Introduction
1. Introduction to A Treasury of Irish Poetry (In the English Tongue).
2. How well old Spenser understood this! See in his View of the State of Ireland the passage beginning: ‘Lord, how quickly doth that country alter men’s natures!’
3. When writing this I had forgotten that Wilde had more brilliantly said the same thing: ‘To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the Christ’s own Renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, was not allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary Classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael’s frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St Paul’s Cathedral, and Pope’s poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it.’ – De Profundis.
Chapter 1
1. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century.
2. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century.
3. A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures.
4. J. R. Green, Irish Nationality.
5. John Stevenson, Two Centuries of Life in Down, 1600–1800.
6. ‘The inhabitants of the Barony of Forth, near Wexford, are the descendants of the first followers of Strongbow. They have never mixed with the Irish, and still speak a singular language, which is more akin to Flemish than to modern English.’ A Frenchman’s Walk through Ireland (1796–7).
7. The Last Independent Parliament of Ireland.
8. Le Fanu, Seventy Years of Irish Life.
9. King, to the Lord Bishop of Carlisle, 3rd Feb. 1717.
10. The Groans of Ireland, a pamphlet published 1741.
11. Letter from a Country Gentleman in the Province or Munster to His Grace the Lord Primate. Dublin, 1741. (For these quotations, and much other evidence, see Lecky History, I)
12. A Frenchman’s Walk through Ireland (1796–7).
13. Lecky, History, I.
Chapter 2
1. M. J. O’Connell, The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade.
2. Eighty-five Years of Irish Life.
3. J. M. Callwell, Old Irish Life.
4. Ibid.
5. Cf. Froude, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century.
6. Poems 0f Egan O’Rahilly, edited by Rev P. S. Dinneen, M.A., and Prof. Tadhg O’Donoghue.
7. Cf. Poems 0f Egan O’Rahilly.
8. The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Poems of Egan O’Rahilly.
13. Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland (1776–1779).
14. Cf. The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade for many of these letters.
15. Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade.
16. Lecky, History.
17. Cf. Duanaire Finn, edited by Professor MacNeill, for an interesting account of Captain Somhairle MacDonnell – an earlier soldier of fortune – who, while serving in the Netherlands, set Irish scribes to make him copies of Irish manuscripts preserved by Irish Franciscans in Louvain.
18. J. M. Callwell, Old Irish Life.