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Excerpt from The Works of William Carleton, Vol. 1: Willy Reilly; Fardorougha the Miser; The Black Baronet, or the Chronicles of Ballytrain; The Evil Eye, or the Black Spectre
As the work was first written, I described a good many of the Catholic priests of the day as disguised in female apparel; but on discovering that there exists an ecclesiastical regulation or canon forbidding any priest, under whatever persecution or pressure, to assume such apparel for the purpose of dis guising his person or saving his life, I, of course, changed that portion of the matter, although a layman might well be pardoned for his ignorance of an ecclesiastical statute, which, except in very rare cases, can be known only to ecclesiastics themselves. I retain one instance, however, of this descrip tion, which I ascribe to Hennessy, the de graded friar, who is a historical character, and who wrought a vast weight of evil, as an informer, against the Catholic priesthood of Ireland, both regular and secular.
With respect to the family name of the heroine and her father, I have adopted both the popular pronunciation and orthography, instead of the real. I give it simply as I found it in the ballad, and as I always heard it pronounced by the people in the first place, from reluctance, by writing it accu rately, to give offence to that portion of this highly respectable family which still exists and, in the next, from a disinclination to dis turb the original impressions made' on the popular mind by the ballad and the traditions associated with it. So far as the traditions go, there was nothing connected with the heroine of which her descendants need feel ashamed. If it had been otherwise, her memory never would have been enshrined in the affections of the Irish people for such an unusual period of time.
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