3-052-572 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Irish Sketches: an itinerant orator, a sketch near Killarney, 1880. A '...dismal, woebegone, lachrymose vagrant and declaimer upon the wrongs of the poor, who was met by our Artist practising his forlorn eloquence in a rustic village near Killarney...This miserable old impostor, we verily believe, instead of being the emissary of a formidable political sedition, is merely a broken-down tradesman or disgraced schoolmaster from some remote town of Ulster - no Catholic, but a Presbyterian, with a special gift of sanctimonious whining, who has come down here for his private gain, to wheedle shillings and pence out of the warm-hearted Celtic population. He finds a susceptible audience, it will be observed, among the women and young persons, who listen with intense credulity and ardent compassion to his dreadful tale of Saxon tyranny, cruelty, and rapacity, in all ages of Irish history...Such are the "men of light and leading" too frequently enabled to practise upon the generous feelings of our ill-informed fellow-subjects in the neighbouring island; which yet we do not choose to speak of, with the present Ministry, as "that country;" but rather always as an essential portion of the United Kingdom'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.