Lays of the Western Gael, 1865

Samuel Ferguson (1810-86) was born in Belfast into a declining Ascendancy family. He gave up a career as a lawyer in 1867 to become an archivist at Dublin Castle. In 1848, he founded the Protestant branch of the 'Repeal Association', but soon reverted to more conservative opinions, and was knighted in 1878. His conservatism did not prevent him from exercising a significant influence on Irish nationalism through his poems and verse translations, and by his indefatigable antiquarian studies. Lays of the Western Gael is Ferguson's most important collection of poems: in it he rendered for the first time in English verse many Gaelic poems that were to become an inspiration to later generations of Irish poets. He declared that it had been his ambition to make 'the voice of this despised people of ours heard high up Olympus', and the critic and poet T.W.Rolleston later claimed that Ferguson was 'the true father and originator of the movement we are carrying on today'.