Title: The Revival of Irish Literature - Addresses by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, K.C.M.G, Dr. George Sigerson, and Dr. Douglas Hyde
Author: Duffy, Charles Gavan, 1816-1903, Sigerson, George, 1835-1925, Hyde, Douglas, 1860-1949
Language: English
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_THE REVIVAL OF IRISH LITERATURE AND OTHER ADDRESSES_



  THE REVIVAL OF
  IRISH LITERATURE


  ADDRESSES BY SIR CHARLES
  GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G.,
  DR. GEORGE SIGERSON,
  AND DR. DOUGLAS HYDE


  LONDON: T. FISHER
  UNWIN, PATERNOSTER
  SQUARE. MDCCCXCIV



CONTENTS.


                                                                PAGE

  1. THE REVIVAL OF IRISH LITERATURE.
     BY SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G.                          9

      i. What Irishmen may do for Irish Literature.

     ii. Books for the Irish People.

  2. IRISH LITERATURE: ITS ORIGIN, ENVIRONMENT.
     BY GEORGE SIGERSON, M.D., FELLOW OF THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY     61

  3. THE NECESSITY FOR DE-ANGLICISING IRELAND.
     BY DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D.                                      115



  The Revival of Irish literature.

  TWO ADDRESSES DELIVERED BEFORE
  THE IRISH LITERARY SOCIETY, LONDON,
  _IN JULY, 1892, AND JUNE, 1893_,

  BY THE PRESIDENT,
  THE HON. SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G.


WHAT IRISHMEN MAY DO FOR IRISH LITERATURE.

Speaking to a Society of young Irishmen who love their country and burn to
serve her, I am tempted to broach a subject which has long lain in my
mind, waiting for the fit audience.

The famine of 1846 paralysed many forces in Ireland, and none more
disastrously than our growing literature. How little has been done in the
region of mind since that calamity, and by what isolated and spasmodic
efforts? The era on which the famine fell was intellectually a singularly
fruitful one. A group of young men, among the most generous and
disinterested in our annals, were busy digging up the buried relics of our
history, to enlighten the present by a knowledge of the past, setting up
on their pedestals anew the overthrown statues of Irish worthies,
assailing wrongs which under long impunity had become unquestioned and
even venerable, and warming as with strong wine the heart of the people,
by songs of valour and hope; and happily not standing isolated in their
pious work, but encouraged and sustained by just such an army of students
and sympathisers as I see here to-day. The famine swept away their
labours; and their passionate attempts to arrest and redress the
destruction which the famine inflicted, delivered them over to
imprisonment and penal exile. Their incomplete work, produced amid the
tumult and conflict of a great political struggle, has been a treasure to
two generations of Irishmen; and it supplied the impulse of work which
rivalled their own. The publisher of Petrie's "Round Towers," and John
O'Donovan's translation of "The Four Masters," assured me that he could
not have ventured to issue books so costly, but for the enthusiasm kindled
in the public mind by the young nationalists, and Butt and Lefanu, who at
that time were strict Conservatives, confessed that while writing "The Gap
of Barnesmore" and "The Cock and Anchor," they constantly thought how
welcome such works would be to Young Irelanders. The patriot's library has
not been burthensome in latter times. But Moore's melodies, Griffin's and
Banim's novels, the histories of MacGeoghegan and Curry, and the writings
of these young men have been a constant cordial to the sorely-tried spirit
of our people. Since their day, individual writers have done useful work
from the unquenchable desire God has planted in men's heart to serve their
own race, but there has been no organised attempt to raise the mind of the
country to higher and more generous ideals of life and duty, or to quicken
its interest in things which it behoves us to know. No nation can with
impunity neglect the mind of the growing generation, the generation which
after a little time will guide its counsels and guard its interests. The
thought which has long haunted my reveries, and which I desire to speak
out to-day, is this--that the young men of your generation might and
should take up anew the unfinished work of their predecessors, and carry
it another stage towards the end which they aimed to reach. Why should
they not? Every generation of men furnishes its own tale of thinkers and
workers. The mind of Ireland has not grown barren, nor can I believe that
it has grown indifferent, though public cares have diverted it away from
intellectual pursuits. There are men, I do not doubt, fit and worthy and
willing to undertake such a task.

Have you reflected on all we have lost, and are losing by the subsidence
of the intellectual enthusiasm of half a century ago? It is not alone that
we are deficient in knowledge essential to equip us for the battle of life
by an acquaintance with the character, capacities, and history of our own
country; but, far worse than that, the mind of the generation destined
some day to fill our place, the youthful mind which used to be kindled and
purified by the poetry and legends of Ireland, runs serious risks of
becoming debased, perhaps depraved, by battening on literary garbage.

I have made inquiries, and I am assured that the books chiefly read by the
young in Ireland are detective or other sensational stories from England
and America, and vile translations from the French of vile originals. It
is for the moralist, and indeed for all of us who love Ireland, to
consider whether the virtues for which our people were distinguished,
purity, piety, and simplicity, are not endangered by such intellectual
diet. I have been vehemently warned that these detestable books can only
be driven out by books more attractive, and I will not dispute the
proposition. There are histories and biographies that delight the student,
there is a poetry that is an inspiration and a solace to healthy minds,
which it would be useless, I admit, to offer to young men accustomed to
the dram-drinking of sensational literature. To them, at any rate, you
must bring books which will excite and gratify the love of the wonderful,
and carry them away from the commonplace world to regions of romance. And
why may not this be done? Why may there not be opened to them a nobler
world of wonder, the story of transcendent achievements, the romance of
history, the "fairy tales of science"? In the dominion of intellectual
wonders there are many fair fields, and only one corner which is a
stagnant fen. To the student, using that word in the wide sense which
covers all who study, you must bring solider and more attractive offerings
than the things you ask him to reject, and, again I ask, why should you
not?

It may be demanded: where are the writers to supply these captivating
books? Let me ask, Where, in 1840, were the writers who were exciting
universal enthusiasm in 1843? Like them, the men of the future are
consciously or unconsciously preparing for their task; they are waiting
the occasion--occasion which is the stage where alone great achievements
are performed. I could name, if it were needful, a few writers not
unworthy to succeed the men of '43, but their work will speak for them. I
prefer to say that if there were not one man of genius left of the Irish
race, there are already materials sufficient to furnish useful and
delightful books for half-a-dozen years.

With a memory running back over six decades of reading, I confidently
affirm that there are scattered in magazines and annuals, in luckless
books neglected in the hurry of our political march, in publications the
very names of which are forgotten by the present generation, Irish stories
of surpassing interest, fit to win and fascinate young Irish readers,
which would not degrade or debase them, but make them better men and
better Irishmen. And in the other domains of intellect, Irish writers
living in or belonging to a country where unhappily there was no market
for books, carried their work to periodicals where it has lain interred
for generations. How many rare and interesting books there are of which we
have lost all trace and memory! I put lately into the hands of a friend of
large intellectual appetite half-a-dozen little volumes of which he had
never heard. "This," I said, pointing to the first, "was written by a
Presbyterian minister, who describes with infinite humour the relations
between the squire and the peasant a hundred years ago, and it is almost
as true to-day as it was then. The writer was hanged as a rebel in '98 by
the very squire whom he had depicted, but his little book is read with
enthusiasm to this day by northern farmers who call themselves Orangemen
and Unionists. This second volume, I said, is the first poem written by
Bulwer Lytton, and the hero is an O'Neill who rallied his nation against
England. Here's a brochure on the Land Question, published in America
fifty years ago by a poor exiled Irishman, which anticipates the alarming
proclamation of first principles by Fintan Lalor and Henry George, and it
is as unknown in Ireland as the lost books of Livy." I do not suggest
that you should publish these books or any of them, but surely they are
finger-posts pointing to an unexplored territory. While I am speaking of
the resources for a popular library, which we have in hand, I may say that
one-third of the writings of Thomas Davis or Clarence Mangan has not been
collected in volumes. Davis's most remarkable achievement as an historian,
"The Patriot Parliament" he calls it--not the Parliament of Grattan, but
the Parliament of Tyrconnell, was prepared for publication by his own
hand, and it has remained without a publisher for two generations. Nothing
of the miscellaneous writings of John Blake Dillon, John O'Hagan, Thomas
Meagher, or Charles Kickham, have been gathered into books. And how much
of the wealth of our ancient Gaelic literature still lies buried in
untranslated MSS., or in the transactions of learned societies.

A perfectly honest and respectable blockhead asked me recently, "What is
the use of books for men working for their daily bread, or for young
fellows whose first business in life is to make some way in the world?"
From the highest class in the nation to the humblest, good books are the
salt of life. They make us wiser, manlier, more honest, and what is less
than any of these, more prosperous. It is not the least of their merits
that good books make manly men and patriotic citizens. Robert Burns
declared that reading the "Life of William Wallace" poured a tide of
Scottish sentiment into his veins, which would boil till the flood-gates
of life shut in eternal rest. A man who has done and suffered much for
Ireland during the last forty years, has often avowed that he was made a
patriot by reading the Poems of Thomas Davis; and how many other Irishmen
have confessed the same debt to him and his associates? The great
Dominican, Father Burke, and Professor Tyndall of Belfast, the fierce
Unionist, are equally warm in their acknowledgment of the effect produced
upon them in their youth by the writings of the Young Irelanders. The late
Judge O'Hagan, one of the most upright and gifted of Irishmen, used to
declare that the evening when he first read the address of John Blake
Dillon to the College Historical Society, he was a Whig, but the next day,
and ever after, he was a Nationalist. To how many of us is that Address
still inaccessible? Would it not be a beneficent work to republish it?
Surely there is no Irishman of any political persuasion who would not
welcome the opportunity of reading a work which produced such an effect on
such a man.

But the discipline of education is not for ornament merely, but for
practical use. Without it men and nations miss their path in life, and see
not at all, or only with purblind eyes, open roads to national prosperity.
In Australia I have known a generation of shepherds and sheep-farmers, who
long trod a soil seamed with gold, knowing nothing of the treasures
beneath their feet. Is not the Irish farmer often as ignorant of the
wealth which other nations draw from the earth, or from the enterprise
born of the leisure and security which the possession of the soil creates?
The domestic industries which help to make French farms prosperous are
just as suitable to our own country, and just as feasible in it. London is
supplied from Normandy with farm produce which would come more naturally
from Munster, and the French make their households pleasant with dainty
preparations of vegetables which the Irish fling away with contempt;
Switzerland is more destitute of coal than Ireland, but Switzerland
competes successfully with England in her own markets with manufactures
for which she does not possess even the raw material. When I met in
France, Italy, and Egypt the marmalade manufactured at Dundee, I felt it
like a silent reproach. Oranges do not grow in Dundee, and sugar is not
manufactured there, but enterprise and industrial education are native to
the soil. Is not this a department in which there is something to be
taught to the people by useful books? Ideas are the root of action, and
books are the cabinets of ideas. If work of a practical and patriotic
spirit is to be done in any country, books must be the beginning of that
work; and why should we not have such books?

What do we hope to make of Ireland?--this is the fundamental question on
which the character of education ought to depend. In Switzerland the bulk
of the people live on their own farms, not needing or desiring great
wealth, but enjoying free, simple lives, ennobled by the perfect liberty
which the poet declares is a child of the mountains. In Belgium there are
many husbandmen thriving on the benign industries cultivated at home,
which rear a nobler class of men than the stricken legions who serve the
steam-engine and the water-wheel. It is not for me to dogmatise on the
proper development of Ireland, but assuredly to be wise and successful it
must harmonise with the nature of the people, and correct it where
correction is needful. Education is far stronger than nature, and there is
no doubt the deficiencies in national character may be repaired by
discipline. The highest teaching of a people is to accustom them to have a
strict regard for the rights of others, to be prudent and temperate in
action, and to regard the whole nation as members of a common household.
To make our people politically free, yet leave them bond-slaves of some
debasing social system like that which crowds the mines and factories of
England with squalid victims, or make the artisans of France so often
godless scoffers, would be a poor result of all Ireland's labours and
sacrifices.

Liberty will do much for a nation, but it will not do everything. Among a
people who do not know and reverence their own ancestors, who do not
submit cheerfully to lawful authority, and do not love the eternal
principles of justice, it will do little. But moral sentiments, generous
impulses, religious feelings still survive in the Irish race, and they
give assurance that in that mystic clime on the verge of the Western
Ocean, where the more debasing currents of European civilisation only
reach it at high tide, there is place for a great experiment for humanity.
There within our circling seas we may rear a race in which the fine
qualities of the Celtic family, fortified by the sterner strength of the
North, and disciplined by the Norman genius of Munster may at last have
fair play; where, at lowest a pious and gallant race may after long
struggles and nameless sufferings possess their own soil and their own
souls in peace.

Let me say, though I have said it more than once before, that the Celts
are among the most teachable of races. The drill, the jacket, the
discipline, transform an Irish peasant into a sub-constable with almost as
military a carriage, and as expert an eye and hand as a veteran of the
Peninsula. A few years in a National School, and the boy who emerged from
a smoky and squalid cabin, shared with a pig, is turned into a clean and
shapely youth, fit to wrestle with the world, and perhaps to win the
match. Look at a railway porter, or a railway policeman--the decent
uniform and the punctual system soon make a new man of the peasant. An
English priest in Paris, with little prejudice in favour of our race,
assured me that no girls crossed the sea who acquire so speedily the
carriage, deportment, and grace which distinguish French women, as girls
from Munster, coming perhaps as servants to some great lady. And this
physical training is a small achievement compared with the result of
discipline on the _intellect_ and _practical power_ of cultivated,
aspiring men. The one multiplies iron, the other multiplies rarest gold of
Ophir. But we have not, I fear, made even a beginning in the practical
education which makes industry prosperous. I lived for a quarter of a
century in Australia, and there rarely came an English ship into the port
of Melbourne that did not bring me letters of introduction with young
Irishmen who hoped to make their home in the new country. Such of them as
it was possible to place in the public service, and that was a limited
number, did their work extremely well. But after I had done all that I
reasonably could do--for I was administering the affairs of a colony where
three-fourths of the inhabitants were English and Scotch, and the
patronage had to be distributed in just relation to the population--an
enormous remnant remained to be provided for. Some of them were as bright,
intelligent young fellows as I ever met in the world, but they were wholly
untrained in any business. They had no profession and no trade; they were
merely nice fellows, and agreeable idle gentlemen. Now what became of them
in the new country, where there was work and pay for everybody who was
willing and able to work, and brought to the public service some capacity
worth paying for? Multitudes of them sank to be waiters in hotels,
barbers, and cabmen. The man who had a trade prospered in a wonderful
manner, the man who had a profession prospered, according to his capacity,
but the man who was ready "to do anything" generally found nothing to do.

It has been asked scornfully what we can hope to effect in a little
country with diminishing population and limited resources? Ought not some
Irish student to teach our people that it is not great states like those
which the greed of conquerors has aggregated, but states scarcely larger
than an Irish province which have done the most memorable work for
humanity and civilisation? The achievements in arts, arms, science, and
discovery, and in the art of government of the Greek Republics, of the
Italian Republics, of the trampled provinces of Spain in the Low
Countries, of the little rib taken out of the side of Spain, and called
Portugal, how emphatically they teach the lesson that it is not by the
quantity but by the quality of their men that states are glorified! A
little book which told this great story would be a boon to our people.

It would be presumptuous to name the books which ought to be published in
such an enterprise, but we may profitably consider the class and character
to be preferred.

Big books of history are only for students, they are never read by the
people. But they will read picturesque biographies, which are history
individualised, or vivid sketches of memorable eras, which are history
vitalised. A dozen lives of representative Irishmen would teach more of
the training and growth of Ireland than a library of annals and State
papers. They would familiarise us with great men, whom the Celt loves
better than systems or policies. This is the class of books in which we
are most deficient; there is no memoir of Roger O'Moore, none of Luke
Wadding, none of Patrick Sarsfield, none of a man as fertile in intellect,
as firm in judgment as any of these, a man whom some of us have seen in
the flesh, the wise and fearless J. K. L. Mr. Fitzpatrick has collected
his letters and literary remains with commendable care, it only needs that
some sympathetic student should ponder over them till the electric spark
is kindled, that a new figure may be given to our imagination for ever.
The first great poet who sang the wrongs of Ireland with civilised Europe
for an audience, has never had an adequate memoir. He has been singularly
unfortunate in his biographer; Lord John Russell discharged on the public
several cart-loads of undigested diaries as "The Memoirs and Journals of
Thomas Moore." They are of little use to anybody at present, but a skilful
literary workman, or a chemist of the intellect, could extract a
delightful little volume from the chaotic mass.

How profitable it would be if the best men of this time would contribute
each of them a study to a gallery of representative Irishmen! We are
accustomed to say, with not unjust reproach, that England knows little of
our country; but, alas! my friends, we Irishmen know too little of it
ourselves. 'Tis a great possession given to us by a gracious God, which we
do not take adequate pains to comprehend; and the philosopher has declared
with profound truth that men only possess what they understand.

And we want works reproduced which have disappeared out of circulation.
The hundred best Irish books have been skilfully discussed in the
newspapers, but the young student soon discovers that half of the hundred
are out of print, or locked up in costly editions. Fifty pounds would not
purchase the volumes recommended. But it would not be impossible to
produce a library containing these very books, or a collection varied by
admitting some books more pertinent to our present wants, for fifty
shillings, to be paid over a period of three or four years--an expenditure
which would be burthensome to few Irishmen accustomed to read.

How are the good books to be circulated effectually? I have always
insisted, and I do now emphatically insist that if this thing is to be
well done the young men of Irish birth at home and abroad must regard it
as their work, and be determined it shall succeed. They must supply
canvassers in every centre of Irish feeling in Ireland, England, Scotland,
America, and Australia. And where the young men are still struggling for a
foothold in the world, the work ought not to be made burthensome to them,
but reproductive. There exists in America a system of canvassing agents by
which books are brought to the remotest farmhouses, and the canvassers
paid a reasonable compensation. Ought we not to imitate this method in our
enterprise?

It will be our duty to see that the literary labourers also shall be
fairly paid, for they are commonly neither a sordid nor even a provident
race. It will be a labour of love to them to feed the mind of their
country, as it has been a labour of love to the men of their class
everywhere. Who can read without a glow of sympathy how the struggling
Scotch farmer and exciseman who gave immortal songs to Scotland, refused
pecuniary reward for a work which he desired to be one of pure
patriotism; or how the indigent French poet, living contentedly in an
humble Pension in the Champs Elysees, on an annuity from his publisher,
declined a seat in the Chamber of Deputies from the Republic which he had
done so much to make possible, and still more emphatically declined all
aid or recognition from the Bonaparte family, to whose cause he had
recalled the French nation by splendid but too indiscriminate panegyrics
on its founder; or how our own national poet, who alone in modern times is
fit to be named with the other two as a writer of songs that will live for
ever, rejected in turn a national tribute, a seat in Parliament, and the
assistance of opulent friends under unexpected calamity--Moore, like Burns
and Beranger, being determined that the purity of his devotion to his
country should run no risk of being misunderstood?

Wherever there is an Irish bookseller, at home or in the two new worlds,
who has taken an intelligent, not merely a sordid interest in his
business, he is the natural agent of this design; and in the many
districts where there is no bookseller at present a _quasi_ bookseller
might be created. If the popular journals in Dublin encourage their agents
to act on behalf of the enterprize, a solid body of retail dealers would
be at once available. I have spoken only of Irish readers, our duty begins
with them, but it does not end with them. Ireland has many friends in
England, and good books have friends everywhere. The volumes of such a
Library ought to be found on the bookstalls from Liverpool to Edinburgh,
they ought to be proffered to the passengers by the great transatlantic
routes, and to the eager crowd of purchasers who throng the book arcades
of Melbourne and Sydney. Can all this be done? Who will be our Minister of
Public Instruction, to organise it and set it in motion? If there be such
a one, I think I see here many who will be his willing associates and
assistants. For one old man who can only hope to see the good work fairly
begun, I can promise that whatever he can do with his moderate resources
to help it in money, or with his waning powers to help it with cordial
co-operation, shall not be wanting.

If we can revive the love of noble books among our people, that is a
result which standing alone is worth striving for. To love noble books is
to share with statesmen and philosophers the pleasure on which they set
the highest price. Time has made trite and commonplace the great saying of
Fénélon, "If the crowns of Europe were laid at my feet in exchange for
books and the love of reading, I would spurn them all." Our own Goldsmith
declares that taking up a new book worth reading is like making a new
friend; a friend from whom we will never be separated by any of the
melancholy mischances on which human friendships are so often wrecked. But
good books will do more than this--they will awaken all that is best in
our nature, and teach us to live worthier lives. They will do for us what
we rarely permit the closest friend to do--they will teach us our faults
and how to amend them. What they might do, not for the individual, but for
the nation, I dare not predict--the possibilities are so prodigious. One
of the keenest intellects of the eighteenth century declared that the
world was ruled by books. What, think you, has most profoundly altered the
condition of the world in the last hundred years? Kings, statesmen,
conquerors? Not so; an armful of books, about as many as a schoolboy
carries in his satchel. The result of these books was not always
beneficent, but it was always immense. The war of arms and of diplomacy
which England carried on against the French Republic and the French Empire
for a dozen years, and which left us the National Debt as a memorial, took
its first impulse from a little book written by Edmund Burke. The
Revolution which it combatted was as certainly the fruit of other books.
The declaration of Irish independence pronounced by the Convention at
Dunganon, and confirmed by the parliament in College Green, simply
formulated the doctrine of a little volume by Molyneux which the House of
Commons at Westminster had caused to be burned by the common hangman. All
that has been done in later days for Free Trade and unrestricted
competition, for the self-government of Colonies, and the education of the
people, was first taught in the treatise of an Edinburgh professor; a book
which has influenced the current of thought and legislation in the British
Empire, and far beyond it, more than any other book written since the
invention of printing.[1] The desire to unfetter the negro which
culminated in the decrees of Abraham Lincoln and the victories of Ulysses
Grant began in a work of genius written by a woman and read by the whole
civilized world. The successive despots expelled during the last sixty
years by the French people, from Charles the Tenth to Napoleon the Third,
were driven out less at the point of the bayonet than at the point of the
pen. The social changes wrought by books in the same era we would,
perhaps, relinquish less willingly than any of these political gains. The
humanising of English law long steeped in blood and tears, is less
attributable to bench and bar than to the books of Jeremy Bentham. If the
Court of Chancery is no longer the patron and factor of dilapidated
edifices and ruined fortunes, if the Dotheboys halls of Yorkshire are shut
up, is it not chiefly to a couple of novels by Charles Dickens we owe
these salutary changes? One little volume written by a woman, critics
assure us, routed filth and laziness out of the farmhouses of Scotland. It
was the novelist Charles Reade who made Englishmen ashamed of the
murderous silent system in prisons, and it was he and another novelist who
put an end (for I hope the end has come) to the shameful abuses of private
lunatic asylums. And it was only the other day that, by a little domestic
story, Walter Besant, with the magic wand of art, raised a Palace of
Delight, where the labouring poor find refreshment and culture in the
dreary desert of East London--so fertilising and fruitful are good books.

Our books may not achieve any of these marvels, but there are results not
beyond their reach. England holds the sympathies of all the communities
which share her blood, less by obeying the same laws than by loving the
same books. And if we do not fail in our task the volumes of the Irish
Library will be read by the Irish settler in Canada, the Irish digger in
California and Australia, our missionaries and soldiers in India, the
adventurous pioneer in Africa, the exile far away in Florida, in Michigan,
in Egypt, or in Siam, with more love and enthusiasm than even in the
homesteads of Leinster and Munster.


BOOKS FOR THE IRISH PEOPLE.

It is nearly a year since I opened to this Society the design of inducing
young Irishmen of the present generation to take up anew a task which
famine and political disaster interrupted among their predecessors--the
task of teaching the Irish people to understand their own country. The
Irish people have never ceased to love their country, they have never
shrunk from any labour or sacrifice to serve her, but they do not
understand Ireland as the Swiss understand Switzerland; as the Flemings
understand the sandbank which their industry has turned into a model farm;
or as the Venetians understand the primitive quagmire which Italian genius
transformed into one of the wonders of the world.

A year may seem a long time to have employed in preliminary arrangements;
but it was not wasted. There were many difficulties to overcome and they
have been overcome. We are now in a position to announce that our first
volume is printed, and ready to be issued, that the second volume is in
the printer's hands, and successive volumes for more than a year are in
preparation. I may mention that the original design of acting through a
Limited Liability Company was abandoned in favour of a better plan; a
successful and experienced publisher, Mr. Fisher Unwin, takes the
responsibility of producing the books, leaving the men of letters to the
task for which they are fitter, that of devising and writing them.

The new Irish Library will be offered to all who desire to welcome it, in
New York and Melbourne and the continents to which they belong, as well as
in Dublin and London; and we hope by an organised system of colportage to
carry the books to many districts where there are no regular booksellers
at present, or no market for Irish books.

When I say we do not understand Ireland, I do not mean merely that we are
imperfectly acquainted with its history, its literature, its art, and its
memorable men; but which of us studies Irish statistics till he
understands them as he does a current account with a tradesman or a
banker? Which of us studies the topography, the political and commercial
geography, the botany, the geology, the resources and deficiencies of the
country so as to qualify him to handle its interests, in a parish or a
parliament, if that task should present itself?

The prosperous wiseacre whom the Germans call a Philistine, and the French
an _épicier_, will tell you that study does not pay. But that respectable
citizen may be assured that whatever he values most in his narrow life,
whatever adds to its comfort and convenience, whatever simplifies and
facilitates his beloved trade (of which steam and electricity are the
nerves and sinews) is nothing else than the remote result of some
student's midnight toil. The garments he wears, the furniture of his trim
home, not less than the laws which protect his life and the customs which
render it easy and pleasant, even the ideas grown commonplace by time
which he daily thinks he is thinking, were discovered, invented, or
brought from regions more civilised, by men whose toil he undervalues; and
if all he owes to study and the intellectual enterprise it begets were
snatched away, his home would be almost as naked as the Redman's wigwam.
But if the man of business be moreover a man of meditation and culture, he
and his class are among the most indispensable forces of a nation, for it
is such men who turn the student's airy speculation into accomplished
fact.

Of all studies that one which a nation can least safely dispense with is a
study of its own history. Some one has invented the audacious axiom that
history never repeats itself, but it would be truer to affirm that history
is always repeating itself; assuredly in our own history identical
weaknesses and identical virtues recur from generation to generation, and
to know them may teach us where weak places in national and individual
character need to be fortified and strong ones developed.

Of politics, if it were only the politics of a parish, what can we know
worth knowing unless the lamp of history lights the misty way? And the
great problem of all--for what special career do the gifts and
deficiencies of our race, their position on the globe, their past and
their present career best fit them?--only a familiarity with their annals
will enable any one to say.

Another use of historical study is to enable us to vindicate our race from
unjust aspersions. This is no sentimental gain, but one eminently
practical; Ireland and Irishmen suffer wrong from systematic
misrepresentation, which only better knowledge will cure. Which of us has
not heard mimics of Macaulay disparaging the Irish Parliament of James II.
as a disgrace to civilisation, or Mr. Froude's gloomy devotees lift their
hands in horror at the Rising of 1641? We purpose to face these calumnies.
In the first volume of our series, Thomas Davis, reprinting the principal
Acts of James' Parliament, criticises them in careful detail, and finds
them for the most part just, moderate, and generous. Whoever takes up the
story of 1641, in the same judicial spirit cannot fail to pronounce that
though in the end barbarities were committed on both sides of that
struggle, according to the evil habit of the age throughout Europe, the
original design of the old inhabitants to repossess themselves of lands
taken from them by fraud and violence a generation earlier, was a design
which the twelve apostles might have sanctioned. I read quite recently,
with a good deal of surprise, a new reproach to Irishmen, derived from the
history of the last century. It was not Celts, we are told, but Normans
and Saxons, who served the Empire with distinction a century ago in peace
and war. Marvellous fact, indeed, that the Catholic Celt did not
distinguish himself as a statesman or a general when he was peremptorily
shut out by law from the Senate and the Council of War, and that he did
not make scientific and practical discoveries when he was deliberately
denied education. But history will teach us that wherever there was an
open door, as on the Continent and in the New World beyond the Atlantic,
and in later times in all the Colonies of the Empire, the Celt has done
notable work, and never in a solitary instance been unfaithful to the
trust so tardily and so reluctantly confided to him. These mordant critics
would exalt the men of English descent by disparaging the men of Celtic
breed, but in vain. We regard all Irishmen who love their country,
whatever be their creed or pedigree, as equally our countrymen. We
rejoice in the splendid record of success in arms, arts, literature, and
diplomacy which the Irish minority can exhibit; we acknowledge thankfully
that wherever the rank of native patriots became thin or broken, men of
the other race leaped into their perilous places; and we cannot look on
the noble edifices which adorn the Irish capital, two of them not excelled
by the Palace of Legislation or the Palace of Commerce in any capital of
Europe, without thankfully remembering how much our country owes to the
cultivated genius of the minority. If the races who inhabit these islands
are ever to understand and honour each other, it must be on condition of
comprehending the past, not hiding it away; and history is the reservoir
from which such knowledge is drawn.

I know no civilised country, except Ireland, whose history is not familiar
to its people. In England you encounter English history everywhere; in
literature, in art, on the stage, and even in the pulpit. In France, not
merely endless books, but museums and picture galleries are devoted to the
illustration of French history. In the United States the schoolboy is
taught the principles of the American constitution as part of the regular
curriculum. Even in Australia its brief history of a single century has
been made a school-book in State schools; but in Ireland the national
history is never named in the schools called national, and that it may be
known volunteers must attempt the task which the State has neglected and
forbidden.

If the statesman gladly acknowledges that such intellectual discipline
makes men better citizens, the moralist rejoices to know that it makes
them better men. I can confidently affirm, for I have seen the prodigy
wrought, that strenuous self-discipline, with love of country for its
inspiration, burns up the grosser sentiments in young men, and teaches
them that life has happier as well as nobler pursuits than
self-indulgence; teaches them to abjure sensual and slavish vices, and
warm their souls with the divine flame of patriotism. An Irish poet has
named the teacher "God's second priest," and a great ecclesiastic, who was
also a wise guide in mundane affairs, the illustrious J. K. L. declared
more than half a century ago that religion could not dispense with this
potent auxiliary.

     "Religion herself," he said, "loses her beauty and influence when not
     attended by education; and her power, splendour, and majesty are
     never so exalted as when cultivated genius and refined taste become
     her heralds and her handmaids. Many have become fools for Christ, and
     by their simplicity and piety have exalted the glory of the Cross;
     but Paul, not John, was the Apostle of the Nations; and doctors, even
     more than prophets, have been sent to declare the truth before kings
     and princes, and the nations of the earth."

One of the worst defects in our course of discipline in and out of school
(for a young man gives himself his most effectual education after he has
escaped from the hands of the schoolmaster) is that it is rarely
practical. We learn little thoroughly, and little of a useful and
reproductive character, and we commonly pay the penalty in a lower place
in the world. As far as I am able to judge Scotsmen are not gifted by
nature with qualities superior to those of Irishmen, but in more than one
country I have seen Irishmen performing some of the roughest and most
menial offices in gangs directed by Scotch overseers. And why? No
intelligent man has any doubt of the cause. For nearly two centuries
Scotland has had excellent parish schools, where the children of the
industrious population get a practical and religious education at the
cost of the State. In Dublin I have seen two of the most national
institutions in the country, a great Irish journal and a great Irish
publishing house, managed by Scotsmen. Again why? For no intelligible
reason except that the Scotch boy is taught mathematics and trained early
in business. This defect, like so many of our shortcomings, has an origin
which we must search for in history. Till 1833 there were no public
schools in Ireland which were not openly designed to proselytise the
people, and since there have been neutral schools, the principal condition
of their existence has been the exclusion from their teaching of the
history and religion of the people. I remember Mr. Bright saying to me
during some temporary repulse of the North in the American Civil War: "Be
assured the end is not at all doubtful; the States which have had three
generations of solid education must win against a mob of arrogant
self-indulgent slave-drivers." I felt bitterly that the converse of the
axiom might be applied to our own country. And if we look into the matter
the happiness and independence of nations seem everywhere to bear a
strict proportion to their moral and intellectual training. Switzerland
spends as much money on education as on soldiers and their costly
equipment; Denmark half as much, and Belgium about a third, and these are
all prosperous and contented little States. But the great empires which
clutch territory and ignore men, spend prodigally on their armies and
parsimoniously on their people. In Prussia education obtains scarcely a
fifth of the amount lavished on preparations for war; in England only
one-sixth the amount; in Italy less than a tenth; and in Russia a hundred
pounds are squandered on turning peasants into soldiers for every twenty
shillings spent on making the peasants fitter to perform their duties in
the world. For my part I would rather see our people developed according
to their special gifts than see them masters of limitless territory or
inexhaustible gold reefs. A Celtic people trained to become all that their
nature fits them to be--humane, joyous, and generous, living diligent,
tranquil lives in their own land, and sending out from time to time, as of
old, men whose gifts and faculties fitted them to become benefactors of
mankind--that is the destiny I desire for my country. None of us can be
ignorant of the fact that a change has come over the national character in
latter times which is not altogether a change for the better. The people
are more alert and resolute than of old, and that is well; but they are
more gloomy and resentful, and something of the piety and simplicity of
old seems to have disappeared. Nature made them blithe, frank, and
hospitable; pleasant comrades and trusty friends; but hard laws and hard
taskmasters have sometimes perverted their native disposition. To my
thinking that patient, long-suffering, bitterly wronged people still
preserve fresh and perennial many of the spiritual endowments which are
among the greatest possessions of a nation. But, like soldiers returning
from a long campaign, who bring back something of the manners and _morale_
of the camp, twenty years of agitation, which however just and necessary
was inevitably demoralising, has blunted their moral sensibility. Blessed
be those who will warn them that to be just and considerate towards
friends and opponents, to refrain from cruelty or wrong under any
temptation, and to speak and act and applaud only the rigid truth, are
the practices which make nations honoured and happy.

What writers ought to aim at, who hope to benefit the people, is to fill
up the blanks which an imperfect education, and the fever of a tempestuous
time, have left in their knowledge, so that their lives might become
contented and fruitful. Let me take an instance--I have sometimes
marvelled that no one has made it his special task to teach the "tenants
at will," who have become proprietors under the Land Purchase Act, what
wonders they may accomplish for themselves and the country. To become
prosperous and independent by systematic industry is not the greatest of
their opportunities; by liberal education and healthy spiritualised lives,
spent on the paternal estate, they may make their sons and daughters types
of whatever is best in the Celtic character. But they have much to learn
and few to teach them. In the United States there is a public department
whose business is to furnish settlers on the public lands with the latest
information on agricultural science, and with a supply of suitable seeds
for new experiments. In the Colonies they are helped also, though less
effectually I think. In Ireland scarcely any one has given them so much as
good advice or good wishes. I hope some one will write in the new Irish
Library a book for this class, describing the _petites cultures_, and the
localised industries of the Continent and the honest outdoor enjoyments
which help to make life happy. Why may these men not realise the dream of
the poet of what Irish farmers, free from feudal bonds, might become?

  "The Happy Land,
  Studded with cheerful homesteads fair to see,
  With garden grace and household symmetry;
  How grand the wide-brow'd peasant's lordly mien
  The matron's smile serene!
                 O happy, happy land!"

I have refrained from specifying books which might be written, and books
which ought to be republished, because a design is fatally discounted by
promising too much at the outset. It is perhaps enough to say that they
must be issued at a price which the people can afford to pay, or they will
not buy them; and they must interest them, or they will not read them,
though they got them for nothing. Although it is an essential basis of the
enterprise to publish books useful to the people, that is not enough. If
you would drive out the impure and atheistical but sensational literature
borrowed from the French, you must replace it by stimulating stories of
our own land: and it will not be safe to neglect poetry, for as a recent
poet sings--

  "Dear to the Gael's the clash of swords,
  And dear the ring of rhyme."

The editors will not print anything which they do not believe useful and
beneficial, but they must not be held responsible for every sentence and
sentiment in books originated, or reprinted, under their direction. A too
rigid strictness might involve an amount of alteration, which would be
fair neither to the author nor the reader, and would be fatal to the
generous and liberal freedom in which alone literature thrives. I will
only add that if the Irish people second our design cordially, the stream
which will now begin to flow shall not soon run dry. But remember that
success depends mainly on you and your compeers. What is the use of
writing books if they are not read and pondered on, and their lessons
taken to heart? Without a sympathetic audience the orator is only a lay
figure, without a sympathetic circle of readers the writer is a wasted
force. We labour for the young men and young women of Ireland, on whom the
future of our race depends; and our hope is that they may respond as
cordially as their predecessors did fifty years ago; that they may aim to
gain a complete knowledge of their own country, and come forth from the
study steeped in Irish memories, proud of Irish traditions, panting with
Irish hopes. Every Irishman, anywhere in the world, who wishes well to our
design, can help it a little; but there is one class whose good wishes are
indispensable. Father Hogan, a professor of Maynooth College, has appealed
to his brethren in the ministry, in language which I prefer to any I could
employ on the subject:--

     "None like the working clergy (he says) can realise the baneful
     effects that are produced by pernicious books, and how fatal to the
     innocence of youth, and to the strength of national as well as of
     personal character, they so often prove. There are none, moreover,
     who have the same responsibility cast upon them to oppose the current
     of evil, and to maintain at the same time the noble and traditional
     generosity of the Church towards literature and men of letters. Our
     denunciations of dangerous books, and especially of light and
     licentious reading, would be justly regarded as mere empty sound were
     we unwilling to lend a helping hand to a movement, the chief object
     of which is to stir up and encourage amongst the young men of Ireland
     a wholesome desire for what is good, and a salutary contempt for what
     is either silly or debased."

There is another class whose help we cannot spare--Irish journalists in
Ireland, England, America, and Australia. They can make our undertaking
known to all who read, and can drop the same thought, as de Tocqueville
says, into a thousand minds at the same moment. They have helped us
hitherto, and they will help us for the future, I make no doubt, as far as
we deserve help, and we are entitled to expect no more.

It will be a pleasant task hereafter, I trust, to remember some of the
dismal predictions which our enterprise had to encounter at the outset.
The black prophets, who believe in no good till it is accomplished, warned
us that we labour in vain, that our population is yearly decreasing, and
is destined to merge in an imperial race, whose voice may be heard
uttering the word of command in the five great divisions of the world, and
that the men who remain are broken by quarrels as old as tradition, and
never likely to end. I would like to conclude with a word on each of these
objections. It is true we are united to a race who dominate huge tracts of
the globe, but I have visited four of the five great divisions in
question, and I can affirm that the word of command is not unfrequently
uttered with an Ulster burr, or an unequivocal Munster brogue. In every
great colony it has been spoken from the _dais_ of authority in the
accents we love. Nay, more, I met officers in the service of France and
Belgium, and some who had served in Austria, indistinguishable from
Frenchmen and Germans in their ordinary conversation, who, when they
strayed into English, became unmistakably Leinster-men or Munster-men, but
none of these Irishmen show the least disposition to merge themselves in
any other race. And the millions of our people in America, are they not
more Irish than the Irish at home? No, there is no danger that we shall
lose our nationality, or weary of labouring for it.

  "The toil for Ireland once begun,
    We never will give o'er,
  Nor own a land on earth but one--
    We're Paddies evermore."

It is too true that our population is still diminishing; generations must
perhaps pass before it regains the maximum it had reached fifty years ago;
but let not that disastrous fact discourage us overmuch. It is not by the
number, but by the intrinsic value of its men and women that a country
becomes powerful and memorable. The true admeasurement, as we may learn
from the inspiring story of small nations, is not geometrical but
metaphysical. Little Athens gave philosophy, literature, and art to
mankind; little Rome imposed her will on all the peoples of the known
world; in modern times little Portugal, with a population which sometimes
fell short of the population of Munster, undertook great enterprises, made
memorable discoveries of new territory, and established in Asia and Africa
settlements, which, after troubled centuries, still survive. The little
Netherlands, with no more men than Portugal, held its own against the
most powerful monarchy in Europe, and planted new Netherlands in distant
countries. Florence almost alone created and fostered the Renaissance
which after desolate ages

       "--------blessed mankind
  With arts anew, and civilised the world."

But these are the commonplaces of history, compared to the story of the
single city of Italy, which, with one arm, "held the golden East in fee,"
and with the other drove back the conquering Turk, bent on the destruction
of Christendom. Or, for an example, that not men but mind is the
conquering force, turn to the barren mountains of Switzerland, where free
institutions were first planted by a handful of husbandmen and hunters,
less than occupy one Irish county, and to-day a federated league of two
and twenty separate republics enjoy substantial prosperity and ideal
liberty, though they muster fewer men than still occupy the two sides of
the Boyne. No; trust me, you have men enough, if they be endowed with the
gifts and disciplined by the culture, which make the destiny of nations.

It would be vain to deny that national quarrels are the most intractable
of our troubles. The Celt is placable and generous in private
transactions, but for public conflicts he has an unsleeping memory. Some
of these quarrels are nearly as old as the Flood. The late Martin Haverty,
who wrote a meritorious history of Ireland, was once discovered by a
friend in a perturbed and angry mood, which he explained by the fact that
he had been reading a record of ill-usage his ancestors sustained from the
invaders. "The slaughter of the Milesians by Strongbow?" queried his
friend. "No," said the historian, "I speak of the slaughter inflicted by
the villanous Milesians on my ancestors the Tuatha De Danaans." No one can
tell with certainty the date of that transaction within a thousand years
or so, and it might perhaps be permitted to rest in peace. There is
another Irish historian and poet, who represents a race to which we have
not yet got altogether reconciled. Our friend, Dr. Sigerson, is as
unmitigated a Dane as the great soldier from whom his name is derived.
When I was last in Dublin I proposed a final burial of national feuds,
ancient and modern, and, as a last victim might be required to consecrate
the transaction, I suggested, that we might execute this last Dane on the
field of Clontarf, where, by some unaccountable mischance, his ancestor
escaped the conquering sword of Bryan. The Doctor offered no objection to
so reasonable a proposal, but suggested that the tramway from Nelson's
Pillar to Clontarf should run quarter-hour trains on the day of execution,
as he wanted a large audience to tell them what they certainly did not
know, that there was a strong Danish contingent in Bryan's Irish army, and
that the Danes, so far from being exterminated at Clontarf, maintained
themselves in Ireland for many generations afterwards, and still
constitute a solid element in our population. Some clement person
suggested that as the sons and daughters of Siger are among the most
gifted patriots in the country just now, it might be discreet to forgive
them offences nearly ten centuries old, but he was pronounced out of
order. I am rejoiced to say a compromise was arrived at in the end, by
which, if the learned doctor will undertake to translate some of the most
characteristic of the Scandanavian sagas for the new Irish Library, and
make us better acquainted generally with the Norse literature, so far as
it relates to Ireland, his punishment may be postponed, and perhaps
altogether remitted. There is another nation with whom our quarrels are
more recent, more bitter, and more prolonged, but it would be genuine
wisdom to make peace with them also if they will let us. The memory of
wrongs which are perpetuated and renewed cannot be forgotten; but, while
no man knows better than I do how just are our complaints and how terrible
the memories they evoke, I affirm that the best Irishmen are prepared
_toto corde_ to forget and forgive the past, if its policy and practices
are never to reappear. The Rules of this Society forbid me to speak of
later quarrels, whether international or internecine; but surely no people
ever were more emphatically exhorted by the circumstances in which they
stand, to close their ranks and end their feuds. Our efforts in this
Society will, I trust, contribute to promote that end.

I have spoken only of the revival of literature for the people, for
happily there has never been altogether wanting a literature for the
studious and thoughtful, maintained by the spontaneous zeal of a few
gifted men and women. It slept at times, but only for an interval.
O'Conor and Curry, Miss Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, Banim and Griffin, have
had successors down to our own day when we are still at times delighted
with glowing historic or legendary stories, or charming idylls of the
people, bright and natural as a bunch of shamrocks with the dew of Munster
fresh upon them. One secluded scholar has spent his manhood collecting our
national records with a care and zeal which in any other country would
compel the recognition and reward of the State; a group of scholars not
connected, I think, except by the _camaraderie_ of a kindred pursuit, have
created a great revival in Gaelic literature; and the Irish press has not
for a generation devoted so much thought to native literature and art,
national customs and manners, as it does just now. There are still local
periodicals full of the enthusiasm of old for our national antiquities,
and it is pleasant to know that they are often sustained by men who differ
from the majority in race, creed, and political opinions. I rarely see
without a strong sentiment of affection and sympathy a little sixpenny
magazine conducted for twenty years by the zeal of one solitary priest
who watches like a father over whatever concerns the Irish intellect. It
is good, therefore, to know that we are not sailing against wind and tide.
The spirit of the era, the state of men's minds as well as the manifest
need of such an enterprise are favourable to our experiment, and I trust
it shall not fail by any indolence or apathy of those who have taken the
responsibility of initiating it.

If I were to express in one phrase the aim of this Society, and of kindred
societies, and of the literary revival of which I have been speaking, it
is to begin another deliberate attempt to make of our Celtic people all
they are fit to become--to increase knowledge among them, and lay its
foundations deep and sure; to strengthen their convictions and enlarge
their horizon; and to tend the flame of national pride, which, with
sincerity of purpose and fervour of soul, constitute the motive power of
great enterprises. Intellectual experiments have not in our own day been
unfruitful of results. Early in this century the philosopher Arago
organised a literary propaganda in Paris, before which Louis Philippe in
the end vanished like a spectre. Dr. Newman and a few of his friends in
Oxford attacked the Puritanism of the English Church with results with
which we are all familiar. One or two Westminster reviewers, and two or
three Manchester manufacturers, reversed the commercial policy of England
in less than a dozen years. Do not be deterred by the manifest
difficulties of the task. The task is difficult but noble, for it is
better to have the teaching of a people than the governing of them. Nor
shall such labour lack its fitting reward, for toil and sacrifice in a
generous cause are among the keenest enjoyments given to man.



  _IRISH LITERATURE:_ ITS ORIGIN, ENVIRONMENT, AND INFLUENCE.

  BY GEORGE SIGERSON, M.D., M.Ch., &c.,

  FELLOW OF THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND.
  CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE SOCIETIES OF ANTHROPOLOGY,
  CLINIC, AND PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF PARIS, &c., &c.



IRISH LITERATURE: ITS ORIGIN, ENVIRONMENT, & INFLUENCE.[2]


Two worlds commemorate that great adventure of Columbus, who, four
centuries ago, after tragic effort, sailed forth from Huelva, and at last
found the fringe of a new continent. He opened its gates to the kingdoms
of Europe, but that vast region had been ages before discovered by the
ships of the daring sea-kings who gave it the name of "Great Ireland"--a
prophetic name.

These men we know; Brendan and Cabot, too, we know; but who shall tell of
him who first, setting his prow against the western sunlight, drove into
the dark mists of the Unknown, and discovered Ireland? Forgotten are his
name and race, forgotten his struggles, who must have been his own king,
counsellor, and guard, in an adventure greater by far, in comparison, than
that of the Genoese. But these things we can tell of the primeval
colonists of our land. When the great migrations of mankind streamed over
Europe, in many branching currents, those were not the least valorous who
went first and farthest. When the Northern Ocean and the Atlantic billows
set bounds to their travel, those must have been amongst the bravest of
heart, the most skilled of hand, and the most aspiring of mind, who
shaped, stored, equipped, and manned the boats that were launched upon
these strange seas to confront all terrors. And it may be a comfort to
know, in view of prevalent hypotheses, that the stock of the Anthropoids
never went through evolutions in this country. Whatever may have happened
elsewhere, the beings who first leaped upon our shores must have been
among the foremost in the developed attributes of manhood.

These isles were to the ancients what America has been to modern Europe,
and more. The apparent course of the sun seemed an invitation, and
ever-flying hope showed, in the splendour of its setting, the glories of
the Hesperides. When Pytheas of Massilia saw the Teutons in the region of
the Elbe, he rejected the view that they had migrated, in favour of the
theory that they were autochthonoi, or products of the place, for it was
inconceivable that so dreary a territory could attract rational beings. It
was otherwise as regards Ireland. The rumour of its fairness seems to have
reached Homer; to this verdant isle of Ogygia Ulysses came, and here
Calypso welcomed and wailed him.

The land must have appeared very beautiful to those first comers who had
traversed the desolate wastes and shaggy forests of the continent, but its
aspect was not altogether that of to-day. Green pastures there were, where
the wild deer browsed, and a wonderful profusion of flowers, and mountain
moors that seemed mantled in purple and gold. But there were also the
mysteries of dark forests of sombre yew, balsamic pine, and immemorial
oak, where lurked the fierce wild bull, lean wolf, and other foes of life,
now like them extinct. We dwell above their remains, for the Book of
Nature is a palimpsest where the record of a new life is written over the
dead letter of the old.

Men coming to a new home bring with them a stock of ideas, some ancestral,
some acquired on the way. They obtain others from the suggestions of their
surroundings after arrival. In the excitement of change, in the presence
of novel phenomena and new experience, the eye is made keen, the senses
are quickened, and the brain is stimulated to the utmost. The rapid
climatic variations of their insular abode must have affected those
accustomed to more constant continental atmospheres. The earliest remnants
of our literature reveal a people who were--or as, I think, who had become
in these conditions--very sensitive to the things of nature, to whom fair
objects of heaven and earth gave joy, and whose exalted imagination saw
mystery in new phenomena. These (common things to us) contradicted their
experience, and the unknown causes were identified with unseen beings.
What wonder if sudden gusts unaccountable, light twirling eddies, mists
marching through ravines and gorges, should mask the invisible powers! Man
was face to face with nature, vibrating with every change, affected by
every influence. His weapons had a secret life within, and the shield of
the champion sounded when one of the Three Waves of Erin rose roaring in
foam.

The aspect of the living waters was ever present, in the surging seas, the
full rivers in all the plains, the liquid voice of streams in every glen,
and the silent, mystical lakes among the mountains. Sometimes the waters
were troubled, and they saw therein the struggles of gigantic
serpents--ancestral memories of extinct animals, or reminiscences of
experience in other regions. Sometimes the waters sank, or, suddenly
rushing up, overwhelmed the abodes of men, owing, they fancied, to some
pledge broken to the invisible deities. These strange phenomena, which
have given cause for so many weird legends, I have correlated with those
that precede or accompany earthquake action. It has seemed to me probable
that there were, of old, beyond our western coasts, islands, which, owing
to the same seismical cause, have sunk beneath the ocean level. The memory
of their existence, and the fact of their absence, might well give rise
to those strange and beautiful traditions of the Lands of Youth, of Life,
of Virtues--their mystical appearance and disappearance--which for ages
inspired the imagination of the poets. When successive waves of invaders
had flowed over the land, the earliest--driven into the woods, mountains,
and remote isles--assumed mythical proportions in the minds of the later
comers, and, in the haze of knowledge, the land and all its far islands
became peopled with a population of phantoms.

That is the cloud-background of our history, the despair of arid
annalists, which contains the Nibelungen treasure of our ancient
literature. We do not look there for precise date, but for the
lightning-flash of ideas in the darkness of the dawn. It was the Heroic
Age of Ireland, when, as in Greece and Rome, all was gigantic, Titanic, or
divine. On the mountain peaks of time man saw his own image in the midst
of clouds, like the spectres of the Brocken, exaggerated, majestic and
terrible. In such conditions the towers of Ilion rose, Hector and Achilles
fought, and Olympus helped the fray. Hence the Epic which has thrilled the
world, and which, long ages later, broke the chains of the Turk, and made
Greece a nation. That Epic stands alone, nor should we desire to have
ideas cast in the same mould. Such desire is the defect of stereotyped
thought, which does not understand that to have something diverse and
original is to possess a treasure. Our ancient literature must be judged
by itself, on its intrinsic merits as the articulate expression of
independent humanity. If a standard is required, let it be compared with
the non-classic literatures of the western world, and it will be found to
rise tall and fair above them, like an Alpine peak which has caught the
morning light whilst darkness reigns below.

It is certain that intellectual cultivation existed in Ireland long before
the coming of St. Patrick. We have the laws at the revision of which he
assisted, and I assert that, speaking biologically, such laws could not
emanate from any race whose brains had not been subject to the quickening
influences of education for many generations. Granting even that
Christianity came before his day, there are yet abounding proofs that our
ancient literature arose in pre-Christian days, so closely do its antique
characters cling to it. Unquestionably no nation ever so revered its men
of learning. They rewarded that reverence by giving immortal life to its
heroes, and by winning for that people the respect of modern scholarship.
I wish I could say of modern Ireland. But our people, generally, drink no
more at the high head-fountains of their island-thought. This is one of
the greatest losses which can befall a nation, for it loses thus its
birthright, that central core of ideas round which new ideas would develop
naturally, grow and flourish, as they never can on alien soil. There is a
tone of sincerity in the ancient narratives which cannot exist in imported
thought, and we are apt to lose inspiring examples of manful striving,
loyal comradeship, truthful lives, chivalric courtesy, and great-minded
heroism. It is true that so we escape some crude conceptions and
improbable wonders. But, as in the physical order, each man seems to pass
through various phases of racial development, so the individual in youth
has tastes similar to those manifested by the race in its youth. Every
people has at first its ideals, simple, sincere, and great, mingled with
myths that stimulate the imagination. Every young generation has similar
wants, and will seek to satisfy them, if not here, then elsewhere, in a
literature that debases the germing ideals, dwarfs the mind, and soils the
imagination.

With roots deep struck in the soil, the literature of the Irish Gael and
commingled races grew vigorously from its own stock and threw out
luxuriant branches and fair blooms. From the first, it exhibited
characters peculiarly its own. But these were not what are considered
Irish, in latter days: and here let me say that I am taken with dismay
when I find some of my patriotic young friends deciding what is and what
is not the Irish style in prose and the Irish note in poetry. We all know
what is meant. But it is scarcely too much to say that you may search
through all the Gaelic literature of the nation, and find many styles, but
not this. If it ever existed, it existed outside of our classic
literature, in a rustic or plebeian dialect. It must be counted, but to
make it exclusive would be to impose fatal fetters on literary expression.
As in other countries, there were not one but many styles, differing with
the subject, the writer, and the age. At one period, we shall find works
characterised by curt, clear and ringing sentences; at another the phrase
moves embarrassed by its own luxuriance.

Still more remote from the popular notion, and far more emphatic, are the
characteristics of Irish Gaelic versification of which there were many
kinds. I shall give a summary of the rules which govern the formation of
one species only, the _Dan direach_, or Direct Metre, of which, however,
there are several varieties:

1. The lines must have a certain number of syllables.

2. There must be four lines in each quatrain of two couplets. The sense
may be complete in the couplet, but must be complete in the quatrain.

3. Concord must be observed; _i.e._, two words (not being prepositions or
particles) in each line must begin with a vowel or with the same
consonant. If these alliterated words be the last two, the concord is
perfect, if not, it is an improper concord. The third and last lines must
have perfect concord.

4. Correspondence must be observed. The bards grouped the consonants into
five classes, according to the characters of the sound. Perfect
correspondence demanded that the end words in two lines should agree in
possessing letters of the same class. [This may sometimes result in what
we call rhyme.] If only the vowels rhyme, whilst the consonants are
disregarded, then this is termed imperfect concordance.

5. Termination required the final word of each couplet to be one syllable
longer than the final word in the preceding line.

6. Union is another essential. Similar to correspondence, in some
respects, the same vowels need not be repeated--it suffices that they
belong to the same class; the final word of one line chimes with a central
word in the next.

There are other rules besides, but these are surely enough to prove that
classic Irish verse was an extremely elaborate affair. It would be
impossible to adapt the English language to verse so intricate. Its
existence betrayed a highly refined development of the organs of speech
and of hearing, which latter is what we should expect from the musical
taste and skill of the race. From such rules, we can readily understand
that the bardic corporation was competent to carry this refinement of
technic, and to develop an intricacy of meaning to such a degree, that
the outer world required an explanation. Some of the poems of Seancan
Torpeist, in the seventh century, were quite as unintelligible as the most
obscure of Browning's, but, unlike Browning, he was always able to
translate them to a puzzled prince. Poets seemed to have a natural
tendency in the direction of over-elaboration; they had been judges until
they developed technicalities and an artificial law language, so that
neither suitors nor audience could understand them. Then the princes
interposed, adding laymen to the court. With their poetic tongue there was
no interference, until it had been unduly exercised in oppressing the
chiefs.

Now, if we examine the mechanism of any of these elaborate verses, we
shall perceive that it contains a lesson greater than has been hitherto
noticed. Open the Book of Kells and look at one of the initial letters,
with its wonderful intricacy of interwoven lines, its exquisite grace of
form, and marvellous delicacy of tint. The first glance shows it to be a
beautiful work of art, and at once we recognise that it must have been
produced by men whose minds, eyes, and hands had been cultivated to the
highest degree. It is not the product of the training and refining of an
individual or of a generation, but of a series of successive individuals
in many generations. Than some of these initial letters nothing of the
kind seems to have ever been made so beautiful before, nor anything since.
Thus human skill in particular departments may ascend progressively till
it reach its zenith and then gradually decline. Mankind acquires, but
loses also; its advance in one direction may mean retreat in another. And
as works such as these are indices to the development of refinement, and
to the co-operation of certain qualities and senses in man, these also
must have their time of rise and fall.

Now the form-and-colour picture presented by one of these fine initials
is, in another department, the sound-picture presented by Gaelic verse. A
little examination shows that, besides possessing the sounds we recognise,
and those which other Europeans nations have noticed, the ancient Irish
composers noted, identified and employed other and more subtle shades of
sound. Consider this question for a moment, for it has a physiological as
well as a literary interest. We all know what the term rhyme now means in
English: the sound-echo of vowels and consonants in two or more terminal
words.[3] It has many charms, but tends to become monotonous in long
poems; hence authors sometimes abandon it completely for blank verse, or,
using it, endeavour to evade the danger of monotony by alternating the
rhyme, carrying over the sense, or varying the length of line. Now this
comes of narrowing the conditions. There is no cause, save custom and
imperfect audition, why only the last vowel and consonant should be
echoed. The ear recognises the echo of the initial letter, or of initial
consonant and vowel, in concord or alliteration. Readers of Spanish dramas
and of Irish street ballads notice also the chime of the accented vowel,
the vowel-rhyme, or _assonante_, although the consonants differ. But the
ancient Irish, in addition to these, had also other varieties, such as the
correspondence between letters of the same class. This avoided the
monotony produced by a reiteration of exactly the same letter, whilst it
repeated the sound with a harmonious variation, and maintained a delicate
airy phantom-chime which must have been delightful to the educated ear.

In connection with this question of sound-echo I have a proposition to put
forward which may well seem startling. Of all the literary possessions of
the human race, the wide world over, nothing now seems to us so constant,
so universal, so eternal as rhyme. Now the fact is that rhyme was quite
unknown to all the dialects of Europe, with one exception, for some
centuries after the Christian era. The Greeks and the Romans wrote much
poetry, but never rhymed it.[4] Their metrical system was elaborate,
satisfactory, and pleasing, but it did not recognise the concordant chime
of syllables. Again, there is no recognition of rhyme, as the term is now
understood, in any of the Gothic dialects previous to the ninth century.

Now, what are we to infer from all this? Here I state my proposition,
which is, that the human ear had not then acquired the power of
distinguishing and taking pleasure in these sound-echoes or repetitions
which we call rhymes. That these would have been adopted, could they have
been discriminated, must be inferred from their quick-extending popularity
when introduced, and their subsequent universal prevalence.

Some years ago, a German professor introduced, and Mr. Gladstone, with the
characteristic vigour of his many-sided mind, supported the theory that
primitive man was partially colour-blind, that he could not discriminate
well between differing hues. Many passages from the classic authors were
adduced in support of this hypothesis, and the argument is based largely
on the paucity or descriptive incompleteness of the colour-epithets. But,
I venture to think that both these eminent authors would have considered
their case strengthened beyond cavil had there been an entire absence of
colour-epithets. That is my case: there is an entire absence of rhyme from
the classic compositions and from the Gothic dialects, in the early ages,
and therefore we must infer that the producers were deaf to the nice
distinctions of chiming sounds. In other words, they were rhyme-deaf.

Whence, then, came this new faculty with which mankind has been endowed?
There can be no doubt that all the European races, spread as they now are
over the world, are indebted for this great gift, which has quickened,
delighted, elevated, and ennobled them for ages, to the Celts, and
demonstrably to the ancient Irish. That seems a great claim to make--so
great that when an Irishman makes it, one might suppose exaggeration; but
foreign scholarship confesses it in part, and the facts render its
acceptance imperative. In our most ancient poems, such as that assigned to
Lugad, son of Ith (who flourished long before the Christian era), where
the language is archaic, full end-rhymes (of consonants and of vowels) are
found amongst other examples of perfect correspondence.[5]

Granting that the ancient Irish possessed the gift of discerning and
composing rhymes before other European nations, as well as a highly
developed metric machinery, another question may arise. It might be
alleged that, confined apart in an island remote from the Continent,
Irish methods could in no way affect the literature of the central and
southern peoples, whilst as regards the northern, it might be urged that
the Irish had no points of contact with them except where sword met sword.
And for this contention, which, I shall prove erroneous, support may
indeed be found in some of our chroniclers and others who seem to imagine
that fighting, not thinking, is the glory of nations, and so exaggerate
the first and show a practical contempt for the last.

Before entering on that topic, let me add another observation. The earlier
development of auditory power in the ancient Irish, their keen
discrimination of subtle sound-agreements and differences, did not stand
alone. It must have been correlated with a corresponding evolution of the
faculty of articulation, and, as this process went on, language as well as
literature was consequently influenced. Other senses evidently shared in
the development. In those initial letters, already mentioned, there is
overflowing evidence of acute visual perception of colour, whilst
appreciation of grace of outline and form is proved also from the writing
of our oldest manuscripts, the finely wrought implements of metal, and the
admirable shape of some of the flint arrow-heads, fashioned before metal
was supposedly known. Mankind may lose what it has acquired (though not
necessarily the inner aptitude), and with the ancient language is passing
away some of the articulation-gains, as with our ancient civilisation have
disappeared some of the educated powers of eye, and ear, and hand.

It occurs to me that from the mechanism of a people's literature, the
composition of its metric especially, we can deduce conclusions as to the
qualities and capacities in social and governmental matters. Building up
verse may be correlated with the building up of a State, for it is an
index of constructive power. The rhythmical tramp of the hexameter of
Hellas and Rome, and the sustained strength of their great epics,
re-appear in the disciplined tread of phalanx and legion, and the
long-continued control of their rule. In the ancient Irish metric there
was less of the rhythmic tread, and probably, as a consequence, much less
sustained power exhibited, whilst there is a great capacity for detail, a
special aptitude for fine arrangements and nice distinctions. Our ancient
laws and history reveal the existence of great capacity for complex social
mechanism with a minor grasp of dominating and sustained control. The
character of our metric might have changed had the race developed a strong
central authority. In support of this speculation, I think it may be said
that in France and England the classic form, borrowed from Rome, ruled
with autocracy and disappeared with the theory of the right divine. The
Revolution revolutionised poetry as well as politics.

It was a splendid idea of the bards to conjure back Oisin from the land of
Youth, and present him and St. Patrick--types of Paganism and
Christianity--in dramatic debate. The great passionate character of Oisin,
his vivid love of battle and the chase, his generous spirit, his pathetic
regret for lost kin and comrades, with his fiery flashes of revolt,
constitute a creation in literature. No wonder that, even though amplified
and altered in the garb of another language, the great conception left its
impress on a later age. But I cite it here for a special reason, because
it may also be taken as typifying the meeting and interaction of ancient
Irish and Roman literatures. Christianity gave the Irish that cohesive
organisation which their political system lacked, and the great schools
took new vigour and vitality. Their rapid and wide-extended reputation
shows that this must have been a pre-cultured people who could thus throw
themselves so alertly into new study and so quickly conquer fame. The
island became the University of Europe, whither students came from many
foreign lands, and where they were warmly welcomed, supplied with food and
books, and all gratuitously. But never in any land had learning such an
explosive power upon a people as upon the Irish. Elsewhere it merely gave
limited impulses. Here, no sooner had scholars trained themselves in
academic studies than all the old adventurous spirit of the nation
revived, and, ignoring minor ambitions, they swarmed off, like bees from a
full hive, carrying with them the honey of knowledge and the ability to
create other centres that should be celebrated for all times.

They are known to have been the first settlers in Iceland. They penetrated
to Athens, and helped potently to revive or establish the study of Greek
in Europe. Some lines of their influences only may be noticed here, but
these are remarkable. St. Sedulius (Siadal), A.D. 430, introduced from the
Irish the terminal sound-echo or rhyme into Latin verse. This innovation
was made in hymns, and as some of these, on account of their beauty and
style, were adopted and chanted in the Church (as some till this day are
sung), their influence in educating the ear and popularising rhyme over
Christendom was incalculable. Take this example of interwoven echoes:

  "A solis =o=rtus car_dine_, =a=dusque terræ limi_tem_,
  =C=hristum =c=anamus princi_pem_, natum Maria vir_gine_."[6]

Sedulius also produced a work of sustained power in hexameter verse,
consisting of five books of nearly 1,800 lines, entitled Carmen Paschale,
or The Paschal Song. It was the first great Christian Epic, and opened the
way for all which came after.

Now, in this great poem, characterised by so much originality and dramatic
power, Sedulius impresses certain marked Irish peculiarities upon the
classic hexameter. Thus, in the following passage, we find not only
examples of "concord" in the alliterated letters, but also of
"correspondence" in the terminal rhymes:

  "Neve quis ignoret, speciem =c=rucis esse =c=_olendam_,
  Quæ Dominum =p=ortavit ovans, ratione, =p=_otenti_
  =Q=uattuor inde plagas =q=uadrati colligit _orbis_.
  Splendidus =a=uctoris de vertice fulget =E=_ous_,
  Occiduo =s=acræ lambuntur =s=idere pl_antæ_
  =A=rcton dextra tenet, medium læva =e=rigit =a=_xem_."

The influence of this remarkable epic, read as it was in all the Irish
(and all the Christian) schools on the Continent and in Britain, must have
been immense. The systematic adoption by its author of rhyme, assonant and
consonant, and of alliteration, must have moulded the forms of subsequent
literary production in all the nascent languages of Europe, north and
south, as it taught them the art of alliteration, of assonant, and of
consonant rhymes.

The influence of St. Brendan was not less vast. If the tale of his voyage
to the West, and his arrival in a land of fair birds and great rivers be
true, he discovered America a thousand years before Columbus. In any case,
this voyage to the Land of the Blessed stimulated the imagination of
generations. It has been termed a prelude to the "Divina Commedia," and,
taken with other mystical visions, which, starting from Ireland,
circulated over the Continent, it doubtless helped to direct the great
genius of Dante. In a similar manner an Irish visionary tale of St.
Patrick's Purgatory, transferred into the Continental languages, gave
origin to one of Calderon's Spanish dramas.

This voyage of Brendan was influential in another direction--in the
discovery of America. Columbus studied the narrative. Hrafn of Limerick,
the Norse voyager, thoroughly knew it, as did others of his nation, such
as Leif and his friends. But there is direct proof of its coercive power.
As you sail into Bristol, you must pass under a high hill which is known
to this day as St. Brendan's Hill.[7] There was a little chapel to St.
Brendan on its summit, because of the reverence which all seamen, whether
Norse, Saxon, or Celt, professed for the sailor-saint. Now, in 1480 two
British merchants equipped two ships to sail to the Isle of Brasylle in
the west of Ireland, but after nine weeks' vain voyaging they put into an
Irish port. The Bristol men (who were largely of Norse blood) were not
discouraged. In 1498, the Spaniard De Ayala informed his sovereign that
for seven years they had every year sent out two, three, or four light
ships in search of the Island of Brazil (_i.e._, the Irish "Hy-Breasail")
and the Seven Cities. The adventure was under the direction of Cabot, the
Genoese, who discovered the northern shore of America a year before
Columbus reached its more inviting isles. Thus, either St. Brendan's
voyage is a fact, and then he was the true First Discoverer; or it is a
fiction, and then it was the direct cause of that discovery. This were a
remarkable result of the power of the imaginative literature of the
ancient Irish. No other people on earth can claim the discovery of a
Continent as the result of a romance.

Whilst some of the early Christians deprecated the study of the pagan
classics, the Irish held large and more liberal views. This was
peculiarly true of St. Columbanus. Authoritative, inflexible, a daring
missionary, his royal mind embraced the wide domain of letters. His
eloquence is confessed. His monastic maxims are described as fit for a
brotherhood of philosophers, whilst his wit is shown in his lighter poems,
his culture in the adoption of old Greek metre, and his Irish training in
the terminal rhymes in the alliteration of many of his verses. The
following show both final rhymes and concordant initials:

  "Dilexerunt =t=enebras =t=etras magis quam l_ucem_,
  =I=mitari contemnunt vitæ =D=ominum =d=_ucem_:
  =V=elut in somnis =r=egnent una hora læt_antur_,
  Sed =æ=terna tormenta =a=dhuc =i=llius par_antur_."[8]

His national characteristics were impressed on the great School of Bobbio,
which he created, in which he died, and whence his influence long radiated
over Italy and the North.

Entering the old Cathedral of Aachen, or Aix-la-Chapelle, you will be
shown the great marble chair in which, cold as the marble, Charlemagne sat
enthroned, sceptre in hand, robed in imperial purple, and with diadem on
brow, dead. So he sate when, a century and a half later, Otho and his
riotous courtiers broke open the vault and stood sobered and appalled
before the majesty of death. On that same chair he sate, in similar
apparel, but with the light of life in his eyes, the new Augustus of a new
Empire, when two Irish wanderers were brought before him. In the streets
of the city in which he hoped to revive the glory of Athens and the
greatness of Rome, they had been heard to cry out: "Whoso wants wisdom,
let him come to us and receive it, for we have it for sale." Their terms
were not onerous--food and raiment. Their claims stood the test. One,
Albinus, was sped to Pavia in Italy; the other, Clement, had the high
honour of superseding the learned Anglo-Saxon Alcuin in the Palatine
school of the Imperial city. Here, he taught the _trivium_ and
_quadrivium_--grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and arithmetic, music,
geometry, and astronomy--the seven arts. In his school sate Charlemagne
under the school-name of David, the members of his family each under an
academic name, and with these the members of the cortége, the Palatins or
Paladins, destined to power and feats of fame. The teaching of the Irish
professors here must have had considerable influence on the literature
(_e.g._, the _Chansons de Geste_) which afterwards took its heroes from
their scholars. Their authority was enhanced by the fact that Charlemagne
himself worked with his Irish professors at a revision of the Gospels on
the Greek and on the Syriac text.[9]

In the crash and chaos which followed soon after his death, when feudal
vassals, strong as their nominal suzerain, lived an isolated war-like life
and forgot letters, in the confusion caused by the shifting about of
nations from the east and north--partly a rebound from imperial
coercion--certain Irish names shine with especial splendour. The first is
that of Johannes Scotus Erigena. Of unquestioned learning, versed in
Greek, he was the founder of Scholastic Philosophy. This affects us still,
for in Scholasticism, as in a forge, the intellect of the Middle Ages was
fired, tempered, and made supple, keen, and trenchant. Hence, with all
its powers awakened and under alert control, it was rendered fit for the
production of the new sciences of modern times. Nor should it be forgotten
that Fearghal the Geometer had but recently died, whose daring scientific
speculations as to the Antipodes had shocked the stiff-minded Saxon
Boniface. Dicuil brought exact science to bear on a cognate subject, in
his work on the measurement of the earth--a work which has been
republished in several foreign countries, but never in his native land.

The multitudes of students who flocked to Paris to hear Erigena, contented
with couches of straw in the Rue de la Fouarre and old halls of the
University, were not the last who invaded it to hear an eloquent Irishman.
Four hundred years later, in the very beginning of the fourteenth century,
another, and perhaps a still more illustrious, representative of Irish
thought, in the person of Duns Scotus the Subtle Doctor, throned it over
the minds of men. So great was his renown that when in 1308 he came to
Cologne the city accorded him a triumphal entry, more splendid than a
king's.

Far, in every sense, from such ovations is that desolate island off the
Scotch coast, where, in the sixth century, "a grey eye turned ever in
vain" towards that Ireland "where the songs of the birds are so sweet,
where the clerks sing like birds, where the young are so gentle, the old
so wise, and the maidens so fair to wed." The exile charges his parting
pupil to bear his blessing, part to Alba, part to Ireland--"seven times
may she be blessed.... My heart is broken in my breast. If death comes to
me suddenly, it will be because of the great love I bear the Gael."

Columba is the first Irish poet of exile--of which our nation has such sad
experience since. His poetry, like his life, is instinct with the deepest
affection for his native land, whilst his work has been the most fruitful
in influence over the intellectual development of Scotland and England.
From the island of Iona, chiefly, went forth that persuasive power which
carried education over Britain. The majority of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms,
all the North of England, where English learning and literature took its
rise, were bathed in an Irish intellectual atmosphere. Caedmon began his
song in this environment, and when later, in the eight century, English
Aldhelm first wrote rhymed Latin verse, it was because he had been a pupil
of the Irishman Mailduff, the first Abbot of Malmesbury.[10]

To speak of literary relations between the Irish and the Norse may provoke
some derision. Were not these the fierce sea-kings the "Danes," whose
delight was in war, and whose avocation in peace was the plunder of
shrines? They were, however, paradoxical enough to build Christ Church,
and to richly endow it. And it is also a curious fact that, previous to
three great invasions of other countries, for which they are severely
blamed, they had been appealingly besought for help by their supposed
victims. Iarl Hacon went to oppose the aggressions of the Emperor Otho;
King Harald Sigurdson to avenge wrongs inflicted by English Harold; and
Iarl Sigurd of the Orkneys (whose mother was an Irishwoman) could not
resist the appeal of Irish beauty in distress--in the person of Queen
Brian Borumha, who was mother of the Norse king of Dublin.

There were, in fact, many and important matrimonial alliances between the
Irish and Norse princes, who often joined forces against foes. This
happened at Clontarf, where the Irish of Leinster had the alliance of the
Dublin and Orkney Norse, whilst Brian brought up the Danes of Limerick.
This battle, let me remark, is described in the literature of both
countries, and in both descriptions there are omens and spiritual beings
such as signalise the epic of Homer. So great was Norse influence over
Ireland that three of our provinces retain the Northern name-endings, and
many a headland and bay has a Norse appellation. They delighted in the
loveliness of the land. Linnæus, in latter days, fell on his knees before
the splendour of a furze-bush in blossom, and we can readily imagine how
tears came into the eyes of the Arctic rovers when they beheld the fresh
green of Ovoca or were dazzled by the crimson and gold of Benn Edair,
which they called Howth.[11] Irish music charmed them, and even now some
of our old airs awake echoes along the norland fiords.[12]

The latest and most distinguished authorities[13] declare that Irish
literature has largely influenced that of the Scandinavians. Their Heroic
Age was much later than ours, from the end of the ninth to the eleventh
centuries, when the ambition of Harold Haarfagre to imitate the imperial
methods of Charlemagne had driven the independent princes to far isles or
foreign voyages. They were in close and continuous contact in peace and
war with the Irish, "whose ancient civilisation was superior and therefore
stronger." Bergen, the old Norse capital, possessed a church dedicated to
St. Columba, and the revered relics of its patron, St. Sunniva, an Irish
maiden! As you sail into Rejkiavik, the capital of Iceland, you pass the
Westman Isles, so-called because of the Irish who had visited and dwelt
there. Now Iceland--that strange attractive island, where cold white snow
covers the hot volcanic heart--is the old home of the Sagas. It had been
first peopled by some Irish monks. Another settlement took place when
Queen Aud--widow of White Olaf, the Norse King of Dublin--went thither on
the death of her son. Norsemen and Irishmen, her kinsfolk and dependents,
accompanied her. Mr. Vigfusson, himself an Icelander, writes with a
generous fairness, characteristic of the race, as follows:

"The bulk of the settlers were men who, at least for one generation, had
dwelt among a Keltic population and undergone an influence which an old
and strongly marked civilisation invariably exercises among those brought
under it--an attraction which in this particular case was of so potent a
kind that centuries later it metamorphosed the Norman knights of the
foremost European kingdom with startling rapidity into Irish chieftains."
"Moreover," he adds, "we find among the emigrants of all ranks men and
women of pure Irish and Scottish blood, as also as many sprung from mixed
marriages, and traces of this crossing survive in the Irish names borne by
some of the foremost characters of the Heroic Age of Iceland, especially
the poets, of whom it is also recorded that they were dark men." He
considers that this close intercourse with the Celts had to do with
heightening and colouring the strong but somewhat prosaic Teuton
imagination into that finer and more artistic spirit manifested in the
Icelandic Saga. The classic land of the Saga was in West Iceland, and
there also the proportion of Irish blood was greatest. On the Norsemen who
still remain there the Irish influence was yet more effective and
powerful. Mr. Vigfusson makes an observation, which is a touching and keen
reproach to those on whom it devolves to publish the manuscript materials
of ancient Irish literature. He writes: "Only when it is possible to judge
fairly of the remains of the Keltic literature of the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh centuries, can any definite conception of the influence it
exerted on Icelandic, Norse, and English literature be properly
estimated."[14]

With the great Sagas, the fame of which has spread abroad as their strong
dramatic character deserves, Northern literature possesses the no less
celebrated Eddas. These Eddic poems "discover an ideal of beauty," writes
Mr. York Powell, "an aerial unearthly fairy world, and a love of nature
which we do not find in the Saga." They also reveal that those who
composed them were familiar with more southern scenes and manners; and the
poems are shown to be the mental offspring of the men "who won Waterford
and Limerick and kinged it in York and East England." "It is well to
remark," he adds, "that among the first poets we have any knowledge of,
the majority are of mixed blood with an Irish ancestress not far back in
the family tree.... Their physical characteristics, dark hair and black
eyes, like Sighvat and Kormack,[15] their reckless passion and wonderful
fluency are also non-Teutonic and speak of their alien descent." In
Bragi's Eddic poem there is a very manifest introduction of a
characteristic Irish rhyme-method.

Thus we have it on unquestionable authority that the noble Norse
literature, which occupies a position of the greatest importance,
dominating as it does the Teutonic world, was itself the offspring, in a
certain sense, of our ancient Irish literature. Irish literary training
and talent presided over and took part in its composition, gave dramatic
vividness to its narrative--grace, method, and myths to its poetry.

With this knowledge in mind you will look with better insight into the
story of the Norsemen in Ireland, and see them, no longer as a cloud of
barbarians, but as brave adventurous knights whose voyages fringed our
seas with a murmur of song, and whose cities, in quiet times, were the
favourite resort of Irishmen skilled in letters and all the arts of peace
and war. "Why should we think of faring home?" sang King Magnus. "My heart
is in Dublin. I shall not return in autumn to the ladies of Nidaros. Youth
makes me love the Irish girl better than myself."

Considering how often and how constantly the prejudice of the ignorant
prevents a good understanding between neighbours, whether these be
individuals or nations, I have sometimes thought of writing a book to be
entitled: "The Good Deeds of our Enemies." Too often do we find writers
stopping at nothing to cover the foe with obloquy. By this they put out
their own eyes and blind our moral sight. Proceeding on a different
principle, I should show enemies, not in their conflicts, but in their
concessions, and the picture would give a truer idea of mankind, for it is
surprising how many kind offices were mutually interchanged between
foemen--even in this very country--who are always represented as savage,
ruthless, and exterminating.

Ireland has been able to act upon the literature of the Continent and of
Britain in three ways: first, directly, next by means of its pupils on
the Continent, and finally by means of the Norse literature. The latter
affected both Britain and Germany, so that the Irish spirit has had a
double influence, be it much or little, upon both. Professor Morley,
indeed, admits that "the story of our literature begins with the Gael";
and pointing out the intermixture of blood, he adds: "But for early
frequent and various contact with the race which in its half barbarous
days invented Oisin's dialogues with St. Patrick, and that quickened
afterwards the Northmen's blood in France and Germany, England would not
have produced a Shakespeare."

Certain it is, I think, that but for the influence of Irish literature,
Shakespeare would not have produced a "Midsummer Night's Dream," "The
Tempest," and "Macbeth." The aerial beings which characterise the first
two plays are like those delightful melodies which Boiëldieu in "La Dame
Blanche," and Flotow in "Marthe" made popular over the Continent, and
which the Irish ear, suddenly attentive, recognises as Irish in spite of
their foreign surroundings.[16]

Teutonic poetry, in certain particulars, appears to have germinated from
the seed which fell from the ripe Irish harvest. The alliteration found in
"Beowulf," the first Anglo-Saxon epic, A.D. 750 (three centuries after
Sedulius), seems a rather crude imitation. Rhyme was introduced into High
German a century later, and this was achieved by Otfried, who had acquired
the gift in that great monastry of St. Gall to which the illustrious
Irishman bequeathed his name, his spirit, and his scholarship, which long
guided his many disciples.

The Nibelungen Lied and the Lay of Gudrun have been called the Iliad and
the Odyssey of Germany. Both, however, have Norse originals. Now, with
respect to the latter it is a remarkable but surely not a surprising
thing, after all we know, that the opening scenes of the lay should be
placed in Ireland. The fierce King of Ireland, Hagen (? Hacon), had a fair
daughter Hilda, and to woo her for their King, Hettel of Denmark, came a
number of daring champions, disguised as merchants. The wooing with music,
which captures the Irish maiden's heart, the flight, pursuit, marriage and
reconcilement, are told with animation. Gudrun, the daughter of Hettel's
Irish wife, is the second heroine of the tale. In the Arthurian Romance of
Tristan and Isolde (as in some others) there are Irish scenes and Irish
characters. Isolde herself has bequeathed Dublin her name in Isolde's
Tower and Chapel-isod. I need but remind you that the Arthurian Romances
gave origin to Tennyson's "Idylls of the King."

The kindred peoples of France and of Spain were naturally not less
influenced than the Teutonic races. The Romans did not give them rhyme;
their own literature had perished; consequently they borrowed from the
islands to which, in Cæsar's time, the continental Druids were sent for
training. Assonant rhyme, found in some Anglo-Norman poems, was common in
the Romance of Oc and all related dialects. "It is clearly the Irish
_Comharda_" (correspondence), writes an English authority, Mr. Guest,
"though not submitted in the Romance dialects to the nice rules which
regulate its assonances in the Gaelic."

Irish literature has received gifts in return: in the old Anglo-Saxon
Mystery Play, found in the Record Office, in the Anglo-Norman Rhyme of
Ross, in the Song of Dermott, and in others unfortunately still
unpublished. Michael of Kildare is supposed to be our first poet in
English, and he is the pioneer-poet of satire in that language.

This postern, which he opened into what has since become the vast empire
of literature in English, gave entrance to many. Spenser came to us,
through it, and, caught by the glamour of the Gael, gave us the "Faërie
Queene," wherein he immortalises some of our scenery and pays tribute to
the ancient renown of our nation:

  "Whilome when Ireland flourished in fame
  Of wealth and goodness far above the rest
  Of all that bear the British Islands name."

It is noteworthy that the great poem, which marked the revival of English
letters after Chaucer, was composed in Ireland. Granting that Spenser
found models in Ariosto and Tasso, yet, if he had remained in London, he
might never have risen above the standard of the Palace-poets. Shakespeare
in London was saved by the drama demanding an environment of popular life.
Probably nothing saved Spenser but his immersion in Irish nature, which
his verse so faithfully reflects. Not only are the material beauties of
our country--mountains, woods, and rivers--mirrored there, but its
spiritual world also. The very name of Una is Irish, and our Puca appears
in trimmed English as "the Pouke," whom Shakespeare again introduces as
Puck, just as our Gaelic Madb becomes "Queen Mab."

But it may be said that Spenser was ignorant of the literature of the
hostile Irish nation, and so could not be influenced by it. The case is
otherwise. When Eudoxus asks: "Have they any art in their compositions, or
bee they anything wittie in or well savoured as poems should be?" Spenser
(as Irenæus) answers: "Yes, truely, I have caused divers of them to be
translated unto me, that I might understand them, and surely they savoured
of sweet wit and good invention, but skilled not of the goodly ornaments
of poetry" (rather these were lost in a prose translation); "they were
sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their naturall device, which gave
good grace and comelinesse unto them."

It is a strange thing to say that Edmund Spenser, who so deprecates their
"rebellious" love of liberty, might well have envied the position and
influence of the Irish poets. At the Queen's Court in England he had
learned "what hell it is in suing long to bide," to "eat the heart in
despair," and all the miseries of dilatory patronage:

  "To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
  To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

In Ireland he saw a different state of things. The poets might almost be
described as the patrons, for theirs it was to distribute praise or
dispraise in poems, "the which," says Spenser, "are held in so high regard
and estimation amongst them that none dare displease them, for feare to
runne into reproach through their offence, and be made infamous in the
mouths of all men."

Their compositions were sung at all feasts and meetings by other persons,
and these also, to his surprise, "receive great rewards and reputation."
Certain it is, though strange, that Edmund Spenser, had he been least bard
in the pettiest principality of Ireland, instead of being the first poet
of the monarch of Great Britain, would not have died of hunger. Neglected
and starving in Westminster, may he not have regretted his political
efforts to destroy the one national organism which above all others had
ever generously encouraged the representatives of literature?[17]

It is a study full of interest to watch the development of the culture of
the Anglo-Irish Pale, and the continuance of that of the Irish nation. In
Latin, their men of learning had long a common language, but the
vernacular was not neglected. In 1600 the literary organisation was still
strong, and its strength was shown in the great Bardic Contention.
Thirty-two years later an assemblage of historians, antiquaries, and monks
was held to collect and collate materials for the great Annals of the
Kingdom. Four years the Four Masters laboured at the work, safe by the far
shore of Donegall, and fortunate it was, for soon after there was no
safety in the "Athens of the West"--the "University of Europe"--for those
of its faithful offspring who loved learning and letters. Teacher and
pupil were banned. In the midst of morasses, forests, or mountain-glens,
they still studied, their bards still sang, and their minstrels played,
often with outposted sentinels on the watch.

What wonder if sadness shadowed the land? But disaster may have some
compensating gifts to noble natures. The true laurel when crushed yields
all its inner fragrance. Deprived of their princes and deposed from their
estate, the bards ceased to be learned in the classic forms of literary
technic; but they became poets of the people. The sincere voice of their
hearts spoke in their song, which is brimful of passionate feeling and
glowing with fair ideals. If in other times they had too often confined
their efforts to the eulogy of particular princes, now it was otherwise.
At the hearths of the people they sang the songs of a Nation.

Perhaps now the first idea of modern nationhood was conceived. Now, at all
events, pathos became a character of Irish literature, distinguishing it
deeply from that counterfeit of late grotesque, the authors of which
resemble those mutilators of men who carved the mockery of laughter upon
the face of grief.

What a subject for a painter would be that meeting between the blind and
hoary bard Carolan, and the young, bright-eyed child Oliver Goldsmith! The
venerable aspect of the ancient Celtic poet he never forgot. "His songs,"
he says, "in general may be compared to those of Pindar; they have
frequently the same flight of imagination." He had composed a concerto
"with such spirit and elegance that it may be compared (for we have it
still) with the finest compositions of Italy." This reminds us of the
time when an enemy, Giraldus Cambrensis, declared that the skill of the
Irish in music "was incomparably superior to that of any other nation."

The meeting of Carolan and Goldsmith may fitly typify the meeting of the
literatures of the old nation and of the Pale--one venerable by age and
glorified by genius, the other young, buoyant, and destined, like it, to
be the guardian and the honour of our common country.

Irish literature is of many blends, not the product of one race but of
several. It resembles the great oriel of some ancient cathedral, an
illumination of many beautiful colours, some of which can never be
reproduced, for the art is lost. We possess an unique treasure in that
ancient literature which grew up from a cultured people, self-centred,
independent of Roman discipline. Were it not for this we should look at
the Northern world through Southern eyes, and, taking our view-point from
the Capitol, see nothing beyond the light of the empire, but wild woods
and wastes made horrid by Cimmerian darkness, and shifting hordes of
quarrelsome barbarians. Yet these were the ancestors of most of the modern
European peoples, and those who so depicted them were their coercive and
uncomprehending foes. Our deliverance from this thraldom of an enemy's
judgment abides in the monuments of the ancient Irish.

The magic password of the Arabian bade the rugged mountain open, and
admitted him to the midst of glittering jewels. The knowledge of our old
literature takes us into the heart of the Cimmerian darkness, and shows it
full of glowing light, it takes us into the homes and minds of one of
those great nations uncomprehended of the Romans, and through that one,
enables us to see the great, passionate, pathetic, wild, and generous
humanity of all.

Thus our ancient literature would be invaluable if for this reason alone,
that it gives a new view-point and a new vista. Its importance is
augmented in this, that its reckless sincerity stands the enduring
evidence of a long-vanished stage of social and intellectual development,
where the fiercer and finer powers, the softer and sterner emotions of an
early mankind strive and commingle with dramatic effect. If such a
deposit were not extant, European scholars might well desire to go as
pilgrims, like the bereaved bards, to the grave of Fergus, son of Roi,
with power to call him again on earth, that he might recite the famous
Táin--the lost Epic of a lost World.

It is strange that words, which are such little things--a mere breath
trembling for a moment in the air--should survive the mightiest monarch
and outlast the lives of empires. The generations who uttered them are
silent; the earth has grown over their homesteads, and forests have
decayed above their cities. Yet out of the Dead Past speaks still the
Living Voice. So, to-day, we may be illumined by the light of a star which
perished a thousand years ago.

It has been said that the history of Ireland is dismal, a chronicle of
defeats. But that is because writers generally make history a mere record
of wars. The shadow of the swordsman obscures all else. The militant
monarch or minister is always put in the foremost place and the highest
position. The pigmy on a platform looks greater than the giant in his
study--but only in the eyes of pigmies. Alexander's Empire died with him,
and his satraps shared the spoil. Aristotle's sceptre is over us still.

There is a blindness which is worse than colour-blindness in the eyes
which see physical, but which cannot perceive intellectual forces and
effects: they will record that Roman power conquered Greece, but fail to
recognise that Greek intellect conquered the conqueror. Our nation has had
its changes of fortune. It has invaded others, and been itself invaded
often--part of the penalty it paid for occupying the fairest isle of the
old world, a penalty we might still pay had not a new world opened wide
its golden gates in the West. But our defeats have not been always
disasters. What seemed to have no other end than the plunder of our wealth
has resulted in the enrichment of our literature, the dissemination of our
ideas, and the capture of the imagination of other nations. The code,
which was devised to accomplish what the most ruthless savage never
designed--the annihilation of the intellect of a most intelligent
nation--studded the Continent with that nation's colleges and gave to its
members the glory of being illustrious leaders of men in the greatest
kingdoms of the world.

Last came the great dispersal, when the descendants of those who had
taught Europe for three centuries, and generously welcomed all
scholars--now made ignorant by law--were driven from their hospitable land
by famine. They went forth, as it is said, hewers of wood and drawers of
water. In other times and places it had meant extinction as slaves under
feudal rule. But mark this!--they entered into the great family of a new
people, whose fundamental principle of Democracy made them equal, and
whose generous nature made them welcome. They have thus been brought to
the very well-spring of the new forces which have been re-shaping human
society and preparing the transformation of the world. In this
incomparable enterprise they are themselves a foremost force, taking part
in the intellectual work with the revived vitality of a race which has
found its Land of Youth.

If we had a past of shame--were we members of a nation that had never
risen or had deeply fallen--these should be incentives to brave hearts to
achieve work for the credit of their race. It is otherwise with us, and we
dare not stand still. The past would be our reproach, the future our
disgrace. Not foreign force, but native sloth can do us dishonour. If our
nation is to live, it must live by the energy of intellect, and be
prepared to take its place in competition with all other peoples.
Therefore must we work, with earnest hearts and high ideals for the sake
of our own repute, for the benefit of mankind, in vindication of this old
land which genius has made luminous. And remember that whilst wealth of
thought is a country's treasure, literature is its articulate voice, by
which it commands the reverence or calls for the contempt of the living
and of the coming Nations of the Earth.



  THE NECESSITY FOR DE-ANGLICISING IRELAND.

  BY DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D.



THE NECESSITY FOR DE-ANGLICISING IRELAND.[18]


When we speak of "The Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish Nation," we
mean it, not as a protest against imitating what is _best_ in the English
people, for that would be absurd, but rather to show the folly of
neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to adopt, pell-mell, and
indiscriminately, everything that is English, simply because it _is_
English.

This is a question which most Irishmen will naturally look at from a
National point of view, but it is one which ought also to claim the
sympathies of every intelligent Unionist, and which, as I know, does
claim the sympathy of many.

If we take a bird's-eye view of our island to-day, and compare it with
what it used to be, we must be struck by the extraordinary fact that the
nation which was once, as every one admits, one of the most classically
learned and cultured nations in Europe, is now one of the least so; how
one of the most reading and literary peoples has become one of the _least_
studious and most _un_-literary, and how the present art products of one
of the quickest, most sensitive, and most artistic races on earth are now
only distinguished for their hideousness.

I shall endeavour to show that this failure of the Irish people in recent
times has been largely brought about by the race diverging during this
century from the right path, and ceasing to be Irish without becoming
English. I shall attempt to show that with the bulk of the people this
change took place quite recently, much more recently than most people
imagine, and is, in fact, still going on. I should also like to call
attention to the illogical position of men who drop their own language to
speak English, of men who translate their euphonious Irish names into
English monosyllables, of men who read English books, and know nothing
about Gaelic literature, nevertheless protesting as a matter of sentiment
that they hate the country which at every hand's turn they rush to
imitate.

I wish to show you that in Anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown
away with a light heart the best claim which we have upon the world's
recognition of us as a separate nationality. What did Mazzini say? What is
Goldwin Smith never tired of declaiming? What do the _Spectator_ and
_Saturday Review_ harp on? That we ought to be content as an integral part
of the United Kingdom because we have lost the notes of nationality, our
language and customs.

It has always been very curious to me how Irish sentiment sticks in this
half-way house--how it continues to apparently hate the English, and at
the same time continues to imitate them; how it continues to clamour for
recognition as a distinct nationality, and at the same time throws away
with both hands what would make it so. If Irishmen only went a little
farther they would become good Englishmen in sentiment also.
But--illogical as it appears--there seems not the slightest sign or
probability of their taking that step. It is the curious certainty that
come what may Irishmen will continue to resist English rule, even though
it should be for their good, which prevents many of our nation from
becoming Unionists upon the spot. It is a fact, and we must face it as a
fact, that although they adopt English habits and copy England in every
way, the great bulk of Irishmen and Irishwomen over the whole world are
known to be filled with a dull, ever-abiding animosity against her,
and--right or wrong--to grieve when she prospers, and joy when she is
hurt. Such movements as Young Irelandism, Fenianism, Land Leagueism, and
Parliamentary obstruction seem always to gain their sympathy and support.
It is just because there appears no earthly chance of their becoming good
members of the Empire that I urge that they should not remain in the
anomalous position they are in, but since they absolutely refuse to become
the one thing, that they become the other; cultivate what they have
rejected, and build up an Irish nation on Irish lines.

But you ask, why should we wish to make Ireland more Celtic than it
is--why should we de-Anglicise it at all?

I answer because the Irish race is at present in a most anomalous
position, imitating England and yet apparently hating it. How can it
produce anything good in literature, art, or institutions as long as it is
actuated by motives so contradictory? Besides, I believe it is our Gaelic
past which, though the Irish race does not recognise it just at present,
is really at the bottom of the Irish heart, and prevents us becoming
citizens of the Empire, as, I think, can be easily proved.

To say that Ireland has not prospered under English rule is simply a
truism; all the world admits it, England does not deny it. But the English
retort is ready. You have not prospered, they say, because you would not
settle down contentedly, like the Scotch, and form part of the Empire.
"Twenty years of good, resolute, grandfatherly government," said a
well-known Englishman, will solve the Irish question. He possibly made the
period too short, but let us suppose this. Let us suppose for a
moment--which is impossible--that there were to arise a series of
Cromwells in England for the space of one hundred years, able
administrators of the Empire, careful rulers of Ireland, developing to the
utmost our national resources, whilst they unremittingly stamped out every
spark of national feeling, making Ireland a land of wealth and factories,
whilst they extinguished every thought and every idea that was Irish, and
left us, at last, after a hundred years of good government, fat, wealthy,
and populous, but with all our characteristics gone, with every external
that at present differentiates us from the English lost or dropped; all
our Irish names of places and people turned into English names; the Irish
language completely extinct; the O's and the Macs dropped; our Irish
intonation changed, as far as possible by English schoolmasters into
something English; our history no longer remembered or taught; the names
of our rebels and martyrs blotted out; our battlefields and traditions
forgotten; the fact that we were not of Saxon origin dropped out of sight
and memory, and let me now put the question--How many Irishmen are there
who would purchase material prosperity at such a price? It is exactly
such a question as this and the answer to it that shows the difference
between the English and Irish race. Nine Englishmen out of ten would jump
to make the exchange, and I as firmly believe that nine Irishmen out of
ten would indignantly refuse it.

And yet this awful idea of complete Anglicisation, which I have here put
before you in all its crudity, is, and has been, making silent inroads
upon us for nearly a century.

Its inroads have been silent, because, had the Gaelic race perceived what
was being done, or had they been once warned of what was taking place in
their own midst, they would, I think, never have allowed it. When the
picture of complete Anglicisation is drawn for them in all its nakedness
Irish sentimentality becomes suddenly a power and refuses to surrender its
birthright.

What lies at the back of the sentiments of nationality with which the
Irish millions seem so strongly leavened, what can prompt them to applaud
such sentiments as:

  "They say the British empire owes much to Irish hands,
  That Irish valour fixed her flag o'er many conquered lands;
  And ask if Erin takes no pride in these her gallant sons,
  Her Wolseleys and her Lawrences, her Wolfes and Wellingtons.

  Ah! these were of the Empire--we yield them to her fame,
  And ne'er in Erin's orisons are heard their alien name;
  But those for whom her heart beats high and benedictions swell,
  They died upon the scaffold and they pined within the cell."

Of course it is a very composite feeling which prompts them; but I believe
that what is largely behind it is the half unconscious feeling that the
race which at one time held possession of more than half Europe, which
established itself in Greece, and burned infant Rome, is now--almost
extirpated and absorbed elsewhere--making its last stand for independence
in this island of Ireland; and do what they may the race of to-day cannot
wholly divest itself from the mantle of its own past. Through early Irish
literature, for instance, can we best form some conception of what that
race really was, which, after overthrowing and trampling on the primitive
peoples of half Europe, was itself forced in turn to yield its speech,
manners, and independence to the victorious eagles of Rome. We alone of
the nations of Western Europe escaped the claws of those birds of prey; we
alone developed ourselves naturally upon our own lines outside of and free
from all Roman influence; we alone were thus able to produce an early art
and literature, _our_ antiquities can best throw light upon the
pre-Romanised inhabitants of half Europe, and--we are our father's sons.

There is really no exaggeration in all this, although Irishmen are
sometimes prone to overstating as well as to forgetting. Westwood himself
declares that, were it not for Irishmen, these islands would possess no
primitive works of art worth the mentioning; Jubainville asserts that
early Irish literature is that which best throws light upon the manners
and customs of his own ancestors the Gauls; and Zimmer, who has done so
much for Celtic philology, has declared that only a spurious criticism can
make an attempt to doubt about the historical character of the chief
persons of our two epic cycles, that of Cuchullain and of Finn. It is
useless elaborating this point; and Dr. Sigerson has already shown in his
opening lecture the debt of gratitude which in many respects Europe owes
to ancient Ireland. The dim consciousness of this is one of those things
which are at the back of Irish national sentiment, and our business,
whether we be Unionists or Nationalists, should be to make this dim
consciousness an active and potent feeling, and thus increase our sense of
self-respect and of honour.

What we must endeavour to never forget is this, that the Ireland of to-day
is the descendant of the Ireland of the seventh century, then the school
of Europe and the torch of learning. It is true that Northmen made some
minor settlements in it in the ninth and tenth centuries, it is true that
the Normans made extensive settlements during the succeeding centuries,
but none of those broke the continuity of the social life of the island.
Dane and Norman drawn to the kindly Irish breast issued forth in a
generation or two fully Irishised, and more Hibernian than the Hibernians
themselves, and even after the Cromwellian plantation the children of
numbers of the English soldiers who settled in the south and midlands,
were, after forty years' residence, and after marrying Irish wives,
turned into good Irishmen, and unable to speak a word of English, while
several Gaelic poets of the last century have, like Father English, the
most unmistakably English names. In two points only was the continuity of
the Irishism of Ireland damaged. First, in the north-east of Ulster, where
the Gaelic race was expelled and the land planted with aliens, whom our
dear mother Erin, assimilative as she is, has hitherto found it difficult
to absorb, and in the ownership of the land, eight-ninths of which belongs
to people many of whom always lived, or live, abroad, and not half of whom
Ireland can be said to have assimilated.

During all this time the continuation of Erin's national life centred,
according to our way of looking at it, not so much in the Cromwellian or
Williamite landholders who sat in College Green, and governed the country,
as in the mass of the people whom Dean Swift considered might be entirely
neglected, and looked upon as hewers of wood and drawers of water; the men
who, nevertheless, constituted the real working population, and who were
living on in the hopes of better days; the men who have since made
America, and have within the last ten years proved what an important
factor they may be in wrecking or in building the British Empire. These
are the men of whom our merchants, artisans, and farmers mostly consist,
and in whose hands is to-day the making or marring of an Irish nation.
But, alas, _quantum mutatus ab illo_! What the battleaxe of the Dane, the
sword of the Norman, the wile of the Saxon were unable to perform, we have
accomplished ourselves. We have at last broken the continuity of Irish
life, and just at the moment when the Celtic race is presumably about to
largely recover possession of its own country, it finds itself deprived
and stript of its Celtic characteristics, cut off from the past, yet
scarcely in touch with the present. It has lost since the beginning of
this century almost all that connected it with the era of Cuchullain and
of Ossian, that connected it with the Christianisers of Europe, that
connected it with Brian Boru and the heroes of Clontarf, with the O'Neills
and O'Donnells, with Rory O'More, with the Wild Geese, and even to some
extent with the men of '98. It has lost all that they had--language,
traditions, music, genius, and ideas. Just when we should be starting to
build up anew the Irish race and the Gaelic nation--as within our own
recollection Greece has been built up anew--we find ourselves despoiled of
the bricks of nationality. The old bricks that lasted eighteen hundred
years are destroyed; we must now set to, to bake new ones, if we can, on
other ground and of other clay. Imagine for a moment the restoration of a
German-speaking Greece.

The bulk of the Irish race really lived in the closest contact with the
traditions of the past and the national life of nearly eighteen hundred
years, until the beginning of this century. Not only so, but during the
whole of the dark Penal times they produced amongst themselves a most
vigorous literary development. Their schoolmasters and wealthy farmers,
unwearied scribes, produced innumerable manuscripts in beautiful writing,
each letter separated from another as in Greek, transcripts both of the
ancient literature of their sires and of the more modern literature
produced by themselves. Until the beginning of the present century there
was no county, no barony, and, I may almost say, no townland which did
not boast of an Irish poet, the people's representative of those ancient
bards who died out with the extirpation of the great Milesian families.
The literary activity of even the eighteenth century among the Gaels was
very great, not in the South alone, but also in Ulster--the number of
poets it produced was something astonishing. It did not, however, produce
many works in Gaelic prose, but it propagated translations of many pieces
from the French, Latin, Spanish, and English. Every well-to-do farmer
could read and write Irish, and many of them could understand even archaic
Irish. I have myself heard persons reciting the poems of Donogha More
O'Daly, Abbot of Boyle, in Roscommon, who died sixty years before Chaucer
was born. To this very day the people have a word for archaic Irish, which
is much the same as though Chaucer's poems were handed down amongst the
English peasantry, but required a special training to understand. This
training, however, nearly every one of fair education during the Penal
times possessed, nor did they begin to lose their Irish training and
knowledge until after the establishment of Maynooth and the rise of
O'Connell. These two events made an end of the Gaelicism of the Gaelic
race, although a great number of poets and scribes existed even down to
the forties and fifties of the present century, and a few may linger on
yet in remote localities. But it may be said, roughly speaking, that the
ancient Gaelic civilisation died with O'Connell, largely, I am afraid,
owing to his example and his neglect of inculcating the necessity of
keeping alive racial customs, language, and traditions, in which with the
one notable exception of our scholarly idealist, Smith O'Brien, he has
been followed until a year ago by almost every leader of the Irish race.

Thomas Davis and his brilliant band of Young Irelanders came just at the
dividing of the line, and tried to give to Ireland a new literature in
English to replace the literature which was just being discarded. It
succeeded and it did not succeed. It was a most brilliant effort, but the
old bark had been too recently stripped off the Irish tree, and the trunk
could not take as it might have done to a fresh one. It was a new
departure, and at first produced a violent effect. Yet in the long run it
failed to properly leaven our peasantry who might, perhaps, have been
reached upon other lines. I say they _might_ have been reached upon other
lines because it is quite certain that even well on into the beginning of
this century, Irish poor scholars and schoolmasters used to gain the
greatest favour and applause by reading out manuscripts in the people's
houses at night, some of which manuscripts had an antiquity of a couple of
hundred years or more behind them, and which, when they got illegible from
age, were always recopied. The Irish peasantry at that time were all to
some extent cultured men, and many of the better off ones were scholars
and poets. What have we now left of all that? Scarcely a trace. Many of
them read newspapers indeed, but who reads, much less recites, an epic
poem, or chants an elegiac or even a hymn?

Wherever Irish throughout Ireland continued to be spoken, there the
ancient MSS. continued to be read, there the epics of Cuchullain, Conor
MacNessa, Déirdre, Finn, Oscar, and Ossian continued to be told, and there
poetry and music held sway. Some people may think I am exaggerating in
asserting that such a state of things existed down to the present
century, but it is no exaggeration. I have myself spoken with men from
Cavan and Tyrone who spoke excellent Irish. Carleton's stories bear
witness to the prevalence of the Irish language and traditions in Ulster
when he began to write. My friend Mr. Lloyd has found numbers in Antrim
who spoke good Irish. And, as for Leinster, my friend Mr. Cleaver informed
me that when he lived in Wicklow a man came by from the County Carlow in
search of work who could not speak a word of English. Old labourers from
Connacht, who used to go to reap the harvest in England and take shipping
at Drogheda, told me that at that time, fifty years ago, Irish was spoken
by every one round that town. I have met an old man in Wicklow, not twenty
miles from Dublin, whose parents always repeated the Rosary in Irish. My
friend Father O'Growny, who has done and is doing so much for the Irish
language and literature at Maynooth, tells me that there, within twenty
miles of Dublin, are three old people who still speak Irish. O'Curry found
people within seven miles of Dublin city who had never heard English in
their youth at all, except from the car-drivers of the great town. I gave
an old man in the street who begged from me, a penny, only a few days ago,
saying, "_Sin pighin agad_," and when he answered in Irish I asked him
where he was from, and he said from _Newna_ (_n' Eamhain_), _i.e._, Navan.
Last year I was in Canada and out hunting with some Red Indians, and we
spent a night in the last white man's house in the last settlement on the
brink of the primeval forest; and judging from a peculiarly Hibernian
physiognomy that the man was Irish, I addressed him in Gaelic, and to the
intense astonishment both of whites and Indians we entered into a
conversation which none of them understood; and it turned out that he was
from within three miles of Kilkenny, and had been forty years in that
country without forgetting the language he had spoken as a child, and I,
although from the centre of Connacht, understood him perfectly. When my
father was a young boy in the county Leitrim, not far from Longford, he
seldom heard the farm labourers and tenants speak anything but Irish
amongst themselves. So much for Ulster and Leinster, but Connacht and
Munster were until quite recently completely Gaelic. In fact, I may
venture to say, that, up to the beginning of the present century, neither
man, woman, nor child of the Gaelic race, either of high blood or low
blood, existed in Ireland who did not either speak Irish or understand it.
But within the last ninety years we have, with an unparalleled frivolity,
deliberately thrown away our birthright and Anglicised ourselves. None of
the children of those people of whom I have spoken know Irish, and the
race will from henceforth be changed; for as Monsieur Jubainville says of
the influence of Rome upon Gaul, England "has definitely conquered us, she
has even imposed upon us her language, that is to say, the form of our
thoughts during every instant of our existence." It is curious that those
who most fear West Britainism have so eagerly consented to imposing upon
the Irish race what, according to Jubainville, who in common with all the
great scholars of the continent, seems to regret it very much, is "the
form of our thoughts during every instant of our existence."

So much for the greatest stroke of all in our Anglicisation, the loss of
our language. I have often heard people thank God that if the English gave
us nothing else they gave us at least their language. In this way they
put a bold face upon the matter, and pretend that the Irish language is
not worth knowing, and has no literature. But the Irish language _is_
worth knowing, or why would the greatest philologists of Germany, France,
and Italy be emulously studying it, and it _does_ possess a literature, or
why would a German savant have made the calculation that the books written
in Irish between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries, and still extant,
would fill a thousand octavo volumes.

I have no hesitation at all in saying that every Irish-feeling Irishman,
who hates the reproach of West-Britonism, should set himself to encourage
the efforts which are being made to keep alive our once great national
tongue. The losing of it is our greatest blow, and the sorest stroke that
the rapid Anglicisation of Ireland has inflicted upon us. In order to
de-Anglicise ourselves we must at once arrest the decay of the language.
We must bring pressure upon our politicians not to snuff it out by their
tacit discouragement merely because they do not happen themselves to
understand it. We must arouse some spark of patriotic inspiration among
the peasantry who still use the language, and put an end to the shameful
state of feeling--a thousand-tongued reproach to our leaders and
statesmen--which makes young men and women blush and hang their heads when
overheard speaking their own language.[19] Maynooth has at last come
splendidly to the front, and it is now incumbent upon every clerical
student to attend lectures in the Irish language and history during the
first three years of his course. But in order to keep the Irish language
alive where it is still spoken--which is the utmost we can at present
aspire to--nothing less than a house-to-house visitation and exhortation
of the people themselves will do, something--though with a very different
purpose--analogous to the procedure that James Stephens adopted throughout
Ireland when he found her like a corpse on the dissecting table. This and
some system of giving medals or badges of honour to every family who will
guarantee that they have always spoken Irish amongst themselves during
the year. But, unfortunately, distracted as we are and torn by contending
factions, it is impossible to find either men or money to carry out this
simple remedy, although to a dispassionate foreigner--to a Zeuss,
Jubainville, Zimmer, Kuno Meyer, Windisch, or Ascoli, and the rest--this
is of greater importance than whether Mr. Redmond or Mr. MacCarthy lead
the largest wing of the Irish party for the moment, or Mr. So-and-So
succeed with his election petition. To a person taking a bird's-eye view
of the situation a hundred or five hundred years hence, believe me, it
will also appear of greater importance than any mere temporary wrangle,
but, unhappily, our countrymen cannot be brought to see this.

We can, however, insist, and we _shall_ insist if Home Rule be carried,
that the Irish language, which so many foreign scholars of the first
calibre find so worthy of study, shall be placed on a par with--or even
above--Greek, Latin, and modern languages, in all examinations held under
the Irish Government. We can also insist, and we _shall_ insist, that in
those baronies where the children speak Irish, Irish shall be taught, and
that Irish-speaking schoolmasters, petty sessions clerks, and even
magistrates be appointed in Irish-speaking districts. If all this were
done, it should not be very difficult, with the aid of the foremost
foreign scholars, to bring about a tone of thought which would make it
disgraceful for an educated Irishman--especially of the old Celtic race,
MacDermotts, O'Conors, O'Sullivans, MacCarthys, O'Neills--to be ignorant
of his own language--would make it at least as disgraceful as for an
educated Jew to be quite ignorant of Hebrew.

       *       *       *       *       *

We find the decay of our language faithfully reflected in the decay of our
surnames. In Celtic times a great proof of the powers of assimilation
which the Irish nation possessed, was the fact that so many of the great
Norman and English nobles lived like the native chiefs and took Irish
names. In this way the De Bourgos of Connacht became MacWilliams, of which
clan again some minor branches became MacPhilpins, MacGibbons, and
MacRaymonds. The Birminghams of Connacht took the name of MacFeóiris, the
Stauntons became MacAveelys, the Nangles MacCostellos; the Prendergasts of
Mayo became MacMaurices, the De Courcys became MacPatricks, the Bissetts
of Antrim became MacEóins, and so on. Roughly speaking, it may be said
that most of the English and Norman families outside of the Pale were
Irish in name and manners from the beginning of the fourteenth to the
middle of the seventeenth century.

In 1465 an Act was passed by the Parliament of the English Pale that all
Irishmen inside the Pale should take an English name "of one towne as
Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skryne, Corke, Kinsale; or colour, as white, black,
brown; or art or science, as smith or carpenter; or office, as cooke,
butler; and that he and his issue shall use this name" or forfeit all his
goods. A great number of the lesser families complied with this typically
English ordinance; but the greater ones--the MacMurroghs, O'Tooles,
O'Byrnes, O'Nolans, O'Mores, O'Ryans, O'Conor Falys, O'Kellys,
&c.--refused, and never did change their names. A hundred and thirty years
later we find Spenser, the poet, advocating the renewal of this statute.
By doing this, says Spenser, "they shall in time learne quite to forget
the Irish nation. And herewithal," he says, "would I also wish the O's
and Macs which the heads of septs have taken to their names to be utterly
forbidden and extinguished, for that the same being an ordinance (as some
say) first made by O'Brien (+brian borúṁa+) for the strengthening of the
Irish, the abrogation thereof will as much enfeeble them." It was, however,
only after Aughrim and the Boyne that Irish names began to be changed in
great numbers, and O'Conors to become "Conyers," O'Reillys "Ridleys,"
O'Donnells "Daniels," O'Sullivans "Silvans," MacCarthys "Carters," and so
on.

But it is the last sixty years that have made most havoc with our Milesian
names. It seemed as if the people were possessed with a mania for changing
them to something--anything at all, only to get rid of the Milesian sound.
"Why," said O'Connell, once talking to a mass-meeting of Lord Chancellor
Sugden, "you wouldn't call a decent pig Sugden." Yet he never uttered a
word of remonstrance at the O'Lahiffs, O'Brollahans, and MacRorys becoming
under his eyes Guthrys, Bradleys, and Rogerses. It is more than a little
curious, and a very bad augury for the future independence of Ireland,
that men of education and intelligence like Carleton the novelist, or
Hardiman, author of the "History of Galway" and the "Irish Minstrelsy,"
should have changed their Milesian names, one from that of O'Cairellan,
who was ancient chief of Clandermot, the other from the well-known name of
O'Hargadain. In Connacht alone I know scores of Gatelys, Sextons,
Baldwins, Foxes, Coxes, Footes, Greenes, Keatings, who are really
O'Gatlies, O'Sesnans, O'Mulligans, O'Shanahans, MacGillacullys, O'Trehys,
O'Honeens, and O'Keateys. The O'Hennesys are Harringtons, the
O'Kinsellaghs, Kingsleys and Tinslys, the O'Feehillys Pickleys, and so on.
O'Donovan, writing in 1862, gives a list of names which had recently been
changed in the neighbourhood of Cootehill, Co. Cavan. These Irish names of
MacNebo, MacIntyre, MacGilroy, MacTernan, MacCorry, MacOscar, MacBrehon,
O'Clery, Murtagh, O'Drum, &c., were becoming, or had become, Victory,
Victoria, Callwell, Freeman, King, Nugent, Gilman, Leonard, Godwin,
Goodwin, Smyth, Golderich, Golding, Masterton, Lind, Crosby, Grosby,
Crosse, Corry, Cosgrove, Judge, Brabacy, Brabazon, Clarke, Clerkin,
Cunningham, Drummond, Tackit, Sexton, and Mortimer[20]--not a bad attempt
at West-Britonising for one little town!

Numbers of people, again, like Mr. Davitt or Mr. Hennessy, drop the O and
Mac which properly belong to their names; others, without actually
changing them, metamorphose their names, as we have seen, into every
possible form. I was told in America that the first Chauncey who ever
came out there was an O'Shaughnessy, who went to, I think, Maryland, in
the middle of the last century, and who had twelve sons, who called
themselves Chauncey, and from whom most of or all the Chaunceys in America
are descended. I know people who have translated their names within the
last ten years. This vile habit is going on with almost unabated vigour,
and nobody has ever raised a protest against it. Out of the many hundreds
of O'Byrnes--offshoots of the great Wicklow chieftains--in the city of New
York, only four have retained that name; all the rest have taken the
Scotch name of Burns. I have this information from two of the remaining
four, both friends of my own, and both splendid Gaelic scholars, though
from opposite ends of Ireland, Donegal and Waterford. Of two brothers of
whom I was lately told, though I do not know them personally, one is an
O'Gara, and still condescends to remain connected with the patron of the
Four Masters and a thousand years of a glorious past, whilst the other
(through some etymological confusion with the word Caraim, which means "I
love") calls himself Mr. Love! Another brother remains a Brehony, thus
showing his descent from one of the very highest and most honourable
titles in Ireland--a Brehon, law-giver and poet; the other brother is John
Judge. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Irishmen prefer to drop their
honourable Milesian names, and call themselves Groggins or Duggan, or
Higgins or Guthry, or any other beastly name, in preference to the
surnames of warriors, saints, and poets; and the melancholy part of it is,
that not one single word of warning or remonstrance has been raised, as
far as I am aware, against this colossal cringing either by the Irish
public press or public men.

With our Irish Christian names the case is nearly as bad. Where are now
all the fine old Irish Christian names of both men and women which were in
vogue even a hundred years ago? They have been discarded as unclean
things, not because they were ugly in themselves or inharmonious, but
simply because they were not English. No man is now christened by a Gaelic
name, "nor no woman neither." Such common Irish Christian names as Conn,
Cairbre, Farfeasa, Teig, Diarmuid, Kian, Cuan, Ae, Art, Mahon, Eochaidh,
Fearflatha, Cathan, Rory, Coll, Lochlainn, Cathal, Lughaidh, Turlough,
Éamon, Randal, Niall, Sorley, and Conor, are now extinct or nearly so.
Donough and Murrough survive in the O'Brien family. Angus, Manus, Fergal,
and Felim are now hardly known. The man whom you call Diarmuid when you
speak Irish, a low, pernicious, un-Irish, detestable custom, begot by
slavery, propagated by cringing, and fostered by flunkeyism, forces you to
call Jeremiah when you speak English, or as a concession, Darby. In like
manner, the indigenous Teig is West-Britonised into Thaddeus or Thady, for
no earthly reason than that both begin with a T. Donough is Denis, Cahal
is Charles, Murtagh and Murough are Mortimer, Dómhnall is Daniel,
Partholan, the name of the earliest coloniser of Ireland, is Bartholomew
or Batty,[21] Eoghan (Owen) is frequently Eugene, and our own O'Curry,
though he plucked up courage to prefix the O to his name in later life,
never discarded the Eugene, which, however, is far from being a
monstrosity like most of our West-Britonised names; Félim is Felix,
Finghin (Finneen) is Florence, Conor is Corney, Turlough is Terence,
Éamon is Edmond or Neddy, and so on. In fact, of the great wealth of
Gaelic Christian names in use a century or two ago, only Owen, Brian,
Cormac, and Patrick seem to have survived in general use.

Nor have our female names fared one bit better; we have discarded them
even more ruthlessly than those of our men. Surely Sadhbh (Sive) is a
prettier name than Sabina or Sibby, and Nóra than Onny, Honny, or Honour
(so translated simply because Nóra sounds like _onóir_, the Irish for
"honour"); surely Una is prettier than Winny, which it becomes when
West-Britonised. Mève, the great name of the Queen of Connacht who led the
famous cattle spoiling of Cuailgne, celebrated in the greatest Irish epic,
is at least as pretty as Maud, which it becomes when Anglicised, and
Eibhlin (Eileen) is prettier than Ellen or Elinor. Aoife (Eefy), Sighle
(Sheela), Móirin (Moreen), Nuala and Fionnuala (Finnoola), are all
beautiful names which were in use until quite recently. Maurya and Anya
are still common, but are not indigenous Irish names at all, so that I do
not mind their rejection, whilst three other very common ones, Suraha,
Shinéad, and Shuwaun, sound so bad in English that I do not very much
regret their being translated into Sarah, Jane, and Joan respectively; but
I must put in a plea for the retention of such beautiful words as Eefee,
Oona, Eileen, Mève, Sive, and Nuala. Of all the beautiful Christian names
of women which were in use a century or two ago Brighid (Breed), under the
ugly form of Bridget, or still worse, of Biddy, and Eiblin under the form
of Eveleen, and perhaps Norah, seem to be the only survivals, and they are
becoming rarer. I _do_ think that the time has now come to make a vigorous
protest against this continued West-Britonising of ourselves, and that our
people ought to have a word in season addressed to them by their leaders
which will stop them from translating their Milesian surnames into hideous
Saxon, and help to introduce Irish instead of English Christian names. As
long as the Irish nation goes on as it is doing I cannot have much hope of
its ultimately taking its place amongst the nations of the earth, for if
it does, it will have proceeded upon different lines from every other
nationality that God ever created. I hope that we shall never be
satisfied either as individuals or as a society as long as the Brehonys
call themselves Judges, the Clan Govern call themselves Smiths, and the
O'Reardons Salmons, as long as our boys are called Dan and Jeremiah
instead of Donal and Diarmuid, and our girls Honny, Winny, and Ellen
instead of Nóra, Una, and Eileen.

Our topographical nomenclature too--as we may now be prepared to
expect--has been also shamefully corrupted to suit English ears; but
unfortunately the difficulties attendant upon a realteration of our
place-names to their proper forms are very great, nor do I mean to go into
this question now, for it is one so long and so difficult that it would
require a lecture, or rather a series of lectures to itself. Suffice it to
say, that many of the best-known names in our history and annals have
become almost wholly unrecognisable, through the ignorant West-Britonising
of them. The unfortunate natives of the eighteenth century allowed all
kinds of havoc to be played with even their best-known names. For example
the river Feóir they allowed to be turned permanently into the Nore, which
happened this way. Some Englishman, asking the name of the river, was
told that it was _An Fheóir_, pronounced In n'yore, because the F when
preceded by the definite article _an_ is not sounded, so that in his
ignorance he mistook the word Feóir for Neóir, and the name has been thus
perpetuated. In the same way the great Connacht lake, Loch Corrib, is
really Loch Orrib, or rather Loch Orbsen, some Englishman having mistaken
the C at the end of loch for the beginning of the next word. Sometimes the
Ordnance Survey people make a rough guess at the Irish name and jot down
certain English letters almost on chance. Sometimes again they make an
Irish word resemble an English one, as in the celebrated Tailtin in Meath,
where the great gathering of the nation was held, and, which, to make sure
that no national memories should stick to it, has been West-Britonised
Telltown.[22] On the whole, our place names have been treated with about
the same respect as if they were the names of a savage tribe which had
never before been reduced to writing, and with about the same
intelligence and contempt as vulgar English squatters treat the
topographical nomenclature of the Red Indians. These things are now to a
certain extent stereotyped, and are difficult at this hour to change,
especially where Irish names have been translated into English, like
Swinford and Strokestown, or ignored as in Charleville or Midleton. But
though it would take the strength and goodwill of an united nation to put
our topographical nomenclature on a rational basis like that of Wales and
the Scotch Highlands, there is one thing which our Society can do, and
that is to insist upon pronouncing our Irish names properly. Why will a
certain class of people insist upon getting as far away from the
pronunciation of the natives as possible? I remember a Galway gentleman
pulling me up severely for speaking of Athenree. "It's not Athenree," he
said, "it's called Athenrye." Yet in saying this he simply went out of his
way to mispronounce the historic name, which means the "King's ford," and
which all the natives call -_ree_, not -_rye_.[23] Another instance out of
many thousands is my own market town, Ballagh-ă-derreen, literally,
"the way of the oak-wood." Ballach is the same word as in the phrase _Fág
a' bealach_, "clear the way," and "derreen" is the diminutive of Derry, an
oak-wood. Yet the more "civilised" of the population, perhaps one in
fifty, offend one's ears with the frightful jargon Bálla-hád-her-een. Thus
Lord Iveagh (Ee-vah) becomes Lord Ivy, and Seana-guala, the old sholder,
becomes Shanagolden, and leads you to expect a mine, or at least a
furze-covered hill.

I shall not give any more examples of deliberate carelessness, ineptitude,
and West-Britonising in our Irish topography, for the instances may be
numbered by thousands and thousands. I hope and trust that where it may be
done without any great inconvenience a native Irish Government will be
induced to provide for the restoration of our place-names on something
like a rational basis.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our music, too, has become Anglicised to an alarming extent. Not only has
the national instrument, the harp--which efforts are now being made to
revive in the Highlands--become extinct, but even the Irish pipes are
threatened with the same fate. In place of the pipers and fiddlers who,
even twenty years ago, were comparatively common, we are now in many
places menaced by the German band and the barrel organ. Something should
be done to keep the native pipes and the native airs amongst us still. If
Ireland loses her music she loses what is, after her Gaelic language and
literature, her most valuable and most characteristic possession. And she
is rapidly losing it. A few years ago all our travelling fiddlers and
pipers could play the old airs which were then constantly called for, the
_Cúis d'á pléidh_, _Drinaun Dunn_, _Roseen Dubh_, _Gamhan Geal Bán_,
_Eileen-a-roon_, _Shawn O'Dwyer in Glanna_, and the rest, whether gay or
plaintive, which have for so many centuries entranced the Gael. But now
English music-hall ballads and Scotch songs have gained an enormous place
in the repertoire of the wandering minstrel, and the minstrels themselves
are becoming fewer and fewer, and I fear worse and worse. It is difficult
to find a remedy for this. I am afraid in this practical age to go so far
as to advocate the establishment in Cork or Galway of a small institution
in which young and promising pipers might be trained to play all the
Irish airs and sent forth to delight our population; for I shall be told
that this is not a matter for even an Irish Government to stir in, though
it is certain that many a Government has lavished money on schemes less
pleasant and less useful. For the present, then, I must be content with
hoping that the revival of our Irish music may go hand in hand with the
revival of Irish ideas and Celtic modes of thought which our Society is
seeking to bring about, and that people may be brought to love the purity
of _Siúbhail Siúbhail_, or the fun of the _Moddereen Ruadh_ in preference
to "Get Your Hair Cut," or "Over the Garden Wall," or, even if it is not
asking too much, of "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay."

Our games, too, were in a most grievous condition until the brave and
patriotic men who started the Gaelic Athletic Association took in hand
their revival. I confess that the instantaneous and extraordinary success
which attended their efforts when working upon national lines has filled
me with more hope for the future of Ireland than everything else put
together. I consider the work of the association in reviving our ancient
national game of +caman+, or hurling, and Gaelic football, has done more
for Ireland than all the speeches of politicians for the last five years.
And it is not alone that that splendid association revived for a time with
vigour our national sports, but it revived also our national
recollections, and the names of the various clubs through the country have
perpetuated the memory of the great and good men and martyrs of Ireland.
The physique of our youth has been improved in many of our counties; they
have been taught self-restraint, and how to obey their captains; they have
been, in many places, weaned from standing idle in their own roads or
street corners; and not least, they have been introduced to the use of a
thoroughly good and Irish garb. Wherever the warm striped green jersey of
the Gaelic Athletic Association was seen, there Irish manhood and Irish
memories were rapidly reviving. There torn collars and ugly neckties
hanging awry and far better not there at all, and dirty shirts of bad
linen were banished, and our young hurlers were clad like men and
Irishmen, and not in the shoddy second-hand suits of Manchester and London
shop-boys. Could not this alteration be carried still further? Could we
not make that jersey still more popular, and could we not, in places
where both garbs are worn, use our influence against English second-hand
trousers, generally dirty in front, and hanging in muddy tatters at the
heels, and in favour of the cleaner worsted stockings and neat breeches
which many of the older generation still wear? Why have we discarded our
own comfortable frieze? Why does every man in Connemara wear home-made and
home-spun tweed, while in the midland counties we have become too proud
for it, though we are not too proud to buy at every fair and market the
most incongruous cast-off clothes imported from English cities, and to
wear them? Let us, as far as we have any influence, set our faces against
this aping of English dress, and encourage our women to spin and our men
to wear comfortable frieze suits of their own wool, free from shoddy and
humbug. So shall we de-Anglicise Ireland to some purpose, foster a native
spirit and a growth of native custom which will form the strongest barrier
against English influence and be in the end the surest guarantee of Irish
autonomy.

I have now mentioned a few of the principal points on which it would be
desirable for us to move, with a view to de-Anglicising ourselves; but
perhaps the principal point of all I have taken for granted. That is the
necessity for encouraging the use of Anglo-Irish literature instead of
English books, especially instead of English periodicals. We must set our
face sternly against penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers, and still more,
the garbage of vulgar English weeklies like _Bow Bells_ and the _Police
Intelligence_. Every house should have a copy of Moore and Davis. In a
word, we must strive to cultivate everything that is most racial, most
smacking of the soil, most Gaelic, most Irish, because in spite of the
little admixture of Saxon blood in the north-east corner, this island _is_
and will _ever_ remain Celtic at the core, far more Celtic than most
people imagine, because, as I have shown you, the names of our people are
no criterion of their race. On racial lines, then, we shall best develop,
following the bent of our own natures; and, in order to do this, we must
create a strong feeling against West-Britonism, for it--if we give it the
least chance, or show it the smallest quarter--will overwhelm us like a
flood, and we shall find ourselves toiling painfully behind the English at
each step following the same fashions, only six months behind the English
ones; reading the same books, only months behind them: taking up the same
fads, after they have become stale _there_, following _them_ in our dress,
literature, music, games, and ideas, only a long time after them and a
vast way behind. We will become, what, I fear, we are largely at present,
a nation of imitators, the Japanese of Western Europe, lost to the power
of native initiative and alive only to second-hand assimilation. I do not
think I am overrating this danger. We are probably at once the most
assimilative and the most sensitive nation in Europe. A lady in Boston
said to me that the Irish immigrants had become Americanised on the
journey out before ever they landed at Castle Gardens. And when I ventured
to regret it, she said, shrewdly, "If they did not at once become
Americanised they would not be Irish." I knew fifteen Irish workmen who
were working in a haggard in England give up talking Irish amongst
themselves because the English farmer laughed at them. And yet O'Connell
used to call us the "finest peasantry in Europe." Unfortunately, he took
little care that we should remain so. We must teach ourselves to be less
sensitive, we must teach ourselves not to be ashamed of ourselves, because
the Gaelic people can never produce its best before the world as long as
it remains tied to the apron-strings of another race and another island,
waiting for _it_ to move before it will venture to take any step itself.

In conclusion, I would earnestly appeal to every one, whether Unionist or
Nationalist, who wishes to see the Irish nation produce its best--and
surely whatever our politics are we all wish that--to set his face against
this constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games,
fashions, and ideas. I appeal to every one whatever his politics--for this
is no political matter--to do his best to help the Irish race to develop
in future upon Irish lines, even at the risk of encouraging national
aspirations, because upon Irish lines alone can the Irish race once more
become what it was of yore--one of the most original, artistic, literary,
and charming peoples of Europe.



Footnotes:

[1] Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations."

[2] Being the substance of a Lecture delivered at the Opening of the Irish
National Literary Society--in Dublin, Sir C. G. Duffy in the chair.

[3] But not now of entire words, as in the _rime riche_ of the French,
where _livre_ (book) rhymes with _livre_ (pound). English "perfect" rhyme
is an incomplete word-echo, which secures some variety.

[4] Sporadic exceptions of course are found in Ovid's occasional leonine
lines. It is suggestive that he lived long and died amidst Scythians, from
whom the Irish Gael deduce their descent.

[5] _E.g._, in its end-words: _tracht_, _eácht_, _fuàcht_, _ruacht_.

[6] These rhymes are more subtly complete than may be supposed, for the
chiming syllables are enriched by this, that the preceding consonants =d=
and =g= (as "soft"), and =t= and =p= (as "hard"), give class-chimes.
Besides this, we have alliteration of two vowels in the first line, and of
two consonants in the second.

[7] Hunt, "History of Bristol, 1884."

[8] In the third line, the letters =v= and =r= are in (imperfect) concord.
They belong to the same class of "light" consonants, from which it might
be inferred that the ancient Irish did not roll the letter _r_.

[9] Thegan; Pithou: Opp. cvii.

[10] Malmesbury is a modification of Mailduff's burg.

[11] _I.e._, Hoved, The Head.

[12] Hr. Sjöden, the eminent Swedish harper, noted several Scandinavian
airs but slightly varied from the Irish.

[13] Messrs. Vigfusson and York Powell in "Corpus Poeticum Boreale," &c.

[14] Vigfusson, Prolegomena to Sturlunga Saga.

[15] From the Irish name, Cormac.

[16] Shakespeare mentions an old Irish air, _Cailin og astor_ (in "Henry
II.", act iv., sc. 4); the air itself is give in Queen Elizabeth's
Virginal Book, so that Irish music must have been admired at her court. It
is curious to see the Irish alliteration still influential in the verses
attributed to her:

  "The doubt of =f=uture =f=oes exiles my present joy,
  And =w=it me =w=arns to =s=hun =s=uch =s=nares as threaten mine annoy;
  For =f=alsehood now doth =f=low and subject =f=aith doth ebb,
  Which would not be if =r=eason =r=uled or =w=isdom =w=eaved the =w=eb."

It is most interesting to observe that Shakespeare himself employs
alliteration in his epitaph, and used it in a manner so closely conforming
to the regular Irish system, as to suggest his acquaintance with it,
_e.g._:

  "Good =f=riend for Jesus' sake =f=orbeare,
  To =d=ig the =d=ust enclosed here,
  =B=lesst =b=e he who =s=pares these =s=tones,
  And cursed =b=e he who moves my =b=ones."

[17] It has been computed that, in the petty princedom of Tyrconnell (now
Donegall county nearly) the real estate allocated to maintenance of the
_literati_ amounted in value to £2,000 yearly, present currency.

[18] Delivered before the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin,
November 25th, 1892.

[19] As an instance of this, I mention the case of a young man I met on
the road coming from the fair of Tuam, some ten miles away. I saluted him
in Irish, and he answered me in English. "Don't you speak Irish," said I.
"Well, I declare to God, sir," he said, "my father and mother hasn't a
word of English, but still, I don't speak Irish." This was absolutely true
for him. There are thousands upon thousands of houses all over Ireland
to-day where the old people invariably use Irish in addressing the
children, and the children as invariably answer in English, the children
understanding Irish but not speaking it, the parents understanding their
children's English but unable to use it themselves. In a great many cases,
I should almost say most, the children are not conscious of the existence
of two languages. I remember asking a gossoon a couple of miles west of
Ballaghaderreen in the Co. Mayo, some questions in Irish and he answered
them in English. At last I said to him, "_Nach labhrann tu Gaedheilg?_"
(_i.e._, "Don't you speak Irish?") and his answer was, "And isn't it Irish
I'm spaking?" "No _a-chuisle_," said I, "it's not Irish you're speaking,
but English." "Well then," said he, "that's how I spoke it ever"! He was
quite unconscious that I was addressing him in one language and he
answering in another. On a different occasion I spoke Irish to a little
girl in a house near Kilfree Junction, Co. Sligo, into which I went while
waiting for a train. The girl answered me in Irish until her brother came
in. "Arrah now, Mary," said he, with what was intended to be a most bitter
sneer; "and isn't that a credit to you!" And poor Mary--whom I had with
difficulty persuaded to begin--immediately hung her head and changed to
English. This is going on from Malin Head to Galway, and from Galway to
Waterford, with the exception possibly of a few spots in Donegal and
Kerry, where the people are wiser and more national.

[20] The following are a few instances out of hundreds of the monstrous
transmographying of Gaelic names into English. The Gillespies
(Giolla-Easbuig, _i.e._, Bishop's servant) are Archbolds or Bishops. The
Mackays (Mac Aodha, _i.e._, son of Ae or Hugh) are Hughes. The Mac Reevys
or Mac Culreevys (Mac Cùil-Riabhaigh, _i.e._, son of the grey poll) are
Grays. The Mac Eóchagains instead of being all Gahagans or Geoghegans
have--some of them--deformed their name into the monstrosity of Goggin.
The Mac Feeachrys (Mac Fhiachraidh) are Vickors or even Hunters. The Mac
Feehalys are often Fieldings. Mac Gilleesa (Mac Giolla Iosa, _i.e._, sons
of Jesus' devotee) are either Gillespie or Giles. The Mac Gillamurrys (Mac
Giolla-Mhuire, _i.e._, son of the Virgin's devotee) is often made Marmion,
sometimes more correctly Macilmurray or Mac Ilmurry. Mac Gillamerry (Mac
Giolla Meidhre, _i.e._, son of the servant of merriment) is Anglicised
Merryman. Mac Gillaree (Mac Giolla-righ, _i.e._, son of the king's
servant) is very often made King, but sometimes pretty correctly Mac
Gilroy or Mac Ilroy--thus the Connemara people have made Kingston of the
village of Ballyconry, because the _ry_ or _righ_ means a king. The Mac
Irs, sons of Ir, earliest coloniser of Ireland, have, by some confusion
with _geirr_, the genitive of _gearr_, "short," become Shorts or
Shortalls, but sometimes, less corruptly, Kerrs. The honourable name of
Mac Rannell (Mac Raghnaill) is now seldom met with in any other form than
that of Reynolds. The Mac Sorarans (Mac Samhradháin, the clan or tribe
name of the Mac Gaurans or Mac Governs) have become Somers, through some
fancied etymology with the word _samhradh_. The Mac Sorleys (Mac
Samharlaigh) are often Shirleys. The honourable and poetic race of
Mac-an-bháirds (sons of the bard) are now Wards to a man. The
Mac-intleevys (Mac an tsléibhe, _i.e._, sons of the mountain) are Levys or
Dunlevys. The Macintaggarts (Mac an tsagairt, _i.e._, son of the priest)
are now Priestmans, or occasionally, I do not know why, Segraves. The
Macgintys (Mac an tsaoi, _i.e._, son of the sage) are very often Nobles.
The Macinteers (Mac an tsaoir, _i.e._, son of the carpenter) instead of
being made MacIntyre as the Scots always have it, are in Ireland
Carpenters or Wrights, or--because _saor_ means "free" as well as
Carpenter--Frees and Freemans. Many of the O'Hagans (O h-Aodhgáin) are now
Fagans, and even Dickens's Fagan the Jew has not put a stop to the hideous
transformation. The O'Hillans (Mac Ui Iollain, _i.e._, sons of Illan, a
great name in Irish romance) have become Hylands or Whelans. It would be
tedious to go through all the well-known names that immediately occur to
one as thus suffering; suffice it to say, that the O'Heas became Hayses,
the O'Queenahans, Mosses, Mossmans, and Kinahans, the O'Longans Longs, the
O'Naghtens Nortons, the O'Reardons Salmons, the O'Shanahans Foxes, and so
on _ad infinitum_.

[21] It is questionable, however, whether Partholan as a modern Christian
name is not itself an Irishised form of Bartholomew.

[22] For more information about Tailtin, see an article by me incorporated
in the "Rules of the Gaelic Athletic Association," recently published.

[23] In Irish it is Beul-áth-an-righ contracted into B'l'áth'n-righ,
pronounced _Blawn-ree_.



  UNWIN BROTHERS,
  THE GRESHAM PRESS,
  CHILWORTH AND LONDON



THE PATRIOT PARLIAMENT

Of 1689, with its Statutes, Rites, and Proceedings.

By THOMAS DAVIS.

Edited, with an Introduction, by the Hon. Sir CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G.


  LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, Paternoster Square.
  DUBLIN: SEALY, BRYERS & WALKER, Middle Abbey Street.
  NEW YORK: P. J. KENEDY, Barclay Street.


NOTICES OF THE BRITISH PRESS.

_From_ THE DAILY NEWS.

The remarkable Series of papers on "The Patriot Parliament."

_From_ THE PALL MALL GAZETTE.

The papers are by far the most valuable of Davis's contribution to Irish
history. Mr Lecky, in his history, has spoken of them with much
admiration, and has adopted many of their conclusions. The account of the
Jacobite Parliament which is given by Lord Macaulay has long been
generally accepted in England, but we believe that any one who will
candidly examine the evidence that is collected by Davis will arrive at
the conclusion that this account is seriously misleading.

To many, however, the most attractive part of this little volume will be
the introduction which is written by Sir Gavan Duffy. It is a brilliant
and powerful indictment of the government of Ireland under the Stuarts. It
is impossible to mistake the accent of sincerity that runs through his
pages, and very few men have written Irish history with such eloquence and
force.

_From_ THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

We have Mr. Lecky's testimony that Davis's account of what he calls the
Patriot Parliament is "the best and fullest" he is acquainted with. He has
made it clear that Macaulay's condemnation of the Parliament was over
coloured.

_From_ NOTES AND QUERIES.

We do not discuss politics, even when upwards of two hundred years
intervenes between the then and the now. From the literary point of view,
taking into consideration the limitations of a popular book, we have
little but praise to give to Davis's "Patriot Parliament." He wrote as a
partisan; but we detect no perversion of facts. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's
introduction is remarkably interesting. Some of our readers will like to
put this volume on the shelf where they keep their books of historic
reference, for in the appendix is a carefully compiled catalogue of the
Lords and Commons of the Parliament of 1689.

_From_ THE TIMES.

A reprint of a politico-historical tract by a writer highly commended by
Mr. Lecky, with an appreciative biographical introduction from the pen of
a well-known authority on Irish history.

_From_ THE GLOBE.

Mr. Lecky once described Davis's work as "by far the best and fullest
account" of the assembly in question, and in reproducing it the Irish
Society have earned the thanks of all students of Irish history.

_From_ THE SCOTSMAN.

The work is a valuable and instructive account of the work done by "the
Popish Parliament of James II." It is introduced by a paper in which its
editor tells all that need be known of Davis, and shows in what respects
his account corrects Macaulay. The reissue should be welcome to every one
interested in Irish history.

_From_ THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN.

It is a vigorous and readable paper, and it carries weight with it.

_From_ THE NEWCASTLE CHRONICLE.

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's introduction extends to nearly one hundred
pages, and traces in bold and rapid lines the history of Ireland under the
Stuarts. It is written with that ease, lucidity, and decision which marks
the style of Davis's colleague of fifty years ago, who now does this
service to the history of his country and to the memory of his friend.

_From_ THE SCOTTISH LEADER.

It would not have been easy indeed to make a better opening of such a
series as this aspires to be. "The Patriotic Parliament" is only a
characteristic fragment of the work of one of Ireland's most notable
heroes, and it is also a contribution of real merit to Irish history. A
perusal of this little book will fully justify Mr. Lecky's praise of the
skill and industry displayed by Davis, at the same time that it will fill
one with a kind of amused admiration of the fervid and somewhat youthful
enthusiasm of the "Young Ireland" of 1845.

_From_ THE FREEMAN.

The Irish Parliament of 1690 has been seriously maligned by Macaulay,
Froude, Ingram, and others. This is a vindication, and the work of an
Irish Protestant. The introduction by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy is very
vividly written and gives a view of the colonisation of Ulster of a very
serious character. We have not space for the story as given here, but we
commend it to our readers who desire to understand the springs of Irish
discontent.

_From_ THE BAPTIST.

To impartial students of history Davis's work will be indispensable.

_From_ THE METHODIST TIMES.

This humble-looking little book marks an era. Sir Charles Duffy has
prefixed an introduction in which he tells once more the long story of
Ireland's wrongs. The perusal of it makes one feel that England will never
lay aside her prejudices and look at Irish questions as she looks at
Italian or Russian questions. After Sir C. G. Duffy's introduction comes
Thomas Davis's modest preface. It fills five pages; it was written just
fifty years ago. It is altogether admirable in tone and sentiment.

_From_ THE UNIVERSE.

We are of opinion that the issue of this new library will tend to place
the position of our country more fairly before the public, and will foster
a much-wanted knowledge of Ireland, its requirements and its failings,
amongst our own people. We bid the patriotic venture most heartily
welcome.

As a necessity, this opening book is identified with Thomas Davis--not by
any means that it is the best specimen of his thought or writing--as in
some sort acting as a hyphen between his era and ours--the era of glorious
promise and that of partial fruition. Sir Gavan Duffy--thanks that he
still survives--supplies a masterly introduction, which to us is the
kernel of the volume.

_From_ THE CATHOLIC TIMES.

Not the least of the many services which Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's
prolific pen has rendered to the country which gave him birth, and which
he has long loved and served with patriotic devotion, is the interesting
historical introduction he has prefixed to Thomas Davis's "Patriotic
Parliament." The mind of the statesman, the heart of the patriot, and the
hand of the practised politician are strikingly evident on every page of
this powerful polemic.

_From_ THE WEEKLY REGISTER.

We are, it may be hoped, at the beginning of a better time. Along with the
publications of the Irish Literary Society, which have just begun so well
with "The Patriotic Parliament of 1689," the joint work of Thomas Davis
and Gavan Duffy, the twin brethren of modern literature in Ireland, may we
see also many a publication by the Irish clergy of such books as the two
we have named, and the volumes published some years ago by the present
Coadjutor-Bishop for Kildare and Leighlin.

_From_ THE COLONIES AND INDIA.

The book before us is one which no student of Irish history can well be
without, for it discloses in what is no doubt the true light the character
of the Catholic Parliament of James II.

_From_ THE WEEKLY DESPATCH.

The volume, a very graphic account of the "Patriot Parliament" of 1689,
written by Thomas Davis, the Irish patriot of two generations back, is an
interesting and very instructive narrative, correcting the slanders and
false statements of Macaulay and other English historians, and showing how
just, and even how tolerant of Protestant aliens, Irish Catholics could be
in the short time allowed to them, more than a hundred years before
Grattan's Parliament came into existence, for experimenting in Home Rule.
But the most readable portion of the volume is the long introduction
supplied by the editor, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who here succinctly
reminds us of some of the wrongs inflicted on his fellow-countrymen and
fellow-religionists in the old days, and not yet redressed.

_From_ THE WEEKLY SUN.

There ought to be many such books in circulation in England and Ireland,
and I hope that this volume will run through many editions. Ignorance has
been the bane of the two countries hitherto. Books like "The Irish
Parliament under James II." will go far to cement that feeling of
friendship by showing the people of this country how erroneous their
preconceived opinions of the character of the Irish people have been.

_From_ THE FREEMAN'S JOURNAL.

Though written fifty years ago, it is as much alive with lessons for the
hour as any composition of recent date. The introduction is in itself a
most valuable summary of the story of Ireland during the Stuart period.
Together with Davis's work it forms a book of which no student of Irish
history or Irish politics can afford to remain in ignorance.

_From_ THE LYCEUM.

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy in his Introduction gives us a sketch of the times
immediately preceding the 1689 Parliament, beginning with the Plantation
of Ulster under James I. Step by step he traces the course of events
through the dark period of Cromwell's campaigns, through the reign of
Charles II., with his lack of good faith and honour in his dealings with
Ireland, down to the time when James, a fugitive from his own country and
in peril of his life, landed on the shores of Ireland and summoned a
Parliament of his Irish subjects. Davis's writings on this Parliament and
his ample vindication of it from the contumely and abuse so freely
bestowed on it, have now, for the first time, been collected together and
given to the reading world as a connected whole. It is a book to be
closely studied as throwing a bright and instructive light on a dark and
much misrepresented portion of Irish history.

_From_ THE DUBLIN DAILY INDEPENDENT.

To Sir Charles Gavan Duffy this work must have been much of a labour of
love. Of that company of devoted Irishmen who had gathered together in
Dublin nigh fifty years ago--he alone survives with one other, a busy
philanthropist in a southern city who has enhanced the beauty of our
national ballads and endeared himself to his countrymen thereby. The
coming home of Gavan Duffy to renew the work of his early manhood after
half a century of exile is an interesting incident. The young fresh
revival in Irish literature in its connection with these few fine old men
is as the return of the Son of Cool to the few remaining old Fians who
kept true to the traditions of their youth in the heart of the wooded
hills of Connaught. It is the proof that their fond hopes cannot be for
ever unfulfilled. Sharing with Sir Charles Gavan Duffy the _kudos_ of
editing the New Library were two men--not unknown to their countrymen. One
of them, as _An Chraoibhin Aoibhinn_, has laboured earnestly and well to
resuscitate an interest in the purely Gaelic side of Irish literature--Dr.
Douglas Hyde. The other, recognising that Thomas Davis's influence is of
that peculiar kind rather bequeathed than withdrawn, has gone forth
zealously to the endeavour of making Thomas Davis understanded of the
people, and with confidence to Mr. T. W. Rolleston may be entrusted the
gathering up the fragments that remain--that nothing be lost--of those who
brought a new soul into Erinn.

_From_ THE DUBLIN EVENING TELEGRAPH.

An able work, by Thomas Davis, edited by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, with a
magnificent essay on the Stuart and Cromwell period. That we should get
such a jewel as this first volume, such a thing of beauty for a shilling,
is little short of a marvel.

_From_ THE CORK HERALD.

It might be said, without exaggeration, that the appearance of this
work--the forerunner as it is of a series in which Irish life, Irish
genius, and Irish character will be represented--constitutes an event of
no ordinary importance in Irish history. It is the outcome of a desire and
a want which have been long felt that the Irish people should know
accurately and intimately everything connected with the past history of
their country, with its literature, its music, its antiquities, and its
art. The same idea which is now taking visible shape, presented itself to
the minds of the leaders of the Young Ireland movement fifty years ago,
when a series of little books was published which have since been the
companions, the inspiration, and the delight of two generations of
Irishmen at home and abroad. There are few Irishmen who have not at one
time or another received a potent intellectual stimulus from the writings
of Davis or Duffy, Mitchell or M'Nevin. We do not err, therefore, when we
say that great possibilities lie hidden in this new movement.



WORKS by DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D. (An Chraoibhin Aoibhinn).

"LEABHAR SGEULUIGHEACHTA."

_viii--261 pp., 8vo. Price =5/-=. Gill & Son, O'Connell Street, Dublin._

Containing some sixteen Folk Tales, Riddles, Ranns, &c., in Irish, with
copious Notes on the Pronunciation, Vocabulary, and Dialect.

"The multitude of characteristic idioms and of those charmingly expressive
turns of speech which one meets with daily among the peasantry is so great
as to make the work a perfect treasure-house of rich jewels of thought....
Dr. Hyde deserves well, not only of his country, but of all scientific
investigators and philologists."--_Freeman's Journal._

"This is the most noteworthy addition that has been made for nearly a
century to modern Gaelic literature."--_Chicago Citizen._

"His collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories is the fruit of years of
pious work. He has travelled into every corner of Ireland where the old
tongue still lingers, gathering from the mouths of the Irish-speaking
peasants the olden stories that linger among them."--_Nation._



"BESIDE THE FIRE."

_lviii--204 pp., large 8vo. Price =7/6=. David Nutt, Strand, London._

Containing Folk Tales and Fairy Stories in Irish and English, collected
from the mouths of the peasantry. With Introduction and Notes, and
additional Notes by ALFRED NUTT.

"Any reader conversant with the subject will at once recognise the fact
that this book is distinctly the most valuable contribution that has ever
been made to Irish Folk-lore. It would be hardly an exaggeration to say
that it is the only work in that particular department that is trustworthy
in its details and scientific in its treatment."--_Nature._

"We may say that Dr. Hyde's is the first [collection of Irish Folk-lore]
which has been presented in a form entirely satisfactory to the scientific
folk-lorist.... Few men know the living Gaelic tongue so well as Dr. Hyde,
and he has made it his object to give these fragments of Gaelic tradition
exactly as he gathered them from the lips of the peasantry, and with all
the collateral information that the scientific investigator can require.
The result is certainly one of the most interesting and entertaining books
of Folk-lore that it has ever been our good fortune to come across."--_The
Speaker._

"Perhaps the most interesting part of Dr. Hyde's collection of Irish
tales, 'Beside the Fire,' is his Introduction."--_Saturday Review._

"We trust that his warning, though late, is not given in vain, and that a
whole literature will not be allowed to die or to become a fossil in the
studies of the Dryasdusts."--_Daily News leading article._



"COIS NA TEINEADH."

_60 pp., large 8vo. Price =1/6=. Gill & Son, O'Connell Street, Dublin._

Containing six Folk Stories in Irish, reprinted from the last volume. With
Additional Notes, &c.



CONTES IRLANDAIS.

Being Extracts from the untranslated portion of the "Leabhar
Sgeuluigheachta," translated into French by M. GEORGES DOTTIN, with the
original Irish text in Roman letters as arranged by Monsieur DOTTIN on the
opposite page.

_70pp., 4to. Price =7/6=. Gill & Son, O'Connell Street, Dublin._



ABHRÁIN GRÁDH; OR, LOVE SONGS OF CONNACHT.

Containing 45 Poems collected from the mouths of Connacht peasantry or
from modern manuscripts, now for the first time collected, translated, and
published, with metrical and literal versions in English on one side of
the page and the Irish text on the other, with Notes, Anecdotes, and much
Illustrative matter.

_160pp., 8vo. Price =2/6= net. T. Fisher Unwin, Paternoster Buildings, and
Gill & Son, Upper O'Connell Street, Dublin._

"In these Connaught Love Songs Dr. Hyde has made, whether in verse or
prose, the best transcript of Celtic poetry into English that we have yet
had. So much of the magic, so much of the local colour, the native grace,
the idiom of the Irish as he has given, one had thought it impossible to
give."--ERNEST RHYS, _in the Academy, Oct. 13th, 1893._

"We cannot too cordially commend to ethnologists and Gaelic antiquarians
these relics of Irish Folk Songs collected with so much industry and
devotion by Dr. Hyde."--_The Times, July 20th, 1893._

"The price of this valuable and delightful work is only half-a-crown, and
it should be welcomed by several classes of readers. The folk-lorists of
course will pounce on it, but folk-lorists are a very small public and
despised of men. Still less numerous are students of the Irish language,
who here find what they need, the Erse poetry on the left page, the
literal translation on the right.... There remains the class of English
readers of poetry, and to them the 'Love Songs of Connacht' may be warmly
recommended."--_From the Daily News leading article, Sept. 1st, 1893._

"No one who has examined Dr. Hyde's previous work can fail to see that he
combines two gifts, the conjunction of which is rarely met with in one
man; he adds to the knowledge, the love of accuracy, and the scientific
spirit of a modern scholar that sense of the _form_, and love of the
_spirit_ of his material which belongs to the creative far more than to
the critical mind. And if such praise seems to any reader excessive, let
him examine for himself the 'Fourth Chapter of the Songs of
Connacht.'"--_From the Speaker, July 15th, 1893._

"Every page deserves some quotation.... Accompanying the poems is the
enchanting commentary of Dr. Hyde; he tells of the old folk from whose
lips, of the old manuscripts, from whose pages he took his songs. He is
philosophical, historical, scientific, at need.... The reader will reflect
that were these poems, or poems a thousand times less good in Greek or
Latin, old French, or old German, or songs of Russia or Roumania, many a
learned man, many a lover of poetry, would be keen to edit, criticise,
proclaim them."--_From the Daily Chronicle, Aug. 21st, 1893._



The Reformer's Book=Shelf.

_Large crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. each._

I. =The English Peasant:= His Past and Present. By RICHARD HEATH.

II. =The Labour Movement.= By L. T. HOBHOUSE, M.A. Preface by R. B.
HALDANE, M.P.

III. =Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life:= The Third and Cheaper Edition
of GEO. JACOB HOLYOAKE'S Autobiography. 2 vols. With Portrait by WALTER
SICKERT.

IV. =Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical.= Edited, and with an
Introduction, by HENRY DUNCKLEY ("VERAX"). 2 vols.



IRISH LITERATURE.

=LOVE SONGS OF IRELAND.= Collected and Edited by KATHARINE TYNAN. Fcap.
8vo, half bound paper boards, =3s. 6d.=

"This is a dainty and pleasing little volume, to be prized by all devotees
of the Muse."--_Daily Telegraph._


=THE COUNTESS KATHLEEN: A Dramatic Poem.= By W. B. YEATS. Uniform with
above.

"It is impossible to read these poems without falling under their
fascination and taking them home to heart."--_Academy._


=IRISH FAIRY TALES.= Edited by W. B. YEATS. Illustrated by JACK B. YEATES.
(A volume of "The Children's Library.") Pinafore cloth binding, floral
edges, =2s. 6d.=

"An exquisite collection ... with an interesting preface by the
author."--_Bookman._


=FINN AND HIS COMPANIONS.= By STANDISH O'GRADY. Illustrated by J. B. YEATS.
Uniform with above.


=JOHN SHERMAN, AND DHOYA.= By GANCONAGH. (Vol. X. of "Pseudonym Library.")
Third edition. Paper, =1s. 6d.=; cloth, =2s.=

"Clever as 'John Sherman' is, cleverness seems almost an odious quality to
ascribe to pathos so unassertive, humour so delicate, and observation so
penetrative."--_Saturday Review._


=THE PARNELL MOVEMENT:= Being the History of the Irish Question from the
Death of O'Connell to the Suicide of Pigott. By T. P. O'CONNOR, M.P. Crown
8vo, cloth boards, =2s.=

"Able, readable, and full of force, and replete with information, it is,
we believe, the best and most comprehensive work on the subject yet
published."--_Nonconformist._


=THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY of THEOBALD WOLFE TONE:= A Chapter from Irish History,
1790-1798. Edited, with an Introduction, by R. BARRY O'BRIEN, of the
Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law, Author of "Fifty Years of Concessions to
Ireland," "Thomas Drummond," &c. 2 vols., with Photogravure Frontispiece
to each. 4 Steel Plates, and a Letter in facsimile. Royal 8vo, cloth, 32s.

"The book, entirely apart from any political question, is delightful
reading."--_Daily News._


=LIFE OF JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY.= Together with his Complete Poems and
Speeches. By JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. Edited by Mrs. JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY. With
Introduction by H. E. JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS, Archbishop of Baltimore.
Portraits and Illustrations. Royal 8vo, cloth, £1 1s.


=DIARY of the PARNELL COMMISSION.= By JOHN MACDONALD, M.A. Revised, with
Additions, from the _Daily News_. Large crown 8vo, cloth, 6s.


=IRELAND.= By the Hon. EMILY LAWLESS, Author of "Hurrish: A Study," &c.
(Vol. X. of "The Story of the Nations.") Maps and Illustrations. Cloth,
5s.


=THE NEED AND USE OF GETTING IRISH LITERATURE INTO THE ENGLISH TONGUE:= An
Address by the Rev. STOPFORD A. BROOKE at the Inaugural Meeting of the
Irish Literary Society in London. Second Edition. Small 4to, paper covers,
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"A charming and suggestive piece of writing."--_Speaker._



THE STORY OF THE NATIONS.

Each Volume is furnished with Maps, Illustrations, and Index.

_Large crown 8vo, fancy cloth, gold lettered, price 5s. each._

=A List of the Volumes.=

1. =ROME.= ARTHUR GILMAN, M.A.

2. =THE JEWS.= Prof. J. K. HOSMER.

3. =GERMANY.= REV. S. BARING-GOULD.

4. =CARTHAGE.= Prof. A. J. CHURCH.

5. =ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE.= Prof. J. P. MAHAFFY.

6. =THE MOORS IN SPAIN.= STANLEY LANE-POOLE.

7. =ANCIENT EGYPT.= Prof. G. RAWLINSON.

8. =HUNGARY.= Prof. ARM. VAMBÉRY.

9. =THE SARACENS.= ARTHUR GILMAN, M.A.

10. =IRELAND.= Hon. EMILY LAWLESS.

11. =CHALDEA.= ZÉNAÏDE A. RAGOZIN.

12. =THE GOTHS.= HENRY BRADLEY, M.A.

13. =ASSYRIA.= ZÉNAÏDE A. RAGOZIN.

14. =TURKEY.= STANLEY LANE-POOLE.

15. =HOLLAND.= Prof. J. E. T. ROGERS.

16. =MEDIÆVAL FRANCE.= GUSTAVE MASSON.

17. =PERSIA.= S. G. W. BENJAMIN.

18. =PHOENICIA.= Prof. G. RAWLINSON.

19. =MEDIA.= ZÉNAÏDE A. RAGOZIN.

20. =THE HANSA TOWNS.= HELEN ZIMMERN.

21. =EARLY BRITAIN.= Prof. A. J. CHURCH.

22. =THE BARBARY CORSAIR.= STANLEY LANE-POOLE.

23. =RUSSIA.= W. R. MORFILL, M.A.

24. =THE JEWS UNDER ROMAN RULE.= W. D. MORRISON, M.A.

25. =SCOTLAND.= J. MACKINTOSH, LL.D.

26. =SWITZERLAND.= R. STEAD, B.A., and LINA HUG.

27. =MEXICO.= SUSAN HALE.

28. =PORTUGAL.= H. MORSE STEPHENS.

29. =THE NORMANS.= SARAH ORNE JEWETT.

30. =THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE.= C. W. C. OMAN, M.A.

31. =SICILY.= E. A. FREEMAN, D.C.L.

32. =TUSCAN REPUBLICS.= BELLA DUFFY.

33. =POLAND.= W. R. MORFILL, M.A.

34. =PARTHIA.= Prof. G. RAWLINSON.

35. =THE AUSTRALIAN COMMONWEALTH.= GREVILLE TREGARTHEN.

36. =SPAIN.= H. E. WATTS.


Some Press Notices.

"That useful series."--_The Times._

"An admirable series."--_Spectator._

"The series is likely to be found indispensable in every school
library."--_Pall Mall Gazette._

_Illustrated Catalogue of the Series, post free._


LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.C.



Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italic_.

Passages in bold are indicated by =bold=.

Passages in Gaelic print are indicated by +Gaelic+.

The following misprints have been corrected:
  "quiet" corrected to "quite" (page 40)
  "side" corrected to "sides" (page 54)
  "hut" corrected to "but" (advertisements)

Punctuation has been corrected without note.





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