France in the days of Madame de Maintenon, and Ireland during Williamite wars. B. of the Boyne described. Juvenile.
POLSON, Thomas R. J.
⸺ THE FORTUNE TELLER’S INTRIGUE. Three Vols. (Dublin: McGlashan). 1847.
“Or, Life in Ireland before the Union, a tale of agrarian outrage.” An unusually objectionable and absurd libel on the priests and people of Ireland. The latter are represented as slavishly submissive to the former, who are spoken of as “walking divinities.” The priests attend their dupes at their execution for agrarian crimes, telling them that they are martyrs for the faith. The scene is Co. Clare.
The Author, an Englishman, and originally a private soldier, owned and edited the Fermanagh Mail for about forty years.
PORTER, Anna Maria. Born, 1780, in Durham. Died 1832. Was daughter of a surgeon of the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons, of Ulster extraction, and a sister of Jane Porter, author of The Scottish Chiefs, &c. She published more than nineteen books.
⸺ HONOR O’HARA. Three Vols. (Longmans). [1826]. American ed., Harper, 1827. Two Vols.
The scene is laid in the N. of England, and the book has no relation to Ireland except that the heroine is supposed to be of Irish origin.
⸺ THE LAKE OF KILLARNEY. Pp. 350. (London). New ed., 1839.
Described by the Author as “a harmless romance, which, without aiming to inculcate any great moral lesson, still endeavours to draw amiable portraits of virtue.”—(Pref.). An old-fashioned novel in the early Victorian sentimental manner. The plot is laid chiefly in Killarney (of which there is some description) and Dublin, at the time of the earlier Napoleonic wars, when Dublin had its parliament and was the centre of fashion. The plot is intricate, but turns chiefly on the mischances and misunderstandings that keep apart the hero, Felix Charlemont, and the heroine, Rose de Blaquière. This latter name was the title of later editions of this book, e.g. (London: C. H. Clare), 1856.