tradition of Irish popular
poetry, sometimes with a real gift. For good or for bad they were
persons of character and of talent, and the last of them is alive,
though he keeps school no longer. He taught boys who had learnt the
rudiments at the ordinary national school, and who wished to carry on
their studies with a view either to the priesthood or to medicine. He
was paid only by the fees of his scholars, who were either the sons of
farmers about him, or of men living at a distance, who sent their
children to be part of the family in some farm where they had kinship or
acquaintance. Thus existence for these scholars was divided between the
home life of a farm and the hours of school. There was, however, a small
element of what in Ireland were called "poor scholars"--boys from the
less prosperous North and West, who came (sometimes walking the whole
journey) to get learning gratis. To them teaching was never refused, and
their board was provided by the farmers, who "would be snatching them
from one and other," since they assisted the other children in preparing
tasks.

Now, in the school which my friend has described to me, there was no
formal teaching of anything but the prescribed subjects. But literature
would be lying about--Haverty's _History of Ireland_, and the
Nationalist papers of the day--and the teacher was there always ready to
expound and answer questions. Himself a fighting politician (a member of
the Fenian organisation, whose name is still sacred throughout Ireland),
he was careful never to draw in or compromise his pupils; but to teach
them the story of their country and discuss it with them was part of his
natural occupation. He taught Irish also, the tongue readiest to him,
for he held that Irishmen should know their own language; but the
essential business of his school was teaching the simple old-fashioned
curriculum, Latin, mathematics, and some Greek. Yet because he was a man
who loved and valued knowledge for its own sake, and loved and valued
literature, it is probable that he gave a more real training to the mind
than is achieved by the most modern system of hand and eye culture and
the rest of it. He taught neither religion nor morals, but his teaching
assumed throughout, what his example showed, that a man should be true
and thorough in what he professed to believe, and should be ready at all
times to make sacrifices for principle. Such a school had the only moral
influence which in Ireland