SOURCE: "Book the Sixth: The Story-Teller," in Poor Scholar: A Study of the Works and Days of William Carleton (1794-1869), Sheed and Ward, 1948, pp. 177-95.

In the following essay, Kiely assesses William Carleton's place in Irish literary history and explores how Carleton turned away from topics pertinent to the Irish peasantry in the writing of his later years.

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He is among the greatest, possibly the greatest writer of fiction that Ireland has given to the English language. He wrote good stories and he wrote very inferior stories; he wrote well and he wrote at times with an excruciating badness; he wrote always with a certain spontaneous outpouring of things seen and heard and vividly remembered, with little evidence that he had ever given more than a moment of his mind to models or forms or the practices of other writers. He would have gladly thought that he...