Addresses by 
 
 Sir Charles 
 jGavan Duffy KO1.G, 
 
 I JDn George Sigerson, 
 
 and 
 
 Dr. Douglas Hyde
 
 .7*. 

 
 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. MDCCCXCtV
 
 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, EN- 
 
 VIRONMENT. BY GEORGE SIGERSON, 
 M.D., FELLOW OF THE ROYAL UNI- 
 VERSITY 61 
 
 3. THE NECESSITY FOR DE-ANGLICISING 115 
 
 IRELAND. BY DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D.
 
 IRevtval of 3risb 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, T 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 cala- 
 mity, 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 
 
 9
 
 10 
 
 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, pro- 
 duced 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 u 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
 
 II 
 
 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, in- 
 dividual 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
 
 12 
 
 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 youth- 
 ful 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 inspi- 
 ration 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 ?
 
 14 
 
 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 con- 
 sciously or unconsciously preparing for their 
 task ; they are waiting the occasion occasion 
 which is the stage where alone great achieve- 
 ments 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 use- 
 ful 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 pre- 
 sent 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
 
 15 
 
 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 re- 
 lations 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, pub- 
 lished in America fifty years ago by a poor 
 exiled Irishman, which anticipates the alarm- 
 ing 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^
 
 i6 
 
 not suggest that you should publish these 
 Ijooks or any of them, but surely they are 
 finger-posts pointing to an unexplored terri- 
 tory. 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 re- 
 markable achievement as an historian, "The 
 Patriot Parliament " he calls it not the 
 Parliament of Grattan, but the Parliament 
 of Tyrconnell, was prepared ifor 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 block- 
 head 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 His- 
 torical 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 in- 
 2
 
 i8 
 
 accessible ? 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 read- 
 ing 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, know- 
 ing 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
 
 19 
 
 Irish fling away with contempt ; Switzerland 
 is more destitute of coal than Ireland, but 
 Switzerland competes successfully with 
 England in her own markets with manufac- 
 tures 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
 
 20 
 
 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 rail- 
 way 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 in- 
 dustry 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 diminish- 
 ing 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 achieve- 
 ments 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 em- 
 phatically 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 judg- 
 ment 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 commend- 
 able 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
 
 26 
 
 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 com- 
 prehend ; 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 impos- 
 sible to produce a library containing these 
 very books, or a collection varied by admit- 
 ting 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
 
 27 
 
 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 canvas- 
 sing 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 provi- 
 dent 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 con- 
 tentedly 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 em- 
 phatically 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
 
 29 
 
 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 Edin- 
 burgh, 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-ope- 
 ration, 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
 
 3 
 
 philosophers the pleasure on which they set 
 the highest price. Time has made trite and 
 commonplace the great saying of Fenelon, 
 " 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 Gold- 
 smith 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
 
 3 1 
 
 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 
 1 Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations."
 
 32 
 
 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
 
 33 
 
 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 Irish- 
 men of the present generation to take up 
 anew a task which famine and political disas- 
 ter interrupted among their predecessors 
 the task of teaching the Irish people to under- 
 stand 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 Ire- 
 land 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. 
 
 35
 
 36 
 
 A year may seem a long time to have em- 
 ployed 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 suc- 
 cessful 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 col- 
 portage 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
 
 37 
 
 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 v whom the Ger- 
 mans call a Philistine, and the French an 
 epicier, 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 con- 
 venience, whatever simplifies and facilitates 
 his beloved trade (of which steam and elec- 
 tricity 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,
 
 38 
 
 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 Red- 
 man's wigwam. But if the man of business 
 be moreover a man of meditation and culture, 
 he and his class are among the most indis- 
 pensable 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 auda- 
 cious 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 de- 
 veloped. 
 
 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
 
 39 
 
 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 asper- 
 sions. This is no sentimental gain, but one 
 eminently practical ; Ireland and Irishmen 
 suffer wrong from systematic misrepresenta- 
 tion, 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
 
 4 o 
 
 repossess themselves of lands taken from them 
 hy fraud and violence a generation earlier, was 
 a design which the twelve apostles might have 
 sanctioned. I read quiet 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 dis- 
 tinction a century ago in peace and war. 
 Marvellous fact, indeed, that the Catholic 
 Celt did not distinguish himself as a states- 
 man 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 his- 
 tory 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 Com- 
 merce in any capital of Europe, without thank- 
 fully 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 reser- 
 voir 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 illustra- 
 tion 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.
 
 43 
 
 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 educa- 
 tion 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 quali- 
 ties 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
 
 44 
 
 population get a practical and religious educa- 
 tion at the cost of the State. In Dublin I 
 have seen two of the most national institu- 
 tions 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 con- 
 verse of the axiom might be applied to our 
 own country. And if we look into the 
 matter the happiness and independence of
 
 45 
 
 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 shil- 
 lings 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
 
 4 6 
 
 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 dis- 
 appeared. Nature made them blithe, frank, 
 and hospitable ; pleasant comrades and trusty 
 friends ; but hard laws and hard taskmasters 
 have sometimes perverted their native dis- 
 position. To my thinking that patient, long- 
 suffering, bitterly wronged people still pre- 
 serve 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 sensi- 
 bility. 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
 
 47 
 
 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 in- 
 stance I have sometimes marvelled that no 
 one has made it his special task to teach the 
 " tenants at will," who have become pro- 
 prietors 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
 
 4 8 
 
 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 1 " 
 
 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
 
 49 
 
 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 origi- 
 nated, 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 
 4
 
 
 
 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 sub- 
 ject : 
 
 "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
 
 52 
 
 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, indis- 
 tinguishable from Frenchmen and Germans 
 in their ordinary conversation, who, when 
 they strayed into English, became unmistak- 
 ably 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
 
 53 
 
 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 ad- 
 measurement, as we may learn from the 
 inspiring story of small nations, is not geo- 
 metrical but metaphysical. Little Athens 
 gave philosophy, literature, and art to man- 
 kind ; little Rome imposed her will on all the 
 peoples of the known world ; in modern times 
 little Portugal, with a population which some- 
 times 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 Portu-
 
 54 
 
 gal, held its own against the most powerful 
 monarchy in Europe, and planted new 
 Netherlands in distant countries. Florence 
 almost alone created and fostered the Renais- 
 sance 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 hand- 
 ful of husbandmen and hunters, less than 
 occupy one Irish county, and to-day a fede- 
 rated league of two and twenty separate 
 republics enjoy substantial prosperity and 
 ideal liberty, though they muster fewer men 
 than still occupy the two side 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,
 
 55 
 
 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 his- 
 torian and poet, who represents a race to 
 which we have not yet got altogether recon- 
 ciled. Our friend, Dr. Sigerson, is as unmiti- 
 gated 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
 
 56 
 
 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 Scan- 
 danavian sagas for the new Irish Library, and
 
 57 
 
 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 emphati- 
 cally 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 litera- 
 ture 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
 
 58 
 
 and women. It slept at times, but only for 
 an interval. O'Conor and Curry, Miss Edge- 
 worth 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 col- 
 lecting our national records with a care and 
 zeal which in any other country would com- 
 pel 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
 
 59 
 
 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 respon- 
 sibility 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. Intel- 
 lectual 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
 
 6o 
 
 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 manu- 
 facturers, 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 enjoy- 
 ments given to man.
 
 IRISH LITERATURE: 
 ITS ORIGIN, ENVIRONMENT, AND INFLUENCE. 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE SIGERSON, M.D., M.Cn., &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. 1 
 
 Two worlds commemorate that great adven- 
 ture of Columbus, who, four centuries ago, 
 after tragic effort, sailed forth from Huelva, 
 and at last found the fringe of a new conti- 
 nent. 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 sun- 
 light, drove into the dark mists of the Un- 
 
 1 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. 
 63
 
 6 4 
 
 known, 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 hap- 
 pened elsewhere, the beings who first leaped 
 upon our shores must have been among the 
 foremost in the developed attributes of man- 
 hood. 
 
 These isles were to the ancients what 
 America has been to modern Europe, and
 
 65 
 
 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 
 5
 
 66 
 
 remains, for the Book of Nature is a palimp- 
 sest 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
 
 6 7 
 
 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 exis- 
 tence, and the fact of their absence, might
 
 68 
 
 well give rise to those strange and beautiful 
 traditions of the Lands of Youth, of Life, of 
 Virtues their mystical appearance and dis- 
 appearance 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, moun- 
 tains, 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
 
 6 9 
 
 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, speak- 
 ing biologically, such laws could not emanate 
 from any race whose brains had not been 
 subject to the quickening influences of educa- 
 tion 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
 
 76 
 
 closely do its antique characters cling to it. 
 Unquestionably no nation ever so revered its 
 men of learning. They rewarded that rever- 
 ence by giving immortal life to its heroes, and 
 by winning for that people the respect of 
 modern scholarship. I . wish I could say of 
 modem 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
 
 71 
 
 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 pecu- 
 liarly 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 decid- 
 ing 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
 
 72 
 
 works characterised by curt, clear and ringing 
 sentences ; at another the phrase moves em- 
 barrassed 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 ; /.<?., 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. Per- 
 fect correspondence demanded that the end
 
 73 
 
 words in two lines should agree in possessing 
 letters of the same class. [This may some- 
 times 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 mean-
 
 74 
 
 ing 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 won- 
 derful 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
 
 75 
 
 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 progres- 
 sively 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 physio- 
 logical as well as a literary interest. We all
 
 76 
 
 know what the term rhyme now means in 
 English : the sound-echo of vowels and con- 
 sonants in two or more terminal words. 1 It 
 has many charms, but tends to become mono- 
 tonous in long poems ; hence authors some- 
 times 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 con- 
 sonant should be echoed. The ear recognises 
 the echo of the initial letter, or of initial con- 
 sonant 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 
 
 1 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.
 
 77 
 
 letter, whilst it repeated the sound with a har- 
 monious 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 un- 
 known to all the dialects of Europe, with one 
 exception, for some centuries after the Chris- 
 tian era. The Greeks and the Romans wrote 
 much poetry, but never rhymed it. 1 Their 
 metrical system was elaborate, satisfactory, 
 and pleasing, but it did not recognise the con- 
 cordant 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 
 
 1 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.
 
 78 
 
 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 sub- 
 sequent universal prevalence. 
 
 Some years ago, a German professor intro- 
 duced, and Mr. Gladstone, with the charac- 
 teristic vigour of his many-sided mind, sup- 
 ported 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
 
 79 
 
 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 Irish- 
 man makes it, one might suppose exaggera- 
 tion ; but foreign scholarship confesses it in 
 part, and the facts render its acceptance im- 
 perative. 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 correspon- 
 dence. 1 
 
 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, 
 
 1 ., in its end-words : tracht, eacht,Juacht, ruacht.
 
 8o 
 
 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 think- 
 ing, 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 develop- 
 ment 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 evi- 
 dence of acute visual perception of colour, 
 whilst appreciation of grace of outline and
 
 8i 
 
 form is proved also from the writing of our 
 oldest manuscripts, the finely wrought imple- 
 ments 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 neces- 
 sarily the inner aptitude), and with the ancient 
 language is passing away some of the articula- 
 tion-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 disci- 
 plined 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 conse- 
 quence, much less sustained power exhibited, 
 whilst there is a great capacity for detail, a 
 6
 
 82 
 
 special aptitude for fine arrangements an*d 
 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 specula- 
 tion, 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 Revo- 
 lution revolutionised poetry as well as politics. 
 It was a splendid idea of the bards to con- 
 jure back Oisin from the land of Youth, and 
 present him and St. Patrick types of Pagan- 
 ism 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, con- 
 stitute a creation in literature. No wonder 
 that, even though amplified and altered in the 
 garb of another language, the great concep- 
 tion 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
 
 83 
 
 interaction of ancient Irish and Roman litera- 
 tures. Christianity gave the Irish that cohe- 
 sive 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 im- 
 pulses. 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 cele- 
 brated for all times. 
 
 They are known to have been the first 
 settlers in Iceland. They penetrated to 
 Athens, and helped potently to revive or
 
 8 4 
 
 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 inter- 
 woven echoes : 
 
 " A solis ortus c&rdine, adusque terra \\m\tem,. 
 Christum canamus princi/m, natum Maria virgine." l 
 
 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. 
 
 1 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.
 
 85 
 
 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 a concord " in the alliterated 
 letters, but also of " correspondence " in the 
 terminal rhymes : 
 
 "Neve quis ignoret, speciem crucis esse coletuiaw, 
 Quit Dominum portavit ovans, ratione, fotenti 
 Quattuor inde plagas quadrati colligit orbis. 
 Splendidus auctoris de vertice fulget "Eons, 
 Occiduo sacra; lambuntur sidere planhe 
 Arcton dextra tenet, medium Iceva erigit z.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
 
 86 
 
 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, circu- 
 lated 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 Ame- 
 rica. 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. 1 
 There was a little chapel to St. Brendan on 
 its summit, because of the reverence which all 
 seamen, whether Norse, Saxon, or Celt, pro- 
 1 Hunt, " History of Bristol, 1884."
 
 8? 
 
 fessed 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 dis- 
 couraged. 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 (z.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 dis- 
 covery of a Continent as the result of a 
 romance. 
 
 Whilst some of the early Christians depre- 
 cated the study of the pagan classics, the Irish 
 held large and more liberal views. This was
 
 88 
 
 peculiarly true of St. Columbanus. Authori- 
 tative, 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 follow- 
 ing show both final rhymes and concordant 
 initials : 
 
 " Dilexerunt tenebras tetras rnagis quam lucent, 
 Imitari contemnunt vita; Dominum Aucein: 
 Velut in somnis regnent una hora \xiantttr, 
 Sed aeterna tormenta adhuc illius para///w." ' 
 
 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 
 
 1 In the third line, the letters v and r are in (imperfect) 
 concord. They belong to the same class of " light " con- 
 sonants, from which it might be inferred that the ancient 
 Irish did not roll the letter r.
 
 89 
 
 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 great- 
 ness 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 arith- 
 metic, music, geometry, and astronomy the 
 seven arts. In his school sate Charlemagne
 
 9 o 
 
 under the school-name of David, the members 
 of his family each under an academic name, 
 and with these the members of the cortege, 
 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 en- 
 hanced 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. 1 
 
 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 
 1 Thegan ; Pithou : Opp. cvii.
 
 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 specu- 
 lations 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 nocked 
 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
 
 92 
 
 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 
 lona, 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 learn- 
 ing and literature took its rise, were bathed 
 in an Irish intellectual atmosphere. Caedmon 
 began his song in this environment, and when
 
 93 
 
 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. 1 
 
 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. larl Hacon went 
 to oppose the aggressions of the Emperor 
 Otho ; King Harald Sigurdson to avenge 
 wrongs inflicted by English Harold ; and 
 larl 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 
 
 1 Malmesbury is a modification of Mailduff s burg.
 
 94 
 
 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 influ- 
 ence 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. 
 Linnaeus, 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. 1 Irish 
 music charmed them, and even now some of 
 our old airs awake echoes along the norland 
 fiords. 2 
 
 The latest and most distinguished authori- 
 
 1 /.*., Hoved, The Head. 
 
 2 Hr. Sjoden, the eminent Swedish harper^ noted seve- 
 ral Scandinavian airs but slightly varied from the Irish.
 
 95 
 
 ties ' 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 de- 
 
 1 Messrs. Vigfusson and York Powell in " Corpus 
 Poeticum Boreale," &c.
 
 9 6 
 
 pendents, 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." " More- 
 over," 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,
 
 97 
 
 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." x 
 With the great Sagas, the fame of which 
 has spread abroad as their strong dramatic 
 character deserves, Northern literature pos- 
 sesses the no less celebrated Eddas. These 
 Eddie 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." 
 1 Vigfusson, Prolegomena to Sturlunga Saga. 
 
 7
 
 " 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, 1 their 
 reckless passion and wonderful fluency are 
 also non-Teutonic and speak of their alien 
 descent." In Bragi's Eddie 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, domina- 
 ting 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 com- 
 position, gave dramatic vividness to its narra- 
 tive grace, method, and myths to its poetry. 
 
 With this knowledge in mind you will look 
 with better insight into the story of the Norse- 
 men 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 
 1 From the Irish name, Cormac.
 
 99 
 
 times, were the favourite resort of Irishmen 
 skilled in letters and all the arts of peace and 
 war. u 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 some- 
 times thought of writing a book to be en- 
 titled : " The Good Deeds of our Enemies." 
 Too often do AVC 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 prin- 
 ciple, 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 repre- 
 sented as savage, ruthless, and exterminating. 
 
 Ireland has been able to act upon the litera- 
 ture of the Continent and of Britain in three 
 ways : first, directly, next by means of its
 
 loo 
 
 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 inter- 
 mixture 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 in- 
 fluence 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 Boieldieu 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. 1 
 
 1 Shakespeare mentions an old Irish air, Cailin og astor 
 (in " Henry II.", act iv., sc. 4) ; the air itself is give in
 
 101 
 
 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 monas- 
 try of St. Gall to which the illustrious Irish- 
 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 future foes exiles my present joy, 
 And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine 
 
 annoy ; 
 
 For falsehood now doth flow and subject faith doth ebb, 
 Which would not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved 
 
 the web." 
 
 It is most interesting to observe that Shakespeare himself 
 employs alliteration in his epitaph, and used it in a man- 
 ner so closely conforming to the regular Irish system, as 
 to suggest his acquaintance with it, e.g. : 
 
 " Good friend for Jesus' sake forbeare, 
 To dig the dust enclosed here, 
 Blesst be he who spares these stones, 
 And cursed be he who moves my bones."
 
 102 
 
 man 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 origi- 
 nals. 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, Hageri (? 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, mar- 
 riage and reconcilement, are told with ani- 
 mation. Gudrun, the daughter of Hettel's 
 Irish wife, is the second heroine of the tale. 
 Iri 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 Tenny- 
 son's "Idylls of the King." 
 
 The kindred peoples of France and of Spain
 
 103 
 
 were naturally not lessi 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 Caesar'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 Com- 
 harda " (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 " Faerie 
 Queene," wherein he immortalises some of our
 
 104 
 
 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 en- 
 vironment 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 igno- 
 rant 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 Irenaeus) 
 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.
 
 lob 
 
 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 encou- 
 raged the representatives of literature ? J 
 
 It is a study full of interest to watch the 
 development of the culture of the Anglo-Irish 
 
 1 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.
 
 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 his- 
 torians, 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 compen- 
 sating 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
 
 io8 
 
 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 nation- 
 hood 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 resem- 
 ble 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 composi-
 
 tions of Italy." This reminds us of the time 
 when an enemy, Giraldus Cambrensis, de- 
 clared 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 vene- 
 rable 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 re- 
 sembles the great oriel of some ancient 
 cathedral, an illumination of many beautiful 
 colours, some of which can never be repro- 
 duced, 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
 
 iio 
 
 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 know- 
 ledge 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 in- 
 valuable if for this reason alone, that it gives 
 a new view-point and a new vista. Its im- 
 portance is augmented in this, that its reck- 
 less sincerity stands the enduring evidence of 
 a long-vanished stage of social and intellec- 
 tual development, where the fiercer and finer 
 powers, the softer and sterner emotions of an 
 early mankind strive and commingle with
 
 Ill 
 
 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 Tain 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 swords- 
 man 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.
 
 112 
 
 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 intel- 
 lectual forces and effects : they will record 
 that Roman power conquered Greece, but 
 fail to recognise that Greek intellect con- 
 quered 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 litera- 
 ture, 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 in- 
 telligent 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 de- 
 scendants 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 mem- 
 bers 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 
 8
 
 our reproach, the future our disgrace. Not 
 foreign force, but native sloth can do us dis- 
 honour. 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 trea- 
 sure, 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-ANGLICI- 
 SING IRELAND. 1 
 
 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, every- 
 thing 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 
 
 1 Delivered before the Irish National Literary Society 
 in Dublin, November 25th, 1892.
 
 u8 
 
 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 ww-literary, 
 and how the present art products of one 
 of the quickest, most sensitive, and most 
 artistic races on earth are now only distin- 
 guished 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 de- 
 claiming ? 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 English-
 
 I2O 
 
 men 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 Irish- 
 men 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 Irish- 
 women 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 Parliamen- 
 tary obstruction seem always to gain their 
 sympathy and support. It is just because 
 there appears no earthly chance of their be- 
 coming 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.
 
 121 
 
 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 Eng- 
 land 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, grand- 
 fatherly 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
 
 122 
 
 were to arise a series of Cromwells in Eng- 
 land 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 intona- 
 tion 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
 
 123 
 
 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 Angli- 
 cisation, 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 sentimen- 
 tality 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 ;
 
 124 
 
 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 benedic- 
 tions 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 un- 
 conscious 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
 
 125 
 
 itself forced in turn to yield its speech, man- 
 ners, 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 litera- 
 ture, 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. West- 
 wood himself declares that, were it not for 
 Irishmen, these islands would possess no 
 primitive works of art worth the mention- 
 ing ; Jubainville asserts that early Irish litera- 
 ture 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 at- 
 tempt 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
 
 126 
 
 already shown in his opening lecture the debt 
 of gratitude which in many respects Europe 
 owes to ancient Ireland. The dim conscious- 
 ness 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 genera- 
 tion 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
 
 127 
 
 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 oi 
 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 coun- 
 try, 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, neverthe- 
 less, constituted the real working popula- 
 tion, 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 t'llo ! 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 con- 
 tinuity 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 Cuchul- 
 lain 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,
 
 129 
 
 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, pro- 
 duced 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 
 9
 
 130 
 
 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 train- 
 ing, however, nearly every one of fair educa- 
 tion 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 ot 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
 
 132 
 
 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 manu- 
 scripts 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 01 
 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 con- 
 tinued to be spoken, there the ancient MSS. 
 continued to be read, there the epics of 
 Cuchullain, Conor MacNessa, Deirdre, Finn, 
 Oscar, and Ossian continued to be told, and 
 there poetry and music held sway. Some 
 people may think I am exaggerating in as- 
 serting that such a state of things existed
 
 133 
 
 down to the present century, but it is no 
 exaggeration. I have myself spoken with 
 men from Cavan and Tyrone who spoke ex- 
 cellent 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 Cqnnacht, who used to go to 
 reap the harvest in England and take ship- 
 ping 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 lan- 
 guage 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
 
 134 
 
 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 (' 
 Eamham], 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 per- 
 fectly. 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 com- 
 pletely Gaelic. In fact, I may venture to say,
 
 that, up to the beginning of the present cen- 
 tury, 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 birth- 
 right 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 con- 
 quered us, she has even imposed upon us her 
 language, that is to say, the form of our 
 thoughts during every instant of our exis- 
 tence." 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 Anglicisa-tion, the loss of our language. I 
 have often heard people thank God that if 
 the English gave us nothing else they gave
 
 136 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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 Anglicisa- 
 tion 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 them- 
 selves to understand it. We must arouse 
 some spark of patriotic inspiration among the
 
 137 
 
 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. 1 
 Maynooth has at last come splendidly to the 
 
 1 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 re- 
 member asking a gossoon a couple of miles west of Bal- 
 laghaderreen 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
 
 138 
 
 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 them- 
 selves will do, something though with a very 
 different purpose analogous to the procedure 
 that James Stephens adopted throughout Ire- 
 land 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 al- 
 ways spoken Irish amongst themselves during 
 
 that I was addressing him in one language and he an- 
 swering 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.
 
 139 
 
 the year. But, unfortunately, distracted as we 
 are and torn by contending factions, it is im- 
 possible to find either men or money to carry 
 out this simple remedy, although to a dis- 
 passionate 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 lan- 
 guage, 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 examina- 
 tions 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
 
 140 
 
 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'Sulli- 
 vans, 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 Mac- 
 Raymonds. The Birminghams of Connacht 
 took the name of MacFeoiris, the Stauntons 
 became MacAveelys, the Nangles Mac- 
 Costellos ; the Prendergasts of Mayo became 
 MacMaurices, the De Courcys became Mac
 
 Patricks, the Bissetts of Antrim became 
 MacEoins, 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 begin- 
 ning of the fourteenth to the middle of the 
 seventeenth century. 
 
 In 1465 an Act was passed by the Parlia- 
 ment 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
 
 142 
 
 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 
 (tytw.ii bofium&) for the strengthening of the 
 Irish, the abrogation thereof will as much 
 enfeeble them. 1 ' 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 any- 
 thing 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 indepen- 
 dence of Ireland, that men of education and
 
 143 
 
 intelligence like Carleton the novelist, or 
 Hardiman, author of the "History of Gal- 
 Way " and the " Irish Minstrelsy," should 
 have changed their Milesian names, one from 
 that of O'Cairellan, who was ancient chief of 
 Clandennot, 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, OTrehys, 
 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, Maclntyre, 
 MacGilroy, MacTernan, MacCorry, MacOscar, 
 MacBrehon, O'Clery, Murtagh, O'Drum, &c., 
 were becoming, or had become, Victory, Vic- 
 toria, Callwell, Freeman, King, Nugent, Gil 
 man, Leonard, Godwin, Goodwin, Smyth, 
 Golderich, Golding, Masterton, Lind, Crosby, 
 Grosby, Crosse, Corry, Cosgrove, Judge, 
 Brabacy, Brabazon, Clarke, Clerkin, Cun- 
 ningham, Drummond, Tackit, Sexton, and
 
 144 
 
 Mortimer 1 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 
 
 1 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 Ciiil-Riabhaigh, i.e., son 
 of the grey poll) are Grays. The Mac Eochagains 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 losa, 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 Mao 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 genjtive 
 of gearr, "short," become Shorts or Shortalls, but some- 
 times, less corruptly, Kerrs. The honourable name of 
 Mac Rannell (Mac Raghnaill) is now seldom met with in
 
 145 
 
 properly belong to their names ; others, with- 
 out actually changing them, metamorphose 
 their names, as we have seen, into every possi- 
 ble form. I was told in America that the first 
 
 any other form than that of Reynolds. The Mac Sorarans 
 (Mac Samhradhain, the clan or tribe name of the Mac 
 Gaurans or Mac Governs) have become Somers, through 
 some fancied etymology with the word sanikradh. The 
 Mac Sorleys (Mac Samharlaigh) are often Shirleys. The 
 honourable and poetic race of Mac-an-bhairds (sons of the 
 bard) are now Wards to a man. The Mac-intleevys 
 (Mac an tsleibhe, 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 Maclntyre as the Scots always 
 have it, are in Ireland Carpenters or Wrights, or be- 
 cause saor means " free " as well as Carpenter Frees and 
 Freemans. Many of the O'Hagans (O h-Aodhgain) are 
 now Fagans, and even Dickens's Fagan the Jew has not 
 put a stop to the hideous transformation. The O'Hillans 
 (Mac Ui lollain, i.e. , sons of Ulan, 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. 
 10
 
 146 
 
 Chauncey who ever came out there was an 
 O'Shaughnessy, who went to, I think, Mary- 
 land, 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 with- 
 in 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 per- 
 sonally, 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 etymo- 
 logical confusion with the word Caraim, 
 which means "I love") calls himself Mr. 
 Love ! Another brother remains a Brehony,
 
 147 
 
 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, hun- 
 dreds 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 re- 
 monstrance 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 un- 
 clean things, not because they were ugly in 
 themselves or inharmonious, but simply be- 
 cause 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, Diar- 
 muid, Kian, Cuan, Ae, Art, Mahon, Eochaidh, 
 Fearflatha, Cathan, Rory, Coll, Lochlainn,
 
 148 
 
 Cathal, Lughaidh, Turlough, Eamon, Randal, 
 Niall, Sorley, and Conor, are now extinct or 
 nearly so. Donough and Murrough survive 
 in the O'Brien family. Angus, Manus, Fer- 
 gal, and Felim are now hardly known. The 
 man whom you call Diarmuid when you 
 speak Irish, a low, pernicious, un-Irish, de- 
 testable 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, Domhnall is Daniel, 
 Partholan, the name of the earliest coloniser 
 of Ireland, is Bartholomew or Batty, 1 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 ; Felim is Felix, Fin- 
 
 1 It is questionable, however, whether Partholan as a 
 modern Christian name is not itself an Irishised form of 
 Bartholomew.
 
 I 4 9 
 
 ghin (Finneen) is Florence, Conor is Corney, 
 Turlough is Terence, Earaon 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, Cor- 
 mac, 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 Nora than Onny, Honny, or 
 Honour (so translated simply because Nora 
 sounds like onotr, the Irish for " honour ") ; 
 surely Una is prettier than Winny, which it 
 becomes when West-Britonised. Meve, the 
 great name of the Queen of Connacht who led 
 the famous cattle spoiling of Cuailgne, cele- 
 brated in the greatest Irish epic, is at least as 
 pretty as Maud, which it becomes when Angli- 
 cised, and Eibhlin (Eileen) is prettier than 
 Ellen or Elinor. Aoife (Eefy), Sighle (Sheela), 
 Moirin (Moreen), Nuala and Fionnuala (Fin- 
 noola), 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 re-
 
 jection, whilst three other very common ones, 
 Suraha, Shinead, 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, Meve, 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-Briton- 
 ising 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 nation-
 
 ality 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 them- 
 selves Judges, the Clan Govern call them- 
 selves Smiths, and the O'Reardons Salmons, 
 as long as our boys are called Dan and Jere- 
 miah instead of Donal and Diarmuid, and our 
 girls Honny, Winny, and Ellen instead of 
 Nora, 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 un- 
 fortunate natives of the eighteenth century 
 allowed all kinds of havoc to be played with 
 even their best-known names. For example 
 the river Feoir they allowed to be turned per- 
 manently into the Nore, which happened this
 
 152 
 
 way. Some Englishman, asking the name ot 
 the river, was told that it was An Fhebir, pro- 
 nounced In n'yore, because the F when pre- 
 ceded by the definite article an is not sounded, 
 so that in his ignorance he mistook the word 
 Feoir for Neoir, 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 English- 
 man having mistaken the C at the end of loch 
 for the beginning of the next word. Some- 
 times 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. 1 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 
 
 1 For more information about Tailtin, see an article by 
 me incorporated in the " Rules of the Gaelic Athletic 
 Association," recently published.
 
 153 
 
 about the same intelligence and contempt as 
 vulgar English squatters treat the topographi- 
 cal nomenclature of the Red Indians. These 
 things are now to a certain extent stereotyped, 
 and are difficult at this hour to change, espe- 
 cially 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 good- 
 will of an united nation to put our topographi- 
 cal 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 pro- 
 nunciation of the natives as possible ? I re- 
 member 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. 1 Another instance 
 out 01 many thousands is my own market 
 
 1 In Irish it is Beul-ath-an-righ contracted into B'l'ath- 
 'n-righ, pronounced Blawn-ree.
 
 154 
 
 town, Ballagh-a-derreen, literally, "the way of 
 the oak-wood." Ballach is the same word as 
 in the phrase Fag a 1 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 Balla-had-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 de- 
 liberate 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
 
 155 
 
 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 lan- 
 guage 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 Cuis d*d pleidh, Drinauu Dunn, Roseeti 
 Dubh, Gamhan Geal Ban, Eileen-a-roon, 
 Shawn O'Dwycr 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 reper- 
 toire of the wandering minstrel, and the 
 minstrels themselves are becoming fewer and 
 fewer, and I fear worse and worse. It is diffi- 
 cult 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 pro- 
 mising pipers might be trained to play all the
 
 Irish airs and sent forth to delight our popu- 
 lation ; 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 Govern- 
 ment 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 Siubhail 
 Siubhail, or the fun of the Moddcrecu Ruad/i 
 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 c&mftn, or hurling, and Gaelic foot-
 
 157 
 
 ball, has done more for Ireland than all the 
 speeches of politicians for the last five years. 
 And it is not alone that that splendid associa- 
 tion revived for a time with vigour our national 
 sports, but it revived also our national recollec- 
 tions, 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. Wher- 
 ever 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 neck- 
 ties 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
 
 158 
 
 still more popular, and could we not, in places 
 where both garbs are worn, use our influence 
 against English second-hand trousers, gene- 
 rally 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 
 Conneinara 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
 
 159 
 
 to move, with a view to de- Anglicising our- 
 selves ; but perhaps the principal point of all I 
 have taken for granted. That is the necessity 
 for encouraging the use of Anglo-Irish litera- 
 ture 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 Sow 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 toil- 
 ing painfully behind the English at each step
 
 i6o 
 
 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 encourag- 
 ing national aspirations, because upon Irish 
 lines alone can the Irish race once more be- 
 come what it was of yore one of the most 
 original, artistic, literary, and charming 
 peoples of Europe. 
 
 ii
 
 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 indict- 
 ment 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.
 
 2 THE PATRIOT PARLIAMENT. 
 
 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 ot 
 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
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 3 
 
 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
 
 4 THE PATRIOT PARLIAMENT. 
 
 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
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 5 
 
 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
 
 6 THE PATRIOT PARLIAMENT. 
 
 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 suc- 
 cinctly 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 1 hope that this volume 
 will run through many editions. Ignorance has been 
 the bane of tfie 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 Ire- 
 land, down to the time when James, a fugitive from his 
 own country and in peril of his life, landed on the shores
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 7 
 
 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 en- 
 hanced 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 man- 
 hood 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, recog- 
 nising 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 understancled of the people, and with confi- 
 dence to Mr. T. W. Rolleston may be entrusted the
 
 8 THE PATRIOT PARLIAMENT. 
 
 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 ap- 
 pearance of this work the forerunner as it is of a 
 series in which Irish life, Irish genius, and Irish cha- 
 racter will be represented constitutes an event of no 
 ordinary importance in Irish history. It is the out- 
 come 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 move- 
 ment. 
 
 LONDON : 
 T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.G.
 
 WORKS by DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D. (An Chraoibhin Aoibhinn). 
 
 "LEABHAR SGEULUICHEACHTA. 
 
 viii 261 pp., STO. Price 5/-. Gill &> Sou, 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 expres- 
 sive 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." 
 
 Iviii 204 //., 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 trust- 
 worthy 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 enter- 
 taining 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, arid 
 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. 
 
 -CO IS NA TEINEADH." 
 
 60 pp., large &vo. Price 1/6. Gill f 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. 
 70/^,4/0. Price 1 '16. Gill & Son, O'Connell Street, Dublin. 
 
 ABHRAIN GRADH; 
 
 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, trans- 
 lated, 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. 
 
 i6o//., 8vo. Price 2/6 net. T. Fisher Uniuin, Paternoster Buildings, 
 and Gill & Son, Upper O' Council 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 Acadciiiy, Oct. itfA, 1893. 
 
 We cannot top cordially commend to ethnologists and Gaelic anti- 
 quarians these relics of Irish Folk Songs collected with so much industry 
 and devotion by Dr. Hyde." The Times, July zoth, 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. ist, 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 iheform, 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 i$th, 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 Rou- 
 mania, many a learned man, many a lover of poetry, would be keen to edit, 
 criticise, proclaim them." Front the Daily Chronicle, Aug. 2ist, 1893.
 
 tlbe IRefonnev's 
 
 Booh-Sbelt 
 
 Large crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. each. 
 
 The English Peasant: His Past and 
 
 Present. By RICHARD HEATH. 
 II. 
 
 The Labour Movement. By i .. i . 
 
 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 HOLY- 
 OAKE'S Autobiography. 2 vols. With Portrait by 
 WALTER SICKERT. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Bam ford's Passages in the Life of 
 
 a Radical. Edited, and with an Introduction, by 
 HENRY DUNCKLEY (" VERAX "). 2 vols. 
 
 LONDON : 
 T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE, B.C.
 
 IRISH LITERATURE. 
 
 LOVE SONGS OF IRELAND. Collected and 
 Edited by KATHARINE TYNAN. Fcap. 8vo, half bound paper 
 boards, 3s. 6cl. 
 
 " This is a dainty and pleasing little volume, to be prized by all de- 
 votees 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 CAN- 
 
 CONAGH. (Vol. X. of "Pseudonym Library.") Third edition. 
 Paper, Is. 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. 
 
 LONDON ; 
 T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.G.
 
 IRISH LITERATURE 
 
 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 Ire- 
 land," "Thomas Drummond," &c. 2 vols., with 
 Photogravure Frontispiece to each. 4 Steel Plates, 
 and a Letter in facsimile. Royal 8vo, cloth, 325. 
 " 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. Por- 
 traits and Illustrations. Royal 8vo, cloth, i is. 
 
 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, 53. 
 
 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 410, paper 
 covers, is. 
 '? A charming and suggestive piece of writing." Speaker. 
 
 LONDON : 
 T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.G.
 
 THE STORY OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 Each Volume is furnished with Maps, Illustrations, and Index. 
 Large crown 8vo, fancy cloth, sold lettered, price 5s. each. 
 
 A List of the Volumes. 
 
 19. MEDIA. ZENAIDE A. RAGO- 
 
 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, 
 
 1. ROME. ARTHUR OILMAN, 
 
 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. 
 
 VAMBERY. 
 
 9. THE SARACENS. ARTHUR 
 
 OILMAN, M.A. 
 
 10. IRELAND. Hon. EMILY 
 
 LAWLESS. 
 
 11. CHALDEA. ZEN AIDE A. 
 
 RAGOZIN. 
 
 12. THE GOTHS. HENRY BRAD- 
 
 LEY, M.A. 
 
 13. ASSYRIA. ZENAIDE A. 
 
 RAGOZIN. 
 
 14. TURKEY. STANLEY LANE- 
 
 POOLE. 
 
 15. HOLLAND. Prof. J. E. T. 
 
 ROGERS. 
 
 !6. MEDIAEVAL FRANCE. 
 GUSTAVE MASSON. 
 
 17. PERSIA. S. G. W. BEN- 
 
 JAMIN. 
 
 18. PHOENICIA. Prof. G. RAW- 
 
 LINSON. 
 
 M.A. 
 
 24. THE JEWS UNDER RO- 
 
 MAN 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. RAW- 
 
 LINSON. 
 
 35. THE AUSTRALIAN COM- 
 
 MONWEALTH. 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.
 
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