far this humidity and severity of climate contributed to the convivial disposition of the people, and to their love of excitement, it were difficult to determine: but, that they were the most hospitable and the most irritable, the most loving and the most quarrelsome, of any nation on the earth, is a deplorable truth. It was this intemperance of temperament that rendered every feast the precursor of a feud, and multiplied the causes of domestic dissension, and prepared the way for foreign aggression: and the physical peculiarity forms the best excuse for "Erin's days of old, when her faithless sons betrayed her;" when every invasion was successful, because every invader found an ally or an enemy, as private pique and personal interest determined. The chiefs of clans, whether under the name of Kings, Princes, or Tanists, lent themselves alternately to Danes or Saxons, as a prey of cattle, or a prey of wives disposed them to seek revenge for personal wrong at the expense of their common country; and thus, says Lanigan, "while the infatuated Irish were fighting among themselves, the common enemy was making his way towards undermining them." The abduction of Dervogal, wife of O'Ruara, prince or tiernach of Brefny, by M Murrogh, king of Leinster, and the application of the latter to Henry the Second, was the most important and fatal result of the native temperament. For this physical evil the Church had no religious remedy. It, however, discovered a temporal compensation; for M'Murrogh founded churches and endowed monasteries, for the remission of crimes, which the nation has never forgiven.

The pride of nations, like that of individuals, shrinks from the display of infirmities so purely physical; and communities, like invalids, revolt against even a cure which involves the too open display of the original malady. It is however by staring such facts as these in the face, that the remedy for long-existing evils can best be found. Knowledge on all points is the necessary forerunner of amendments; and though oceans cannot be drained, nor mountains moved, yet there is no natural combination over which science and civilization may not attain a mastery. The time is now arrived when Ireland should no longer be addressed in the language of faction, or of fable. It is now treason to flatter, and it will not long be possible to deceive her. Malachi "with his collar of gold " is going fast out of date: "Con of the hundred fights" is but a type of the modern Cons of Donnybrook and Ballinasloe; and, to a certain extent, even St. Patrick's " occupation is gone," or if still evoked to administer the spirit to his votarists, it is under other signs than those appropriated to the church, and which, as signs of the times, are not wholly unworthy of observation.1 That a time should have existed -recently existed, when to cull up such images from the vasty deep of doubtful story was not only patriotism, but sound policy, is as true as it is lamentable. For rhyme and reason, fact and fable, poetry and prose, were alike legitimate instruments to urge on the consummation of that event, without which no permanent good for Ireland could ever have been effected. That genius and inferior ta

Lord Anglesey and O'Connell shaking hands under the benedictory patronage of the Saint, is a conspicuous invitation to Sweetman's beer and Parliament whiskey in the vicinity of Dublin.

lent should have equally availed themselves of so rude and fanciful an agency, to revive the spirit, awaken the imagination, and cheer the enterprize of a gallant nation, was at once natural and laudable; but it is a proud and delightful conviction that other and wider spheres are opening to the native intellect of the country-that Erin's last and most inspired bard may, as far as her " days of old" are concerned, hang up his harp on the laurel, whose crowning wreath he has well won; and when again he strings it in his country's cause, he may find a fitting theme in the prospective ameliorations of her days to come: even the wildest of her novelists may now close her volumes of idle Shanaos, and seek in fact for better sources of national pride than she ever found in fiction. The actual condition of Ireland, no less than the progress of events and opinions in the rest of Europe, has decreed its eternal divorce from the past. It is no longer to restoration, but to reformation, that Irishmen must look; and the only useful lesson that can be read to them from the history of the "buried majesty" of their two thousand kings is, that while Irish valour preserved the nation from having been ever conquered, the Irish sin of personal pretension and misplaced jealousy has preserved it ever divided, feeble, and miserable.

But without further preface, passons au deluge. In the earliest known epoch of Ireland, when druidism was the religion of the land, the memory of the intellectual class was taxed, it is said, to collect and transmit such public facts as the then existing state of society (of which so little is known) originated. Their bards," an inferior order of druids," says a learned and grave English historian, "were as well their philosophers and poets, as their historians; and, from the beginning of the Milesian monarchy, the public traditions were handed down in their sonnets "1-a compendious mode of writing history, now unfortunately obsolete. The early Irish, like the other Celtic nations, had no records but such as were embalmed in verse; for nations, like life, begin with poetry and end with prose. Literary Greece started with Hesiod and Homer; and the Iliad was recited a century before the works of Pherecydes, the first Greek prose writer, were composed or known. The rhyming records of the bardic historians were delivered in a branch of the Celtic, at that time the language of northern Europe," and which at this day," says a modern Irish antiquary, is a living language in Ireland." Although with the destruction of druidism the bards fell, to rise no more, yet the spirit of their order, and their hereditary profession of genius, was continued in the persons of the Filias and Seanachies, or genealogists, of succeeding ages-the historiographers of the pentarchy and their tributary princes; for at feast or feud, in Fes or field, the Tanaist and his Seanachy were ever inseparable. In the sixth century, long after Christianity had diffused its light over the pagan altars of Ireland, Dirmod, the supreme monarch and king of kings, had a druid or pagan bard in his train. "Paganism," says a scepti

1 Warner, History of Ireland.

2 O'Connor, Dissertation on the Ancient History of Ireland. See Lluid's Preface to the Irish Vocabulary, and Dr. Raymond's Introduction to the History of Ireland.

cal writer,1 "was still found loitering in the land, and sometimes maintaining its ascendancy in the highest stations." A more orthodox historian is, however, shocked at the slur thus thrown on Irish kings and Irish Seanachies, and observes that "Dirmod, monarch of Ireland, who was killed in 560, had, I know, his bards or poets, according to the custom of Irish princes; but those bards were Christians." 2 Nearly contemporary with the pagan, or Christian, bard of king Dirmod, flourished his much more celebrated compatriot-Oisin, or Ossian, whose birth, parentage, and education, have been the source of so much quarrelsome polemics down to the end of the last century. The name of Oisin belongs to the pagan history of Ireland, notwithstanding his supposed controversy with St. Patrick. That name has been very generally borrowed to give illustration to the effusions of much more modern poets, whose works are as completely lost to posterity as those of their great prototype. Whatever is original in the English translations, once so noted and now so little noticed, must belong to a still more recent time. It has always been the fault of Irish antiquaries to make the antiquity of the country too antiquated. Even the English Spenser falls into this error, (so natural for a poet to adopt,) when he talks of "divers compositions of their bards, which he caused to be translated to him, which savoured of sweet wit and good invention, and were sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their natural devices." He mistakes the written collections of the Filias or Seanachies of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, for the inspirations of bards of far remoter times. The most learned writers on Irish literature, Colgan, Usher, Ware, Harris, &c. have not, I believe, been able to trace any writer before Sedulius, a Christian priest of the fifth century, or more probably the eighth, of whom Lanigan says that some of the most beautiful hymns that are read in the church have been taken from his poems. This is all that is known of them. Whether Sedulius was a SpaDiard, an Italian, or an Irish priest, is not clearly proved. There was a Sedulius, abbot of Kildare in 828, who was probably the Irish poet alluded to; for it is only in the ninth century that something like historical fact begins to dawn on modern inquiry. In the tenth century, the bard of the gallant Brien Boroimhe fought, it is said, and sung by his side, in the plains of Clontarf, against the Danes. The crown of the king, and the harp of his Filia, were found near each other on the field of battle. But, besides the bard of the heroic Brien, he is said to have had an antiquary, or Seanachy, of great eminence, called "one Mac-Lian, antiquary of Ireland;" his works however have not reached posterity. Mac-Lian is also said to have written "the Munster Book of Battles," in which the battle of Clontarf was authentically related. In the same century," called," says Ware," the dark, or unhappy age, from

3

1 Campbell's Strictures on the Ecclesiastical History of Ireland.

2 Warner.

3 Colgan says, that the Latinized name of Sedulius was the Irish Seidhuil, or Shiel, and that there were eight eminent men of that name in Irish history. I leave it to Sir W. Beetham to trace the last and best of that illustrated appellation to that goodly stock.

the scarcity of writers, flourished the royal author Cormac Mac Culinan, king and bishop of Cashel, who fell in battle anno 908. He writ an history, called the Psalter of Cashel." A copy of a part of this Psalter, in an old parchment manuscript, it is said was seen a century back in the Bodleian Library at Oxford; but the on-dits of tradition do but interrupt the march of authenticated facts. Though these family genealogists, or poets-laureate of the Irish dynasts, rhymed and recited the feats of their patrons, and the glory and antiquity of their ancestors, yet they do not come forth as historians. The written civil history of Ireland must, therefore, be sought among her churchmen, said to have been the most learned of the then Christian world. The introduction of Christianity could not fail to have a singular and improving influence upon the literature of the natives, if any literature existed at the time; for, with all due deference to Phoenicia and to Cadmus, it is proved that the use of letters in Ireland was due to the Christian missionaries. It is quite certain that the names of all literary arts and instruments in the Irish language, are of Latin origin-to "read," to "write," "book," &c.; and St. Patrick is said to have introduced the Roman characters, for that the Irish, before their conversion, were utterly unacquainted with them: and the bishops considered the acquirement of this knowledge essential in their converts, to render them capable of reading the Scriptures and other books. If, however, the Seanachies were in possession of a means of rescuing their records from the fragility of oral tradition, it does not appear that they availed themselves of it; and, to judge of their literary poverty by that of the ecclesiastical writers of the times, previous to the English invasion, they must have been very barbarous indeed.

The church, it must be owned, had a bad time of it in the Island of Saints. Down to the twelfth century she had not one stone-edifice, save those "puzzles of posterity"-the round towers, under whose protection she raised her rude cells and humble temples of wood and wattles. Those eternal forests, which anciently gave the name of "the woody island" to the country, (for it appears that as long as the island was in the possession of the natives, it was "full of woods on every side,") presented as great an obstacle to Irish saints as to English invaders. The lives of the first missionaries must have been no less arduous and perilous than those of the early settlers and back-woodsmen of America. Obliged to clear the land, to become hewers of wood and drawers of water, in order to obtain shelter and safety in a land which, according to the old Irish saying, was thrice under wood, thrice under the plough, and thrice was bare," they had also to submit to the violence and despotism of the most unruly sons of the church that her power had ever to contend against. Whatever tenures they obtained from the toparchs, that were not foundations, were of a military nature; and monks and priests, headed by abbots and bishops, fought through every epoch of Irish story, until long after the period of the English invasion. No rank, or station, in the church saved the servants of God from

3

Boate, Warner.

2 Attributed by modern sceptics to the Danes.

3 Lanigan's Ecclesiastical History.

serving in the army; and, as almost all the Irish kings who died a natural death, died under the cowl, so not a few Irish priests perished in military harness. Dr. Lanigan, who laments that the practice "so fatal to ecclesiastical discipline, of compelling bishops and abbots to attend kings in their military expeditions," should have prevailed, relates that, in the eighth century, king Aidus having a quarrel with the people of Leinster, raised an army in which the clergy were pressed to an almost universal amount, not even excepting the archbishop of Armagh, or Fothadius, (a most learned and holy lecturer and writer, called "Fothadius of the Canons," from his knowledge of the branches of ecclesiastical science.) After a long march to the borders of Leinster, the clergy showed signs of insubordination, and, probably ashamed of their lay brothers in arms, vowed they would not "march through Coventry with them, that was flat." The spokesman was Fothadius of the Canons; and the army of saints was forthwith disbanded, and returned home to the bosoms of their families.1

But the Irish Church had not only to contend with domestic evils, inimical to literary labour; the piratical invasions along the several coasts were attended with the plunder of her shrines aud altars, and also with the abduction of her sons and daughters from their cells and monasteries; for it is certain that a traffic in human beings was carried on to a most deplorable extent throughout the whole British isles, Ireland not excepted.

In the eighth century, a king of Northumberland landed between Drogheda and Dublin, destroyed all the churches and monasteries he found in his way, and carried off their inhabitants "as captives or slaves." The monastery of Bangor, the most powerful and wealthy of that epoch, was also plundered of its rich shrine of St. Comgall, and the abbot and all the monks murdered. From all this it may be concluded that, at the time of the Danish invasion, the state of written history, civil and ecclesiastical, must have been at a very low ebb; and the literary plunder, laid to the account of the barbarous but cognoscente invaders, seems to have existed only in the imagination of antiquaries; by whom it has been said that the plunder of the monastic libraries of Ireland furnished every library in Europe, from the Vatican to Copenhagen, with valuable Mss.

Up to the twelfth century the Irish bishops married, and the see of Armagh was long hereditary in a native family. Dr. Lanigan, in a great passion, says of the archbishop Donald, "that he succeeded to his brother in virtue of the pretended abominable right of hereditary succession;" for, he adds, "he was one of those lay pseudo-archbishops, who were a disgrace to Armagh, and to the whole Irish

church.".

2 Of this custom there are many records: one of the most curious is to be found in the old Irish Ms. called "Leabher na Gaert," translated by General Vallancey. It enumerates slaves among other subsidies given in lieu of services due to the supreme kings from their lieges. Thus, "to O'Fogarty king of Eile (a little kingdom in the county of Tipperary, north of Cashel, called Eile na Fhogartie'), six men-slaves, six women-slaves, six shields and swords, according to the prose ; eight coats-of-mail, eight horses, and eight cups." In times past," says Archbishop Usher, "the buying and selling of servants (which now is grown out of use) was a matter so common in this country, that, in an ancient synod in Ireland, a bishop's legacy out of the Church-goods is proportioned by the price of a wife or a maid-servant, as may be seen in the ancient books of canons written about 700 years since; the one remaining in Bene't College, and the other in Sir R. Cotton's library."--Usher of Corbes, &c. &c.

3 Dr. Warner was induced, by this reiterated assertion, to apply to the English