Throughout the oeuvre of Limerick writer Gerald Griffin (1803-1840), the supernatural vacillates between acceptability and enlightened explicability. The Collegians, Griffins novel of 1829, takes the supernatural and neutralizes it into a quaint trade-off between reason and imagination:
for sensible as the Dalys were accounted in their daily affairs,
they were not wholly exempt from the prevailing weakness of their
countrymen. Mrs. Daly's three first children died at ...