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[ Aetat. 1-12 ] J O Y C E 33As he grew up he was to see an increasingly close parallel between hisown plight and Parnell's, and in 1912 he compared them directly in 'Gasfrom a Burner.'For John Joyce the fall of P^nell,, closely synchronized with a fall inhis own fortunes, was the dividing line between the stale present and thegood old days. He had done everything he could to save 'the Chief,' evento going down to Cork before a by-election to plead with his tenants there(in the days when he still had tenants) to vote for the Parnellite candidate.His anticlericalism acquired a new fierceness, and, while it included allthe clergy, he reserved his best effect for Archbishops Walsh and Logue,'Billy with the lip' and 'the tub of guts up in Armagh.' 46But his angeragainst Healy and 'the Bantry gang' was greatest of all, and so uncontrolledthat he cried out at a meeting at the Leinster Hall while Healywas speaking, You're an impostor! You're only waiting for the momentto betray him,' and had to be forcibly removed. 47Not long after Parnell's death on October 6, 1891, the nine-year-oldJames Joyce, 48feeling as angry as his father, wrote a poem denouncingHealy under the title 'Et Tu, Healy.' John Joyce was so pleased with itthat he had it printed and distributed to his friends;* unfortunately nocopy survives. Stanislaus Joyce remembered that it ended with the deadParnell, likened to an eagle, looking down on the grovelling mass of Irishpoliticians fromHis quaint-perched aerie on the crags of TimeWhere the rude din of this . . . centuryCan trouble him no more, t 5 0Besides seconding John Joyce's attitude, the poem, in equating Healy andBrutus, was Joyce's first use of an antique prototype for a modern instance,Parnell being Caesar here, as in 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room'he would be Christ; and while this equation may be discounted as merelya schoolboy's, it persists in Stephen as Dedalus and Bloom as Ulysses. Thefinal portrait of Parnell as a lofty eagle on the crags is automatic enough,but still seems faintly premonitory of Joyce's description of himself in'The Holy Office' as a stag on the highest mountain ridges.In the Joyce household Dante Conway, who stood firmly with the* 'Remember it?' he said long afterwards to the bookdealer Jacob Schwartz, 'Why shouldn'tI remember it? Didn't I pay for the printing of it, and didn't I send a copy to the Pope?' 49tjohn J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, in A Bibliography of James Joyce (1953), p. 3,give four other lines from the poem:My cot alas that dear old shady homeWhere oft in youthful sport I playedUpon thy verdant grassy fields all dayOr lingered for a moment in thy bosom shade.Joyce remarked to Harriet Weaver that he had parodied the lines in Finnegans(231).Wake

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