Above : Hedge School

The desolating peace of the Penal times was a more sinister peril to Irish literature than had been any of the devastating wars of invasion or spoliation that had plagued the country. Legislation which struck directly at mind and character was more deadly than the sword. With education denied to an entire people, and teaching made a criminal offence, there seemed to be little hope of literary activity. The great mass of the people belonged to the proscribed faith, and they were also Gaelic speakers so that their language was penalised equally with their religion. Some of the well-to-do Catholics were able to send their sons to Douai and St. Omer and other centres on the Continent in defiance of the laws. But most of the people had to depend upon the learning they could obtain in the ” hedge-schools.” These seats of study, conducted—also in defiance of the law—by teachers with a price upon their heads, were the surviving representatives of the great scholastic establishments of earlier times. There were maintained to some extent the traditions of classical learning, and there also, and there alone, were cultivated the language and literature, the history and legends of the Gaelic race. In these illegal academies the peasantry got all that was left of native culture, while their more prosperous and leisured neighbours came back from their foreign schools with a foreign education.

Yet the literary instinct which had flourished during wars of conquest and extermination also asserted itself amidst the blighting horrors of persecution. Of literature of a serious description there was indeed but little. Strangely enough, the creative genius of the down-trodden and almost hopeless people burst forth in song. ” The Irish, deprived by the Penal laws of all possibility of bettering their condition, or of educating themselves, could do nothing but sing, which they did in every county of Ireland, with all the sweetness of the dying swan ” • A great deal of the works of these numerous poets has been lost. Deprived of the advantages of the printing press, their poems were • Dr. Douglas Hyds, ” Literary History of Inland.” preserved only in the tenacious memories of the peasantry, or in manuscripts copied in humble cottages by loving hands. But many have been retained, and in recent years some of them have been published.