as

Moral

Published Helen.

With many lesser tales, collected

Tales, Tales of Fashionable Life, etc. A collected edition was published in 1832, and again in 1848.

CHAPTER VII.

LITERATURE IN IRELAND.

THERE is unfortunately but little necessity to apportion a separate chapter to the literature of Ireland. We have already remarked upon the singular absence of literary production, and of genius at all worthy to be called national, which we find at a period so rich in literary power, in the unfortunate island, which, to the great misfortune both of her neighbours and herself, is so closely connected with Great Britain. What a happy solution would it be of many problems could engineering science, which has done so much, find means to move that uneasy Erin out into the wide Atlantic, far enough off from us to give her full scope for independence and self-development! They move houses and churches in America, why not an island? Such a divorce would be hailed, we should imagine, with delight on both sides-and would afford a full opportunity for the putting forth of national effort, up to this time sadly wasted in internal agitations, and affording us no means of estimating the national genius. Great social unhappiness and political restraint do not, however, seem to furnish a sufficient reason for the absence of worthy utterance, especially in a race so generally pervaded by the lighter gifts, at least, of wit and fancy; and we can scarcely accept the Catholic disabilities and the wrongs of Ireland as enough to account

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for her silence in the world. No country could be more bound in chains of iron, in political repression and corruption, than was Scotland in the end of last century. It is true that there was no dominant race holding the mastery, and that in religion the people had their own way; but they had no political power, nor freedom of self-government, and the nation was under the heel of an almost irresponsible minister, and an entirely dominant party. Yet Burns rose out of the homely fields when political freedom had no existence-and the vivacious army of the Critics at an after period burst forth from the very prison-house and coldest shade of social oppression. In Ireland a few songs and speeches, a little fiction, but even that not of the highest order, is all that we find to distinguish an age which, in both the other countries of the Union, was nothing less than a new birth. Miss Edgeworth and Thomas Moore, both of whom have already been individually treated, are the only names which we can pick out to take their place in the lists of those which are really of national importance; and the latter we feel can only be admitted on sufferance to any such classification. He is a poor creature to stand against Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley-or even against Burns and Scott, who represent the smaller of the partners in the Union; but, such as he is, he is the best that Ireland has done.

It is true that Sheridan, then just waning, had been in his day one of the most brilliant figures in society, and in the lighter sphere of literary composition; but in a national point of view there was no meaning in him, any more than there was any promise of a new literary era in the fine comedies which are his only real standing ground in literature, and which belonged entirely, in spirit and scenery and sentiment, to the eighteenth century. It is scarcely possible indeed, even though Sheridan's bril

liant wit and disorderly ways were a sort of impersonation of the conventional character of the Irishman, to record him as Irish at all, save by birth. He was educated at Harrow, and was nominally a member of one of the Inns of Court. The society, of which he was so remarkable a figure, was in London, not Dublin. His romance of early love was enacted in Bath. His great triumphs as an orator were in the British Parliament, and not even upon subjects in any way connected with Ireland. The younger but much less important orator and playwriter, Richard Lalor Sheil, was a better representative of his country. But his plays are of little or no importance, and he was absorbed in his mature days by parliamentary life, in which he never made so brilliant a figure as Sheridan. This, indeed, is the sphere in which the Irishmen have showed best, and it is a pity that we cannot find justification enough in his political pamphlets to take in the grandiose, if never entirely grand, figure of Daniel O'Connell, the great Liberator, the leader of his people, one of the best and most satisfactory embodiments of his race. The very limited niche which is all we could give him in literary history would afford no fit pedestal for a personage so important in the history of his country. Who can doubt that he had his faults? That shade of unreality which belongs to a character so expansive, so eager for popular approbation, born to please as well as born to sway, and the inextinguishable twinkle in the eye of a man who was never quite unconscious of his own art— the "blarney" supposed to be native to his race, the toopersuasive eloquence, the touch of humbug in his utmost sincerity-sadly detract from his greatness. But when all is said that can be said, there are few manly critics or generous lookers-on who would not compound for still more impefections could Ireland and we have back the Liberator with all his native bigness and large and genial

life. The contrast between O'Connell, born under circumstances which would have indeed excused any degree of national rancour and bitterness, yet so full, even in hottest fight, of the happy humour, the instinctive friendliness, and easy sentiment, which were once supposed habitual to his race, and the bitter theorists and revolutionaries produced by a later generation and in an age entirely awakened to, and eagerly trying to remedy, everything like injustice to Ireland, is extraordinary. Surely, in the meantime, that happy humour and engaging eloquence, the wit, the fancy, the diffusion of a kind of genial genius over the face of the country, which we once cordially believed in, as characteristic of Ireland, must have died away. Perhaps, indeed, O'Connell, among his other influences, possessed the power of making us take for granted the fine faculties of his countrymen, and thus was not only the glory but the glorifier of his race.

To descend, however, from this great representative of the nation, who stands, like one of her unique towers, in the midst of her, with no fit competitor near him, and whom, unfortunately, we have little pretence for introducing, we are obliged to descend into the ordinary strain of literature, making a great step downward from Sheridan to his namesake James Sheridan Knowles, a playwright of considerable pretensions and some skill, though little geuius, whose plays had an enormous popularity, some of them still, in a certain degree, holding the stage. The tragedy of Virginius and the picturesque Hunchback are still among those which managers occasionally resort to, to give a prick of new sensation to jaded playgoers. There was some link of relationship, whence the name, between the more famous Sheridan and Knowles, who, however, was of a humbler strain of life-the son of a schoolmaster, and for some time exercising the same profession. "Knowles is a delightful fellow, and a man of true