Their ancestors were driven out of Ireland before; and
they were glad when they saw those that had put them out put out
themselves, and every one of them skivered.'
And another old man said: 'When I was a young chap knocking about in
Connemara, I often heard songs about the Stuarts, and talk of them and
of the blackbird coming over the water. But they found it hard to get
over James making off after the Battle of the Boyne.' And another says
of James: 'They liked him well before he ran; they didn't like him after
that.'
And when I looked through the lately gathered bundle of songs again, and
through some old collections of Jacobite songs in Irish, I found they
almost all belonged to Munster. And if they are still sung there, it is
not, I think, for the sake of the kings, but for the sake of the poets
who made them--Red-haired Owen O'Sullivan, potato-digger, harvestman,
hedge-schoolmaster, whose poems are still the joy of the Munster people;
O'Rahilly, more learned, and as boundlessly redundant; O'Donnell, whose
heart was set on translating Homer into Irish; O'Heffernan, the blind
wanderer; and many others. For the Munstermen have always been more
'prone to versify' than their leaner neighbours on the bogs and stones
of Connaught.
There is a common formula for most of these songs or 'Visions,'
_Aislinghe_, as they are called. Just as artists of to-day find no
monotony in drawing Ireland over and over again with her harp, her
wolf-dog, and her round tower, so the Munster poets found no monotony in
representing her as a beautiful woman, white-skinned, with curling hair,
with cheeks in which 'the lily and the rose were fighting for mastery.
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