图书图片
PDF
ePub

Now clothed, with a roof to shield them,
They never shall want again,

Though thoughts of the past will yield them
Still many a throb of pain.

"You are smiling, Knight of Ridley, And, doubtless, you think me weak, But I heard a plaint of agony

That the stoniest heart might break: Such as the angels above us

Weep over, with drooping wing,
As the Merciful who doth love us,
True comfort alone can bring!

"That woman was pure as the sunbeam,
That blesses a guilty earth,
When a shadow dimm'd its lustre,
And all that her life was worth:
In the flush of her maiden beauty,
The warmth of a trusting heart,
She swerved from the path of duty,
The Tempter had done his part.
"She was but of lowly station,

He sprung from a knightly race-
The blazon'd roll of his ancestors
Is dimm'd by the foul disgrace!
She clung to his neck-he spurn'd her,
And cast her away in scorn,
To her father's house return'd her,
To be cast adrift-forlorn!

"Long years she wearily wander'd
With the child of guilty love;
In vain she had craved his pity,

Whom no tender thoughts could move.

Now of all God's erring creatures,

Who struggle through want and pain,

Such desolate, woful features

May I never behold again!

"I have moved you, Knight of Ridley,
I see by the heaving chest,

By the eyes in shame averted,
By remorse that knows no rest!

By the brow which bears the traces
Of the fell deceiver's ban,

That the image of God defaces,

Sir Richard, THOU ART THE MAN!'"

II.

Time, with all its fitful changes,
Has been busy at the Hall;
Bright again the summer robes it,
Now, within, the sunbeams fall:
Fall upon a grey head bending

With the weight of added years,
And upon a young man blending
All the charms that youth endears.

Death has taken one sad victim,

But has spared the child she loved,
And for him, in deep atonement,
All the father's heart is moved.
Ev'ry chord of life is centred

In the long-lost son now found;
Seeds of hallowing hope have entered
Where but late was sterile ground.

Tall and handsome is the stripling,
Ev'ry lineament defined
On his fair and comely features,
With the attributes of mind.
And for him the father spares not
From his unbarr'd coffers now,
That the wealth for which he cares not.
Good on others may bestow.

Well the youth repays his bounty
As the years roll swiftly on-
Riches, honours, high distinction,
Grace the Knight of Ridley's son:
Step by step he wins promotion
As a lawyer, upright, keen,
Firm and loyal in devotion
To his country and his queen.

Ay, the

poor abandon'd outcast,
Born in sorrow, nursed in shame,
Now has reach'd a lofty station,
And has gain'd a world-wide fame:
Just, to factions yielding never,

As Chancellor and ermined peer,
Proud the name, unsullied ever,
Of EGERTON, LORD ELLESMERE!
The coronet is but a bauble

In its own bejewell'd worth;
Nobler 'tis to win than wear it,

Or to claim its right by birth! Better still than rank or glory, When above the dead we bend, To say that through life's chequer'd story, Like Egerton," he lost no friend!”

162

IRISH WHEAT AND TARES.

THE task of disintegrating fused races may interest and amuse a speculative mind, but it scarcely answers as a problem for political solution. A wealthy Saxon, with his beautiful and virtuous Milesian wife, is quite content with her as she is—

Not too bright and good

For human nature's daily food

to trouble his head about her ancestry, attested by cromlechs, kistvaens, and round towers; and probably, on her part, she appreciates the value of a comfortable home, although in her idler moments, she may pore over the legends of her native land, full as they are, of romantic attractions.

In his History of Ireland, Moore candidly tells us, that "it is beyond the historian's power to ascertain, whether the Firbolgs or Belgae went directly to Ireland from Gaul, or vid Britain. As for the Celts, whom they are said to have driven into Ireland from Britain, that persecuted race seems, by going still farther west, to be consummating a grand cycle which may again commence its course by the overland route."

According to O'Flaherty, who, however, does not vouchsafe his authority, the first colonisation of Ireland occurred in the fourth century after the Flood, when Partolan landed ON A WEDNESDAY on the coast of Kerry.

Still, by an Irish historian we are told, in the time of Tacitus, of the "divided and factious state of her people." One of the petty kings was obliged to fly from "domestic faction to Roman protection."

"At an early period were naturalised the principles of exclusion and proscription." "Not merely (under the Milesian rule) were the great mass of the old Celtic population held in subjection by the sword, but also the descendants of the foreign settlers. The remains of the conquered Belgic tribes were wholly excluded from every share in the administration of public affairs."

[ocr errors]

In A.D. 90, we read that they "confederated amongst themselves by a common sense of humiliation and wrong," which led to an indiscriminate massacre of their rulers.

66

66

A Celtic usurper's reign is described as one of gloom and sterility"no grain on the stalk"-"abandoned wholly to the rule of the rabble."

After three hundred years-a moderate hiatus-the race of Partolan was judiciously and summarily swept away by a plague.

Then came the Nemedians, who being shortly afterwards destroyed by African pirates, the country continued desolate for a period of no less than two hundred years.

Then came the Firbolgs, who first imposed the regal authority; but, as they brought it to a land uninhabited, they imposed it not on Ireland, but on themselves. They divided the country into a pentarchical government, which continued till the twelfth century.†

[blocks in formation]

Forty years after the erection of the quintuple power, the Firbolgs were dispossessed by the Tuatha-de-danaan.

The Firbolgs fled to the Isle of Man, &c.

In turn, succeeded Milesian invaders from Spain-a Scythic race, "we are told," but the authority is really the question-led by Heremon and Heber, sons of a Milesian king (Fenius, the Scythian, was their ancestor).

Dr. O'Connor has, in a great measure, with the best intentions, exposed the absurdities of the lists of Irish sovereigns; but even he falls into errors scarcely less ridiculous.

The love of pedigree-making is a weakness inherent in human nature; authentic genealogy based on facts are the title deeds of the governing classes; but family tradition is deceptious; and, under favourable circumstances, two generations may be quite sufficient to produce the fiction of antiquity, after which it seldom fails to be perpetuated, as we have seen in the brochure of the present Lyon King of Arms.

It must be owned, that the commencement of the Milesian monarchy was marked for study by the features which but too much characterised its whole course-discord and anarchy.

Ollamh Fodhla, instituted the triennial convention of Tara, and from his time to a recent period have continued:

1. Hereditary offices.

2.

[ocr errors]

employments.

3. The system of Indian castes and trades.

After long flights of dynasties, of three hundred years' duration, we come to Couay the Great in the year 2.

In A.D. 130, we have the second plebeian war.

In A.D. 403, St. Patrick is introduced as a captured slave.

About A.D. 787, we have "weakness, insubordination, and confusion.” Immediately after the inhuman nose tax of A.D. 849, we are informed, "the fame of Ireland as a place of refuge for the exile sufferer was even in those dark times maintained."

In the days of the great Brian Boru, "internal feuds, murders," &c. In 1013, we read of the "perfidy and restlessness of the people of Leinster.

In 1022, after a succession of murders, the not surprising "decline of religion and morals throughout the country."

In 1119, St. Bernard draws a gloomy picture of the troubles of the Church and its corruption.

In 1169 landed the first Anglo-Norman adventurers, under Robert FitzStephen.

It will thus be seen, that to attribute to these invaders, and their descendants, the sufferings of the people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is irreconcilable with the historic evidence (such as it is), that suffering had always been the normal state, if such a term may be so applied.

As the King of Dahomey shrewdly remarked: "My people make their own sufferings. If I did not gratify them with blood, they would soon choose another ruler."

Henry VII. seems to have had a clear idea of the state of Ireland, in his own time, and much as he felt the worth and loyalty of the Butlers,

he wisely entrusted the government to Kildare.

rule this man, this is the man to rule all Ireland."

*

"If all Ireland cannot

And it is a curious fact, recorded in a recent number of a local journal, that this great and popular nobleman was remarkable, as a landlord, for always "insisting on good security for the rent."

Some papers recently appeared in that popular little weekly periodical, Notes and Queries, on the past history of Ireland, and the author,† an Irishman by birth, seems to be much of the same opinion as ourselves. The authorities which he quotes in support of his statements it would be unnecessary here to recapitulate, and, moreover, most of our pages were written before the publication of the papers in question.

There is one point, however, which seems to have been overlookedthe Irish apologists, one and all, historians as well as politicians, prove that the Irish have prospered in every land, and under every description of ruler, but their own. Irishmen have ruled the destinies of England in places of the highest power. In France, Spain, and elsewhere, they have risen, though aliens, to the highest distinctions of the native nobility.

Under the most despotic governments abroad, they have come to the surface, and shone with the greatest lustre.

We ask, therefore, how can it be said that the British-certainly the mildest form of government in the world-should be such a grinding tyranny only to the Irish, and that this latter race, under severe and arbitrary rulers elsewhere, does not complain? Is it not that they are oppressed, if by any, by their own local, native, and to the manner born, petty rulers, and that they can only prosper when spread out— their spirit diluted, as it were, with the water of other races?

But petty and intermediate native rulers have notoriously been, from the earliest periods of authentic history, the bane of this charming Emerald Isle. By these, all attempts at instructing the masses, are virtually obstructed, by both Protestants and Papists. With a compulsory national education, it would be no longer possible to delude the people, and play upon their fears and their imagination.

But the ethnological question, as a political auxiliary, is surely open to the most serious objections; and in his recent work on the Irish in America, Mr. Maguire, while giving a side-thrust at what he calls the hybrid Scotch-Irish, seems to have overlooked the large preponderance of the Anglo-Norman, so unmistakably traceable, in the personal lineaments of the peasantry of the south-east of Ireland. This latter race is, however, not exceeded-if equalled-in all the characteristics that raise human nature to the highest level, yet it seems to have been considered convenient to blink the origin of this fine people. The pretence of the Celtic claim is, curiously enough, undermined by such a reflection on the Scotch.

It was

"Have you ever heard of such curiosities as the Scotch-Irish? There are such men, and very contemptible they are. They ignore their country, and are despised by Americans as well as Irishmen." only in the states Mr. Maguire heard of those hybrids (?) Assuredly it was not the squalid Irishry, that a Frenchman last

* The Kilkenny and South-east of Ireland Archæological Journal.
† Mr. Pinkerton.

The Irish in America. By J. F. Maguire Esq., M.P.

year

« 上一页继续 »