[7] Part of the cultural programme of the magazine was to counter the Catholic claim to possession of a Gaelic past by showing how Protestant minds and hearts could respond to Irish literature and history.
[8] Through the 1830s and 1840s the chief ideologist of the magazine was Mortimer O'Sullivan, a Grand Chaplain of the Orange Order in Ireland, a role he shared with his brother Samuel.
It shared readers and sometimes writers with British magazines and even with the Nationalist The Nation (for example, the Young Irelander Michael Joseph Barry, a friend of Sheridan Le Fanu's brother William, who was arrested in 1848 on a charge of treason).
[9] Sheridan Le Fanu's first story appeared in the magazine in January 1835, the first of twelve instalments of the Purcell Papers, called The Ghost and the Bonesetter.
[16] His daughter joined Nina Cole, Annie Robertson and Rhoda Broughton (a niece) in having articles and then books published with his help.