Juliana Burke married Patrick French of Loughrea, county Galway, in 1766. He was a member of an old Roman Catholic family, but the licence for the marriage was for a marriage by the Church of Ireland Rector or Curate of St Catherine's parish church, Dublin. They had one child, Mary, who was married to Lieut.-Colonel Haviland. From this marriage descend the Haviland-Burkes.

The following is a copy from the Dublin Diocesan Records in the Public Record Office, Dublin1:

A Licence was granted the eighth day of January in the year of our Lord 1766 by the Rt Worshipful Alex. McAulay, Esqre, Doctor of Laws, Vicar General of the Diocese of Dublin and Official Principal and Chancellor of the Consistorial and Metropolitan Court of Dublin lawfully constituted, to solemnize marriage between Patk. French of Loughrea in the Co. of Galway Gentleman and Juliana Burke of the Parish of St Catherine, Dublin, Spinster. Directed to the Rev. Samuel Pullein Clerk, Master of Arts, Vicar of the sd. Parish, or to his licensed Curate assst. Sealed with the Seal of the afsd Court.

There is no entry in the parish register of the marriage being celebrated in St Catherine's Church. The ceremony probably took place privately. The Act 19 Geo. II, c. 13 (Ir.), s. I provided that any marriage celebrated after 1st May, 1746, between a Papist and any person who hath been...a Protestant or between two Protestants if celebrated by a Popish priest should be absolutely null and void.

As Juliana had been baptised in the Established Church it was necessary, to prevent any question of the validity of the marriage, that the ceremony should be performed by a clergyman of that church. 1 Now destroyed.

ED

CHAPTER II

SCHOOLDAYS

DMUND BURKE, when a child, was delicate, and showed symptoms of lung trouble. To escape from the unfavourable atmosphere of his home on Arran Quay, which was liable to flooding by the Liffey, he was sent, at an early age, to the residence of his mother's family at Ballyduff, near Castletown-Roche, in the north of Co. Cork, where he spent most of his boyhood.

He had learnt his letters at his mother's knee. What was his first schooling, we ascertain from Mrs Leadbeater. She tells us that the three brothers, Garret, Richard and Edmund,

had been when very young, at school with an old woman, who was very cross, and they resented her crossness so much, that one holyday the three little fellows set out for her cabin, with intent to kill her. As her good genius would have it, she happened to be from home, and their fit of fury evaporated before the next opportunity1.

His next school was in the ruined castle of Monanimy, an old stronghold of the Nagles, in which a kind of hedge school was held2. The school-master's name was O'Halloran, who (as Prior states), lived to a great age, and was known to one or two of the oldest inhabitants living there many years ago, who remembered him, in his youth, as boasting upon all occasions that he was the first to put a Latin Grammar into the hands of Edmund Burke.

Prior, in his second edition, tells an interesting story how Burke, when on a visit to the Nagles in 1766, was shaving one morning and saw O'Halloran coming up the avenue to see him. He rushed down half shaved, grasped him by both hands, and gossiped with him about the old times, and then-" didn't he put five golden guineas into my hand as I was coming away," said the old man.

O'Halloran was evidently one of the old race of Philomaths, who kept alive in rural Ireland under circumstances of difficulty, and often of danger, in the troublous times of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the traditions of classical learning. Poor hedge school-masters .were, down to time of living memories, to be found in Ireland, well versed in the masterpieces of Greek and Roman literature, and they 1 Leadbeater Papers, 1, p. 46.

2 Historical and Topographical Notes, North Co. Cork, p. 161.

were often, too, mathematicians of no mean attainments. Oliver Goldsmith also received his earliest teaching from such a village pedagogue-Thomas Byrne, an old soldier, "who, besides being something of a bookman, dabbled in rhyme, and was even capable of extemporizing a respectable Irish version of Virgil's Eclogues1."

Close by Ballyduff was the site of Kilcolman Castle, where Edmund Spenser had lived and written the early books of the Faerie Queene. Thence on the 27th December, 1591, he dated the dedication of Colin Clout's Come Home Again to "the Right Worthy and Noble Knight, Sir Walter Raleigh," and there were the woods he bid to "answer" and "eccho ring" to his exquisite Epithalamium2. Burke felt Spenser's inspiration, and delighted in the same "mountains and rivers and fair forests"; he, too, wandered by "Mulla, faire and bright"; and in after times he looked back to those days of his boyhood, and wrote of them in terms of most affectionate recollection3. He composed, when in Trinity College, a poem on the river Blackwater-Spenser's "swift Awenduff, which of the Englishman is called Blackwater"-and invoked

Ye beauteous nymphs that haunt the dusky wood
Which hangs recumbent o'er the crystal flood;
And ye whose midnight dance in mystic round
With a green circle marks the flowry ground;
Oh aid my voice that I may wake once more
The slumbering echo on the Mulla's shore".

The Blackwater runs through Castletown-Roche, and is there fed

1 Goldsmith, by Austin Dobson, p. 14.

Sylvanus Spenser, son of Edmund Spenser, married Ellen, daughter of David Nagle of Monanimy. She was great-aunt of Edmund Burke's mother. Topographical Notes, North Co. Cork, p. 225.

3 See Colin Clout's Come Home Again:

"One day, quoth he, I sat as was my trade

Under the foot of Mole, that mountain hore,
Keeping my sheepe amongst the cool and shade
Of the green alders by the Mulla's shore.

There a strange shepheard chaunst to find me out
Whether allured by my pipe's delight,

Whose pleasing sound enshrilled far about,

Or thither led by chaunce, I know not right."

In the Faerie Queene, Book VII, Spenser makes the neighbourhood of Kilcol

man the haunt of Faunus and Cynthia and her Nymphs.

Cp. Faerie Queene, Book IV, Canto XI. See also Mutabilitie, Cantos VI, XXXV, XLII, and Epithalamium:

"Ye nymphs of Mulla, which with careful heed

The silver scaly trouts do tend full well."

by the tributary Awebeg (termed Mulla by Spenser) that courses down from Kilcolman and glides close to Ballyduff,

Strong Allo tombling from Slewlogher steep

And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep.

With the exception of a few stanzas, which are contained in a letter to Richard Shackleton of 3rd February, 1746-71, this poem of Burke's is lost. Dennis, one of his college friends, wrote in November, 1747, to Richard Shackleton, "Ned (Burke) has finished the first canto of the Blackwater," but "the poem on the Blackwater, once in possession of Shackleton, was, with some of his earlier letters from London, borrowed by Burke's father, and never returned?."

The boy had gained strength by five years' residence in the genial climate of Southern Ireland. He returned to Dublin, and went for a year to a school, kept by a Mr James Fitzgerald, in Smithfield, close to his father's house3.

On the 26th May, 1741, he was sent, together with his brothers Richard and Garret, to Ballitore School. Some fifteen years previously this famous school had been founded by Abraham Shackleton, a Yorkshire Quaker, who, early in the eighteenth century, came over to Ireland as tutor to the children of John Duckett, of Duckett's Grove, and of William Cooper, of Cooper's Hill, in the county Carlow. With their encouragement he opened the school on 1st March, 1726, at Ballitore, a small town in the south of the county Kildare, and continued as its headmaster till 1756, when he was succeeded by his son Richard, Burke's friend, who was one of the seven original members of the "Club." Abraham Shackleton died on 4th June, 1771.

The simple, yet fascinating, Annals of Ballitore bring before the reader a picture of the later portion of the eighteenth century in Ireland far different from that of most of the memoirs of the time. They contain the traditions of the cultivated Quaker circles of the county Kildare, and of the school kept by the Shackletons.

The hamlet and school surroundings with its fields and orchards, where Edmund Burke played and studied as a boy, whither he loved to return, and through which he would wander again in his visits in after life, are presented as the scene of secluded prosperity and tranquillity, during a period when too often in Ireland "the grim form

1 Post p. III.

2 Prior, Life of Burke, 5th edition (London, 1856), pp. 25, 26; Leadbeater Papers, I, p. 169.

3 Beauties of Burke (London, 1798).

The first volume of the Leadbeater Papers is so termed by the authoress.

of famine stalked by day, and outrage and rapine roamed by night." Three generations of Shackletons dwelt and taught there in amity with all around, and it was not until the Insurrection of 1798 that any of the storms of those troublous times affected them. Then civil war invaded their home. A skirmish took place in the school orchard at Ballitore, and the house itself was occupied by the rebels and soldiery in turn. The village was sacked and burned to the ground, and atrocities on both sides, such as characterised the Rebellion of of 1798, were enacted before the eyes of the gentle lady, who, from being the annalist of peace, becomes the vivid chronicler of horrid war.

Edmund Burke had passed away in 1797 and was thus spared, amidst his accumulating sorrows, the shock of knowing what desolation had come on those scenes of which he wrote in his dying letter to Mrs Leadbeater, he "had so tender a remembrance."

This is a description of Ballitore as it appeared when Burke was a schoolboy there1:

Through Timolin runs a pretty stream called the Grise2. This place has little to recommend it but the situation, a neat new church upon a rising ground on the right, and a very good inn. About a mile beyond, to our left, our eyes were charmed with the sweetest bottom, where, through the lofty trees, we beheld a variety of pleasant dwellings. Through a road that looked like a fine terrace-walk, we turned down to view this lovely vale, where Nature assisted by Art, gave us the utmost contentment. It is a colony of Quakers, called by the name of Ballitore. The Grise winds its streams very near the houses; and the buildings, orchards and gardens shew a neatness peculiar to that people. Their burying-ground, near the road, is surrounded with different trees, whose verdure made us imagine it was a beautiful garden, till better informed. The hedges that inclose their meadows and fields are quick-set, kept of an equal height, and about every ten yards have trees regularly planted, which in a few years will form a beautiful grove of a large extent. Industry seems to reign amongst them, and all their works are executed with a thriving hand.

Abraham Shackleton (writes his grand-daughter Mrs Leadbeater) was a man whose memory was long held in veneration. His exterior bespoke his character: his countenance expressed the sweetness and humility of his mind, mixed with a gravity sometimes bordering on austerity. Being the youngest of six orphans, and his habit not being robust enough for

1 From A Tour Through Ireland, in Several Entertaining Letters, Wherein The present state of that Kingdom is considered; and the most noted Cities, Towns, Seats, Rivers, Buildings, &c. are described. Interspersed with Observations on the Manners, Customs, Antiquities, Curiosities, and Natural History of that Country. By Two English Gentlemen. Dublin (Peter Wilson), 1748.

2 The Griese rises near Dunlavin in Co. Wicklow, and flows south-west through the Co. Kildare till it joins the Barrow near Mageney.