AN IRISH POOR SCHOLAR

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 134

AN IRISH POOR SCHOLAR

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his oak stick partook the enthusiasm, while he burst into whole pages of Horace, and Virgil, and Ovid. It was not in the least a matter of display. It was simply audible soliloquy. It was the delight of learning for learning's sake, such as one dares not hope to find in a lackadaisical modern university. Prosody transfigured him like one of Dr. Faustus' potions. While I was humbly wondering at his Latin quantities, he was off into Greek verse—I think it was one of Thersites' acrid attacks upon the Kings; and although I could not follow the words, I felt myself for the moment listening to a living Phrygian Mr. T. W. Russell. But this mood was a short one. Latin, Greek, and Gaelic classics are the luxuries of Master Duffy's voluptuous moments. The business of his life (and this in a mountain-bred Irish peasant is the strangest portion of his history) is physical science and mathematics. It is easy vaguely to imagine how in some dead and gone hedge-school in the mountains, or from the lips of some ancient priest from Louvain or St. Omer, the bright mountain-boy may have imbibed his Latin hexameters. I have failed altogether to trace the origin of his acquisitions in mechanical science; yet science in Master Duffy's case is, barring religion, the most passionate object of worship of his life. In the days when he was about to be ejected from his father's farm, he travelled to the county town of Castlebar on law business. He there, for the first time in his life, saw a railway engine. The portent so bewitched him that he took a lodging beside the station, and there for three days hovered lovingly about the steam giant, while the engine-driver explained to him its every valve and crank and cog. He lost the farm, but came home for ever rich in dreams of mechanical discovery. In various odd ways he had piled together a little money—as a writer of American letters, as a chiseller … continue reading »

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