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Humours of Irish Life By: Various |
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[Illustration: Frank Webber wins the wager Drawn by Geo. Morrow ]
HUMOURS
OF IRISH LIFE WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY CHARLES L. GRAVES, M.A. [Illustration: Fiat Lux]
NEW YORK:
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
PRINTED BY THE
EDUCATIONAL COMPANY
OF IRELAND LIMITED
AT THE TALBOT PRESS
DUBLIN
Introduction.
The first of the notable humorists of Irish life was William Maginn, one
of the most versatile, as well as brilliant of Irish men of letters. He was born in Cork in 1793, and was a classical schoolmaster there in
early manhood, having secured the degree of LL.D. at Trinity College,
Dublin, when only 23 years of age. The success in "Blackwood's Magazine"
of some of his translations of English verse into the Classics induced
him, however, to give up teaching and to seek his fortunes as a magazine
writer and journalist in London, at a time when Lamb, De Quincey,
Lockhart and Wilson gave most of their writings to magazines. Possessed of remarkable sparkle and finish as a writer, considering with
what little effort and with what rapidity he poured out his political
satires in prose and verse, and his rollicking magazine sketches, it was
no wonder that he leaped into popularity at a bound. He was the original
of the Captain Shandon of Pendennis and though Thackeray undoubtedly
attributed to him a political venality of which he was never guilty,
whilst describing him during what was undoubtedly the latter and least
reputable period in his career, it is evident that he considered Maginn
to be, as he undoubtedly was, a literary figure of conspicuous
accomplishment and mark in the contemporary world of letters. Amongst his satiric writings, his panegyric of Colonel Pride may stand
comparison even with Swift's most notable philippics; whilst his Sir
Morgan O'Doherty was the undoubted ancestor of Maxwell's and Lever's
hard drinking, practical joking Irish military heroes, and frequently
appears as one of the speakers in Professor Wilson's "Noctes
Ambrosianae," of which the doctor was one of the mainstays. Besides his convivial song of "St. Patrick," his "Gathering of the
Mahonys," and his "Cork is an Eden for you, Love, and me," written by
him as genuine "Irish Melodies," to serve as an antidote to what he
called the finicking Bacchanalianism of Moore, he contributed, as Mr. D.
J. O'Donoghue conclusively proves, several stories, including "Daniel
O'Rourke," printed in this volume, to Crofton Croker's "Fairy Legends
and Traditions of Ireland," first published anonymously in 1825 a set
of Folk Tales full of a literary charm which still makes them delightful
reading. For just as Moore took Irish airs, touched them up and
partnered them with lyrics to suit upper class British and Irish taste,
so Croker gathered his Folk Tales from the Munster peasantry with whom
he was familiar and, assisted by Maginn and others, gave them exactly
that form and finish needful to provide the reading public of his day
with an inviting volume of fairy lore. Carleton and the brothers John and Michael Banim, besides Samuel Lover,
whose gifts are treated of elsewhere in this introduction, followed with
what Dr. Douglas Hyde rightly describes as Folk Lore of "an incidental
and highly manipulated type." A more genuine Irish storyteller was Patrick Kennedy, twice represented
in this volume, whose "Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celt" and
"Fireside Stories of Ireland" were put down by him much as he heard
them as a boy in his native county of Wexford, where they had already
passed with little change in the telling from the Gaelic into the
peculiar Anglo Irish local dialect which is markedly West Saxon in its
character. His lineal successor as a Wexford Folklorist is Mr. P. J. McCall, one of
whose stories, "Fionn MacCumhail and the Princess" we reproduce, and a
woman Folk tale teller, Miss B. Hunt, adds to our indebtedness to such
writers by her recently published and delightful Folk Tales of Breffny
from which "McCarthy of Connacht" has been taken for these pages... Continue reading book >>
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