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Upon the holy table too lay 'twa span-lang wee unchristened bairns. For this hell the poet pictures is the creation of a creed that throngs it with the souls of innocent babes. 'Suffer little children to come unto me, Christ had said; 'for of such is the kingdom of heaven. 'But unbaptized children must come unto me, the devil of superstition said; 'for of such is the kingdom of hell.
At last he found it was a question how near it was to All Soul's day; and then came an equally amazing query whether the gentlemen's babe had been baptized; for it appeared that on All Soul's day the spirits of unchristened infants had the power of rising from the sands in a bewildering mist, and leading wayfarers into the sea.
And this illiterate clergy exercised their ministry amidst a rude and half-heathen population, in which Danish pirates, unchristened, or christened by the hundred on a field of battle, were mingled with a Saxon peasantry scarcely better instructed in religion. The state of Ireland was still worse.
I had long been under reproach for my slackness in this matter. Inuendoes were mixed with odious comparisons upon Mary Lyon's tongue. If her daughter had only married a Cameronian, the bairn would have been baptized within seven days! Never had she seen an unchristened bairn so long about a house!
Perchance also he called to mind, at that crisis, his little dead daughter, who had blossomed and faded among the green glades of Wily, and over whose grave the parson of the parish had refused to read the services of the Church. The poor babe had died unchristened, and under such circumstances the rubric forbade the solemnization of funeral rites.
The click of steel had followed quickly, had not there come a muttering and shouting from the peasants about the door and from those crowding up behind them; and all knew that these were no children of Queen's Irish or friendly Namaras and Dermotts, but of the wild Irish about Lough Gara and Lough Cara, who rowed their skin coracles, and had masses of hair over their eyes, and left the right arms of their children unchristened that they might give the stouter blows, and swore only by St.
But, Sir Thomas, were it fair to take the Holy Land from the heathen Saladin, so full of all the virtues which may distinguish unchristened man, and give it to Giles Amaury, a worse pagan than himself, an idolater, a devil-worshipper, a necromancer, who practises crimes the most dark and unnatural in the vaults and secret places of abomination and darkness?"
He is the only poet who was also, in the European sense, on the spot; even if, in the sense of the Gilbertian song, the spot was barred. He also knew that something rather crucial was happening to Christendom; he thought it was getting unchristened. It is even a little amusing, indeed, that these two Pro-Italian poets almost conducted a political correspondence in rhyme. Mrs.
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