Book Description

Excerpt from The Works of William Carleton, Vol. 1: Willy Reilly; Fardorougha the Miser; The Black Baronet, or the Chronicles of Ballytrain; The Evil Eye, or the Black Spectre As the work was first written, I described a good many of the Catholic priests of the day as disguised in female apparel; but on discovering that there exists an ecclesiastical regulation or canon forbidding any priest, under whatever persecution or pressure, to assume such apparel for the purpose of dis guising his person or saving his life, I, of course, changed that portion of the matter, although a layman might well be pardoned for his ignorance of an ecclesiastical statute, which, except in very rare cases, can be known only to ecclesiastics themselves. I retain one instance, however, of this desmip tion, which I ascribe to Hennessy, the de graded fliar, who is a historical character, and who wrought a vast weight of evil, as an informer, against the Catholic priesthood of Ireland, both regular and secular. With respect to the family name of the heroine and her father, I have adopted both the popular pronunciation and orthography, instead of the real. I give it simply as I found it in the ballad, and as I always heard it pronounced by the people; in the first place, from reluctance, by writing it accu rately, to give offence to that portion of this highly respectable family which still exists and, in the next, from a disinclination to dis turb the original impressions made on the popular mind by the ballad and the traditions associated with it. So far as the traditions go, there was nothing connected with the heroine of which her descendants need feel ashamed. If it had been otherwise, her memory never would have been enshrined in the affections of the hish people for such an unusual pe1iod of time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.