Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/168

 CH. XI.] to be governed the case following; while the other, at the head of whom was Mr. Patrick Murray of Kilfinane in south Limerick, maintained that the correspondence of the two cases, after and before, was mere agreement, not government. And they argued with as much earnestness as the Continental Nominalists and Realists of an older time.

Sometimes the discussions on various points found their way into print, either in newspapers or in special broadsheets coarsely printed; and in these the mutual criticisms were by no means gentle.

There were poets too, who called in the aid of the muses to help their cause. One of these, who was only a schoolmaster in embryo—one of Dannahy's pupils—wrote a sort of pedagogic Dunciad, in which he impaled most of the prominent teachers of south Limerick who were followers of Murray. Here is how he deals with Mr. Murray himself:—

Lo, forward he comes, in oblivion long lain, Great Murray, the soul of the light-headed train; A punster, a mimic, a jibe, and a quiz, His acumen stamped on his all-knowing phiz: He declares that the subsequent noun should agree With the noun or the pronoun preceding To be.

Another teacher, from Mountrussell, was great in astronomy, and was continually holding forth on his favourite subject and his own knowledge of it. The poet makes him say:—

The course of a comet with ease I can trail, And with my ferula I measure his tail; On the wings of pure Science without a balloon Like Baron Munchausen I visit the moon; Along the ecliptic and great milky way, In mighty excursions I soaringly stray; With legs wide extended on the poles I can stand, And like marbles the planets I toss in my hand.