[In the following essay, Krans examines the lives and works of novelists born in Ireland and raised as Catholics, discussing in particular how these novelists portrayed the lives and character of the Irish peasant and middle classes.]

At the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century a group of young writers began to appear whose works were more national and more worthy of being considered as an elucidation of Irish life and the character of the race than those of any previous novelist, except perhaps Miss Edgeworth. This is the group of novelists of the peasantry. They were all of Celtic stock, and bred in the Catholic faith. At this time O'Connell's agitation had awakened the Irish Catholics, and there is doubtless a connection between this little outburst of literary energy and the repeal of Catholic disabilities.

There is a strong contrast between the careers of these novelists of the peasantry and the gentry novelists. Lady Morgan in her theatrical and literary Bohemia or in Belgravia, Maxwell and his sporting life, Lever's high-living and gay company, the comfortable lives of Miss Edgeworth, the Crokers and Mrs. Hall, and Lover drolling it in the drawing-rooms of Dublin or London, make a series of pictures quite different from that of John Banim's harassed, hand-to-mouth existence, Griffin's fight for bread and fame, and the necessitous career of Carleton, struggling for education and a livelihood. With the novelists of the peasantry the devil-may-care temper that gave the novels of the gentry their characteristic tone no longer rules. They cannot take hold of life in the same free, off-hand manner.

John Banim, the first of the group, was born in 1798, the year of the Rebellion, and the same in which Croker and Carleton first saw the light, in Kilkenny, where his father—a bit of old Ireland in his testy temper, his warm heart, and his love of a social glass—was engaged in the double occupation of farmer and shopkeeper, in the latter capacity a dealer in the necessaries of a sportsman's and angler's outfit. His father was of the "strong farmer" class, that is, somewhere between the thriving peasant and the gentleman farmer. He kept a pair of blood-horses, and in Banim's boyhood (though reverses soon came) was in easy circumstances. John's formal education began under an eccentric pedagogue, who, by a weakness for drink and other foibles, could rival the hedge-schoolmasters of Carleton's tales; it was continued at a preparatory school at Kilkenny, and ended there with his fifteenth year. In the same year he left home for Dublin to study drawing, returning two years later to support himself in a school position as drawing-master. He shortly formed a romantic and unfortunate attachment for one of his pupils. He was not thought eligible by the young lady's father, his suit was scornfully rejected, and all communication forbidden between the lovers. Under the agitation of the separation the delicate, high-strung girl became ill and died. Banim, intensely emotional by nature, abandoned himself to the tide of grief. Exposure to bad weather at the time of the funeral and after, when he wandered for days careless and scarce conscious of his whereabouts, together with the agony of his sorrow, resulted in a collapse of body and mind from which it took months to recover; this planted the seeds of a disorder that eventually brought him to his death. On his partial recovery he resolved to give up art for literature, went to Dublin, and half starved there for two years. But in spite of struggles the Dublin experiment ended prosperously. He wrote a tragedy, Damon and Pythias, that was accepted by Macready and put upon the stage at Covent Garden with triumphant success. This was in 1821. A visit home followed the success of the tragedy, during which he married and planned a fresh literary campaign. London was thought a better field than Dublin for his talents, and in 1822, with a few pounds in his pocket and accompanied by his young wife, he entered upon the struggle of life there without a single friend or even an introductory letter.

The illness of his wife after their arrival in London soon exhausted their slender store, and necessity drove Banim to continued literary labor beyond his strength. At this time, when circumstances called for all his health and energy, anxiety and excessive toil induced a terrible illness, a return of the racking pains that had tortured him for months after the death of his first love. From this to the end of his life Banim fought his battle with a broken sword. He worked on with set teeth, besieged and prostrated by illness after illness. He scarce wrote three pages of his stories, he tells his brother, free from "wringing, burning, agonizing pain." The story of his life from his arrival in London to his death is a story of toil, disappointment, and disaster, with painful illness as an almost constant attendant. When only thirty-one years old, his health was so feeble that change of air and scene was declared to be his only hope. In 1829 he left London for Boulogne-sur-Mer. There he was stricken with paralysis of the lower limbs. When in 1832 cholera was epidemic in Boulogne, the paralyzed man was attacked by it, recovered, relapsed, and again fought his way back to life. This left him ever after weak and shattered in body, and for a time in mind. At last, baffled and broken, he owned himself defeated in the struggle, and wrote for help to his literary friends. And this prostration came just as fame and fortune began to smile upon him. The three series of the O'Hara Tales (1825, 1826, 1829), written by him and his brother Michael in collaboration, had been entirely successful, and his novel The Boyne Water (1825) had been well received. But at the moment when the road for the first time seemed smooth before him, his literary work was done. The appeal to his brethren of the pen had not been in vain. Subscriptions from literary men, a benefit performance in Dublin, a purse from his fellow-citizens of Kilkenny, and other generous gifts kept him beyond want for the rest of his life. In 1835 he returned to Kilkenny to die. His brother Michael, who met him in Dublin to take him home, was shocked at the ravages that disease and wasting toil had wrought, and describes him—he was then in his thirty-seventh year—as "a meagre, attenuated, almost white-haired old man." After seven more painful years John Banim died at Kilkenny in 1842.

Michael Banim, John's eldest brother, who has appeared in the background of this sketch, was born at Kilkenny in 1796. His education was the same as John's, except that for a time he took up the study of law, only to abandon it shortly, however, because of a reverse of fortune that befell his father. With the self-sacrifice that marked all his relations with father and brother, he devoted himself to unravelling the tangled threads of his father's business. In 1825 he wrote, at John's suggestion, a tale for The Tales of the O'Hara Family. This was Crohoore of the Bill-hook, one of the most popular of the series, and he continued throughout his brother's literary life to publish jointly with him. After a series of ups and downs of fortune, he died, an old man of seventy-eight, in 1874.

The first of John Banim's novels, considered in their historical sequence, is The Boyne Water, a novel after the manner of Scott, in which the thread of a double love story is followed through numberless thrilling adventures, with the siege of Londonderry, the battle of the Boyne, and the siege of Limerick as the great features. The story opens before the outbreak of hostilities between James and William. Parties of Protestant gentry, wrathful and dismayed, dining together in Dublin, tap their swords significantly, and denounce Tyrconnel's policy that is sweeping Protestants from the army, civic offices, the bench, and the bar, and striving to substitute a Catholic for a Protestant ascendency. Frantic parsons declaim against open mass-houses where before there was godly silence, against tolerated priests, Papist prelates at court, and the imminence of universal Popery. All hands contemplate with well-grounded terror the spectacle of the English ascendency for the moment abolished, the native Irish restored to their rights and ready to retaliate upon those who had trampled upon them since Cromwell's time. The love plot turns on a typical dilemma growing out of the conditions of the day, when religious and political feeling ran high, and the nation arrayed itself, Protestant against Catholic, in opposing ranks. There are twin heroes and heroines. Evelyn, a young Protestant gentleman, becomes engaged to Eva M'Donnell, a young Catholic lady. The young lady's brother, Edmund M'Donnell, engages himself to Evelyn's sister. The double marriage is being celebrated when, in the midst of the ceremony, a messenger bursts in with the announcement, "William the Deliverer has landed." In the excitement of the moment the ceremony is suspended; the parsons and priests, who were officiating together at the mixed wedding, break out in fierce recriminations; the parties to the wedding are drawn into the angry altercation. The Protestant sister leaves the Catholic lover's arms for the protection of her brother, and in like manner the Catholic sister takes her place by her brother's side. M'Donnell hastens to join James's army; the Protestant brother and sister make the best of their way to Londonderry, the Protestant refuge in the north. This flight gives occasion for a picture of the country at this critical moment. The roads are astir with Protestants, gentle and simple, hastening to the northern towns where the Williamites were to stand at bay, and passing these are parties of Catholics hurrying in an opposite direction.

The interest in the book as a love story soon fades away, and attention is centred upon battles and sieges and the historical personages that appear upon the stage. The whole story of the long siege of Derry is told from the time King James and his army sat down before the closed gates to the day the English ship broke the boom across the river, and the besiegers were forced sullenly to withdraw. The horrors of the siege are not spared. The Protestants are even reduced to feed upon carrion, and die in the streets of hunger and the fever that comes of it. The Rev. George Walker, the soul of the fighting men of the city, is always well to the front. Clad in his clericals, armed, and with a military sash, he now leads a sally from the walls, now prays for victory in the churches.

The battle scenes at the Boyne are designed to be the feature of the book. All through them there are interesting glimpses of the oddly sorted companions in arms that made up the army of James—the ragged, wild Irish regiments, in motley uniforms, bare-legged, and armed with rusty pikes and firelocks, in strange contrast to the bright chivalry of their French allies. The careful descriptions of the battleground are the result of a tour made by Banim especially to familiarize himself with its topography. The figure of William on his white horse, stern, silent, and in person commanding and inspiring his troops, is contrasted with that of the incapable James, in the churchyard on Dunore hill, lending a willing ear to the French officer who counsels flight for France, while Sarsfeld vainly urges his majesty to head in person a last charge, and strike with his own arm for his triple crown.

The chief incidents of The Last Baron of Crana (1826) fall in the years just following the events of The Boyne Water. The novel is both an illustration of the working of the penal laws upon the Catholics within their jurisdiction and a picture of the life of a class of Catholics who lived in open defiance of them. With the first chapter the story plunges into the midst of the battle of Aughrim. Sir Redmund O'Burke, an officer in James's army, is prompted by a soldier's admiration of courage to save the life of Captain Pendergast of William's army from the swords of James's troopers. The tide of the battle then sweeps the two apart, to meet again as William's army wins the day. Sir Redmund lies mortally wounded, and with his last breath asks Pendergast to protect his young son who has survived the battle. In obedience to the dying request, Pendergast finds O'Burke's son, and takes him to his home in the north. With the youth go a priest, his tutor, and a faithful Catholic retainer. En route to the north they stop in Dublin. As in The Boyne Water, so here the political temper of the time is reflected in the sentiments voiced at gatherings of Protestant gentlemen where Pendergast is a guest. He, with three Catholics now dependent on him for protection, listens eagerly to hear the feeling of the victors regarding the fate of the Catholics. Every voice is raised against the treaty of Limerick as a measure of unmerited leniency toward the vanquished and of ungrateful injustice to the supporters of King William.

In due time, the persecuting laws are passed against the Catholics, and Pendergast must either keep O'Burke uneducated and forbid him the ministrations of his church, or break the law of the land that made education for a Catholic illegal and forbade a Catholic priest to exercise his functions. He chooses the latter course, and breaks the laws for his young friend's sake. O'Burke is daily tutored by the priest, and in a hut a little removed from the house the mass is regularly celebrated. Moved by a private spite an enemy, who knows of these proceedings, swears out a warrant against O'Burke, the priest, and the faithful retainer of O'Burke, who is a Catholic, and whom Pendergast has made his gamekeeper, and also against some Catholic gentlemen who happen at the time to be Pendergast's guests. The officer of the law visits the house, and orders the household before him. First laying down five pounds, he demands O'Burke's sleek hunter, for by law a Protestant could always claim the horses of a Catholic by paying five pounds a head, and on the same basis takes the handsome coach-horses of Pendergast's guests. He then demands the discharge of Pendergast's gamekeeper, who, as a Catholic, illegally held the position. All the Catholics are then fined in accordance with another statute which provided that all good men must attend Sabbath services of the Established Church once a week, on penalty of a fine for each absence. The suspects are asked how often they have attended public worship in a church of the established form. All answer, "Never." Accordingly the fine is reckoned from the time of the passing of the statute six years back up to date. The bailiff pays his respects last to the priest. When the latter finds himself discovered, knowing death to be the penalty of exercising his office, he fells the bailiff with a swinging blow, dashes through the window, and escapes.

Such is the illustration in this fiction of the penal laws at work upon those within their jurisdiction. The career of the last Baron of Crana, the personage who gives the book its name, represents the career of many Catholics, some of the better sort, who defied the laws and warred against them.

At the close of the civil war, the young Baron of Crana knows that his estates will be confiscated, on the ground of his having held a commission in James's army. In reckless defiance of a condition of things in which he and his Catholic brethren are so outrageously treated he joins a band of Rapparees, and becomes their leader. The Rapparees, so called from their carrying raparies or half-pikes, were wild bands of plunderers, originally recruited from the Catholics who had fought for King James, and who, after the termination of hostilities, continued to exist as freebooters and gentlemen of the road. To them it was a virtue to break the laws, and rob and plunder the officers of a usurping king, the persecutor of them and their faith. It was their delight to rob the rich Sassenachs, and to empty the money-bags of tithe-proctors and tax gatherers as they returned from their rounds laden with King William's dues. The Rapparees, generally speaking recruited from the lower ranks of society, had also a scattering of ruined Catholic gentlemen—some even of the Baron of Crana's pretensions—who took refuge among them, preferring, for one reason or another, the life of outlaws at home to military service in the armies of France or Spain. The leaders of these bands sometimes rivalled Robin Hood in daring, courage, and generosity, and, like him, were the darlings of the poor, whom they disdained to molest. It was as a leader of these bands that the last Baron of Crana, ruined by his devotion to the cause of James, unsettled by the wars, without home or occupation, wound up his career.

In The Conformists (1829) Banim again illustrates the practical working of the penal laws. Hugh Darcy, a Catholic country gentleman, is confronted with the problem of educating his two sons in the face of the laws against Catholic education. Tutors fear prosecution, and will not risk teaching the boys, so Mr. Darcy resolves to make a shift to teach them himself. But he loves his ease, soon tires of racking his brains over rusty Latin and forgotten mathematics, and relinquishes the effort, to spend the evenings more comfortably over the bottle. Making the care of the estate his excuse, he leaves the education of the boys in their mother's hands. A Catholic neighbor, who can find no one to teach his daughters, begs Mrs. Darcy, as a special kindness, to allow them to share with the boys the advantages of her instruction. The request granted, two bright young ladies become the fellow-students of her sons, and this situation leads to a collision with the penal laws.

Dan, the younger son, clever with rod and gun but a dunce at his books, is ashamed to display his backwardness before the young ladies, and to make up for lost time betakes himself surreptitiously to a hedge-schoolmaster who, hounded out of his profession by the penal laws, earned his bread as a laborer upon a neighboring farm. This man, overcoming his fears, consents to help Dan out, and, in a lonely spot, screened by a hedge, they daily toil with book and slate. But the plan ends in disaster. The officers of the law get wind of the illegal education, and one fine day a bailiff bursts rudely upon the studious seclusion of the pair. The hedge-schoolmaster gives leg-bail and escapes, but young Dan is dragged off to jail to expiate his crime.

The incident that concludes this story shows the operation of one of the most outrageous and intolerable provisions of the code—that which makes the son of a Catholic who conforms the legal heir to his father's estate. On the son's turning Protestant, not only does he become legal heir, but the father is not allowed, from the moment the son reads his recantation, to sell or mortgage any part of his property. Here the law is brought into operation in this way. Dan has become engaged. An ingenious conspiracy of his enemies forces him to believe that father and mother, brother and mistress have combined against him in an unnatural plot involving the breaking of his engagement and the marriage of his brother to his lady. Dan determines to take his revenge with a weapon as cruel and unnatural as those his family are turning, he believes, against himself. The penal law above referred to is ready to his hand. He resolves to turn Protestant, and thus revenge himself at once upon father, brother, and mistress, by securing the whole patrimony to himself. The story is no less successful as an illustration of the working of the penal law from the fact that Dan finds he has wronged his family in suspecting them, becomes reconciled to them, and marries the lady of his choice.

The Irish novels are one more witness to the purity of the Catholic priesthood in Ireland. The priest unfaithful to his vows is a figure almost unknown to them. The Nowlans (1826) is the only one of these stories in which the breaking of a priest's vows for the love of a woman is the central situation.

John Nowlan, the hero of The Nowlans, is a handsome, intelligent young peasant, with all the peasant's dower of impulse and passion. Set apart for the priesthood, he has completed his education in the three R's, some Greek and Latin, and plenty of theology. Mr. Long, a wealthy country gentleman, taking a fancy to young Nowlan, domesticates him in the "big house," where he becomes tutor in the classics to Miss Letty Adams, Mr. Long's pretty niece.

The expected happens; the ardent young peasant finds himself inextricably in love with the inexperienced girl who returns his passion. The young man vainly tries to tear himself away from temptation. His resistance is weakened by doubts concerning the faith and practice of his own church. Protestants, seeking to convert him, bring batteries of arguments to bear against his creed. They assail, too, and with special effect at this critical moment, the Roman rule of celibacy as unnatural, and praise marriage as the grand condition of virtuous happiness. The Established Church clergyman, whom Nowlan has come to know, a young man just married and living in blameless happiness with his lovely wife, is to Nowlan the tempting image of a bliss within his own reach if he will but yield to argument. In the ferment of such thoughts and temptations, he and Letty, forgetting all that opposes their love, give themselves up to it completely. Nowlan's vows are broken, and the young pair flee to Dublin to live a life of poverty and struggle until Letty's death in child-bed. At last Nowlan, chastened by repentance, returns to follow the profession which sin and misfortune had interrupted. Thus the only one of these novels that has for its main situation the temptation and sin of a priest, ends in repentance, and a reconciliation between the erring priest and his church.

In The Peep o' Day, or John Doe (1825) John Banim has written a story of one of the secret societies—the Shanavests, so called from the part of dress by which the members chose to be distinguished. Their object is here the lowering of rack-rents and tithes. By anonymous letters they proscribe rents and tithe-rates, and where their demands are disregarded inflict summary and dire punishment. They attend to other matters also. In one instance a Shanavest letter commands a Catholic lawyer to plead gratis for all defenders in the tithe-proctor's court; in another the priest finds a Shanavest notice nailed to his door demanding the reduction of Christmas and Easter dues, the reduction of marriage fees to two shillings per pair, and of christening fees to ten pence per head.

The leader of the Shanavests of this tale is the son of a once prosperous farmer. His father was ruined and his sister robbed of her good name by a villanous middleman. To revenge his father and sister he joins the illegal association of which he eventually becomes the leader, bringing his vengeance to a full accomplishment at the story's end, by having the middleman shot and his body tossed into the flames of his own house, which the Shanavests had fired.

Michael Banim's Crohoore of the Bill-Hook (1825) is also a story of the secret societies. The Whiteboys are "up." A black-hearted tithe-proctor has aroused their ire and receives a midnight visit. He is dragged from his bed, and buried alive up to the neck. One of the band with a pruning knife in his hand then steps up and after an address delivered in a tone of savage mockery slices the ears from the victim's head. The victim is then made to swear, on the book, that he will abandon forever his unpopular profession. This done, the troop, with a wild "hurrah" that testifies their triumph, withdraw.

The action of Crohoore is placed in the period when the peasants labored under the cruel code, then almost in full operation. While deprecating the violence of the Whiteboys, the story aims to make clear the grievances from which the Whiteboy movement arose, and to disabuse Englishmen of the idea that the Whiteboy disturbances were groundless outbreaks of savagery and malice. The peasantry are presented in their poverty and ignorance, neglected, galled, and hard-driven by middlemen and tithe-proctors who squeezed the very marrow from their bones. Under maddening hardships it is seen how natural, almost inevitable, it was that they should blindly seek redress and wreak vengeance in the only way open to them.

In The Croppy (1828), by Michael Banim, the scene is the County Wexford; the time, the eve of and during the Rebellion of '98. The novel is a love story moving through a series of historic and semi-historic incidents representing the life men lived in those days of suspense and danger. The novel takes its title from a word applied to the rebels by their enemies as a term of contempt. The rebels affected a fashion of close-cut polls in imitation of the French Republicans. This way of wearing the hair was considered a badge of disaffection, and the crop-head rebel was dubbed the "croppy." The Croppy introduces the two parties who were to be antagonists in the impending struggle—the Catholic peasantry, mostly identified with the United Irishmen, the society planning the Rebellion which was to free Ireland from English rule, and the Orangemen, the loyalists and conspiracy hunters, bent on preventing an outbreak or suppressing one if it should occur.

The meetings of the United Irishmen of the early part of the story reflect the attitude of the peasantry of the south toward the Rebellion. An emissary of the United Irishmen comes down from the north to see how matters stand in the County Wexford on the eve of the rising. In a smithy he meets a parochial committee of the society—decent men, snug farmers and small tradesmen they seem—to canvass the situation. He asks if, in their operations, they have proceeded in the spirit of the oath of membership by which they swore to make the society a brotherhood of Irishmen of every religious persuasion. The frank replies told the familiar tale, that generous patriots groaned to hear, of a great movement inspired by the ideal of a happy freedom for a United Ireland, gone wrong, and sunk to the level of a bitter sectarian struggle rooted in old hate, fear, and religious bigotry.

The Croppy gives a sample, too, of the outrages of the Orange yeomanry that marked the attempts to quell the growing disaffection. These deeds convinced the Catholics that the Orangemen were conspiring to exterminate them, and precipitated the Rebellion. This is the kind of thing that was happening all over the country. A United Irishman blacksmith had been making pikes for the use of the rebels, and the pike-heads were concealed beneath the anvil in the shop. Some informer revealed the fact to the yeomanry. The man's son rushes into the smithy with the news that the yeomanry are at his heels to search for concealed weapons. Messengers at once post off to warn neighbors similarly involved. The smith, as the guilty man, hastens from the shop to conceal himself, thinking his wife and children will be unharmed. The yeomanry clatter up to the door; find the bird flown; seize the son and some of the neighbors who are suspected; burn the smithy, and try to turn their captives into informers by torture. Some are fastened to trees and flogged within an inch of their lives. The smith's son is strung up to the limb of a tree and lowered, to try if they can wring from the convulsed lips and bewildered senses of the boy confessions regarding the conspiracy and the hiding-place of his father. The boy, still keeping silence, is again strung up, and again lowered to gasp out a false story, that can do his friends no harm, and may do good, to the effect that the Catholics were about to sweep down on the Orangemen ten thousand strong. This assertion fell in with the belief held by the Orangemen (corresponding to the Catholic fear of them) that their enemies were planning a massacre. Hence operations stop at once; the lad is left to expire in the arms of his parents; there is a rush for the horses, and the Orange cavalry gallop to quarters to prepare for the descent of the ten thousand.

The difficulties of the country gentry who sought to remain neutral during the Rebellion are illustrated in the dilemma of the Sir Thomas Hartley of the story. He is one of those whose sympathies had gone with the United Irishmen up to the time their proceedings changed from open remonstrance to secret conspirarcy; but he shrank from rebellion, and refused to wade through blood to freedom. He detested the bigotry of the Orangemen, however, and actively opposed their pitch-cappings, scourgings, half-hangings and wholehangings of peasants on the mere suspicion of rebellion. As a result of his conduct the Orangemen marked him for an enemy and a traitor, and the rebellious peasantry believed they had in him a secret champion of their conspiracy. Of one side of this understanding he is made well aware at the very outbreak of the Rebellion, when, sitting at home, he is startled one day by a tremendous shout, like the clamor of a thousand throats. Looking from his window he sees, swarming on his lawn, a motley multitude composed of the Catholic peasantry of the whole neighborhood, armed with rusty guns, bludgeons, scythes, and formidable pikes. The peasantry are "up" and the Rebellion has begun. A spokesman steps before the mob and informs Sir Thomas that he, the "barrow-knight," has been chosen to take command of the troops of the Union drawn up before him, and that they are ready to follow him to the world's end. On his declining the honor, and declaring he will have no hand in the Rebellion, the threatening shouts of the wild crowd bear in upon him the perils of the trimmer's position:—

"What's the rason you have for skulkin' back, Sir Thomas?"

"You're afeared, Sir Thomas, an' the curse o' Cromwell on all cowards. But ar'n't you afeared iv us? Ar'n't you afeared we'd drag you down from that windee, an' make you march wid us, or die by us?"

"Oncet more, an' for the last time, Sir Thomas, will you be one among us or an inemy agin us?"

"Smash the duour!"

Sir Thomas, by good fortune, is able to escape rebel violence, but only to be caught on the other horn of the dilemma. The Orangemen, regarding his inactivity as disloyalty, pack the jury, try him, and condemn him to death as a traitor.

The scenes from the heart of the Rebellion make a vivid picture of the state of the County Wexford—the roads astir with the rebels in disorderly mobs, burning houses and piking the enemies they could lay hands on, while the Orangemen retaliated by bayoneting or shooting every timid straggler in a peasant's coat who had not turned out with the main body. The rebel army, officers and men, becomes familiarly known. The scene upon the hill of Ballyorvil, where the rebels are preparing for the attack on Enniscorthy, is curious to the last degree in the glimpses given of the grotesque appearance and doings of the "throops of the Union." In the front of this body were collected all who bore firearms, some few shouldering muskets, and the rest clutching guns of every kind and calibre, plundered from the villages they passed through on their way, wrested from parties of defeated Orangemen, or dragged from places of concealment to grace the long-expected day. Ammunition was scarce, and carried for the most part in bits of paper thrust inaccessibly into the depths of their pockets. Behind the "gunsmen" rose groves of long pikes roughly fashioned from the anvil, rude, black weapons, but serviceable, and fit instruments in this civil strife where the pomp and circumstance of war found no place. This army was clad as strangely as it was armed. Uniforms there were none. Some had pouches or cross-belts wrested from the soldiers, but most were dressed in their usual costumes, except that many doffed coats, stockings, and brogues to go into action in the broiling summer weather as cool and light as possible. The leaders, mostly farmers and small tradesmen, with a few priests, among them the burly figure of the Father Rourke of history, later hung upon Wexford bridge, were out in front of their commands. They were clad like the rank and file, except perhaps for a green hatband or some badge of green fastened upon them. These officers, with difficulty raising their tones of command above the general clamor, in which the shrill cries of women and children who had accompanied the men bore no inconsiderable part, were busied in pushing, pulling, coaxing, and cursing their unruly throngs into some sort of disposition for march and battle.

From the hill of Ballyorvil the story follows the rebel forces as they sweep pell-mell, with undisciplined courage into Enniscorthy; to their camp on Vinegar Hill, with particular attention to the slaughter ad libitum of cattle to appease their hunger, and Orangemen to satisfy their revenge; thence to Wexford, and to the capture of Ross, and the retreat therefrom, with which the novel as a story of the Rebellion concludes.

The preoccupation of the Banims with the past and present fortunes of their co-religionists, and their strong Catholic sympathies, are written all over their work, which is largely concerned with the pressure of the penal laws upon the Catholics, with the lives and ministrations of the priests of their church, and in general with the Catholic peasantry. Gerald Griffin, a friend of Banim's, who brought out a collection of Irish stories shortly after the publication of the second series of O'Hara tales, was, like Banim, a Catholic, wrote with strong Catholic sympathies, and kept before his eyes a declared purpose of faithfully presenting in his stories his Catholic countrymen and their religion. A Catholic spirit, if not always apparent upon the surface of his work, still breathes through it all.

Griffin came of a middle-class Catholic family. His father was a brewer in the city of Limerick, where Gerald was born in 1803. In 1810 the family left Limerick to reside in the country, at first at Fairy Lawn (near Loughill on the Shannon), then at Adare, and later at Pallas Kenry. Like Carleton and the Banims he received an imperfect education, intrusted to the care of whatever tutors or masters happened to be at hand, among them a preceptor who maintained in his methods some of the oddities of the hedge-school "philomaths." Memories of this man and of the school he kept in the little thatched Catholic chapel are preserved in the schoolroom scene of Griffin's The Rivals (1830). Gerald's boyhood and youth seem a record of almost unbroken happiness. He spent his time in hunting, or in boating and fishing upon the Shannon, or in rambles about the country. His taste for the romantic past delighted in the antiquarian remains in which the neighborhood was rich. The noble assemblage of ecclesiastical ruins within the demesne of the Earl of Dunraven, which adjoined the town of Adare, especially appealed to his reverent and pious nature, and doubtless helped to strengthen that interest in his country's past which eventually found expression in his historical novel The Invasion (1832). The scenes and experiences of this happy boyhood and youth were the stuff of which his prose and poetry were made. In those days he gleaned from the remote and quiet neighborhoods in which he lived, or which he visited, their legends, traditions, and folk-tales, and came by the knowledge of peasant life and character which he afterward worked into his fiction.

With his twentieth year this life of happy pastimes and pastoral calm, so gracefully reflected in many wistful retrospects of his poetry, came to an end. A love for literature, which had been his from childhood, developed into an overwhelming passion for literary fame, and in 1823, extravagantly hopeful of quick success, he left home for London to live by his pen in the city wilderness. A letter to his parents, written after two years of life in London, tells of his early plans:—

"I cannot with my present experience conceive anything more comical than my own views and measures at the time. A young gentleman totally unknown, even to a single family in London, coming into town with a few pounds in one pocket and a brace of tragedies in another, supposing that one will set him up before the others are exhausted, is not a very novel, but a very laughable delusion."

A cherished ambition of succeeding by his own unaided efforts, an extreme sensitiveness that made him unwilling to put himself under obligations to those upon whom he felt he had no claim, threw him back upon his own resources and made it difficult for the one friend of earlier days whom he found in London, Banim, or for chance friends or acquaintances, no matter how kindly intentioned, to render him any assistance.

Disappointment and delay, of course, attended his efforts to get his plays upon the stage. His purse empty, reduced to desperate straits, he turned to hack work of any and every kind. In spite of wasting and continuous labor he could scarce keep soul and body together. He lived in wretched lodgings in poverty as extreme as ever a Grub Street penny-a-liner survived, going sometimes for days without food, and toiling all the while at a pace beyond human nature to endure. Pride forbade him to own himself vanquished. "That horrid word 'failure,' " he wrote to his brother; "no, death first." And this was no vain boast, for at times the grim alternative to which he alludes was not far from its accomplishment.

The story of his first two years is distressing and painful to read. But after that prospects brightened. He obtained by slow degrees a footing as a magazine writer. In 1827 he made a decided hit with Holland Tide (1826), a series of tales of Irish life that completely established his character with the periodicals, and seemed to promise much for the future. Early in 1827 he returned to live with his brother at Pallas Kenry, where he wrote Tales of the Munster Festivals (1827), which more than sustained the reputation made by Holland Tide. The Collegians (1829) crowned his two preceding successes. To Griffin, however, the game had not been worth the candle. He had, to use his own phrase, "won half a name," but at the expense of a constitution sapped and shattered by severe trials and wasting toil.

The rest of the story may be briefly told. He lived mostly at home in Pallas Kenry with his brothers, for a time continuing his literary work. Always of a religious nature, religion gradually filled more and more of his feeling and thought, and he resolved to take up a religious vocation. In 1838 he joined the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic lay order who gave themselves to the education of the children of the poor. With them he lived and worked until his death of a fever in 1840.

In his survey of Irish life, Griffin attends to the life of the peasantry and to the life of his own order—the rural middle class; the gentry are occasionally introduced; the nobility are scarcely heard of.

Three of the Tales of the Munster Festivals, "Card-Drawing," "The Hand and the Word," and "The Aylmers of Bally-Aylmer," deal with life on the south-west coast of Ireland. In the first two of these the fisher-folk appear. They are seen occupied as was their daily wont—they talk Irish, hunt seals, go to sea in canoes to fish, lade the turf-boats, till their gardens, eat potatoes and oaten bread, exercise themselves in offices of kindness toward strangers, and obey their priests in all reasonable matters. They are seen also, under the spur of dark passion, acting out, now and again, the tragedies that broke upon the peaceful regularity of their lives. The tales of the fisher-folk gain wonderfully in effect from the romantic setting of giddy precipice and perilous sea before which the little dramas are enacted. Griffin knew this coast well, felt its wild charm, and makes the reader feel it. The outlook of these stories is upon the stupendous cliffs and crags for which the coast is famous, upon vistas of bizarre and fantastic grandeur—insular columns and pinnacles, amphitheatres, and arches, deep caverns, and grottos worn from the solid rock, and, girdling all, the board Atlantic tossing its bright green waves against the rocky walls, or heaving sullenly at their feet. The scenes from this wild coast are introduced not merely for their picturesqueness, but are used to bring together in a single impression the fearful in landscape and the dangerous and desperate in human passion, so that moral and physical gulfs and precipices combine to produce situations of poignant terror. The scene in "The Hand and the Word," in which Pennie's happy lover, struggling for his life with a jealous rival, is hurled from a beetling crag into the sea hundreds of feet below, is an instance of this. A situation in "Card-Drawing" is another instance. Kinchela, tortured by the guilt of a murder, the responsibility for which he has fastened upon his rival, is being lowered by a rope from the cliff-top. Suspended in mid-air between the cliff-top and the sea, he hears a strand of the rope snap just above him and beyond his reach. In an agony of terror he holds the incident for the threat of an angry God against his murderous and unrepentant soul.

In "The Aylmers of Bally-Aylmer" the gentry of the coast of Kerry are in the foreground. The story is laid in the eighteenth century. The country about the home of the Aylmers is a wild district of mountain and bog, doomed by nature to poverty, far removed from any considerable centre of civilization, and traversed by few regular roads. The state of society in this section, to judge from the story, was much like that which subsisted in the Highlands of Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century. Smuggling was the lucrative trade, and practised by all classes, gentlemen and peasants, Catholics and Protestants alike. To be known to meddle in the "running trade" brought no opprobrium upon the character of a gentleman. In the deep natural harbors among the mountains privateers found their shelter. All classes united in a conspiracy to baffle the officers of the revenue, and informers found themselves in such danger that their trade was almost abandoned. Gentlemen brought in oceans of Burgundy and brandy, never destined to pass through the hands of an exciseman, which they got in exchange for sheepskins and other commodities.

Griffin alone of the novelists touches upon one odd and incongruous element of Irish life—that of the Palatines, or "Palentins," as the peasantry called them. They were German emigrants brought over by a few great landlords assisted by a grant from the Irish Parliament. This was early in the eighteenth century, when English commercial legislation adverse to Irish interests had resulted in poverty, famine, and an almost total depopulation of districts in the south and west. With the hope of reviving agriculture at a time when the penal laws were driving native energy to the continent, these Palatines were brought over. They were a part of the tide of German emigration that set toward the American colonies at the same period. The "Limerick Dutchman" and the "Pennsylvania Dutch" are of one stock. As they appear in Griffin's story of "Suil Dhuv, or The Coiner" they are peaceful and inoffensive in their habits; in religion Protestants, adhering to one or another non-Conformist type of worship; and possessed of the thrift and industry which those who brought them over thought might be edifying to the shiftless and go-easy ways of the Catholic peasantry.

"Suil Dhuv, or the Coiner" acquaints the reader with the footing upon which these foreigners stood with the native peasantry among whom they had dropped, as it were from the clouds. A difference in religion, habits, and disposition, and the partiality shown by the lords of the soil to their new protégés in granting them long leases and other favors, are seen to result in a deep-rooted hatred between Palatine and native. The natives, generous and open-handed to a fault, had an inexpressible contempt for the unremitting exertion in acquiring and the caution in distributing money of these foreign interlopers whose "heart was in a trifle," and whose cold-blooded prudence never gave the rein to genial or convivial impulse. They hated also their dry Puritanical exactness in religious matters, and, indeed, had little in common with them beyond the religious bigotry and national prejudice that moved each to return heartily the evil feelings of the other.

In the fat Palatine parson of the story, some of the traits that aroused the contemptuous aversion of the Catholic peasantry crop out. When he speaks, it is in a strong German accent, strangely mingled with the broad drawling patois of the natives, and in a dry formal phraseology of religious cant. He has the true Evangelical appetite and solicitude as to the quantity and quality of his food and drink, which Thackeray and other satirists of the brethren have made the target of their shafts. And his portrait includes also greed for gold as a feature, a weakness comically illustrated by the purchase of a brass ingot believed by him to be pure gold. He obtained it by imposing, as he thought, upon what he mistook for the extreme simplicity of the peasant who offered it to him. The peasant turned out to be a clever rascal, whose plausible story and simple countenance enabled him to palm off his wares on unsuspecting strangers.

In "The Half Sir," "The Barber of Bantry," "Tracy's Ambition," and The Collegians, middle-class life has a prominent place. In "The Half Sir" it is the hero's social position as one of this class that gives the story its coloring, and the plot its direction. This hero is a young man of low origin who has inherited a fortune. This fortune and his education have raised a barrier between him and the class to which he belonged. His sympathies lead him to seek the society of rank and position. Here he finds himself snubbed right and left. His misery over the slights and cold shoulders to which he has exposed himself are surrounded with an atmosphere of tragic gloom quite out of keeping with the weakness of the situation. Weary of slights and snubs, the hero abjures high society, and settles down as a misanthropic member of the middle class. As such he has his differences from the nobility and gentry. Sporting tastes are wanting; he can stay away from hunts, horse-races, or cock-fights without compunction. Sociable and convivial tastes are also undeveloped; he never gives dinners, dances, or parties, and shows no zeal to make himself and his friends drunk at every opportunity. His benefactions do not stream from the heart in the bursts of impulsive generosity that delight both the giver and the humble recipient of bounty. The poor man can scarcely be grateful to so cold and phlegmatic a benefactor.

The "half quality" of whom this hero is a type were not in high favor with the peasantry. A peasant of this tale has referred contemptuously to the hero as a "half sir," and is asked what he means by the expression. He makes himself clear. The "half sir," he says, is—

"A sort of small gentleman, that way: the singlings¹ Of a gentleman, as it were. A made man—not a born gentleman. Not great, all out, nor poor, that way entirely. Betuxt and betune, as you may say. Neither good potale, nor yet strong whiskey. Neither beef nor vale. … A man that wouldn't go to a hunt, nor a race-course, nor a cock-fight, nor a hurlenmatch, nor a dance, nor a fencen-bout, nor any one born thing. Sure that's no gentleman! A man that gives no parties nor was ever known yet to be drunk in his own house. o poh!—A man that was never seen to put his hand in his pocket of a frosty mornen and say to a poor man, 'Hoy, hoy! my good fellow, here's a tinpenny for you, and get a drap o' something warm and comfortable agen the day.' A man that was never by any mains overtaken in liquor himself, nor the cause of anybody else being so, either. Sure such a man as that has no heart!"

Mr. Edmund Moynahan and his family in The Barber of Bantry are distinctly middle class, though eventually Moynahan forfeits his standing. Unhappily drawn into the bacchanalian whirl of the gentry, he loses his habitual sobriety, and becomes a "sitter-up-o'-nights" and bottle companion to his genteel, bibulous neighbors, drowning integrity and respectability in claret and whiskey punch. But before his fall he was an exemplary member of his class. He rose and retired early. The dawn saw him watching his laborers in the field or on the road, and till sunset he was occupied in business, or in advising and assisting his tenants. His wife was a stirring, competent woman. She knew Buchanan 's Domestic Medicine from cover to cover; superintended the dairy or the flaxdressers at work in the barn; knit stockings, and nursed the sick tenantry. Dancing, riding, flirting, dinner-giving, and the like she left to the gentry. In the Moynahan establishment, economy and industry went hand in hand. Nor were the Moynahans without their pleasures. In the evening there was reading aloud, while Mr. Moynahan dozed; Mrs. Moynahan knit or played with the children; and occasionally there came a chance visitor to be entertained with temperate cheer. They were pious people, too; they fasted on fast days and kept holy days holy; they were edified by the unadorned exhortation of the parish priest; in short, they lived at peace with themselves, the world, and heaven.

Mr. Moynahan was no convivialist; he prided himself upon the wholesomeness of his fare, and frowned upon the wild and extravagant follies of the gentry, eschewing the luxury and profusion he could not afford. The duelling habits of the gentry were to him bloodthirsty and barbarous. Horse-races, hunts, and cock-fights were not his passions. Like the "half sir," he was neither sporting man nor convivialist.

Mr. Moyanahan was tax-collector for his district, and in this vocation also failed to conform naturally to the standards of the gentry. When he began to assess taxes, he shocked his genteel acquaintances by a very ungenteel disposition to do so in proportion to real values and according to law. The code of the gentry expected a tax-collector to make his own fortune as fast as possible, and to let his friends off easily. Moynahan seemed indisposed to follow the customary procedure; he showed a very ungenteel squeamishness in cheating the King's exchequer for his own good and the good of his friends. On his visits to them in a professional capacity he was surprised at receiving assurances that they had no windows, no hearths, no carriages, horses, nor cows; in a word, that the wealth they were wont on all other occasions to display with pride had suddenly and mysteriously dwindled to nothing. If he shook his head and suggested the propriety of a personal inspection, he was answered by a polite reminder that to do so would be a reflection upon their veracity. He was then invited to dine and spend the night with them, and loaded with attentions. A company of taxable gentlemen were there to meet him. The conversation did not fail to bring out the course of his predecessors in office; they had pursued a certain line of conduct; he surely would not make himself singular. Each member of the company had some little thing he might want. One was anxious to supply his cellar, another his table, a hundred his pantry. All hands looked forward to his visit, and assured him that every house in the country had a convivial board, a comfortable chamber, and a blazing fire for the taxgatherer. Of course, so much kindness and generosity overcame the ungenteel scruples of the good-natured man; the least the tax-collector could do for his friends was to write down fifty, or less, where a hundred should stand. The middle-class conscience at last conformed to the standard of the gentry.

The Daly family in The Collegians have many traits in common with the middle-class people just referred to. There is the same homeliness, the same happy, if somewhat insipid, domesticity. They have the tendency, present also in the others, to moralize every incident that comes within reach. And they share also with the others the pietistic sentiment (very different from the heart-felt religion of the peasantry) that does duty as a sanction for the little prudences and decorums demanded by their circumstances and position.

The middle class, as Griffin portrays it, differs from the nobility and gentry in the lack of the dash and go, the frankness and high spirit, the sporting and convivial tastes, the recklessness, and wild wit and gayety. It wants also the primitive force, the depth, the fervor, the homely but subtle and searching humor of peasant life. It is more sober and subdued in tone and temper, more decorous. It is prudent, takes thought for the morrow, is domestic, moral, conscientious, and pious, with conventionality, tameness, timidity, and insipidity for its unpleasant features.

William Carleton, the last and greatest of this group, and the greatest of these Irish novelists, was born in Prillisk, County Tyrone, in 1798. His father was a peasant tenant, and William passed his youth among scenes precisely similar to those he describes in his stories. Both father and mother were peasants of the finest type. They seem to have summed up in themselves the best traits, the accomplishments, and the knowledge of their class, and to have possessed in a high degree the domestic virtues which are the glory of the humbler Irish. Of his parents Carleton says:—

"My father indeed was a very humble man, but on account of his unaffected piety and stainless integrity of principle, he was held in high esteem by all who knew him, no matter of what rank they might be…. My father possessed a memory not merely great or surprising, but absolutely astonishing. As a narrator of old tales, legends, and historical anecdotes he was unrivalled, and his stock of them inexhaustible. He spoke the Irish and the English languages with equal fluency. With all kinds of charms, old ranns, or poems, old prophecies, religious superstitions, tales of pilgrims, miracles and pilgrimages, anecdotes of blessed priests and friars, revelations from ghosts and fairies, he was thoroughly well acquainted. I have never heard since, during a tolerably large intercourse with Irish society, both educated and uneducated—with the antiquary, the scholar, or the humble senachie—any single legend, tradition, or usage, that, so far as I can recollect, was perfectly new to me, or unheard before in some similar or cognate guise.

"My mother possessed the sweetest and most exquisite of human voices. In her early life, I had often been told, by those who had heard her sing, that any previous intimation of her attendance at a dance, wake, or other festive occasion, was sure to attract crowds of persons, many from a distance of several miles, in order to hear from her lips the touching old airs of the country. No sooner was it known that she would attend any such meeting, than the news of it spread through the neighborhood like wild-fire, and the people flocked from all parts to hear her, just as the fashionable world does now, when the name of some eminent songstress is announced in the papers—with this difference, that upon such occasions, the voice of the one falls only on the cultivated ear, whilst that of the latter falls deep upon the untutored heart. She was not so well acquainted with the English tongue as my father, although she spoke it with sufficient ease for all the purposes of life; and for this reason among others she always gave the Irish versions of the songs in question rather than the English ones."²

Carleton's education was of the humblest description. As his father removed from one small farm to another, from townland to townland, Carleton attended the hedge-schools wherever he happened to be. Government, in its endeavor to crush out Catholic education, had only surrounded it, as it had the Catholic priesthood, with a halo; and Carleton shared in the strange enthusiasm for Greek and Latin, and "the larnin'" in general, that was not uncommon among ditchers and ploughboys. Carleton sat under a series of hedge-schoolmasters, and knew by experience both the harmlessly eccentric, and cruel and violent variety; a niece of his died of an inflammation that resulted from the master's plucking her ear with such violence as to bring on inflammation of some of the internal tendons. Carleton also picked up here and there some smattering of higher learning as opportunity offered.

In his fifteenth year he started for Munster in search of education as a poor scholar. The plan was not carried out, however, and he was soon home again, devoting himself assiduously to the enjoyment of fairs and markets, wakes, weddings, christenings, and merrymakings. For some two or three years he remained at home, and was distinguished as a dancer and athlete of local celebrity, and a prominent figure at all festivities. As a true peasant, too,—we have his own word for it,—he was an adept at dressing and swinging the "sprig of shillelagh." He enjoyed also a great reputation for his supposed learning, among his own family more especially, which led them to destine him for the priesthood.

When about nineteen he left home again, this time on a pilgrimage. His father had often told him the stories that centred about St. Patrick's Purgatory on the little island in Lough Derg. To this romantic spot Carleton went as one of the stream of pilgrims. What he saw there affected him unfavorably, set him thinking on religious questions, and was the occasion of his later change of faith, for the became a Protestant, though in later years he returned, in sympathy at least, to the religion of his fathers.

An epoch in Carleton's life was made by his chancing upon a copy of Gil Blas. A longing to see the world consumed him, and he left home a third time, making his way to Dublin, where for years he had a hard struggle with poverty; indeed, all through his life the wolf was never far from the door. In Dublin he fell in with Cæsar Otway, a Protestant controversialist and proselytizer, who, though of a harsh and unamiable character, stood Carleton's friend, and gave him his start in literature by getting him to write his account of his Lough Derg pilgrimage (from a Protestant controversialist point of view) in The Lough Derg Pilgrim, later included in the Traits and Stories.

From this time on his life was uneventful. He married the daughter of a schoolmaster, and taught for a while, but eventually supported himself entirely by his pen. When about thirty years old he published the Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830), which established his reputation. Then came Fardarougha the Miser (1839), and Valentine M'Clutchy (1847).

The Young Ireland movement was at this time in full swing. Carleton did not escape from its influence, and contributed to The National Library the short novels Paddy Go-Easy (1845), Rody the Rover (1845), and Art Maguire (1847), all designed to correct peasant weaknesses and follies—intemperance, bad farming and housekeeping, and secret societies. On Banim's death, he applied, without success, for the pension the government had given his fellow-novelist. Had he obtained it, he would have been freed from the hack work that may have had something to do with the decline of his genius. Carleton died in Dublin in 1869, at the age of seventy.

Carleton's work, unique in many ways, is especially so for the light it throws upon the strange system of peasant education that prevailed in the days of his youth. "The Hedge School" and "Going to Maynooth," two tales from the Traits and Stories, give a most full and faithful account of the hedge-schoolmaster—that quaint and curious product of the laws against Catholic education,—of his school, his methods of instruction, his pupils, and his status in rural social life. The fact that the hedge-schoolmaster and the hedge-school have passed away forever under the stress of social changes gives these stories a strong interest as social documents.

The hedge-schoolmasters were a class of men so called because, when the penal laws were in operation and to teach publicly in a schoolhouse was impossible, they would settle on some green spot behind a hedge, where the sons of the farmers from the country round flocked to them, in spite of spies and statutes, to learn whatever they could teach. Even after the abolition of the penal laws against Catholic education the same customs for a long time prevailed in neighborhoods where from poverty or other reasons there was no schoolhouse.

These masters, as Carleton presents them, were for the most part originals, eccentric to the last degree. They combined a real enthusiasm for learning with a deal of ludicrous pedantry. Learning was scarce in the country, and any one having the character of it excited in the peasantry a profound reverence that kept the pride of these gentlemen at the full stretch of inflation. In their deportment they were consequential and dictatorial, with the airs of superiority that resulted from a sense of their own knowledge and a pitying contempt for the dark ignorance of those around them. In the effort to preserve their professional dignity, they intrenched themselves behind a great solemnity of manner, which the irrepressible humor of their country was continually attacking and breaking through. A curious custom that prevailed among them, in accordance with which a hedge-schoolmaster established himself by driving away those less qualified and usurping their place, made acuteness and quickness as essential to them as learning. If a schoolmaster desired to settle in a town which already possessed a teacher, the proper method of procedure was to challenge him to a public debate upon the chapel green or some convenient place. The peasants always witnessed these debates with the keenest relish, and encouraged them as tending to maintain a high standard in the profession. In such contests the victory was to the ready-witted, and once a master was defeated—"sacked" or "made a hare of" were the Irish expressions—the reverence of the country-side was gone from him and forthwith transferred to the person of the victor. It was not expected of the hedge-schoolmaster to instruct in morality or religion; that was the priest's business, and, indeed, these men were far from exemplary in manners and morals. An inordinate love of whiskey, odd as it may appear, was often a recommendation in a teacher, and one which, to do them justice, few were without. This is illustrated in "The Hedge-School." An Irish peasant is asked why he sent his child to Mat Meegan, a master notoriously addicted to liquor, rather than to Mr. Frazer, a man of sober habits who taught in the same neighborhood:—

" 'Why do I send them to Mat Meegan, is it?' he replied—'and do you think, sir,' said he, 'that I'd send them to that dry-headed dunce, Mr. Frazher, with his black coat upon him, and his caroline hat, and him wouldn't take a glass of poteen wanst in seven years? Mat, sir, likes it, and teaches the boys ten times betther whin he's dhrunk nor whin he's sober; and you'll never find a good tacher, sir, but's fond of it. As for Mat, when he's half gone, I'd turn him agin the country for deepness in larning; for it's then he rhymes it out of him, that it would do one good to hear him.'

" 'So,' said I, 'you think that a love of drinking poteen is a sign of talent in a schoolmaster?'

" 'Ay, or in any man else, sir,' he replied. 'Look at tradesmen, and 'tis always the cleverest that you'll find fond of the dhrink! If you had hard Mat and Frazher, the other evening, at it—what a hare Mat made of him! but he was just in proper tune for it, being, at the time, purty well I thank you, and did not lave him a leg to stand upon. He took him in Euclid's Ailments and Logicals, and proved in Frazher's teeth, that the candlestick before them was the church-steeple, and Frazher himself the person; and so sign was on it, the other couldn't disprove it, but had to give in.' "

The schoolroom scenes in "The Hedge-School" are wonderful in dialogue and as genre pictures, and impress the reader with a sense of reality as vivid as the printed page can convey. One or two extracts from the story will illustrate this, the first a passage describing the scholars. Surrounding a large turf fire in the centre of the schoolhouse floor is a circle of urchins—

"Sitting on the bare earth, stones, and hassocks, and exhibiting a series of speckled shins, all radiating towards the fire like sausages on a Poloni dish. There they are—wedged as close as they can sit; one with half a thigh off his breeches, another with half an arm off his tattered coat—a third without breeches at all, wearing as a substitute a piece of his mother's old petticoat pinned about his loins—a fourth, no coat—a fifth, with a cap on him, because he has got a scald, from having sat under the juice of fresh hung bacon—a sixth with a black eye—a seventh two rags about his heels to keep his kibes clean—an eighth crying to get home, because he has got a headache, though it may be as well to hint, that there is a drag-hunt to start from beside his father's in the course of the day. In this ring, with his legs stretched in a most lordly manner, sits, upon a deal chair, Mat himself, with his hat on, basking in the enjoyment of unlimited authority. His dress consists of a black coat, considerably in want of repair, transferred to his shoulders through the means of a clothes-broker in the county-town; a white cravat, round a large stuffing, having that part which comes in contact with the chin somewhat streaked with brown—a black waistcoat, with one or two 'tooth-an'-egg' metal buttons sewed on where the original had fallen off—black corduroy inexpressibles, twice dyed, and sheep's-gray stockings. In his hand is a large, broad ruler, the emblem of his power, the woeful instrument of executive justice and the signal of terror to all within his jurisdiction. In a corner below is a pile of turf, where, on entering, every boy throws his two sods, with a hitch from under his left arm. He then comes up to the master, catches his forelock with finger and thumb, and bobs down his head, by way of making him a bow, and goes to his seat. Along the walls on the ground is a series of round stones, some of them capped with a straw collar or hassock, on which the boys sit; others have bosses, and many of them hobs—a light but compact kind of boggy substance found in the mountains. On these several of them sit; the greater number of them, however, have no seats whatever, but squat themselves down, without compunction, on the hard floor…. Near the master himself are the larger boys, from twenty-two to fifteen—shaggy-headed slips, with loose-breasted shirts lying open about their bare chests; ragged colts, with white, dry, bristling beards upon them, that never knew a razor; strong stockings on their legs; heavy brogues, with broad, nail-paved soles; and breeches open at the knees."

In "The Poor Scholar" Carleton presents a social type as distinctly the product of the penal laws as the hedge-schoolmaster. The so-called "poor scholars" were recruited from the poorest of the peasantry in districts where next to no Catholic education could be had, where the stirring lad might contrive to learn reading and writing, but scarcely more.

It was the highest ambition of the Irish peasant to make a priest of his boy, as it was of the Scotch peasant to see his son a minister of the Kirk. If a boy showed a love for "the larnin'," was eager to pursue it, and generally clever and promising, his father was apt to destine him for the priesthood. A subscription raised among the neighbors solved the question of ways and means. Thus provided with a small sum to start him, the poor scholar made for the south—for Munster, the paradise of hedge-schoolmasters and the goal for poor scholars. The sketch of Jemmy M'Evoy, the poor scholar of Carleton's tale, will bring out the general character and experiences of the class.

Jemmy M'Evoy is the son of a poor man who tills a "spot" of barren farmland. For all their drudgery from morning to night and from year's end to year's end, the family can scarce keep body and soul together. Jemmy resolves to raise his old father from distress, or die in the struggle. He plans to start for Munster as a poor scholar to educate himself for the priesthood, and swears he will never return until he can come back "a priest an' a gintleman." To further the plan, the support of the parish priest is enlisted. He puts the case before his congregation, and asks from them, as was customary, a generous subscription to start the poor scholar to Munster to make himself "a priest an' a gintleman." A good collection comes in; his funds are sewed in the lining of his coat; and the bundle is over his shoulder. Then follows the parting with mother and father and brothers and sisters—an uproar of grief, last embraces, and benedictions mingled with the bursts of lamentation; then the open road for the south; kind entertainment by the way, and no pay accepted from the poor scholar; Munster at last; a hedge-school receives him, and the first step is taken toward making himself "a priest an' a gintleman." The poor scholar, quick and industrious as he is, serves as the butt of the master's gibes and insult, and the victim of his brutal temper. As a climax to his trials he catches a contagious fever that is raging. The master then promptly turns him out upon the road. Having pulled through the fever, steady in the purpose to make himself a priest and relieve the destitution of his family, he returns to the hedge-school to brave again the tyrannies of the master. The poor scholar's trials end happily, however. The story of the master's barbarity gets abroad, and brings him kind friends who send him to a good school. In due time he is ordained; returns to his home in the north; is received by his own with open arms and pious jubilations, and is "a priest an' a gintleman" at last.

In Valentine M'Clutchy (a powerful book, despite its grossly partisan spirit) Carleton gives a detailed study of the character and career of an Irish land agent or middleman of the worst type, of Orange bigotry at work, and of the so-called New Reformation movement in its attempts at the conversion of Papists.

There are middlemen, or land agents, everywhere, but political and social conditions gave Ireland a type of its own. The course of Irish history had made most of its landlords Protestants. The position of an Irish Protestant landlord living in the midst of a degraded population, differing from him in race and religion, had but little attraction, and hence the landlord was apt to live abroad, especially if he possessed English as well as Irish estates, as many Irish landlords did. The system of middlemen was the necessary result of this absenteeism. The landlord, disliking the trouble and difficulty of collecting rents from a number of small tenants, abdicated his active functions, and let his land for a long term, and, generally speaking, at a moderate rent, to a large tenant, or middleman, who took upon himself the whole practical management of the estate, raised the rent of the landlord, and over and above this made a profit for himself by subletting. Sometimes the head tenant followed the example of his landlord, and, abandoning all serious industry, left the care of the property to his subtenant, and in turn became an absentee. He, perhaps, sublet his tenancy again at an increased rent, and the process continued until there might be a half-dozen persons between the landlord and the cultivator of the soil. The fact that many of the landlords were almost perpetual absentees, together with the fact that many of the Irish land agents were magistrates as well, gave the Irish middlemen almost unlimited power for tyranny and oppression, and made them the pest of Irish society.

Valentine M'Clutchy, who gives this book its name, has worked himself up from processserver to bailiff, from bailiff to constable, from constable to under-agent, or practical manager of the estate, and thence to chief agent or middleman. This last position he obtained by displacing the good agent who preceded him. The young absentee lord, who spent his time in fashionable dissipations in England, was, between his betting books, his yacht, and his mistress, always in desperate financial straits. M'Clutchy contrived to convince his lordship that the old agent was too soft and humane. He would handle the estate, he assured the young lord, less tenderly, and bring in a larger return. So the estate changed hands, and M'Clutchy became head agent. Once in the position, it is his principle to make the interest of landlord and tenant subservient to his own. To put this principle into practice he strengthens his arm to the utmost. As middleman he has all the power of a landlord. He next aims for the magistracy. A bribe sets him upon the bench; and the powers of the landlord for good or ill are backed by the arm of the law.

He now goes to work in the most approved style of bad agent. The schools, which the good agent, his predecessor, had patronized, are opposed on the ground that they make the peasant independent and politically unmanageable. With apparent good nature he allows the tenants to fall into arrears with their rent; in reality he is lax that he may get a lever to force stiff-necked peasants into compliance with his dictation at election time on penalty of immediate eviction. He tricks them by defective leases. They have trusted his verbal promises only to find them brazenly forgotten, or denied at convenience. They have known him to secrete papers in the thatch eaves of their cabins—forged proofs of treasonable plots of which they are innocent. They have seen his drunken, profligate son outrage their feelings in times of deep distress by making the tenure of house and home conditional upon a daughter's or sister's dishonor. The tenants have come to fear his power and his craft, and to recognize as well the business capacity that guides his cruelty and rapacity.

Though M'Clutchy has the peasantry under his heel, is on the road to wealth, and commands a kind of consideration in the country as a stirring man of business and a strong ally of the government, all does not run smooth. The temper of the peasantry becomes ferocious. A coward as well as a tyrant, he fears for his life, and to make himself secure in his tyranny determines to raise an Orange Yeomanry Cavalry corps. A petition to the government for its incorporation being granted, he organizes the corps, captains it himself, and makes it the instrument of his outrages and the support of his personal and official tyrannies.

This is the one of the Irish novels that, in following the career of M'Clutchy as a zealous Orangeman, master of an Orange lodge, and captain of a corps of Orange cavalry, best succeeds in putting the reader on intimate terms with the Orangemen in general, their place in the Irish life of the first decade of the nineteenth century, their prejudices, feelings, aims, and manners.

The Orangemen took their name, of course, from William of Orange, who was regarded as the champion of Irish Protestantism. In its origin Orangeism was an outgrowth of the feuds between the lower ranks of Papists and Protestants in the north—at first only the Protestant side of a party fight. Subsequently, when there was imminent danger of a French invasion, the gentlemen of the Ascendency, who had hitherto held aloof from the society, placed themselves at the head of their Protestant tenantry, and began organizing the Orangemen into lodges. The country gentlemen who identified themselves with the Orangemen were almost all bigots, frantically opposed to admitting Catholics to Parliament, or to any concession of Catholic relief, and red-hot champions of the existing constitution of church and state. The society, under their control, became a political association, in recognized alliance with the government, against Catholic disaffection, and every kind of rebel, Protestant or Catholic. A desire on the part of the Orangemen to enroll themselves into cavalry and infantry corps for the defence of the Protestant constitution was regarded with favor by the government, and members recruited from the Orange lodges were incorporated as Yeomanry Corps. A book of rules and regulations circulated among the members of the society, showed that it aimed at high moral excellence. Every Orangeman was expected, it was said, to have a sincere love for his Maker, to be an enemy to brutality, and to promote the honor of King and country and the principles of Protestant Ascendency. He was expected to refrain from cursing and intemperance, and to combat, so far as was in his power, the forces of atheism and anarchy.

Carleton's satire turns upon the discrepancy between the high-flown professions and the actual practice of the Orangemen. He describes the meeting of the lodge of which M'Clutchy is the master. The lodge room is reeking with the fumes of hot punch and tobacco. A mixed company is assembled—Orange blacksmiths, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, pious, punch-loving Dissenters, grand jurors, hard-drinking squires, all more or less boisterously drunk, singing party songs, quarrelling, and now and again pausing to drink in due form the loyal toast to "the glorious, pious, and immortal memory of the great and good King William, who saved us from Popery, brass money, and wooden shoes," or its complement, "To hell with the Pope." From such meetings as these the yeomanry not infrequently sallied, when sufficiently drunk, to ride through the streets, firing about at random, singing, and shouting "Any money for the face of a papist," "To hell with the Pope," "Ram down the Catholics," and the like. Or sometimes they might pay a visit to an inoffensive Catholic family—to satisfy a private grudge perhaps—on the pretext of searching for concealed weapons, routing the household out of bed, turning the house upside down, insulting the women folk, and terrifying all hands with the possibility of they knew not what drunken violence. Or, again, they might ride to the house of the priest, startling the good man from his rest by firing volleys over his house-top (if their aim was steady enough to clear it) to the tune of "Croppies Lie Down." But this was only boisterous "funning." Their real service was in riding with M'Clutchy to dispossess poor, rack-rented tenants, who, perhaps, had so good a "back" in the country that for a few bailiffs to evict, without an armed force, was out of the question. The fate of M'Clutchy in this novel was not infrequently the fate of men of his class. The bad middleman, unjust magistrate, and violent Orangeman was found dead one morning, shot through the heart by a peasant whom he had wronged.

Carleton throws a flood of light on the secret societies, which, Catholic or Protestant, and under different names, were so startling a feature of Irish life. In most of his tales and novels he relies for a strong element of interest upon these societies and their operations. There is a romantic appeal in the mystery that hangs over their nocturnal meetings, and the desperate deeds in which discovery means death to the perpetrator, and success means death or violence to the victim.

Rody the Rover is devoted exclusively to this subject. Carleton was at one time himself a Ribbonman, and, so far at least as the operation and effects of Ribbonism are concerned, knew whereof he spoke. According to the theory of this story Ribbonism originated with a set of bold, shrewd rascals who, ready to stake their lives for the chance of gain, and pretending to be friends of the peasantry and champions of their religion, banded them together and incited them to violence. Then the originators of the society, who were in the secret of the movements of the lodges all over the country, would repair at their convenience to Dublin Castle, represent themselves as in a position to make valuable disclosures as to the plans of the disaffected peasantry, provided they were substantially remunerated for the danger they ran as informers.

Rody, the central figure of the story, is an emissary of the instigators of the movement, and his procedure is meant to illustrate the methods of effecting its organization. The field of operations is a little village. Here a young stranger one fine day makes his appearance. He gives himself out a fugitive from justice. In a scrimmage between Catholics and Orangemen he laid an Orangeman low, he says, and the man, to get him in trouble, refused to recover. This of course opens all hearts and homes to him. Tom M'Mahon, an unsuspecting young peasant, takes Rody—for so is the stranger called—to his own home. Plausible, shrewd, and daring, Rody insinuates himself into M'Mahon's friendship, and finally tells him, in awful secrecy, that he wishes to make him a member of a widespread conspiracy for the liberation of their country and religion. He professes himself unable to reveal the leaders of the conspiracy, but darkly hints that O'Connell and other patriots and Catholic champions are behind the movement, though their safety and policy compel them to denounce the society publicly. M'Mahon takes these overtures in good faith, and, after binding himself by an oath never to reveal the person who has made the communication to him, the Ribbon oath itself is administered. Having taken the oath he is straightway made an Article Bearer (one entitled to administer the oath to others), and empowered to enroll and captain fifty of the boys of the neighborhood. The story proceeds to show the difficulties Tom M'Mahon found in controlling his men after he had called this organization, with its possibilities for evil, into existence. He is honest and humane, but soon the control of the men gets into other hands. Instead of aiming, vaguely perhaps, at generous religious and patriotic ends, the Ribbonmen, now led by the base and ignorant, make their society subserve plans of private spite, and are ready to rush into acts of violence at the dictates of headlong impulses and base passions. Soon the whole character of the neighborhood changes. The midnight meetings, and the whiskey-drinking that went with them, broke up habits of regular industry. Peace was gone; dark passions awoke and ruled, with bloodshed, riot, and conflagration as the order of the day and night, while soldiers, posses of sheriffs, and peelers were ever tramping the country-side.

The ending of the story emphasizes the thought of the whole book. Tom M'Mahon, though generous and honest, is accused of a murder which he did his best to prevent his brother Ribbonmen from committing. Rody is instrumental in fastening the responsibility of the crime upon him. M'Mahon, though innocent, is executed. The instigators of all the trouble, who are back of Rody, turn informers and are handsomely rewarded by the government, a reward by which Rody also profits in his degree. Thus, in Carleton's view, in the matter of Ribbonism, the peasantry are blind and silly dupes in the hands of rapacious and designing monsters, who play the part of double-faced traitors, stir up disaffection only to betray it to the government, and grow fat upon the proceeds. Rody the Rover is said to have produced a deep impression among the peasantry. Carleton himself claimed it resulted in the disbandment of six hundred Ribbon lodges. True as Carleton's picture is of the effects of Ribbonism, and useful and convincing as was its lesson to the people of the futility of accomplishing their ends by the operation of secret societies that defied the law, its theory of the origin of Ribbonism is baseless. The origin of the society is wrapped in a cloud of mystery and uncertainty which investigation has not yet dispelled.

In The Black Prophet, Carleton writes the story of one of the famines that from time to time desolated Ireland, and made fearful pages in the annals of the most distressful country that ever yet was seen. Before a background of dreadful and harrowing scenes from the famine of 1817 is unfolded a tale of crime and guilt in itself sufficient to shadow the story with gloom. Carleton was a young man at the time when the action of this story is supposed to have occurred, and images of the suffering of those days seem to have been branded upon his memory, as upon the memory of the people in general, in letters of fire. Of this and other famines the potato, that dangerous and demoralizing esculent, Raleigh's fatal gift, was the more immediate cause. It was the staple, almost the only food of the people, and a failure of the crop meant starvation.

In The Black Prophet the approach of this famine of 1817, and the succeeding stages in its progress, are presented in special instances of tragic distress. It opens with descriptions of the natural phenomena that foretold the coming calamity—the heavy canopy of low, dull clouds that emptied themselves in ceaseless rain upon the land; the fields that should have waved with ripe grain covered only with thin, backward crops; lowlands ravaged by flood; the corn prostrate under layers of mud and gravel, and all autumn's bounty destroyed by the wet and sunless days that spoke ominously of imminent dearth and destitution. The famine comes in course, and with it the pestilence; and the progress of the two is followed as they sweep over the land, leaving terror and desolation in their train. The kitchens, well-stocked in happier times, are now unfurnished. The family groups are sickly, woe-worn, marked by the look of care and depression which bad and insufficient food impressed upon the countenance. Harrowing pictures, sparing no physical horror, are given of the afflicted people. Every face has the look of painful abstraction, telling plainly of the sleepless solicitation of hunger that mingles itself with every thought and act. All who come upon the scene of the story bear in some form the sorrowful impress of the fatal visitation that ravaged the land. Garments hang loose about wasted persons; the eyes move with a dull and languid motion; the parchment skin clings to the sharp protruding bones.

It was typhus that went with the famine of 1817, a trying disease both to sufferers and to those who tend them—slow in coming, long to stay, and attended by a train of tedious and lingering miseries that were increased a hundred-fold by destitution and want. All the feelings of family affection, almost morbidly intense among the lower Irish, were allowed, while the disease ran its course, full and painful time to be racked to the limit of human suffering.

The misery had many aspects. Everywhere were reminders of the gloomy triumph famine and pestilence were achieving over the country. The roads were black with funerals, and chapel bells busy ringing dead men's knells. Numberless fever-stricken mendicants died in the temporary sheds erected for them by the roadsides. Families hitherto respectable and independent cast aside shame and pride, and in the frightful struggle between life and death went about soliciting alms with the clamor and importunity of professional beggars, or, goaded by the cravings of hunger, fought like vultures for the dole of charity at the soup shops, or other public depots of relief where rations of bread and meal were dispensed. Not the least of the trials of the afflicted people was the sight of the bursting granaries of snug farmers and miserly meal-mongers who found their profit in selling little doles of meal at famine prices; or the sight of lines of heavily laden provision carts on their way to neighboring harbors for exportation, meeting or mingling with the funerals that were continually passing along the highways. Hunger breaks through stone walls, and, as might be expected at such a time, the restraints that normally protect property were disregarded. Starving multitudes in the ravening madness of famine broke into and pillaged granaries and mills, or attacked the cruel misers, who, forced to distribute provisions on pain of death, at last became charitable with a bad grace. Provision carts also were intercepted by starving hordes who helped themselves to the contents, gobbling up the raw meal like famished maniacs, or staggering home to their families with bundles of the precious spoil.

The Black Prophet is a lookout upon a land laboring under a grievous affliction, where suffering, sorrow, and death prevailed. But now and again the horrors of famine are transfigured by the light of love they kindle, by the profound sympathies, the heroic self-sacrifice, the beautiful spirit of piety and lowly resignation that are awakened. This terrible calamity even wears at moments the expression of benevolence, as when it drives black passions from the hearts of the peasants, and wipes out hates and feuds to make of old enemies kind friends ready with help and pity. And there are lovely and memorable characters whose personalities remain as old acquaintances after the incidents of the story are forgotten—old men and women with the rugged and primitive grandeur of Old Testament people; Mave Sullivan, a character sweet and sound, made all of gentleness, firmness, purity, and love; and Sally M'Gowan, irresistibly interesting in the fierce untamed beauty of a mixed nature, swept by the tides of impulse to evil or good.

The Black Prophet is a book which no one can read with indifference. It is written from the heart of the author saddened by the spectacle of the terrible affliction upon his countrymen. Its pictures are dreadful as a new Inferno. The atmosphere of this story of suffering and crime is one of deadening gloom, and it haunts the mind at last with a general sense of the appalling disasters to which man, body and spirit, is exposed.

Notes

¹ "Singlings" are the first runnings of spirits in the process of distillation.

² O'Donoghue's Life of Carleton, Vol. I, pp. 5-7.