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Updated: June 18, 2025
But such is the inevitable tendency of the system of "I am better than thou," whether it be practised by a Catholic priest of the hedge-school, by a fanatic bawler about new light, or by a fierce and uncompromising churchman. Faith, hope, and charity, are alike misinterpreted and misunderstood.
Such was the neglected state of education at that time, that for a year or two afterwards there was no school sufficiently near to which I could be sent. At length it was ascertained that a master, another Connaught-man by the way, named O'Beirne, had opened a school a hedge-school of course at Pindramore. To this I was sent, along with my brother John, the youngest of the family next to myself.
"Sir," replied the other master, who till then was silent, wishing, perhaps, to sack Mat in presence of the gentlemen, "it is a hedge-school; and he is no scholar, but an ignoramus, whom I'd sack in three minutes, that would be ashamed of a hedge-school."
He says that Diarmid was killed by the druids, who put a burning shirt on him, a fragment of mythology that may connect Diarmid with the legend of Hercules, if it is not due to the 'learning' in some hedge-school master's ballad. Then we talked about Inishmaan.
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.
There was once a fairy who created the fields and forests expressly for those in love, in that eternal hedge-school of lovers, which is forever beginning anew, and which will last as long as there are hedges and scholars. Hence the popularity of spring among thinkers.
Not only was there no priest to initiate them into the mysteries, granted by Christ to the redeemed soul; there was not even a Catholic school-master to instruct them. Even the "hedge-school" could not be set on foot.
"The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter"; nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian, a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant.
The Englishman was now nettled, and determined to wreak his ill-temper on Mat, by turning him and his establishment into ridicule. "Isn't this, Mister I forget your name, sir." "Mat Kavanagh, at your sarvice." "Very well, my learned friend, Mr. Mat Kevanagh, isn't this precisely what is called a hedge-school?" "A hedge-school!" replied Mat, highly offended; "my seminary a hedge-school!
He cannot be fairly illustrated by quotation; but read any of his stories and see if he does not bring up vividly before you Ireland as it was before the famine; Ireland still swarming with beggars who marched about in families subsisting chiefly on the charity of the poor; Ireland of which the hedge-school was plainly to him the most characteristic institution.
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