down.'

But with all this, he had plenty of common sense, and an old man at
Ballylee tells me:--'One time there were a sort of
nightwalkers--Moonlighters as we'd call them now, Ribbonmen they were
then--making some plan against the Government; and they asked Raftery to
come to their meeting. And he went; but what he said was this, in a
verse, that they should look at the English Government, and think of all
the soldiers it had, and all the police--no, there were no police in
those days, but gaugers and such like--and they should think how full up
England was of guns and arms, so that it could put down Buonaparty; and
that it had conquered Spain, and took Gibraltar from it; and the same in
America, fighting for twenty-one years. And he asked them what they had
to fight with against all those guns and arms?--nothing but a stump of a
stick that they might cut down below in the wood. So he bid them give up
their nightwalking, and come out and agitate in the daylight.'

I have been told--but I do not know if it is true--that he was once sent
to Galway Gaol for three months for a song he made against the
Protestant Church, 'saying it was like a wall slipping, where it wasn't
built solid.'


III.

When at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the poets O'Lewy and
O'Clery and their supporters held a 'Contention,' the results were
written down in a volume containing 7,000 lines. I think the greater
number of the 'Contentions' between Raftery and his fellow-poets were
never written down; but the country people still discuss them with all