D’ALTON, John. The History of the County of Dublin (THOMAS DAVIS’S COPY)

Dublin: Hodges and Smith, College-Green, 1838. Demy octavo. pp. viii, 943. Presentation copy to Mr. Thomas Davis “in testimony / of his Zeal for Irish Interests” from Mr. Dwyer. With the bookplates of John Paul Haverty and Patrick Maxwell. Bound at the Sign of the Three Candles in quarter morocco on linen boards, with their ticket on lower pastedown. Very good.
Not in Bradshaw or Gilbert.
Thomas Davis (1814-45), Young Irelander, poet and journalist, was born at Mallow, the son of an English army surgeon and an Irish Protestant mother. Educated at T.C.D. he was later called to the Bar but never practised. Influenced by Thomas Carlyle and other romantic writers, he first enunciated his ideas of Irish Nationalism in his pamphlet read before the Dublin Historical Society in 1840. He was particularly scathing about his old alma mater: “Gentlemen, the Dublin university is the laughing stock of the literary world, and an obstacle to the nation’s march; its inaccessible library, ‘the mausoleum of literature’, and effete system of instruction, render it ridiculous abroad; and its unaccounted funds, and its bigot laws, and you know why it is hated at home”. Continuing in a nationalistic vein he goes on to say: “But, Gentlemen, you have a country. The people among whom we were born, with whom we live, with whom if our minds are in health, we have most sympathy, are those over whom we have power - power to make them wise, great, good ... You are Irishmen. She relies on your devotion. She solicits it by her present distraction and misery. No! her past distraction - her present woe ... Perchance ‘tis a fanciful thing, yet in the misfortunes of Ireland, in her laurelled martyrs, in those who died ‘persecuted men for a persecuted country’ in the necessity she was under of bearing the palms to deck her best to the scaffold-foot and a lost battle-field, she has seemed to me chastened for some great future”.
Davis was co-founder with Charles Gavan Duffy of The Nation, he was an influential member of Young Ireland and a supporter of the Repeal Association. His best-known poems included: ‘A Nation Once Again’; ‘The West’s Asleep’; ‘Lament for the Death of Owen Roe O’Neill’; ‘Fontenoy’; ‘Clare’s Dragoons’; ‘Tone’s Grave’ and ‘My Land’.
Arthur Griffith described him as “the prophet I followed throughout my life, the man whose words and teachings I tried to translate into practice in politics”. Davis died of a fever in 1845, still a young man. A prodigious work in which the author explores in great detail the history, topography, and genealogy; providing useful knowledge on every nook and cranny of the metropolitan county.

[Cat 160]