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Sometimes old Denis's hearth was selected; at others, a neighboring wakehouse, and not unfrequently the chapel-green, where, surrounded by a crowd of eager listeners, the young priest and his Latin would succeed in throwing the hedge-schoolmaster and his problems completely into the shade.
The hedge-schoolmaster conducted the rites, and the air resounded with the sonorous hexameters of Virgil and the musical odes of Horace. In the Irish-speaking portions of the country the hedge-schoolmaster was often also a poet who wrote mellifluous songs in Irish, which were sung throughout the entire district and sometimes earned him enduring fame.
The violence of the act broke some of the internal muscles or tendons, suppuration and subsequently inflammation, first of the adjoining Parts and afterwards of the brain, took place, and the fine intelligent little creature was laid in a premature grave, because the ignorance of the people justified a pedantic hedge-schoolmaster in the exercise of irresponsible cruelty.
What hedge-schoolmaster has scattered them so loosely and profusely over this lovely land? Whip the wretch with rattlesnakes! Memphis indeed! as if Memphis with its monolithic statues needed commemoration on the banks of the Mississippi! A new Osiris a new Sphinx, "half horse, half alligator, with a sprinkling of the snapping turtle."
I have heard that by turns he was, in his New Sphere, a Player at the Dublin Theatre, a Drawer at a Usquebaugh Shop in Cork, a hedge-schoolmaster among the Bogtrotters a wild, savage kind of People, that infest the Southern parts of that fertile but distracted kingdom a teacher of the Mathematics in Belfast, and a fiddler going about to wakes and weddings in the county of Galway.
Some were drinking, some indulging in song, and some were already lying drunk or asleep in different parts of this subterraneous pandemonium. Exalted in what was considered the position of honor sat a country hedge-schoolmaster, his mellow eye beaming with something between natural humor, a sense of his own importance, and the influence of pure whiskey, fresh it is called, from the Still-eye.
The mistress of a dame-school can hear spelling-lessons; and any hedge-schoolmaster can drill boys in the multiplication-table.
A hedge-schoolmaster was then held in such respect and veneration, that no matter how cruel or profligate he might be, his person and character, unless in some extraordinary case of cruelty, resulting in death or mutilation, were looked upon as free from all moral or legal responsibility.
Maginn was a wit, Mahony was the hedge-schoolmaster in excelsis, and Carleton was the first realist in Irish peasant fiction. But all alike drew their best inspiration from essentially Irish themes. The pendulum has swung back slowly but steadily since the days when Irish men of letters found it necessary to accommodate their genius to purely English literary standards.
The copies are often ill-spelt and ill-written, but with all their faults they are as noble a monument to national love of learning as any nation can boast of. In our gallery of types we must not forget the character whom English writers contemptuously called the "hedge-schoolmaster." The hedge-school in its most elemental state was an open-air daily assemblage of youths in pursuit of knowledge.
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