national subjects. We have Irish artists, but no Irish, no national art. This ought not to continue; it is injurious to the artists, and disgraceful to the country. The following historical subjects were loosely jotted down by a friend. Doubtless, a more just selection could be made by students noting down fit subjects for painting and sculpture, as they read. We shall be happy to print any suggestions on the subject - our own are, as we call them, mere hints with loose references to the authors or books which suggested them. For any good painting, the marked figures must be few, the action obvious, the costume, arms, architecture, postures historically exact, and the manners, appearance, and rank of the characters strictly studied and observed. The grouping and drawing require great truth and vigour. A similar set of subjects illustrating social life could be got from the Poor Report, Carleton’s, Banim’s, or Griffin’s stories, or, better still, from observation.

The references are vague, but perhaps sufficient.

The Landing of the Milesians. - Keating, Moore’s Melodies.
Ollamh Fodhla Presenting his Laws to his People. Keating’s, Moore’s, and O’Halloran’s Histories of Ireland. - Walker’s Irish Dress and Arms, and Vallancey’s Collectanea.
Nial and his Nine Hostages. - Moore, Keating.
A Druid’s Augury. - Moore, O’Halloran, Keating.
A Chief Riding out of his Fort. - Griffin’s Invasion, Walker, Moore.
The Oak of Kildare. - Moore.
The Burial of King Dathy in the Alps, his thinned troops laying stones on his grave. - M’Geoghegan, “Histoire de l’Irlande” (French edition), Invasion, Walker, Moore.
St. Patrick brought before the Druids at Tara. - Moore and his Authorities.
The First Landing of the Danes. - See Invasion, Moore, etc.
The Death of Turgesius. - Keating, Moore.
Ceallachan tied to the Mast. - Keating.
Murkertach Returning to Aileach. - Archæological Society’s Tracts.
Brian Reconnoitring the Danes before Clontarf.
The Last of the Danes Escaping to his Ship.
O’Ruare’s Return. - Keating, Moore’s Melodies.
Raymond Le Gros Leaving his Bride. - Moore.
Roderick in Conference with the Normans. - Moore, M’Geoghegan.
Donald O’Brien Setting Fire to Limerick. - M’Geoghegan.
Donald O’Brien Visiting Holycross. - M’Geoghegan.
O’Brien, O’Connor, and M’Carthy making Peace to attack the Normans. - M’Geoghegan, Moore.
The Same Three Victorious at the Battle of Thurles. - Moore and O’Conor’s Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores.
Irish Chiefs leaving Prince John. - Moore, etc.
M’Murrough and Gloster. - Harris’s Hibernica, p. 53.
Crowning of Edward Bruce. - Leland, Grace’s Annals, etc.
Edgecombe Vainly Trying to Overawe Kildare. - Harris’s Hibernica.
Kildare “On the Necks of the Butlers.” - Leland.
Shane O’Neill at Elizabeth’s Court. - Leland.
Lord Sydney Entertained by Shane O’Neill.
The Battle of the Red Coats. - O’Sullivan’s Catholic History.
Hugh O’Neill Victor in Single Combat at Clontibret. - Fynes Moryson, O’Sullivan, M’Geoghegan.
The Corleius. - Dymmok’s Treatise, Archæological Society’s Tracts.
Maguire and St. Leger in Single Combat. - M’Geoghegan.
O’Sullivan Crossing the Shannon. - Pacata Hibernia.
O’Dogherty Receiving the Insolent Message of the Governor of Derry. - M’Geoghegan.
The Brehon before the English Judges. - Davis’s Letter to Lord Salisbury.
Ormond Refusing to give up his Sword. - Carte’s Life of Ormond.
Good Lookers-on. - Strafford’s Letters.
Owen Conolly before the Privy Council, 1641. - Carey’s Vindiciæ.
The Battle of Julianstown. - Temple’s Rebellion, and Tichbourne’s Drogheda.
Owen Roe Organising the Creaghts. - Carte, and also Belling and O’Neill in the Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica.
The Council of Kilkenny. - Carte.
The Breach of Clonmel. - Do.
Smoking Out the Irish. - Ludlow’s Memoirs.
Burning Them. - Castlehaven’s Memoirs.
Nagle before the Privy Council. - Harris’s William.
James’s Entry into Dublin. - Dublin Magazine for March, 1843.
The Bridge of Athlone. - Green Book and Authorities.
St. Ruth’s Death. - Do.
The Embarkation from Limerick. - Do.
Cremona. - Cox’s Magazine.
Fontenoy. - Do.
Sir S. Rice Pleading against the Violation of the Treaty of Limerick. - Staunton’s Collection of Tracts on Ireland.
Molyneux’s Book burned.
Liberty Boys Reading a Drapier’s Letter. - Mason’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Lucas Surrounded by Dublin Citizens in his Shop.
Grattan Moving Liberty. - Memoirs.
Flood Apostrophising Corruption. - Barrington.
Dungannon Convention. - Wilson, Barrington.
Curran Cross-Examining Armstrong. - Memoirs.
Curran Pleading before the Council in Alderman James’s Case.
Tone’s First Society. - See his Memoirs.
The Belfast Club. - Madden’s U. I., Second Series, vol. i.
Tone, Emmet, and Keogh in the Rathfarnham Garden.
Tone and Carnot. - Tone’s Memoirs.
Battle of Oulart. - Hay, Teeling, etc.
First Meeting of the Catholic Association.
O’Connell Speaking in a Munster Chapel. - Wyse’s Association.
The Clare Hustings. - Proposal of O’Connell.
The Dublin Corporation Speech.
Father Mathew Administering the Pledge in a Munster County.
Conciliation. - Orange and Green.
The Lifting of the Irish Flags of a National Fleet and Army.

Men are ever valued most for peculiar and original qualities. A man who can only talk commonplace, and act according to routine, has little weight. To speak, look, and do what your own soul from its depths orders you are credentials of greatness which all men understand and acknowledge. Such a man’s dictum has more influence than the reasoning of an imitative or commonplace man. He fills his circle with confidence. He is self-possessed, firm, accurate, and daring. Such men are the pioneers of civilisation and the rulers of the human heart.

Why should not nations be judged thus? Is not a full indulgence of its natural tendencies essential to a people’s greatness? Force the manners, dress, language, and constitution of Russia, or Italy, or Norway, or America, and you instantly stunt and distort the whole mind of either people.

The language, which grows up with a people, is conformed to their organs, descriptive of their climate, constitution, and manners, mingled inseparably with their history and their soil, fitted beyond any other language to express their prevalent thoughts in the most natural and efficient way.

To impose another language on such a people is to send their history adrift among the accidents of translation - ’tis to tear their identity from all places - ’tis to substitute arbitrary signs for picturesque and suggestive names - ’tis to cut off the entail of feeling, and separate the people from their forefathers by a deep gulf - ’tis to corrupt their very organs, and abridge their power of expression.

The language of a nation’s youth is the only easy and full speech for its manhood and for its age. And when the language of its cradle goes, itself craves a tomb.

What business has a Russian for the rippling language of Italy or India? How could a Greek distort his organs and his soul to speak Dutch upon the sides of the Hymettus, or the beach of Salamis, or on the waste where once was Sparta? And is it befitting the fiery, delicate-organed Celt to abandon his beautiful tongue, docile and spirited as an Arab, “sweet as music, strong as the wave” - is it befitting in him to abandon this wild, liquid speech for the mongrel of a hundred breeds called English, which, powerful though it be, creaks and bangs about the Celt who tries to use it?

We lately met a glorious thought in the “Triads of Mochmed,” printed in one of the Welsh codes by the Record Commission: “There are three things without which there is no country - common language, common judicature, and co-tillage land - for without these a country cannot support itself in peace and social union.”

A people without a language of its own is only half a nation. A nation should guard its language more than its territories - ’tis a surer barrier, and more important frontier, than fortress or river.

And in good times it has ever been thought so. Who had dared to propose the adoption of Persian or Egyptian in Greece - how had Pericles thundered at the barbarian? How had Cato scourged from the forum him who would have given the Attic or Gallic speech to men of Rome? How proudly and how nobly Germany stopped “the incipient creeping” progress of French! And no sooner had she succeeded than her genius, which had tossed in a hot trance, sprung up fresh and triumphant.

Had Pyrrhus quelled Italy, or Xerxes subdued Greece for a time long enough to impose new languages, where had been the literature which gives a pedigree to human genius? Even liberty recovered had been sickly and insecure without the language with which it had hunted in the woods, worshipped at the fruit-strewn altar, debated on the council-hill, and shouted in the battle-charge.

There is a fine song of the Fusians, which describes

“Language linked to liberty.”

To lose your native tongue, and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest - it is the chain on the soul. To have lost entirely the national language is death; the fetter has worn through. So long as the Saxon held to his German speech he could hope to resume his land from the Norman; now, if he is to be free and locally governed, he must build himself a new home. There is hope for Scotland - strong hope for Wales - sure hope for Hungary. The speech of the alien is not universal in the one; is gallantly held at bay in the other; is nearly expelled from the third.

How unnatural - how corrupting ’tis for us, three-fourths of whom are of Celtic blood, to speak a medley of Teutonic dialects! If we add the Celtic Scots, who came back here from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and the Celtic Welsh, who colonised many parts of Wexford and other Leinster counties, to the Celts who never left Ireland, probably five-sixths, or more, of us are Celts. What business have we with the Norman-Sassenagh?

Nor let any doubt these proportions because of the number of English names in Ireland. With a politic cruelty the English of the Pale passed an Act (3 Edw. IV., c. 3) compelling every Irishman within English jurisdiction “to go like to one Englishman in apparel, and shaving off his beard above the mouth,” “and shall take to him an English sirname of one town, as Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skryne, Corke, Kinsale; or colour, as White, Blacke, Browne; or art or science, as Smith or Carpenter; or office, as Cook, Butler; and that he and his issue shall use this name, under pain of forfeiting his goods yearly.”

And just as this Parliament before the Reformation, so did another after the Reformation. By the 28th Henry VIII., c. 15, the dress and language of the Irish were insolently described as barbarous by the minions of that ruffian king, and were utterly forbidden and abolished under many penalties and incapacities. These laws are still in force; but whether the Archæological Society, including Peel and O’Connell, will be prosecuted seems doubtful.

There was, also, ’tis to be feared, an adoption of English names, during some periods, from fashion, fear, or meanness. Some of our best Irish names, too, have been so mangled as to require some scholarship to identify them. For these and many more reasons the members of the Celtic race here are immensely greater than at first appears.

But this is not all; for even the Saxon and Norman colonists, notwithstanding these laws, melted down into the Irish, and adopted all their ways and language. For centuries upon centuries Irish was spoken by men of all bloods in Ireland, and English was unknown, save to a few citizens and nobles of the Pale. ’Tis only within a very late period that the majority of the people learned English.

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

We shall answer this partly by saying that, through the labours of the Archæological and many lesser societies, it is being revived rapidly.

We shall consider this question of the possibility of reviving it more at length some other day.

Nothing can make us believe that it is natural or honourable for the Irish to speak the speech of the alien, the invader, the Sassenagh tyrant, and to abandon the language of our kings and heroes. What! give up the tongue of Ollamh Fodhla and Brian Boru, the tongue of M’Carty, and the O’Nials, the tongue of Sarsfield’s, Curran’s, Mathew’s, and O’Connell’s boyhood, for that of Strafford and Poynings, Sussex, Kirk, and Cromwell!

No! oh, no! the “brighter days shall surely come,” and the green flag shall wave on our towers, and the sweet old language be heard once more in college, mart, and senate.

But even should the effort to save it as the national language fail, by the attempt we will rescue its old literature, and hand down to our descendants proofs that we had a language as fit for love, and war, and business, and pleasure, as the world ever knew, and that we had not the spirit and nationality to preserve it!

Had Swift known Irish he would have sowed its seed by the side of that nationality which he planted, and the close of the last century would have seen the one as flourishing as the other. Had Ireland used Irish in 1782, would it not have impeded England’s re-conquest of us? But ’tis not yet too late.

For you, if the mixed speech called English was laid with sweetmeats on your child’s tongue, English is the best speech of manhood. And yet, rather, in that case you are unfortunate. The hills, and lakes, and rivers, the forts and castles, the churches and parishes, the baronies and counties around you, have all Irish names - names which describe the nature of the scenery or ground, the name of founder, or chief, or priest, or the leading fact in the history of the place. To you these are names hard to pronounce, and without meaning.

And yet it were well for you to know them. That knowledge would be a topography, and a history, and romance, walking by your side, and helping your discourse. Meath tells it flatness, Clonmel the abundant riches of its valley, Fermanagh is the land of the Lakes, Tyrone the country of Owen, Kilkenny the Church of St. Canice, Dunmore the great fort, Athenry the Ford of the Kings, Dunleary the Fort of O’Leary; and the Phœnix Park, instead of taking its name from a fable, recognises as christener the “sweet water” which yet springs near the east gate. [43]

All the names of our airs and songs are Irish, and we every day are as puzzled and ingeniously wrong about them as the man who, when asked for the air, “I am asleep, and don’t waken me,” called it “Tommy M’Cullagh made boots for me.”

The bulk of our history and poetry are written in Irish, and shall we, who learn Italian, and Latin, and Greek, to read Dante, Livy, and Homer in the original - shall we be content with ignorance or a translation of Irish?

The want of modern scientific words in Irish is undeniable, and doubtless we should adopt the existing names into our language. The Germans have done the same thing, and no one calls German mongrel on that account. Most of these names are clumsy and extravagant; and are almost all derived from Greek or Latin, and cut as foreign a figure in French and English as they would in Irish. Once Irish was recognised as a language to be learned as much as French or Italian, our dictionaries would fill up and our vocabularies ramify, to suit all the wants of life and conversation.

These objections are ingenious refinements, however, rarely thought of till after the other and great objection has been answered.

The usual objection to attempting the revival of Irish is, that it could not succeed.

If an attempt were made to introduce Irish, either through the national schools, or the courts of law, into the eastern side of the island, it would certainly fail, and the reaction might extinguish it altogether. But no one contemplates this save as a dream of what may happen a hundred years hence. It is quite another thing to say, as we do, that the Irish language should be cherished, taught, and esteemed, and that it can be preserved and gradually extended.

What we seek is, that the people of the upper classes should have their children taught the language which explains our names of persons or places, our older history, and our music, and which is spoken in the majority of our counties, rather than Italian, German, or French. It would be more useful in life, more serviceable to the taste and genius of young people, and a more flexible accomplishment for an Irish man or woman to speak, sign, and write Irish than French.

At present the middle classes think it a sign of vulgarity to speak Irish - the children are everywhere taught English, and English alone in schools - and, what is worse, they are urged by rewards and punishments to speak it at home, for English is the language of their masters. Now, we think the example and exertions of the upper classes would be sufficient to set the opposite and better fashion of preferring Irish; and, even as a matter of taste, we think them bound to do so. And we ask it of the pride, the patriotism, and the hearts of our farmers and shopkeepers, will they try to drive out of their children’s minds the native language of almost every great man we had, from Brian Boru to O’Connell - will they meanly sacrifice the language which names their hills, and towns, and music, to the tongue of the stranger?

About half the people west of a line drawn from Derry to Waterford speak Irish habitually, and in some of the mountain tracts east of that line it is still common. Simply requiring the teachers of the national schools in these Irish-speaking districts to know Irish, and supplying them with Irish translations of the school books, would guard the language where it now exists, and prevent it from being swept away by the English tongue, as the Red Americans have been by the English race from New York to New Orleans.

The example of the upper classes would extend and develop a modern Irish literature, and the hearty support they have given to the Archæological Society makes us hope that they will have sense and spirit to do so.

But the establishment of a newspaper partly or wholly Irish would be the most rapid and sure way of serving the language. The Irish-speaking man would find, in his native tongue, the political news and general information he has now to seek in English; and the English-speaking man, having Irish frequently before him in so attractive a form, would be tempted to learn its characters, and, by-and-by, its meaning.

These newspapers in many languages are now to be found everywhere but here. In South America many of these papers are Spanish and English, or French; in North America, French and English; in Northern Italy, German and Italian; in Denmark and Holland, German is used in addition to the native tongue; in Alsace and Switzerland, French and German; in Poland, German, French, and Sclavonic; in Turkey, French and Turkish; in Hungary, Magyar, Sclavonic, and German; and the little Canton of Grison uses three languages in its press. With the exception of Hungary, the secondary language is, in all cases, spoken by fewer persons than the Irish-speaking people of Ireland, and while they everywhere tolerate and use one language as a medium of commerce, they cherish the other as the vehicle of history, the wings of song, the soil of their genius, and a mark and guard of nationality.

Judged by the Directory, Dublin is nobly supplied with institutions for the promotion of Literature, Science, and Art; and, judged by its men, there is mind enough here to make these institutions prosper, and instruct and raise the country. Yet their performances are far short of these promises, and the causes for ill-success are easily found. We believe these causes could be almost as easily removed.

In the first place, we have too many of these institutions. Stingy grants from Government and the general poverty of the people render economy a matter of the first consequence; yet we find these societies maintaining a number of separate establishments, at a great expense of rent and salaries.

The consequence, of course, is that none of them flourish as they ought - museums, meetings, lectures, libraries, and exhibitions are all frittered away, and nothing is done so well as it might be. Moreover, from the want of any arrangement and order, the same men are dragged from one society to another - few men do much, because all are forced to attempt so many things.

But ’tis better to examine this in detail, and in doing so we may as well give some leading facts as to the chief of these bodies. Take, for example, as a beginning, the

INSTITUTIONS FOR THE PROMOTION OF THE FINE ARTS.

And first there is the Hibernian Academy. It was founded in 1823, received a present of its house in Abbey Street, and some books and casts, from Francis Johnston, a Dublin architect, and has the miserable income of £300 a year from the Treasury. It has a drawing-school, with a few casts, no pictures, bad accommodation, and professors whose pay is nearly nominal.

It undoubtedly has some men of great ability and attainments, and some who have neither; but what can be done without funds, statues, or pictures? To aggravate its difficulties, the Dublin Society has another art school, still worse off as to casts, and equally deficient in pictures. As a place of instruction in the designing of patterns for manufactures and the like, the Dublin Society school has worked well; and many of the best-paid controllers of design in the English manufactories were educated there; but as a school of fine arts it does little; and no wonder. Another branch of the Hibernian Academy’s operations is its annual exhibition of pictures. These exhibitions attract crowds who would never otherwise see a painting, promote thought on art, and procure patronage for artists. In this, too, the Hibernian Academy has recently found a rival in the Society of Irish Artists, established in 1842, which has an annual exhibition in College Street, and pays the expenses of the exhibition out of the admission fees, as does the Hibernian Academy. We are not attaching blame to the Society of Irish Artists in noticing the fact of its rivalry.

There are three other bodies devoted to the encouragement of art. One of these is the Art Union, founded in 1840, and maintained entirely by subscriptions to its lottery. It distributes fine engravings from Irish pictures among all its members, and pictures and statues, bought in the exhibitions of the Hibernian Academy, and of the Society of Irish Artists, among its prize-holders; and it gives premiums for the works of native or resident artists. Its operation is as a patron of art; and, in order to get funds for this purpose, and also to secure superior works and a higher competition, it extends its purchases to the best foreign works exhibited here. It has no collection, and has merely an office in College Street - in fact, its best permanent possession is its unwearied secretary. The Society of Ancient Art was established last year for the formation of a public gallery of casts from classical and mediæval statues, and ultimately for purposes of direct teaching by lectures, etc. It obtained some funds by subscription; but under the expectation, ’tis said, of a public grant, has done nothing. Lastly, there is the “Institute of Irish Architects,” founded in 1839 “for the general advancement of civil architecture, for promoting and facilitating the acquirement of a knowledge of the various arts and sciences connected therewith, for the formation of a library and museum,” etc.

To us it is very plain that here are too many institutions, and that the efficiency of all suffers materially from their want of connection and arrangement. Some, at least, might be amalgamated with great advantage, or rather all, except the Art Union. That is only a club of purchasers, and any attempt materially to change its nature would peril its funds. Some such plan as the following would accomplish all that is vainly attempted now. Let the Government be pressed to give £2,000 a year, if the public supply £1,000 a year. Let this income go to a new Hibernian Academy - the present Hibernian Academy, Artists’ Society, Society of Ancient Art, the Art Schools of the Dublin Society, and the Institute of Irish Architects being merged in it. This merger could be easily secured through the inducements secured by the charter, and by accommodation, salaries, and utility of the new body. The present property of these bodies, with some moderate grant, would suffice for the purchase of a space of ground ample for the schools, museums, library, lecture-room, and yards of such an institution.

At the head of it should be a small body governing and accounting for its finances, but no person should be a governing member of more than one of its sections. These sections should be for Statuary, Painting, Architecture, and Design Drawing. Each of these sections should have its own Gallery and its own Practice Rooms; but one Library and one public Lecture Room would suffice for the entire. The architectural section would also need some open space for its experiments and its larger specimens. A present of copies of the British Museum casts, along with the fund of the Ancient Art Society, would originate a Cast Gallery, and a few good pictures could be bought as a commencement of a National Gallery of Painting, leaving the economy of the managers and the liberality of the public gradually to fill up. Collections of native works in canvas and marble, and architectural models, could be soon and cheaply procured. The Art Library of the Dublin Society added to that of the Hibernian Academy would need few additions to make it sufficient for the new body.

Such an Institute ought not to employ any but the best teachers and lecturers. It should encourage proficiency by rewards that would instruct the proficient; it should apply itself to cataloguing, preserving, and making known all the works of art in the country; give prizes for artistical works; publish its lectures and transactions; issue engravings of the most instructive works of art; and hold evening meetings, to which ladies would be admitted. It should allow at least £400 a year for the support of free pupils. In connection with its drawing and modelling schools should be a professorship of anatomy, or, what were better, some arrangement might be made with the College of Surgeons, or some such body, for courses of instruction for its pupils. The training for its pupils in sculpture, painting, and design should include the study of ancient and modern costumes, zoology, and of vegetable and geological forms. For this purpose books should not be so much relied on as lectures in gardens, museums, and during student excursions. Of course the architectural pupils should be required to answer at a preliminary examination in mathematics, and should receive special instruction in the building materials, action of climate, etc., in Ireland.

Were the buildings standing, and the society chartered judiciously, the sum we have mentioned would be sufficient. Four professors at from £200 to £300 a year each, four assistants at £100 a year each, a librarian at the same rate, with payments for extra instruction in anatomy, etc., etc., and for porters, premiums, and so forth, would not exceed £2,000 a year. So that if £400 were expended on free pupils, there would remain £600 a year for the purchase of works for the galleries.

At present there is much waste of money, great annoyance and loss of time to the supporters of these institutions, and marvellously little benefit to art. The plan we have proposed would be economical both of time and money; but, what is of more worth, it would give us, what we have not now, a National Gallery of Statuary and Painting - good Exhibition Rooms for works of art - business-like Lecturers and Lectures - great public excitement about art - and, finally, a great National Academy.

If anyone has a better plan, let him say it; we have told ours. At all events, some great change is needed, and there can be no fitter time than this for it.

In any community it is desirable to have Literary Institutions, as well classified as legal offices, and as free from counteraction; but it is especially desirable here now. Our literary class is small, and its duties measureless. The diseased suction of London - the absence of gentry, offices, and Legislature - the heart-sickness that is on every thoughtful man without a country - the want of a large, educated, and therefore book-buying class - and (it must be confessed) the depression and distrust produced by rash experiments and paltry failure, have left us with few men for a great work. Probably the great remedy is the restoration of our Parliament - bringing back, as it would, the aristocracy and the public offices, giving society and support to Writers and Artists, and giving them a country’s praise to move and a country’s glory to reward them.

But one of the very means of attaining nationality is securing some portion of that literary force which would gush abundantly from it; and, therefore, consider it how you will, it is important to increase and economise the exertions of the literary class in Ireland. Yet the reverse is done. Institutions are multiplied instead of those being made efficient which exist; and men talk as proudly of the new “Teach-’em-everything-in-no-time-Society” as if its natty laws were a library, its desk a laboratory and a museum, and its members fresh labourers, when all they have done is to waste the time of persons who had business, and to delude those who had none, into the belief that they were doing good. Ephemeral things! which die not without mischief - they have wasted hours and days of strong men in spinning sand, and leave depression growing from their tombs.

It is a really useful deed to rescue from dissipation, or from idle reading, or from mammon-hunting, one strong, passionate man or boy, and to set him to work investigating, arranging, teaching. It is an honest task to shame the ‘broidered youth from meditation on waistcoats and the display of polka steps into manly pursuits. It is an angel’s mission (oftenest the work of love) to startle a sleeping and unconscious genius into the spring and victory of a roused lion. But it is worse than useless to establish new associations and orders without well considering first whether the same machinery do not already exist and rust for want of the very energy and skill which you need too. There is a bridge in a field near Blarney Castle where water never ran. It was built “at the expense of the county.” These men build their mills close as houses in a capital, taking no thought for the stream to turn them.

We have already censured this in some detail with reference to societies for the promotion of the Fine Arts, and have urged the formation, out of all these fiddling, clashing bodies, of some one great institution for the promotion of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, with a Museum, a Library, a Gallery, and Lecturers, governed by professional minds, great enough to be known and regarded by the people, and popular and strong enough to secure Government support.

Similar defects exist everywhere. Take the Dublin Society for example. Nothing can be more heterogeneous than its objects. We are far from denying its utility. That utility is immense, the institution is native, of old standing (it was founded in 1731), national, and, when it wanted support, our pen was not idle in its behalf.

But we believe its utility greatly diminished by its attempting too many things, and especially by including objects more fitly belonging to other institutions; and on the opposite side it is maimed, by the interference of other bodies, in its natural functions. The Dublin Society was founded for the promotion of husbandry and other useful arts. Its labours to serve agriculture have been repeated and extensive, though not always judicious. It has also endeavoured to promote manufactures. It has gardens and museums fitter for scientific than practical instruction, admirable lecturers, a library most generously opened, a drawing-school of the largest purposes and of equivocal success, and various minor branches.

The Irish Academy has some of this fault. It endeavours to unite antiquarianism and abstract science. Its meetings are alternately entertained with mathematics and history, and its transactions are equally comprehensive. We yield to none in anxiety for the promotion of antiquarian studies; we think the public and the government disgraced by the slight support given to the Academy. We are not a little proud of the honour and strength given to our country by the science of MacCullagh, Hamilton, and Lloyd; but we protest against the attempt to mix the armoury of the ancient Irish, or the Celtic dialects, or the essay on Round Towers, with trigonometry and the calculus, whether in a lecture-room or a book.

Let us just set down, as we find them, some of the Literary and Scientific Institutions. There are the Royal Dublin Society, the Royal Irish Academy (we wish these royalties were dropped - no one minds them), the Irish Archæological Society, the Royal Zoological Society, the Geological Society, the Dublin Natural History Society, the Dublin Philosophical Society, the Royal Agricultural Society, etc., etc. Now, we take it that these bodies might be usefully reduced to three, and if three moderate government grants were made under conditions rewarding such a classification, we doubt not it would instantly be made.

In the first place, we would divorce from the Irish Academy the scientific department, requiring Trinity College to form some voluntary organisation for the purpose. To this non-collegiate philosophers should be admitted, and, thus disencumbered, we would devote the Academy to antiquities and literature - incorporate with it the Archæological Society - transfer to it all the antiques (of which it had not duplicates) in Trinity College, the Dublin Society, etc., and enlarge its museums and meeting-room. Its section of “polite literature” has long been a name - it should be made real. There would be nothing inconvenient or strange in finding in its lecture-rooms or transactions the antiquities and literature of Ireland, diversified by general historical, critical, and æsthetical researches.

The Dublin Society would reasonably divide into two sections. One, for the promotion of husbandry, might be aggrandised by tempting the Agricultural Society to join it, and should have a permanent museum, an extensive farm, premiums, shows, publications, and special lecturers. The second section, for the encouragement of manufactures, should have its museum, workshops, and experiment ground (the last, perhaps, as the agricultural farm), and its special lecturers. The library might well be joint, and managed by a joint committee, having separate funds. The general lecturers on chemistry and other such subjects might be paid in common. The drawing school (save that for pattern and machine drawing) might be transferred to the Art Institution; and the botanic garden and museum of minerals to a third body we propose.

This third body we would form from a union of the Zoological, the Geological, the Natural History, and all other such societies, and endow it with the Botanic and Zoological Gardens - give it rooms for a general and for a specially Irish museum, and for lecture-rooms in town, and supply it with a small fund to pay lecturers, who should go through the provinces.

We are firmly convinced that this re-arrangement of the Institutions of Dublin is quite practicable, would diminish unproductive expenses, economise the time, and condense the purposes of our literary, scientific, and artistical men, and increase enormously the use of the institutions to the public.

Of course the whole plan will be laughed at as fanciful and improbable; we think it easy, and we think it will be done.

When we are considering a country’s resources and its fitness for a peculiar destiny, its people are not to be overlooked. How much they think, how much they work, what are their passions, as well as their habits, what are their hopes and what their history, suggest inquiries as well worth envious investigation as even the inside of a refugee’s letter.

And there is much in Ireland of that character - much that makes her superior to slavery, and much that renders her inferior to freedom.

Her inhabitants are composed of Irish nobles, Irish gentry, and the Irish people. Each has an interest in the independence of their country, each a share in her disgrace. Upon each, too, there devolves a separate duty in this crisis of her fate. They all have responsibilities; but the infamy of failing in them is not alike in all.

The nobles are the highest class. They have most to guard. In every other country they are the champions of patriotism. They feel there is no honour for them separate from their fatherland. Its freedom, its dignity, its integrity, are as their own. They strive for it, legislate for it, guard it, fight for it. Their names, their titles, their very pride are of it.

In Ireland they are its disgrace. They were first to sell and would be last to redeem it. Treachery to it is daubed on many an escutcheon in its heraldry. It is the only nation where slaves have been ennobled for contributing to its degradation.

It is a foul thing this - dignity emanating from the throne to gild the filthy mass of national treason that forms the man’s part of many an Irish lord.

We do not include in this the whole Irish peerage. God forbid. There are several of them not thus ignoble. Many of them worked, struggled, sacrificed for Ireland. Many of them were true to her in the darkest times.

They were her chiefs, her ornaments, her sentinels, her safeguards. Alas! that they, too, should have shrunk from their position, and left their duties to humbler, but bolder and better men.

Look at their station in the State. Is it not one of unequivocal shame? They enjoy the half-mendicant privilege of voting for a representative of their order, in the House of Lords, some twice or thrice in their lives. One Irish peer represents about a dozen others of his class, and thus, in his multiplex capacity, he is admitted into fellowship with the English nobility. The borrowed plumes, the delegated authority of so many of his equals, raise him to a half-admitted equality with an English nobleman. And, although thus deprived of their inheritance of dignity, they are not allowed even the privilege of a commoner. An Irish lord cannot sit in the House of Commons for an Irish county or city, nor can he vote for an Irish member.

But an Irish lord can represent an English constituency. The distinction is a strange one - unintelligible to us in any sense but one of national humiliation. We understand it thus - an Irish lord is too mean in his own person, and by virtue of his Irish title, to rank with the British peerage. He can only qualify for that honour by uniting in his the suffrages and titles of ten or twelve others. But - flattering distinction! - he is above the rank of an Irish commoner, nor is he permitted to sully his name with the privileges of that order. And - unspeakable dignity! - he may take his stand with a British mob.

There is no position to match this in shame. There is no guilt so despicable as dozing in it without a blush or an effort, or even a dream for independence. When all else are alive to indignity, and working in the way of honour and liberty, they alone, whom it would best become to be earliest and most earnest in the strife, sink back replete with dishonour.

Of those, or their descendants, who, at the time of the Union, sold their country and the high places they filled in her councils and in her glory, for the promise of a foreign title, which has not been redeemed, the shame and the mortification have been perhaps too great to admit of any hope in regard to them. Their trust was sacred - their honour unsuspected. The stake they guarded above life they betrayed then for a false bauble; and it is no wonder if they think their infamy irredeemable and eternal.

We know not but it is. There are many, however, not in that category. They struggled at fearful odds, and every risk, against the fate of their country. They strove when hope had left them. Wherefore do they stand apart now, when she is again erect, and righteous, and daring? Have they despaired for her greatness, because of the infidelity of those to whom she had too blindly trusted?

The time is gone when she could be betrayed. This one result is already guaranteed by recent teaching. We may not be yet thoroughly instructed in the wisdom and the virtue necessary for the independent maintenance of self-government; but we have mastered thus much of national knowledge that we cannot be betrayed. There is no assurance every nation gave which we have not given, or may not give, that our present struggle shall end in triumph or in national death.

The writers of The Nation have never concealed the defects or flattered the good qualities of their countrymen. They have told them in good faith that they wanted many an attribute of a free people, and that the true way to command happiness and liberty was by learning the arts and practising the culture that fitted men for their enjoyment. Nor was it until we saw them thus learning and thus practising that our faith became perfect, and that we felt entitled to say to all men, here is a strife in which it will be stainless glory to be even defeated. It is one in which the Irish nobility have the first interest and the first stake in their individual capacities.

As they would be the most honoured and benefited by national success, they are the guiltiest in opposing or being indifferent to national patriotism.

Of the Irish gentry there is not much to be said. They are divisible into two classes - the one consists of the old Norman race commingled with the Catholic gentlemen who either have been able to maintain their patrimonies, or who have risen into affluence by their own industry; the other, the descendants of Cromwell’s or William’s successful soldiery.

This last is the most anti-Irish of all. They feel no personal debasement in the dishonour of the country. Old prejudices, a barbarous law, a sense of insecurity in the possessions they know were obtained by plunder, combine to sink them into the mischievous and unholy belief that it is their interest as well as their duty to degrade, and wrong, and beggar the Irish people.

There are among them men fired by enthusiasm, men fed by fanaticism, men influenced by sordidness; but, as a whole, they are earnest thinkers and stern actors. There is a virtue in their unscrupulousness. They speak, and act, and dare as men. There is a principle in their unprincipledness. Their belief is a harsh and turbulent one, but they profess it in a manly fashion.

We like them better than the other section of the same class. These last are but sneaking echoes of the other’s views. They are coward patriots and criminal dandies. But they ought to be different from what they are. We wish them so. We want their aid now - for the country, for themselves, for all. Would that they understood the truth, that they thought justly, and acted uprightly. They are wanted, one and all. Why conceal it - they are obstacles in our way, shadows on our path.

These are called the representatives of the property of the country. They are against the national cause, and therefore it is said that all the wealth of Ireland is opposed to the Repeal of the Union.

It is an ignorant and a false boast.

The people of the country are its wealth. They till its soil, raise its produce, ply its trade. They serve, sustain, support, save it. They supply its armies - they are its farmers, its merchants, its tradesmen, its artists, all that enrich and adorn it.

And, after all, each of them has a patrimony to spend, the honourable earning of his sweat, or his intellect, or his industry, or his genius. Taking them on an average, they must, to live, spend at least £5 each by the year. Multiply it by seven millions, and see what it comes to.

Thirty-five millions annually - compare with that the rental of Ireland; compare with it the wealth of the aristocracy spent in Ireland, and are they not as nothing?

But a more important comparison may be made of the strength, the fortitude, the patience, the bravery of those, the enrichers of the country, with the meanness in mind and courage of those who are opposed to them.

It is the last we shall suggest. It is sufficient for our purpose. To those who do not think it of the highest value we have nothing to say.

In a climate soft as a mother’s smile, on a soil fruitful as God’s love, the Irish peasant mourns.

He is not unconsoled. Faith in the joys of another world, heightened by his woe in this, give him hours when he serenely looks down on the torments that encircle him - the moon on a troubled sky. Domestic love, almost morbid from external suffering, prevents him from becoming a fanatic or a misanthrope, and reconciles him to life. Sometimes he forgets all, and springs into a desperate glee or a scathing anger; and latterly another feeling - the hope of better days - and another exertion - the effort for redress - have shared his soul with religion, love, mirth, and vengeance.

His consolations are those of a spirit - his misery includes all physical sufferings, and many that strike the soul, not the senses.

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

Suckled by a breast that is supplied from unwholesome or insufficient food, and that is fevered with anxiety - reeking with the smoke of an almost chimneyless cabin - assailed by wind and rain when the weather rages - breathing, when it is calm, the exhalations of a rotten roof, of clay walls, and of manure, which gives his only chance of food - he is apt to perish in his infancy.

Or he survives all this (happy if he have escaped from gnawing scrofula or familiar fever), and in the same cabin, with rags instead of his mother’s breast, and lumpers instead of his mother’s milk, he spends his childhood.

Advancing youth brings him labour, and manhood increases it; but youth and manhood leave his roof rotten, his chimney one hole, his window another, his clothes rags (at best muffled by a holiday cotamore) - his furniture, a pot, a table, a few hay chairs and rickety stools - his food, lumpers and water - his bedding, straw and a coverlet - his enemies, the landlord, the tax-gatherer, and the law - his consolation, the priest and his wife - his hope on earth, agitation - his hope hereafter, the Lord God!

For such an existence his toil is hard - and so much the better - it calms and occupies his mind; but bitter is his feeling that the toil which gains for him this nauseous and scanty livelihood heaps dainties and gay wines on the table of his distant landlord, clothes his children or his harem in satin, lodges them in marble halls, and brings all the arts of luxury to solicit their senses - bitter to him to feel that this green land, which he loves and his landlord scorns, is ravished by him of her fruits to pamper that landlord; twice bitter for him to see his wife, with weariness in her breast of love, to see half his little brood torn by the claws of want to undeserved graves, and to know that to those who survive him he can only leave the inheritance to which he was heir; and thrice bitter to him that even his hovel has not the security of the wild beast’s den - that Squalidness, and Hunger, and Disease are insufficient guardians of his home - and that the puff of the landlord’s or the agent’s breath may blow him off the land where he has lived, and send him and his to a dyke, or to prolong wretchedness in some desperate kennel in the next town, till the strong wings of Death - unopposed lord of such suburb - bear them away.

Aristocracy of Ireland, will ye do nothing? - will ye do nothing for fear? The body who best know Ireland - the body that keep Ireland within the law - the Repeal Committee - declare that unless some great change take place an agrarian war may ensue! Do ye know what that is, and how it would come? The rapid multiplication of outrages, increased violence by magistrates, collisions between the people and the police, coercive laws and military force, the violation of houses, the suspension of industry - the conflux of discontent, pillage, massacre, war - the gentry shattered, the peasantry conquered and decimated, or victorious and ruined (for who could rule them?) - there is an agrarian insurrection! May Heaven guard us from it! - may the fear be vain!

We set aside the fear! Forget it! Think of the long, long patience of the people - their toils supporting you - their virtues shaming you - their huts, their hunger, their disease.

To whomsoever God had given a heart less cold than stone, these truths must cry day and night. Oh! how they cross us like Banshees when we would range free on the mountain - how, as we walk in the evening light amid flowers, they startle us from rest of mind! Ye nobles! whose houses are as gorgeous as the mote’s (who dwelleth in the sunbeam) - ye strong and haughty squires - ye dames exuberant with tingling blood - ye maidens, whom not splendour has yet spoiled, will ye not think of the poor? - will ye not shudder in your couches to think how rain, wind, and smoke dwell with the blanketless peasant? - will ye not turn from the sumptuous board to look at those hard-won meals of black and slimy roots on which man, woman, and child feed year after year? - will ye never try to banish wringing hunger and ghastly disease from the home of such piety and love? - will ye not give back its dance to the village - its mountain play to boyhood - its serene hopes to manhood?

Will ye do nothing for pity - nothing for love? Will ye leave a foreign Parliament to mitigate - will ye leave a native Parliament, gained in your despite, to redress these miseries - will ye for ever abdicate the duty and the joy of making the poor comfortable, and the peasant attached and happy? Do - if so you prefer; but know that if you do, you are a doomed race. Once more, Aristocracy of Ireland, we warn and entreat you to consider the State of the Peasantry, and to save them with your own hands.

There are (thank God!) four hundred thousand Irish children in the National Schools. A few years, and they will be the People of Ireland - the farmers of its lands, the conductors of its traffic, the adepts in its arts. How utterly unlike that Ireland will be to the Ireland of the Penal Laws, of the Volunteers, of the Union, or of the Emancipation?

Well may Carleton say that we are in a transition state. The knowledge, the customs, the superstitions, the hopes of the People are entirely changing. There is neither use nor reason in lamenting what we must infallibly lose. Our course is an open and a great one, and will try us severely; but, be it well or ill, we cannot resemble our fathers. No conceivable effort will get the people, twenty years hence, to regard the Fairies but as a beautiful fiction to be cherished, not believed in, and not a few real and human characters are perishing as fast as the Fairies.

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

Much may be saved - the Gaelic language and the music of the past may be handed uncorrupted to the future; but whatever may be the substitutes, the Fairies and the Banshees, the Poor Scholar and the Ribbonman, the Orange Lodge, the Illicit Still, and the Faction Fight are vanishing into history, and unless this generation paints them no other will know what they were.

It is chiefly in this way we value the work before us. In it Carleton is the historian of the peasantry rather than a dramatist. The fiddler and piper, the seanachie and seer, the match-maker and dancing-master, and a hundred characters beside are here brought before you, moving, acting, playing, plotting, and gossiping! You are never wearied by an inventory of wardrobes, as in short English descriptive fictions; yet you see how every one is dressed; you hear the honey brogue of the maiden, and the downy voice of the child, the managed accents of flattery or traffic, the shrill tones of woman’s fretting, and the troubled gush of man’s anger. The moory upland and the corn slopes, the glen where the rocks jut through mantling heather, and bright brooks gurgle amid the scented banks of wild herbs, the shivering cabin and the rudely-lighted farm-house are as plain in Carleton’s pages as if he used canvas and colours with a skill varying from Wilson and Poussin to Teniers and Wilkie.

But even in these sketches his power of external description is not his greatest merit. Born and bred among the people - full of their animal vehemence - skilled in their sports - as credulous and headlong in boyhood, and as fitful and varied in manhood, as the wildest - he had felt with them, and must ever sympathise with them. Endowed with the highest dramatic genius, he has represented their love and generosity, their wrath and negligence, their crimes and virtues, as a hearty peasant - not a note-taking critic.

In others of his works he has created ideal characters that give him a higher rank as a poet (some of them not surpassed by even Shakespeare for originality, grandeur, and distinctness); but here he is a genuine Seanachie, and brings you to dance and wake, to wedding and christening - makes you romp with the girls, and race with the boys - tremble at the ghosts, and frolic with the fairies of the whole parish.

Come what change there may over Ireland, in these Tales and Sketches the peasantry of the past hundred years can be for ever lived with.

We no more see why Irish people should not visit the Continent than why Germans or Frenchmen ought not to visit Ireland; but there is a difference between them. A German rarely comes here who has not trampled the heath of Tyrol, studied the museums of Dresden and the frescoes of Munich, and shouted defiance on the bank of the Rhine; and what Frenchman who has not seen the vineyards of Provence and the bocages of Brittany, and the snows of Jura and the Pyrenees, ever drove on an Irish jingle? But our nobles and country gentlemen, our merchants, lawyers, and doctors - and what’s worse, their wives and daughters - penetrate Britain and the Continent without ever trying whether they could not defy in Ireland the ennui before which they run over seas and mountains.

The cause of this, as of most of our grievances, was misgovernment, producing poverty, discomfort, ignorance, and misrepresentation. The people were ignorant and in rags, their houses miserable, the roads and hotels shocking; we had no banks, few coaches, and, to crown all, the English declared the people to be rude and turbulent, which they were not, as well as drunken and poor, which they assuredly were. An Irish landlord who had ill-treated his own tenants felt a conscientious dread of all frieze-coats; others adopted his prejudices, and a people who never were rude or unjust to strangers were considered unsafe to travel amongst.

Most of these causes are removed. The people are sober, and are rapidly advancing to knowledge, their political exertions and dignity have broken away much of the prejudices against them, and a man passing through any part of Ireland expects to find woeful poverty and strong discontent, but he does not fear the abduction of his wife, or attempts to assassinate him on every lonely road. The coaches, cars, and roads, too, have become excellent, and the hotels are sufficient for any reasonable traveller. One very marked discouragement to travelling was the want of information; the maps were little daubs, and the guide-books were few and inaccurate. As to maps we are now splendidly off. The Railway Commissioners’ Map of Ireland, aided by the Ordnance Index Map of any county where a visitor makes a long stay, are ample. We have got a good general guide-book in Fraser, but it could not hold a twentieth of the information necessary to a leisurely tourist; nor, till the Ordnance Memoir is out, shall we have thorough hand-books to our counties. Meantime, let us not burn the little guides to Antrim, Wicklow, and Killarney, though they are desperately dull and inexact - let us not altogether prohibit Mrs. Hall’s gossip, though she knows less about our Celtic people than the Malays; and let us be even thankful for Mr. O’Flanagan’s volume of the Munster Blackwater (though it is printed in London) for his valuable stories, for his minute, picturesque, and full topography, for his antiquarian and historic details, though he blunders into making Alaster M’Donnell a Scotchman, and for his hearty love of the scenery and people he has undertaken to guide us through.

And now, reader, in this fine soft summer, when the heather is blooming, and the sky laughing and crying like a hysterical bride, full of love, where will ye go - through your own land or a stranger’s? If you stay at home you can choose your own scenery, and have something to see in the summer, and talk of in the winter, that will make your friends from the Alps and Apennines respectful to you.

Did you propose to study economies among the metayers of Tuscany or the artisans of Belgium, postpone the trip till the summer of ‘45 or ‘46, when you may have the passport of an Irish office to get you a welcome, and seek for the state of the linen weavers in the soft hamlets of Ulster - compare the cattle herds of Meath with the safe little holdings of Down and the well-found farms of Tipperary, or investigate the statistics of our fisheries along the rivers and lakes and shores of our island.

Had a strong desire come upon you to toil over the glacier, whose centre froze when Adam courted Eve, or walk amid the brigand passes of Italy or Spain - do not fancy that absolute size makes mountain grandeur, or romance - to a mind full of passion and love of strength (and with such only do the mountain spirits walk) the passes of Glenmalure and Barnesmore are deep as Chamouni, and Carn Tual and Slieve Donard are as near the lightning as Mount Blanc.

To the picture-hunter we can offer little, though Vandyke’s finest portrait is in Kilkenny, and there is no county without some collection; but for the lover of living or sculptured forms - for the artist, the antiquarian, and the natural philosopher, we have more than five summers could exhaust. Every one can see the strength of outline, the vigour of colour, and the effective grouping in every fair, and wake, and chapel, and hurling-ground, from Donegal to Waterford, though it may take the pen of Griffin or the pencil of Burton to represent them. An Irishman, if he took the pains, would surely find something not inferior in interest to Cologne or the Alhambra in study of the monumental effigies which mat the floors of Jerpoint and Adare, or the cross in a hundred consecrated grounds from Kells to Clonmacnoise - of the round towers which spring in every barony - of the architectural perfection of Holycross and Clare-Galway, and the strange fellowship of every order in Athassel, or of the military keeps and earthen pyramids and cairns, which tell of the wars of recent and the piety of distant centuries. The Entomology, Botany, and Geology of Ireland are not half explored; the structure and distinctions of its races are but just attracting the eyes of philosophers from Mr. Wilde’s tract, and the country is actually full of airs never noted, history never written, superstitions and romances never rescued from tradition; and why should Irishmen go blundering in foreign researches when so much remains to be done here, and when to do it would be more easy, more honourable, and more useful?

In many kinds of scenery we can challenge comparison. Europe has no lake so dreamily beautiful as Killarney; no bays where the boldness of Norway unites with the colouring of Naples, as in Bantry; and you might coast the world without finding cliffs so vast and so terrible as Achill and Slieve League. Glorious, too, as the Rhine is, we doubt if its warmest admirers would exclude from rivalry the Nore and the Blackwater, if they had seen the tall cliffs, and the twisted slopes, and the ruined aisles, and glancing mountains, and feudal castles through which you boat up from Youghal to Mallow, or glide down from Thomastown to Waterford harbour. Hear what Inglis says of this Avondhu: -

“We have had descents of the Danube, and descents of the Rhine, and the Rhone, and of many other rivers; but we have not in print, as far as I know, any descent of the Blackwater; and yet, with all these descents of foreign rivers in my recollection, I think the descent of the Blackwater not surpassed by any of them. A detail of all that is seen in gliding down the Blackwater from Cappoquin to Youghal would fill a long chapter. There is every combination that can be produced by the elements that enter into the picturesque and the beautiful - deep shades, bold rocks, verdant slopes, with the triumphs of art superadded, and made visible in magnificent houses and beautiful villas with their decorated lawns and pleasure grounds.”

And now, reader, if these kaleidoscope glimpses we have given you have made you doubt between a summer in Ireland and one abroad, give your country “the benefit of the doubt,” as the lawyers say, and boat on our lake or dive into our glens and ruins, wonder at the basalt coast of Antrim, and soften your heart between the banks of the Blackwater.

No enemy speaks slightingly of Irish Music, and no friend need fear to boast of it. It is without a rival.

Its antique war-tunes, such as those of O’Byrne, O’Donnell, Alestrom, and Brian Boru, stream and crash upon the ear like the warriors of a hundred glens meeting; and you are borne with them to battle, and they and you charge and struggle amid cries and battle-axes and stinging arrows. Did ever a wail make man’s marrow quiver, and fill his nostrils with the breath of the grave, like the ululu of the north or the wirrasthrue of Munster? Stately are their slow, and recklessly splendid their quick marches, their “Boyne Water,” and “Sios agus sios liom,” their “Michael Hoy,” and “Gallant Tipperary.” The Irish jigs and planxties are not only the best dancing tunes, but the finest quick marches in the world. Some of them would cure a paralytic and make the marble-legged prince in the Arabian Nights charge like a Fag-an-Bealach boy. The hunter joins in every leap and yelp of the “Fox Chase”; the historian hears the moan of the penal days in “Drimindhu,” and sees the embarkation of the Wild Geese in “Limerick’s Lamentation”; and ask the lover if his breath do not come and go with “Savourneen Deelish” and “Lough Sheelin.”

Varied and noble as our music is, the English-speaking people in Ireland have been gradually losing their knowledge of it, and a number of foreign tunes - paltry scented things from Italy, lively trifles from Scotland, and German opera cries - are heard in our concerts, and what is worse, from our Temperance bands. Yet we never doubted that “The Sight Entrancing,” or “The Memory of the Dead,” would satisfy even the most spoiled of our fashionables better than anything Balfe or Rossini ever wrote; and, as it is, “Tow-row-row” is better than poteen to the teetotalers, wearied with overtures and insulted by “British Grenadiers” and “Rule Brittannia.”

A reprint of Moore’s Melodies on lower keys, and at much lower prices, would probably restore the sentimental music of Ireland to its natural supremacy. There are in Bunting but two good sets of words - “The Bonny Cuckoo,” and poor Campbell’s “Exile’s of Erin.” These and a few of Lover’s and Mahony’s songs can alone compete with Moore. But, save one or two by Lysaght and Drennan, almost all the Irish political songs are too desponding or weak to content a people marching to independence as proudly as if they had never been slaves.

The popularity and immense circulation of the Spirit of the Nation proved that it represented the hopes and passions of the Irish people. This looks like vanity; but as a corporation so numerous as the contributors to that volume cannot blush, we shall say our say. For instance, who did not admire “The Memory of the Dead”? The very Stamp officers were galvanised by it, and the Attorney-General was repeatedly urged to sing it for the jury. He refused - he had no music to sing it to. We pitied and forgave him; but we vowed to leave him no such excuse next time. If these songs were half so good as people called them, they deserved to flow from a million throats to as noble music as ever O’Neill or O’Connor heard.

Some of them were written to, and some freely combined with, old and suitable airs. These we resolved to have printed with the music, certain that, thus, the music would be given back to a people who had been ungratefully neglecting it, and the words carried into circles where they were still unknown.

Others of these poems, indeed the best of them, had no antetypes in our ancient music. New music was, therefore, to be sought for them. Not on their account only was it to be sought. We hoped they would be the means of calling out and making known a contemporary music fresh with the spirit of the time, and rooted in the country.

Since Carolan’s death there had been no addition to the store. Not that we were without composers, but those we have do not compose Irish-like music, nor for Ireland. Their rewards are from a foreign public - their fame, we fear, will suffer from alienage. Balfe is very sweet, and Rooke very emphatic, but not one passion or association in Ireland’s heart would answer to their songs.

Fortunately there was one among us (perchance his example may light us to others) who can smite upon our harp like a master, and make it sigh with Irish memories, and speak sternly with Ireland’s resolve. To him, to his patriotism, to his genius, and, we may selfishly add, to his friendship, we owe our ability now to give to Ireland music fit for “The Memory of the Dead” and the “Hymn of Freedom,” and whatever else was marked out by popularity for such care as his.

In former editions of the Spirit[45] we had thrown in carelessly several inferior verses and some positive trash, and neither paper nor printing was any great honour to the Dublin press. Every improvement in the power of the most enterprising publisher in Ireland has been made, and every fault, within our reach or his, cured - and whether as the first publication of original airs, as a selection of ancient music, or as a specimen of what the Dublin press can do, in printing, paper, or cheapness, we urge the public to support this work of Mr. James Duffy’s - and, in a pecuniary way, it is his altogether.

We had hoped to have added a recommendation to the first number of this work, besides whatever attraction may lie in its music, its ballads, or its mechanical beauty.

An artist, whom we shall not describe or he would be known,[46] sketched a cover and title for it. The idea, composition, and drawing of that design were such as Flaxman might have been proud of. It is a monument to bardic power, to patriotism, to our music and our history. There is at least as much poetry in it as in the best verses in the work it illustrates. If it do nothing else, it will show our Irish artists that refinement and strength, passion and dignity, are as practicable in Irish as in German painting; and the lesson was needed sorely. But if it lead him who drew it to see that our history and hopes present fit forms to embody the highest feelings of beauty, wisdom, truth, and glory in, irrespective of party politics, then, indeed, we shall have served our country when we induced our gifted friend to condescend to sketching a title-page. We need not describe that design now, as it will appear on the cover of the second number, and on the title-page of the finished volume.

Ballad Poetry Of Ireland.

How slow we have all been in coming to understand the meaning of Irish Nationality!

Some, dazzled by visions of pagan splendour, and the pretensions of pedigree, and won by the passions and romance of the olden races, continued to speak in the nineteenth century of an Irish nation as they might have done in the tenth. They forgot the English Pale, the Ulster Settlement, and the filtered colonisation of men and ideas. A Celtic kingdom with the old names and the old language, without the old quarrels, was their hope; and though they would not repeat O’Neill’s comment as he passed Barrett’s castle on his march to Kinsale, and heard it belonged to a Strongbownian, that “he hated the Norman churl as if he came yesterday”; yet they quietly assumed that the Norman and Saxon elements would disappear under the Gaelic genius like the tracks of cavalry under a fresh crop.

The Nationality of Swift and Grattan was equally partial. They saw that the government and laws of the settlers had extended to the island - that Donegal and Kerry were in the Pale; they heard the English tongue in Dublin, and London opinions in Dublin - they mistook Ireland for a colony wronged, and great enough to be a nation.

A lower form of nationhood was before the minds of those who saw in it nothing but a parliament in College Green. They had not erred in judging, for they had not tried to estimate the moral elements and tendencies of the country. They were as narrow bigots to the omnipotency of an institution as any Cockney Radical. Could they, by any accumulation of English stupidity and Irish laziness, have got possession of an Irish government, they would soon have distressed every one by their laws, whom they had not provoked by their administration, or disgusted by their dulness.

Far healthier, with all its defects, was the idea of those who saw in Scotland a perfect model - who longed for a literary and artistic nationality - who prized the oratory of Grattan and Curran, the novels of Griffin and Carleton, the pictures of Maclise and Burton, the ancient music, as much as any, and far more than most, of the political nationalists, but who regarded political independence as a dangerous dream. Unknowingly they fostered it. Their writings, their patronage, their talk was of Ireland; yet it hardly occurred to them that the ideal would flow into the practical, or that they, with their dread of agitation, were forwarding a revolution.

At last we are beginning to see what we are, and what is our destiny. Our duty arises where our knowledge begins. The elements of Irish nationality are not only combining - in fact, they are growing confluent in our minds. Such nationality as merits a good man’s help and wakens a true man’s ambition - such nationality as could stand against internal faction and foreign intrigue - such nationality as would make the Irish hearth happy and the Irish name illustrious, is becoming understood. It must contain and represent the races of Ireland. It must not be Celtic, it must not be Saxon - it must be Irish. The Brehon law and the maxims of Westminster, the cloudy and lightning genius of the Gael, the placid strength of the Sasanach, the marshalling insight of the Norman - a literature which shall exhibit in combination the passions and idioms of all, and which shall equally express our mind in its romantic, its religious, its forensic, and its practical tendencies - finally, a native government, which shall know and rule by the might and right of all; yet yield to the arrogance of none - these are components of such a nationality.

But what have these things to do with the “Ballad Poetry of Ireland”? Much every way. It is the result of the elements we have named - it is compounded of all; and never was there a book fitter to advance that perfect nationality to which Ireland begins to aspire. That a country is without national poetry proves its hopeless dulness or its utter provincialism. National poetry is the very flowering of the soul - the greatest evidence of its health, the greatest excellence of its beauty. Its melody is balsam to the senses. It is the playfellow of childhood ripens into the companion of his manhood, consoles his age. It presents the most dramatic events, the largest characters, the most impressive scenes, and the deepest passions in the language most familiar to us. It shows us magnified, and ennobles our hearts, our intellects, our country, and our countrymen - binds us to the land by its condensed and gem-like history, to the future by examples and by aspirations. It solaces us in travel, fires us in action, prompts our invention, sheds a grace beyond the power of luxury round our homes, is the recognised envoy of our minds among all mankind and to all time.

In possessing the powers and elements of a glorious nationality, we owned the sources of a national poetry. In the combination and joint development of the latter we find a pledge and a help to that of the former.

This book of Mr. Duffy’s,[47] true as it is to the wants of the time, is not fortuitous. He has prefaced his admirable collection by an Introduction, which proves his full consciousness of the worth of his task, and proves equally his ability to execute it. In a space too short for the most impatient to run by he has accurately investigated the sources of Irish Ballad Poetry, vividly defined the qualities of each, and laboured with perfect success to show that all naturally combine towards one great end, as the brooks to a river, which marches on clear, deep, and single, though they be wild, and shallow, and turbid, flowing from unlike regions, and meeting after countless windings.

Mr. Duffy maps out three main forces which unequally contribute to an Irish Ballad Poetry.

The first consists of the Gaelic ballads. True to the vehemence and tendencies of the Celtic people, and representing equally their vagueness and extravagance during slavish times, they nevertheless remain locked from the middle and upper classes generally, and from the peasantry of more than half Ireland, in an unknown language. Many of them have been translated by rhymers - few indeed by poets. The editor of the volume before us has brought into one house nearly all the poetical translations from the Irish, and thus finely justifies the ballad literature of the Gael from its calumnious friend: -

“With a few exceptions, all the translations we are acquainted with, in addition to having abundance of minor faults, are eminently un-Irish. They seem to have been made by persons to whom one of the languages was not familiar. Many of them were confessedly versified from prose translations, and are mere English poems, without a tinge of the colour or character of the country. Others, translated by sound Irish scholars, are bald and literal; the writers sometimes wanting a facility of versification, sometimes a mastery over the English language. The Irish scholars of the last century were too exclusively national to study the foreign tongue with the care essential to master its metrical resources; and the flexible and weighty language which they had not learned to wield hung heavily on them,

‘Like Saul’s plate armour on the shepherd boy,

Encumbering, and not arming them.’

If it were just to estimate our bardic poetry by the specimens we have received in this manner, it could not be rated highly. But it would manifestly be most unjust. Noble and touching, and often subtle and profound thoughts, which no translation could entirely spoil, shine through the poverty of the style, and vindicate the character of the originals. Like the costly arms and ornaments found in our bogs, they are substantial witnesses of a distinct civilisation; and their credit is no more diminished by the rubbish in which they chance to be found than the authenticity of the ancient torques and skians by their embedment in the mud. When the entire collection of our Irish Percy - James Hardiman - shall have been given to a public (and soon may such a one come) that can relish them in their native dress, they will be entitled to undisputed precedence in our national minstrelsy.”

About a dozen of the ballads in the volume are derived from the Irish. It is only in this way that Clarence Mangan (a name to which Mr. Duffy does just honour) contributes to the volume. There are four translations by him, exhibiting eminently his perfect mastery of versification - his flexibility of passion, from loneliest grief to the maddest humour. One of these, “The Lament for O’Neil and O’Donnell,” is the strongest, though it will not be the most popular, ballad in the work.

Callanan’s and Ferguson’s translations, if not so daringly versified, are simpler and more Irish in idiom.

Most, indeed, of Callanan’s successful ballads are translations, and well entitle him to what he passionately prays for - a minstrel of free Erin to come to his grave,

“And plant a wild wreath from the banks of the river

O’er the heart and the harp that are sleeping for ever.”

But we are wrong in speaking of Mr. Ferguson’s translations in precisely the same way. His “Wicklow War Song” is condensed, epigrammatic, and crashing, as anything we know of, except the “Pibroch of Donnil Dhu.”

The second source is - the common people’s ballads. Most of these “make no pretence to being true to Ireland, but only being true to the purlieus of Cork and Dublin”; yet now and then one meets a fine burst of passion, and oftener a racy idiom. The “Drimin Dhu,” “The Blackbird,” “Peggy Bawn,” “Irish Molly,” “Willy Reilly,” and the “Fair of Turloughmore,” are the specimens given here. Of these “Willy Reilly” (an old and worthy favourite in Ulster, it seems, but quite unknown elsewhere) is the best; but it is too long to quote, and we must limit ourselves to the noble opening verse of “Turloughmore” -

“‘Come, tell me, dearest mother, what makes my father stay,

Or what can be the reason that he’s so long away?’

Oh! ‘hold your tongue, my darling son, your tears do grieve me sore;

I fear he has been murdered in the fair of Turloughmore.’”

The third and principal source consists of the Anglo-Irish ballads, written during the last twenty or thirty years.

Of this highest class, he who contributes most and, to our mind, best is Mr. Ferguson. We have already spoken of his translations - his original ballads are better. There is nothing in this volume - nothing in Percy’s Relics, or the Border Minstrelsy, to surpass, perhaps to equal, “Willy Gilliland.” It is as natural in structure as “Kinmont Willie,” as vigorous as “Otterbourne,” and as complete as “Lochinvar.” Leaving his Irish idiom, we get in the “Forester’s Complaint” as harmonious versification, and in the “Forging of the Anchor” as vigorous thoughts, mounted on bounding words, as anywhere in the English literature.

We must quote some stray verses from “Willy Gilliland”: -

“Up in the mountain solitudes, and in a rebel ring,

He has worshipped God upon the hill, in spite of church and king;

And sealed his treason with his blood on Bothwell bridge he hath;

So he must fly his father’s land, or he must die the death;

For comely Claverhouse has come along with grim Dalzell,

And his smoking roof tree testifies they’ve done their errand well.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

“His blithe work done, upon a bank the outlaw rested now,

And laid the basket from his back, the bonnet from his brow;

And there, his hand upon the Book, his knee upon the sod,

He filled the lonely valley with the gladsome word of God;

And for a persecuted kirk, and for her martyrs dear,

And against a godless church and king he spoke up loud and clear.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

“‘My bonny mare! I’ve ridden you when Claver’se rode behind,

And from the thumbscrew and the boot you bore me like the wind;

And while I have the life you saved, on your sleek flank, I swear,

Episcopalian rowel shall never ruffle hair!

Though sword to wield they’ve left me none - yet Wallace wight I wis,

Good battle did, on Irvine side, wi’ waur weapon than this.’ -

“His fishing-rod with both his hands he gripped it as he spoke,

And, where the butt and top were spliced, in pieces twain he broke;

The limber top he cast away, with all its gear abroad,

But, grasping the tough hickory butt, with spike of iron shod,

He ground the sharp spear to a point; then pulled his bonnet down,

And, meditating black revenge, set forth for Carrick town.”

The only ballad equally racy is “The Croppy Boy,” by some anonymous but most promising writer.

Griffin’s “Gille Machree” - of another class - is perfect - “striking on the heart,” as Mr. Duffy finely says, “like the cry of a woman”; but his “Orange and Green,” and his “Bridal of Malahide,” belong to the same class, and suffer by comparison, with Mr. Ferguson’s ballads.

Banim’s greatest ballad, the “Soggarth Aroon,” possesses even deeper tenderness and more perfect Irish idiom than anything in the volume.

Among the Collection are Colonel Blacker’s famous Orange ballad, “Oliver’s Advice” (“Put your trust in God, my boys, but keep your powder dry”), and two versions of the “Boyne Water.” The latter and older one, given in the appendix, is by far the finest, and contains two unrivalled stanzas: -

“Both foot and horse they marched on, intending them to batter, But the brave Duke Schomberg he was shot as he crossed over the water. When that King William he observed the brave Duke Schomberg falling, He rein’d his horse, with a heavy heart, on the Enniskilleners calling; ‘What will you do for me, brave boys? see yonder men retreating, Our enemies encouraged are - and English drums are beating’; He says ‘My boys, feel no dismay at the losing of one commander, For God shall be our King this day, and I’ll be general under.’”

Nor less welcome is the comment: -

“Some of the Ulster ballads, of a restricted and provincial spirit, having less in common with Ireland than with Scotland; two or three Orange ballads, altogether ferocious or foreign in their tendencies (preaching murder, or deifying an alien), will be no less valuable to the patriot or the poet on this account. They echo faithfully the sentiments of a strong, vehement, and indomitable body of Irishmen, who may come to battle for their country better than they ever battled for prejudices or their bigotries. At all events, to know what they love and believe is a precious knowledge.”

On the language of most of the ballads Mr. Duffy says: -

“Many of them, and generally the best, are just as essentially Irish as if they were written in Gaelic. They could have grown among no other people, perhaps under no other sky or scenery. To an Englishman, to any Irishman educated out of the country, or to a dreamer asleep to impressions of scenery and character, they would be achievements as impossible as the Swedish Skalds or the Arabian Nights. They are as Irish as Ossian or Carolan, and unconsciously reproduce the spirit of those poets better than any translator can hope to do. They revive and perpetuate the vehement native songs that gladdened the halls of our princes in their triumphs, and wailed over their ruined hopes or murdered bodies. In everything but language, and almost in language, they are identical. That strange tenacity of the Celtic race, which makes a description of their habits and propensities when Cæsar was still a Proconsul in Gaul true in essentials of the Irish people to this day, has enabled them to infuse the ancient and hereditary spirit of the country into all that is genuine of our modern poetry. And even the language grew almost Irish. The soul of the country, stammering its passionate grief and hatred in a strange tongue, loved still to utter them in its old familiar idioms and cadences. Uttering them, perhaps, with more piercing earnestness, because of the impediment; and winning out of the very difficulty a grace and a triumph.”

How often have we wished for such a companion as this volume! Worse than meeting unclean beds, or drenching mists, or Cockney opinions, was it to have to take the mountains with a book of Scottish ballads. They were glorious, to be sure, but they were not ours - they had not the brown of the climate on their cheek, they spoke of places afar, and ways which are not our country’s ways, and hopes which were not Ireland’s, and their tongue was not that we first made sport and love with. Yet how mountaineer without ballads any more than without a shillelagh? No; we took the Scots ballads, and felt our souls rubbing away with envy and alienage amid their attractions; but now, Brighid, be praised! we can have all Irish thoughts on Irish hills, true to them as the music, or the wind, or the sky.

Happy boys! who may grow up with such ballads in your memories. Happy men! who will find your hearts not only doubtful but joyous in serving and sacrificing for the country you thus learned in childhood to love.

A Ballad History Of Ireland.

Of course the first object of the work we project[48] will be to make Irish History familiar to the minds, pleasant to the ears, dear to the passions, and powerful over the taste and conduct of the Irish people in times to come. More events could be put into a prose history. Exact dates, subtle plots, minute connections and motives rarely appear in Ballads, and for these ends the worst prose history is superior to the best ballad series; but these are not the highest ends of history. To hallow or accurse the scenes of glory and honour, or of shame and sorrow; to give to the imagination the arms, and homes, and senates, and battles of other days; to rouse, and soften, and strengthen, and enlarge us with the passions of great periods; to lead us into love of self-denial, of justice, of beauty, of valour, of generous life and proud death; and to set up in our souls the memory of great men, who shall then be as models and judges of our actions - these are the highest duties of history, and these are best taught by a Ballad History.

A Ballad History is welcome to childhood, from its rhymes, its high colouring, and its aptness to memory. As we grow into boyhood, the violent passions, the vague hopes, the romantic sorrow of patriot ballads are in tune with our fitful and luxuriant feelings. In manhood we prize the condensed narrative, the grave firmness, the critical art, and the political sway of ballads. And in old age they are doubly dear; the companions and reminders of our life, the toys and teachers of our children and grand-children. Every generation finds its account in them. They pass from mouth to mouth like salutations; and even the minds which lose their words are under their influence, as one can recall the starry heavens who cannot revive the form of a single constellation.

In olden times all ballads were made to music, and the minstrel sang them to his harp or screamed them in recitative. Thus they reached farther, were welcomer guests in feast and camp, and were better preserved. We shall have more to say on this in speaking of our proposed song collection. Printing so multiplies copies of ballads, and intercourse is so general, that there is less need of this adaptation to music now. Moreover, it may be disputed whether the dramatic effect in the more solemn ballads is not injured by lyrical forms. In such streaming exhortations and laments as we find in the Greek choruses and in the adjurations and caoines of the Irish, the breaks and parallel repetitions of a song might lower the passion. Were we free to do so, we could point out instances in the Spirit of the Nation in which the rejection of song-forms seems to have been essential to the awfulness of the occasion.

In pure narratives and in the gayer and more splendid, though less stern ballads, the song-forms and adaptation to music are clear gains.

In the Scotch ballads this is usual, in the English rare. We look in vain through Southey’s admirable ballads - “Mary the Maid of the Inn,” “Jaspar,” “Inchcape Rock,” “Bishop Hatto,” “King Henry V. and the Hermit of Dreux” - for either burden, chorus, or adaptation to music. In the “Battle of Blenheim” there is, however, an occasional burden line; and in the smashing “March to Moscow” there is a great chorusing about -

“Morbleu! Parbleu!
What a pleasant excursion to Moscow.”

Coleridge has some skilful repetitions and exquisite versification in his “Ancient Mariner,” “Genevieve,” “Alice du Clos,” but nowhere a systematic burden. Campbell has no burdens in his finest lyric ballads, though the subjects were fitted for them. The burden of the “Exile of Erin” belongs very doubtfully to him.

Macaulay’s best ballad, the “Battle of Ivry,” is greatly aided by the even burden line; but he has not repeated the experiment, though he, too, makes much use of repeating lines in his Roman Lays and other ballads.

While, then, we counsel burdens in Historical Ballads, we would recognise excepted cases where they may be injurious, and treat them as in no case essential to perfect ballad success. In songs, we would almost always insist either on a chorus, verse, or a burden of some sort. A burden need not be at the end of the verse; but may, with quite equal success, be at the beginning or in the body of it, as may be seen in the Scotch Ballads, and in some of those in the Spirit of the Nation.

The old Scotch and English ballads, and Lockhart’s translations from the Spanish, are mostly composed in one metre, though written down in either of two ways. Macaulay’s Roman Lays and “Ivry” are in this metre. Take an example from the last: -

“Press where ye see my white plume shine, amid the ranks of war,
And be your Oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre.”

In the old ballads this would be printed in four lines, of eight syllables and six alternately, and rhyming only alternately, thus: -

“Press where ye see my white plume shine,
Amid the ranks of war,
And be your Oriflamme to-day
The helmet of Navarre.”

So Macaulay himself prints this metre in some of his Roman Lays.

But the student should rather avoid than seek this metre. The uniform old beat of eight and six is apt to fall monotonously on the ear, and some of the most startling effects are lost in it. In the Spirit of the Nation the student will find many other ballad metres. Campbell’s metres, though new and glorious things, are terrible traps to imitation, and should be warily used. The German ballads, and, still more, Mr. Mangan’s translations of them, contain great variety of new and safe, though difficult, metres. Next in frequency to the fourteen-syllable line is that in eleven syllables, such as “Mary Ambree” and “Lochinvar”; and for a rolling brave ballad ’tis a fine metre. The metre of fifteen syllables with double rhymes, (or accents) in the middle, and that of thirteen, with double rhymes at the end, is tolerably frequent, and the metre used by Father Prout, in his noble translation of “Duke D’Alençon,” is admirable, and easier than it seems. By the way, what a grand burden runs through that ballad: -

“Fools! to believe the sword could give to the children of the Rhine,
Our Gallic fields - the land that yields the Olive and the Vine!”
The syllables are as in the common metre, but it has thrice the rhymes.

We have seen great materials wasted in a struggle with a crotchety metre; therefore, though we counsel the invention of metres, we would add that unless a metre come out racily and appropriately in the first couple of verses, it should be abandoned, and some of those easily marked metres taken up.

A historical ballad will commonly be narrative in its form, but not necessarily so. A hymn of exultation - a call to a council, an army, or a people - a prophecy - a lament - or a dramatic scene (as in Lochiel), may give as much of event, costume, character, and even scenery as a mere narration. The varieties of form are infinite, and it argues lack of force in a writer to keep always to mere narration, though when exact events are to be told that may be the best mode.

One of the essential qualities of a good historical ballad is truth. To pervert history - to violate nature, in order to make a fine clatter, has been the aim in too many of the ballads sent us. He who goes to write a historical ballad should master the main facts of the time, and state them truly. It may be well for those perhaps either not to study or to half-forget minute circumstances until after his ballad is drafted out, lest he write a chronicle, not a ballad; but he will do well, ere he suffers it to leave his study, to reconsider the facts of the time or man, or act of which he writes, and see if he cannot add force to his statements, an antique grace to his phrases, and colour to his language.

Truth and appropriateness in ballads require great knowledge and taste.

To write an Irish historical ballad, one should know the events which he would describe, and know them not merely from an isolated study of his subject, but from old familiarity, which shall have associated them with his tastes and passions, and connected them with other parts of history. How miserable a thing is to put forward a piece of vehement declamation and vague description, which might be uttered of any event, or by the man of any time, as a historical ballad. We have had battle ballads sent us that would be as characteristic of Marathon or Waterloo as of Clontarf - laments that might have been uttered by a German or a Hindu - and romances equally true to love all the world over.

Such historical study extends not merely to the events. A ballad writer should try to find the voice, colour, stature, passions, and peculiar faculties of his hero - the arms, furniture, and dress of the congress, or the champions, or the troops he tells of - the rites wherewith the youth were married - the dead interred, and God worshipped; and the architecture - previous history and pursuits (and, therefore, probable ideas and phrases) of the men he describes.

Many of these things he will get in books. He should shun compilations, and take up original journals, letters, state papers, statutes, and cotemporary fictions and narratives as much as possible. Let him not much mind Leland or Curry (after he has run over them), but work like fury at the Archæological Society’s books - at Harris’s Hibernica, at Lodge’s Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica, at Strafford’s Pacata, Spencer’s View, Giraldus’s Narrative, Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, the Ormond Papers, the State Papers of Henry the Eighth, Stafford’s and Cromwell’s and Rinuccini’s Letters, and the correspondence and journals, from Donald O’Neill’s letter to the Pope down to Wolfe Tone’s glorious memoirs.

In the songs, and even their names, many a fine hint can be got; and he is not likely to be a perfect Balladist of Ireland who has not felt to tears and laughter the deathless passions of Irish music.

We have condemned compilations; but the ballad student may well labour at Ware’s Antiquities. He will find in the History of British Costume, published by the Useful Knowledge Society, and in the illustrated work now in progress called Old England, but beyond all other books, in the historical works of Thierry, most valuable materials. Nothing, not even the Border Minstrelsy, Percy’s Relics, the Jacobite Ballads, or the Archæological Tracts, can be of such service as a repeated study of the Norman Conquest, the Ten Years’ Study, and the Merovingian Times of Augustine Thierry.

We know he has rashly stated some events on insufficient authority, and drawn conclusions beyond the warrant of his promises; but there is more deep dramatic skill, more picturesque and coloured scenery, more distinct and characteristic grouping, and more lively faith to the look and spirit of the men and times and feelings of which he writes, in Thierry, than in any other historian that ever lived. He has almost an intuition in favour of liberty, and his vindication of the “men of ‘98” out of the slanderous pages of Musgrave is a miracle of historical skill and depth of judgment.

In the Irish Academy in Dublin there is a collection (now arranged and rapidly increasing) of ancient arms and utensils. Private collections exist in many provincial towns, especially in Ulster. Indeed, we know an Orange painter in a northern village who has a finer collection of Irish antiquities than all of the Munster cities put together. Accurate observation of, and discussion on, such collections will be of vast service to a writer of historical Ballads.

Topography is also essential to a ballad, or to any Historian. This is not only necessary to save a writer from such gross blunder as we met the other day in Wharton’s Ballad, called “The Grave of King Arthur,” where he talks of “the steeps of rough Kildare,” but to give accuracy and force to both general references and local description.

Ireland must be known to her Ballad Historians, not by flat, but by shaded maps, and topographical and scenic descriptions; not by maps of to-day only, but by maps (such as Ortelius and the maps in the State Papers) of Ireland in time past; and, finally, it must be known by the eye. A man who has not raced on our hills, panted on our mountains, waded our rivers in drought and flood, pierced our passes, skirted our coast, noted our old towns, and learned the shape and colour of ground and tree and sky, is not master of all a Balladist’s art. Scott knew Scotland thus, and, moreover, he seems never to have laid a scene in a place that he had not studied closely and alone.

What we have heretofore advised relates to the Structure, Truth, and Colouring of ballads; but there is something more needed to raise a ballad above the beautiful - it must have Force. Strong passions, daring invention, vivid sympathy for great acts - these are the result of one’s whole life and nature. Into the temper and training of “A Poet,” we do not presume to speak. Few have spoken wisely of them. Emerson, in his recent essay, has spoken like an angel on the mission of “The Poet.” Ambition for pure power (not applause); passionate sympathy with the good, and strong, and beautiful; insight into nature, and such loving mastery over its secrets as a husband hath over a wife’s mind, are the surest tests of one “called” by destiny to tell to men the past, present, and future, in words so perfect that generations shall feel and remember.

We merely meant to give some “Hints on the Properties of Historical Ballads” - they will be idle save to him who has the mind of a Poet.

The Songs of Ireland. [49]

There are great gaps in Irish song to be filled up. This is true even of the songs of the Irish-speaking people. Many of the short snatches preserved among them from olden times are sweet and noble; but the bulk of the songs are very defective. Most of those hitherto in use were composed during the last century, and therefore their structure is irregular, their grief slavish and despairing, their joy reckless and bombastic, their religion bitter and sectarian, their politics Jacobite and concealed by extravagant and tiresome allegory. Ignorance, disorder, and every kind of oppression weakened and darkened the lyric genius of Ireland. Even these, such as they are, diminish daily in the country, and a lower class comes in. We have before us a number of the ballads now printed at Cork, in Irish, and English and Irish mixed. They are little above the street ballads in the English tongue. If Hardiman’s and Daly’s collections be fair specimens (as we believe they are) of the Irish Jacobite songs, we should not care to have more than a few of them given to the people; but, perhaps, there may be twenty, which, if printed clearly in slips, would sell as ballads in the Irish districts.

Assuming that the morsels given in O’Reilly’s catalogue of Irish writers do not exaggerate the merits of the older bards, their works would supply numberless pastoral, love, joy, wailing, and war songs. A popular editor of these could condense them into three or four verses each - cut them so as exactly to suit the airs, preserve the local and broad historical allusions, but remove the clumsy ornaments and exaggerations. This is what Ramsay, Burns, and Cunningham did with the Lowland Scotch songs, and thus made them what they are - the best in Europe. This need not prevent complete editions of these songs in learned books; but such books are for libraries, not cabins.

There is one want, however, in all the Irish songs - it is of strictly national lyrics. They are national in form and colour, but clannish in opinion. In fact, from Brian’s death, there was no thought of an Irish nation, save when some great event, like Aodh O’Neill’s march to Munster, or Owen Roe’s victory at Beinnburb, flashed and vanished. These songs celebrate M’Carthy or O’More, O’Connor or O’Neill - his prowess, his following, his hospitality; but they cry down his Irish or “more than Irish” neighbour as fiercely as they do the foreign oppressor. True it is, you will find amid the flight of minstrels one bolder than the rest, who mourns for the time when the Milesians swayed, and tells that “a soul has come into Eire,” and summons all the Milesian tribes to battle for Ireland. But even in the seventeenth century, when the footing of the Norman and Saxon in Ireland was as sure as that of the once-invading Milesians themselves, we find the cry purely to the older Irish races, and the bounds of the nation made, not by the island, but by genealogy.

We may remark, in passing, that on no hypothesis did these same Milesians form more than the aristocracy of ancient Ireland - a class - a race of conquerors.

Dr. MacHale has made a noble attempt to supply this deficiency by his translation of Moore into Irish; but we are told that the language of his translation is too literary, and that the people do not relish these songs. A stronger reason for their failure (if in so short a time their fate can be judged) is, that the originals want the idiom and colour of the country, and are too subtle in thought. This remark does not apply to Moore’s love songs, not to some, at least, of his political lyrics, and we cannot doubt that, if translated into vernacular Irish, and printed as ballads, they would succeed. For the present nothing better can be done than to paraphrase the Songs of the Nation into racy and musical Irish; though a time may come when someone born amid the Irish tongue, reared amid Gaelic associations, instructed in the state of modern Ireland, and filled with passion and prophecy, shall sing the union and destiny of all the races settled on Irish ground, till the vales of Munster and the cliffs of Connaught ring with the words of Nationality.

But whatever may be done by translation and editing for the songs of the Irish-speaking race, those of our English-speaking countrymen are to be written. Moore, Griffin, Banim, and Callanan have written plenty of songs. Those of Moore have reached the drawing rooms; but what do the People know even of his? Buy a ballad in any street in Ireland, from the metropolis to the village, and you will find in it, perhaps, some humour, some tenderness, and some sweetness of sound; but you will certainly find bombast, or slander, or coarseness, united in all cases with false rhythm, false rhyme, conceited imagery, black paper, and blotted printing. A high class of ballads would do immense good - the present race demean and mislead the people as much as they stimulate them; for the sale of these ballads is immense, and printers in Dublin, Drogheda, Cork, and Belfast live by their sale exclusively. Were an enterprising man to issue the choice songs of Drennan, Griffin, Moore, on good paper, and well printed, he would make a fortune of “halfpenny ballads.”

The Anglo-Irish songs, though most of the last century, are generally indecent or factious. The cadets of the Munster Protestants, living like garrison soldiers, drinking, racing, and dancing, wrote the one class. The clergy of the Ulster Presbyterians wrote the other. “The Rakes of Mallow” and “The Protestant Boys” are choice specimens of the two classes - vigorous, and musical, and Irish, no doubt, but surely not fit for this generation.

Great opportunities came with the Volunteers and United Irishmen, but the men were wanting. We have but one good Volunteer song. It was written by Lysaght, after that illustrious militia was dissolved. Drennan’s “Wake of William Orr” is not a song; but he gave the United Men the only good song they had - “When Erin First Rose.” In “Paddy’s Resource,” the text-book of the men who were “up,” there is but one tolerable song - “God Save the Rights of Man;” nor, looking beyond these, can we think of anything of a high class but “The Sean Bhean Bhochd,” “The Wearing of the Green,” Lysaght’s “Island,” and Reynolds’ “Erin-go-bragh,” if it be his.

Two of Lady Morgan’s songs, “Savournah Dilis” and “Kate Kearney,” have certainly gone through all classes; and perhaps we might add a little to these exceptions; but it is a sad fact that most of the few good songs we have described are scarce, and are never printed in a ballad shape.

There is plenty, then, for the present race of Irish lyrists to do. They have a great heritage in the national music. It has every excellence and every variety. It is not needful for a writer of our songs to be a musician, though he will certainly gain much accuracy and save much labour to others and himself by being so. Moore is a musician of great attainments, and Burns used to compose his songs when going over, and over, and over the tune with or without words. But constantly listening to the playing of Irish airs will enable any man with a tolerable ear, and otherwise qualified, to write words to them.

Here, we would give two cautions. First - that the airs in Moore’s Melodies are very corrupt, and should never be used for the study of Irish music. This is even more true of Lover’s tunes. There is no need of using them, for Bunting’s and Holden’s collections are cheaper, and contain pure settings. Secondly - that as there are hundreds of the finest airs to which no English words have been written, and as the effect of a song is greatly increased by having one set of words always joined with one tune, our versifiers should carefully avoid the airs to which Moore, Griffin, or any other Irishman has written even moderately good words.

In endeavouring to learn an air for the purpose of writing words to it, the first care should, of course, be to get at its character - as gay, hopeful, loving, sentimental, lively, hesitating, woeful, despairing, resolute, fiery, or variable. Many Irish airs take a different character when played fast or slow, lightly or strongly; but there is some one mode of playing which is best of all, and the character expressed by it must determine the character of the words. For nothing can be worse than a gay song to calm music, or massive words to a delicate air; in all cases the tune must suggest, and will suggest, to the lyrist the sentiment of the words.

The tune will, of course, fix the number of lines in a verse. Frequently the number and order of the lines can be varied. Three rhymes and a fall, or couplets, or alternate rhymes, may answer the same set of notes; or rhymes, if too numerous, may be got rid of by making one long, instead of two short lines. Where the same notes come with emphasis at the ends of musical phrases, the words should rhyme, in order to secure the full effect. The doubling two lines into one is most convenient where the first has accents on both the last syllables, for you thus escape the necessity of double rhyming. In the softer airs the effect of this is rather agreeable than otherwise.

Talking of double rhymes, they are peculiarly fitted for strong political and didactic songs, for the abstract and political words in English are chiefly of Latin origin, of considerable length and gravity, and have double accents. The more familiar English words (which best suit most songs) contain few doubly-accented terminations, and are, therefore, little fitted for double rhyming.

Expletive syllables in the beginning of lines where the tune is sharp and gay are often an improvement, but they should never follow a double rhyme.

In strong and firm tunes, having a syllable for every note is a perfection, though one hard to be attained without harshness, from the crowd of consonants in English. With soft tunes, on the other hand, it is commonly better to have in most lines two or more light notes to one syllable, so that the words may be dwelt on and softly sounded; but where and how must be determined by the taste of the writer.

The sound of the air will always show the current of thought, its pauses and changes; and a nice attention and bold sympathy with these properties of a tune is necessary to lyrical success.

A great advantage, too, of writing for existing airs is the variety of metres thus gained, and the naturally greater variety of thought and expression thus suggested.

We have spoken, in reference to Ballads, of the use of Choruses and Burdens, and said that we thought there were some Ballads which were injured by them; but all songs, save (perhaps) those of desperate sorrow, gain by burden lines and choruses. They are almost universal in the Native Irish and Lowland Scotch. Beranger has employed them in most of his songs, and Moore in many of his. A chorus should, of course, contain the very spirit of the song - bounding, if it be gay; fierce, if it be bold; doting, if it loves. Merely repeating one verse between, or at the head or tail of another, is not putting a chorus; it must be the verse which beats the best on your ear, and has the most echo in your heart. So, too, of burdens; they are not made merely by bringing in the same words in like places. They must be marked words forcibly brought in.

Irish choruses have often a glorious effect in English songs, nor need anyone familiar with the peasantry, or with Edward O’Reilly’s Irish Writers, published as the first part of the Transactions of the Iberno-Celtic Society be at any loss for them.

These are some of the minutiæ of song-writing, which we note for the consideration of our young writers, leaving them to add to or modify these, according to their observation.

Of course, different men and different moods will produce various classes of songs. We shall have places for all, Songs for the Street and Field require simple words, bold, strong imagery, plain, deep passions (love, patriotism, conciliation, glory, indignation, resolve), daring humour, broad narrative, highest morals. In songs for the wealthier classes, greater subtlety, remoter allusion, less obvious idiom and construction, will be tolerable, though in all cases we think simplicity and heartiness needful to the perfect success of a song.

If men able to write will fling themselves gallantly and faithfully on the work we have here plotted for them, we shall soon have Fair and Theatre, Concert and Drawing-room, Road and Shop, echoing with Songs bringing home Love, Courage, and Patriotism to every heart.

Influences of Education.

“Educate, that you may be free.” We are most anxious to get the quiet, strong-minded People who are scattered through the country to see the force of this great truth; and we therefore ask them to listen soberly to us for a few minutes, and when they have done to think and talk again and again over what we say.

If Ireland had all the elements of a nation, she might, and surely would, at once assume the forms of one, and proclaim her independence. Wherein does she now differ from Prussia? She has a strong and compact territory, girt by the sea; Prussia’s lands are open and flat, and flung loosely through Europe, without mountain or river, breed or tongue, to bound them. Ireland has a military population equal to the recruitment of, and a produce able to pay, a first-rate army. Her harbours, her soil, and her fisheries are not surpassed in Europe.

Wherein, we ask again, does Ireland now differ from Prussia? Why can Prussia wave her flag among the proudest in Europe, while Ireland is a farm?

It is not in the name of a kingdom, nor in the formalities of independence. We could assume them to-morrow - we could assume them with better warrants from history and nature than Prussia holds; but the result of such assumption would perchance be a miserable defeat.

The difference is in Knowledge. Were the offices of Prussia abolished to-morrow - her colleges and schools levelled - her troops disarmed and disbanded, she would within six months regain her whole civil and military institutions. Ireland has been struggling for years, and may have to struggle many more, to acquire liberty to form institutions.

Whence is the difference? Knowledge!

The Prussians could, at a week’s notice, have their central offices at full work in any village in the kingdom, so exactly known are their statistics, and so general is official skill. Minds make administration - all the desks, and ledgers, and powers of Downing Street or the Castle would be handed in vain to the ignorants of - - any untaught district in Ireland. The Prussians could open their collegiate classes and their professional and elementary schools as fast as the order therefor, from any authority recognised by the People, reached town after town - we can hardly in ten years get a few schools open for our people, craving for knowledge as they are. The Prussians could re-arm their glorious militia in a month, and re-organise it in three days; for the mechanical arts are very generally known, military science is familiar to most of the wealthier men, discipline and a soldier’s skill are universal. If we had been offered arms to defend Ireland by Lord Heytesbury, as the Volunteers were by Lord Buckinghamshire, we would have had to seek for officers and drill-sergeants - though probably we could more rapidly advance in arms than anything else, from the military taste and aptness for war of the Irish People.

Would it not be better for us to be like the Prussians than as we are - better to have religious squabbles unknown, education universal, the People fed, and clad, and housed, and independent as becomes men; the army patriotic and strong; the public offices ably administered; the nation honoured and powerful? Are not these to be desired and sought by Protestant and Catholic? Are not these things to be done, if we are good and brave men? And is it not plain, from what we have said, that the reason for our not being all that Prussia is, and something more, is ignorance - want of civil and military and general knowledge amongst all classes?

This ignorance has not been our fault, but our misfortune. It was the interest of our ruler to keep us ignorant, that we might be weak; and she did so - first by laws, prohibiting education; then by refusing any provision for it; next, by perverting it into an engine of bigotry; and now, by giving it in a stunted, partial, anti-national way. Practice is the great teacher, and the possession of independence is the natural and best way for a People to learn all that pertains to freedom and happiness. Our greatest voluntary efforts, aided by the amplest provincial institutions, would teach us less in a century than we would learn in five years of Liberty.

In insisting on education we do not argue against the value of immediate independence. That would be our best teacher. An Irish Government and a national ambition would be to our minds as soft rains and rich sun to a growing crop. But we insist on education for the People, whether we get it from the Government or give it to themselves as a round-about, and yet the only, means of getting strength enough to gain freedom.

Do our readers understand this? Is what we have said clear to you, reader! - whether you are a shopkeeper or a lawyer, a farmer or a doctor? If not, read it over again, for it is your own fault if it be not clear. If you now know our meaning, you must feel that it is your duty to your family and to yourself, to your country and to God, to act upon it, to go and remove some of that ignorance which makes you and your neighbours weak, and therefore makes Ireland a poor province.

All of us have much to learn, but some of us have much to teach.

To those who, from superior energy and ability, can teach the People, we now address ourselves.

We have often before and shall often again repeat, that the majority of our population can neither read nor write, and therefore that from the small minority must come those fitted to be of any civil or military use beyond the lowest rank. The People may be and are honest, brave, and intelligent; but a man could as well dig with his hands as govern, or teach, or lead without the elements of Knowledge.

This however, is a defect which time and the National Schools must cure; and the duty of the class to which we speak is to urge the establishment of such Schools, the attendance of the children at them, and occasionally to observe and report, either directly or through the Press, whether the admirable rules of the Board are attended to. In most cases, too, the expenditure of a pound-note and a little time and advice would give the children of a school that instruction in national history and in statistics so shamefully omitted by the Board. Reader! will you do this?

Then of the three hundred Repeal Reading-rooms we know that some, and fear that many, are ill-managed, have few or no books, and are mere gossiping-rooms. Such a room is useless; such a room is a disgrace to its members and their educated neighbours. The expense having been gone to of getting a room, it only remains for the members to establish fixed rules, and they will be supplied with the Association Reports (political reading enough for them), and it will be the plain duty of the Repeal Wardens to bring to such a room the newspapers supplied by the Association. If such a body continue and give proofs of being in earnest, the Repeal Association will aid it by gifts of books, maps, etc., and thus a library, the centre of knowledge and nursery of useful and strong minds, will be made in that district. So miserably off is the country for books, that we have it before us on some authority that there are ten counties in Ireland without a single book-seller in them. We blush for the fact; it is a disgrace to us; but we must have no lying or flinching. There is the hard fact; let us face it like men who are able for a difficulty - not as children putting their heads under the clothes when there is danger. Reader! cannot you do something to remedy this great, this disabling misery of Ireland? Will not you now try to get up a Repeal Reading-room, and when one is established get for it good rules, books from the Association, and make it a centre of thought and power?

These are but some of the ways in which such service can be done by the more for the less educated. They have other duties often pointed out by us. They can sustain and advance the different societies for promoting agriculture, manufactures, art, and literature in Dublin and the country. They can set on foot and guide the establishment of Temperance Bands, and Mechanics’ Institutes, and Mutual Instruction Societies. They can give advice and facilities for improvement to young men of promise; and they can make their circles studious, refined, and ambitious, instead of being, like too many in Ireland, ignorant, coarse, and lazy. The cheapness of books is now such that even Irish poverty is no excuse for Irish ignorance - that ignorance which prostrates us before England. We must help ourselves, and therefore we must educate ourselves.

Foreign Travel.

We lately strove to induce our wealthier countrymen to explore Ireland before they left her shores in search of the beautiful and curious. We bid the economist search our towns and farms, our decayed manufactures, and improving tillage. Waving our shillelagh, we shouted the cragsman to Glenmalure and Carn Tual, and Achill and Slieve League. Manuscript in hand, we pointed the antiquary to the hundred abbeys of North Munster, the castles of the Pale, the palaces and sepulchres of Dunalin, Aileach, Rath Croghan, and Loughcrew, and we whispered to our countrywomen that the sun rose grandly on Adragool, that the moon was soft on Lough Erne (“The Rural Venice”), and that the Nore and Blackwater ran by castled crags like their sweet voices over old songs.

But there are some who had not waited for our call, but had dutifully grown up amid the sights and sounds of Ireland, and knew the yellow fields of Tipperary, and the crash of Moher’s wave, and the basalt barriers of Antrim, and the moan or frown of Wexford over the graves of ‘98, and there are others not yet sufficiently educated to prize home excellence. To such, then, and to all our brethren and sisters going abroad, we have to say a friendly word.

We shall presume them to have visited London, Woolwich, the factories of Lancashire and Warwick, and to have seen the Cumberland lakes, and therefore to have seen all worth seeing in England, and that they are bound for somewhere else. For a pedestrian not rich there is Wales - the soft vales of the far North and South Clwyd, and the Wye and Llanrwst, and the central mountain groups of Snowdon, and still finer of Cader Idris. But if he go there we pray him not to return without having heard and, so far as he could, noted down a few airs from the harp and cruit, collected specimens of the plants and minerals of Wales for the museum (existing or to be) of his native town, studied the statistics of their great iron works or their little home-weaving; nor, if he has had the sense and spirit to take a Welsh and an Irish vocabulary, without some observations on the disputed analogy of the two languages, and how far it exists in general terms, as it certainly does in names of places. By the way, we warn him that he will know little of the peasantry, and come home in the dark about Rebecca, unless he can speak Welsh. The Welsh have been truer to their language than we were to ours; their clergy ministered in it; their people refused their tongues to the Saxon as if ’twere poison; and even their nobles, though tempted by England, welcomed the bard who lamented the defeat of Rhuddlan, and gloried in the frequent triumphs of Glendower.

But let us rather classify pursuits than countries.

We want the Irish who go abroad to bring something back besides the weary tale of the Louvre and Munich, and the cliffs of the Rhine, and the soft airs of Italy. We have heard of a patriot adventurer who carried a handful of his native soil through the world. We want our friends to carry a purpose for Ireland in their hearts, to study other lands wisely, and to bring back all knowledge for the sustenance and decoration of their dear home.

How pleasantly and profitably for the traveller this can be done. There is no taste but may be interested, no capacity but can be matched, no country but can be made tributary to our own. The historian, the linguist, the farmer, the economist, the musician, the statesman, and the man of science can equally augment their pleasure and make it minister to Ireland.

Is a man curious upon our language? He can (not unread in Neilson, nor unaccompanied by O’Reilly’s Dictionary) trace how far the Celtic words mixed in the classical French, or in the patois of Bretagne or Gascony, coincide with the Irish; he can search in the mountains of North Spain, whether in proper names or country words there be any analogy to the Gaelic of the opposite coast of Ireland.

The proper names are the most permanent, and if there be any truth in Sir William Betham’s theories, the names of many a hill and stream in Tuscany, North Africa, and Syria ought to be traceable to an Irish root. Nor need this language-search be limited to the south. Beginning at the Isle of Man, up by Cumberland (the kingdom of Strath Clyde), through Scotland, Denmark, Norway, to Ireland, the constant intercourse in trade and war with Ireland, and in many instances the early occupation by a Celtic race, must have left indelible marks in the local names, if not the traditions, of the country. To the tourist in France we particularly recommend a close study of the History of the Gauls, by Amadeus Thierry.

The student of our ecclesiastical history, whether he hold with Dr. Smiles that the Irish Church was independent, or with Dr. Miley, that it paid allegiance to Rome, may delight in following the tracks of the Irish saints, from Iona of the Culdees to Luxieu and Boia (founded by Columbanus), and St. Gall, founded by an Irishman of that name. Rumold can be heard of in Mechlin, Albhuin in Saxony, Kilian in Bavaria, Fursey in Peronne, and in far Tarentum the traveller will find more than one trace of the reformer of that city - the Irishman, St. Cathaldus. We cannot suppose that any man will stray from Stackallen, or Maynooth at least, without keeping this purpose in mind, nor would it misbecome a divine from that Trinity College of which Ussher was a first Fellow.

Our military history could also receive much illustration from Irish travellers going with some previous knowledge and studying the traditions and ground, and using the libraries in the neighbourhood of those places where Irishmen fought. Not to go back to the Irish who (if we believe O’Halloran) stormed the Roman Capital as the allies of Brennus of Gaul, nor insisting upon too minute a search for that Alpine valley where, says MacGeoghegan, they still have a tradition of Dathy’s death by lightning, there are plenty of places worth investigating in connection with Irish military history. In Scotland, for example, ’twere worth while tracking the march of Alaster MacDomhnall and his 1,500 Antrim men from their first landing at Ardnamurchan through Tippermiur, Aberdeen, Fivy, Inverlochy, and Aulderne, to Kilsyth - victories, won by Irish soldiers and chiefs, given to them by tradition, as even Scott admits, though he tries to displace its value for Montrose’s sake, and given to them by the highest cotemporary authorities - such as the Ormond papers.

Then there is the Irish Brigade. From Almanza to Fontenoy, from Ramillies to Cremona, we have the names of their achievements, but the register of them is in the libraries and war offices and private papers of France, and Spain, and Austria, and Savoy. A set of visits to Irish battle-fields abroad, illustrated from the manuscripts of Paris, Vienna, and Madrid, would be a welcomer book than the reiterated assurances that the Rhone was rapid, the Alps high, and Florence rich in sculpture, wherewith we have been dinned.

We have no lives of our most illustrious Irish generals in foreign services - Marshal Brown, the Lacys, Montgomery of Donegal, the rival of Washington; and yet the materials must exist in the offices and libraries of Austria, Russia, and America.

Talking of libraries, there is one labour in particular we wish our countrymen to undertake. The constant emigration of the princes, nobles, and ecclesiastics of Ireland, from the Reformation downwards, scattered through the Continent many of our choicest collections. The manuscripts from these have been dispersed by gift and sale among hundreds of foreign libraries. The Escurial, Vienna, Rome, Paris, and Copenhagen are said to be particularly rich in them, and it cannot be doubted that in every considerable library (religious, official, or private) on the Continent some MSS. valuable to Ireland would be found. In many cases these could be purchased, in some copied, in all listed. The last is the most practical and essential labour. It would check and guide our inquiries now, and would prepare for the better day, when we can negotiate the restoration of our old muniments from the governments of Europe.

A study of the monuments and museums throughout France, Spain, Italy, and Scandinavia, in reference to the forts, tombs, altars, and weapons of ancient Ireland, would make a summer pleasant and profitable.

But we would not limit men to the study of the past.

Our agriculture is defective, and our tenures are abominable. It were well worth the attention of the travelling members of the Irish Agricultural Society to bring home accurate written accounts of the tenures of land, the breeds of cattle, draining, rotation, crops, manures, and farm-houses, from Belgium or Norway, Tuscany or Prussia.

Our mineral resources and water-power are unused. A collection of models or drawings, or descriptions of the mining, quarrying, and hydraulic works of Germany, England, or France, might be found most useful for the Irish capitalist who made it, and for his country which so needs instruction. Besides, even though many of these things be described already, yet how much more vivid and practical were the knowledge to be got from observation.

Our fine or useful arts are rude or decayed, and our industrial and general education very inferior. The schools and galleries, museums and educational systems of Germany deserve the closest examination with reference to the knowledge and taste required in Ireland, and the means of giving them. One second-rate book of such observations, with special reference to Ireland, were worth many greater performances unapplied to the means and need of our country.

Ireland wants all these things. Before this generation dies, it must have made Ireland’s rivers navigable, and its hundred harbours secure with beacon and pier, and thronged with seamen educated in naval schools, and familiar with every rig and every ocean. Arigna must be pierced with shafts, and Bonmahon flaming with smelting-houses. Our bogs must have become turf-factories, where fuel will be husbanded, and prepared for the smelting-house. Our coal must move a thousand engines, our rivers ten thousand wheels.

Our young artisans must be familiar with the arts of design and the natural sciences connected with their trade; and so of our farmers; and both should, beside, have that general information which refines and expands the minds - that knowledge of Irish history and statistics that makes it national, and those accomplishments and sports which make leisure profitable and home joyous.

Our cities must be stately with sculpture, pictures, and buildings, and our fields glorious with peaceful abundance.

But this is an Utopia! Is it? No; but the practicable object of those who know our resources! To seek it is the solemn, unavoidable duty of every Irishman. Whether, then, oh reader, you spend this or any coming season abroad or at home, do not forget for a day how much should be done for Ireland.

“The Library of Ireland.”

While the Gaelic-speaking people of Ireland were restricted to traditional legends, songs, and histories, a library was provided for those who used English by the genius and industry of men whose names have vanished - a fate common to them with the builder of the Pyramids, the inventor of letters, and other benefactors of mankind. Moore has given, in Captain Rock, an imperfect catalogue of this library. The scientific course seems to have been rather limited, as Ovid’s Art of (let us rather say essay on) Love was the only abstract work; but it contained biographies of Captain Freney the Robber, and of Redmond O’Hanlon the Rapparee - wherein, we fear, O’Hanlon was made, by a partial pen, rather more like Freney than history warrants; dramas such as the Battle of Aughrim, written apparently by some Alsatian Williamite; lyrics of love, unhoused save by the watch; imperial works, too, as Moll Flanders; and European literature - Don Beliants, and the Seven Champions. Whether they were imported, or originally produced for the grooms of the dissolute gentry, may be discussed; but it seems certain that their benign influence spread, on one side, to the farmers’ and shopkeepers’ sons, and, on the other, to the cadets of the great families - and were, in short, the classics of tipsy Ireland. The deadly progress of temperance, politics, and democracy has sent them below their original market, and in ten years the collector will pay a guinea apiece for them.

During the Emancipation struggle this indecent trash shrunk up, and a totally different literature circulated. The Orange party regaled themselves chiefly with theology, but the rest of the country (still excepting the classes sheltered by their Gaelic tongue) formed a literature more human, and quite as serious. There occasionally is great vigour in the biographies of Lord Edward, Robert Emmet, and other popular heroes chronicled at that time; but the long interview of Emmet with Sarah Curran, the night before his execution, is a fair specimen of the accuracy of these works. The songs were intense enough, occasionally controversial, commonly polemical, always extravagant; the Granu Wails and Shan-Van-Vochts of the Catholic agitation cannot be too soon obsolete. The famous Waterford song: -

“O’Connell’s come to town,
And he’ll put the Orange down,
And by the heavenly G - - he’ll wear the crown,
Says the Shan Van Vocht!”

is characteristic of the zeal, discretion, and style of these once powerful lyrics. A history of the authorship of these biographies and songs would be interesting, and is perhaps still possible. The reprint in the series of Hugh O’Reilly’s Irish history - albeit, a mass of popular untruth was put at the end of it - shows as if some more considerate mind had begun to influence these publications. They, too, are fast vanishing, and will yet be sought to illustrate their times.

In the first class we have described there was nothing to redeem their stupid indecency and ruffianism; in the latter, however one may grieve at their bigotry, and dislike their atrocious style, there were purity, warmth, and a high purpose.

The “Useful Knowledge Society” period arrived in Britain, and flooded that island with cheap tracts on algebra and geometry, chemistry, theology, and physiology. Penny Magazines told every man how his stockings were wove, how many drunkards were taken up per hour in Southwark, how the geese were plucked from which the author got his pens, how many pounds weight of lead (with the analysis thereof, and an account of the Cornish mines by way of parenthesis) were in the types for each page, and the nature of the rags (so many per cent. beggars, so many authors, so many shoe-boys) from which the paper of the all-important, man and money-saving Penny Magazine was made. On its being suggested that man was more than a statistician, or a dabbler in mathematics, a moral series (warranted Benthamite) was issued to teach people how they should converse at meals - how to choose their wives, masters, and servants by phrenological developments, and how to live happily, like “Mr. Hard-and-Comfortable,” the Yellow Quaker.

Unluckily for us, there was no great popular passion in Ireland at the time, and our communication with England had been greatly increased by steamers and railways, by the Whig alliance, by democratic sympathy, and by the transference of our political capital to Westminster. Tracts, periodicals, and the whole horde of Benthamy rushed in. Without manufactures, without trade, without comfort to palliate such degradation, we were proclaimed converts to Utilitarianism. The Irish press thought itself imperial, because it reflected that of London - Nationality was called a vulgar superstition, and a general European Trades’ Union, to be followed by a universal Republic, became the final aspirations of “all enlightened men.” At the same time the National Schools were spreading the elements of science and the means of study through the poorer classes, and their books were merely intellectual.

Between all these influences Ireland promised to become a farm for Lancashire, with the wisdom and moral rank of that district, without its wealth, when there came a deliverer - the Repeal agitation.

Its strain gradually broke the Whig alliance and the Chartist sympathy. Westminster ceased to be the city towards which the Irish bowed and made pilgrimage. An organisation, centring in Dublin, connected the People; and an oratory full of Gaelic passion and popular idiom galvanised them. Thus there has been, from 1842 - when the Repeal agitation became serious - an incessant progress in Literature and Nationality. A Press, Irish in subjects, style, and purpose, has been formed - a National Poetry has grown up - the National Schools have prepared their students for the more earnest study of National politics and history - the classes most hostile to the agitation are converts to its passions; and when Lord Heytesbury recently expressed his wonder at finding “Irish prejudices” in the most cultivated body in Ireland, he only bore witness to an aristocratic Nationality of which he could have found countless proofs beside.

Yet the power of British utilitarian literature continues. The wealthy classes are slowly getting an admirable and a costly National Literature from Petrie, and O’Donovan, and Ferguson, and Lefanu, and the University Magazine. The poorer are left to the newspaper and the meeting, and an occasional serial of very moderate merits. That class, now becoming the rulers of Ireland, who have taste for the higher studies, but whose means are small, have only a few scattered works within their reach, and some of them, not content to use these exclusively, are driven to foreign studies and exposed to alien influence.

To give to the country a National Library, exact enough for the wisest, high enough for the purest, and cheap enough for all readers, appears the object of “The Library of Ireland.”

Look at the subjects - A History of the Volunteers, Memoirs of Hugh O’Neill, of Tone, of Owen Roe, of Grattan, Collections of Irish Ballads and Songs, and so forth. It would take one a month, with the use of all the libraries of Dublin, to get the history of the Volunteers. In Wilson’s so-called history you will get a number of addresses and 300 pages of irrelevant declamation for eight or ten shillings. Try further, and you must penetrate through the manuscript catalogues of Trinity College and the Queen’s Inns (the last a wilderness) to find the pamphlets and newspapers containing what you want; yet the history of the Volunteers is one interesting to every class, and equally popular in every province.

Hugh O’Neill - he found himself an English tributary, his clan beaten, his country despairing. He organised his clan into an army, defeated by arms and policy the best generals and statesmen of Elizabeth, and gave Ireland a pride and a hope which never deserted her since. Yet the only written history of him lies in an Irish MS. in the Vatican, unprinted, untranslated, uncopied; and the Irishman who would know his life must grope through Moryson, and Ware, and O’Sullivan in unwilling libraries, and in books whose price would support a student for two winters.

Of Tone and Grattan - the wisest and most sublime of our last generation - there are lives, and valuable ones; but such as the rich only will buy, and the leisurely find time to read.

The rebellion of 1641 - a mystery and a lie - is it not time to let every man look it in the face? The Irish Brigade - a marvellous reality to few, a proud phantom to most of us - shall we not all, rich and poor, learn in good truth how the Berserk Irish bore up in the winter streets of Cremona, or the gorgeous Brigade followed Clare’s flashing plumes right through the great column of Fontenoy?

Irish Ballads and Songs - why (except that Spirit of the Nation which we so audaciously put together), the popular ballads and songs are the faded finery of the West End, the foul parodies of St. Giles’s, the drunken rigmarole of the black Helots - or, as they are touchingly classed in the streets, “sentimental, comic, and nigger songs.” Yet Banim, and Griffin, and Furlong, Lover and Ferguson, Drennan and Callanan, have written ballads and songs as true to Ireland as ever MacNeill’s or Conyngham’s were to Scotland; and firmly do we hope to see with every second lad in Ireland a volume of honest, noble, Irish ballads, as well thumbed as a Lowland Burns or a French Beranger, and sweetly shall yet come to us from every milking-field and harvest-home songs not too proudly joined to the sweetest music in the world.

This country of ours is no sand bank, thrown up by some recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honoured in the archives of civilisation, traceable into antiquity by its piety, its valour, and its sufferings. Every great European race has sent its stream to the river of Irish mind. Long wars, vast organisations, subtle codes, beacon crimes, leading virtues, and self-mighty men were here. If we live influenced by wind and sun and tree, and not by the passions and deeds of the past, we are a thriftless and a hopeless People.

There is much doubt as to who were the first inhabitants of Ireland; but it is certain that the Phœnicians had a great commerce with it. The Firbolgs, a rude people, held Ireland for a long period. They were subdued by the Tuatha de Danaan, a refined and noble race, which in its turn yielded its supremacy to the arms of the Milesians. The dates during these centuries are not well ascertained.

B. C.
1000. Dr. O’Conor, the Librarian of Stowe, fixes this as the most probable date of the Milesian invasion.
- -    Ollamh Fodhla institutes the Great Feis, or Triennial Convention, at Tara.
- -    Thirty-two monarchs are said to have reigned between this sovereign and Kimbaoth, who built the Palace of Emania.
 
A. D.
  40. Reformation of the Bardic or Literary Order, by Conquovar, King of Ulster.
  90. The old population successfully revolt against the Milesians, and place one of their own race upon the throne.
 130. Re-establishment of the Milesian sway.
 164. King Feidlim, the Legislator, establishes the laws of Eric.
 258. From Con of the Hundred Battles descended the chieftains who supplied Albany, the modern Scotland, with her first Scottish rulers, by establishing, about the middle of the third century, the kingdom of Dalriada in Argyleshire.
 333. The Palace of Emania destroyed during a civil war.
 387. The birth of St. Patrick.
 396. Nial of the Nine Hostages invades Britain.
 432. His Mission to Ireland.
 436. Dathi, the last of the Pagan monarchs of Ireland, succeeded Nial, and was killed while on one of his military expeditions, at the foot of the Alps, by lightning.
 465. March 17 - Death of St. Patrick.
 554. The last triennial council held at Tara.
 795. First Invasion of the Danes.
1014. April 23, Good Friday - Defeat of the Danes at Clontarf by Brian Boroihme.
1152. Synod of Kells. Supremacy of the Church of Rome acknowledged.
1159. Pope Adrian’s bull granting Ireland to Henry II.
1169. May - First landing of the Normans.
1171. October 18 - Henry II. arrives in Ireland.
1172. A Council, called by some a Parliament, held by Henry II. at Lismore.
1185. Prince John is sent over by his father as Lord of Ireland, accompanied by his tutor, Giraldus Cambrensis.
1210. King John, at the head of a military force, arrives in Ireland.
1216. Henry III. grants Magna Charta to Ireland.
1254. Ireland granted, under certain conditions, by Henry III. to his son, Prince Edward.
1277. Some of the Irish petition Edward I. for an extension of English laws and usages to them.
1295. A Parliament held at Kilkenny by Sir John Wogan, Lord Justice.
1309. A Parliament held at Kilkenny by Sir John Wogan. Its enactments on record in Bolton’s Irish Statutes.
1315. Edward Bruce lands with 6,000 men at Larne in May, invited by the Irish. Crowned near Dundalk.
1318. Defeat and death of Bruce at Faghard, near Dundalk.
1367. Parliament assembled at Kilkenny by Lionel, Duke of Clarence, at which the celebrated Anti-Irish Statute was passed prohibiting adoption of Irish costume or customs, intermarriage with the Irish, etc., under very severe penalties, to the Anglo-Irish of the Pale.
1379. The first Act ever passed against Absentees.
1394. Richard II. lands with an army at Waterford.
1399. Richard II.’s second expedition to Ireland.
1463. A College founded at Youghal by the Earl of Desmond. Another at Drogheda.
1472. Institution of the Brotherhood of St. George for the protection of the Pale.
1494. Nov. - The Parliament assembled at Drogheda passed Poyning’s Law.
1534. First step of the Reformation in Ireland.
1536. Nearly total destruction of the Kildare Geraldines. Henry VIII.’s supremacy enacted by Statute.
1537. Act passed for the suppression of religious houses.
1541. Act passed declaring Henry VIII. _King_ of Ireland.
1579. The last Earl of Desmond proclaimed a traitor.
1583. The Earl of Desmond assassinated.
1586. April 26 - Attainder of Desmond and his followers. Forfeiture of his estate - 574,628 Irish acres. Elizabeth institutes the planting system.
1592. The Dublin University founded.
1595. Aodh O’Neill’s victory at Blackwater, and death of Marshal Bagnal.
1603. March 30 - Submission of O’Neill (Tyrone) to Mountjoy.
1607. Flight of the Northern Earls, Tyrone and Tyrconnell. Consequent seizure by the Crown of the six entire counties of Cavan, Fermanagh, Armagh, Derry, Tyrone, and Tyrconnel (now Donegal), amounting in the whole to about 511,456 Irish acres.
1608. May 1 - Sept. - Sir Cathair O’Dogherty’s rising.
1613. May 18 - After the creation of fourteen peers and forty new boroughs, a Parliament is assembled to support the new _plantation_ of Ulster by the attainder and outlawry of the gentlemen of that province.
1616. Commission for inquiring into defective titles.
1635. Lord Wentworth’s oppressive proceedings to find a title in the Crown to the province of Connaught.
1641. Oct. 23 - The breaking out of the celebrated Irish insurrection.
1642. The confederate Catholics form their General Assembly and Supreme Council at Kilkenny - “Pro Deo, pro rege, _et patria, Hibernia, unanimes_,” their motto.
1646. June 5 - Monroe totally defeated by Owen Roe O’Neill at Benburb, near Armagh.
1649. Aug. 15 - Oliver Cromwell arrives in Dublin.
- -    Sept. 2, 10, 15. - Siege, storming, and massacre of Drogheda.
- -    Oct. 1 - Siege and massacre of Wexford.
- -    Nov. 6 - Death of Owen Roe O’Neill at Cloch-Uachdar Castle, Co. Cavan.
1650. May 29 - Cromwell embarks for England.
1653. Sept. 26 - The Irish war proclaimed ended by the English Parliament. - Act of Grace, ordering the Irish Catholics to transport themselves, on pain of death, into Connaught before 1st of March, 1654.
1661. May 8, 1666. Acts of Settlement and Explanation. 7,800,000 acres confiscated and distributed under them.
1689. March 12 - James II. landed at Kinsale.
- -    May  7 } The Irish Parliament summoned by him: met at the
- -    July 20 } Inns of Court.
1690. June 14 - William III. landed at Carrickfergus Bay.
- -    July 1 - Battle of the Boyne.
- -    Aug 30 - The first siege of Limerick under William III. raised by Sarsfield.
1691. June 30 - Athlone taken after a gallant defence.
1691. July 12 - Battle of Aughrim.
- -    Oct. 3 - Capitulation and Treaty of Limerick.
1692. April 5 - The articles agreed upon by the Treaty confirmed by William III.
- -    Nov. 3 - Lord Sydney’s protest against the claim of the Irish House of Commons to the right of “preparing heads of bills for raising money” - the beginning of the struggle between the Protestant ascendency and the English Government, which bore national fruit in 1782, but which was crushed in 1800.
1695. August - Parliament violated the Treaty of Limerick -
         7 William III., c. 67 - Prohibits Catholic education at home or abroad.
         7 William III., c. 5 - Disarms Papists.
1697. 9 William III., c. 1 - Banishes Popish archbishops, bishops, vicars-general, and all regular clergy, on pain of death. 9 William III., c. 2 - An Act “to confirm the Treaty of Limerick,” which directly and grossly violates its letter and spirit. It is fit to remember that in the Irish House of Lords, from which Catholics were excluded, seven spiritual and five temporal peers protested against this infamous legislation.
1698. The 9 and 10 William III., c. 40 - An Act aimed at the Irish woollen manufacture. Molyneux published his famous _Case of Ireland being bound by Acts of Parliament passed in England_. This book, by order of the English House of Commons, was burned by the hangman.
1704. March 4 - The “Act to prevent the further growth of Popery,” one of the most noted links in the penal chain.
1719. October 17 - Representation of the Irish House of Lords against appeals to England.
1720. 6 Geo. I. - Act passed by the English Legislature to secure the dependency of Ireland.
- -    Swift’s first Irish pamphlet - “A proposal for the universal use of Irish manufactures.” Prosecuted by Government.
1724. Wood’s patent to coin half-pence for Ireland, and Swift’s successful opposition to the scheme by the “Letters of M. B. Drapier.” The first time all Irish sects and parties were unanimous upon national grounds.
1728. 1 Geo. II., c. 9, s. 8. - The Act disfranchising Roman Catholics.
1737. The tithe of agistment got rid of by the Irish gentry, and the chief burden of the tithe thereby thrown on the farmers and peasantry.
1743. Lucas rises into notice in the Dublin Corporation.
1745. April 30 - Battle of Fontenoy.
1749. Dr. Lucas is obliged to leave Ireland.
1753. Dec. 17 - The House of Commons asserts its control successfully over the surplus revenue, in opposition to Government.
1756. The first public effort by Mr. O’Connor and Dr. Curry to inspire the Catholics with the spirit of freedom. They succeed with the mercantile body, but are opposed by many of the gentry and clergy.
1760. March and April - Mr. Wyse and Dr. Curry revive the scheme of an association to manage Catholic affairs.
1761. Dr. Lucas returned as representative of Dublin to the first parliament of George III.
1763. Establishment of the _Freeman’s Journal_ by Dr. Lucas - the first independent Irish newspaper.
1768. The duration of parliament limited to eight years.
1778. First relaxation of the Penal Code, Catholics allowed long tenures of land, etc.
- -    The Volunteers first formed. Flood the foremost popular leader.
1779. The achievement of Free Trade [_i.e._, Ireland’s right to trade with the colonies, etc.].
1782. Ireland’s legislative independence won. Grattan’s prime.
1785. Orde’s Commercial Propositions.
1789. Debates upon the Regency question.
1790. The formation of the Society of United Irishmen at Belfast. Theobald Wolfe Tone its founder.
1792.} The Franchise restored to the Roman Catholics; the Bar opened
1793.} to them, etc.
1795. Sept. 21 - First Orange Lodge formed.
1796. Dec. 24 - The remnant of the French expedition arrives in Bantry Bay without General Hoche, the commander.
1798. May 23 - Breaking out of the insurrection.
- -    June 21 - Battle of Vinegar Hill.
- -    August 22 - General Humbert lands with a small force at Killala.
- -    Dec. 9 - Meeting of the Bar to oppose the projected Union. Saurin moves the resolution, which is carried.
1799. Jan. 22 - The Union proposed.
- -    June 1 - Parliament prorogued, Government having been defeated by small majorities.
1800. Feb. 10 - The House of Lords divided, 75 for and 26 against the Union.
- -    Feb. 15 - The House of Commons divided, 158 for, 115 against the Union.
- -    March 17 - On this day, the first of the following January was fixed in the Commons for the commencement of the Union.
1803. Robert Emmet’s insurrection and execution.
1810. Great Repeal meeting in Dublin.
1821. George IV. in Ireland.
1823. Catholic Association formed.
1825. Act passed to put down the Catholic Association.
1828. O’Connell’s election for Clare.
1829. April 13 - Emancipation granted.
1831. Education Board formed.
1833. Coercion Bill passed by the Whigs.
1836. May - Parliament rejects Repeal motion.
1838. Poor Law. Temperance Movement.
1840. Corporation Reform. Repeal Association formed by O’Connell.
1842. October 15 - Establishment of the _Nation_.
1843. Monster meetings. Prosecutions. William Smith O’Brien joins the Repeal Association.
1844. Verdict against, and imprisonment of Repeal leaders, 12th February, and 30th May. Liberation, 7th September.
The future is ours - for good, if we are persevering, intelligent, and brave; for ill, if we quarrel, slumber, or shrink.