s, or kept in a madhouse until the day of
his death. He had been a student in Maynooth, where he became deranged,
and was, of course, sent home to his friends, with whom he recovered
sufficiently to become cruel and hypocritical, to an extent which I have
never yet seen equalled. Whenever the son of a rich man committed an
offence, he would grind his teeth and growl like a tiger, but in no
single instance had he the moral courage or sense of justice to correct
him. On the contrary, he uniformly "nursed his wrath to keep it warm,"
until the son of a poor man transgressed, and on his unfortunate body
he was sure to wreak signal vengeance for the stupidity or misconduct of
the wealthy blockhead. This was his system, and my readers may form some
opinion of the low ebb at which knowledge and moral feeling were at the
time, when I assure them, that not one of the humbler boys durst make a
complaint against the scoundrel at home, unless under the certainty of
being well flogged for their pains. A hedge-schoolmaster was then held
in such respect and veneration, that no matter how cruel or profligate
he might be, his person and character, unless in some extraordinary case
of cruelty, resulting in death or mutilation, were looked upon as free
from all moral or legal responsibility. This certainly was not the fault
of the people, but of those laws, which, by making education a crime,
generated ignorance, and then punished it for violating them.

For the present it is enough to say, that a most interesting child,
a niece of my own, lost her life by the severity of Pat Frayne, the
Connaught-man. In a fit of passion he caught the poor girl by the ear,
which he nearly plucked out of her head. The violence of the act broke
some of the internal muscles or tendons,--suppuration and subsequently
inflammation, first of the adjoining Parts and afterwards of the brain,
took place, and the fine intelligent little creature was laid in
a premature grave, because the ignorance of the people justified a
pedantic hedge-schoolmaster in the exercise of irresponsible cruelty.
Frayne was never prosecuted, neither was the classical despot, who by
the way sits for the picture of the fellow in whose school, and at whose
hands, the Poor Scholar receives the tyrannical and heartless treatment
mentioned in that tale. Many a time the cruelty exercised towards that
unhappy boy, whose name was Qum, has wrung my heart and brought the
involuntary tears to my eyes