There was extraordinary intellectual activity among the schoolmasters of those times: some of them indeed thought and dreamed and talked of nothing else but learning; and if you met one of them and fell into conversation, he was sure to give you a strong dose as long as you listened, heedless as to whether you understood him or not. In their eyes learning was the main interest of the world. They often met on Saturdays; and on these occasions certain subjects were threshed out in discussion by the principal men. There were often formal disputations when two of the chief men of a district met, each attended by a number of his senior pupils, to discuss some knotty point in dispute, of classics, science, or grammar.
There was one subject that long divided the teachers of Limerick and Tipperary into two hostile camps of learning--the verb _To be_. There is a well-known rule of grammar that 'the verb _to be_ takes the same case after it as goes before it.' One party headed by the two Dannahys, father and son, very scholarly men, of north Limerick, held that the verb { 153} _to be governed_ the case following; while the other, at the head of whom was Mr. Patrick Murray of Kilfinane in south Limerick, maintained that the correspondence of the two cases, after and before, was mere _agreement_, not _government_. And they argued with as much earnestness as the Continental Nominalists and Realists of an older time.
Sometimes the discussions on various points found their way into print, either in newspapers or in special broadsheets coarsely printed; and in these the mutual criticisms were by no means gentle.
There were poets too, who called in the aid of the muses to help their cause. One of these, who was only a schoolmaster in embryo--one of Dannahy's pupils--wrote a sort of pedagogic Dunciad, in which he impaled most of the prominent teachers of south Limerick who were followers of Murray. Here is how he deals with Mr. Murray himself:--
Lo, forward he comes, in oblivion long lain, Great Murray, the soul of the light-headed train; A punster, a mimic, a jibe, and a quiz, His acumen stamped on his all-knowing phiz: He declares that the subsequent noun should _agree_ With the noun or the pronoun preceding _To be_.
