A good, bitty, diary makes fine late-night reading in bed. It doesn't matter where you drop off. Such a one is that of William Allingham, the man from Ballyshannon who, in England, came to know many of the more noted literary and political figures. John Julius Norwich, in his introduction to the Penguin edition does mention as "surely the most embarrassing poem ever to have found its way into the Oxford Book of English Verse" his "Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen" piece. But the diary (1824-1889) is good stuff. Here Allingham is over dinner with Tennyson. (T for Tennyson W.A. for Allingham).
T.: - A Russian noble who spoke English well, said one morning to an English guest "I've shot two peasants this morning." "Pardon me, you mean pheasants," "No, indeed, two men, they were insolent and I shot them."
W.A.: "In Ireland it's the other way."
T.: "Couldn't they blow up that horrible island with dynamite and carry it off in pieces - a long way off?"
W.A.: "Why did the English go there?"
T.: "Why did the Normans come to England? The Normans came over here and seized the country, and in a hundred years the English had forgotten all about it, and they were all living together on good terms."
I demurred: T went on raising his voice: "The same Normans went to Ireland and the Irish with their damned unreasonableness are raging and foaming to this hour."
W.A.: "The Norman Duke had a claim on the crown of England."
T.: " No rightful claim."
W.A.: "But suppose all these to be bygones. You speak of a century, a short time in history - think what Ireland had to complain of only in the last century - the penal laws and the deliberate destruction of their growing industry by the English government: what do you say to that?"
T.: "That was brutal! Our ancestors were horrible brutes. And the Kelts are very charming and sweet and poetic. I love their Ossians and their Finns and so forth - but they are most damnably unreasonable.
W.A.: "They are most unfortunate." Y