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this time five men had been pitched upon as ringleaders, Allen, Larkin, O'Brien, Maguire, and Condon. All were found guilty and condemned to death. The last two were afterwards released, Maguire, curiously enough, on the intercession of the whole body of press representatives who had attended the trial, Condon, it was believed, because he was an American citizen. The other three were hanged publicly at Manchester on November 23.

The excitement caused in Ireland was extraordinary. It was believed that these men were put to death, not because they were guilty of murder, for this was not proved, and each one to the end protested his innocence, but because, as has often happened in other countries in a moment of passion and panic, the mob had demanded a victim, and the lot had fallen not on one but on three. They were all men of good character, working for their bread. O'Brien was the son of an evicted farmer; Larkin, the grandson of a farmer flogged and transported in '98; Allen, for whose fate, most pity was felt, had been brought up a carpenter, was only 19, and was soon to have been married. He, like the others, had not asked for mercy or denied his share in the rescue, but only in the death of Sergeant Brett. In his last letter to his family he said, 'I am dying an honourable death. I am dying for Ireland, dying for the land that gave me birth, dying for the island of saints, and dying for liberty. Every generation of our countrymen has suffered, and where is the Irish heart could stand by unmoved? I should like to know what trouble, what passion, what mischief could separate the true Irish heart from its own native isle.' On the next Sunday the chapels were filled with prayers for the souls of the victims. Their bodies had been buried in quicklime, but immense funeral processions were held, and are still held in their memory.

Their fate gave the touch of pathos that had been wanting to the Fenian movement. After sentence of death had been pronounced on them, and before they left the dock, they had cried out together God save Ireland!' The song founded on these words has become the national anthem of the greater part of Ireland.

6

Never till the latest day

Shall the memory pass away

Of the gallant lives thus given for our land;
But on the cause must go,

Amidst joy or weal or woe,

Till we've made our isle a nation free and grand

God save Ireland, say we proudly,

God save Ireland, say we all;

If upon the scaffold high

Or the battle-field we die,

Oh, what matter when for Erin dear we fall?

Many other songs have been written and are sung in their honour-The Martyrs,''Martyrs' Day,' 'The Martyred Three,' and the one that, to take the test of the broad sheets, is most popular, the 'Smashing of the Van.'

One cold November morning in 1867,

These martyrs to their country's cause a sacrifice were given.
God save Ireland! was the cry, all through the crowd it ran;

The Lord have mercy on the boys that helped to smash the van.

Our ballad singers, in their summaries of history, are never afraid of names, but daringly string them together in a sort of rhymed Calendar of Worthies,' as :

Now to begin to name them, I'll continue in a direct line,

There's John Mitchel, Thomas Francis Maher, and also William Smith O'Brien, John Martin and O'Donoghue, Erin sorely feels their loss,

For to complete their number I will include O'Donovan Ross.

There is a redeeming intensity and continuity of purpose through even such doggerel verses as these; they are not without dignity if looked on as roughly hammered links in an unequally wrought chain.

Parnell, when in Kilmainham Jail, was sung at fairs and markets all through the country, and in the first burst of sorrow for his loss many verses were written, but none that have taken, or are likely to take, a real hold on the country, and this, although the first that were printed in United Ireland' after his death were written by the first of our poets, Yeats. The split in the party, or the influence of priests, or perhaps the strange belief held by many that he is still alive, has laid a silencing finger on the singers' lips. And some have looked elsewhere for words to associate with his grave:

Oh, I have dreamed a dreary dream,

Beyond the Isle of Skye:

I saw a dead man win a fight,

And I thought that man was I.

But Davis's beautiful Lament for Owen Roe' best expresses the

despair that has been felt by every new peasant generation, as one leader after another has been struck down :

We thought you would not die, we were sure you would not go
And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell's cruel blow.
Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky.
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen? Why did you die?

Soft as woman's was your voice, O'Neil, bright was your eye.
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen, why did you die?
Your troubles are all over, you're at rest with God on high;
But we're slaves and we're orphans, Owen. Why did you die?

III.

Few of our ballads can take rank with those of Davis at his best, but there are some of them, those written by the felons themselves, that stand outside criticism, sweat-drops of the worker, blood-drops of the fighter shed as he passed along the hard highway. As some old lines say:

And he was also in the war,

He who this rhyme did write;

Till evening fought he with the sword,
And sang the song at night.

Such are those of Doheny, who was hunted over bogs and mountains for many weeks in '48, after Smith O'Brien's rising, in which he had taken part. He has told of these wanderings in his book, 'On a Felon's Track,' and also in one of his ballads, written while on his keeping' on the Kerry mountains, and addressed to Ireland, 'Acushla gal machree: '—

I've given thee my youth and prime

And manhood's waning years,

I've blest thee in the sunniest time
And shed for thee my tears;

And, mother, though thou'st cast away
The child who'd die for thee,

My fondest wish is still to pray
For Cushla gal machree.

I've tracked for thee the mountain sides

And slept within the brake,

More lonely than the swan that glides

On Lua's fairy lake;

The rich have spurned me from their door

Because I'd set thee free,

Yet do I love thee more and more

Acushla gal machrec

Another felon ballad writer was Kickham, from whose 'Rory of the Hill' I have already quoted. His 'Patrick Sheehan,' well known in country places, is still an obstacle in the path of the recruiting sergeant:

Bereft of home, and kith and kin,

With plenty all around,

I starved within my cabin
And slept upon the ground;
But cruel as my lot was

I ne'er did hardship know
Till I joined the English army
Far away from Aherlow.

'Rouse up there,' says the Corporal,
You lazy Hirish hound-

Why, don't you hear, you sleeping dog,

The call to arms" sound?'

Alas! I had been dreaming

Of days long, long ago:
I woke before Sebastopol
And not in Aherlow.

Then, Irish youths, dear countrymen,
Take heed of what I say,

For if you join the English ranks
You'll surely rue the day.

And whenever you are tempted

A soldiering to go,

Remember poor blind Sheehan

Of the glen of Aherlow.

IV.

To the spiritual mind the spiritual truth underlying each development of Christianity is always manifest. But there is a significant contrast in the outward form in which religion appears to the peasant of England and the peasant of Ireland. In England (I quote again from the Jail Journal '), ' is there not our venerable Church, our beautiful liturgy? There is a department for all that, with the excellent Archbishop of Canterbury at the head of it.' To the English peasant the well-furnished village church, the pulpit cushion, the gilt-edged Bible, the cosy rectory, represent respectability, comfort, peace, a settled life. In Ireland the peasant has always before his eyes, on his own cottage walls or in his whitewashed chapel, the cross, the spear, the crown of thorns, that tell of what once seemed earthly failure, that tell that He to whom he kneels was led to a felon's death.

In England the poet of to-day must, if he will gain a hearing, write of the visible and material things that appeal to a people who have made 'The Roast Beef of Old England' a fetish, and whose characteristic song is :

We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,

We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.

In Ireland he is in touch with a people whose thoughts have long been dwelling on an idea; whose heroes have been the failures, the men who went out to battle and who always fell,' who went out to a battle that was already lost-men who, whatever may have been their mistakes or faults, had an aim quite apart from personal greed or gain.

Some of us are inclined to reproach our younger poets with a departure from the old tradition because they no longer write patriotic and memorial ballads. But in singing of the dim wisdoms old and deep that God gives unto man in sleep,' they have not departed from it, they have only travelled a little further on the road that leads from things seen to things unseen. And a poet is not to be shaped and trained like a yew tree and set in a hedgerow, to guard even the most hallowed ashes. He must be left to his own growth, like the tree that clings to its own hillside, that sends down its roots to find hidden waters, that sends out its branches to the winds and to the stars.

AUGUSTA GREGORY.

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