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From the fact that tramps and vagabonds frequently sleep under hedges the word has come to be used as a term of contempt, as in “hedge-priest,” an inferior and illiterate kind of parson at one time existing in England and Ireland, and in “hedge-school,” a low class school held in the open air, formerly very common in Ireland.

Instead of going to the gymnasium, where I should have had to appear without the German essay, I preferred to visit the "hedge-school" as the French say, that is to lounge about the park, and there on a lonely bench in the most out-of-the-way corner, commit my youthful sorrows to paper.

Further, should the grant scheme be rendered more flexible, i.e. extended to a lower grade of qualification, and thus the public purse be applied to the maintenance and perpetuation of a hedge-school system of education,––or should it be rendered more liberal, i.e. should the Government be induced to do proportionally more, and the school-builders be required to do proportionally less,––superstition and infidelity would, in the carrying out of their schemes of perversion, have, in consequence, just all the less to sacrifice and to acquire.

At Drumgooland, a neighbouring hamlet, he opened what is called in Ireland a public school; a sort of hedge-school for village children.

He cannot be fairly illustrated by quotation; but read any of his stories and see if he does not bring up vividly before you Ireland as it was before the famine; Ireland still swarming with beggars who marched about in families subsisting chiefly on the charity of the poor; Ireland of which the hedge-school was plainly to him the most characteristic institution.