I would broadly characterise as Fenian every Irish outbreak or ebullition in the nineteenth century up to the time of the baneful influence of the man who conducted the Midlothian campaign.

Half the tumultuous efforts of the earlier movements would have been rendered ridiculous had it been possible to have them contemporaneously examined by a few special correspondents.  I can imagine the representative of the Daily Mail finding material for very few sensational headlines in the Whiteboys Insurrection.

As for the tales of single-handed terrorism, these in Ireland did nursery duty to alarm imaginative children, just as the adventures of Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard or the kidnapping of heirs by gipsies serve as stories to thrill English little ones.

Of course in 1789 to have killed three Protestants was counted a passport into heaven in the vicinity of Vinegar Hill.  But Father Matthew’s temperance crusade was worth more salvation to the nation, and mere threatening letters count for nothing.  I have had over one hundred in my time, yet I’ll die in my bed for all that.

My father-in-law had a pretty solid contempt for the Whiteboys—­not the original breed, but those who assumed the title in Kerry early in the nineteenth century.

He was told that these miscreants had a plan to surround his house that night and to shoot everybody in it, and at that very moment they were confabulating at a certain farmhouse.

Refusing to be escorted or guarded, he made his way to that farm, and walking into the kitchen, rated the lot of them in unmeasured terms.

Cowed and abashed they listened to him as he threatened the law, hell, and the devil alone knows what beside.  Finally, pistol in hand, he bade them produce their arms and put them in his dog-cart.

This they actually did—­for they had imbibed no liquor to give them false pluck—­and, with a final curse, he whipped up his horse and drove away ‘with all their teeth’ to the barracks, where he left a very useful arsenal, and was never troubled by one of them again.

To thus obtain complete immunity by sheer coolness is as much a matter of personal magnetism as anything else.  An instance of this, which impressed me much, occurred in a coiner-ghost story told by Mr. T.P.  O’Connor, which I venture to quote.

’The hero was no less a person than Marshal Saxe.  One night, on the march, he bivouacked in a haunted castle, and slept the sleep of the brave until midnight, when he was awakened by hideous howls heralding the approach of the spectre.  When it appeared, the Marshal first discharged his pistol point-blank at it without effect, and then struck it with his sabre, which was shivered in his hand.  The invulnerable spectre then beckoned the amazed Marshal to follow, and preceded him to a spot where the floor of the gallery suddenly yawned, and they sank together through it to sepulchral depths.  Here he was surrounded by a band of desperate coiners who would forthwith have made away with him if the Marshal had not told them who he was, and warned them that if he disappeared his army would dig to the earth’s centre to find him, and would infallibly find and finish every one of them.