’The two provinces of Munster are afoot, and will not stop till tithes are overthrown, and rents accordingly; and if help were given them, and we to stand by Ireland, the English guard would be feeble, and every gap made easy.  The Gall (English) will be on their back without ever returning again; and the Orangemen bruised in the borders of every town, a judge and jury in the courthouse for the Catholics, England dead, and the crown upon the Gael....

’There is many a fine man at this time sentenced, from Cork to Ennis and the town of Roscrea, and fair-haired boys wandering and departing from the streets of Kilkenny to Bantry Bay.  But the cards will turn, and we’ll have a good hand:  the trump shall stand on the board we play at....  Let ye have courage.  It is a fine story I have.  Ye shall gain the day in every quarter from the Sassanach.  Strike ye the board, and the cards will be coming to you.  Drink out of hand now a health to Raftery:  it is he would put success for you on the Cuis da ple.’

This is part of another song:—­

’I have a hope in Christ that a gap will be opened again for us....  The day is not far off, the Gall will be stretched without anyone to cry after them; but with us there will be a bonfire lighted up on high....  The music of the world entirely, and Orpheus playing along with it.  I’d sooner than all that, the Sassanach to be cut down.’

But with all this, he had plenty of common sense, and an old man at Ballylee tells me:—­’One time there were a sort of nightwalkers—­Moonlighters as we’d call them now, Ribbonmen they were then—­making some plan against the Government; and they asked Raftery to come to their meeting.  And he went; but what he said was this, in a verse, that they should look at the English Government, and think of all the soldiers it had, and all the police—­no, there were no police in those days, but gaugers and such like—­and they should think how full up England was of guns and arms, so that it could put down Buonaparty; and that it had conquered Spain, and took Gibraltar from it; and the same in America, fighting for twenty-one years.  And he asked them what they had to fight with against all those guns and arms?—­nothing but a stump of a stick that they might cut down below in the wood.  So he bid them give up their nightwalking, and come out and agitate in the daylight.’

I have been told—­but I do not know if it is true—­that he was once sent to Galway Gaol for three months for a song he made against the Protestant Church, ’saying it was like a wall slipping, where it wasn’t built solid.’

III.