Irish Literature

It is uncertain at what period and in what manner the Irish discovered the use of

letters. It may have been through direct commerce with Gaul, but it is more

probable, as McNeill has shown in his study of Irish oghams, that it was from the

Romanized Britons that they first learned the art of writing. The Italian alphabet,

however, was not the first to be employed in Ireland. Whoever the early Irish may

have been who first discovered letters, whether from intercourse with Britain or

with Gaul, they did not apparently bring either the Latin or the Greek alphabet

back with them to Ireland, but they invented an entirely new one of their own,

founded with considerable skill upon the Latin; this was used in very early times

by the Irish Celts for inscriptions upon pillars and gravestones. This ogham

script, as it is called, consists of lines, straight or slanting, long or short, drawn

either over, under, or through a given straight line, which straight line is in

lapidary inscriptions usually formed by the angular edge of a rectangular upright

stone. Thus, four cuts to the right of the line stand for S, to the left of the line

they mean C, and if they pass through the line they mean E. None of even the

oldest Irish manuscripts preserved to us is anything like as ancient as these

lapidary inscriptions. The language of the ogham stones is in fact centuries older

than that of the very oldest vellums, and agrees to a large extent to what has

been found of the old Gaulish linguistic monuments. Early Irish literature and the

sagas relating to the pre-Christian period of Irish history abound with references

to ogham writing, which was almost certainly of pagan origin, and which

continued to be employed up to the Christianization of the island. It was

eventually superseded by the Roman letters which were introduced by the

Church and must have been propagated with all the prestige of the new religion

behind them; but isolated ogham inscriptions exist on grave stones erected as

late as the year 600. When the script was introduced into Ireland is uncertain,

but it was probably about the second century. Although it answered well, indeed

better than the rounded Roman letters, for lapidary inscriptions, yet it was too

cumbrous an invention for the facile creation of a literature, though a professional

poet may well have carried about with him on his "tablet-staves", as the

manuscripts call them, the catchwords of many poems, sagas and genealogies.

Over a couple of hundred inscribed ogham stones still exist, mostly in the

south-west of Ireland, but they are to be found sporadically wherever the Irish Celt

planted his colonies in Scotland, Wales, Devonshire, and even further East.

Earliest Manuscripts. The earliest existing examples of the written Irish

language as preserved in manuscripts do not go back farther than the eighth

century; they are chiefly found in Scriptural glosses written between the lines or

on the margins of religious works in Latin, preserved on the Continent, wither

they were carried by early Irish missionaries in the numerous monasteries which

they founded in Switzerland, Germany, France, and Italy. The oldest piece of

consecutive Irish preserved in Ireland is found in the "Book of Armaugh", written

about the year 812. These early glosses, though of little except philological

interest yet show the wide learning of the commentators and the extraordinary

development, even at that early period, of the language in which they wrote. Their

language and style, says Kuno Meyer, stand on a high level in comparison with

those of the Old High German glosses. "We find here", he writes, "a fully-formed

learned prose style which allows even the finest shades of thought to be easily

and perfectly expressed, from which we must conclude that there must have

been a long previous culture [of the language] going back at the very least to the

beginning of the sixth century" (Kultur der Gegenwart, part I, section xi, p. 80).

These glosses are to be found at Wertzburg, St. Gall, Karlsruhe, Milan, Turin, St.

Paul in Carinthia, and elsewhere. The "Liber Hymnorum" and the "Stowe Missal"

are, after the glosses and the "Book of Armaugh" perhaps the most ancient

manuscripts in which Irish is written. They date from about the year 900 to 1050.

The oldest books of miscellaneous literature are the "Leabhar na h-Uidhre", or

"Book of the Dun Cow", transcribed about the year 1100, and the "Book of

Leinster", which dates from about fifty years later. Both these books are great

miscellaneous literary collections. After them come many valuable vellums. The

date at which these manuscripts were penned is no criterion of the date at which

their contents were first written, for many of them contain literature which, from

the ancient forms of words and other indications, must have been committed to

writing as early as the seventh century at least. We cannot carry these pieces

farther back linguistically, but it is evident from their contents that many of them

must have been handed down orally for centuries before they were committed to

writing. It must also be noted that a seventeenth century manuscript may

sometimes give a more correct version of a seventh-century piece than a vellum

many centuries older.

Early Christian Scholars in Ireland. It happens that Ireland's first great saint is

also the first person of whom it can be said without hesitation that some at least

of the writings ascribed to him are really his. We actually possess a manuscript

(Book of Armaugh) 1100 years old, containing his "Confession" or apology. There

is no reason, however, for supposing that it was with St. Patrick that a

knowledge of the Roman alphabet was first brought to Ireland. Before his arrival

there were Christians in Munster. At the beginning of the third century there were

British missionaries at work, according to Zimmer, in the southern province of the

island. Bede says distinctly that Paladius was sent from Rome to the Irish who

already believed in Christ "ad Scottos in christum credentes" (Eccl. Hist., bk. I,

xiii). Pelagius, the subtle heresiarch who taught with such success at Rome, and

who acquired great influence there, was of Irish descent. "Habet", says St.

Jerome, "progenium Scotticæ gentis de Brittanorum vicinia" (P.L., XXIV, 682,

758). He came probably from those Irish who had settled in Wales and South

Britain. His friend and teacher Celestius is said by some to have been an

Irishman also, but this is doubtful. Sedulius, however (Irish Siadal, now Shiel in

English), the author of the "Carmen Paschale", who flourished in the first half of

the fifth century, and who has been called the Virgil of theological poetry, was

almost certainly an Irishman. Indeed the Irish geographer Dicuil in the eighth

century calls him noster Sedulius, all of which shows that some Irish families at

least were within the reach of a cosmopolitan literary education in the fourth and

fifth centuries and that they were quick to grasp it.

Existing Manuscript Literature. Although so many scholars have during the

last fifty years given themselves up to Celtic studies, it remains true that the time

has not yet come, nor can it come for many years when it will be possible to

take anything like an accurate survey of the whole field of Irish literature.

Enormous numbers of important MSS. still remain unedited; many gaps occur in

the literature which have never been filled up, unless perhaps here and there by

some short piece in a learned magazine; of many periods we know little or

nothing. There are poets known to us at present practically only by name, whose

work lies waiting to be unearthed and edited, and so vast is the field and so

enormous the quantity of matter to be dealt with that there is room for an entire

army of workers, and until much more pioneer work has been done, and further

researches made in Irish grammar, prosody, and lexicography, it will be

impossible to reduce the great mass of material into order, and to date it with

anything like certainty. The exact number of Irish manuscripts still existing has

never been accurately determined. The number in the Royal Irish Academy,

Dublin, alone is enormous, probably amounting to some fifteen hundred. O'Curry,

O'Longan, and O'Beirne catalogued a little more than half the manuscripts in the

Academy, and the catalogue filled thirteen volumes containing 3448 pages; to

these an alphabetic index of the pieces contained was made in three volumes,

and an index of the principle names, etc. in thirteen volumes more. From an

examination of these books one may roughly calculate that the pieces

catalogued would number about eight or ten thousand, varying from long epic

sagas to single quatrains or stanzas, and yet there remains a great deal more to

be indexed, a work which after a delay of very many years is happily now at last

in process of accomplishment. The library of Trinity College, Dublin, also

contains a great number of valuable manuscripts of all ages, many of them

vellums, probably about 160. The British Museum, the Bodeian Library at Oxford,

the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, and the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels are

all repositories of a large number of valuable manuscripts.

Contents of the Manuscripts. From what we know of the contents of the

existing manuscripts we may set down as follows a rough classification of the

literature contained in them. We may well begin with the ancient epics dating

substantially from pagan times, probably first reduced to writing in the seventh

century or even earlier. These epics are generally shot through with verses of

poetry and often with whole poems, just as in the case of the French

chantefable, "Aucassin et Nicollet". After the substantially pagan efforts may

come the early Christian literature, especially the lives of the saints, which are

both numerous and valuable, visions, homilies, commentaries on the Scriptures,

monastic rules, prayers, hymns, and all possible kinds of religious and didactic

poetry. After these we may place the many ancient annals, and there exists

besides a great mass of genealogical books, tribal histories, and semi-historical

romances. After this may come the bardic poetry of Ireland, the poetry of the

hereditary poets attached to the great Gaelic families and the provincial kings,

from the ninth century down to the seventeenth. Then follow the Brehon laws and

other legal treaties, and an enormous quantity of writings on Irish and Latin

grammar, glossaries of words, metrical tracts, astronomical, geographical, and

medical works. Nor is there any lack of free translations from classical and

medieval literature, such a Lucam's "Bellum Civile", Bede's "Historica

Ecclesiastica", Mandeville's "Travels", Arthurian romances and the like. Finally

there exists a rich poetical literature of the last three centuries, and certain prose

works such as Keating's invaluable history of Ireland, with great quantities of

keenes, hymns, love-songs, ranns, bacchanalian, Jacobite, poetical, and

descriptive verses, of which thousands have still to be found, although an

enormous number have perished. To this catalogue may perhaps be added the

unwritten folk-lore of the island both in prose and verse which has only lately

begun to be collected, but of which considerable collections have already been

made. Such, then, is a brief and bald résumé of what the student will find before

him in the Irish language.

There may be observed in this list two remarkable omissions. There is no epic

handed down entirely in verse, and there is no dramatic literature. The Irish epic

is in prose, though it is generally interwoven with numerous poems, for though

many epopees exist in rhyme, such as some of the Ossianic poems, they are of

modern date, and none of the great and ancient epics we constructed in this

way. The absence of the drama, however, is more curious still. Highly cultivated

as Irish literature undoubtedly was, and excellent scholars both in Greek and

Latin as the early Irish were, nevertheless they do not seem to have produced

even a miracle play. It has been alleged that some of the Ossianic poems,

especially those containing a semi-humorous, semi-serious dialogue between

the last of the great pagans, the poet Oisin (Ossian he is called in Scotland), and

the first of the great Christian leaders, St. Patrick, were originally intended to be

acted, or at least recited, by different people. If this be really so, then the Irish

had at least the rudiments of a drama, but they never appear to have carried it

beyond these rudiments, and the absence of all real dramatic attempt, however it

may be accounted for, is one of the first things that is likely to strike with

astonishment the student of comparative literature.

Early Irish Epic or Saga. During the golden period of the Greek and Roman

genius no one thought of writing a prose epic or a saga. Verse epics they left

behind them, and history, but the saga of the Northmen, the sgeul or úrsgeul of

the Gael, was unknown to them. It was only in a time of decadence that a body

of Greek prose romance appeared, and the Latin language produced in this line

little of a higher character that the "Golden Ass" or the "Gesta Romanorum". In

Ireland, on the other hand, the prose epic or saga developed to an abnormal

degree, and kept on developing, to some extent at least, for well over a thousand

years. It is probable that very many sagas existed before the coming of

Christianity, but it is highly improbable that any of them were written down in full

length. It was no doubt only after the full Christianization of the island, when it

abounded in schools of learning, that the Irish experienced the desire to write

down their primitive prose epics and as much as they could recapture of their

ancient poetry. In the "Book of Leinster", a manuscript of the middle twelfth

century, we find a list of the names of 187 epic sagas. The ollamh (ollav), or

arch-poet, who was the highest dignitary among the poets, and whose training

lasted for some twelve years, was obliged to learn two hundred and fifty of these

prime sagas and one hundred secondary ones. The manuscripts themselves

divide these prime sagas into the following romantic categories, from the very

names of which we may get a glance of the genius of the early Gael, and form

some conception of the tragic nature of his epic:--Destruction of Fortified Places,

Cow Spoils (i.e., cattle-raids), Courtships or Wooing, Battles, Stories of Caves,

Navigations, Tragical Deaths, Feasts, Sieges, Adventures of Travel, Elopements,

Slaughters, Water-eruptions, Expeditions, Progresses, and Visions. "He is no

poet", says the Book of Leinster, "who does not synchronize and harmonize all

these stories."

In addition to the names of 187 sagas in that book, there exist the names of

many more that occur in the tenth or eleventh century tale of MacCoise, and all

the known ones, with the exception of one added later and another in which there

is evidently an error in transcription, refer to events prior to the year 650 or

thereabouts. We may take it then that the list was drawn up in the seventh

century. Who were the authors of these sagas? That is a question that cannot be

answered. There is not a trace of authorship remaining, if, indeed, authorship be

the right word for what is far more likely to have been the gradual growth of

stories, woven around racial, or tribal, or even family history, and in some cases

around incidents of early Celtic mythology, thus forming stories which were ever

being told and retold, burnished up and added to by professional poets and

saga-tellers, and which were, some of them, handed down for perhaps countless

generations before they were ever put on parchments or before lists of their

names and contents were made by scholars. Those which recount ancient tribal

events or dynastic wars were probably much exaggerated, magnified, and

undoubtedly distorted during the course of time; others, again, of more recent

growth, give us perhaps fairly accurate accounts of real events.

It seems quite certain that, as soon as Christianity had pervaded the island, and

bardic schools and colleges had been formed alongside of the monasteries, there

was no class of learning more popular than that which taught the great

traditionary doings, exploits, and tragedies of the various tribes and families and

races of Ireland. Then the peregrinations of the bards and the

inter-communication among their colleges must have propagated throughout all

Ireland any local traditions that were worthy of preservation. The very essence of

the national life of the island was embodied in these stories, but, unfortunately,

few only of their enormous number have survived to our days, and even these are

mostly mutilated or preserved in mere digests. Some, however, exist at nearly

full length, although probably in no case are they written down in the ancient

vellums in just the same manner as they would have been recounted by the

professional poet, for the writers of most of the early vellums were not the poets

but generally Christian monks, who took an interest and a pride in preserving the

early memorials of their race, and who cultivated the native language to such an

amazing degree that at a very early period it was used alongside Latin, and soon

almost displaced it, even in the domain of the Church itself. This patriotism of the

Irish monks and this early cultivation of the vernacular are the more remarkable

when we know that it is the very reverse of what took place throughout the rest of

Europe, where the almost exclusive use of Latin by the Church was the principal

means of destroying native and pagan tradition. In spite, however, of the

irrevocable losses inflicted upon the Irish race by the Northmen from the end of

the eighth to the middle of the eleventh century, and of the ravages of the

Normans after their so-called conquest, and of the later and more ruthless

destructions wrought wholesale and all over the island by the Elizabethan and

Cromwellian English, O'Curry was able to assert that the content of the strictly

historical tales known to him would be sufficient to fill up 4000 large quarto

pages. He computes that the tales belonging to the Ossianic and the Fenian

cycle would fill 3000 more, and that, in addition to these, the miscellaneous and

imaginative cycles which are neither historical nor Fenian, would fill 5000, not to

speak of the more recent and novel-like productions of the later Irish.

Pagan Literature and Christian Sentiment. The bulk of the ancient stories

and some of the ancient poems were probably, as we have seen, committed to

writing by monks of the seventh century, but are themselves substantially pagan

in origin, conception, and colouring. And yet there is scarcely one of them in

which some Christian allusion to heaven, or hell, or the Deity, or some Biblical

subject, does not appear. The reason of this seems to be that, when Christianity

succeeded in gaining the upper hand over paganism, a kind of tacit compromise

was arrived at, by means of which the bard, and the filè (i.e., poet), and the

representative of the old pagan learning were permitted by the sympathetic

clerics to propagate their stories, tales, poems, and genealogies, at the price of

tacking on to them a little Christian admixture, just as the vessels of some

feudatory nations are compelled to fly at the masthead the flag of the suzerain

power. But so badly has the dovetailing of the Christian into the pagan part been

performed in most of the oldest romances that the pieces come away quite

separate in the hands of even the least skilled analyser, and the pagan

substratum stands forth entirely distinct from the Christian accretion. Thus, for

example, in the evidently pagan saga called the "Wooing of Etain", we find the

description of the pagan paradise given its literary passport, so to speak, by a

cunningly interwoven allusion to Adam's fall. Etain was the wife of one of the

Tuatha De Danann., who were gods. She is reborn as a mortal--the pagan Irish

seem, like the Gaulish druids, to have believed in metempsychosis--and weds

the king of Ireland. Her former husband of the Tuatha De Danann race still loves

her, follows her into life as a mortal, and tries to win her back by singing to her a

captivating description of the glowing unseen land to which he would lure her. "O

lady fair, wouldst thou come with me" he cries "to the wondrous land that is

ours", and he describes how "the crimson of the foxglove is in every brake--a

beauty of land the land I speak of. youth never grows into old age there, warm

sweet streams traverse the country", etc.: and then the evidently pagan

description of this land of the gods is made passable by an added verse in which

we are adroitly told that, though the inhabitants of this glorious country saw

everyone, yet nobody saw them, "because the cloud of Adam's wrongdoing has

concealed us".

It is this easy analysis of the early Irish literature into its ante-Christian and

post-Christian elements which lends to it an absorbing interest and a great value

in the history of European thought. For, when all spurious accretions have been

stripped off, we find in it a genuine picture of pagan life in Europe, such as we

look for in vain elsewhere. "The church adopted [in Ireland] towards Pagan sagas

the same position that it adopted toward Pagan law. . . . I see no reasons for

doubting that really genuine pictures of a pre-Christian culture are preserved to us

in the individual sagas" (Windisch, Irische Texte, I, 258). "The saga originated in

Pagan and was propagated in Christian times, and that too without its seeking

fresh nutriment, as a rule, from Christian elements. But we must ascribe it to the

influence of Christianity that what is specifically pagan in Irish saga is blurred

over and forced into the background. And yet there exist many whose contents

are plainly mythological. The Christian monks were certainly not the first who

reduced the ancient sagas to fixed form. but later on they copied them faithfully

and promulgated them after Ireland had been converted to Christianity" (ibid., 62).

Irish Literature and Early Europe. When it is understood that the ancient Irish

sagas record, even though it be in a more or less distorted fashion, in some

cases reminiscences of a past mythology, and in others real historical events,

dating from the pagan times, then it needs only a moment's reflection to realize

their value. "Nothing" writes Zimmer "except a spurious criticism which takes for

original and primitive the most palpable nonsense of which Middle-Irish writers

from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth century are guilty with regard to their own

antiquity, which is in many respects strange and foreign to them, nothing but

such a criticism can on the other hand make the attempt to doubt of the

historical character of the chief persons of the saga cycles. For we believe that

Méve, Conor MacNessa, Cuchulainn, and Finn MacCumhail (Cool) are just as

much historical personalities as Arminius or Dietrich of Berne or Etzel, and their

date is just as well determined." (Kelt-Studien, fasc. ii, 189.) The first three of

these lived in the first century B.C., and Finn in the second or third century.

D'Arbois de Jubainville expresses himself to the same effect. "We have no

reason", he writes, "to doubt the reality of the principal rôle in this [cycle of

Cuchulainn]" (Introduction à l'étude de la littérature celtique, 217); and of the

story of the Boru tribute imposed on Leinster in the first century he writes: "The

story has real facts for a basis though certain details may have been created by

the imagination"; and again, "Irish epic story, barbarous though it be, is, like Irish

law, a monument of a civilization far superior to that of the most ancient

Germans" (L'épopée celtique en Irlande, preface, p. xli.). "Ireland in fact", writes

M. Darmesteter in his "English Studies", summing up his legitimate conclusions

derived from the works of the great Celtic scholars, "has the peculiar privilege of a

history continuous from the earliest centuries of our era to the present days. She

has preserved in the infinite wealth of her literature a complete and faithful picture

of the ancient civilization of the Celts. Irish literature is therefore the key which

opens the Celtic world (Eng. tr., 1896, 182). But the Celtic world means a large

portion of Europe and the key to its past history can be found at present nowhere

else than in the Irish manuscripts. Without them we would have to view the past

history of a great part of Europe through that distorting medium, the coloured

glasses of the Greeks and Romans, to whom all outer nations were barbarians,

into whose social life they had no motive for inquiring. Apart from Irish literature

we would have no means of estimating what were the feelings, modes of life,

manners, and habits of those great Celtic races who once possessed so large a

part of the ancient world, Gaul, Belgium, North Italy, parts of Germany, Spain,

Switzerland, and the British Isles, who burnt Rome, plundered Greece, and

colonized Asia Minor. But in the ancient epics of Ireland we find another standard

by which to measure, and through this early Irish medium we get a clear view of

the life and manners of the race in one of its strongholds, and we find many

characteristic customs of the continental Celts, which are just barely mentioned

or alluded to by Greek and Roman writers, reappearing in all the circumstance

and expansion of saga-telling.

Of such is the custom of the "Hero's Bit", mentioned by Posidonius, upon which

one of the most famous Irish sagas, "Bricriu's Feast", is founded. Again the

chariot, which had become obsolete in Gaul a couple of hundred years before

Caesar's invasion, is described repeatedly in the sagas of Ireland, and in the

greatest of the epic cycles the warriors are always represented as fighting from

their chariots. We find, as Diodorus Siculus mentions, that the bards had power

to make battles cease by interposing with song between the combatants. Caesar

says (Gallic War, bk. VI, xiv) the Gaulish druids spent twenty years in studying

and learned a great number of verses, but Irish literature tells us what the

arch-poet, probably the counterpart of the Gaulish druid, actually did learn. "The

manners and customs in which the men of the time lived and moved are

depicted", writes Windisch, "with a naive realism which leaves no room for doubt

as to the former actuality of the scenes depicted. In matter of costume and

weapons, eating and drinking, building and arrangement of the banqueting hall,

manners observed at the feasts and much more, we find here the most valuable

information" (Ir. Texte I, 252). "I insist", he says elsewhere, "that Irish saga is the

only richly-flowing source of unbroken Celtism." "It is the ancient Irish language",

says d'Arbois de Jubainville, "that forms the connecting point between the

neo-Celtic languages and the Gaulish of the inscribed stones, coins, and proper

names preserved in Greek and Roman literature." It is evident then that those of

the great Continental nations of to-day whose ancestors were mostly Celtic, but

whose language, literature, and traditions have completely disappeared, must, if

they wish to study their own past, turn themselves to Ireland, and there they will

find the dry bones of Posidonius and Caesar rise up before them in a ruddy

covering of flesh and blood which, for the first time, will enable them to see what

manner of men were their own forebears.

Three Principal Saga Cycles. There are three great cycles in Irish story-telling,

two of them very full, but the third, in many ways the most interesting, is now but

scantily represented. This last cycle was the purely mythological one, dealing

with the Tuatha De Danann, the gods of good, and the Fomorians, gods of

darkness and evil, and giving us, under the apparently early history of the various

races that colonized Ireland, really a distorted early Celtic pantheon. According

to these accounts, the Nemedians first seized upon the islands and were

oppressed by the Fomorians, who are described as African sea-robbers; these

races nearly exterminated each other at the fight round Conning's Tower on Tory

Island. Some of the Nemedians escaped to Greece and came back a couple of

hundred years later calling themselves Firbolg. Others of the Nemedians who

escaped came back later, calling themselves the Tuatha De Danann. These last

fought the battle of North Moytura and beat the Firbolg. They fought the battle of

South Moytura later and beat the Fomorians. They held the island until the

Gaels, also called Milesians or Scoti, came in and vanquished them. From these

Milesians the present Irish are mostly descended. Good sagas about both of

these battles are preserved, each existing in only a single copy. Nearly all the

rest of this most interesting cycle has been lost or is to be found merely in

condensed summaries. These mythological pieces dealt with people, dynasties,

and probably the struggle between good and evil principles. There is over it all a

sense of vagueness and uncertainty.

The heroic cycle (or Red Branch, Cuchulainn, or Ulster Cycle as it is variously

called), on the other hand, deals with the history of the Milesians themselves

within a brief but well-defined period, and we seem here to find ourselves not far

removed from historical ground. The romances belonging to this cycle are sharply

drawn, numerous, and ancient, many of them fine both in conception and

execution. The time is about the birth of Christ, and the figures of Cuchulainn

(Coohullin), King Conor Mac Nessa, Fergus, Naoise (Neesha), Meadhbh (Mève),

Déirdre, Conall Cearnach, and their fellows, have far more circumstantially about

them than the dim, mist-magnified, distorted forms of the mysterious Dagda,

Nuada of the Silver Hand, Bres, Balor of the Evil Eye, Dana, and the other beings

which we find in the mythological cycle. The best known and greatest of all these

sagas is the "Táin Bo Chuailgne", or "Cattle-Raid of Cooley", a district in the

county of Louth. It gives a full account of the struggle between Connacht and

Ulster, and the hero of the piece, as indeed of the whole Red Branch cycle, is

the youthful Cuchulainn, the Hector of Ireland, the most chivalrous of enemies.

This long saga contains many episodes drawn together and formed into a single

whole, a kind of Irish Iliad, and the state of society which it describes from the

point of culture-development is considerably older and more primitive than that of

the Greek epic. The number of stories that belong to this cycle is considerable.

Standish Hayes O'Grady has reckoned ninety-six (appendix to Eleanor Hull's

"Cuchulainn Saga"), of which eighteen seem now to be wholly lost, and many

others very much abbreviated, though they were all doubtless at one time told at

considerable length.

After the Red Branch or heroic cycle we find a very comprehensive and even

more popular body of romance woven round Finn Mac Cumhail (Cool), his son

Oscar, his grandson Oisin or Ossian, Conn of the Hundred Battles of Ireland, his

son Art the Lonely, and his grandson Cormac of the Liffey, in the second and

third centuries. This cycle of romance is usually called the Fenian cycle because

it deals so largely with Finn Mac Cumhail and his Fenian militia. These,

according to Irish historians, were a body of Irish janissaries maintained by the

Irish kings for the purpose of guarding their coasts and fighting their battles, but

they ended by fighting the king himself and were destroyed by the famous cath

(or battle of) Gabhra (Gowra). As the heroic cycle is often called the Ulster cycle,

so this is also known as the Leinster cycle of sagas, because it may have had

its origin, as MacNeill has suggested, amongst the Galeoin, a non-Milesian tribe

and subject race, who dwelt around the Hill of Allen in Leinster. This whole body

of romance is of later growth or rather expresses a much later state of civilization

than the Cuchulainn stories. There is no mention of fighting in chariots, of the

Hero's Bit, or of many other characteristics which mark the antiquity of the Ulster

cycle. Very few pieces belonging to the Finn story are found in Old Irish, and the

great mass of texts is of Middle and Late Irish growth. The extension of the story

to all the Gaelic-speaking parts of the kingdom is placed by MacNeill between

the years 400 and 700; up to this time it was (as the product of a vassal race)

propagated only orally. Various parts of the Finn saga seem to have developed in

different quarters of the country, that about Diarmuid of the Love Spot in South

Munster, and that about Goll the son of Morna in Connacht. Certain it is that this

cycle was by far the most popular and widely spread of the three, being familiarly

known in every part of Ireland and of Gaelic-speaking Scotland even to the

present day. It developed also in a direction of its own, for though none of the

heroic tales are wholly in verse, yet the number of Ossianic epopees, ballads,

and poems is enormous, amounting to probably some 50,000 lines, mostly in the

more modern language.

Early Christian Literature. Perhaps no country that ever adopted Christianity

was so thoroughly and rapidly permeated and perhaps saturated with its

language and concepts as was Ireland. It adopted and made its own in secular

life scores and hundreds of words originally used by the Church for ecclesiastical

purposes. Even to the present day we find in Irish words like póg, borrowed from

the Latin for "[the kiss] of peace", pac[is], Old Irish póc; the word for rain,

báisteach, is from baptizare, and meant originally "the water of baptism". From

the same root comes baitheas, "the crown of the head", i.e. the baptized part. A

common word for warrior, or hero, laich, now laoch, is simply from laicus, a

layman. The Latin language was, of course, the one used for religious purposes,

both in prose and verse, for some time after the introduction of Christianity. In it

were written the earliest hymns: Patrick used it in his "Confession", as did

Adaman in his "Life of Columcille". But already by the middle of the eighth

century the native language had largely displaced it all over Ireland as a medium

for religious thought, for homilies, for litanies, books of devotion, and the lives of

saints. We find the Irish language used in a large religious literature, much of

which is native, some of which represents lost Latin originals which are now

known to us only in the Irish translations. One interesting development in this

class of literature is the visions-literature beginning with the vision of St. Fursa,

which is given at some length by Bede, and of which Sir Francis Palgrave states

that "tracing the course of thought upwards we have no difficulty in deducing the

poetic genealogy of Dante's Inferno to the Milesian Fursæus". These "visions"

were very popular in Ireland, and so numerous they gave rise to the parody, the

twelfth century "Vision of Mac Conglinne". More important than these, however,

are the lives of the saints, because many of them, dating back to a very remote

period, throw a great deal of light on the manners of the early Irish. In the first half

of the seventeenth century Brother Michael O'Cleary, a Franciscan, travelled

round Ireland and made copies of between thirty and forty lives of Irish saints,

which are still preserved in the Burgundian library at Brussels. Nine, at least,

exist elsewhere in ancient vellums. A part of one of them, the voyage of St.

Brendan, spread all through Europe, but the Latin version is much more complete

than any existing Irish one, the original having probably been lost.

Irish Historical Literature. Owing to the nature of the case, and considering the

isolation of Ireland, it is extremely difficult, or rather impossible, to procure

independent foreign testimony, to the truth of Irish annals. But, although such

testimony is denied us, yet there happily exists another kind of evidence to

which we may appeal with comparative confidence. This is nothing less than the

records of natural phenomena reported in the annals, for if it can be shown by

calculating backwards, as modern science has enabled us to do, that such

natural phenomena as the appearance of comets or the occurrence of eclipses

are recorded to the day and hour by the annalists, then we can also say with

something like certainty that these phenomena were recorded at their

appearance by writers who personally observed them, and whose writings must

have been actually consulted and seen by these later annalists whose books we

now possess. If we take, let us say, the "Annals of Ulster", which treat of Ireland

and Irish history from about the year 444, but of which the written copy dates

only from the fifteenth century, we find that they contain from the year 496 to 884

as many as eighteen records of eclipses and comets, and all these agree

exactly to the day and hour with the calculations of modern astronomers. How

impossible it is to keep such records unless written memoranda are made of

them at the time by eyewitnesses is shown by the fact that Bede, born in 675, in

recording the great solar eclipse which took place only eleven years before his

own birth, is yet two days astray in his date; while on the other hand the "Annals

of Ulster" give, not only the correct day, but the correct hour, thus showing that

their complier, Cathal Maguire, had access either to the original, or a copy of an

original, account by an eyewitness. Whenever any side-lights have been thrown

from an external quarter on the Irish annals, either from Cymric, Saxon, or

Continental sources, they have always tended to show their accuracy. We may

take it then without any credulity on our part, that Irish history as recorded in the

annals may be pretty well relied upon from the fourth century onward.

The first scholar whom we know to have written connected annals was

Tighearnach, Abbott of Clonmacnoise, who died in 1088. He began in Latin with

the founding of Rome; later on he makes occasional mention of Irish affairs, and

lays it down that Irish history is not to be trusted before the reign of Cimbaed,

that is, prior to about the year 300 B.C., "Omnia monimeta Scotorum [the Irish

were always called Scotti till into the late Middle Ages] usque Cimbaed incerta

erant." In the fourth century B.C. the references to Ireland become fuller and

more numerous, they are partly in Latin, partly in Irish, but towards the end of the

work Latin gives way to the native speech. The greatest book of annals, with a

few trifling exceptions also the latest, is known under the title of the "Four

Masters" (q. v.). It is evident from the entries that the compilers of the "annals of

Ulster" and the rest copied from ancient originals. In the "Annals of Ulster" for

instance, we read under the year 439 "Chronicon magnum scriptum est", at the

years 467 and 468 the compiler writes "sic in libro Cuanach inveni", at 482 "ut

Cuana scriptsit", at 507 "secundum librum Mochod", at 628 "sicut in libro

Dubhdaleithe narratur", etc. No nation in Europe can boast of so continuous and

voluminous a history preserved in a vernacular literature. The only surviving

history of Ireland as distinguished from annals was written Geoffrey Keating, a

learned priest, in the first half of the seventeenth century; it also is taken, almost

exclusively, from the old vellum manuscripts then surviving, but which mostly

perished, as Keating no doubt foresaw they would, in the cataclysm of the

Cromwellian wars.

Irish Poetry. There is no other vernacular poetry in Europe which has gone

through so long, so unbroken, and so interesting a period of development as that

of the Irish. The oldest poems are ascribed to the early Milesians and are

perhaps the most ancient pieces of vernacular literature existing. None of the

early poems rhymed. There is little we can see to distinguish them from prose

except a strong tendency, as in the Teutonic languages, toward alliteration, and

a leaning toward dissyllables. They are also so ancient as to be unintelligible

without heavy glosses. It is a tremendous claim to make for the Celt that he

taught Europe to rhyme, yet it has often been made for him, and not by himself,

but by such men as Zeuss, the father of Celtic learning, Constantine Nigra, and

others. Certain it is that as early as the seventh century we find the Irish had

brought the art of rhyming verses to a high pitch of perfection, that is, centuries

before most of the vernacular literatures of Europe knew anything at all about it.

Nor are their rhymes only such as we are accustomed to in English, French, or

German poetry, for they delighted not only in full rhymes, like these nations, but

also in assonances, like the Spaniards, and they often thought more of a middle

rhyme than of an end rhyme. The following Latin verses, written no doubt after his

native models by Aengus Mac Tipraite some time prior to the year 704, will give

the reader an idea of the middle or interlinear rhyming which the Irish have

practiced from the earliest times down to the present day:

Martinus mirus more

Ore laudavit Deum,

Puro Corde cantavit

Atque amavit Eum.

A very curious and interesting peculiarity of a certain sort of Irish verse is a desire

to end a second line with a word with a syllable more than that which ends the

first, the stress of the voice being thrown back a syllable in the last word of the

second line. Thus, if the first line end with an accented monosyllable, the second

line will end with a dissyllabic word accented on its first syllable, or if the first line

end with a dissyllable accented on its penultimate the second line will end with a

trisyllable accented on its ante-penultimate. This is called aird-rinn in Irish, as:

Fall'n the land of learned mén

The bardic band is fállen,

None now learn a song to sing

For long our fern is fading.

This metre, which from its popularity must be termed the hexameter of the Irish,

is named Deibhidhe (D'yevvee), and well shows in the last two lines the internal

rhyme to which we refer. If it be maintained, as Thurneysen maintains, that the

Irish derived their rhyming verses from the Latins, it seems necessary to account

for the peculiar forms that so much of this verse assumed in Irish, for the merest

glance will show that the earliest Irish verse is full of tours de force, like this

"aird-runn", which cannot have been derived from Latin. After the seventh century

the Irish brought their rhyming system to a pitch of perfection undreamt of by any

nation in Europe, even at the present day, and it is no exaggeration to say that

perhaps by no people was poetry so cultivated and, better still, so remunerated

as in Ireland.

There were two kinds of poets known to the early Gael. the principle of those was

called the filè (filla); there were seven grades of filès, the most exalted being

called an ollamh (ollav). These last were so highly esteemed that the annalists

often give their obituaries, as though they were so many princes. It took from

twelve to twenty years to arrive at this dignity. Some fragments of the old

metrical textbooks still exist, showing the courses required from the various

grades of poets, in pre-Norse times. One of these, in elucidation of the metric,

gives the first lines of three hundred and fifty different poems, all no doubt well

known at the time of writing, but of which only about three have come down entire

to our own time. If there were seven species of filès there were sixteen grades of

bards, each with a different name, and each had its own peculiar metres (of

which the Irish had over 300) allotted to him. During the wars with the Norsemen

the bards suffered fearfully, and it must have been at this time, that is during the

ninth and tenth centuries, that the finely-drawn distinction between poets and

bards seems to have come to an end. So highly esteemed was the poetic art in

Ireland that Keating in his history tells us that at one time no less than a third of

the patrician families of Ireland followed that profession. These constituted a

heavy drain on the resources of the country, and at three different periods in Irish

history the people tried to shake off their incubus. However, Columcille, who was

a poet himself, befriended them; at the Synod of Drum Ceat, in the sixth century,

their numbers were reduced and they were shorn of many of their prerogatives;

but, on the other hand, public lands were set apart for their colleges, and these

continued until the later English conquest, when those who escaped the spear of

Elizabeth fell beneath the sword of Cromwell.

Modern Irish Poetry. Much of the ancient poetry in the schools was in the

nature of a memoria technica, the frame in which valuable information was

enshrined, but the bards attached to the great houses chanted a different strain.

So numerous are the still-surviving poems from the Battle of Clontarf down to the

sixteenth century that Meyer has remarked that the history of Ireland could be

written out of them alone. When the great houses fell beneath the sword of

Elizabeth, of Cromwell, and of William, it is unnecessary to mention that the

entire social fabric of Gaeldom fell with them, and amongst other things the

colleges of the bards and brehons, which had existed, often on the same spot

and in possession of the same land, for over a thousand years. The majority of

learned men were slain, or driven out, or followed their masters into exile. No

patrons for the native arts remained in Ireland, and, worse still, there was no

security for the life of the artist. The ancient metres, over three hundred of which

had at one time been cultivated, and which, although reduced to less than a

score in the Elizabethan period, were still the property only of the learned and

highly educated, so intricate were the verse forms, now died away completely.

There was, perhaps, not a single writer living by the middle of the eighteenth

century who could compose correct verses in the classical metres of the

schools.

On the other hand, however, there arose a new kind of poetry, in which the

consonant rhyming of the old school was replaced by vowel chiming or vowel

rhyming, and in which only the syllables on which the stress of the voice fell were

counted; a splendid lyrical poetry sprung up amongst the people themselves

upon these lines. The chief poets in these latter times were in very reduced

circumstances, mostly school masters or farmers, and very different indeed in

status from the refined, highly educated, and stately poets who had a century or

two before sat at the right hand of powerful chieftains advising them in peace and

war. A usual theme of the new poets, who seemed to revel in their newly found

freedom of expression, was the grievances of Ireland sung under a host of

allegorical names, the chances of the Stuarts returning, and the bitterness of the

present compared with the glories of the past, or the vision of Ireland appearing

as a beautiful maiden. The poets of the South used even to hold annual bardic

sessions, though such attempts must always have been attended with great

danger, for the possession of a manuscript was often a sufficient cause for

persecuting or imprisoning the possessor; many fine books were on this account

hidden away or walled up lest they should bring the owner into trouble with the

authorities. Even as late as 1798, the grammarian Neilson of County Down, who

was a Protestant clergyman of the Established Church and perfectly loyal to the

Government, was arrested by a dozen dragoons and accused of treason because

he preached in Irish.

It is very difficult to convey in the English language any idea of the beautifully

artistic and recondite measures in which the poets of the last two or three

centuries have rejoiced, both in Ireland and in the Highlands of Scotland, where

also they produced a splendid lyrical outburst, about the same time as in Ireland,

and on the same lines. Suffice it to say that most of their modern poetry was

written and is being written to this very day upon a wonderful scheme of vowel

sounds, arranged in such a manner that first one and then another vowel will

strike the ear at skillfully recurring intervals. Some poems are written entirely on

the æ sound, others on the ú (oo), í (ee) or á (au) sounds, but most upon a

delightful intermingling of two or more of them. Here is a typical verse of Tadhg

Gaelach O'Sullivan, who died in 1800 and who consecrated his muse, which had

first led him astray, to the service of religion, his poems producing a sound effect

for good all over the South of Ireland. The entire poem was made upon the

sounds of é (æ) and o, but, while the arrangement in the first half of the verse is

o/é, é/o, o, the arrangement in the second half is o, é/o, é/o, é/é. To understand

the effect that this vowel rhyming should produce, we must remember that the

vowels are dwelt upon in Irish, and not passed over quickly as they are in

English:

The poets we praise are up-raising the notes

Of their lays, and they know how their tones will delight,

For the golden-haired lady so graceful so poseful

So Gaelic so glorious enthroned in our sight.

Unfolding a tale how the soul of a fay

Must be clothed in the frame of a lady so bright,

Untold are her graces, a rose in her face is,

And no man so staid is but faints at her sight.

Owen Roe O'Sullivan, the witty and facetious namesake of the pious Tadhg

Gaelach, is the best know of the southern poets, and Raftery, who, like his

famous Scottish contemporary Donnchadh Bán Mackintyre, was completely

illiterate, but who composed some admirable religious as well as secular pieces,

is best known in Connacht.

Irish Folk-Literature. If any country in the world has ever undergone an

educational martyrdom it is Ireland. From 1649, down almost to the present day,

her Catholic population were either denied education by law or given an education

which taught them to neglect their own country. Under the carefully devised

system of "National" education, as it was called, which came into being about

the year 1830, and which supplanted the hedge schools of the natives, the

children, who over a great part of Ireland were still Irish-speaking, were deprived of

the right of being taught to read or write the language of their homes. Over a great

part of the island, schoolmasters who knew no Irish were appointed to teach

children who knew no English. Needless to say this entailed a horrible amount of

useless suffering all round, and blasted for over two generations the life-prospects

of many hundreds of thousands of Irish children by insisting upon their growing

up unable to read or write, sooner than teach them to read or write the only

language that they knew. Up to this period, Irish MSS. which had, on the

relaxation of the penal laws, ceased to be dangerous possessions, were

commonly possessed and cherished, but from this time forward the peasantry

began to neglect them. The new generation, taught in the government schools,

conceived that Irish was the mark of the beast, and grew ashamed of it, and as a

natural consequence the manuscripts perished by the hundreds and thousands.

Admirable poets existed in Connacht and in Ulster in the middle and at the close

of the eighteenth century whose works have absolutely disappeared, except for a

very few that were enshrined in people's memories. The books that contained

them were lost, torn up or burned. It is only a few years ago that an English

gentleman stopping for the fishing at a farm-house in a midland county found a

whole washing-basket full of Irish manuscripts thrown into the river to make room

on the loft for his portmanteau. A friend saved for the present writer three

manuscripts which he had found the children tearing up on the floor in a house in

County Clare, one of which contained one of the most valuable sagas known for

elucidating the belief in metempsychosis of the ancient Irish, one for which

d'Arbois de Jubainville, who was aware of its existence, had searched the

libraries of Europe in vain.

The story continued thus until the rise of the Gaelic League and its rapid spread

during the last few years. But in spite of the enormous loss of modern MSS. the

memory of the people has preserved a very large quantity of folk-poems on all the

usual topics of folk-poetry, songs of religion, love, wine (or its Irish equivalent),

and beauty; eulogies, laments, death-songs, etc. These have only recently been

to some extent recovered. In prose also the people have a large unwritten

literature of folk-stories, the equivalent of the German Märchen, but as a rule

much longer and better told. Many of these are stories of Finn and his Fenian

warriors already mentioned, but many others are of pure Aryan origin and have

their counterparts in most Aryan literature. Of these, too, it is only recently that

collections have been made. There is one remark which must not be omitted

about this folk-poetry and indeed about Irish MS poetry as well--it possesses

scarcely anything in the nature of a ballad. Lyrics couched in the most

exquisitely artful rhyme, and delicate and bacchanalian and religious poetry of all

sorts, Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland produced in plenty. But they have

almost nothing in the nature of the splendid lowland ballads. They could not tell a

story in verse. With the exception of the Ossianic poems and a few poems of the

classic school there was never an attempt made to recount a striking tale

through the medium of verse.

Modern Irish Printed Literature. For long it was believed that the Celtic

languages were connected with the East--with the Phoenicians according to a

favourite theory--or at least that they had nothing in common with the Aryan or

Indo-European group of tongues. All the scholars of the eighteenth century and

the beginning of the nineteenth took up this attitude. Even the great German

scholar Bopp excluded Celtic from his Indo-European grammar. Lhuyd, the

Welsh antiquary, had already shown early in the eighteenth century the close

co-relationship between all the Celtic tongues, but it remained to the Bavarian

Zeuss to prove to the world beyond yea or nay in his "Grammatica Celtica"

published in 1853 that the Celtic languages were Indo-European. Since that day

Celtic scholarship, based on Zeuss's monumental work has made enormous

strides. The work of the great native Irish scholars O'Curry and O'Donovan, who

first penetrated the difficult heritage of the Brehon Laws, and who from their

marvelous and unique acquaintance with Irish manuscripts first gave the world a

general knowledge of Irish literature, was succeeded by the more strictly

scientific labours of Whitley Stokes, Father Edmund Hogan, S. J., Robert

Atkinson, and of Standish Hayes O'Grady (whose acquaintance with the modern

and ancient literature makes him the legitimate successor of O'Donovan and

O'Curry), of W. M. Hennessey and Father Bartholomew McCarthy, all in Ireland,

while Zeuss found a worthy successor in Ebel, who published a corrected and

augmented version of his "Grammatica" in 1871. In recent days Windisch,

Thurneysen, Zimmer, and Kuno Meyer have done immense work in the same

field. In France, Gaidoz founded the "Revue Celtique" in 1870, afterwards edited

by d'Arbois de Jubainville, and of which twenty-eight volumes have appeared; in

them many Irish texts have been published and much light thrown upon Celtic

subjects in general. The "Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie" made its appearance

in 1896, and was followed by the "Archiv für celtische Lexicographie".

Up to this point, and by most of those learned men, the Irish language was

regarded as a subject for pure scholarship only, and as a thing dead, having no

immediate or necessary connexion with the country or the people that had given

it birth. Their scholastic labours, however, may to some extent have paved the

way for the popular movement which succeeded. Certain it is that a great popular

movement in favour of the language and literature sprang up at the very close of

the nineteenth century in Ireland itself, under the auspices of a society called the

Gaelic League, founded upon a previous society called the Gaelic Union, which

was an offshoot from an older and still existing body, the Society for the

Propagation of the Irish Language. The Gaelic League was founded in the year

1893; the objects were: (1) The preservation of Irish as the national language in

Ireland and the extension of its use as a spoken tongue. (2) The study and

publication of existing Irish literature and the cultivation of a modern literature in

Irish.

Such was the intellectual stagnation in Ireland at the period of this foundation

that it would be safe to assert that there were not, at the time, more than a few

hundred people living, if so many, who could read or write in Irish. After many

years of silent labour and much painful uphill toil, the League has at last become

a widely spread popular movement throughout the Irish world. Hundreds of books

have been written and published under its auspices and many thousands of

people have been taught to read them. It publishes a weekly and a monthly

paper, and it has done a great deal toward collecting the rapidly-perishing folklore

of the country. The number of working affiliated branches belonging to the

League, carrying on education work from week to week, in the year 1908, was in

Munster 192, in Leinster 115, in Ulster, 113, and in Connacht 74. There were 22

branches in Scotland, 11 in England, and a few more isolated ones scattered

over England and America. The League is governed by a president, two

vice-presidents, and an annually elected executive of forty-five members, of whom

fifteen must reside in or near Dublin, the rest represent various parts of the

country and Scotland and England. These meet once a month in Dublin and

govern the League. They controlled and paid out of their own funds in 1908 seven

organizers for Conn's Half of Ireland (Connacht and Ulster), and there were

forty-two district teachers working for the League in this part of Ireland. In Mogh's

Half (Leinster and Munster) there were six organizers and eighty district

teachers. There are also six colleges connected with and practically funded by

the Gaelic League, at Ballingeary in Cork, at Partry in Mayo, at Cloghaneely in

Donegal, at Ring in Waterford, and one each in Dublin and Belfast. The country

colleges have two terms, each of which lasts about six weeks. The Dublin and

Belfast colleges are open during the winter. There were over two hundred

students at each of the Cork and Mayo colleges in 1908.

Scores of writers in Irish have arisen under the impetus of the new movement,

scarcely one of whom, it is safe to say, would ever have put pen to paper in

English. Perhaps the best-known and most idiomatic writer in Irish at the present

day in Canon Peter O'Leary, P. P., of Castlelyons in County Cork. He is a

novelist, grammarian, and writer on miscellaneous subjects. Michael Breathnach

(or Walsh), J. J. Doyle, T. Haynes, Father Dineen, M. O'Malley, P. O'Conaire,

Conan Maol (P. J. O'Shea), P. O'Shea, Agnes O'Farrelly, J. P. Craig, and

Michael MacRuaidhri (Rogers) are all story writers or novelists. D. O'Flaherty, M.

Timoney, Patrick O'Leary, M. MacRuaidhri, the Rev. Dr. Sheehan, and the

O'Malley brothers have all been rescuing Irish folk-lore both in prose and verse.

The League abounds in grammarians, a phase of its activity which recalls to us

the Greek renaissance of the sixteenth century. Fathers O'Leary, O'Reilly,

Edmund Hogan S. J., Crehan, Dr. Bergin, Dr. Henry P. McGinley, J. H. Loyd, D.

Foley, S. O'Cathain, and J. Craig have all worked on grammar as well as on other

scholastic and literary subjects; while the Rev. Dr. Henebry, Father Hayden, S.

J., Dr. Quiggin and Father Mullin have written upon Irish pronunciation and

dialects. Voluminous writers on history and other subjects are Michael

Breathnach (d. in October, 1908), Eoghan O'Neachtain, and Sean O'Kelly. Father

Dineen is a lexographer, editor of texts, and miscellaneous writer. Father John C.

McErlean, S. J., R. Foley, and Tadhg O'Donoghue are all editors of texts; the

latter is also a poet and miscellaneous writer. Canon O'Leary, Father T. O'Kelley,

T. Hayes, W. Ryan, P. O'Conaire, Dr. O'Beirne and F. Patridge have all written

plays; Father O'Kelly has written the libretto of an Irish opera which was

produced in 1909.

The Gaelic league has also published editiones principes of the poetry of Owen

Roe O'Sullivan, Seághan Clárach MacDonnell, Pierce Ferriter, Geoffrey Keating,

Geoffrey O'Donohue of the Glen, Pierce Fitzgerald, Murphy of Raithineach,

Collum Wallace, and others. The works of all these poets existed previously only

in scattered manuscripts or in the mouths of the people until the League saved

them. The Irish Texts Society, founded in London in 1898, has published ten

handsome volumes of hitherto unpublished Irish texts, including Keating's

"History" in three volumes. T. O'Concannon, M. Foley, Rev. P. O'Sullivan (a

Protestant clergyman), P. Stanton, the late Denis Fleming, and others have been

enriching Irish by translations from English and other languages. Nearly all the

Catholic and Nationalist papers publish more or less Irish in every issue, so there

is little danger of the language ceasing to be written. Of the 11,332 students who

followed the various courses under the intermediate, or secondary, school

system in 1908-09, 6085 took up Irish as one of their subjects. The language is

also taught more or less satisfactorily in 3047 primary schools out of 8538. Of

these schools, however, many belong to the more Protestant counties of the

North of Ireland, and these have as yet had little to do with the new movement.

The School of Irish Learning under Dr. Bergin, of which Kuno Meyer was the

practical founder, gives higher university teaching in comparative philology,

phonology, comparative grammar, and the reading of the old vellum MSS. Its

courses in 1908-09 were attended by over 30 students, its journal "Eriu" and its

"Anecdota Hibernica" are known to all Celtic scholars.

We may now briefly sum up what we have said about the native Gaelic literature.

The Irish probably learnt the use of letters in the second century, but did not use

the Roman alphabet until the country was converted to Christianity in the fourth

and fifth centuries. The earliest existing manuscripts do not go back earlier than

the eighth century, but the inscribed Ogham stones are centuries older than

these. The early epics and sagas contain a substantially accurate picture of

pagan times and of pagan manners and customs. The feeling of the Church was

from the first thoroughly sympathetic towards the native language and native

scholarship. The number of existing Irish manuscripts is great, but it is difficult to

say with accuracy what they contain, nor can they be certainly dated and sifted

until Celtic studies have made further progress. The introduction of Christianity

left its mark deeply upon the people and on the language. The Irish annals may

be substantially relied on from the fourth century onwards. The Irish had already

highly developed the use of rhyme as early as the seventh century, and Zeuss,

the father of Celtic learning, Constantino Nigra, and others ascribe the invention

of rhyme to the Celts, but Thurneysen and other deny that. There has been a

great loss of manuscripts in recent times, but owing to the literary revival brought

about by the Gaelic League during the last fifteen years there is small fear of any

further losses in this direction. Under the stimulus of the new literary movement,

dozens of Irish writers have sprung up, and a new literature of novels, stories,

dramas, history, and poetry has arisen. This brings the story of Irish literature to

a close. Whether the new movement will be an enduring one or not, no one can

yet tell, but in 1909 the County Councils (i.e., the elective governing bodies) of

twenty counties, including the whole of Munster and Connacht, 130 urban and

district councils out of about 170, the general council of county councils (the

largest really representative body in Ireland), the corporations of Dublin and other

cities, and the Convention of the Irish Race, held in February 1909, at which were

present between two and three thousand delegates from public bodies, branches

of the United Irish League and A. O. H., all passed resolutions asking the Senate

of the new National University of Ireland to make a knowledge of Irish an

essential for matriculation. From which it would appear that there is up to the

present no falling off of Gaelic enthusiasm, but rather a desire to rebuild the

nation, if possible, upon native lines.

ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE

When the Norman knights landed in Ireland they arrived speaking Norman

French, but they soon dropped French, and, becoming assimilated with the

natives, used Irish only as their common language. The Palesmen, however, and

the inhabitants of some of the walled cities like Kilkenny must have spoken early

English side by side with French. About the oldest book produced on Irish soil

which contains written English is a vellum MS of 64 leaves in the British Museum

marked Harl. 913, written in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, very

probably at the Grey Abbey of Kildare, which contains among other writings no

less than sixteen Old English pieces, some of which were composed in Ireland,

for one is on the death of De Birmingham, the life-long enemy of the Irish, and

another contains two Irish words, russin (Irish, ruisin, a luncheon) and corrin

(Irish, cuirín, a pot or wallet). One piece is attributed to a friar Michel Kyldare,

which would make it appear that the author is an Irishman. One or two other

vellum MSS. of the fifteen century also exist in English writing which may have

been produced in Ireland, "A Conquest of Ireland", "Secreta Accrotorum", and the

Lamboth MS. 623, a kind of sixteenth-century miscellany; but with these very

trifling exceptions, up to almost the end of the sixteenth century all literature

written in Ireland had been either in Irish or Latin. Strange as it may appear, the

Latin language, although it yielded to Irish in the eighth century as a literary

medium, was nevertheless almost universally learned in Ireland as spoke

language by anyone of any pretensions to breeding and culture. Blessed

Edmund Campion, who wrote his "History of Ireland" in 1571, writes thus of the

"Meere Irish": "Without either precepts or observation of congruity, they speake

Latin like a vulgar language learned in their common schools of Leachcraft and

law."

The earliest books of importance written in Ireland in the English language were

probably Spenser's "View of the present state of Ireland" and Hammer's

"Chronicle". In the seventeenth century, however, Ireland produced a more

vigorous literature in English, which began to be written occasionally by natives

as well as Palesmen. Stanihurst (1547-1618), although he wrote "De rebus in

Hibernia gestis" in Latin, was perhaps the first Irish-born man (he was a native of

Dublin) to attempt more ambitious things in English verse. He translated the first

four books of Virgil's Æneid into "English heroic verse" in 1583, but only aroused

the scornful derision of his English contemporaries by his effort. The seventeenth

century, however, was in Ireland an era of great men and great learning, if not

great literature. It witnesses from start to finish a war of race and of religion,

miserable and merciless, a long drawn out agony. Such eras are necessarily

fatal to literature. During this century Keating and McFirbis wrote in Irish,

O'Mulchonry in Irish and Latin and translated from the Spanish. O'Sullevan Bearr

wrote his great history of the Irish wars in Latin. Ussher, the renown scholar and

ecclesiastic, the glory of the Pale, wrote in Latin and English. Stanihurst, his

uncle, answered him in Latin; Ward, Colgan, and O'Clery wrote in Irish and Latin.

Ware wrote in Latin. So did Lynch and Luke Wadding, pride of the Franciscan

Order. Of all the great writers and scholars of the seventeenth century Keating,

McFirbis, and O'Flaherty were the only ones who remained throughout upon their

native soil. During many years the lives of most of these men would not have

been worth an hour's purchase had they been caught upon their native soil.

It is indeed only with the advent of Molyneux (b. in 1656), that we find the first

Irishman who used the English language with effect on behalf of Ireland herself.

He forms a kind of connecting link between the nationality of the Catholic and

Celtic Irish, by this time largely banished, broken, or exterminated, and those

Protestant nationalists who waxed ever stronger during the succeeding century.

A scientific and learned writer of renown, a friend of Locke, and by training and

inclination a philosopher, Molyneux was moved to write his "Case of Ireland" is

1698 by his indignation at the violent action of the English Parliament in ruining

Ireland by forcibly throttling its woolen trade to help the traders of England. His

book was by order of the British House of Commons burnt by the common

hangman. But it found a mighty echo soon after in the sæva indignatio of Swift,

and its legitimate consummation, three-quarters of a century later, in the burning

eloquence of Gratten and the humiliation of England. One brilliant Irish writer of

this century, Count Hamilton (b. at Roscrea, in 1646; d. 1720) used French for

his literary medium. His "Mémoires du Chevalier de Gramont" is a delightful

classic, which gives a brilliant description of the Court of Charles II.

A number of poets of Anglo-Irish birth, but chiefly of English upbringing, whose

names figure rather prominently in the story of English literature, are found

through this and the next century. Of these, one of the most remarkable as a

man, though hardly as a poet, was Roger Noyle, Earl of Orrery, a son of the Earl

of Cork. He was at once soldier, statesman, courtier, playwright, poet and

romancist. A bloody supporter of Cromwell, the murderer of the Bishop of Ross,

and extirpator of the native Irish, he had the wit to turn with the times, and under

Charles II to exchange the rusty broadsword of Oliver for the polished pen of the

wit and the graceful jibe of the courtier. A different character was Wentworth

Dillon, Earl of Roscommon (1633-1684), whom Pope characterized as the most

correct writer of English verse before Addison; he was almost the only moral

writer of the reign of the "merry monarch". Denham (1615-1658), "majestic

Denham" as Pope calls him, was also an Irishman, and was in a way a

forerunner both of Dryden and of Pope, and had much of the strength of the one

and of the pointed antithesis and classic polish of the other. "He is one of the

writers", says Dr. Johnson, "that improved our taste and advanced our language."

His lines on the river Thames are widely known even still, though it is safe to say

that not one in a thousand knows they were composed by an Irishman. Richard

Flecknoe (d. 1678), whom Dryden damned as being "without dispute . . . through

all the realms of nonsense absolute", was another Irishman. So were Tate and

Brady, the translators of the Psalms into a kind of doggerel verse, which, bad as

it was, held its own in Protestant worship for generations. So was Southern, the

celebrated playwright, who made seven hundred pounds by a single play, while

"glorious John" Dryden had to confess that he never made more than one

hundred. So was Farquhar (1678-1707), born in Derry, one of the most brilliant

dramatists of his age. So was the inimitable Richard Steele (1676-1729), whose

delightful essays glorified the "Spectator". So was Parnell, the poet (1679-1717).

Congreve too, the witty dramatist, though born in England, was educated in

Ireland.

Of all these men, however, and many more who might be mentioned, it may at

once be predicated that though born in Ireland they did not draw from the land of

their childhood any inspiration whatsoever. They were in Ireland but not of her;

England they looked upon as their real country; to her and her alone they

consecrated their talents. But in justice to them it must be remembered that men

who would rise by the pen or shine in literature in the English language must look

to England and to it alone, for there only was to be had a public who would

understand them. It is really with Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) that English

literature in Ireland for the first time allowed itself to be coloured, in part at least,

by the country of its birth. For although the bulk of Swift's direct, lucid, powerful,

and nervous writings belong to England, yet a considerable portion of them are a

direct outcome of his Irish life and his Irish surroundings. It is true that Molyneux

had preceded him as an exponent of that Protestant nationalism which, by

making the English in Ireland as independent as possible of the English in

England, tended also in some measure towards the uplifting of the enslaved and

disenfranchised native Irish. But Molyneux did not wield the pen of Swift. He was

a thinker, not a stylist, a philosopher rather than a writer. Swift was both. He who

in England had been beyond all comparison the most powerful political

pamphleteer of his day, the protagonist and mainstay of his party, became in

Ireland the determined support of the civil rights of his fellow countrymen and

their outspoken champion against English aggression. His services to his native

country rendered his name endeared to hundreds of thousands of native Irish

Catholics, men whom he himself looked on, and quite truly, as being powerless

in Ireland either for good or evil, merely "hewers of wood and drawers of water".

Indeed the dean was, like all other Protestant dignitaries of his day, the declared

enemy, if not of the Irish race, at least of the Irish language which was the only

one used by the great majority of the native inhabitants. At one time he thought

he had a scheme by which the Irish language "might easily be abolished and

become a dead one in half an age, with little expense and less trouble". "It would

be", he said again, "a noble achievement to abolish the Irish language in the

kingdom" but whatever his scheme was he did not further enlighten the public

upon it and it died with him. One of his own most spirited poems, "O'Rourke's

Feast", is a translation from the Irish, perhaps the first of the kind ever made in

Ireland. He heard it sung at a banquet in the County Leitrim, and was so taken

by the air that he asked for a translation, and was told that McGovern, the

author, could give it to him in either Latin or English. Several other poems of the

dean's relate to his life in Ireland and his surroundings there.

It is because a certain percentage of Swift's writings both in prose and verse are

concerned with the people and conditions of Ireland, that he may be regarded as

the father of Anglo-Irish literature, a term which can properly be applied only to

literature coloured or inspired by Ireland or Irish themes, written in the English

language but by Irish-born people. If this definition of Anglo-Irish literature be

correct, it would exclude almost all of Swift's predecessors and his successors

also, for indifference to Ireland on the part of Irish writers of English did not by

any means end with Swift. With the eighteenth century, it became increasingly

difficult to place Irish-born writers, for an ever-growing number belong, like Swift,

to both countries. It is hard to see how by any stretch of the imagination

Laurence Sterne, the author of "Tristram Shandy", though born and partly

educated in Ireland, could be called an Anglo-Irish writer. Ireland, as the Psalmist

says, was not in all his thoughts. The same is true of Sir Philip Francis, the

reputed author of "Letters of Junius". Even our beloved Goldsmith (1728-1774),

typical and altogether delightful Irishman though he was, cannot properly be

termed an Anglo-Irish poet. His "Vicar of Wakefield" struck a new note in English

literature and even profoundly affected the rising genius of Goethe, but neither it,

nor his plays, nor his poetry concerned themselves even indirectly with his native

country. What is true of Goldsmith is true to some extent even of Richard

Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), who was of pure Milesian descent, and whose

nature, like that of Goldsmith was Irish in the extreme. Bishop Berkeley

(1684-1753), on the other hand, after whom the State University of California is

named, is really an Irish writer. His wonderful "Queries" are almost as pertinent

to the case of Ireland today as they were eight score years ago. Edmund Burke

(1730-1797), the profoundest and perhaps the noblest political thinker that the

British Isles ever produced, while he was never for a moment forgetful of the

country of his birth, yet belongs for the most part, as far as his writings go, to

England and English politics.

It is apparent from what we have written that Ireland gave to England in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some of its most distinguished authors,

that these authors, though born in Ireland and born amidst Irish surroundings,

were mostly of English descent, and turned naturally for a public to the England

of their fathers, whose language they spoke and wrote. It is also evident that, as

time went on, an ever-increasing number of Irish Gaels (still unemancipated and

denied education in their own language) joined the rank of those Irish writers who

looked to an English and not an Irish public. It is only in the nineteenth century,

however, that we get a vigorous and thriving Anglo-Irish literature, inspired wholly

by Irish themes and written mainly for the Irish people themselves. The foremost

of these new Anglo-Irish writers were, in prose, Miss Edgeworth, and in poetry,

Thomas Moore.

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), the creator of the Anglo-Irish novel, was the scion

of a good family. some of whose members belonged to the Catholic and some to

the Protestant religion. She herself belonged to the latter, but it was a relative of

hers (see EDGEWORTH, HENRY ESSEX) who attended the unfortunate Louis

XVI to the scaffold. She was gifted with a mind as singularly open and

unprejudiced as it was acute and observant. To this she united an admirable

style, clear and pungent, and a dramatic power of presentment which rarely failed

her. She never looked upon herself as a writer with a mission, but undoubtedly

she was not without a certain didactic sense which impelled her to point out to

Irishmen in her novels, some of the absurdities and faults of which they were

guilty. Her "Castle Rackrent", the story of the downfall through its own reckless

squandering of a great Irish family, as told through the mouth of an ancient

servitor of their house, is a tale of very great power. In her novel the "Absentee"

she attacks, and with equal force though in a different vein, another side of the

same social evil who effects she had portrayed so powerfully in "Castle

Rackrent". Following Macklin (really McLaughlin) in his play of "The True-Born

Irishman" produced in 1763, she holds up to merciless ridicule the Irish

land-owners who deserted their own estates to try to cut a figure in London, and

there compete with men who were at once much wealthier than themselves and

also, so to speak, born and bred to the life of the English metropolis. Her "Moral

Tales" are frequently reprinted even to this day. Miss Edgeworth cannot in any

political sense be called a nationalist writer. The cry "Ireland a Nation" never

appealed to her, nor does the struggle of the native Irish against the English

garrison, nor the doings of the men of '98, nor the feelings of the natives against

the settlers. With her began the Irish novel, but not the Irish political novel. Her

contemporary Lady Morgan (1783-1859) wrote Irish novels also, but no one ever

reads them now, while Miss Edgeworth's popularity is perennial.

Of a different temperament was Thomas Moore (1779-1852), the first great

Anglo-Irish poet. It is true that he had some few predecessors, among whom

were Ned Lysaght, the poet of Gratten and the Volunteers, and William Drennan,

the poet of the United Irishmen, but he owed nothing to any of them. A Catholic

and in his youthful days a sympathizer with the men of the '98 rebellion, and with

Irish national aspirations, his muse spread the name and fame of his native land

throughout thousands upon thousands of those gilded drawing-rooms, where,

before that, Irish aspirations or even the very name of Erin would have been met

only by a scoff or perhaps some still more emphatic disapproval. While rescuing

the admirable ancient muse of Ireland from oblivion he wedded it to the most

melodious songs that the English language had yet produced, and he never

shrank from insisting upon the national character both of his music and of his

verses, nor hesitated to depict the sad and oppressed state of his mother

country. Who can say what considerable if indirect influences Moore's verses

may have exercised on the hearts of men, when it came, as it soon after did, to

dealing with the gravest Irish problems in the House of Commons, including the

emancipation of the Catholics. Just as Sir Walter Scott's novels effected a

profound change in the outlook of England upon Scotland, and of the Lowlanders

upon the Highlanders, so Moore's "melodies" must have made hundreds of

thousands of Englishmen and loyalists for the first time familiar with the wrongs,

the aspirations, and the inner soul of Ireland. Not that Moore was in any sense a

poet of the people; he was a poet rather of the cultured classes and of the

drawing-room, and thus the very antithesis of Burns. It is safe to say that the

Irish peasantry themselves never grasped his memories as a popular possession

or sang them commonly at their firesides. But with the cultured classes his

vogue was enormous. Probably no poet ever lived whose lines penetrated into so

many drawing-rooms alien in sympathy to himself and his ideals.

It has been of late years the custom on many sides to decry Moore. It is,

however, hard to subscribe to almost any of the complaints. It is true that

divorced to a certain extent from the life of the native Gael, and being ignorant of

the national language, he takes war tunes and welds them to love-songs and

takes love-songs and makes slogans of them. This is a real fault of commission;

with regard to other criticisms it is not always fair to judge a poet for faults of

omission, or in other words fro not being what nature did not make him. Above all

it is hard to accuse of time-serving or of pusillanimity a poet who could imperil his

popularity in England by such a vigorous melody as that in which he compares

the oppression of Ireland to the captivity of the Jews and prophecies the

destruction of her tyrant. A great deal of Moore's success as a poet is due to the

national music of Ireland to which his songs are wed, and lyrics such as

"Avenging and Bright", "The Minstrel Boy", "Let Erin Remember", "When he who

adores the", and "She is far from the land" have become almost embedded in the

life of Ireland and part and parcel of the national mind.

Moore died in 1852, but long before his death there had sprung into being a

distinctly Irish literature, inspired by Irish feelings and ideals, and looking not to

an English but an Irish public. The poets Callahan and Walsh were its

precursors. The foundation by Davis, Dillon, and Duffy of the weekly paper "The

Nation" in 1842 produced a profound effect all over Ireland, but the Young Ireland

writers who then arose never attempted to reach the people through any other

medium than English, although at this time Irish was still the familiar speech of

about four millions. Of the poets of the Young Ireland movement two stand out

pre-eminently, Thomas Davis (d. 1845) and Clarence Mangen (d. 1849). Davis

sang, not so much because he was born with the divine afflatus, as because he

deliberately set himself to act upon the soul of the people, through the medium of

poetry. In this he succeeded, for his vigorous political verse, ballads and other

national and patriotic songs, thrown off in haste and not always polished, though

generally powerful, exercised a profound effect upon Ireland. Mangen on the other

hand, though a Young Irelander by conviction, shrank from the glare and blare of

political movements, led a lonely life, consumed by the fires of his own thoughts.

Though the effect of his poems upon the people was far less than that of Davis,

he, when at his best, as in his "Dark Rosaleen", attained to heights which would

have been impossible to the other. By far the greatest prose writer of the Young

Ireland movement was that ardent rebel against English rule, John Mitchel

(1815-1872), of whom it is safe to say, that no man born in Ireland, Swift alone

excepted, ever made such powerful use of the English tongue as a medium of

thought, instruction, and invective. His powers of sardonic scorn and indignation

are very Swiftian, and his "Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps)" is one of the most

scathing political works ever written, while his "Jail Journal" gives a good idea of

the man himself.

At this time also appeared a group of novelists whose works have never ceased

to be popular for nearly two generations. Of these the most remarkable was

Carleton (1794-1859), who understood the peasantry and depicted their feelings

in a way that no one else has ever done. In books like "Fardoroughs the Miser",

the "Black Prophet", and "Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry", he portrays

not so much the life as the passions of the people with vividness and power.

Samuel Lover (1797-1868), on the other hand, and John Banim (1798-1844), were

the novelists of the bourgeoise class, and Charles Lever (1797-1868) and perhaps

W. H. Maxwell, of the rocking, sporting, jovial gentry, whose day of doom was

even then approaching, though they knew it not. The gentle and retiring Gerald

Griffin, a poet also, gave Ireland at least one novel of supreme excellence in the

"Colleen Bawn", and Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) left behind him some very

weird stories, the excellent ballad "Shamus O'Brien", and a capital novel of

eighteenth century life in Ireland, "The House by the Churchyard". On the whole it

may be said of the Young Ireland movement that it, more than any other

movement before or after it, worked by and through letters; but strong political

passions do not make for a true and abiding literature; and the vigorous ballads

and political verses of Davis, Gavan Duffy (q. v.), and D'Arcy McGee and their

group seem to us to-day to contain but little originality. After the great famine,

and the dispersion of the Young Irish group, Ireland lay exhausted and listless

until the Fenian m