It is, therefore, to supply a popular want that these sketches and poems have been collected from the pages of the Celtic Magazine, in which they first appeared under the title they still retain. The portrait of Richard D'Alton Williams which appears in this work is the only one ever published of that graceful and gifted writer. The miniature ivory portrait, of which our frontispiece is a faithful copy, was made when "Shamrock" had the honor of being a political prisoner, in Newgate, on account of his participation in the 'Forty-Eight movement. This is the first and only one ever taken of him. As the reader will readily observe, he was sketched in prison garb. His sole surviving son, Mr. Dalton Williams of New Orleans, was good enough to have a copy made specially for IRISH POETS AND NOVELISTS— a favor which is highly appreciated. The portrait of that sweet charmer of the lyre, James Joseph Callanan, so far as can be learned, has never before appeared in print. The one that accompanies his life-sketch in the present work is supposed to have been taken in his native city before he left forever the land of his love. Here also the reader will find, for the first time in extenso, a memoir of that genuine poet and patriotic Irishman, Bartholomew Dowling, who has done good work in the domain of Irish literature. Like most men of genius he was modest, and wrote seemingly without any intention of leaving his work behind him in a collective form. The disjecta membra poetae have, however, been gathered together in this volume. The consciousness of having assisted in rescuing the poems of this excellent author from the brink of oblivion more than compensates for the labor expended on the entire book. It may be objected that we have omitted many of Ireland's best poetical writers here. Very true; the author of the Irish Melodies is not mentioned; nor are many others of greater note than some of those represented, because we seek not so much to increase the fame of well-known poets as to popularize those comparatively unknown, but whose works, nevertheless, entitle them to our gratitude and admiration. THE EDITOR. INTRODUCTION. T HE ruthless efforts of the British Government to degrade and stifle the mental energies of the Irish people are little known to the great mass of their descendants in these later days of intellectual freedom. Occasional mention is made of the atrocious Penal Code, which, even as recently as the beginning of the present century, was enforced by those of whom the immortal Davis wrote: They bribed the flock, they bribed the son, To sell the priest and rob the sire; Their dogs were taught alike to run But how few, even amongst the friends of the Irish cause, are intimately familiar with the text and the means employed for the execution of those monstrous enactments against the acquirement and dissemination of human knowledge! The question involves one of the darkest pages of history and possesses a deep import for all who belong either closely or remotely to that widelyscattered but ambitious and hopeful part of the world's population known as the Irish Nation. The Goths and Vandals, sweeping down from the shores of the Baltic and razing to the earth the temples of art and science, were less malignant in their purpose than the statesmen who framed those statutes for the suppression of education in Ireland. The former, rude and barbarous, destroyed the fountain of knowledge but spared the stream that supplied it, whilst the latter, with ripe experience in the ways of civilization, not only shattered the receptacle but also penetrated to the depths in order to obstruct the current upon which a nation depended for intellectual existence. All the furies of a merciless tyranny were directed against the schoolmasters of Ireland by a monarchy which boasted of its own wealth of learning and the liberality of its patronage of art and literature. It was not the semi-barbarous Goth but the civilized Anglo-Norman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that proved the greatest scourge of knowledge in Ireland. It was not the wild tribesmen from the mountains of Northern Europe, but the titled courtiers and mail-clad warriors from the land of Shakespeare, of Bacon, of Macauley and of Locke, that rifled the archives of the Irish monasteries and wantonly destroyed the ancient treasures of a nation of scholars. The spectacle of a people made helplessly illiterate by process of law should excite resentment in the mind of every lover of justice. It should also stand as a barrier for the protection of their descendants, so frequently subjected to humiliation and reproach by those who are either ignorant of or otherwise blindly prejudiced to the facts of history. During recent generations the people of Ireland, both at home and abroad, were but too often com |