'There is many a fine man at this time sentenced, from Cork to
Ennis and the town of Roscrea, and fair-haired boys wandering and
departing from the streets of Kilkenny to Bantry Bay. But the cards
will turn, and we'll have a good hand: the trump shall stand on the
board we play at.... Let ye have courage. It is a fine story I
have. Ye shall gain the day in every quarter from the Sassanach.
Strike ye the board, and the cards will be coming to you. Drink out
of hand now a health to Raftery: it is he would put success for you
on the _Cuis da ple_.'

This is part of another song:--

'I have a hope in Christ that a gap will be opened again for us....
The day is not far off, the Gall will be stretched without anyone
to cry after them; but with us there will be a bonfire lighted up
on high.... The music of the world entirely, and Orpheus playing
along with it. I'd sooner than all that, the Sassanach to be cut
down.'

But with all this, he had plenty of common sense, and an old man at
Ballylee tells me:--'One time there were a sort of
nightwalkers--Moonlighters as we'd call them now, Ribbonmen they were
then--making some plan against the Government; and they asked Raftery to
come to their meeting. And he went; but what he said was this, in a
verse, that they should look at the English Government, and think of all
the soldiers it had, and all the police--no, there were no police in
those days, but gaugers and such like--and they should think how full up
England was of guns and arms, so that it could put down Buonaparty; and
that it had conquered Spain, and took Gibraltar from it; and the same in
America, fighting for twenty-one years. And he asked them what they had
to fight with against all those guns and arms?--nothing but a stump of a
stick that they might cut down below in the wood. So he bid them give up
their nightwalking, and come out and agitate in the daylight.'

I have been told--but I do not know if it is true--that he was once sent
to Galway Gaol for three months for a song he made against the
Protestant Church, 'saying it was like a wall slipping, where it wasn't
built solid.'

III.

When at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the poets O'Lewy and
O'Clery and their supporters held a 'Contention,' the results were
written down in a volume containing 7,000 lines. I think the greater
number of the 'Contentions' between Raftery