O! my dear, my fair-haired youth,
Thou yet hast hearts of fire and truth;
Then up with shout and out with blade,
We'll raise once more the white cockade.

Not many of the Jacobite song writers
are now known by name.  Among those
that are conspicuous, stands one
Andrew Magrath, generally known among
the peasants as "Manguire Sugach," or
"The Jolly Merchant."  He seems to have
been a drunken rover who was expelled
from the Roman Catholic priesthood, and
refused admittance to the Protestant
church, where he sought shelter.  The
disgraced man, a sort of tipsy genius,
eventually turned pedlar, in Limerick, and
produced a great many satirical, political,
and amatory poems.  His humour is
indisputable, his love poems are pure and
fervid.  His "Lament " at being neither
Protestant nor Papist, a mock serious
poem, is still a popular Irish street song.
His finest Jacobite verses perhaps are
contained in his Song of Freedom, and begin:

All woeful long, I wept despairing,
Sad hearted, fainting, wearied, weak,
The foeman's withering bondage wearing,
Hid in the gorge of the mountains bleak.
No friend to cheer my visions dreary,
Save generous Donn, the King of Faery,
Who mid the festal banquet airy,
Did strains prophetic to me speak.

This same Donn, king of the Munster
Fairies, who prophesied the victorious
return of the untoward Stuarts from France,
was originally, says Celtic legend, the son
of Milesius, a famous king of Spain, who,
when his kinsfolks invaded Ireland more
than a thousand years before the Christian
era, was cast away with all his ship's
company on the west coast of Munster.  He
now reigns (especially by moonlight) at
Knock-firinn: a haunted hill, in the county
Limerick, where he has been even seen
by belated persons drunk enough to see
him.  The Jolly Merchant's song, in the
second verse, contains an allusion to
Phelim, father of Con of the Hundred
Battles, who the most veracious Irish
historians have over and over again proved
to be son of Tuathal Teachtmar: a better
man than the spelling of his rough name
would seem to imply, who ruled in Ireland
circa 200 B.C. (Emperor Severus).
Another of these Jacobite minstrels (and the
writers of street songs are so seldom known
that it is interesting to trace the
patriarchs), was John M'Donnell, surnamed
Claragh, a native of Charleville, in the
county Cork.  He was the contemporary
of a celebrated Limerick poet, whisky-
drinker, and wit, John Toomey.  M'Donnell
began at least, even if he did not finish, a
History of Ireland, and had the intention
of translating the Iliad into Irish.  He
was a staunch Jacobite.  In his Vision, a
patriotic song, a beautiful Banshee (not
the weeping and wailing hag of modern
Irish legends), is supposed to lead him
through the fairy haunts of Ireland.  The
song ends with a dubious prophecy almost
worthy of the great Zadkiel, or a Derby
Day prophet:

"Say O say, thou being bright!
When shall the land from slavery waken,
When shall our hero claim his right
And tyrants' halls be terror shaken?"
She gives no sign —the form divine
Pass'd like the winds by fairies woken;
The future holds in Time's dark folds,
The despot's chain of bondage broken.

We beg to say we are indebted to Mr.
Walsh for the ingenious word "woken."
M'Donnell died in 1754, and his brother
poet, John Toomey, wrote his elegy.  Some
time after these men came Owen
O'Sullivan (Owen the Red), a native of Kerry.
This eccentric bard was a reaper, and in
the off season an itinerant hedge
schoolmaster, whose wandering disciples learnt
from him to translate Homer and Virgil
into Irish.  He is a favourite poet of the
Munster peasantry.  Like Burns, he loved
not wisely, but too well; like Burns, too, he
drank himself to death in his prime.
O'Sullivan's great drinking song begins
almost fiercely, and with the poet's usual
irrestrainable dythrambic vehemence:

This cup's flowing treasure
I toast to that treasure
The brave man whose pleasure
Is drinking rich wine.
Who deep flagons draining,
From quarrels abstaining,
The morn finds remaining,
All joyous, divine.
It ne'er shall be mine
To gather vile coin,
To fools at life's waning,
For age to resign.

Another of these celebrities was William
Heffernan (Blind William), of Shronehill,
in Tipperary: a rival of M'Donnell and
Toomey in the Bardic Sessions, or Eisteddfods,
of those days. This Heffernan was
only so far like Homer that he was literally
a blind beggar; yet his satires, elegies,
love songs, and odes are pronounced by
Irish scholars to be singularly refined,
tender, and sweet.  His Cliona of the
Rock, Mr. Hardiman says, "is heightened
with all the glow and warmth of the richest
Oriental colouring." Another popular song