The Literature of King's County

THE IRISH MONTHLY
July 1904

By Matthew Russell, S.J.

In the Christmastide of 1903 appeared for the first time Ard na h-Eireann: An Irish Ireland Magazine, under the auspices of the St. Columkille Branch of the Gaelic League at Tullamore. As the term "magazine" seems to be applied chiefly to monthly publications, and as the new venture was intended to come, like Christmas itself, once a year only, a more accurate title, though less patriotic and less picturesque, would have been "The Tullamore Annual." However, whatever may be said about the name, there is no doubt about excellence of the Annual itself. It's patrons would have been very unreasonable if they had not been fully satisfied with the fare provided for their first banquet of local literature.

Local literature, indeed, is the special subject of the three of four pages that we are going now to detach from Ard na h-Eireann. In doing so we shall not scruple to interpolate some additional matter here and there, having the same rights over the paper in question as a cow has to her calf - tanquam quid notum propriumque, according to Celsus, as Thomas Moore quotes him in one of his witty notes.

There is such a thing, and it is very desirable that there should be such a thing, as local patriotism. Tennyson, in the last poetical of his songs, "Hands All Round,"says that:

That man's the best Cosmopolite
Who loves his native country best.

And in the same way they love their native country best who love their native country, their native parish, their native village, their native homestead. Our small hearts are not capable of unlimited love and sympathy and interest; and we are allowed to feel special interest in the persons and things that we are closely connected with. And so our patriotism may lawfully be localized, prompting us to feel a keen interest in what concerns the town or the rural district with which we are linked by birth of residence.

In a volume, there fore issuing from the capital of King's County it is not out of place to ask what country has done for English literature; for, alas!, the present writer is not competent to enquire what King's County men have written in Irish. It would be ungrateful, and, indeed, dishonest, not to acknowledge from the first that many of the dates that will be given in the following enumeration of King's County litterateurs are taken from Mr. David J. O'Donoghue's Poets of Ireland, a work of extraordinary research of a very minute and painstaking kind.

One of the greatest King's County literary names will come as a surprise on some of our readers. Kenelm Henry Digby, author of Mores Catholici; or Ages of Faith, was born at Geashill in the year 1800. He is not claimed or recognized as an Irishman as proudly and emphatically as he ought to be. He is not included in Mr. Alfred Webb's Compendium of Irish Biography - that admirable work which we can lose no opportunity of commending as one of the most valulable and most interesting Irish books that the nineteenth century has bequeathed to the twentieth. No doubt Kenelm Digby's education and literary work lay outside of Ireland; but he was born he was in King's County, and his family had been planted long enough in Ireland to have given a Bishop of Dromore to the English ecclesiastical garrison. His father was an officer in that same garrison: this great catholic writer was the youngest son of the Very Rev William Digby, Dean of Clonfert, who, in naming him after a famous knight of the time of Charles I. and Cromwell, had little notion that his Kenelm too, like Sir Kenelm Digby, would become a fervent convert to the Catholic faith. He was sent at a very early age to Trinity College, and tool his B.A. degree in 1823. Already, the year before, he had published The Broad stone of Honour, a work of immense research and enthusiasm on the origin, spirit, and institutions of Christian Chivalry. Wordsworth dedicated a poem to him" as an acknowledgement, however unworthy, of pleasure and instruction derived from his numerous and valuable writings illustrate of the piety and chivalry of the olden times." About this time Digby became a Catholic, and as early as the year 1831, long before the Oxford movement towards Rome, appeared the first volume of his greatest work, Mores Catholici; or Ages of Faith. He published fourteen other works, full of multifarious learning and quotations drawn from various literatures. His wife was Miss Dillon, aunt of Sir Christopher Dillon Bellew, Bart., who gave up his position and entered the Society of Jesus,as did also the second brother, Father Michael Bellow, S.J. Kenelm Digby died on the 22nd of March, 1880.

"Sterling Coyne" is very like a punning pseudonym, but it is the real name of the very clever man. Joseph Sterling Coyne was born at Birr, King's County, in the year 1803 - the same year as Gerald Griffin, John Henry Newman, James Clarence Mangan, and (on the other side of the Atlantic) Orestes Augustus Brownson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Coyne was the son of an officer in the Irish Commissariat. He was intended for the Bar but preferred a literary life. He was the author of half a dozen successful comedies which are still to be had in Lac's acting edition of plays. Mr. O'Donoghue says he was responsible for several hundred dramatic pieces, some of them adapted from French or German. He also wrote in Bentley's Miscellany, and was one of the original writers of Punch. He died in London, July 18th, 1868.

Another King's County man was John Boyle, who was born in 1822, went to the United States in 1842, and died in New York, January 27th, 1885. He published, in 1876, The Battlefields of Ireland, and he contributed many poems to The Nation and the Boston Pilot.

Another of The Nation poets, born in King's County in 1809 - the annus mirabilis, which was the birth-year of Gladstone, Tennyson, and other men - was John Frazer, who generally signed his verses "J. de Jean". He was a cabinetmaker, and some of his poems are very beautiful. Indeed Mr. Martin Mac Dermott, who has himself given us many exquisite poems, says in his Songs and Ballads of Young Ireland that, "except one or two, there was no poet of finer or more distinctive qualities who wrote for The Nation". He adds: "Originally an Orangeman and a Presbyerian, he became passionately imbued with an enthusiasm for Ireland's nationality, and eventually embrace the religion as well as the cause of the people," like a patriot of more prosaic type in later times, Joseph Gillis Biggar.

Henry Grattan Curran may be claimed for King's County, on the score of his having been Resident Magistrate at Birr. He wrote of the Forties, and many food translations from the Irish.

A much stronger claim may be put forward for the Rev. Joseph Fitzgerald. He was born at Tullamore in the year 1793, and received his first education in that town at a school conducted there by his father. His ecclesiastical studies he went through at Navan and Maynooth. He was ordained in 1820. He was transferred from the parish of Delvin to that of Rahan in November, 1847, where Father John Colgan had just been carried off by the fever that then raged in the country. Father Fitzgerald was probably the first priest to become a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was a graceful writer of prose and verse. Beside many poems in The Nation and in the excellent but short-lived Irish Catholic Magazine, which James Duffy published, Father Fitzgerald was the author of Sacred Melodies and of a long poem on the Pleasures of Piety probably modelled on Cambell's Pleasures of Hope and Roger's Pleasures of Memory, which were very popular at that time. We are not sure that the Pleasure of Piety ever found a publisher. A poem with the same title was Published in 1824 by Eleanor Dickinson, an Irish Quaker. Father Joseph Fitzgerald died on the 18th February, 1856, in the sixty-third year of his age and the thirty-sixth of his priesthood.

Since we have included H. G. Curran as a King's County R. M., and Father Fitzgerald as the pastor of a King's County parish, may we claim Mr. T. D. Sullivan as the occupant of a King's County jail?. He has himself linked his imprisonment with our local literature by his Prison Poems and Lays of Tullamore, published in the year 1888. Much more decisive is the of Mr. Edward Egan to be mentioned in the present context, for not only was he born in the King's County, August 9th, 1858, but he expressly calls his collection of verses King's County Couplets, and they were published at Birr in 1892. Another local publication was John Murdock's Joy Hours or, Essays Poems, and Lyrics, published at Portarlington, where the poet was at the time a telegraph clerk, according to the omniscient writer whose authority we have so frequently invoked.

James Lynam Molloy, one of the most popular song writers and composers of the day (or of yesterday), is the son of Dr. J.K.Molloy, of Cornalure, King's County, and was born there in 1837. The songs that Mr. O'Donoghue mentions are "The Kerry Dance," "Darby and Joan," "Just a Song at Twilight," and "Bantry Bay." He was called to the English Bar in 1872, but does not practice. Perhaps his songs scared away the briefs. "My lady Common Law loveth to lie alone".

Mary C.F. Monck was the eldest daughter of Richard Monck, of Banagher, King's County and was born there in 1835. She married Mr. Alfred Munster, Danish Consul for Ireland, in 1858, and lived at Holywood, near Belfast, till her death, January 19th, 1892. Her poems were published in magazines of such standing as the Dublin University Magazine (1855-1858), Chamber's Journal, All the year Round, and Bentley's Miscellany. John Tarpey Kelly was born at Clonmacnoise, King's County, February 24, 1864, and lived near Birr for many years. As an official of the Post Office he resided for many years in London after 1882, where he took an active part in establishing the Southwark Irish Literary Club. He was a vigorous and frequent contributor of poetry to The nation, and other Dublin journals; and he showed great earnestness and perseverance in publishing a collection of poems of John Francis O'Donnell, after the death of that gifted Limerick man. Mr Kelly died prematurely in Dublin three years ago, to the great regret of his many friends.

When this Catalogue raisonne of king's County literary worthies was published at Tullamore, it strangely omitted a local magnate, the County Court Judge William O'Connor Morris, of Gurtnamona, Tullamore. Though officially a man of peace, war in his chief element in literature. He is the author of many volumes - Great Commanders of Modern Times, Moltke, Hannibal, The Campaign of 1815, etc. He is an indefatigable contributor to the magazines and reviews; and, indeed, our own pages have been dignified by one of his learned papers - The O'Connors of Connaught, vol. 10 p. 480. He is by no means the only literary member of his family. His brother, Mr. Matthew O'Connor Morris, has published volume of hunting reminiscences; and his daughter, Miss O'Connor Morris, has published at least one novel,called we think, Killeen. In this department she was forestalled by her aunt, who contributed to our early volumes as Miss M. c. O'Connor Morris, but who had been transformed into Mrs. Bishop by the last of the sacraments when her name appeared as the biographer of Mrs.Caven, author of the Recit d'une Soeur. This book and, indeed all her writings, such as her Prisoners of the Temple in Father Coleridge's quarterly series, show that Mrs Bishop is a Catholic - her mother's faith, not her father's.

Charles Lever was connected with King's County through his brother, Rev. John Lever, Rector of Tullamore, who some pretended had a hand in his brother's work, just as people had said of Sir Walter Scott's brother.

Another brilliant novelist, J. Sheridan Lefanu, was associated with King's County. His family still own Silverbook, near Clara. Mrs B.M. Croker, the author of Diana Barrington, Pretty Miss Neville, and other successful novels, dealing principally with Indian military life, is connected with the county whose literary distinctions we are enumerating: for she is the daughter of the Rev. William Sheppard, Rector of Kilgiffin, and her uncle,Captain Sheppard, lives near Shinrone. Her aunt, daughter of Leonard Watson, of Warrenpoint, Co Down, is a convert to the Catholic Church.

Our catalogue of King's County litterati may close with the names of two distinguished men - T. W. Rolleston and Professor R.Y. Tyrell, though, indeed we perceive that Robert Yelverton Tyrell is said only to be the son of a King's County Rector he has a high reputation for his classical attainments; but he has recently had the misfortune to publish a sonnet which he must now himself condemn as very badly constructed, and much more deplorably conceived.

Finally, Thomas William Hayden Rolleston was born in 1857, near Shinrone, King's County, the youngest son of Charles Rolleston Spunner, Q.C., County Court Judge of Tipperary. He has lived much abroad, has helped to translate Walt Whiteman into German, has done a variety of good literary work, and has taken part in the Irish Literary Movement of recent years in London and Dublin.

It would be interesting to pit the literary claims of King's County against one other. On behalf of the latter we can, without any searching, remember at once "M.E. Francis", that is, Mrs. Francis Blundell, the author of a long series (happily not nearly finished) of delighted novels, which, though they run through The Times, or the Cornhill Magazine, and charm the novel-reading public, are yet innocent enough for a convent library. She and her sister - Mrs. Egerton Castle, author of many brilliantly successful novels, also, and Miss Elinor Sweetman, who has published two exquisite volumes of verse - were born at Lamberton Park, near Maryborough. The sister county can hardly match that triad of sisters; and certainly the Rev. Joseph Fitzgerald, whom we have included in our list, is left far behind by another Joseph - Father Joseph Farrell, who was born at Maryborough, July 31, 1841, and died at Monasterevin, March 24, 1885. His Lectures of a Certain Professor is the most eloquent collection of essays ever produced by an Irish priest, at least until the recent appearance of Cannon Sheehan's of Canon Sheehan's brilliant book, Under the Cedars and the Stars. Two boasts of the Queen's County are John Keegan, a true poet, and James Jeffrey Roche, another true poet - the present editor of the Boston Pilot, in which he succeeded a still finer poet, John Boyle O'Reilly.

At any rate, there are few countries in which a rural district like the King's County would be found to have produced such a crop of literary talent as is represented by the names that have here been strung together.

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