and soon passed permanently into my memory, and Burns's poems, which were as common in Ulster as in Dumfriesshire.
The prints in the single sitting-room were as instructive as the books. I remember best an engraving of "Louis XVI. taking leave of his Family," for Irish Catholics were Royalists till misgovernment made Radicals of them; and "Pius VI. refusing Bonaparte's offer of a National Cockade and a Pension." There were also portraits in rude woodcuts of O'Connell and Sheil, and of some Irish ecclesiastics.
There was no regular bookseller's shop in Monaghan, but a couple of printers sold school-books; and at a weekly market there was always a pedlar who supplied, at a few pence, cheap books printed at Belfast, of which the most popular were the "Battle of Aughrim" and "Billy Bluff." The drama of the battle was in the hands of every intelligent schoolboy in Ulster, who strode an imaginary stage as Sarsfield or Ginkle, according to his sympathies. I can recall a device employed by a book-hawker at that time to stimulate the interest of his customers, which may perhaps have been borrowed from precautions invented in the penal times. "I won't sell my book," he cried, "and I darn't sell my book, for the law forbids me to sell my book, but I'll sell my straw (producing a stalk of wheaten straw), and whoever buys my straw for a penny shall have my book for nothing." I bought the straw on an occasion, counting upon some tremendous disclosure of iniquity in high places or some device for liberating Ireland. I forget what the brochure contained, but I have a painful recollection that the investment did not answer my expectation.[1]
Mr. Bleckley was a careful and assiduous teacher, much devoted to his school, and for five years I profited by his instructions. We parted under circumstances which, as I
- ↑ There were rustic poems of a national spirit printed from time to time, especially among the weavers of Ulster and the schoolmasters of the South; classes whose sedentary pursuits lent themselves naturally to poetry. I remember a poem entitled the "Knight of the Shamrock Plume," printed in Monaghan, when I was a schoolboy, which described an episode in '98 in curiously inflated and sonorous verse, modelled on Pope's Homer, one couplet describing pike-making which I considered prodigiously fine—I can still recall—
"The busy smiths with unabating care
From hissing bars the shining lance prepare."
