Patrick O’Brien,
Richard O’Brien,
Daniel Shay,
John Shea,
John Walsh,
Joseph Walsh.
It is well to note that the English parliament of that day was looking keenly at the causes that cost England her mighty empire on this continent; and apparently they underrated the influence of Mr. Lodge’s Puritan in that struggle, and bitterly blamed the plain Irish without any Scotchery.
Mr. Lodge means well; but folklore and history are two distinct affairs.
The imaginative school of history finds its best exemplar in a gentleman from Tennessee, the home of the Cardiff giant, the Giascutus, and the Scotch-Irishman. He is known as Judge Temple, and has written a volume called Covenanter, Cavalier, Puritan,—a work which has shaken the earth and spoiled the apple crop. The Judge is original; he honors the Scotch-Irishman as he does all ghost dancers, but he has discovered that all the might of the republic sprang from the Covenanter. I know what a Covenanter used to be, but I can’t solve this covenanter of Judge Temple. I can explain him as he appears in this literary offspring of this intellectual Cardiff giant. If an Irishman a few years ago did anything extraordinary, wonderful, or notorious, he would have been a Scotch-Irishman; in the Temple history he is a Covenanter; if he breaks a bank, or a man’s head, or the Decalogue, he is merely an Irishman. Apply that rule to all men and you have history as it is hatched out in Tennessee. The Covenanter germ was born in Scotland and spread over America, creating miracles. As the natives of North Britain are not remarkable for national modesty and self-effacement, I am puzzled to learn how this conversion of the world to freedom and civilization has escaped the shrinking writers of Scotland. If Judge Temple is not restrained by an injunction at an early date, Professor Burgess and Senator Lodge will be compelled sorrowfully to march on Washington, there to deposit in the National Museum the Teutonic Genius and the Puritan Marvel; or they might be turned over to some of the Yellow Sundays which specialize the exploitation of freaks.
Meantime we should keep our eye on Judge Temple, the young Lochinvar of history, who has come out of the South.