rise.

But Ireland supplied no further inspiration.

The various plantations of the seventeenth century produced an
Anglo-Irish stock which soon asserted itself in literature. As a
typical example, we may take the author of _The Vicar of Wakefield_.
At his first school at Lissoy, Oliver Goldsmith came under Thomas
Byrne, a regular shanachie, possessed of all the traditional lore,
with a remarkable gift for versifying. It was under this man that the
boy made his first attempts at verse, and his memory is celebrated in
_The Deserted Village_:

There, in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule,
The village master taught his little school.
A man severe he was, and stern to view.

Unfortunately Goldsmith was removed to Elphin at the age of nine, and
although he retained an affection for Irish music all his life, his
intimate connection with Irish Ireland apparently ceased at this
point. "Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain" is doubtless
full of reminiscences of the poet's early years in Westmeath, but the
sentiments, the rhythm, and the language are entirely cast in an
English mould. We may mention, in passing, that it has been suggested
that Swift derived the idea of the kingdom of Lilliput from the Irish
story of the Adventures of Fergus macLeide amongst the leprechauns.
All that can be said is that this derivation is not impossible,
though the fact that the tale is preserved only in a single
manuscript rather points to the conclusion that the story did not
enjoy great popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

We have seen that Goldsmith was removed from an Irish atmosphere at a
tender age, and this is not the only instance of the frowning of
fortune upon the native literature. When the fame of the ancient
bards of the Gael was noised from end to end of Europe, it was
through the medium of Macpherson's forgeries. _Fingal_ caught the
fleeting fancy of the moment in a manner never achieved by the true
Ossianic lays of Ireland. The _Reliques of Irish Poetry_, published
by Miss Brooke by subscription in Dublin in 1789 to vindicate the
antiquity of the literature of Erin, never went into a second
edition. And although some of the pieces contained in that volume
have been reprinted in such undertakings of a learned character as
the volumes of the Dublin Ossianic Society, J.F. Campbell's _Leabhar
na Feinne_, and Cameron's _Reliquiae Celticae_, they have aroused
little interest amongst t