Celts, Carthaginians and Constitutions: Anglo-Irish Literary Relations, 1780 - 1820

Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Celts, Carthaginians and Constitutions: Anglo-Irish Literary Relations, 1780 - 1820Author(s): Norman VanceSource: Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 22, No. 87 (Mar., 1981), pp. 216-238Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30075032 .

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Celts, Carthaginians

and constitutions:

Anglo-Irish literary relations,

1780

1820

F. S. L.

Lyons

in his Ford lectures at Oxford,

and in a broadcast talk,

has

stressed the need for a new

general theory

of Irish culture,

a wider

understanding

of the Irish tradition.' This

essay

is an

attempt

to take a few

steps

in this direction. It will review some of the

English

literature written in

Ireland between 1780 and 1820,

and trace its connections with Ireland and

with

England.

In the

forty years

after the Volunteer movement,

it will be

argued,

Irish authors

writing

in

English,

influenced

by

new ideas about Celts

and constitutions and even about

Carthaginians,

did

something

to establish a

tradition of

specifically

Irish literature. This has all too often been

neglected or

misunderstood by literary

historians, for whom

Anglo-Irish

literature

begins

more than half a

century

later.2

This

neglect

has

political

and

ideological implications.

It raises the

tricky

question

`VsTat

is Irish literature?'

Douglas Hyde,

son of an

Anglican

clergyman

of Berkshire stock and afterwards first

president

of Ireland,

gave a

sublimely simple

answer in his

Literary history of

Ireland

by flatly refusing

to

discuss

anything

written in

English.'

The culture and the

country

of his

ancestors could have,

or

perhaps

should have, nothing

to do with the

literary

expression

of the Irish

psyche,

he maintained. Other Irish

literary historians

are less extreme,

but show no interest in

any English-speaking writers, except

Swift, before

Mangan

and

Ferguson

and the

poetry

of

Young

Ireland. If

Thomas Moore is mentioned at all it is

only

in

passing,

often

just

as a source of

allusions in

Ulysses.

Even

Mangan

and

Ferguson

are of interest

chiefly as

precursors,

the

angry

red flush in the

sky

before the onset of the 'Celtic

twilight'

and the

resurgence

of

political

and

literary independence in

sympathetic

detonation.4 Life and literature came to an end in

1690, leaving

only

an alien

Anglo-Irish

tradition of

writing, inseparable

from the culture of

the British mainland and undeserving

of the name or

dignity

of Irishness.

'F. S. L. Lyons,

Culture and anarchy

in Ireland, 1890-1939 (Oxford, 1979),

and 'The

four Irelands' in Listener,

29 Mar. 1979,

pp 438,

440.

'The most recent account,

Richard Fallis,

The Irish renaissance: an introduction to

Anglo-Irish

literature

(Dublin, 1978 begins

with

Young

Ireland. See also Malcolm

Brown, The

politics of

Irish literature: from

Thomas Davis to W. B. Yeats

(London,

1972).

'Douglas Hyde,

A

literary history of

Ireland (Dublin, 1899), P.

xxxvi.

4E.g.

Ernest

Boyd, Ireland's

literary

renaissance (1916 (reprint, Dublin, 1968,

of 2nd

ed., New

York, 1922), pp 15, 26-7. There are of course some

exceptions to the

trend,

notably

the introduction to S. A. Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (eds),

A

treasury ofIrish

poetry (London, 1900), esp. pp x,

xi.

216



Though

Professor J. C. Beckett and others have written

sympathetically

and

well about the

Anglo-Irish tradition, the

myth

of a cultural vacuum from

Sarsfield to

Synge

has been

persistent

and

powerful,

a

literary

version of the

legend

of the

flight

of the 'wild

geese'.

The modern Dublin

poet

Richard

Weber writes

Further and farther

flap

the

great grey geese

Through

the

trailing sky, beyond long limp

clouds

That thin

away

into the distant historical

evening

In silent indication of where the sun has sunk;

Further and farther,

till the

eyes

strain and fail,

And the island of Ireland recedes and dims and dies

To a dream of dreams for more than two hundred

years.'

But this view of Ireland as a land lost even to the

literary imagination

till the

literary

Renaissance and the rise of the nation-state owes more to Daniel

Corkery

than to

history.

It

posits

absolute and

mutually

exclusive cultural

categories of Irish Irishness and a

usurping Anglo-Irish literary tradition

which has little to do with the real Ireland.

George

Bernard Shaw was

frankly

impatient

with this view. It

depended,

he insisted,

on a na and sentimental

theory

of racial

separateness

maintained

by

fools in Ireland and

England.

In

the 1904

preface

to John Bull's other island,

his

play

about

English

ideas and

Irish

realities, he wrote

Macaulay, seeing

that the Irish had in Swift an author worth stealing,

tried to annex him

by contending

that he must be classed as an

Englishman

because he was not an original

Celt. He

might

as well have refused the name of Briton to Addison because he did not

stain himself blue and attach scythes

to the

poles

of his sedan chair . . There is no Irish

race

any

more than there is an English

race or a Yankee race. There is an Irish climate,

which will

stamp

an

immigrant

more

deeply

and durably

in two

years, apparently,

than

the

English

climate will in two hundred.'

If Shaw was

right

the characteristic feature of Ireland until the twentieth

century, namely

its difficult

relationship

with

England,

was a matter of

concern for

anyone

on Irish soil,

not least the writer. John

Eglinton

was

just

such a writer,

like Swift and like Shaw in that he came from non-Celtic stock.

He

projected

himself in 1917 not so much as an

Anglo-Irishman as a Modern

Irishman, accepting,

but

refusing

to be

swamped by,

Ireland's

English

dimension. He was one who,

as he stated,

'accepts

as a

good European

the

connection with Great Britain and

yet

feels himself to be far more distinct

from the

Anglo-Saxon

than he is from the Mere Irishman'. Like Yeats,

like

Douglas Hyde, Eglinton speaks

as a

political

Irishman and writer involved

with a tradition of

struggle against English

dominance

just

as much as if he

was descended from the disinherited

kings

of Ireland:

It has

always been the instinctive

policy

of

English government

to

ignore

the existence

of this race

[the Anglo-Irish],

which it snubbed and over-ruled all

through the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

and at which,

far more than at the Catholic Irish,

it aimed the act of union.'

'Robin Skelton (ed.),

Six Irish

poets (London, 1962), p.

127.

6G. B. Shaw,

Prefaces (London, 1938), pp 443-4.

'John

Eglinton, Anglo-Irish essays (London, 1917), p.

4.

217



There were

many

earlier

parallels

to

Eglinton's Modern

Irishman, English

or Scots

by

descent but

militantly

and

self-consciously

Irish for all that.

Young

Ireland, in the

1840s, freely acknowledged

this. Thomas

D'Arcy McGee, one

of its

propagandists, wrote a

patriotic account of The Irish writers

of

the

seventeenth

century (1846),

which discussed

Archbishop Ussher and Sir

James Ware as well as

Keating

and the Annals

of

the Four Masters. William

Molyneux, descendant of

Queen Elizabeth's chancellor of the

exchequer

for

Ireland, and the friend and

correspondent

of Locke,

counted as another of

McGee's

patriotic

Irish writers on the

strength

of his

pamphlet

The case

of

Ireland stated

(1698):

'He was the man who relumed the

fading light

of

nationality,

and so

impregnated

it with the fire of his own fame that it has

never since

gone

out.'s

Molyneux is of interest as a

patron

of

antiquarian research as well as a

propagandist,

as it will

appear,

but he

helps

to make the

point that the

assertion of Irish

identity

has never in fact

depended solely

on its Celtic

component

and has

depended very

little on the Irish

language,

for the battle of

national

independence

was

fought chiefly

in

English.

Daniel

O'Connell, the

Liberator

himself, on at least one

occasion, publicly accepted

the decline of

the Irish

language

and the rise of

English

as the national

language

as a benefit

to Ireland and a

step

forward into modern nationhood.9

Irish nationalism before the Gaelic

League

lacked the self-conscious

Celticism which has since characterised it. The Irish writers who

responded

with intense excitement or with

patriotic nostalgia

to the constitutional

developments

from Grattan's

parliament (1782 to the act of union

(1800

were Modern Irishmen like John

Eglinton

and their work was Irish literature

for all that it was conceived and written in

English. But it does not follow from

this that all writers in the

period

1780 to 1820 were

identifiably

Irish. Nor does

it follow that those who were

seriously

Irish in their

writing, deeply concerned

with

specifically Irish

realities, were unaffected

by

Celtic traditions

just

because

they wrote in

English. It is time to make

preliminary distinctions

among

the Irish writers in the

period 1780-1820.

Emigration surely affects Irish letters

just

as it affects

everything

else. The

heroic

figures

in Irish literature have tended to be exiles,

though only

geographically.

There is a more radical exile of the

spirit, however, of the kind

which made Swift an Irish writer

only by default and

successfully obscured the

Irish

origins of

Congreve, Farquhar,

Nahum

Tate, Steele, Goldsmith and

Richard

Brinsley Sheridan. Dublin had a

court, but a

vice-regal

rather than a

regal court, and there was a

tendency

for

literary

Dublin to

express this

subordination

by taking

its tone from London. So London rather than Dublin

tended to be where the action was for the ambitious Irishman.

Thackeray

wryly

comments on a Dublin

poster

in his Irish sketchbook:

'Miss

Hayes

will

give her first and farewell concert at the

Rotunda, previous to

leaving

her native

country.' Only

one instance of talent do we read of,

and that,

in a

desponding tone, announces its intention of

quitting its native

country. All the rest of

the

pleasures

of the

evening

are

importations from

cockney-land.1

8Thomas

D'Arcy McGee, Irish writers

of

the seventeenth

century (Dublin, 1846),

p.

227.

'Arthur Houston,

Daniel O'Connell: his

early life and

journal (London, 1906), p.

11.

'W. M.

Thackeray, Irish sketchbook

(1842),

in The

Oxford Thackeray,

ed.

George

Saintsbury (17 vols, Oxford, 1908), v, 11.

218



Patrick Brontd,

father of a famous

family,

found in

evangelical

protestantism and

Cambridge

the

only

career

open

to his talents and

escaped

from Ireland and

poverty

with relief,

never to return. His

only

Irish work,

The

maid

of Killarney (1816),

is a

disagreeable

and

patronising polemic against

the

popish superstition

which

disfigures

the natural beauties of Ireland."

But not all went into exile and

forgot

where

they

came from. Of the writers

who

stayed some

obviously wished that

they

had been able to

get away.

Samuel

Whyte, headmaster of the

English

Grammar School in Grafton

Street, Dublin, seems to have been a case in

point.

His

pupils included Richard

Brinsley Sheridan and Thomas

Moore, and when he

published

his Poems on

various

subjects (3rd ed., 1795 the subscribers included

many of the

great

names of the

protestant ascendancy.

But the list went

beyond

that: it

ranged

from the duke and duchess of Leinster

(the

duchess was a former

pupil

to

John

Philpot

Curran

(to

be defence counsel for so

many

of the United

Irishmen), and the famous and fated Lord Edward

Fitzgerald.

The

poems

indicate a

very English, Augustan

world of fashionable amateur theatricals

and

elegant

neo-classical verse. Nicholas Rowe's

tragedy

Jane Shore had first

been

performed

in 1715,

in the London of Swift and

Pope

and Addison,

but

Whyte

had embellished it with extra

speeches

for a

private performance

in

Dublin in 1790. Even earlier,

even more

English

and aristocratic,

was Milton's

masque Comus,

and

Whyte

was

proud

to have been associated with a

private

performance of that at the

country

seat of the Rt Hon. David Latouche. Miss

Elizabeth Latouche,

later the countess of

Lanesborough, performed

the

part

of the

Lady.

Also

taking part

was the Rt Hon.

Henry

Grattan.12

But with the name of Grattan something

more

specifically

Irish

seeps into

Whyte's prim pages.

Grattan's great year

had been 1782,

when the Volunteer

excitement came to a head at the famous

Dungannon convention, the

declaratory act and

Poynings'

law were at last repealed

in

response

to the

Volunteer resolutions,

and Grattan was

granted 00,000 by

a

grateful

Irish

parliament. Four

years later,

under the

presidency

of Charlemont the

Volunteer Earl and national hero,

the

Royal

Irish

Academy

was

incorporated

on the same wave of

patriotic

enthusiasm as a

body

of men 'anxious to make

their labours redound to the honour and

advantage

of their

country'

i3

Many

of

its founder members were

among Whyte's subscribers, notably

Richard

Kirwan, William Preston and

Joseph Cooper

Walker. There was a

special

section for

antiquities

in the Transactions

of

the

Royal

Irish

Academy

and in this

Walker and others

published

researches on the ancient

past

of Ireland,

drawing

in

part

on

seventeenth-century

works

by

Irish writers in Latin or Irish

such as Roderic

O'Flaherty's Ogygia (1685, partly sponsored by

William

Molyneux and

Keating's History of

Ireland

(1633

or

1634). Research and

contact with

surviving

bards combined to

produce

Walker's Memoirs of

the

Irish bards in 1786. Grattan and the Volunteers had

helped

to restore to

Ireland a

self-respect

and a

patriotic

interest in its own

past which even

Whyte

"John Lock and W. T. Dixon,

A man of

sorrow: the life,

letters and times

of

the Rev.

Patrick Bronte, 1777-1861

(London, 1965), pp 359-64;

see also J. Horsfall Turner (ed.),

Bronteana: the Rev. Patrick Bronte, A.B.,

his collected works and

life (Bingley, 1898), pp

131-99.

''Samuel

Whyte, Poems on various

subjects (3rd ed., Dublin, 1795), pp. ix,

60ff.

"Index to R.I.A. Trans. (1813), p.

97.

219



the snobbish and

condescending Anglophile

could scarce forbear to cheer.

One of

Whyte's poems,

'The hone: a

piece

of Irish

mythology',

is an

elaborately punning amatory

narrative set

by

the shore of

Lough Neagh,

though

O'Neil's frustrated

pursuit

of Grifolia O'Connor as he describes it is

more like the

story

of

Apollo's pursuit

of

Daphne

than

anything

in the Ulster

Cycle.

It is as if

Whyte

is aware of a new

spirit

abroad in Irish letters in a

rediscovered Irish

past,

but lacks the

imagination

and the

poetic

resources to

do it

justice.

A sub-Horatian

Epistle

to

Joseph

Walker dated 1789

cautiously

celebrates this new

patriotic spirit:

Walker is one of those who

. . . fill'd with

patriotic zeal,

the deeds rehearse

Of chieftains mighty

and renown'd in verse.

But the whole of the

Royal

Irish Academy

deserves praise,

if

Whyte

were

competent

to bestow it,

which he has the

grace

to realise he is not:

Not

thy bright

name alone,

the charter'd band,

That bless with

learning's

beams their native land,

And

gave

her claim among

the nations birth,

The last in effort

though

not least in worth,

. . .

Some

happier genius hence, for

song admir'd,

May

catch the hint,

and as of old

inspir'd,

To distant

ages

make the worthies known,

And, with his

country's glory,

fix his own."

The best was

obviously yet

to be,

but an Irish

poetry

was

stirring

even in the

purlieus

of Grafton Street. This self-conscious

attempt

on the

part

of a socio

intellectual elite to establish some sort of contact with a

newly-rediscovered

indigenous popular

culture has

parallels

all over

Europe

in this

period,

as

Peter Burke has demonstrated. Greeks and Poles,

Finns and

Flemings, were

assiduously collecting

folk

songs

as a

strategy

to revive a sense of national

identity

and

solidarity

in adverse

political

conditions. The

patriotic collectors,

idealistic intellectuals,

were not

usually

of the

people

themselves but

sought to

identify

with the

people

in an enthusiasm for national culture and nationhood

largely

of their own

making."

In the

eighteenth century, as

again

in the

nineteenth, Irish cultural nationalism was at least

partly

an enthusiasm of the

Anglo-Irish

elite rather than the Celtic Irish. In the best

society

in Dublin in

the 1780s and 1790s

people might

be

patronising

about Irish

antiquities, but

they

could no

longer ignore

them. William Preston,

another subscriber to

Samuel

Whyte's miscellany

and a member of the

Royal

Irish

Academy, is a

good example

of a cultivated,

self-consciously

neo-classical

poetic

talent

uneasily

stirred to

things unattempted yet

in

prose

and

rhyme by

the new

interest in

things

Irish. But to understand Preston's

significance

it will be

necessary

to look more

closely

at the revival of interest in Irish

antiquities and

more

specifically

at Irish

responses

to the Ossianic cult which was

sweeping

Europe

at the time. Preston is a curious case,

for he is both

patriot

and

prude, a

cautiously-conservative defender of a

classical, anti-romantic

poetic yet

"Samuel

Whyte, Poems, pp 255-7,

156.

'Peter

Burke, Popular

culture in

early modern

Europe (London, 1978), pp

10 12.

220



eagerly dedicating

his

poems

to Charlemont and

momentarily exploiting

the

Gothic, Ossianic romantic

sensibility

he later

opposed bitterly.

Historians of

English

romanticism

invariably point

to

Percy's Reliques of

ancient

English poetry (1765

and to the later

poems

of

Gray

as straws in the

wind that was to

sing

in

Coleridge's

Aeolian

harp. They usually

fail to notice

that

Percy

was an Irish

bishop

and a founder member of the

Royal

Irish

Academy

like Preston and Walker. He was a

spiritual godfather

to much of

the

antiquarian

work of the time, especially

Charlotte Brooke's

Reliques of

ancient Irish

poetry (1789):

a title he

obviously inspired.

This collection of

ancient Irish texts in

prose

and verse with

distinguished verse-translations

popularised

much of the

antiquarian

work of the

previous twenty years

and

provided a

powerful

stimulus to its continuation. Miss Brooke drew not

only

on her own

knowledge

of Irish but on works such as Charles O'Conor's

Dissertations on the

history of

Ireland

(1766

and an Introduction to the

study of

the

history

and

antiquities of

Ireland

(1772 by

her

godfather Sylvester

O'Halloran. She included a translation of the famous

thirteenth-century

prose-work, the

Agallamh

na senorach or

Colloquy of

the ancient men, a

dialogue between St Patrick and the ancient hero

Ossian, or

Oisin, come back

to his old haunts to see that the new order of Christendom has taken over.

Yeats used the same material in his

Wanderings of

Oisin: the Celtic Revival was

a

century

older than Yeatsians will admit.

16

It has been

plausibly argued

that

Irish

patriotism lay

behind the

publication

of Charlotte Brooke's

Reliques

as it

did behind the later Celtic Revival. Th

Reliques

was an

attempt

to reclaim for

old Ireland the

nobility

and

dignity

of ancient

legend

to which the Scots were

unjustly laying

claim." Since 1773 the dubious but not

entirely phoney

Macpherson

had caused the name of Ossian to echo

through Europe,

but

claimed he was a Scot and not an Irishman. It has been

proved

that

though

Macpherson scornfully

denied Irishness to Ossian he drew on Irish materials

such as

Keating's History of

Ireland and

O'Flaherty's Ogygia.

He also used the

MS Book

of

the Dean

of

Lismore which includes a late,

probably

fifteenth

century

Scots Gaelic account of the

colloquy

of Patrick and Ossian, obviously

drawing

on much older material of the kind that Miss Brooke

published."

Ossian and all his works had an enormous influence on continental

romanticism, finding immortality

in Schiller and in Goethe's Werther which

makes use of the Ossianic

Songs of

Selma.

19

Ossian also

explains why

Wilde

was called Oscar: Ossian's son was called Oscar,

and

through literary piety

Napoleon

bestowed the name on his

godson

who became

King

Oscar I of

Sweden. The

story goes

that

King

Oscar II of Sweden was cured of an

eye

'One connection between the two revivals is Standish James

O'Grady, who was

prompted to the

scholarship

which

inspired

the later movement after his

discovery

in

1872 of O'Halloran's General

history of Ireland

(1778). See Ernest

Boyd, Ireland's

literary renaissance,

p.

27.

'K. F. Gantz,

'Charlotte Brooke's

Reliques of Irish

poetry and the Ossianic contro

versy' in Studies in

English (Austen, Texas), xx

(1940), pp 137-56.

"Derek S. Thomson,

The Gaelic sources

of Macpherson's

'Ossian'

(Edinburgh,

1951), pp 69, 80. See Alfred

Nutt, Ossian and Ossianic literature

(London, 1899), pp 18,

26, 28.

19J. W. von Goethe,

The sorrows

of the

young

Werther (1774),

tr. Catherine Hutter

(Signet edition, New

York, 1962), pp

113-18.

221



disease

by

Wilde's father and consented to

give

his name and act as

godfather

to the infant Oscar.2 Dr Johnson's

magisterial

scorn ensured that Ossian was

less

respected

in

England.

Johnson was convinced from the outset that

Macpherson,

Ossian's so-called editor,

was a charlatan and a

fraud, a

confidence unembarrassed

by knowledge

of

any

Celtic

language. But

Johnson was shrewd as well as

dogmatic:

late in life he confided to Boswell: 'I

think this wild adherence to Chatterton more unaccountable than the

obstinate defence of Ossian. In Ossian there is a national

pride,

which

may

be

forgiven, though

it cannot be

applauded.''

This was in 1782. National

pride

mattered rather more in Ireland than in

England

at the time,

for this was the

great year

of Grattan's and the

Volunteers'

triumph

as

already

discussed. What was Gothic

self-indulgence in

London was the

timely rediscovery

of

patriotic myth

in Dublin. In the

spirit of

the heroic Ireland whose

songs

she had translated,

Miss Brooke included in

her collection an

original poem

called Aladn: an Irish tale. She said herself that

these Irish

poems '[fill

the mind with ideas

altogether new,

and

which,

perhaps,

no modern

language

is

entirely prepared

to

express',"

and her own

poem registers

this

heady strangeness.

Her

story,

culled from

Keating

and

from Ferdinand Warner's

History of

Ireland

(1763),

concerns MaOn,

an Irish

prince

in rebellious exile in France. This was before the famous

'year of the

French', but one should remember that it was at the French court that

Irish, as

well as Scottish,

Jacobites took

refuge

and dreamed of return. This

gives an

almost subversive

topicality to the

poem,

written in the

revolutionary year

1789; the troubles of a more recent Ireland

glow a lurid red

through the mists

of this earlier Celtic

twilight when the bard Craftine addresses Matin in his

exile:

MaOn

bright

and deathless name

Heir of

glory

son of fame

Hear 0 hear the Muse's strain

Hear the

mourning

Bard

complain

Hear him,

while his

anguish

flows

O'er

thy bleeding country's woes.

Hear, by him,

her Genius

speak

Hear her,

aid and

pity

seek

He comes,

the arm of Gallia's host;

Valour's fierce and

lovely boast

Gallia's

grateful

debt is

paid;

See, she

gives

her

generous

aid

Her warriors round their hero

press;

They rush,

his

wrongs,

his

country

to redress."

20E. G.

Withycombe (ed.), Oxford dictionary of English Christian names

(3rd ed.,

Oxford, 1977), P. 235, s.c. 'Oscar'. Professor Richard

Ellmann, who is

preparing a bio

graphy

of Wilde,

tells me that the

story

cannot be confirmed,

and that it is more

likely

that Oscar owed his name

directly

to his mother's Ossianic enthusiasms,

but he adds

that there is evidence that Wilde used to tell the

story

about his royal

Swedish

god

father to his friends.

'James Boswell,

Life of Johnson

(1791 (0.U.P., 1970, edition), p.

1175

(entry for 7

Mar, 1782).

22Charlotte Brooke,

Rehques of

ancient Irish

poetry (Dublin, 1789), p. vi.

23Ibid., pp 350,

353. The sources are discussed

by

R. K.

Alspach,

Irish

poetry from the

English invasion to 1798

(2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1959), pp 117-18.

222



It is time to return to William Preston. At this moment,

when

hopes

of

nationhood and

government

stood

high,

Preston 'turned democratical',

in the

words of another and more

convincing

democratic

poet,

the United Irishman

William Drennan,'

and took

up

the

patriotic

Ossianic strain he later

abandoned. But Preston was more than a fair-weather

patriot:

he had

forfeited his chance of a

fellowship

at

Trinity College, Dublin, after a brilliant

under-graduate

career

by writing witty lampoons against

the

unpopular

provost, John

Hely-Hutchinson,

who had been

imposed

on the reluctant

college by

the

government

in 1774. Talented, cosmopolitan,

an Irish barrister

who had also

frequented

the Middle

Temple,

Preston won the interest of the

wits of the

day, including

the fastidious Horace

Walpole,25

with his collection

of

poems.

There were the usual tedious and unactable

plays

on historical

subjects,

the familiar satirical and occasional verse of

any

minor writer of the

period anywhere

in Britain. But a series of satirical

epistles

to Richard Twiss

struck a different note. Twiss had written a churlish and

uncomplimentary

Tour

of

Ireland in 1775,

and Preston

cleverly,

defended his

country by

ransacking

the Tour for statements that could be turned

against Twiss,

ambiguities

which

might imply

that his

disappointments

with Ireland were

largely amatory

and that

everything

that went

wrong

was a

thoroughly

deserved

judgement upon

him.26

Preston was to rise to a sterner

patriotism

than this.

Together

with Curran,

to be the United Irishmen's defence counsel,

and Yelverton,

the chief baron of

the

exchequer,

and Charlemont the Volunteer Earl,

Preston was a member of

a

patriotic

intellectual coterie,

'The Monks of St Patrick',

which met

every

Saturday

in Kevin Street, Dublin,

until the recall of Fitzwilliam in 1795

finally

destroyed

the Grattanite constitutional

aspirations

of the

past

fifteen

years.27

Nothing daunted, Preston contributed verse to the United Irishmen's

paper

the Press until liberal nationalism

collapsed

in red ruin at

Ballynahinch

and

Vinegar

Hill. One of his better

poems

was entitled

'Thoughts

on

visiting

the

moat of Navan',

scene of a terrible battle

long

before.

Though

not as

deeply

immersed in Irish

antiquities

as some of his

contemporaries,

Preston contrives

to reduce the sub-Homeric Ossianic melancholia to taut Miltonic

couplets and

to introduce the

possibilities

of

peace

side

by

side with the characteristic

Ossianic note of doomed battle,

probably

assisted

by Virgil's fourth

Eclogue

and Milton's Ode on the

morning of

Christ's

nativity: long

since there came

The cruel Dane,

the Saxon fierce

The hearts of Erin's sons to

pierce,

To fill the land with blood and

spoil,

And lord it o'er the

ravag'd

soil.

24Drennan to Mrs Martha McTier,

May 1797, in D. A. Chart

(ed.), The Drennan

letters

(Belfast, 1931), p. 257.

'Christopher Preston, 'Life and

writings

of William Preston,

1753-1807' in Studies,

xxxi

(1942), pp 377-9.

26William Preston,

An heroic

epistle from Donna Teresa Pinna

9 Ruiz,

of Murcia,

to

Richard Twiss,

Esq.,

F.R.S. (Dublin, 1776);

An heroic answer

from Richard Twiss,

Esq.,.

ER. S.

(Dublin, 1776), both included in Poetical works

(2 vols, Dublin, 1793), i, 1-44.

'Christopher Preston, 'William

Preston', pp

379-80.

223



But now

Bid all her

[Hate's deadly engines

take

The

shape

of sickle, scythe

and rake;

May patriot

care the bad o'er-awe

And licence yield

to sober law;

May

Freedom lead

thy

children's hearts,

To feel and love the

peaceful

arts . . .28

Preston is at his best as a

poet

of

place,

a characteristic he

perhaps

shares with

his

greater contemporary,

Drennan. Preston's 'Verses written in the

Dargle, in

the

county

of Wicklow' owes a bit to Thomas Gray's

celebration of 'The

bard', but there were Irish as well as Welsh

bards, and

Joseph

Walker had

recently

written about them.

Patriotically noting

that 'Poets in all

ages have

been friends of

liberty', though stopping

well short of Blake's

development of

this theme,

Preston muses that

. . here,

in old heroic times,

The minstrel wak'd his

lofty rhymes;

He tun'd the

harp,

he bade them flow,

Attemper'd

to the stream below

When

England

would a land enthrall,

She doom'd the muses' sons to fall;

Lest virtue's hand should

string

the

lyre,

And feed with

song

the

patriot

fire.

Lo, Cambria's bards her

fury feel;

See, Erin mourns the

bloody

steel.

To such a scene,

to such a shade,

Condemn'd, proscrib'd,

the

poet stray'd."

Unfortunately,

Preston's

wayward

muse never

fully engages

with

specifi

cally

Irish material. A few lines later the

poetry escapes

to the

Italy

of Petrarch

and Laura. Preston realises the

opportunities

available for

patriotic poetry,

but feels that somehow this is not

really

for him. The

dedicatory sonnet to

Charlemont which

prefaced

his 1782 collection is a modest disclaimer,

an

admission of unfitness to

hymn

the

glories

of Grattanite and Volunteer

Ireland:

Caulfield, were mine the chian father's

vein,

Or had I heir'd

Tyrtaeus' lofty song,

Then

might

I rise,

to

sing

the

patriot throng,

And hail thee first amidst that awful train.30

But he cannot.

Tyrtaeus

was a

seventh-century-B.C. elegaic poet whose

patriotic songs

were

sung by

the

Spartans

on the march. He seems also to have

28Joshua Edkins (ed.),

A collection of poems, mostly original, by

several hands

(Dublin, 1801), pp 286-7.

29William Preston,

Poetical works, ii, 30.

30William Preston,

Poems on several occasions (Dublin, 1782), p. [iii].

224



been connected with the

political

reforms of this time.31 William Drennan,

who will be discussed later,

was a bolder

spirit

than Preston who really

did

inherit

Tyrtaeus' lofty song

and was called the

Tyrtaeus

of the United

Irishman.

Preston, as

already stated, was

fully

conscious of the excitements of his

time, but claimed in the end that 'the

presiding genius

of the moment calls on

men, to

act, rather than to

write; and is more

bent, on

furnishing

materials for

future bards,

than on

encouraging

those of the

present day'.32

There were some of these bards in the years

after the union,

but

though

Preston lived till 1807 he was not

among

them. A cautious man,

he took

refuge

in

literary

conservativism and

political

deference to the

powers

that be in the

troubled

years immediately

before and after the union.

Though

he had

experi

mented with

irregular

odes and Gothic fancies in earlier years," encountering

as it were the raw materials of

European romanticism, he reacted

violently

against

such

things

and

espoused

an austere classicism which would have

made Horace feel like a crude

poetaster.

In 1802 he contributed to the Polite

Letters section of the Transactions of

the

Royal

Irish

Academy

some 'Reflec

tions on the

peculiarities

of style

and manner in the late German writers whose

works have

appeared

in

English'.

Goethe and Schiller and Kotzebue are

fatally lacking

in 'the sublime simplicity,

the chaste

symmetry,

and

harmonious integrity

of the Greek and Roman models. . the

prototypes

are

to be found only

in Bedlam'. Preston continued,

'I must own it has moved

my

bile to mark the

growth

and

prevalence of

the

strange

and

preposterous partiality

for the Gothic

productions

of the German school. The

distempered rage

for

the

gloomy,

the horrible,

the disconnected,

the

disproportioned

and the

improbable.'

The real trouble was that for him German romanticism was

morally

and

perhaps politically subversive, and after the horrors of '98 and the untender

mercies of Norbury

and others Preston wanted

nothing

more to do with that:

[German productions

are

sprinkled with

the seeds of

revolutionary principles,

and the

germs of innovation and

anarchy ...

May not this revolution in taste be a

prelude

to

other revolutions;

a small skirt of the cloud,

like a man's hand, ushering

in the

blackening tempest

Are not the German writings

calculated, to

generate,

in both

sexes, a ferocious

hardihood, and

independence

of mind;

a

dangerous contempt

of

established forms ... Who knows, then,

but this

preternatural appetite

for the

irregular, the

indecorous, the

boisterous, the

sanguinary,

and the terrific, may

be the

precursor of some

strange moral, or

political convulsion?'

Other writers who shared the earlier Preston's liberal nationalism were

much less cautious in the

writing

which

expressed

it. A sense of Ireland's

past

was

important

in Ireland's heroic

present. Henry Flood, one of the

great

'Oxford classical

dictionary

s.c. Tyrtaeus'. Macpherson,

the compiler

of Ossian,

also translated some Tyrtaeus,

included in the 1805 edition of The

poems of Ossian,

616-20.

32William Preston,

Poetical works, i, p.

viii.

"E.g. 'Epistle

to a

young gentleman, on his

having addicted himself to the

study of

poetry', 'Sympathy' and

`Myrrha,

an

irregular

ode' in Poetical works, i, 168ff, 238, ii,

17ff.

mR.I.A. Trans., viii

(1802), pp 17, 70,

79.

225



patriot orators,

had left his fortune to further the

study

of Irish

antiquities,

and although

the will was successfully

contested the

controversy

it caused

reveals considerable

depths

of

feeling.

Sir Laurence Parsons,

a friend and

fellow M.P. of the deceased,

drew on a wealth of

secondary published

material

concerned with Irish

legend, early

Greek

knowledge

of Ireland,

Irish

antiqui

ties and Irish music to

prove

that Ireland was the mother-country

of western

civilisation and so well worth the

scholarly study

which Flood had

hoped

to

endow." It was claimed that the

Argonauts

had visited Ireland but had never

heard of

England:

the

pseudo-Orphic Argonautica,

a much later work than

was then realised,

seemed to

imply

this and even the

scholarly

William Preston

reprinted

the

appropriate passage

in his edition of the

Argonautica

of

Apol

lonius Rhodius, though very sceptical

about it.'

One source that Parsons drew on with

respect

and awe was the work of Colonel

(later Major-General

Charles Vallancey,

the

English-born military engineer

and

surveyor,

whose work in Ireland cast over him the

spell

of the Celtic past.

He was

quite

unconscious of

any

tension between his official

position

with the

army

which supported

the English

domination of Ireland and his

imaginative

sympathy

with the old Ireland before the coming

of the invader. He

curiously

anticipates

the better-known Thomas Davis and Samuel

Ferguson

who

worked on a later and fuller survey

of Ireland.

They

too were bewitched

by

the

old Ireland

preserved

in

place-names

and burial mounds.

Vallancey

was an

enthusiast rather than a scholar,

who became convinced that Irish was one of

the most ancient

languages

on earth and went to

extraordinary lengths

to

prove

it. His instinct was

right

but his

philology

was

wrong.

Modern

scholars have claimed that some features of the

language, mythology, poetic

rhythms

and even

legal system

of ancient Ireland find their closest analogues

in the

Rigveda

and the Brahmin culture of ancient India,

the womb of the

whole

Indo-European

civilisation.37 So far so

good:

but

Vallancey

was con

vinced that there were

Carthaginians

or Phoenicians in ancient Ireland. So

little is known about

Carthage

since Rome demolished city,

civilisation and

language

with horrible

efficiency,

that

very

little can be

proved

or

disproved

about the

place.

Phoenician traders

may

have reached ancient Ireland,

as

they

may

have reached ancient Cornwall. Sherlock Holmes was

supposed

to be

interested in the Punic roots of Cornish. But Vallancey

makes bricks without

straw when he claims that Irish and Carthaginian

are, essentially,

almost the

same

tongue.

Almost the

only

evidence he had was some weird lines of

mumbojumbo

which

might

be

Carthaginian

in the middle of Plautus's

neglected comedy

the Poenulus or Little Carthaginian.

These have fascinated

scholars since the time of

Scaliger

and Dutch scholarship

in the

eighteenth

century

established that the

mumbojumbo

had a Semitic base, likely enough

since

Carthage

was a

colony

of the Biblical

city

of

Tyre.'

But

Vallancey

would

"Sir Lawrence Parsons, Bt,

Observations on the bequest of Henry

Flood (Dublin,

1795), pp 38-46, 80-91, etc.

36Argonautica,

II 1178ff (where

the Argonauts pass

an island called Iernis,

an old

name for Ireland);

see William Preston, tr.,

The Argonautics of Apollonius

Rhodius (3

vols, Dublin, 1803), iii, 21ff, 84.

37See Myles

Dillon and N. K. Chadwick,

The Celtic realms (London, 1969),

ch. 10.

38Plautus, Poenulus, v, 930-49. The

history

of the relevant scholarship

is

surveyed

in

Maurice Sznycer,

Les passages puniques

et transcription

latine dans le `Poenulus' de

Plaute (Paris, 1967), pp

11-14.

226



have none of this. With more confidence than

competence

he

flatly

contra

dicted

grammarians

like Samuel Bochardt and insisted the words were closer

to Irish than to Hebrew. He buttressed his

theory

with a

farrago

of

fascinating

misinformation about similarities between Chaldean and Irish

astronomy

proving Tyrian

and Phoenician influences,

and even claimed that the

Carthaginians brought

the famous round towers with them.

Vallancey fetched

up

on wilder shores of

knowledge

than his

Carthaginian traders ever

did, for

he claimed that

through

them Ireland had received even ancient Chinese

cultural influences. The Chinese for God was

Chang-ti,

or Tien,

and the Irish

was Ti,

which

proved

it." In fact there was no reason to doubt that Irish or a

language very

like it was

spoken

in the

garden

of Eden.4 This Phoenician

fantasy

had an

unexpected

offshoot. Whether he

actually

believed it or not,

Joyce

was able to make use of it in

Ulysses

to reinforce his connections

between Homeric Mediterranean

myth

and Irish realities. There are

Finnegan-Phoenix-Phoenician puns

in

Finnegans

wake. Poker-faced, Joyce

told a Trieste audience in 1907 that the Irish

language and culture was of

course of Phoenician

origin

and

plausibly paraphrased Vallancey's

arguments.'

It is

very easy

to

laugh

at

Vallancey,

but there is an

oddly touching

romantic

patriotism

for a country

not his own behind all this. In John Bull's other island

(1904

Shaw

suggests

that

perhaps

it is the

Englishman

rather than the

Irishman who is the romantic sentimentalist,

the Irishman rather than the

Englishman

who is

calculatingly exploitive

in

Anglo-Irish

relations.

Vallancey

is a case in

point,

and he had his astute and

calculating

Irish flatterers. One of

these was his friend and assistant Charles O'Conor,

who wrote a letter

shrewdly indicating

the

unacknowledged political significance

of

Vallancey's

antiquarian compendium Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis

(1770-90):

From

[the copiousness

and

energy [of

the Irish

language you have found it

amply

fitted for the

purposes

of a

thinking people,

who were long

at leisure for the cultivation

of their intellectual powers.

...

[But now

in too

many

instances we find the

people

preyed upon

and

employed

to

support parties ... Such

examples exhibit

salutary

lessons to nations [like

Grattanite

Ireland

still free,

but tardy

in

removing excesses

which sooner or later must end

unhappily.42

The

political passions

of

antiquarianism

were

strongly

felt

by

Francis

Dobbs, an Irish M.P. and former Volunteer who

fanatically opposed

the act of

union on the

grounds

that it would

get seriously

in the

way

of the

impending

Second

Coming

of Christ,

which was destined to

happen

in Ireland.

Why

Did

not ancient records show that the

harp

was the

symbol

of old Ireland,

and fine

linen its native

product,

so the

playing

of

apocalyptic harps by angelic

hosts

"Charles Vallancey,

An

essay

on the

antiquity of the Irish

language, being a collation

of

the Irish with the Punic languages (1772),

included in Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis,

(2nd ed., Dublin, 1781), pp 274, 193-6, 130-31.

°Ibid., pp

251-74.

41iames

Joyce, Finnegans

wake

(1939 (3rd ed., London, 1964), pp 221, 608;

see

Ireland, island of saints and

sages'

in Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann

(eds), The

critical

writings of James

Joyce (New York, 1959), p.

156. See also Michael Seidel, Epic

geography

in James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (Princeton, 1976), p.

16.

'Reprinted in

Collectanea, ii, 244-5.

227



clothed in white linen was

already

well

provided

for. Other ancient records

showed that St Patrick had banished the snakes from Ireland,

which of course

prepared

the

way

for the final overthrow of that great serpent

Satan.43

All this

antiquarian

lore and

lunacy, coloured

by patriotic emotion,

was

available to the Irish

poets

and

imaginative

writers of the time. Dobbs's

comment about the Irish

harp

was an

important one,

for a

high point

in this

first Celtic revival was the Belfast

harpists'

festival on Bastille

day 1792.

Theobald Wolfe Tone used this occasion as a cover for a

meeting

of the United

Irishmen, who had

adopted

the

harp

as their emblem." Edward

Bunting,

organiser

of the festival,

a

young

Belfast organist,

collaborated in later

years

with

poets

like William Drennan and Thomas Moore in

making

available

melodies collected from the old Irish

harpists

and bards to

accompany

the new

Irish

poetry.

In 1795 Drennan,

son of a Belfast

presbyterian minister,

physician

and founder of the United Irishmen,

wrote his

stirring poem

of

Ireland's

past

and

present,

'When Erin first rose from the

dark-swelling

flood', and soon it was

being sung

to a tune of

Turlough Carolan, 'last of the

Irish bards'.45 A little later, borrowing

with

acknowledgement

from

Drennan,

Moore

sang

no less

sweetly

'Dear

harp

of

my country,

in darkness I found

thee'. The

essentially

musical tradition of Irish

poetry

in

English

has its

origins

in the Belfast

harpists'

festival and finds its

apotheosis

in the intricate

contrapuntal

harmonies of

Joyce's Ulysses

which

embody fragments from

many

of Moore's Irish melodies.

Drennan's 'When Erin first rose' has an

unacknowledged place

in the

history

of Irish

mythmaking.

John of

Salisbury

tells us that

Pope Adrian IV

gave Henry

II of

England

an emerald

ring

when

confirming

him in his title of

lord of Ireland." With this in mind, perhaps,

Drennan coined the

phrase

'the

Emerald Isle',

Ireland the rich

possession

from ancient

days:

he wrote

When Erin first rose from the

dark-swelling flood,

God bless'd the

green island,

He saw it was

good:

The Emerald of

Europe,

it

sparkled,

it shone.

In the

ring

of this world the most

precious

stone . .

Alas, for

poor

Erin that some still are seen,

Who would

dye

the

grass red, in their hatred of

green

. .

[And

with

feeling

of

vengeance presume

to defile

The cause, [and

the men,

of the EMERALD ISLE.47

43Francis Dobbs,

A concise view

from hikory

and

prophecy of the

great predictions in

the Sacred

Writings (London, 1800), pp xviii-xxi, 116-17,

268-9. There is an account of

Dobbs in Jonah Barrington,

The rise and fall of

the Irish nation (Paris, 1835), p.

105.

"See Mary McNeill,

The

life

and times

of Mary

Ann McCracken, 1770-1866 (Dublin,

1960), pp 75-84,

and C. M. Fox,

Annals of

the Irish harpers (London, 1911), pp

98-9 for

accounts of the festival.

45It was known as 'Erin to her own tune and words' (William Drennan,

Fugitive

pieces

in verse and

prose (Belfast, 1815), p. 1).

'John of Salisbury, Metalogicus,

iv ,

ch. 42; Migne, Patrologia

Latina, cxcix 1855),

col

945. See Notes and

Queries,

11th ser., ii,

no 39(24 Sept. 1910), p.

250.

°William Drennan, Fugitive

Pieces, pp

1-3.

228



Unfairly,

Moore

got

the credit for Drennan's

phrase

when

twenty-five years

later he celebrated the brave

days

of a more romanticised,

less

vigorous

Ireland

Ere the emerald

gem

of the western world

Was set in the crown of the

stranger."

Drennan was one of the ablest,

and for a time one of the most ardent,

writers

of his

day.

His

political passions, though

not

perhaps

his

principles, changed

in the direction of moderation after his trial for seditious libel in 1794.

Drennan ceased to be active in the United Irishmen,

but he retained his belief

in the essential

dignity

of his

country.

In Drennan the

faltering

association of

patriotic feeling,

a sense of heroic

possibilities

in Ireland's

past,

and a culti

vated

literary sensibility

found

intermittently

in other writers hardened and

crystallised

into a

powerful

and

angry

Irish

poetry

of some distinction,

honed

by the iconoclastic wit of the

century

of Voltaire:

My Country shall I

mourn, or

bless,

Thy

tame and wretched

happiness

. . .

at the back of

Europe,

hurl'd

A base POSTERIOR of the world."

He was

proud

of his

country,

which is

why

he

complained

so

bitterly

of its

complacent quietism,

as it seemed to him,

in the unfruitful

years which

followed on Grattan's

triumph.

Anxious to halt the

unpatriotic drift to

England

or America, writing

in the

atmosphere

of this first Celtic revival,

he

composed

'Verses for old Irish melodies'

purporting

to be

sung by

womenfolk

trying

to halt the

flight

of the 'wild

geese'

after defeat in battle:

Why, why

such haste to bear abroad

The witness of

your country's

shame

Stand

by

her altars,

and her God,

He

yet may build her

up

a name.

Then should her

foreign

children hear

Of Erin,

free and blest once more,

Will

they

not curse their fathers' fear,

That left too soon their native shore?'

Drennan's

poetry

and

patriotism

are of a

higher

order than Preston's because

the

enlightenment

tradition of the

eighteenth century

was a stimulus rather

than a conservative neo-classical

refuge

for him. His

university education in

Scotland had been liberal as well as medical,

and he rather

elegantly

finished

"Thomas Moore,

'Let Erin remember the

days

of old' from Irish melodies (1820),

most accessible,

with the

accompanying music,

in M. W. Balfe's edition

(London,

1859), p. 47.

"William Drennan, Fugitive pieces, pp

12-13.

p. 6.

229



off his

Edinburgh

M.D. dissertation

(on blood-letting

as a treatment for

fever

with a

tag

from Catullus about the

pleasures

of

being

able to

go

home

again.5'

His classical

training

was sound

enough

to

produce

a

polished though

not

very

literal translation of the Electra of

Sophocles

and to

supply

him with ancient

examples

of heroic resistance to

tyranny

which were useful to him as the

United Irishmen's

literary propagandist."

But Drennan's Scottish education had been

political

as well as

literary

and

medical. The

political philosophy

of John Locke

(which lay

behind his friend

William

Molyneux's

The case

of

Ireland

stated

was an

important

element in

the

thought

of the Scottish

Enlightenment.

Francis Hutcheson,

Ulster-born

professor

of moral

philosophy

at

Glasgow University,

much admired

by

Drennan and a close friend of his father's,

is one of the

key figures

here.

Dugald Stewart,

Drennan's

philosophy professor

and friend at

Edinburgh

University,

was one of his

disciples."

Hutcheson followed Locke's notions of

contract and insisted that

when the common rights

of the community

are

trampled upon,.

. . then as the

governor

is

plainly perfidious

to his trust,

he has forfeited all the

power committed to him.

In every

sort of government

the

people

has this

right

of

defending

themselves

against

the abuse of

power."

The

implications

for a

tyrannously-misgoverned

Ireland were unmistakable.

The Jacobinical

presbyterian Joseph Priestley,

an

important

influence on the

early

radical

Coleridge,

was another of Hutcheson's

disciples

and one of

Drennan's mentors." Another of Hutcheson's intellectual

disciples

was

Thomas Jefferson,

who derived from him the doctrines of

political liberty

enshrined in his draft of the American declaration of

independence.56

The

impact

of the American revolution on Ireland was immense. Tom

Paine, the child and father of

political revolution, was an

important influence

on the United Irishmen. Theobald Wolfe Tone maintained that Paine's

Rights

of

man was the 'Koran of Blefescu'

(Belfast).

This

largely presbyterian

radical

tradition

stemming

from Locke is of immense

importance

not

merely

to

Drennan and the United Irishmen but to the whole climate of advanced

opinion

in Ireland

during

this first Celtic revival. The Irish

past

which was

largely

a

literary

diversion for

Anglican

intellectuals like William Preston was

a vital

political

and

literary weapon

for

presbyterian

writers like William

51William Drennan,

De venaesectione in febribus

continuis

(Edinburgh, 1778), p. 43.

"William Drennan, tr.,

The Electra

of Sophocles (Belfast, 1817); see also 'The

jewels

of Cornelia' and 'Translation of a letter from Marcus Brutus to Marcus Tullius Cicero'

reprinted in

Fugitive pieces, pp 160-66, 167-73.

"See W. R. Scott,

Francis Hutcheson, his

life, teaching

and

position in the

history of

philosophy (Cambridge, 1900), esp. pp 23,

75-8. Drennan links himself with Hutcheson

and the radical

dissenting

tradition in a

speech of 1794

reprinted

in

Fugitive pieces, pp

192-97.

"Francis Hutcheson,

A short introduction to moral

philosophy (Glasgow, 1747), pp

303f, 310.

'Priestley

to Rev. Thomas Lindsey,

23 Dec. 1798,

in J. T. Rutt (ed.), Life

and

correspondence of Joseph Priestley (2 vols, London, 1831-2), ii, 412.

"See Adrienne Koch,

The

philosophy of Thomas

Jefferson (Gloucester, Mass., 1943),

pp 15-17, 138.

230



Drennan. The new radicalism was available to stiffen

patriotism or

nostalgic

antiquarianism

with moral and

political passion. Henry Brooke, father of

Charlotte Brooke of the

Reliques,

was an

early example

of this.

Theorising

in

the wake of the 1745 rebellion he sided with Locke in

locating

civil

liberty

in

'the

right

of

being governed by

laws to which the

people give

their own

consent'.

Popularity

was the sole mandate for

monarchy

and

political control,

he claimed." Brooke was a kindred

spirit

to the eccentric

Edgeworths

of

Edge

worthstown.

Richard Lovell

Edgeworth

was a scientist and Rousseauistic

educational theorist who associated with Preston and Charlemont and the rest

of them in the Royal

Irish

Academy

and

firmly

cast his vote

against

the

union." His unconventional intellectual radicalism was transmitted to his

more famous

daughter

Maria. In Castle Rackrent

(1800

we have the first

great

Irish novel, virtually

coincident with the union and

ironically questioning

the

moral basis of the

protestant ascendancy.

It was

fitting that when some Irish

radicals from this tradition

gathered together

to form the reformist Dublin

Constitutional

Society,

the chairman should have been

Capel Molyneux,

great-nephew

of the

patriotic

William

Molyneux

whose Case

of

Ireland stated

first

applied

Lockian notions of

government

to the

question

of Irish constitu

tional

liberty.

It was to this

group

that Drennan

presented

his Letters of

an

Irish helot (1785),

his first

published

work."

The union

represented

a

crushing

blow to the

aspirations

of Drennan and

his associates. The note of

melancholy retrospect

becomes much

stronger

in

Irish

poetry

after 1800 and

helps

to associate it more

closely with romanticism.

It was

symbolically appropriate

that the

English

romantics should have been

represented at the last session of the Irish

parliament by

De

Quincy,

who

happened

to be

visiting

a schoolfriend in Dublin at the time. From the

Visitors'

Gallery

he saw the union ratified 'without a

muttering,

or a

whispering,

or the

protesting

echo of a

sigh',

and was

angry

and

indignant.'

So was Drennan. His

poem `Glendalloch',

written in 1802,

contains familiar

elements:

Gray's poetics

and Irish realities;

an ancient round tower, Druids,

Danish invasion,

Grattan's

parliament.

But it concludes

gloomily

that

Glendalloch is the memorial and mausoleum of Ireland's defeated

hopes:

Yon

mould'ring pillar,

'midst the

gloom,

Finger

of Time shall

point

her tomb;

While silence of the

ev'ning

hour

Hangs

o'er Glendalloch's ruin'd tow'r.61

This

melancholy

note is of course characteristic of Ossianic

poetry: 'Weep on

the rocks of

roaring winds, 0 maid of Inistore Bend

thy

fair head over the

waves, thou lovelier than the

ghost

of

hills; when it

moves, in a

sun-beam, at

57Henry Brooke,

The

farmer's

six letters to the protestants of

Ireland (Dublin, 1746),

pp 5f, 26.

"See R. L. Edgeworth,

Memoirs, begun by himself

and concluded by

his daughter

Maria

Edgeworth (2 vols, London, 1820).

'William Drennan,

Letters of

an Irish helot

(Dublin, 1785), pp

3-4.

'Thomas De

Quincy, Autobiography from 1785 to 1803

(1853), in Collected

writings,

ed. David Masson (14 vols, Edinburgh, 1889), i,

223.

tWiniam Drennan,

Fugitive pieces, p.

115.

231



noon, over the silence of Morven!'62 It was from this that Matthew Arnold

misleadingly

assumed that Celtic literature was

characteristically gloomy."

Irish literature of the nineteenth

century

has been too

easily

dismissed as mere

sentimental

retrospect,

but a volume of Poems

by several hands

(chiefly

Drennan and

Preston), published just

after the union in 1801,

shows

why

this

might

be so.

Announcing

itself as

'exclusively composed

of

poetry strictly

and

purely

Irish' it includes a

dreary piece by one Thomas Robertson entitled

`Ossian's last

hymn,

versified'.

Fingal

is dead,

Scandinavian hosts

sweep

over

the land,

and Ossian,

last of his race,

is

dying

to music: 'Then farewell,

life

and thou, my harp,

farewell.'"

Some

post-union poetry

is better than this,

but Irish writers after 1800 tend

to

adopt

a different and more wistful tone. Patriotic

antiquarianism

and

Grattanite enthusiasm have not died

utterly

but

they

are

relegated

to the

past

tense, a source of

nostalgic poetic imagery

rather than ammunition for a con

tinuing

and

hopeful

conflict. The main

literary

harvest of the

antiquarian

revival of the

previous quarter century

was

reaped

in tears when

liberty

was

lost after the union. Thomas Moore,

author of the Irish melodies

(1808-35),

Lady Morgan,

author of The wild Irish

girl (1806),

Charles Maturin,

author of

The wild Irish

boy (1808

and Me/moth the wanderer

(1820),

are the charac

teristic writers of this

period.

New

political possibilities begin

to

emerge:

one

of the subscribers to Poems

by

several hands was the

young

Daniel O'Connell.

Lady Morgan at least was

cautiously

O'Connellite in

sympathy,

but the

connections between the muse and the revived nationalism of the later nine

teenth

century

are indirect and filtered

through

French

romanticism, as it will

be seen.

If the cause of

liberty

was lost with the union it was buried

deeper

still in

1803 with the failure of Emmet's rebellion. Thomas Moore had known Emmet

at

Trinity

and had shared his

revolutionary ardours, though by good

luck or

good judgement

he

managed

to avoid

damning

involvement in the con

spiracies

of

liberty. Instead he wrote for Emmet the

epitaph

that no man was

to write:

Oh breathe not his

name, let it

sleep

in the shade,

Where cold and unhonour'd his relics are laid:

Sad, silent, and dark be the tears that we

shed,

As the

night-dew

that falls on the

grass

o'er his head."

The

regular

musical

rhythms help

to contain and to domesticate Emmet's wild

enthusiasm. Hazlitt said

unkindly

that Moore converted the 'wild

harp

of Erin

into a musical snuffbox' !66 This was not

quite fair, though

Moore often

does.

give

the

appearance

of

being

on his best behaviour in the fashionable

English

drawing-rooms

where he earned his

popularity

and his

living.

His

poetry

was

62James

Macpherson, tr., The

poems of Ossian

(2 vols, London, 1773), i, 235.

"Matthew Arnold,

On the study of

Celtic literature (1867 (Everyman ed., London,

n.d.), pp 84-5,

118.

"Joshua Edkins (ed.),

A collection

of poems, preface, p. [viii]; p. 132.

"Irish melodies,

p. 5.

66William Hazlitt,

The

spirit of the

age (1825),

in

Complete works,

ed. P. P. Howe

(21 vols, London, 1930-34), xi, 174.

232



intended for

singing

rather than

reading,

which accounts for its

incantatory

quality,

and the music it was set to derived from ancient Irish

minstrelsy

even

if that had to be

heavily simplified

and

regularised.

A friend of

Byron,

like

Byron

and

Southey poetically responsive

to the

mystery

of the east,

Moore

was not an

exclusively

Irish romantic. He tried to combine the romantic,

modes of

nostalgic patriotism

and oriental exoticism in La/la Rookh (1817),

a

rather tedious narrative

poem

which includes a

reworking

of the Emmet

story

disguised

as Persian fable. It was a

great success,

but not

everyone

read it:

Lady Holland, prominent

in the

English whig

circle which

adopted Moore,

complained:

'Mr Moore,

I have not read

your Larry

O'Rourke. I don't like

Irish stories.'67

The characteristic elements of Moore's romanticism are wistful

patriotism,

amorous dalliance,

and a

gentle

cosmic

melancholy.

The

plight

of Sarah

Curran, the beloved of

poor

Robert Emmet,

allowed all three to come

together

in one of his most famous

songs,

'She is far from the land where her

young

hero

sleeps'.

A

genuinely religious feeling gives depth

and

dignity

to

some of his more serious

pieces,

and

helps

to

explain

his enormous

popularity

in France. His

poem

'This world is all a

fleeting

show/For man's illusion

given' formed the basis of the first number of Hector Berlioz' Tristia

(Opus

18),

a

religious

meditation for voices and orchestra

composed

in Rome

(1830

31)68

Berlioz

responded avidly

to Moore as

love-poet

as well. He first encoun

tered the Irish melodies

during

a violent emotional crisis in 1827. In

1864,

infatuated with the

possibility

of once more seeing Estelle,

whom he had loved

nigh fifty years before,

he wrote that neither Balzac nor

Shakespeare

had

found words for his feelings: only

Moore had,

'in these

exquisite

lines which

recur to

my

mind as I write':

Believe me,

if all those

endearing young

charms

Which I

gaze

on so

fondly today

Were to

change by tomorrow, and fleet in

my

arms

Like

fairy gifts fading away,

Thou wouldst still be adorned,

as this moment thou art,

Let

thy

loveliness fade as it will,

And around the dear ruin each wish of

my

heart

Would entwine itself

verdantly

still.

Berlioz wrote romantic music

inspired by Shakespeare

and

Byron

and Sir

Walter

Scott, but his

settings

of Moore's Irish melodies,

his

Neuf

melodies

irlandaises (1830),

were so

popular

that the new word `melodie

began

to

sup

plant

'chanson' as the French for

'song'.69

The fact that Berlioz and other French romantics found

inspiration

in both

Moore and Sir Walter Scott is

interesting

and significant.

The troubled

history

of Scotland in the seventeenth

century

of Old

Mortality (1816

or the

°Terence de Vere White,

Thomas Moore,

the Irish poet (London, 1977), p.

235.

"Thomas Moore,

Sacred songs,

in

Complete poetical

works

(London, 1869

ed.),

p. 200; Hector

Berlioz, Memoirs, 1803-65,

tr. Rachel and Eleanor Holmes

(New York,

1966), p. 161.

"Irish melodies,

p. 57; Hector

Berlioz, Memoirs, pp

67, 518; Jacques

Barzun, Berlioz

and the romantic

century (2 vols, London, 1951), i,

98.

233



eighteenth-century

Jacobite rebellion of

Waverley (1814 provided

Scott with

antagonisms

which had yielded

to the

equipoise

of modern Scotland but

patriotic

and sectarian emotion recollected in

tranquillity

was the basis of his

romanticism and

helped

to create a sense of the

present

as both the

product

and the

healing

of the

past.

It was the same with Moore's Ireland,

but the anta

gonisms

were much more recent and the

present registered

exhaustion rather

than

equipoise.

The imaginative sympathy

with

past

troubles was even more

infectious because the troubles were scarcely past.

Moore was

drawing

on the

nationalist enthusiasms and patriotic antiquarianism

of

only

a few

years back.

His

poem

'Remember the

glories

of Brien the Brave!' is

ostensibly

about Brian

Baru and the battle of Clontarf,

but the last stanza also

registers Moore's

response

to '98 and to the

enterprise

of his

college

friend Robert Emmet:

Forget

not our wounded

companions,

who stood

In the

day

of distress

by

our side;

While the moss of the

valley grew

red with their blood

They stired

not, but

conquer'd

and died.

Whether the struggle

and the heroism belonged

to the

eighteenth

or to the

eleventh

century they

had passed

into myth,

an

inspiration

to

patriotism the

world over. Berlioz set the

poem

to music,

and in the

July

revolution of 1830

the streets of Paris echoed with the

song.

7

French romanticism in the 1820s

and 1830s lacked a secure base in

purely

French

nostalgia

because of the

cultural

disruptions

of the revolution of 1789 and the lack of a

strong popular

tradition to draw upon

in the ancien

regime.

So Moore,

like Scott and

Byron,

was a

godsend.

The fiercely propagandist Augustin Thierry

drew

heavily

on

Moore in his Histoire de la

conquete

de

l'Angleterre par

les Normands

(1825 to

support

his romantic thesis that the human spirit always struggles

for freedom

and

always

survives

racially

motivated wars of

conquest.

In a section

dealing

with Ireland he draws heavily

on

Vallancey's antiquarian

researches as well as

Moore's

poetry

and takes the sad

story

down to the

suppression

of the '98

rebellion, concluding

that the wicked

English

have tried to make a desert of

the

garden

of Ireland: 'they

have made a fertile country,

whose

people

are

by

nature sociable and

intelligent,

the most uninhabitable

place

in

Europe'.7'

Thierry's

words had unexpected consequences,

as will be demonstrated

below.

The note of desolation which

Thierry caught

from Moore recalls the idea of

cultural and

political

vacuum from 1690 to mid-nineteenth

century

discussed

at the outset. Drennan's

poem

about the 'wild

geese'

has

already

been men

tioned, but

any home-based,

poetically-effective appeal against

or invocation

of the

unhappy

tradition of exile

imaginatively

restores the exiles and

helps to

fill the cultural if not the

political

vacuum exile

implies.

One of Moore's best

poems

returns to this theme, summoning

the

strengths

of an old Ireland back

from exile and the

past

in the creative act of a lament. The subtle

rhythm

of

`Oh, ye Dead' indicates a rarer

quality

of

feeling

than one

usually

finds in

Moore:

n'Irish melodies, p. 8;

Hector Berlioz,

Memoirs, p.

107.

71Augustin Thierry, Histoire de la

conquete

de l'Angleterre par

les Normands (3 vols,

Paris, 1825), 'Conclusion', iii, 482

(my translation).

234



Oh, ye Dead, oh, ye

Dead whom we know

by

the

light you give

From

your

cold

gleaming eyes, though you

move like men who live,

Why

leave

you

thus your graves

In far off fields and waves,

Where the worm and the sea-bird

only

know your bed,

To haunt this

spot

where all

Those

eyes

that

wept your fall,

And the hearts that wail'd

you,

like

your own,

lie dead

It was from this that Joyce

took the theme of his

story

'The dead' in Dubliners.

The controlled ironies of

Joyce's deliberately

unromantic

style,

his scrupulous

meanness, serve to

bring

out the unsentimental sombreness which he derives

from Moore."

Sydney Owenson,

later

Lady Morgan,

and Charles Maturin,

are much less

well-known writers but

they help

to demonstrate that Moore is not an isolated

figure

in Irish literature after the union. The

patriotic antiquarianism

of the

twenty years

before the union

gave

their work,

as well as his, significant

sub

stance.

Disappointment,

whether

personal

or

political, gave

it

passion. Lady

Morgan

tried her hand at Irish melodies, though

not so

successfully

as Moore.

In 1807 she

published

The

lay of

an Irish

harp,

or metrical

fragments,

but her

Patriotic sketches

of Ireland,

written in

Connaught

of the same

year

was a much

better book. It

registers

an interest in ruins and

landscape

and

regrets

the

dwindling interest in ancient

song

and

harp-music among

the

country

dwellers. Ossian is never very

far

away,

and she records her

delight

at discover

ing

a noble

young peasant among

the Leitrim mountains famed for

singing

the

songs

of Ossian which had

passed

to him

by

oral tradition from ancient times.

The desolate

landscapes

of the west of Ireland combine with ruined

abbeys

to

produce

a romantic sense of old

unhappy

far off

things

and battles

long ago,

and more than once she invokes the

paintings

of the

seventeenth-century

Italian artist,

Salvator Rosa,

whose

biography

she wrote,

because of his

characteristic interest in rocks and shattered trees and bandits in the wilds."

All of these elements can be found in her novels,

starting

with the

immensely

popular

The wild Irish

girl.

Pre-romantic theorists of

landscape gardening,

such as Uvedale Price,'

had

already

associated the sublime,

the Ossianic and

the

rugged

terrain of Salvator Rosa,

but

Lady Morgan

was the first to relate

this

English

idea to Irish realities. The

plots

which

incorporate

this back

ground

in action are all much the same: a disinherited Irish chieftain,

dis

consolately playing

his

harp

in the shadow of a round tower,

looks out over a

savage landscape

where he sees

approaching

him a beautiful

young girl

whose

father now owns his ancestral lands.

By creating

characters with famous his

torical names she can

immediately

furnish them with noble or

interesting ante

72Discussed in De Vere White, Moore,

p. 76.

"Lady Morgan, Patriotic sketches

of Ireland,

written in

Connaught (2 vols, London,

1807), esp. i, 150; ii, 36-9. In her

Life and times

of

Salvator Rosa (2 vols, London, 1824),

she

misleadingly portrays

him as a bandit and outlaw himself (i, 116

as well as an

Italian

patriot, which assimilates him to the outlawed heroes of her novels.

74Uvedale Price,

Essays

on the

picturesque compared with the sublime and the

beautiful

(3 vols, London, 1810), ii, 255-7; iii,

308-9. See also

Luigi Salerno, SalvatorRosa(Milan.

1963), p. 14.

235



cedents, carefully

footnoted with reference to Walker's Irish bards or

Vallancey's

researches or other works

produced

in the

heyday

of

patriotic

antiquarianism.

The

prevailing

Ossianic

melancholy

of

departed glories can

be suffused with

hope

if the

plot

contrives to

bring

a man of ancient name back

to the lands and the

power

which are his

birthright.

This

provides

a

topically

significant

version of the

myth

of the eternal return to comfort the

politically

disinherited and to enrich and

support

the O'Connellite rhetoric of

Repeal

sounding loudly

at the time,

even

though Lady Morgan disapproved

of

O'Connell's extreme methods. No wonder the Dublin

street-singers

intoned:

Och, Dublin

City

there's no doubtin',

Bates

every city upon

the

say;

'Tis there

you'll

hear O'Connell

spoutin',

An'

Lady Morgan making tay;

For 'tis the

capital

of the finest nation,

Wid

charming pisantry

on a fruitful sod,

Fighting

like divils for conciliation,

An'

hating

each other for the love of God."

Lady Morgan

was a

great

believer in conciliation and

hope,

and the novelistic

convention of the

happy marriage

or

piece

of

good

fortune which resolves the

plot provided

her with a convenient

symbol.

The O'Briens and the

O'Flahertys

(1827),

a national tale set in the

period 1782-98, makes this a

golden age,

'that

greatest

and best

epoch

of Irish

story'." Though

the novel is

largely set in

fashionable Dublin it

participates

in the idea of a national eternal return

by

making

the O'Briens descended from Brian Boru and the earls of

Inchiquin,

and the

O'Flahertys descended from Roderic

O'Flaherty,

author of

Ogygia,

the

great seventeenth-century

Latin

history

of Ireland. The return of the dis

inherited, and the novel's celebration of the Grattanite

golden age,

have

strong ideological

overtones as

they crystallise

into

myth

a

heyday of

light,

liberty

and intellectual

vigour

fostered

by

national

self-respect

and

irradiating

the darkness of

bigotry

and intolerance. O'Donnel

(1814

ends with a fortunate

marriage

which

brings

back the heroic Ireland

temporarily

humiliated

by

the

union, so that the brave descendant of the chiefs of Tirconnel returned

to the domains of his inheritance. . . he beheld the hall where the

harp

of Carolan had so

often reverberated. Nor was it without emotion that he

hung

once more the sword of

O'Donnel the Red,

which he had

repurchased,

over the

mantel-piece

of the domestic

hearth, while his faithful Irish

wolf-dog lay at his feet."

It is almost too much to take,

but

they

loved it in France,

where

Lady Morgan

travelled

widely

and was

very popular,

and Sir Walter Scott himself

gave

his

approval

and

encouragement."

75Ascribed to Charles Lever but

probably traditional.

Quoted by Lady Morgan

herself in her Memoirs

(2 vols, London, 1862), ii, 232.

76The O'Briens and the

O'Flahertys:

a national tale

(4 vols, London, 1827), iii,

6.

"O'Donnel: a national tale (3 vols, London, 1814), ii,

305-6.

78See Lionel Stevenson,

The wild Irish

girl: the

life of Sydney Owenson,

Lady Morgan,

1776-1859 (London, 1936),

and Elizabeth

Suddaby and P. J. Yarrow

(eds.), Lady

Morgan

in France

(Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1971).

236



Scott also

encouraged

Charles Maturin,

and his unaccountable

liking

for

Maturin's The Milesian

chief (1812

went

beyond

a casual reviewer's

praise

for

he

paid

Maturin the

compliment

of

incorporating

some features of the

plot

in

The bride

of

Lammermoor

(1819).

In fact both The Milesian

chief

and The wild

Irish

boy try

to

exploit

the success of

Lady Morgan's

The wild Irish

girl

and are

of little merit. But

they

are not without interest. Maturin was an

impoverished

and

disappointed

Church of Ireland

clergyman

of considerable

learning

and

neurotic

temperament.

Ossian and

brigands

from the Irish

past,

conflated

with scenes from Salvator Rosa,

decorate his

pages,

but he is much less rebel

lious

politically:

the disaster of the union is somehow internalised in his fiction

into a sense of

personal alienation, Gothic

nightmare

which draws on the

Faustian

legend

of unhallowed

knowledge

and

experience leading

to fearful

misery

and terror. His finest work is

undoubtedly

Me/moth the wanderer'

(1820),

which is

only incidentally Irish, but his sense of national and

psycho

logical dislocation, supported by

a vivid historical

imagination

and curious

erudition, brings

with it a romantic longing

for

healing

and wholeness. In The

wild Irish

boy

the hero, Ormsby Bethel,

finds

inspiration

and

healing among

lakes and mountains,

and Professor Norman Jeffares has

plausibly argued

that this demonstrates that 'the real foundation of his romantic nationalism'

was the Wordsworth of the

Lyrical

ballads. Maturin

represents

another link

between Irish romanticism and French literature, though

his romantic

psychology

was of more interest than his romantic

history,

for Baudelaire and

Balzac

acknowledged

his

inspiration.'

Before the union a

patriotic

and

topical

Irish

poetry

came into

being,

inspired by

the

glories

of 1782 and the new interest in old Ireland,

but essen

tially

similar to the

pre-romantic poetry

of the sublime or the Gothic asso

ciated with

Gray

and Horace

Walpole

in

England.

After the union this

topical

patriotism mellowed and faded into wistful

mythmaking

romanticism asso

ciated with Sir Walter Scott and the

European

romantics. What

happened

to

this Irish tradition

eventually, and

why

has it been

forgotten

It has been demonstrated that what

may

be called the first Celtic revival in

Ireland fuelled not

merely

Irish but French romanticism. It was

through

France that the new

spirit

of Irish

hope

and Irish literature touched Thomas

Davis. A Benthamite radical,

he was

sceptical

of

Thierry's picture

of the dis

inherited Irish

singing

Moore's Irish melodies to the sound of the

harp by

the

lake-shore, rehearsing

the 'sorrows of Ireland and the crimes of its

oppressors'." Nonetheless, this kindled in him an almost

religious

enthusiasm

for a new

Young Ireland which would

repair

the

ravages

of the

past.

Cultural

nationalism in Ireland,

as it is

generally understood,

stems from Davis and

Mangan

and

Ferguson,

but it had its roots in an earlier tradition. Davis him

self

acknowledged

this. In the columns of the Nation he wrote

patriotically

about 'Irish music and Irish

poetry'

and indicated his

familiarity

with the

79A. N. Jeffares, 'Place, space

and

personality and the Irish writer' in Andrew

Carpenter (ed.), Place,

personality and the Irish writer

(Gerarcis Cross, 1977), p.

19. For

a

general account of Maturin see R. E.

Lougy, Charles Robert Maturin

(Lewisburg

and

London, 1975). For Maturin and Balzac see Pierre

Barberis, Balzac et le mal du si碬e

(Paris, 2

vols, 1970), i, 531, 614-15. Balzac was also interested in Moore and in

Thierry's

romantic view of Ireland (ibid., pp 614, 398).

'Malcolm Brown,

The

politics of Irish

literature, p.

47.

237



work of Edward

Bunting,

the

organiser

of the Belfast

harpists'

festival of 1792.

He was not

greatly impressed

with the

quality

of most of the

songs

in

Bunting's Ancient music

of

Ireland

(1797-1840),

but made an honourable

exception

of William Drennan's work,

which has

already

been

discussed, and

tested the whole collection by

the standard of Moore's Irish melodies which he

valued highly:

`. . 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',81

Moore and Drennan and the minor balladist Edward

Lysaght, rather

curiously

included here,

are the

only

true Irish

poets

of the

period,

he claims.

This is a rather

meagre acknowledgment

of the tradition of Irish literature of

which Moore is the culmination,

and Davis the continuation,

after a fashion,

but it is

important. Young

Ireland stands between two Celtic revivals,

though

the first has been

unduly

overshadowed

by

the second,

and there are indirect

but

significant

continuities between the two. A narrow

understanding

of the

Irish literary

tradition has led to the

neglect

of some fine Irish literature and a

noble vision of Ireland in times which are

perhaps

still to come. William

Drennan looked to a

glorious

resurrection after the death of William Orr the

United Irishman:

Here we watch our brother's

sleep;

Watch with us,

but do not

weep:

Watch with us,

thro' dead of

night

But

expect

the

morning light.

Conquer

Fortune

persevere

Lo it breaks

the

morning

clear

The cheerful cock awakes the skies;

The

day

is come

Arise, arise!'

NORMAN VANCE

University of

Sussex

"Thomas Davis,

'Irish music and

poetry'

in T. W. Rolleston (ed.),

Prose

writings of

Thomas Davis (London, [18901), p.

189.

uWilliam Drennan,

The wake of William Orr' in Glenda/loch, and other

poems (2nd

ed., Dublin, 1859), p.

47.

238



Documents

Celts, Carthaginians and Constitutions: Anglo-Irish Literary Relations, 1780 - 1820