English As We Speak It in Ireland

by P. W. Joyce

The schools that arose in this manner, which were of different classes, were spread all over the country during the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. The most numerous were little elementary schools, which will be described farther on. The higher class of schools, which

answered to what we now call Intermediate schools, were found all over the southern half of Ireland, especially in Munster. Some were for classics, some for science, and not a few for both; nearly all conducted by men of learning and ability; and they were everywhere eagerly attended. 'Many of the students had professions in view, some intended for the priesthood, for which the classical schools afforded an admirable preparation; some seeking to become medical doctors, teachers, surveyors, &c. But a large proportion were the sons of farmers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, or others, who had no particular end in view, but, with the instincts of the days of old, studied classics or mathematics for the pure love of learning. I knew many of that class.

'These schools continued to exist down to our own time, till they were finally broken up by the famine of 1847. In my own immediate neighbourhood were some of them, in which I received a part of my early education; and I remember with pleasure several of my old teachers; rough and unpolished men many of them, but excellent solid scholars and full of enthusiasm for learning—which enthusiasm they communicated to their pupils. All the students were adults or grown boys; and there was no instruction in the elementary subjects—reading, writing, and arithmetic—as no scholar attended who had not sufficiently mastered these. Among the students were always half a dozen or more "poor scholars" from distant parts of Ireland, who lived free in the hospitable farmers' houses all round: just as the scholars from Britain and elsewhere

were supported in the time of Bede—twelve centuries before.'[^[5]]

In every town all over Munster there was—down to a period well within my memory—one of those schools, for either classics or science—and in most indeed there were two, one for each branch, besides one or more smaller schools for the elementary branches, taught by less distinguished men.

There was extraordinary intellectual activity among the schoolmasters of those times: some of them indeed thought and dreamed and talked of nothing else but learning; and if you met one of them and fell into conversation, he was sure to give you a strong dose as long as you listened, heedless as to whether you understood him or not. In their eyes learning was the main interest of the world. They often met on Saturdays; and on these occasions certain subjects were threshed out in discussion by the principal men. There were often formal disputations when two of the chief men of a district met, each attended by a number of his senior pupils, to discuss some knotty point in dispute, of classics, science, or grammar.

There was one subject that long divided the teachers of Limerick and Tipperary into two hostile camps of learning—the verb To be. There is a well-known rule of grammar that 'the verb to be takes the same case after it as goes before it.' One party headed by the two Dannahys, father and son, very scholarly men, of north Limerick, held that the verb

to be governed the case following; while the other, at the head of whom was Mr. Patrick Murray of Kilfinane in south Limerick, maintained that the correspondence of the two cases, after and before, was mere agreement, not government. And they argued with as much earnestness as the Continental Nominalists and Realists of an older time.

Sometimes the discussions on various points found their way into print, either in newspapers or in special broadsheets coarsely printed; and in these the mutual criticisms were by no means gentle.

There were poets too, who called in the aid of the muses to help their cause. One of these, who was only a schoolmaster in embryo—one of Dannahy's pupils—wrote a sort of pedagogic Dunciad, in which he impaled most of the prominent teachers of south Limerick who were followers of Murray. Here is how he deals with Mr. Murray himself:—