Although treatises on law are not literature in the true sense of the word, yet those of Ireland are too numerous and valuable not to claim at least some short notice. When it was determined by the Government, in 1852, to appoint a Royal Commission to publish the Ancient Laws and Institutions of Ireland, those great native scholars O'Donovan and O'Curry (the only men who had arisen since the death of Mac Firbis who were competent to undertake the task) set about transcribing such volumes of the Irish law code as had escaped the vicissitudes of time, and before they died—which they did, unhappily, not long after they had begun this work—O'Donovan had transcribed 2,491 pages of text, of which he had accomplished a preliminary translation in twelve manuscript volumes, while his fellow labourer O'Curry had transcribed 2,906 pages more, and had accomplished a tentative translation of them which filled thirteen volumes. Four large volumes of these laws have been already published, and two more have been these very many years in preparation, but have not as yet seen the light.
The first two of the published volumes contain the Seanchus Mór , which includes a preface to the text, in which we are told how and where it was put together and purified, and the law of Athgabhail or Distress. The second volume contains the law of hostage-sureties, of fosterage, of Saer-stock tenure and Daer-stock tenure, and the law of social connexions. The third volume contains the so-called Book of Acaill, which is chiefly concerned with the law relating to torts and injuries. It professes to be a compilation of the dicta and opinions of King Cormac mac Art, who lived in the third century, and of Cennfaeladh, who lived in the seventh. The fourth volume of the Brehon law consists of isolated law-tracts such as that on "Taking possession," that containing judgments on co-tenancy, right of water, divisions of land, and the celebrated Crith Gabhlach which treats of social ranks and organisation.
The text itself of the Seanchus Mór, which is comprised in the first two published volumes, is comparatively brief, but what swells it to such a size is the great amount of commentary in small print written upon the brief text, and the great amount of additional annotations upon this commentary itself. Whatever may have been the date of the original laws, the bulk of the text is much later, for it consists of the commentaries added by repeated generations of early Irish lawyers piled up as it were one upon the other.
Most of the Brehon law tracts derive their titles not from individuals who promulgated them, but either from the subjects treated of or else from some particular locality connected with the composition of the work. They are essentially digests rather than codes, compilations, in fact, of learned lawyers. The essential idea of modern law is entirely absent from them, if by law is understood a command given by some one possessing authority to do or to forbear doing, under pains and penalties. There appears to be, in fact, no sanction laid down in the Brehon law against those who violated its maxims, nor did the State provide any such. This was in truth the great inherent weakness of Irish jurisprudence, and it was one inseparable from a tribal organisation, which lacked the controlling hand of a strong central government, and in which the idea of the State as distinguished from the tribe had scarcely emerged. If a litigant chose to disregard the brehon's ruling there was no machinery of the law set in motion to force him to accept it. The only executive authority in ancient Ireland which lay behind the decision of the judge was the traditional obedience and good sense of the people, and it does not appear that, with the full force of public opinion behind them, the brehons had any trouble in getting their decisions accepted by the common people. Not that this was any part of their duty. On the contrary, their business was over so soon as they had pronounced their decision, and given judgment between the contending parties. If one of these parties refused to abide by this decision, it was no affair of the brehon's, it was the concern of the public, and the public appear to have seen to it that the brehon's decision was always carried out. This seems to have been indeed the very essence of democratic government with no executive authority behind it but the will of the people, and it appears to have trained a law-abiding and intelligent public, for the Elizabethan statesman, Sir John Davies, confesses frankly in his admirable essay on the true causes why Ireland was never subdued, that "there is no nation or people under the sunne that doth love equall and indifferent justice better than the Irish; or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof although it be against themselves, so that they may have the protection and benefit of the law, when uppon just cause they do desire it."
The Irish appear to have had professional advocates, a court of appeal, and regular methods of procedure for carrying the case before it, and if, a brehon could be shown to have delivered a false or unjust judgment he himself was liable to damages. The brehonship was not elective; it seems indeed in later times to have been almost hereditary, but the brehon had to pass through a long and tedious course before he was permitted to practise; he was obliged to be "qualified in every department of legal science," says the text; and the Brehon law was remarkable for its copiousness, furnishing, as Sir Samuel Ferguson remarks, "a striking example of the length to which moral and metaphysical refinements may be carried under rude social conditions." As a makeweight against the privileges which are always the concomitant of riches, the penalties for misdeeds and omissions of all kinds were carefully graduated in the interests of the poor, and crime or breach of contract might reduce a man from the highest to the lowest grade.
There is little intimation in the laws as to their own origin. Like the Common Law of England, to which they bear a certain resemblance, they appear to have been in great part handed down from time immemorial, probably without undergoing any substantial change. It is curious to observe how some of the typical test-cases carry us back as far as the second century. Thus the very first paragraph in the Law of Distress—one of the most important institutions among the Irish, for Distress was the procedure by which most civil claims were made good—runs thus:
"Three white cows were taken by Asal from Mogh, son of Nuada, by an immediate seizure. And they lay down a night at Lerta on the Boyne. They escaped from him and they left their calves, and their white milk flowed upon the ground. He went in pursuit of them, and seized six milch cows at the house at daybreak. Pledges were given for them afterwards by Cairpre Gnathchoir for the seizure, for the distress, for the acknowledgment, for triple acknowledgment, for acknowledgment by one chief, for double acknowledgment."
But these things are supposed to have happened in the days of Conn of the Hundred Battles, yet the case remained a leading one till the sixteenth century.
The Brehon laws probably embody a large share of primitive Aryan custom. Thus it is curious to meet the Indian practice of sitting "dharna" or fasting on a debtor in full force amongst the Irish as one of the legal forms by which a creditor should proceed to recover his debt. "Notice," says the text of the Irish law,
"precedes every distress in the case of inferior grades, except it be by persons of distinction or upon persons of distinction; fasting precedes distress in their case. He who does not give a pledge to fasting is an evader of all. He who disregards all things shall not be paid by God or man. He who refuses to cede what should be accorded to fasting, the judgment upon him according to the Feini is that he pay double the thing for which he was fasted upon, he who fasts notwithstanding the offer of what should be accorded to him, forfeits his legal right to anything according to the decision of the Feini."
There were, according to Irish history, four periods at which special laws were enacted by legislative authority, first during the reign of Cormac mac Art in the third century, secondly when St. Patrick came, thirdly by Cormac mac Culinan the king-bishop of Cashel, who died in 903, and lastly by Brian Boru about a century later. But the great mass of the Brehon Code appears to have been traditionary, or to have grown with the slow growth of custom. None of the Brehon Law books so far as they have as yet been given to the public, shows any attempt to grapple with the nature of law in the abstract, or to deal with the general fundamental principles which underlie the conception of jurisprudence. A great number of the cases, too, which are raised for discussion in the law-books, appear to be rather possible than real, rather problematical cases proposed by a teacher to his students to be argued upon according to general principles, than as actual serious subjects for legal discussion. This is particularly the case with a great part of the Book of Acaill.
The part of the Brehon Law called the Seanchus Mór was redacted in the year 438, according to the Four Masters, "the age of Christ 438, the tenth year of Laeghaire, the Seanchus and Feineachus of Ireland were purified and written." Here is how the book itself treats of its own origin:
"The Seanchus of the men of Erin—what has preserved it? The joint memory of two seniors; the tradition from one ear to another; the composition of poets; the addition from the law of the letter; strength from the law of nature; for these are the three rocks by which the judgments of the world are supported."
The commentary says that the Seanchus was preserved by Ross, a doctor of the Béarla Feini or Legal dialect, by Dubhthach , a doctor of literature, and by Fergus, a doctor of poetry.
"Whoever the poet was that connected it by a thread of poetry before Patrick, it lived until it was exhibited to Patrick. The preserving shrine is the poetry, and the Seanchus is what is preserved therein."
Dubhthach exhibited to Patrick—
"The judgments and all the poetry of Erin, and every law which prevailed among the men of Erin through the law of nature and the law of the seers, and in the judgments of the island of Erin and in the poets.... 'The judgments of true nature,' it tells us, 'which the Holy Ghost had spoken through the mouths of the brehons and just poets of the men of Erin from the first occupation of this island down to the reception of the faith, were all exhibited by Dubhthach to Patrick. What did not clash with the Word of God in the written law and in the New Testament and with the consensus of the believers, was confirmed in the laws of the brehons by Patrick and by the ecclesiastics and the chieftains of Erin; for the law of nature had been quite right, except the faith and its obligations, and the harmony of the church and the people—and this is the Seanchus Mór."
M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, however, has shown that the Seanchus Mór is really made up of treatises belonging to different periods, of which that upon Immediate Seizure is the oldest. While some of the other treatises must be of much later date, this tract, he has proved, cannot in its present form be later than the close of the sixth century, because it contains no trace of the right of succession accorded to women by an Irish council of about the year 600, while at the same time it cannot be anterior to the introduction of Christianity, because it contains mention of altar furniture amongst things seizable, and contains two Latin words, altoir (altar) and c?s (cinsus = census). This, however, does not wholly discredit the tradition that St. Patrick had a hand in the final redaction of at least a part of the Seanchus Mór, for altars were certainly known in Ireland before Patrick, and the insertion of the clause about altar furniture may even have been due to the apostle himself. How far certain parts of the law may have reached back into antiquity and become stereotyped by custom before they became stereotyped by writing there is no means of saying. But, as M. d'Arbois de Jubainville has pointed out, the Seanchus Mór is closely related to the Cycle of Conor and Cuchulain, as the various allusions to King Conor, and to his arch-brehon Sencha, and to Morann the Judge, and to Ailill, and to the custom of the Heroes' Bit, show, while the cycle of Finn and Ossian is passed over.
There are many allusions to the Seanchus Mór in Cormac's Glossary, always referring to the glossed text, which must have been in existence before the year 900. Again the text of the Seanchus Mór relies upon judgments delivered by ancient brehons such as Sencha, in the time of King Conor mac Nessa, but there is no allusion in its text to books or treatises. The gloss, on the other hand, is full of such allusions, and it is evident that in early times the names of the Irish Law Books were legion. Fourteen different books of civil law are alluded to by name in the glosses on the Seanchus, and Cormac in his Glossary gives quotations from five such books. It is remarkable that only one of the five quoted by Cormac is among the fourteen mentioned in the glosses on the Seanchus Mór, and this alone goes to show the number of books upon law which were in use amongst the ancient Irish, most of which have long since perished.
********
Published in 1865 and 1869.
For him see above p. 412.
This passage was already so old in the time of Cormac mac Cuilennáin or Culinan, who died in 907, that it required a gloss, for Cormac in his Glossary refers to the gloss on the passage.
See p. 229 for a case of fasting on a person.
Vol. i. p. 31.
"Cours de Littérature celtique," tome vii. "études sur le droit Celtique," II. partie, chap. 2.
Modern cíos, "rent." "Census," according to M d'Arbois de Jubainville, was pronounced "kêsus," and had a variant cinsus in Low Latin pronounced "c?sus," whence Irish c?s and German Zins.
See under the words Athgabail, Flaith, Ferb, Ness, as Jubainville has pointed out.
The Irish of the eighteenth century being almost wholly deprived by law of all possibilities of bettering their condition, and having the necessary means of education rigidly denied them, turned for solace to poetry, and in it they vented their wrongs and bitter grief. I have met nothing more painful in literature than the constant, the almost unvarying cry of agony sent out by every one of the Irish writers during the latter half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century.
There seems to have been very great literary activity amongst the natives in almost every county of Ireland during this period, and the poets it produced were countless; during this period, too, the Irish appear to have translated many religious books from French and Latin into Irish. In one way the work of the eighteenth century is of even more value to us than that of any earlier age, because it gives us the thoughts and feelings of men who, being less removed from ourselves in point of time, have probably more fully transmitted their own nature to their descendants—the Irish of the present day. Unhappily, however, though many volumes of the work of the eighteenth century have survived, yet countless others have been lost during the last fifty years, and the only body in Ireland competent to secure Irish manuscripts by purchase, takes unfortunately not the slightest heed of any modern Irish writings, which are daily perishing in numbers.
Of the poets of what I have called the New School, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the most noted was certainly David O'Bruadar, or Broder, whose extant poems would fill a volume. They are in the most various forms of the new metres, but their vocabulary and word-forms are rather those of the more ancient bards, which renders his poetry by no means easy of translation. He appears to have been the bard par excellence of the Williamite wars, and bitter is his cry of woe after the Boyne and Aughrim.
"One single foot of land there is not left to us, even as alms from the State; no, not what one may make his bed upon, but the State will accord us the grace—strange! of letting us go safe to Spain to seek adventures!
"They will be in our places, thick-hipped, mocking, after beating us from the flower of our towns, full of pewter, brass, plates, packages—English-speaking, shaven, cosy, tasteful.
"There will be a beaver cape on each of their hags, and a silk gown from crown to foot; bands of churls will have our fortresses, full of Archys (?), cheeses and pottage.
"These are the people—though it is painful to relate it—who are living in our white moats, 'Goody Hook' and 'Mother Hammer,' 'Robin,' 'Saul,' and 'Father Salome'!
"The men of the breeches a-selling the salt, Gammer,' 'Ruth,' and 'Goodman Cabbage,' 'Mistress Capon,' 'Kate and Anna,' 'Russell Rank,' and 'Master Gadder'!
" where Déirdre, that fair bright scion used to roam, where Emer and the Liath Macha used to be, where Eevil used to be beside the Crag, and the elegant ladies of the Tuatha De Danann.
"Where the poet-schools, the bards, and the damsels were, with sporting, dance, wine and feasts, with pastime of kings and active champions."
For a moment, after the accession of James II. and during the viceroyalty of Tyrconnel, courage and hope returned to the natives. Their poetry, wherever preserved, is a veritable mirror wherein to read their transitions of feeling.
"Thanks be to God, this sod of misery
Is changed as though by a blow of wizardry;
James can pass to Mass in livery,
With priests in white and knights and chivalry."
"Where goes John , he has no red coat on him , and no 'who goes there' beside the gate, seeking a way , contentiously, in the teeth of law, putting me under rent in the night of misfortune.
"Where goes Ralph and his cursed bodyguard, devilish prentices, the rulers of the city, who tore down on every side the blessed chapels, banishing and plundering the clergy of God.
"They do not venture to say to us, 'You Popish rogue;' but our watchword is, 'Cromwellian Dog.'
"The cheese-eating clowns are sorrowful, returning every greasy lout of them to their trades, without gun, or sword, or arm exercise; their strength is gone, their hearts are beating....
"After transplanting us, and every conceivable treachery, after transporting us over-sea to the country of Jamaica, after all whom they scattered to France and Spain.
"All who did not submit to their demands, how they placed their heads and hearts on stakes! and all of our race who were valiant in spirit, how they put them to death, foully, disgustingly!
"After all belonging to our church that the Plot hanged, and after the hundreds that have died in fetters from it, and all whom they had deep down in the jail of every town, and all who were bound in the tower of London.
"After all their disregard for right, full of might and injustice, without a word in the law, who would not even write your name, but ever said of us 'Teigs and Diarmuids,' disrespectfully.
"There is many a Diarmuid now, both sensible and powerful! and many a Teig, too, both merry and jubilant! in the county of Eber, who is strong on the battlefield—the foreigners all everlastingly hated that name....
"Friends of my heart, after all the thousands we lost, I cry impetuously to God in the heavens, giving thanks every day without forgetting, that it is in the time of this king we have lived....
"Having the fear of God, be ye full of almsgiving and friendliness, and forgetting nothing do ye according to the commandments; shun ye drunkenness and oaths and cursing, and do not say till death 'God damn' from your mouths," etc.
But Aughrim and the Boyne put an end to the dream that the Irish would ever again bear sway in their own land, and the carefully-devised Penal laws proceeded to crush all remaining independence of spirit out of them, and to grind away their very life-blood. Once more their poets fell back into lamentations over the past and impotent prophecies of the return of the Stuarts and the resurrection of Erin. Despite their sentimental affection for the paltry Stuarts, who ever used them as their tools, many of the poets were perfectly clear-sighted about them.
"It is the coming of King James that took Ireland from us,
With his one shoe English and his one shoe Irish.
He would neither strike a blow nor would he come to terms,
And that has left, so long as they shall exist, misfortune upon the Gaels."
"Our case," says another poet, "is like the plague of Egypt; whoever chooses to break your lease, breaks it, and there is no good for you to go arguing your right."
"King's rent, country's rent, clergy's rent, rent for your nose, rent for your back, rent for warming yourself, head-money at the head of every festival, hearth money, and money for readying roads!
"His goods are not taken from any one all at once, at one time; he must pay for being allowed to keep them first, and be forced to sell them afterwards.
"If you happen to be alive, then you are the 'Irish rogue,' if you happen to be dead, then there's no more about you, except that your soul is in the fetters of pain, like the bird-flock that is among the clouds.
"It is the King of Kings—and King James, the Pope, the friars, and the fasting, and King Louis, who put Christendom under a settlement, that sent this ban upon the children of Milesius."
Every poet describes the condition of the native Irish in almost the same strains.
"Their warriors are no better off than their clergy; they are being cut down and plundered by them every day. See all that are without a bed except the furze of the mountains, the bent of the curragh, and the bog-myrtle beneath their bodies.
"Under frost, under snow, under rain, under blasts of wind, without a morsel to eat but watercress, green grass, sorrel of the mountain, or clover of the hills. Och! my pity to see their nobles forsaken!
"Their estates were estimated for, and are now in the hands of robbers, their towns are under the control of English-speaking bastards, their title deeds which were firm for a while, are now in the hands of foreigners, whose qualities are not mild.
"Their forts are under the sway of tradespeople; none of their fortresses is to be seen remaining for them, but black prisons and the houses of the fetters, and some of their heads parted from their tender bodies.
"And some of them in the clutch of famine so that they die, and some of them hunted to Connacht of the slaughter, , under the lock of the Shannon, not easy to open, and without provision to feed their mouths there—their warm dwellings under the control of the perjurers."
The feelings of the native Irish, smarting under the cowardice, selfishness, and incompetence of James II., were but moderately excited by the rather feeble attempt of his son to regain his father's kingdom by the sword. One or two stray bards, however, saluted his undertaking with poems:
"Long in misery were we, No man free from English gall, Now our James is on the sea We shall see revenge for all. Flowering branch of royal blood, Soon his bud shall burst to flame, James our friend is on the flood, Learned and good and first in fame. Luther's louts, and Calvin's clan, Every man who loved to lie, Boar-hounds of the bloody fang We shall see them hang on high.
"But this and its fellows were only spasmodic rhapsodies. The Irish kept their real enthusiasm for the gallant attempt of Charles Edward, and the Jacobite poems of Ireland would, if collected, fill a large-sized volume. So popular did Jacobite poetry become that it gave rise to a conventional form of its own, which became almost stereotyped, and which seems to have been adopted as a test subject in bardic contests, and by all new aspirants to the title of poet. This form introduces the poet as wandering in a wood or by the banks of a river, where he is astonished to perceive a beautiful lady approaching him. He addresses her, and she answers. The charms of her voice, mien, and bearing are portrayed by the poet. He inquires who and whence she is, and how comes she to be thus wandering. She replies that she is Erin, who is flying from the insults of foreign suitors and in search of her real mate. Upon this theme the changes are rung in every conceivable metre and with every conceivable variation, by the poets of the eighteenth century. Some of the best of these allegorical pieces are distinctly poetic, but they soon degenerated into conventionalism, so much so that I verily believe they continued to be written even after the death of the last Stuart. The possibility of a Jacobite rebellion gave rise to some fine war-songs also, calling upon the Irish to break their slumbers, but they were too exhausted and too thoroughly broken to stir, even in the eventful '45.
One of the earliest writers of Jacobite poetry, and perhaps the most voluminous man of letters of his day amongst the native Irish, was JOHN O'NEAGHTAN of the county Meath, who was still alive in 1715. One of his early poems was written immediately after the battle of the Boyne, when the English soldiery stripped him of everything he possessed in the world, except one small Irish book. Between forty and fifty of his pieces are enumerated by O'Reilly, and I have seen others in a manuscript in private hands. These included a poem in imitation of those called "Ossianic," of 1296 lines, and a tale written about 1717 in imitation of the so-called Fenian tales, an amusing allegoric story called the "Adventures of Edmund O'Clery," and a curious but extravagant tale called the "Strong-armed Wrestler." Hardiman had in his possession a closely-written Irish treatise by O'Neaghtan of five hundred pages on general geography, containing many interesting particulars concerning Ireland, and a volume of Annals of Ireland from 1167 to about 1700. He also translated a great many church hymns and, I believe, prose books from Latin. His elegy on Mary D'Este, widow of James II., is one of the most musical pieces I have ever seen, even in Irish—
"SLOW cause of my fear NO pause to my tear. The brIghtest and whItest LOW lIes on her bier. FAIR Islets of green, RARE sIghts to be seen, Both hIghlands and Islands THERE sIgh for the Queen.
"TORLOUGH O'CAROLAN, born in 1670, and usually called "the last of the bards," was one of the best known poets of the first half of the eighteenth century. He was really a musician, not a bard, and his advent marked the complete break-down of the old Gaelic polity, according to which bard and harper were different persons. Carolan was born in Meath, but usually resided in Connacht, and having become blind from small-pox in his twenty-second year he was educated as a harper, and achieved in his day an enormous renown. He composed over two hundred airs, many of them very lively, and usually addressed to his patrons, chiefly to those of the old Irish families. He composed his own words to suit his music, and these have given him the reputation of a poet. They are full of curious turns and twists of metre to suit his airs, to which they are admirably wed, and very few are in regular stanzas. They are mostly of a Pindaric nature, addressed to patrons or to fair ladies; there are some exceptions, however, such as his celebrated ode to whiskey, one of the finest bacchanalian songs in any language, and his much more famed but immeasurably inferior "Receipt for Drinking." Very many of his airs and nearly all his poetry with the exception of about thirty pieces are lost. He died in 1737 at Alderford, the house of the Mac Dermot Roe.
"When his death was known," says Hardiman, "it is related that upwards of sixty clergymen of different denominations, a number of gentlemen from the surrounding counties, and a vast concourse of country people, assembled to pay the last mark of respect to their favourite bard. All the houses in Ballyfarnon were occupied by the former, and the people erected tents in the fields round Alderford House. The harp was heard in every direction. The wake lasted four days. On each side of the hall was placed a keg of whiskey, which was replenished as often as emptied. Old Mrs. Mac Dermot herself joined the female mourners who attended, 'to weep,' as she expressed herself, 'over her poor gentleman, the head of all Irish music.' On the fifth day his remains were brought forth, and the funeral was one of the greatest that for many years had taken place in Connacht."
Another good poet was TEIG O'NAGHTEN, who lived in Dublin, and is well known for a voluminous manuscript Irish-English dictionary, at which he worked from 1734 to 1749. Some twenty or thirty of his poems remain. Another learned poet and lexicographer was HUGH MAC CURTIN of the County Clare. With the assistance of his friend, a priest called Conor O'Begley, he produced a great English-Irish dictionary in Paris in 1732. He had previously published a grammar at Louvain in small octavo in 1728. This was no work to commend him to the powers that were, and he appears to have been cast into prison, for in a touching note at p. 64 of the last edition of his grammar he asks the reader's pardon for confounding an example of the imperative with the potential mood, which he was caused to do "by the great bother of the brawling company that is round about me in this prison." What became of him eventually I do not know.
Contemporaneous with him lived O'GALLAGHER, bishop of Raphoe, who had the unique distinction of publishing a book—a volume of Irish sermons—which went through over twenty editions. He, also, pursued letters in the midst of difficulties, at one time escaping from the English soldiers who were sent out to take him by the start of only a few minutes, the parish priest O'Hegarty of Killygarvan being captured in his stead, and promptly shot dead by the officer in command so soon as a rescue was attempted. His Irish is remarkable for its simplicity and its careless use of English and foreign words, carefully eschewed by men like Mac Curtin and O'Neaghtan.
Amongst the Southerns JOHN "CLáRACH" MAC DONNELL was perhaps the finest poet of the first half of the eighteenth century, but his pieces have never been collected. It was in his house, near Charleville in the County Cork, that the poets of the south used to meet in bardic session to exercise their genius in public. He wrote part of a history of Ireland in Irish and translated a portion of Homer into Irish verse, but these are probably lost. He, too, cultivated letters under difficulty, and had, according to Hardiman, "on more occasions than one to save his life by hasty retreats from his enemies the bard-hunters." Some of his poems give dreadful descriptions of the state of the Irish and the savage cruelty of their new masters. Here is how he describes one of them:—
"Plentiful is his costly living in the high-gabled lighted-up mansion of Brian, but tight-closed is his door, and his churlishness shut up inside with him, in Aherlow of the fawns, in an opening between two mountains, until famine cleaves to the people, putting them under its sway.
"His gate he never opens to the moan of the unhappy wretches, he never answers their groans nor provides food for their bodies; if they were to take so much as a little faggot or a scollop or a crooked rod, he would beat streams of blood out of their shoulders.
"The laws of the world, he used to tear them constantly to pieces, the ravening, stubborn, shameless hound, ever putting in fast fetters the church of God, and Oh! may heaven of the saints be a red-wilderness for James Dawson!"
It would be impossible to enumerate here all the admirable and melodious poets produced—chiefly by the province of Munster—during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of this. A few of them, however, I must notice.
MICHAEL COMYN, of the County Clare, was the author of the prose story called "The Adventures of Torlogh, son of Starn, and the Adventures of his Three Sons," and he revived the Ossianic muse by his exquisite version—evidently based upon traditional matter—of "Ossian in the Land of the Young."
BRIAN MAC GIOLLA MEIDHRE, or Merriman, whose poem of the "Midnight Court," contains about a thousand lines with four rhymes in each line, was another native of the County Clare. This amusing and witty poem, one certainly not intended "virginibus puerisque," is a vision of Aoibhill , queen of the Fairies of Munster, holding a court, where, when the poet sees it, a handsome girl is in the act of complaining to the queen that in spite of her beauty and fine figure and accomplishments she is in danger of dying unwed, and asking for relief. She is opposed by an old man, who argues against her. She answers him again, and the court finally pronounces judgment. Standish Hayes O'Grady once characterised this poem as being "with all its defects, perhaps the most tasteful piece in the language," and it is certainly a wonderful example of sustained rhythm and vowel-rhyme. It was written in 1781.
TADHG GAOLACH O'SULLIVAN, of the County Cork, was another of the most popular poets in his day. His earlier poems contained certain indiscretions for which, in later life, he made ample amends by devoting himself solely to religious poetry, and attempting to turn the force of public opinion against vice in every shape, especially drunkenness and immorality. A small volume of his religious poems, probably the best of the kind produced by any of the New School, was printed during his own lifetime in Limerick, and repeatedly afterwards, at Cappoquin, and I believe elsewhere, in Roman letters, and finally by O'Daly, of Anglesea Street, in Dublin, 1868. His poems are very musical and mellifluous, but abound in "Munsterisms," which make them difficult to readers from other provinces. He died in 1800.
Another fine poet of the County Clare was DONOUGH MAC CONMARA, or Macnamara, as he is usually called in English. He was educated at Rome for the priesthood, but being of a wild disposition he was expelled from the ecclesiastical college there, and returning to Ireland, made his way to a famous school in the county Waterford at Slieve Gua, in the neighbourhood of which the people of the surrounding districts had for over a hundred years been accustomed to support "poor scholars" free of charge. He himself also opened a successful school, but a young woman of the neighbourhood, whom he had satirised, put a coal in the thatch and burnt him out. He led a rambling existence after that. He went to America and spent two summers and a winter in Newfoundland, which was then largely planted by the Irish. He appears to have also wandered a good deal about the Continent. The longest of his poems is a kind of mock Aeneid, describing his voyage to America and how the ship was chased by a French cruiser. Eevil, the fairy queen of Munster, brings him away in a dream to Elysium, where instead of Charon he finds "bald cursing Conan" the Fenian acting as ferryman. But he is best known by his beautiful lyric, "The Fair Hills of Holy Ireland," which he composed apparently when on the Continent. He led a ranting, roving, wild life, changed his religion a couple of times with unparalleled effrontery, but becoming blind in his old age, he repented of his sins and his misspent life, and died some time about the beginning of this century. He was, like all these poets, a good scholar, as a Latin epitaph of fourteen verses, which he wrote over the pious Teig Gaolach proves—
"Plangite Pierides, vester decessit alumnus, Eochades non est, cuncta-que rura silent.
"Perhaps the best known at the present day of all the Munster poets is the witty, wicked OWEN ROE O'SULLIVAN from Slieve Luachra, in Kerry, whose sayings and songs have been proverbial for three generations, and whose fame has penetrated into many counties besides his own. All the poets I have mentioned hitherto, except perhaps the pious Teig Gaolach, were almost professional wits, but Owen Roe, to judge from the number of his bons mots that are still preserved, must have surpassed them all. All the poets I have mentioned were also Jacobite poets, but in elaboration of the usual Jacobite theme of the Lady Erin, Owen Roe is easily first. His denunciations of the foreigner were incessant. He was originally a working man, and laboured hard with plough and spade. His poem called the "Mower" is well known. His explanation of a Greek passage, which puzzled his employer's son fresh from a French college, first brought him into repute, and he opened a school in the neighbourhood of Charleville as a teacher of Latin and Greek. As was the case with very many of the Munster bards, his passion for the frail sex was the undoing of him. He was denounced from the altar, and his school was given up. He died, still young, about the year 1784.
WILLIAM DALL O'HEFFERNAN, JOHN O'TOOMY "the Gay," ANDREW MAC GRATH (surnamed the Mangairè Súgach, or Merry Merchant, the frailest and wildest of all the bards), EGAN O'RAHILLY, of Slieve Luachra in Kerry, OWEN O'KEEFE, parish priest of Doneraile, and JOHN MURPHY, of Rathaoineach, are a few of the names that instantly suggest themselves to all readers of the Irish manuscripts of Munster.
The north of Ireland produced a great number of poets also during the eighteenth century, of whom PATRICK LINDON and ART MAC CúMHAIDH, both of the County Armagh, PHILLIP BRADY, of the County Cavan, and JAMES MAC CUAIRT, of the County Louth, a friend of Carolan's, were some of the best known, but owing to the fatal loss of Irish manuscripts, chiefly those of the northern half of Ireland, and the apparent determination of the Royal Irish Academy not to use any of the funds (granted by Government for the prosecution of Irish studies) in the preservation of any modern texts, it is to be feared that a great portion of their works and of those of at least a hundred other writers of the eighteenth century is now lost for ever.
It would be interesting to take a retrospect of the splendid lyrical outburst produced by our brothers of the Scotch Highlands contemporaneously with that of the poets I have just mentioned, but it would extend the scope of this work too much. There seems to me to be perhaps more substance and more simplicity and straightforward diction in the poems of the Scotch Gaels, and more melody and word play, purchased at the expense of a good deal of nebulousness and unmeaning sound, in those of the Irish Gaels; both, though they utterly fail in the ballad, have brought the lyric to a very high pitch of perfection.
In Connacht during the eighteenth century the conditions of life were less favourable to poetry, the people were much poorer, and there was no influential class of native schoolmasters and scribes to perpetuate and copy Irish manuscripts, as there was all over Munster, consequently the greater part of the minstrelsy of that province is hopelessly lost, and even the very names of its poets with the exception of CAROLAN, NETTERVILLE, MAC CABE, MAC GOVERN, and a few more of the last century, and MAC SWEENY, BARRETT, and RAFTERY of this century, have been lost. That there existed, however, amongst the natives of the province a most widespread love of song and poetry, even though most of their manuscripts have perished, is certain, for I have collected among them, not to speak of Ossianic lays and other things, a volume of love poems and two volumes of religious poems, almost wholly taken from the mouths of the peasantry. This love of poetry and passion for song, which seems to be the indigenous birthright of every one born in an Irish-speaking district promises to soon be a thing of the past, thanks, perhaps partly, to the apathy of the clergy, who in Connacht almost always preach in English, and partly to the dislike of the gentry to hear Irish spoken, but chiefly owing to the far-reaching and deliberate efforts of the National Board of Education to extirpate the national language.
Upon the present century I need not touch. Its early years, during which Irish was the general language of the nation, witnessed little or no attempts at its literary cultivation, except amongst the people themselves, who, too poor to call the press to their aid, kept on copying and re-copying their beautiful manuscripts with a religious zeal, and producing poetry—but of no very high order—over the greater part of the country. Then came the famine, and with it collapse. In the sauve-qui-peut that followed, everything went by the board, thousands of manuscripts were lost, and the old literary life of Ireland may be said to have come to a close amidst the horrors of famine, fever, and emigration.
The advent of Eugene O'Curry and John O'Donovan, however, gave a great impetus to the work begun by O'Reilly and Hardiman, and men arose like Petrie and Todd to take a literary interest in the nation's past, and in the language that enshrined it. Meanwhile that language was fast dying as a living tongue without one effort being made to save it. It is only the last few years that have seen a real re-awakening of interest amongst the people in their hereditary language, and the establishment of a monthly and a weekly paper, chiefly written in Irish. The question whether the national language is to become wholly extinct like the Cornish, is one which must be decided within the next ten years. There are probably a hundred and fifty thousand households in Ireland at this moment where the parents speak Irish amongst themselves, and the children answer them in English. If a current of popular feeling can be aroused amongst these, the great cause—for great it appears even now to foreigners, and greater it will appear to the future generations of the Irish themselves—of the preservation of the oldest and most cultured vernacular in Europe, except Greek alone, is assured of success, and Irish literature, the production of which—though long dribbling in a narrow channel—has never actually ceased, may again, as it is even now promising to do, burst forth into life and vigour, and once more give that expression which in English seems impossible, to the best thoughts and aspirations of the Gaelic race.
********
"Béidhid féin 'n ár n-áit go másach magaidh
D'éis ár sáruighthe, i mbláth ár mbailteadh,
Go péatrach, prásach, plátach, pacach,
Go béarla, beárrtha, bádhach (?) blasta."
I.e., Refusing hospitality except for payment.
Cuchulain's wife.
Cuchulain's grey steed. See ch. XXVI, note 13.
Aoibhioll of the Grey Crag, a queen of the Munster fairies. See ch. XXXII, notes 28, and 31.
This is the metre of the poem, a very common one among the New School. The poet is one Diarmuid Mac Carthy. I forget whence I transcribed his poem.
"Cá ngabhann Seón? ní'l cóta dearg air,
Ná "who goes there" re taebh an gheata 'ge,
Ag iarraidh slighe anaghaidh dlighe go spairneach,
Dom' chur fá chíos i n-oidhche an acarainn."
James II.
"'Sé tigheacht Righ Séamas do bhain dínn éire
Le n-a leath-bhróig gallda 's a leath-bhróig gaedhealach.
Ni thiubhradh sé buille uaidh ná réidhteacht
'S d'fág sin, fhad's mairid, an donas ar Ghaedhealaibh."
"Cíos righ, cíos tire, cíos cléire,
Cíos sróna, cíos tóna, cios teighte
Airgiod ceann i gceann gach féile
Airgiod teallaigh as bealaigh do réightiughadh."
I forget whence I copied this, but such pieces are innumerable.
"Fada sinn i ngalar buan
Faoi smacht cruaidh measg na nGall
O tá Séamas óg ar cuan
Bhéarfaid uatha díol d'á cheann," etc.
From a manuscript of my own.
Hardiman printed about fifteen Jacobite poems in the second volume of his "Irish Minstrelsy," and O'Daly about twenty-five more in his "Irish Jacobite Poetry," 2nd edition.
Or rather to the resurrection of an ancient theme long lost, for as Dr. Sigerson has shown, one of the Monks of St. Gall had already treated it in Latin nine hundred years before. See Constantine Nigra's "Reliqui? Celtic?," and Dr. Sigerson's "Bards of the Gael and Gall," p. 413.
Bought by my friend Mr. David Comyn at the sale of the late Bishop Reeves's MSS.
In a MS. note by Hardiman in my copy of O'Reilly, he attributes to him a piece called "Jacobidis and Carina," and the "Battle of the Gap of the Cross of Brigit," which are unknown to me.
In his fifteenth year, according to O'Reilly; his eighteenth, according to Hardiman's "Irish Minstrelsy," but Hardiman seems to have changed his opinion, for I have a note in his handwriting in which he states that Carolan was twenty-two years old when he became blind.
Hardiman has printed twenty-four of his poems in his "Ancient Irish Minstrelsy," and I printed about twelve more, mostly from manuscripts in my own possession. The late bookseller, John O'Daly, of Anglesea Street, had, I believe, a number of poems of Carolan in his possession, but the Royal Irish Academy did not buy them—or indeed any other of his unique stock of manuscripts—at his sale, and I fear they are now hopelessly lost.
A small village on the border of the County Sligo.
O'Curtin's note runs—"As tré shiothbhuaireadh na cuideachtan cullóidighe atá timchioll orm annsa gcarcairse, do chuir mé an sompla déigheanach so do bheanas ris an Modh gcomhachtach so ionar ndiaigh, annso, san Modh foláirimh." This note was pointed out to me by my friend, Father Ed. Hogan, S.J., who has also been unable to trace the cause of Curtin's imprisonment, or his subsequent fate.
I printed the whole of this ferocious poem in the Cork Arch?ological Journal.
Recently printed without a translation by Patrick O'Brien, of 46, Cuffe Street, Dublin.
First printed nearly forty years ago by the Ossianic Society, and since then by my friend Mr. David Comyn, with a prose translation and glossary, and recently by my friend Mr. O'Flannghaoile, with translations in verse and prose.
See Ossianic Society, vol. iii. p. 36. It was printed with the following curious title-page, "Medi? noctis consilium, auctore Briano Mac-Gilla-Meidhre, de comitatu Clarensi, in Momonia, A.D. MDCCLXXX. Poema heroico-comicum, quo nihil aut magis gracile aut poeticum aut magis abundans in hodierno Hiberni? idiomati exolescit. Curtha a gclódh le Tomás mhic Lopuis ag Loch an chonblaigh Oghair, MDCCC." But both place and date are fictitious. It was almost certainly printed by O'Daly of Anglesea Street, for after his death I found amongst some papers of his the proof-sheets corrected with his own hand! My friend, Mr. Patrick O'Brien, of Cuffe Street, has since printed another edition with a brief vocabulary.
His "Eachtra Giolla an Amarain" was published in 1853 by "S. Hayes," and recently with a number of his other poems translated into English, and republished with the late John Fleming's Irish life of the poet, by my friend Tomás O'Flannghaoile.
I.e., the descendant of Eochaidh Muighmheadhoin, father of Niall of the Nine Hostages. See above, p. 33.
All the Irish of the eighteenth century had, when not secretly educated at home, to go abroad in pursuit of knowledge.
Specimens of their poetry may be found in O'Daly's two excellent volumes, "The Poetry of Munster," and in his "Jacobite Relics" and in Walsh's "Popular Songs," but most of them are still in manuscript.
These are my "Religious Songs of Connacht," quoted more than once in this book as though published. They were meant to have been published simultaneously with it, but unfortunately the plates of both volumes were melted down, while I was revising these proofs, in the great fire at Sealy, Bryers and Walker's, Dublin.
Conducted by the Gaelic League.
We must now follow the fortunes of the Irish language as a spoken tongue, "questo linguaggio difficile e davvero stupendo," as Ascoli calls it, which after imposing itself upon both Dane and Norman, was brought face to face as early as the fourteenth century with its great competitor English, before which, despite its early victory in the contest, it has at last nearly but not quite gone down, after an unremitting struggle of nearly five centuries.
As early as the year 1360, the English appear to have taken the alarm at the inroads which the Irish language—at that time a much more highly-cultured form of speech than their own—had made upon the colonists, and we find King Edward issuing orders to the Sheriff of the Cross and Seneschal of the Liberty of Kilkenny in these terms—
"As many of the English nation in the Marches and elsewhere have again become like Irishmen, and refuse to obey our laws and customs, and hold parliaments after the Irish fashion, and learn to speak the Irish tongue, and send their children among the Irish to be nursed and taught the Irish tongue, so that the people of English race have for the greater part become Irish; now we order (1) that no Englishman of any state or condition shall ... follow these Irish customs, laws, and parliaments; (2) that any one of English race shall forfeit English liberty, if after the next feast of St. John the Baptist he shall speak Irish with other Englishmen and meantime every Englishman must learn English and must not have his children at nurse amongst the Irish."
In 1367, the last year of the administration of the Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, a parliament held at Kilkenny passed the famous act that inter-marriage with the Irish should be punished as high treason, and that any man of English race using the Irish language should forfeit all his land and tenements to the Crown, and forbidding also the entertainment of bards, ministrels, and rhymers.
These first attacks upon the language cannot possibly have produced much effect, for we find the English power within a hundred years after their passing, reduced to the lowest point, and there was scarcely an English or Norman noble in Ireland who had not adopted an Irish name, Irish speech, and Irish manners. The De Bourgo had became Mac William, and minor branches of the same stem had become Mac Philpins, Mac Gibbons, and Mac Raymonds; the Birminghams had became Mac Feóiris, the Stauntons Mac Aveeleys, the Nangles Mac Costellos, the Prendergasts Mac Maurices, the De Courcys Mac Patricks, the Bissetts of Antrim Mac Keons, etc.
A hundred years after the Statute of Kilkenny, the English, driven back into the Pale, which then consisted of less than four counties, passed a law in 1465, enjoining all men of Irish names within the Pale to 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 Cooke, Butler," and he and his issue were ordered to use these names or forfeit all their goods. This, however, the parliament was unable to carry through, none of the great Irish names within or alongside the Pale, Mac Murroughs, O'Tooles, O'Byrnes, O'Mores, O'Ryans, O'Conor Falys, O'Kellys, etc., seem to have been in the least influenced by it.
Next an attempt was made to maintain English in at least the seaports and borough towns, for we find an enactment of the year 1492-93 amongst the Archives of the Urbs Intacta, commanding that in Waterford, "no manner of man, freeman or foreign, of the city or suburb's dwellers, shall emplead nor defend in Irish tongue against any man in the court, but all they that any matters shall have in court to be administered, shall have a man that can speak English to declare his matter, except one party be of the country then every such dweller shall be at liberty to speak Irish." Galway followed suit in 1520, and enacted that "no Irish judge or lawyer shall plead in no man's cause nor matter within this our court, for it agreeth not with the king's laws."
How far these petty attempts were successful may be judged from the fact that Captain Ap Harry, a Welsh officer, describing in October, 1535, Lord Butler's march for the recovery of Dungarvan Castle, says, "We were met by his lordship's brother-in-law, Gerald Mac Shane, (Fitzgerald) Lord of the Decies, who, though a very strong man in his country, could speak never a word of English, but made the troops good cheer after the gentilest fashion that could be. All this journey from Dungarvan forth there is none alive that can remember that English man of war was ever in these parts." Still more striking is the statement that in the Dublin parliament of 1541, all the peers except Mac Gillapatric were of Norman or English descent, and yet not one except the Earl of Ormond could understand English. A letter to the English Privy Council, written in 1569, by Dominicke Linche, of Galway, confirms this. "Even they of the best houses," he writes, "the brothers of the Erle of Clanrickarde, yea and one of his uncles, and he a bysshop, can neither speak nor understand in manner any thinge of their Prince's language, which language by the old Statutes of Galway, every man ought to learn and must speak before he can be admitted to any office within the Corporation."
Nor had the extirpating policy succeeded even in the Pale, for we read in the State Papers that in the county of Kildare in 1534, "there is not one husbandman in effect that speaketh English nor useth any English sort nor manner, and their gentlemen be after the same sort."
The great Earl of Kildare had nearly as many volumes of Irish as he had of English in his library. A catalogue of his books was drawn up in 1518. Amongst the Irish manuscripts were St. Berachán's book, the Speech of Oyncheaghis (?) Cuchuland's Acts, the History of Clone Lyre, etc. Murchadh O'Brien, king of Thomond, promised Henry VIII. as early as 1547, when in London, that he and his heirs should use the English habit and manner, and to their knowledge the English language, and to their power bring up their children in the same. And indeed that family seems to have been always the greatest prop of the English power in the South of Ireland. Thomas Moore, settling in Ireland in 1575, got his lands in King's County on the condition that his sons and servants "should use for the most the English tongue, habit, and government," and make no appeals to the Brehon law. Three years after this, in 1578, we find Lord Chancellor Gerard affirming that all the English, and the most part with delight, even in Dublin speak Irish, and greatly are spotted in manners, habit, and conditions with Irish stains.
In the Vatican Library my friend Father Hogan found a MS. of about the year 1580 with a memorandum concerning certain Franciscan friars, three of whom spoke Irish only, including the Provincial who preached all over Ireland, five more knew Irish better than English, while five are entered as knowing English better than Irish, none are entered as knowing English only.
In 1585 the Irish chieftains of Hy Many, the O'Kellys country, agreed that "Teige mac William O'Kelly and Conor Oge O'Kelly shall henceforth behave themselves like good subjects and shall bring up their children after the English fashions and in the use of the English tongue." Of course such enforced promises had no effect. We find in the State Papers that at St. Douay in 1600 were sixty young gentlemen, eldest sons of the principal gentlemen of the Pale, and that they all spoke Irish.
In 1608 it was found that the superior of the Irish Jesuits, apparently a Pales-man, Father Christopher Holywood of Artane, near Dublin, could speak no Irish, and a document was sent at once to the General of the Jesuits, pointing out how this destroyed his usefulness in the Irish mission. Care was taken that the same mistake should not be made in appointing his successor, Robert Nugent.
In 1609 we find Richard Conway, a Jesuit, writing that the English in Ireland took care that all children are taught English and chastise them if they speak their own native tongue (sic). Five or six years later Father Stephen White writes, "Scarcely one in a thousand of the old Irish know even three words of any tongue except Irish, the modern Irish learn to speak Irish and English."
Nevertheless the cause of the English language cannot have much progressed during the next fifty years, for we find in 1657 a petition presented to the Municipal Council of Dublin to the effect that "whereas by the laws all persons ought to speak and use the English tongue and habit,—contrary whereunto and in open contempt thereof, there is Irish commonly and usually spoken and the Irish habit worn not only in the streets and by such as live in the country and come to this city on market days, but also by and in several families in this city, to the scandalising of the inhabitants and magistrates of this city. And whereas there is much of swearing and cursing used and practised (as in the English tongue too much, so also in the Irish tongue)," etc. Irish, indeed, seems to have been the commonest language in Dublin at this time. James Howel in a letter written August 9, in 1630, says:
"Some curious in the comparisons of tongues, say Irish is a dialect of the ancient British, and the learnedest of that nation in a private discourse I happened to have with him seemed to incline to this opinion, but I can assure your Lordship I found a great multitude of their radical words the same with the Welsh, both for sense and sound. The tone also of both nations is consonant, for when I first walked up and down the Dublin markets methought I was in Wales when I listened to their speech. I found the Irish tone a little more querulous and whining than the British, which I conjecture proceeded from their often being subjugated by the English."
During the Cromwellian wars most of the members of the Confederation of Kilkenny who took the side of the Nuncio Rinuccini knew little if anything of the English language, "qui," says Rinuccini in his MSS., "boni publici zelo flagrarent, plerique linguam quidem Ibernicam quia vernaculam, bene, sed Anglicam male vel nullo modo callerent." When an order was issued by the Supreme Council for the new oath of association to be translated from English into Irish by each bishop for his diocese, it was found upon inquiry that some of the bishops did not understand a word of English. The Nuncio appears to have been very much impressed by the sweetness of the Irish language, but he had not leisure to devote himself to the study of it. Some of the Italian members of his household, however, became complete masters of it. Numbers of the poor people who had been plundered by the soldiery came to complain to him of their losses, and he notes in his diary that their wail and lamentation in Irish was far more plaintive and expressive than any music of the great masters which he had ever heard among the more favoured nations of the Continent.
Irish was at this time the usual "vehicle of business and of negociation with the natives, even amongst the learned," as we see in Carte's life of the Duke of Ormond, who was born in England in 1607 and educated as a Protestant by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
"The Duke," says Carte, "when about twenty or twenty-four years of age learned the Irish language by conversing with such Irish gentlemen as spoke it in London; he understood it perfectly well and could express himself well enough in familiar conversation, but considered himself not so well qualified as to discourse about serious matters; he afterwards on many occasions found himself at a great loss, as he had to negociate business of national importance with gentlemen who were far less intelligent in the English language than he was in the Irish. On such occasions he would use the same methods which he took with the titular bishop of Clogher, the great favourite of Owen O'Neil, and successor to that general in the command of the Ulster forces. This bishop he brought over to the king's interest, and gained his entire confidence by a conversation carried on between both parties in private. The Duke always spoke in English and the bishop in Irish, as neither understood the language of the other so as to venture upon communicating his sentiments in it with any degree of accuracy or precision."
The Irish themselves never neglected literature, and whenever their political star was in the ascendant the fortunes of their bards and learned men rose with it. Thus we find Rory O'More, the close friend of Owen Roe O'Neill, and the chief of the O'Mores of Leix, engaged in 1642 in an attempt to re-establish Irish schools and learning, and writing on the 20th of September, 1642, to Father Hugh de Bourgo at Brussels, "If we may, before Flan Mac Egan dies, we will see an Irish school opened, and therefore would wish heartily that these learned and religious fathers in Louvain would come over in haste with their monuments (?) and an Irish and Latin press." The Mac Egan here alluded to was the eminent Brehon and Irish antiquarian who lived at Bally-mac-Egan in the county Tipperary in Lower Ormond, whose imprimatur was considered so valuable that the Four Masters procured for their work his written approbation. Seven years after this letter, the town of Wexford, from which O'More wrote in the interests of humanity and learning, sank in fire and ruin and its inhabitants both men and women were put to the sword in one universal massacre.
There were in the year 1650, forty-seven Jesuit priests in Ireland, according to a memorandum given me by Father Hogan, S.J., of these two—one from Meath the other from Kerry—spoke Irish only: and four from Dublin, all of course of English extraction, spoke English only, while the remaining forty-one spoke both languages. Seven of these bi-linguists were from Dublin and ten from Meath.
These instances show that Irish was the usual spoken language of the country, even in Dublin, but there are indications that the ardour with which it had been cultivated and the respect with which its professors had been regarded was dying out. Even as early as 1627 we find one Connla Mac Echagan of West Meath, translating the "Annals of Clonmacnois" into English, and in his dedication to his friend and kinsman Torlogh Mac Cochlan, lord of Delvin, he says that formerly many septs lived in Ireland whose profession it was to chronicle and keep in memory the state of the kingdom, but, he adds, "now as they cannot enjoy that respect and gain by their profession, as heretofore they and their ancestors received, they set nought by the said knowledge, neglect their books, and choose rather to put their children to learn English than their own native language, insomuch that some of them suffer tailors to cut the leaves of the said books (which their ancestors held in great account) and sew them in long pieces to make their measures of, that the posterities are like to fall into more ignorance of many things which happened before their time."
A little later, in 1639, Father Stapleton, in his "Doctrina Christiana," published in Irish and Latin—the first Irish book ever printed in Roman characters—throws the blame for the neglect of Irish literature first upon the Irish antiquarians "who have placed it under difficulties and hard words, writing it in mysterious ways, and in dark difficult language," and secondly upon the upper classes "who bring their native natural language (which is powerful, perfect, honourable, learned, and sharply-exact in itself) into contempt and disrespect, and spend their time cultivating and learning other foreign tongues."
Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh, in his book printed at Louvain in 1632, says that Irish is the language of the whole of Hibernia, but there were some differences of pronunciation in the various provinces, and between the learned and the common people, the universal opinion being that the people of Connacht spoke it best, they having both power of expression and propriety of phrase, while the men of Munster had the power of expression without the propriety, and the people of Ulster the propriety without the power of expression. The people of Leinster were considered deficient in both.
O'Molloy in his "Lochrann na gCreidmheach," published in 1675, says that "no language is well understood by the common people of the island except Irish alone." The students of the Irish College at Rome were at this time bound by rule to speak Irish, and an Irish book was to be read in the refectory during dinner and supper, and all candidates for the priesthood were directed by the Synod of Tuam, in 1660, to learn to read and write Irish well.
Sir William Petty, writing in 1672, has an interesting passage on the people of Wexford and of Fingal: "The language of Ireland is like that of the North of Scotland, in many things like the Welsh and Manques, but in Ireland the Fingallians" "speak neither English, Irish, nor Welsh, and the people about Wexford, though they speak in a language differing from English, Welsh, and Irish, yet it is not the same with that of the Fingallians near Dublin. Both these sorts of people are honest and laborious members of the kingdom." Petty's strictures upon the Irish language, of which he was utterly ignorant, and which he ludicrously asserts "to have few words," need not here be noticed. He appears to show, however, that the Irish had already begun to borrow some words from English, and expressed many of the "names of artificial things" in "the language of their conquerors by altering the termination and language only."
It need hardly be said that once the English Government got the upper hand in the seventeenth century, and placed bishops and clergy of its own in the sees and dioceses throughout Ireland, they made it a kind of understood bargain with their nominees that they should have no dealings and make no terms with the national Irish language. Bedell, who was an Englishman and had been created an Irish bishop, neglected this unwritten compact far enough to learn Irish himself and to translate, with the help of a couple of Irishmen, the Bible into Irish, and he also circulated a catechism in English and Irish amongst the natives. He reaped his reward in the undying gratitude of the Irish and the equally bitter animosity of his own colleagues. Ussher, then primate, in answer to a pathetic letter of Bedell's asking what were the charges against him, said in his reply, "the course which you took with the Papists was generally cried out against, neither do I remember in all my life that anything was done here by any of us, at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense, or by which the adversaries were more confirmed in their superstitions and idolatry, whereas I wish you had advised with your brethren before you would aventure to pull down that which they have been so long a building," meaning the discrediting and destruction of the Irish language. The Irish, however, did not forget the efforts Bedell had made in behalf of their tongue, for, having taken him prisoner in the war of 1648, they treated him with every courtesy in their power, and when he died their troops fired a volley over his grave, crying out, Requiescat ultimus Anglorum, while a priest who was present was heard to exclaim with fervour, "Sit anima mea cum Bedelo."
Indeed, the attitude adopted by the Government and the bishops who were its loyal henchmen, placed the defenders of the Established Church in a very awkward and embarrassing position. They wanted to make Protestants of the people, but they could not talk to them nor preach to them. The only possible course for the bishops to pursue, supposing them to have been in earnest, and to have been ecclesiastics and not Government place-men, would have been to appoint Irish-speaking clergy under them, a thing which with scarcely an exception they utterly and obstinately refused to do. So that for a hundred and fifty years the native inhabitants of Ireland were obliged to pay a tenth of their produce to a foreign clergy whom they could not understand and who never troubled themselves to understand them. How gentlemen and scholars like Ussher could take up the position they did, is marvellous. He declares with one breath that "the religion of the Papists is superstitious and idolatrous, their faith and doctrines erroneous and heretical, their church in respect of both apostatical, to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion and profess their faith and doctrine is a grievous sin," and with the next breath he tells Bedell when he circulated books in the Irish language meant to convert these same Papists, that nothing was ever done "at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense." This can only be accounted for, so far as I can see, by strong social prejudice and race hatred. The desire to see the Irish and their language crushed and in extremis was stronger than the desire to make Protestants of them, and this feeling continued for at least a hundred and fifty years. Even so late as the latter half of the eighteenth century we find Dr. Woodward, Protestant bishop of Cloyne, stating that "the difference of language is a very general (and where it obtains an insurmountable) object to any intercourse with the people," on the part of the Protestant clergy, but, he adds coolly, "if it be asked why the clergy do not learn the Irish language, I answer that it should be the object of Government rather to take measures to bring it into entire disuse," one of the most cynical avowals I can remember on the part of an Irish prelate as to what he was there for—not for the spiritual good of the people who paid him tithes, but as the official tool of the Government to crush their nationality.
Even Dean Swift, so clear-sighted a politician where Ireland's financial wrongs were concerned, was in his policy towards the people's language quite at one with men like Ussher and Woodward. Yet he knew perfectly well that over three-fourths of the island he and his confrères were, so far as polemical arguments or conversion went, powerless either for good or evil. He was, like the other Protestant dignitaries of his day, a declared enemy of the Gaelic speech, which he considered prevented "the Irish from being tamed," and at one time he said he had a scheme by which their language "might easily be abolished and become a dead one in half an age, with little expense and less trouble." In another place he says, "it would be a noble achievement to abolish the Irish language in the kingdom, so far at least as to oblige all the natives to speak only English on every occasion of business, in shops, markets, fairs, and other places of dealing: yet I am wholly deceived if this might not be effectually done in less than half an age and at a very trifling expense; for such I look upon a tax to be, of only six thousand pounds to accomplish so great a work." Whatever the Dean's plan was, he did not further enlighten the public upon it, and the scheme appears to have died with him.
The absorbing power of Irish nationality continued so strong all through the seventeenth century that according to Prendergast many of the children of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers who had settled in Ireland could not speak a word of English. It was the same all over the country. In 1760 Irish was so universally spoken in the regiments of the Irish Brigade that Dick Hennessy, Edmund Burke's cousin, learnt it on foreign service. Still later, during the Peninsular War, the English officers in one of the Highland regiments attempted to abolish the speaking of Gaelic at the mess table, but the Gaelic-speaking officers completely outvoted them. Irish was spoken at this time by all the Milesian families of high rank, except when they wished to deliberately Anglicise themselves. Michael Kelly, the musical composer and vocalist, who was born in Dublin in 1764, tells us in his "Reminiscences:"—
"I procured an audience of the Emperor of Germany at Schoenbrunn, and found him with a half-dozen of general officers, among whom were Generals O'Donnell and Kavanagh, my gallant countrymen. The latter said something to me in Irish which I did not understand, consequently made him no answer. The Emperor turned quickly on me and said, 'What! O'Kelly, don't you speak the language of your own country?' I replied, 'Please, your Majesty, none but the lower orders of the Irish people speak Irish.' The Emperor laughed loudly. The impropriety of the remark made before two Milesian Generals flashed into my mind in an instant, and I could have bitten off my tongue. They luckily did not, or pretended not to hear."
It is from the middle of the eighteenth century onward that the Irish language begins to die out. I doubt whether before that period any Milesian family either in Ireland or the Scotch Highlands spoke English in its own home or to its own children.
I have been at much pains to trace the decay of the language, and the extent to which it has been spoken at various periods from that day to this, and have consulted all the volumes of travellers and statisticians upon which I have been able to lay hands. The result, however, has not been very satisfactory so far as information goes. It is simply amazing that most Irish and many English writers, who have had to deal with Ireland from that day to this, have in their sketchy and generally unreliable accounts of the island, its people, and its social conditions, simply ignored the fact that any other language than English was spoken in it at all. Perhaps the most trustworthy accounts of the anomalous condition of the Irish-speaking race in their own island are by foreigners who have recorded what they saw without prejudice one way or the other, whereas one cannot help thinking that English and Irish writers who, while going over the same ground, have yet absolutely ignored all allusion to the question of language, did so because they found it a difficult and awkward question to deal with.
The first authorities I know of who speak of Irish as dying out are Dr. Samuel Madden, who, writing in 1738, states that not one in twenty was ignorant of English, and Harris, who, in his description of the county Down six years later, says that Irish prevailed only amongst the poorer Catholics. Both these statements, however, are preposterously exaggerated. In the very year that Madden wrote died O'Neill of Clanaboy, one of the best-known and most influential men of the county Down, and I found in the Belfast Museum the Irish manuscript of the funeral oration pronounced over his body, and any O'Neill would probably at that period have turned in his grave had his funeral discourse been spoken in English.
Madden's statement that in 1738 nineteenth-twentieths of the population knew English is an incredible one and so utterly disproved by all the other evidence, that it is astonishing that so sound and careful a historian as Mr. Lecky should have accepted it as substantially true. The evidence upon the other side is overwhelming. Forty-seven years after Madden wrote this the German, Küttner, travelling through Ireland, wrote a series of letters in which he distinctly says that he found the common people either did not understand English at all or understood it imperfectly.
More than two generations had passed away after Madden's statement that nineteen-twentieths of the population knew English, when we find a Scotchman, Daniel Dewar, in a book entitled "Observations on the Character, Customs and Superstitions of the Irish," writing thus in 1812:—
"The number of people who speak this language is much greater than is generally supposed. It is spoken throughout the province of Connaught by all the lower orders, a great part of whom scarcely understand any English, and some of those who do, understand it only so as to conduct business. They are incapable of receiving moral or religious instruction through its medium. The Irish is spoken very generally through the other three provinces except amongst the descendants of the Scotch in the north. It cannot be supposed that calculations on this subject should be perfectly accurate, but it has been concluded on good grounds that there are about two millions of people in Ireland who are incapable of understanding a continued discourse in English."
I have always found, says Dewar, with much shrewdness, "that in places where gentlemen hostile to this tongue assured me there was not a word of it spoken, in these very districts I heard very little English." He gives an amusing account of the various contradictory objections that he found at that time urged against it.
"Some of the Anglo-Hibernians at that time (1808) strongly maintained that this dialect is so barbarous that it cannot answer the purpose of instruction, others that it would awaken the enthusiasm of the Wild Irish (as they call them) to make any attempt of this kind, and consequently that it might prove dangerous to the Government, and others, that they had no desire to be taught in Irish, and that it would be useless to send teachers among them for this purpose."
Dutton, in his statistical history of the county Clare, published in 1808, says that almost all the gentlemen of that county spoke Irish with the country people, but he adds, "scarcely one of their sons is able to hold a conversation in this language. The children of almost all those who cannot speak English are proud of being spoken to in English and answering in the same, even although you may question them in Irish. No Irish is spoken in any of the schools, and the peasants are anxious to send their children to them to learn English." This apparently does not refer to the hedge schools of the natives, but to the charter and other English schools. "I think the diversity of language and not the diversity of religion," writes Grattan, in 1811, "constitutes a diversity of people. I should be very sorry that the Irish language should be forgotten, but glad that the English language should be generally understood." This seems to have been also the position taken up by his great rival Flood, who, when dying, left some ￡50,000 to Trinity College for the cultivation of the Irish language. Trinity College, however, never secured the money, and its so-called Irish professorship, lately established, in the fifties, is only an adjunct of its Divinity School, and paid and practically controlled, not by the college, nor by people in the least interested in the cultivation of Celtic literature, but by a society for the conversion of Irish Papists through the medium of their own language.
In 1825, that is eighty-seven years after Madden's statement that nineteen-twentieths of the population knew English, the Commissioners of Education in Ireland, in their first report laid before Parliament, state "it has been estimated that the number of Irish who employ the ancient language of the country exclusively is not less than 500,000, and that at least a million more, although they have some understanding of English and can employ it for the ordinary purposes of traffic, make use of their tongue on all other occasions as the natural vehicle of their thoughts."
Lappenberg, a German who travelled in Ireland, reckoned that out of a population of seven millions of inhabitants in 1835, four millions spoke Irish "als ihre Muttersprache."
In 1842 Mac Comber's "Christian Remembrancer," discussing the possibility of "converting" the Irish, says, "there are about 3,000,000 of Irish who still speak the Irish language and love it as their mother tongue," and "that part of the Irish population which still speaks and understands little else than Irish" is "nearly a third of the entire population of Ireland."
A German, J. C. Kohl, who travelled extensively in Ireland in 1843, shortly before the famine, says that in Clare the "children would run by the side of the car crying, 'Burnocks halfpenny,' burnocks being an appellation applied to every stranger, and 'halfpenny' the only English that the little rogues seemed to know." The neglect of the use of Irish in the churches, which had even then set in, largely owing to the teaching and wishes of O'Connell and his parliamentarians, struck the German spectator as something astonishing, for apparently he could not understand how an ancient nation with whose fame all Europe had recently been filled owing to the exertions of O'Connell, should be casting away its national birthright. "The great city of Cork," he notes, "which lies in a district where much Irish is still spoken, contains only two churches where sermons are preached in Irish. A short time ago the Irish prisoners in Cork gaol petitioned the chaplain that he would preach his Sunday sermon to them in Irish."
This acute foreign observer gives a very interesting account of the state of the Irish language round Drogheda, a coast town some twenty miles north of Dublin, which is worth quoting here since it accurately describes the condition of affairs over the greater part of Leinster sixty years ago, but which is now so absolutely extinct that few modern Irishmen could believe it except on the most unimpeachable testimony. "Drogheda," he writes, "is the last genuine Irish town, the suburbs of Drogheda are genuine Irish suburbs ... and a great many people are to be found in the neighbourhood who speak the old Irish tongue more fluently and more frequently than the English." Kohl was hospitably entertained by a priest in Drogheda—whose name unfortunately he does not mention, but who appears to have been a man of superior intelligence. His house had several harps in it, and he was delighted by a young blind harper who first played Brian Boru's march for him, and then an air called the Fairy Queen. At Kohl's request the priest also sent for a reciter of Irish poetry, who asked what he would wish recited. "If you were to repeat all you know," said the priest, "we should have to listen all night, I suppose, and many other nights as well."
The man, says Kohl, "began to recite and went on uninterruptedly for a quarter of an hour. His story, of which I, of course, understood not a word, but which my friendly host afterwards explained to me, treated of a Scottish enchantress named Aithura, who forsaken by her Irish lover, Cuchullin, laid a cruel spell upon his son Konnell which compelled him by an irresistible enchantment, and entirely against his will, to follow, to persecute, to fight, and at last to destroy his father, Cuchullin. At the last moment, after stabbing his father to the heart in spite of the efforts by which he struggled to resist the horrible impulse of his destiny, his own heart broke in the struggle, and he and his father died together, while the revengeful spirit of the cruel enchantress hovered in exultation over the dying, repeating to her treacherous lover the story of his inconstancy and her revenge." "I was glad," adds Kohl, "of assuring myself by oral demonstration of the actual existence of Ossianic poetry like this, at the present day. The reciter was, as I have said, a simple and ignorant man, with a good deal of the clown about him, and his recitation was as simple, unadorned, and undeclamatory as himself. Sometimes, however, when carried away by the interest of his story his manner and voice were animated and moving. At such times he fixed his eyes on his hearers as if demanding their sympathy and admiration for himself and his poem. Sometimes I noticed that the metre completely changed, and I was told that this was the case with all Irish poems, for that the metre was always made to suit the subject. I also heard that the most beautiful part of this ballad was the dialogue of father and son upon the battlefield, but that a prose translation would give me no idea at all of its beauty."
The priest told him that "Ossianic poetry was very abundant in the neighbourhood of Drogheda." "This," he says, "I had heard before, and from all I heard in Ireland I am much inclined to believe—which indeed many have also conjectured—that Macpherson obtained the materials for his version of Ossian's poems from popular tradition and ballads of the North of Ireland. The whole Irish nation both in the south and north, is certainly much more imbued with the spirit of this poetry and still possesses many more traces of it than the Scottish people, whether of the Highlands or Lowlands."
Another very acute German traveller, Rodenberg, describes the people of Kerry as always speaking Irish among themselves in 1860, while their English was so bad that he could hardly understand it. He notices, however, that several words of corrupted English were interwoven with their Irish conversation, which so disgusted him that he remarks, "everything about these people is patchwork, their clothing, their dwellings, their language." He reports at full length a most interesting conversation which he had with a priest near Limerick, who assured him that they had to pull down in order to build up, that is, pull down the edifice of the Irish language in which the people were denied education in order to build up a new education in the English language. "Nor is it," said the priest, "the first time that the Irishman has had to turn his hand against his most sacred things. Red Hugh of Donegal destroyed the house of his forefathers that the enemy might not make of it a fortress against his own people, but he wept while he destroyed it."
In the Galway fish market Rodenberg could not hear a single word of English spoken. The population of Connacht was at this time a little unnder a million, and the census of 1861 showed that about one-tenth of the whole population were ignorant of English. The population of the city of Galway in this year was 23,787, of whom 3,511 were ignorant of English.
According to the census of 1891 something over three-quarters of a million people in Ireland were bi-linguists, and 66,140 could speak Irish only, thus showing that in thirty years Irish was killed off so rapidly that the whole Island contained fewer speakers in 1891 than the small province of Connacht alone did thirty years before.
This extinguishing of the Irish language has not been the result of a natural process of decay, but has been chiefly caused by the definite policy of the Board of "National Education," as it is called, backed by the expenditure every year of many hundreds of thousands of pounds. This Board, evidently actuated by a false sense of Imperialism, and by an overmastering desire to centralise, and being itself appointed by Government chiefly from a class of Irishmen who have been steadily hostile to the natives, and being perfectly ignorant of the language and literature of the Irish, have pursued from the first with unvarying pertinacity the great aim of utterly exterminating this fine Aryan language.
The amount of horrible suffering entailed by this policy, and the amount of hopeless ignorance stereotyped in hundreds of thousands of children, and the ruination of the life-prospects of hundreds of thousands more, by insisting upon their growing up unable to read or write, sooner than teach them to read and write the only language they knew, has counted for nothing with the Board of National Education, compared with their great object of the extermination of the Irish language, and the attainment of one Anglified uniformity. In vain have their own inspectors time after time testified to the ill results of denying the Irish-speakers education in their own language, in vain have disinterested visitors opened wide eyes of astonishment at schoolmasters who knew no Irish being appointed to teach pupils who know no English. In vain have the schoolmasters themselves petitioned to be allowed to change the system, in vain did Sir Patrick Keenan (afterwards himself Chief Commissioner of National Education) address the Board saying, "the shrewdest people in the world are those who are bi-lingual, borderers have always been remarkable in this respect, but the most stupid children I have ever met with are those who were learning English while endeavouring to forget Irish. The real policy of the educationist would in my opinion be to teach Irish grammatically and soundly to the Irish-speaking people, and then to teach them English through the medium of their native language." All in vain! Against the steady, unwavering, unrelenting determination to stamp out the Irish language which has been paramount in the Board ever since the days of Archbishop Whately, every representation passed unheeded, and it would appear that in another generation the Board—at the cost of unparalleled suffering—will have attained its object.
This is not the place to discuss the bearings of this question still less to drag in the names of individuals, but the reader who has followed the history of Irish literature to this will be perhaps anxious to have it continued up to date, and so I may as well here place on record what I and many others have seen with our own eyes over and over again.
An Irish-speaking family, endowed with all the usual intelligence of the Irish-speaking population, with a gift for song, poetry, Ossianic lays, traditional history, and story, send their children to school. A rational education, such as any self-governing country in Europe would give them, would teach them to read and write the language that they spoke, and that their fathers had read and spoken for fifteen hundred years before them. The exigencies of life in the United Kingdom would then make it necessary to teach them a second language—English. The basis of knowledge upon which they started, and which they had acquired as naturally as the breath of life, would in any fair system of education be kept as a basis, and their education would be built up upon it. They would be taught to read the Ossianics lays which they knew by heart before, they would be given books containing more of the same sort, they would be taught to read the poems, and they would have put into their hands books of prose and poetry of a kindred nature. They had picked up many items of information about the history of Ireland from their fathers and mothers, they would be given a simple history of Ireland to read. All this they would assimilate naturally and quickly because it would be the natural continuation of what they already in part possessed. But the exigencies of life in the United Kingdom makes it necessary to read English poems and English books, and to know something of English history also, this they would learn after the other.
Will it be believed, the Board of National Education insists upon the Irish-speaking child starting out from the first moment to learn to read a language it does not speak. It is forbidden to be taught one syllable of Irish, easy sentences, poems, or anything else. It is forbidden to be taught one word of Irish history. Advantage is taken of nothing that the child knew before or that came natural to it, and the result is appalling.
Bright-eyed intelligent children, second in intelligence, I should think, to none in Europe, with all the traditional traits of a people cultured for fifteen hundred years, children endowed with a vocabulary in every-day use of about three thousand words (while the ordinary English peasant has often not more than five hundred) enter the schools of the Chief Commissioner, to come out at the end with all their natural vivacity gone, their intelligence almost completely sapped, their splendid command of their native language lost for ever, and a vocabulary of five or six hundred English words, badly pronounced and barbarously employed, substituted for it, and this they in their turn will transmit to their children, while everything that they knew on entering the school, story, lay, poem, song, aphorism, proverb, and the unique stock-in-trade of an Irish speaker's mind, is gone for ever, and replaced by nothing.
I have long looked and inquired in vain, on all hands, for any possible justification of this system, and the more I have looked and inquired the more convinced I am that none such exists unless it be an unacknowledged political one. Its results at all events are only too obvious. The children are taught, if nothing else, to be ashamed of their own parents, ashamed of their own nationality, ashamed of their own names. The only idea of education they now have is connected not with the literary past of their own nation, but with the new board-trained schoolmaster and his school, which to them represent the only possible form of knowledge. They have no idea of anything outside of, or beyond, this. Hence they allow their beautiful Irish manuscripts to rot—because the schoolmaster does not read Irish. They never sing an Irish song or repeat an Irish poem—the schoolmaster does not; they forget all about their own country that their parents told them—the schoolmaster is not allowed to teach Irish history; they translate their names into English—probably the schoolmaster has done the same; and what is the use of having an Irish name now that they are not allowed to speak Irish! Worst of all they have not only dropped their Irish Christian names, but they are becoming ashamed of the patron saints of their own people, the names even of Patrick and of Brigit. It is a remarkable system of education, and one well worth the minutest study that can be paid it, which is able to produce these effects, but with even the smallest philological regard for the meaning of words, it cannot be called "education."
Ar n-a críochnughadh ag Ráth-Treagh anaice le Dungar, i bparráiste Tigh-Baoithin i gcondae Roscomáin, an ficheadh lá Lúghnasa, le Dúbhglas de h-íde, d'á ngoirthear go coitchionn an Craoibhín Aoibhinn, de phór na nGall-Ghaedhal i n-Eirinn.
Buidheachas le Dia!
CRíOCH.
********
Preface to "Glossarium Palaeo-Hibernicum."
Red Book in Archives of Diocese of Ossory. The statute is in the barbarous law-French of the period, "et si nul Engleys ou Irroies conversant entre Engleys use la lang Irroies entre eux-mesmes encontre cest ordinance, et de ceo soit attient, soint sez terrez," etc.
Municipal Archives of Waterford. Hist. MSS. Commission, 10th report. Appendix v. p. 323.
Galway Archives.
"Ulster Journal of Arch?ology."
See "Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland," 1897, p. 192.
State Papers, part iii. vol. ii. p. 502.
One of the four prophets of Ireland, see ch. XVI, note 23.
Archdale ii, 27.
Cal. of State Papers, p. 130.
"Tribes of Hy Many," p. 20.
State Papers, Dom. Eliz. an. 1600, p. 496.
This was that Father Nugent who improved and developed the powers of the Irish harp. A letter in Irish to him from Maelbrighte O'Hussey is printed by Father Hogan, S.J., in "Ibernia Ignatiana," p. 167.
Father Hogan's "Distinguished Irishmen of the Sixteenth Century," p. 38.
MS. in Royal Library of Brussels of Stephen White's "Vindici?," fo. 62. Consulted by Father Hogan, S.J.
"Transactions of the Ossory Arch. Society," vol. ii. p. 350.
Preface to Halliday's edition of Keating's "Forus Feasa," p. xi. The fine poet, David Bruadar (p. 592), wrote a satiric poem on the haste the Irish made to speak English when the Duke of Ormond was in power, two lines of which I quote from memory:
"Is mairg atá gan Béarla binn Ar dteacht an Iarla go h-Eirinn.
"See above p. 578.
Published by the late Father Denis Murphy, S.J., for the Irish Antiquarian Society.
I fear many of our moderns are also more or less open to this reproach.
"Ar an adhbhar sin as cóir agus as iommochuibhe dúinne na Herenaig bheith ceanamhail gradhach onórach an ar dteangain ndúchais nádurtha féin, an ghaoilag, noch atá chomhfuelethach chomhmúchta soin, nach mór na deacha si as coimhne na nduine; a mhileán so as féidir a chur ar an aois ealathain noch as udair don teangain, do chuir i fá fórdhoreatheacht agus cruos focal, da scribha a modaibh agus fhocalaibh deamhaire doracha, dothuicseanta, agus ni fhoilid saor mórán d'ár nduinibh uaisle dobheir a tteanga dhuchais nadurtha (noch ata fortill fuirithe onórach fólamtha géarchuiseach inti féin) a ttarcuisne agus a neamhchionn, agus chaitheas a n-aimsir á saorthudh agus á foghlaim teangtha coimhtheach ele" (pp. 10 and 11, preface).
"Tertio notandum quod hoc ipsum idioma sit vernaculum toti in primis Hiberni?, tamsetsi cum aliquo discrimine turn quoad dialectum nonnihil variantem inter diversas provincias, turn quoad artificii observationem inter doctos et vulgares.... Et dialecti quidem variatio ita se habere passim ?stimatur, ut cum sint quatuor Hiberni? provinci? Momonia Ultonia Lagenia Conactia, penes Conactes sit et potestas rect? pronunciationis et phraseos vera proprietas, penes Momonienses potestas sine proprietate, penes Ultones proprietas sine potestate, penes Lagenos nec potestas pronunciationis nec phraseos proprietas."—"De Hibernia Commentarius," p. 7. Louvain, 1632. This shows the antiquity of the Irish saying, "tá ceart gan bias ag an Ulltach, ta blas gan ceart ag an Muimhneach, ni'l bias ná ceart ag an Laighneach, tá blas agus ceart ag an gConnachtach."
"Ní maith tuigthear leis an bpobal gcoitcheann éinteangadh acht an ghaoidhealg amháin" (see p. 11). See also a mandate of the "Sacra Congregatio Visitationis."
"Quando aderit Rector Hibernicus val alius lingu? peritus, legantur ad mensam ter in hebdomada, libri spirituales, in idiomati Hibernico compositi, ne alumni ejus obliviscantur."—Extracted from the "Archiv. Coll. Hib. Rom?.," lib. xxiii., by Father Hogan, S.J.
Ellington's "Life and Writings of Ussher."
See above, p. 555.
It was not, I think, until the tithe war took place, that the established clergy began to see anything irrational in their attitude. In 1834, however, the Hon. Power Trench, Archbishop of Tuam, wrote to Phillip Barron, of Waterford, editor of Ancient Ireland, a weekly magazine for the cultivation of the Irish language, regretting that in the whole of his diocese (where probably not one in twenty at that period understood a word of English) he had not outside of his own brother, a single clergyman who had "acquired a proficiency in the Irish language."
"Present State of the Irish Church," seventh edition, 1787, p. 43, quoted by Anderson, in his "Native Irish."
Robert Molesworth's "True Way to Make Ireland Happy," printed in 1697, is also quoted as an authority for this statement, but I have not been able to discover a copy of this book even in the Library of Trinity College.
Roche's "Memoirs of an Octogenarian."
Vol. i. p. 263.
Thus on referring to a recent history of the County Sligo in two volumes by a distinguished author to see how far Irish prevailed in a certain barony, I find the fact that any other language than English either was or is spoken in Sligo, so far as I could see, quietly ignored. It is the same with most authors of local and county histories.
I published this with a translation in the "Journal of Ulster Arch?ology."
"Das Englische wird vom gemeinen Volke entweder gar nicht oder sehr unvolkommen erlernt" ("Briefe Aus Irland," Leipzig, 1785, p. 214).
Grattan's "Miscellaneous Works," p. 321, edition of 1822.
"Burnocks" does not look like a real word. I have no idea what it means or it is meant for.
This is a singular distortion of the story of Aoife and the coming of her and Cuchulain's son, Conlaoch to Erin. See above p. 300.
This of course is a misapprehension.
It is curious to observe that Kohl found the race of harpers by no means extinct in Ireland, and his testimony appears quite disinterested and trustworthy. "I afterwards heard," he says, "that piece (The Fairy Queen) on the pianoforte, but it did not sound half so soft and sweet as from the instrument of this blind young harper.... We were very much delighted with our harper who was certainly an accomplished artist, yet Ireland contains many of still greater ability and celebrity. The most celebrated of all, however, is a man named Byrne, blind also if I do not mistake. When, therefore, Moore sings—
"'The harp that once through Tara's hall The soul of music shed Now hangs as mute on Tara's wall As if the soul were fled,' his lamentation must not be literally understood."" He also mentions that when he was in Drogheda ""a concert was in preparation to be given next week at which seven harpers, mostly blind, were to play together.""
"An English tourist, C. R. Wild , mentions meeting a harper at Leenane in Connemara in 1857, who requested permission to play to him during his meal. He describes him as "an ancient man bearing a small Irish harp such as were common in olden days; ... the music produced was, for the most part, plaintive and slow, and the tones particularly soft and melodious." The priest who entertained Kohl had a number of harps in his house, but, unfortunately, the German says nothing of their size or shape. From these instances it would appear that the race of Irish harpers did not quite die out with those who assembled at Belfast at the close of the last century when Bunting secured so many of their airs, but that some lingered on till after the famine. How far these latter harpers could be regarded as the genuine descendants of the old race is doubtful.
"Wenn sie unter sich sind so sprechen sie immer das naturale Irisch, aber auch das nicht mehr rein sondern mit corrumpirtem English durchwoben. Alles an diesem Volke ist Fetzenwerk, ihre Kleidung, ihre Wohnung, ihre Sprache" ("Insel der Heiligen," vol. i. p. 185. Berlin, 1860).
See Vol. ii. p. 9 for this interesting conversation in which the attitude of the typical Catholic priest towards his national language is shown.
In spite of the well-known opposition of the National Board the National Schoolmasters themselves as early as 1874 in their Congress unanimously passed the following resolution:—"The peasants in Irish-speaking districts have not English enough to convey their ideas, except such as relate to the mechanical business of their occupation. Hence they are not able in any degree to cultivate or impress the minds of their children (though often very intelligent themselves), who consequently grow up dull and stupid if they have been suffered to lose the Irish language or to drop out of the constant practice of it." This is exactly what I and every other spectator have found, and it means that the Board of National Education is engaged in replacing an intelligent generation of men by an utterly stupid and unintelligent one.
Sir Patrick Keenan, C.B., K.C.M.G., who was for a time head of the Educational system in Ireland, and was employed by the Government to report upon the plan of teaching the people of Malta in Maltese, reported to Parliament that the attempt to substitute English or Italian for Maltese in the schools was a fatal one. "Such a course would simply mean that the people are to get no chance, much less choice, of acquiring a knowledge either of their own or any other language." This is exactly true of spots in Ireland, and after his experiences in Donegal, Sir Patrick Keenan drew up the following memorial:—"1. That the Irish-speaking people ought to be taught the Irish language grammatically, and that school books in Irish should be prepared for the purpose. 2. That English should be taught to all Irish-speaking children through the medium of the Irish. 3. That if this system be pursued the people will be very soon better educated than they are now, or possibly can be for many generations upon the present system. And 4. That the English language will in a short time be more generally and purely spoken than it can be by the present system for many generations." When he became head of the National System of Education, Sir Patrick found himself unable to carry out his own recommendations without personal inconvenience, being probably afraid to offend his colleagues, and nothing has been since done to remove the scandal.
For many years the schoolmaster was not even allowed to explain anything in Irish to a child who knew no English! This, rule, however, has been abrogated.
Dr. Pedersen, a Dane, who recently resided for three months in the Arran Islands to learn the language that is there banned—at the present moment the only inhabitant in one of these islands, not counting coastguards, who does not speak Irish is the schoolmaster!—took down about 2,500 words. I have written down a vocabulary of 3,000 words from people in Roscommon who could neither read nor write, and I am sure I fell 1,000 short of what they actually used. I should think the average in Munster, especially in Kerry, would be between 5,000 and 6,000. It is well known that many of the English peasants use only 300 words, or from that to 500.
A friend of mine travelling in the County Clare sent me three Irish MSS. the other day, which he found the children tearing to pieces on the floor. One of these, about one hundred years old, contained a saga called the "Love of Dubhlacha for Mongan," which M. d'Arbois de Jubainville had searched the libraries of Europe for in vain. It is true that another copy of it has since been discovered, and printed and annotated with all the learning and critical acumen of two such world-renowned scholars as Professor Kuno Meyer and Mr. Alfred Nutt, both of whom considered it of the highest value as elucidating the psychology of the ancient Irish. The copy thus recovered and sent to me is twice as long as that printed by Kuno Meyer, and had the copy from which he printed been lost it would be unique. These things are happening every day. A man living at the very doors of the Chief Commissioner of National Education writes to me thus: "I could read many of irish Fenian tales and poems, that was in my father's manuscripts, he had a large collection of them. I was often sorry for letting them go to loss, but I could not copy the 1/20th of them.... The writing got defaced, the books got damp and torn while I was away, I burned lots of them twice that I came to this country.... I was learning to write the old irish at that time; I could read a fair share of it and write a little." That man should have been taught to read and write his native language, and not practically encouraged to burn the old books, every one of which probably contained some piece or other not to be found elsewhere.
Even where the people had no manuscripts in common use amongst them, their minds were well-stored with poems and lays. A friend wrote to me from America the other day to interview a man who lived in the County Galway, who he thought had manuscripts. Not finding it convenient to do this, I wrote to him, and this is his reply: "Dear sir, about twenty years since I was able to tell about two Dozen of Ossian's Irish poems and some of Raftery's, and more Rymes composed by others, but since that time no one asked me since to tell one Irish story at a wake or by the fireside sine the old people died. Therefore when I had no practice I forgot all the storys that ever I had. I am old. Your most Humble Servant, Michael B."
Another writes: "I have no written manuscript. I had three poems about the dareg more the first when he came to Ireland in search of his wife that shewed (?) him, when Gaul faught him and tied him he come to Ireland, a few years after, when he got older and stronger, and faught Gaul for 9 days in succession the ninth day Gaul killed him then in 18 years after his son called Cun came to Ireland to have revenge and faught Gaul, and after eleven days fighting he was killed by Gaul. I had a poem called Lee na mna mora or the poem of the big woman who faught Gaul for five days, but Osker kills her. I had the baptism of Ossian by St. Patrick the best of all and many others of Ossians' to numerous to mention now, I also had some poemes of Cucullan the death and the lady in English and in Irish I had the beettle in English and Irish and when fin went to denmark in English and Irish and many other rymes of modern times. I seen some address in the Irish times last year where to write to some place in Dublin where Ossians poems Could be got but I forget the Number. The people that is living Now a days could not understand the old Irish which made me drop it altogether their parents is striving to learn their children English what themselves never learned so the boys and girls has neither good english or good Irish. Hoping your friends and well wishers are well, fare well old stock. M...."
This is the direct result of the system pursued by the National Board, which refuses to teach the children anything about Patrick and Brigid, but which is never tired of putting second-hand English models before them. Archbishop Whately, that able and unconventional Englishman, who had so much to do with moulding the system, despite his undoubted sense of humour, saw nothing humorous in making the children learn to repeat such verses as—
"I thank the goodness and the grace Which on my birth have smiled, And made me in these Christian days A happy English child!
"and the tone of the Board may be gathered from this passage, I believe, which occurred in one of their elementary books: "On the east of Ireland is England, where the Queen lives. Many people who live in Ireland were born in England, and we speak the same language, and are called one nation." The result of this teaching is apparent to every one who lives in Ireland, and does not shut his eyes. "God forbid I should handicap my daughter in life by calling her Brigid," said a woman to me once. "It was with the greatest difficulty I could make any of the Irish christen their children Patrick," said Father O'Reilly of Louisburgh to me, talking of his Australian mission. For the wholesale translation of names, such as O'Gara into Love, O'Lavin into Hand, Mac Rury into Rogers, and so on, which is still going on with unabated vigour, see an article by me in "Three Irish Essays," published by Fisher Unwin.
The End