The young Nugents, two boys and a girl, go to visit their Aunt in her tumbledown old family place near Cork. The children get into touch with the fairies, and as a result family papers are recovered and fortune smiles once more on the Nugents.
[14] i.e., Fairies.
“TRAVERS, Coragh,” [see CRAWFORD, Mary S.]
TRENCH, W. Stewart. 1808-1872. Was land agent in Ireland to the Marquess of Lansdowne, the Marquess of Bath, and Lord Digby. Owing to his very admirable character he came to be respected by the people. His opinion of Irish character was very high. His views will be found set forth more fully in his Realities of Irish Life.
⸺ IERNE. (Longmans). Two Vols. 1871.
“A study of agrarian crime ... in which the Author used material collected for a history of Ireland, which he refrained from publishing owing to the feeling occasioned by the controversy over the Irish Land Bill. He endeavours ... to show the causes of the obstinate resistance by the Irish to measures undertaken for their benefit, and to show the method of cure.”—(Baker).
TROLLOPE, Anthony. 1815-1882. Lived in Ireland, 1841-1859, at Banagher and at Clonmel. Finished in Ireland his first two novels, The MacDermotts (1844), and The Kellys and O’Kellys (1848), both failures with the public. He claims to have known the people, and was sympathetic but anti-nationalist. It would be out of place here to dwell on the place in English literature of the Author of Barchester Towers and The Warden and Orley Farm, and the rest. An admirable contemporary article on his novels will be found in Dublin Review, 1872, Vol. 71, p. 393. The following deserves quotation: “This Englishman, keenly observant, painstaking, absolutely sincere and unprejudiced, with a lynx-like clearness of vision, and a power of literal reproduction of which his clerical and domestic novels, remarkable as they exhibit it, do not furnish such striking examples, writes a story as true to the saddest and heaviest truths of Irish life, as racy of the soil, as rich with the peculiar humour, the moral features, the social oddities, the subtle individuality of the far west of Ireland as George Eliot’s novels are true to the truths of English life.”
⸺ THE MACDERMOTTS OF BALLYCLORAN. (Lane). 1s. [1844]. 1909.
Scene: Co. Leitrim. Chief characters: the members of a broken-down Catholic county family. Miss MacDermott is engaged to a Sub-Inspector of police. This latter, because of certain difficulties that stand in the way of their marriage, attempts to elope with her. Her brother comes on the scene, and there is an affray, in which the Sub-Inspector is killed. Young MacDermott is tried and publicly hanged. This is the mere outline. More interesting is the background of Irish rural life, seen in its comic and quaint aspect, by an observant and not wholly unsympathetic Englishman. The portrait of the grand old Father John M’Grath is most life-like and engaging, but the pictures of low life in the village and among the illicit stills is vulgar in tone and the humour somewhat coarse. The book is spoken of by a competent critic, Sir G. O. Trevelyan, as in some respects the Author’s best. The Author himself considers this his best plot. It has been spoken of as “one of the most melancholy books ever written.”