Another moment and he has done. "Father and son," says MacWilliam, [{473}] "hang them high!" and old Lynott they hanged forthwith; but young Lynott had eloped with MacWilliam's daughter to Scotland, and there changed his name to Edmund Lindsay. The judgment of the short eric was, however, held good; and the Burkes rode rough-shod over the Barretts, until, as Mr. Ferguson, almost verbally versifying the Chronicle of Duald Mac Firbis, says:
Till the Saxon Oliver Cromwell,
And his valiant Bible-guided
Free heretics of Clan London
Coming in, in their succession,
Rooted out both Burke and Barrett;
a process of eviction which Mr. Ferguson, not merely for the sake of poetical justice, but out of the invincible ignorance of pure puritanical Protestantism, appears on the whole very highly to approve.
This ballad is indeed unique in its order: no Irish ballad approaches its wild sublimity and the thoroughness of detail with which it is conceived and executed. The only Irish narrative ballad which can bear a general comparison with it is Mr. Florence MacCarthy's "Foray of Con O'Donnell," a poem as perfect in its historical reality, in the aptness of all its figures, illustrations, and feats of phrase to a purely Celtic ideal, and which even surpasses "The Welshmen" in a certain easy and lissome grace of melody, that falls on the ear like the delicately drawn notes of Carolan's music. But this grace is disdained by the grim and compressed character which animates every line of Mr. Ferguson's ballad. His other works, fine of fancy and ripe of phrase as they are, fall far below it, "The Tain-Quest" does not on the whole enthral the reader, or magnetize the memory. "The Healing of Conall Carnach," and "The Burial of King Cormac" are poems that will hold their place in many future Books of Irish Ballads; they are unusually spirited versifications of passages from the more heroic period of early Irish history; but excepting occasional lines, they only appear to be the versifications of already written legends. The ballad of Grace O'Malley, commonly called Grana Uaile, may be advantageously contrasted with these, and it contains some verses of singular power—as, for example, where the poet denies the imputation of piracy against this lady who loved to roam the high seas under her own commission—
But no: 'twas not for sordid spoil
Of barque or sea-board borough,
She plough'd with unfatiguing toil
The fluent-rolling furrow;
Delighting on the broad-back'd deep
To feel the quivering galley and sweep
Strain up the opposing hill, and sweep
Down the withdrawing valley.
"Aideen's Grave" is a poem of a different kind, full of an exquisite melancholy grace; and where Ossian is supposed to apostrophise his future imitator, it is as if he thought after the manner of the Fenians, but was withal master of every symphony of the English tongue:
Imperfect in an alien speech
When wandering here some child of chance,
Through pangs of keen delight shall reach.
The gift of utterance,—
To speak the air, the sky to speak,
The freshness of the hill to tell,
Who roaming bare Ben Edar's peak,
And Aideen's briery dell,
And gazing on the Cromlech vast,
And on the mountain and the sea,
Shall catch communion with the past,
And mix himself with me.
There are lines in this poem that a little remind us of Gray, as—
At Gavra, when by Oscar's side
She rode the ridge of war;
and again in the "Farewell to Deirdre" there is something in the cast and rhythm of the poem, rather than in any individual word or line, that recalls Scott's "Farewell to North Maven." But to say so is not to hit blots. Mr. Ferguson's is beyond question the most thoroughly original vein of poetry that any Irish bard of late days has wrought out; and in laying down this volume we can only regret that the specimens he has thought worthy of collection are so few in comparison not merely with what he might have done, but with what he actually has done. For [{474}] this modesty, let us hope that the prompt penance of a second and enlarged edition may atone.