Samuel Ferguson (Belfast 1810 – Howth nr Dublin 1886), born into a solid Protestant-Ulster middle-class milieu, was schooled in Belfast and studied law, first in London and then in Dublin, gaining his barrister’s qualification in 1838. He had by then published verse in periodicals; his engagement with Irish literature came in 1834 with a sustained, vehement critique of James Hardiman’s Irish minstrelsy of 1831 in the recently-founded Dublin University magazine. Ferguson, a conservative and unionist Protestant with Gaelic cultural sympathies, denounced Hardiman’s historicist recall of the past grievances of Ireland’s Gaelic-speaking, Catholic population now that, after the enactment of Catholic Emancipation (1828), a more harmonious patriotism had become possible. The one-nation Irish patriotism as proposed by Ferguson was paternalist, envisaging for the Protestant, Anglo-Irish classes the role of leading the Catholic, Gaelic population into a much-needed civilization process. On that basis, Catholic and Protestant, Gael and Anglo-Irish, could meet in shared love of the country’s native soil and a shared appreciation of Ireland’s native legends. Ferguson’s review went so far as to furnish poetic specimens of a patriotic celebration of one-nation Irishness as palliative rejoinders against the bitterly disaffected material collected by Hardiman.

Hardiman saw Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom in parallel to Scotland, with a unionist, integrated elite in the capital and a picturesque Gaelic population furnishing local colour in the remoter districts. On that basis, like an Irish Walter Scott, he did much to investigate the country’s Gaelic antiquity and to draw on that for literary puposes. His verse on ancient Gaelic topics was first popularized through its inclusion in Charles Gavan Duffy’s anthology The ballad poetry of Ireland (1845), and culminated in Lays of the Western Gael and other poems (1865) and his verse epic Congal (1872), a major achievement in an outmoded and moribund genre. His historical tales were collected as Hibernian nights’ entertainments (serialized in the Dublin University magazine from the mid-1830s onwards, later also published in book form). This work made him the most important literary figure in Irish literary historicism between Thomas Moore and W.B. Yeats.

Ferguson was knighted in 1878 and became president of the Royal Irish Academy, where he had continued George Petrie’s campaign to develop a new, scientific archeology for Ireland, denouncing lingering tendencies to speculate on the Gaels’ Oriental origins or connections, and himself contributing on inscriptions in the runic ogham alphabet.