Charles Teeling, with a delicate reticence which is characteristic, has merely hinted at his own romance, and said nothing of his brother’s. The object of Charles’s devotion was Miss Catherine Carolan, daughter of Dr. James Carolan, of Carrickmacross. The glimpses we get of the Carolans are interesting, and make us long to know more of them. The celebrated harper, Arthur O’Neill, tells us of a visit he paid to Dr. Carolan’s hospitable house in Carrickmacross, when he was on his bardic rounds; and Mr. Denis Carolan Rushe, the doctor’s descendant, has in his possession a copy of a religious rule of life, drawn up for her own observance by another daughter of the Doctor’s, a sister of Catherine’s. These two facts indicate a household where all the best characteristics of true Irish Catholic gentlefolk—their hospitality, their love for, and generous patronage of art, their deep sense of religion—were carefully cultivated.
Of Bartle Teeling’s devotion to Lady Lucy Fitzgerald, and of the ring she gave him, we have already spoken elsewhere.
Mary Anne McCracken’s unreturned love for Thomas Russell is among the most pathetic romances of ’Ninety-Eight. He may have loved another better; but it is her name we join with his, when we stand in Downpatrick, beside the tomb she made for him; and perhaps it is because her love has written itself in them that the words she has chosen for the inscription move us so strangely, in their austere simplicity:
“The Grave of Russell.”
SOME OBSCURE HEROINES OF ’NINETY-EIGHT
Some Obscure Heroines of ’Ninety-Eight
“All Ulster over, the weemen cried
For the stanin’ crops in the lan’.