Chapter XLIV

THE HISTORY OF IRISH AS A SPOKEN LANGUAGE

We must now follow the fortunes of the Irish language as a spoken tongue, "questo linguaggio difficile e davvero stupendo," as Ascoli calls it,[1] which after imposing itself upon both Dane and Norman, was brought face to face as early as the fourteenth century with its great competitor English, before which, despite its early victory in the contest, it has at last nearly but not quite gone down, after an unremitting struggle of nearly five centuries.

As early as the year 1360, the English appear to have taken the alarm at the inroads which the Irish language—at that time a much more highly-cultured form of speech than their own—had made upon the colonists, and we find King Edward issuing orders to the Sheriff of the Cross and Seneschal of the Liberty of Kilkenny in these terms[2]—

"As many of the English nation in the Marches and elsewhere have again become like Irishmen, and refuse to obey our laws and customs, and hold parliaments after the Irish fashion, and learn to speak the Irish tongue, and send their children among the Irish to be nursed and taught the Irish tongue, so that the people of English race have for the greater part become Irish; now we order (1) that no Englishman of any state or condition shall ... [under forfeiture of life, limbs, and everything else] follow these Irish customs, laws, and parliaments; (2) that any one of English race shall forfeit English liberty, if after the next feast of St. John the Baptist he shall speak Irish with other Englishmen and meantime every Englishman must learn English and must not have his children at nurse amongst the Irish."

In 1367, the last year of the administration of the Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, a parliament held at Kilkenny passed the famous act that inter-marriage with the Irish should be punished as high treason, and that any man of English race using the Irish language should forfeit all his land and tenements to the Crown, and forbidding also the entertainment of bards, ministrels, and rhymers.

These first attacks upon the language cannot possibly have produced much effect, for we find the English power within a hundred years after their passing, reduced to the lowest point, and there was scarcely an English or Norman noble in Ireland who had not adopted an Irish name, Irish speech, and Irish manners. The De Bourgo had became Mac William, and minor branches of the same stem had become Mac Philpins, Mac Gibbons, and Mac Raymonds; the Birminghams had became Mac Feóiris, the Stauntons Mac Aveeleys, the Nangles Mac Costellos, the Prendergasts Mac Maurices, the De Courcys Mac Patricks, the Bissetts of Antrim Mac Keons, etc.

A hundred years after the Statute of Kilkenny, the English, driven back into the Pale, which then consisted of less than four counties, passed a law in 1465, enjoining all men of Irish names within the Pale to take an English name, "of one towne as Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skryne, Corke, Kinsale; or colour as White, Black, Brown; or art or science as Cooke, Butler," and he and his issue were ordered to use these names or forfeit all their goods. This, however, the parliament was unable to carry through, none of the great Irish names within or alongside the Pale, Mac Murroughs, O'Tooles, O'Byrnes, O'Mores, O'Ryans, O'Conor Falys, O'Kellys, etc., seem to have been in the least influenced by it.

Next an attempt was made to maintain English in at least the seaports and borough towns, for we find an enactment of the year 1492-93 amongst the Archives of the Urbs Intacta, commanding that in Waterford, "no manner of man, freeman or foreign, of the city or suburb's dwellers, shall emplead nor defend in Irish tongue against any man in the court, but all they that any matters shall have in court to be administered, shall have a man that can speak English to declare his matter, except one party be of the country [i.e., of Irish race] then every such dweller shall be at liberty to speak Irish."[3] Galway followed suit in 1520, and enacted that "no Irish judge or lawyer shall plead in no man's cause nor matter within this our court, for it agreeth not with the king's laws."[4]

How far these petty attempts were successful may be judged from the fact that Captain Ap Harry, a Welsh officer, describing in October, 1535, Lord Butler's march for the recovery of Dungarvan Castle, says, "We were met by his lordship's brother-in-law, Gerald Mac Shane, (Fitzgerald) Lord of the Decies, who, though a very strong man in his country, could speak never a word of English, but made the troops good cheer after the gentilest fashion that could be. All this journey from Dungarvan forth there is none alive that can remember that English man of war was ever in these parts." Still more striking is the statement that in the Dublin parliament of 1541, all the peers except Mac Gillapatric were of Norman or English descent, and yet not one except the Earl of Ormond could understand English.[5] A letter to the English Privy Council, written in 1569, by Dominicke Linche, of Galway, confirms this. "Even they of the best houses," he writes, "the brothers of the Erle of Clanrickarde, yea and one of his uncles, and he a bysshop, can neither speak nor understand in manner any thinge of their Prince's language, which language by the old Statutes of Galway, every man ought to learn and must speak before he can be admitted to any office within the Corporation."[6]

Nor had the extirpating policy succeeded even in the Pale, for we read in the State Papers that in the county of Kildare in 1534, "there is not one husbandman in effect that speaketh English nor useth any English sort nor manner, and their gentlemen be after the same sort."[7]

The great Earl of Kildare had nearly as many volumes of Irish as he had of English in his library. A catalogue of his books was drawn up in 1518. Amongst the Irish manuscripts were St. Berachán's book,[8] the Speech of Oyncheaghis (?) Cuchuland's Acts, the History of Clone Lyre, etc. Murchadh O'Brien, king of Thomond, promised Henry VIII. as early as 1547, when in London, that he and his heirs should use the English habit and manner, and to their knowledge the English language, and to their power bring up their children in the same.[9] And indeed that family seems to have been always the greatest prop of the English power in the South of Ireland. Thomas Moore, settling in Ireland in 1575, got his lands in King's County on the condition that his sons and servants "should use for the most the English tongue, habit, and government," and make no appeals to the Brehon law. Three years after this, in 1578, we find Lord Chancellor Gerard affirming that all the English, and the most part with delight, even in Dublin speak Irish, and greatly are spotted in manners, habit, and conditions with Irish stains.[10]

In the Vatican Library my friend Father Hogan found a MS. of about the year 1580 with a memorandum concerning certain Franciscan friars, three of whom spoke Irish only, including the Provincial who preached all over Ireland, five more knew Irish better than English, while five are entered as knowing English better than Irish, none are entered as knowing English only.

In 1585 the Irish chieftains of Hy Many, the O'Kellys country, agreed that "Teige mac William O'Kelly and Conor Oge O'Kelly shall henceforth behave themselves like good subjects and shall bring up their children after the English fashions and in the use of the English tongue."[11] Of course such enforced promises had no effect. We find in the State Papers that at St. Douay in 1600 were sixty young gentlemen, eldest sons of the principal gentlemen of the Pale, and that they all spoke Irish.[12]

In 1608 it was found that the superior of the Irish Jesuits, apparently a Pales-man, Father Christopher Holywood of Artane, near Dublin, could speak no Irish, and a document was sent at once to the General of the Jesuits, pointing out how this destroyed his usefulness in the Irish mission. Care was taken that the same mistake should not be made in appointing his successor, Robert Nugent.[13]

In 1609 we find Richard Conway, a Jesuit, writing that the English in Ireland took care that all [their own] children are taught English and chastise them if they speak their own native tongue[14] (sic). Five or six years later Father Stephen White writes, "Scarcely one in a thousand of the old Irish know even three words of any tongue except Irish, the modern Irish learn to speak Irish and English."[15]

Nevertheless the cause of the English language cannot have much progressed during the next fifty years, for we find in 1657 a petition presented to the Municipal Council of Dublin to the effect that "whereas by the laws all persons ought to speak and use the English tongue and habit,—contrary whereunto and in open contempt thereof, there is Irish commonly and usually spoken and the Irish habit worn not only in the streets and by such as live in the country and come to this city on market days, but also by and in several families in this city, to the scandalising of the inhabitants and magistrates of this city. And whereas there is much of swearing and cursing used and practised (as in the English tongue too much, so also in the Irish tongue)," etc. Irish, indeed, seems to have been the commonest language in Dublin at this time. James Howel in a letter written August 9, in 1630, says:

"Some curious in the comparisons of tongues, say Irish is a dialect of the ancient British, and the learnedest of that nation in a private discourse I happened to have with him seemed to incline to this opinion, but I can assure your Lordship I found a great multitude of their radical words the same with the Welsh, both for sense and sound. The tone also of both nations is consonant, for when I first walked up and down the Dublin markets methought I was in Wales when I listened to their speech. I found the Irish tone a little more querulous and whining than the British, which I conjecture proceeded from their often being subjugated by the English."

During the Cromwellian wars most of the members of the Confederation of Kilkenny who took the side of the Nuncio Rinuccini knew little if anything of the English language, "qui," says Rinuccini in his MSS., "boni publici zelo flagrarent, plerique linguam quidem Ibernicam quia vernaculam, bene, sed Anglicam male vel nullo modo callerent." When an order was issued by the Supreme Council for the new oath of association to be translated from English into Irish by each bishop for his diocese, it was found upon inquiry that some of the bishops did not understand a word of English. The Nuncio appears to have been very much impressed by the sweetness of the Irish language, but he had not leisure to devote himself to the study of it. Some of the Italian members of his household, however, became complete masters of it. Numbers of the poor people who had been plundered by the soldiery came to complain to him of their losses, and he notes in his diary that their wail and lamentation in Irish was far more plaintive and expressive than any music of the great masters which he had ever heard among the more favoured nations of the Continent.[16]

Irish was at this time the usual "vehicle of business and of negociation with the natives, even amongst the learned," as we see in Carte's life of the Duke of Ormond, who was born in England in 1607 and educated as a Protestant by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"The Duke," says Carte, "when about twenty or twenty-four years of age learned the Irish language by conversing with such Irish gentlemen as spoke it in London; he understood it perfectly well and could express himself well enough in familiar conversation, but considered himself not so well qualified as to discourse about serious matters; he afterwards on many occasions found himself at a great loss, as he had to negociate business of national importance with gentlemen who were far less intelligent in the English language than he was in the Irish. On such occasions he would use the same methods which he took with the titular bishop of Clogher, the great favourite of Owen O'Neil, and successor to that general in the command of the Ulster forces. This bishop he brought over to the king's interest, and gained his entire confidence by a conversation carried on between both parties in private. The Duke always spoke in English and the bishop in Irish, as neither understood the language of the other so as to venture upon communicating his sentiments in it with any degree of accuracy or precision."[17]

The Irish themselves never neglected literature, and whenever their political star was in the ascendant the fortunes of their bards and learned men rose with it. Thus we find Rory O'More, the close friend of Owen Roe O'Neill, and the chief of the O'Mores of Leix, engaged in 1642 in an attempt to re-establish Irish schools and learning, and writing on the 20th of September, 1642, to Father Hugh de Bourgo at Brussels, "If we may, before Flan Mac Egan dies, we will see an Irish school opened, and therefore would wish heartily that these learned and religious fathers in Louvain would come over in haste with their monuments (?) and an Irish and Latin press." The Mac Egan here alluded to was the eminent Brehon and Irish antiquarian who lived at Bally-mac-Egan in the county Tipperary in Lower Ormond, whose imprimatur was considered so valuable that the Four Masters procured for their work his written approbation.[18] Seven years after this letter, the town of Wexford, from which O'More wrote in the interests of humanity and learning, sank in fire and ruin and its inhabitants both men and women were put to the sword in one universal massacre.

There were in the year 1650, forty-seven Jesuit priests in Ireland, according to a memorandum given me by Father Hogan, S.J., of these two—one from Meath the other from Kerry—spoke Irish only: and four from Dublin, all of course of English extraction, spoke English only, while the remaining forty-one spoke both languages. Seven of these bi-linguists were from Dublin and ten from Meath.

These instances show that Irish was the usual spoken language of the country, even in Dublin, but there are indications that the ardour with which it had been cultivated and the respect with which its professors had been regarded was dying out. Even as early as 1627 we find one Connla Mac Echagan of West Meath, translating the "Annals of Clonmacnois" into English,[19] and in his dedication to his friend and kinsman Torlogh Mac Cochlan, lord of Delvin, he says that formerly many septs lived in Ireland whose profession it was to chronicle and keep in memory the state of the kingdom, but, he adds, "now as they cannot enjoy that respect and gain by their profession, as heretofore they and their ancestors received, they set nought by the said knowledge, neglect their books, and choose rather to put their children to learn English than their own native language, insomuch that some of them suffer tailors to cut the leaves of the said books (which their ancestors held in great account) and sew them in long pieces to make their measures of, [so] that the posterities are like to fall into more ignorance of many things which happened before their time."

A little later, in 1639, Father Stapleton, in his "Doctrina Christiana," published in Irish and Latin—the first Irish book ever printed in Roman characters—throws the blame for the neglect of Irish literature first upon the Irish antiquarians "who have placed it under difficulties and hard words,[20] writing it in mysterious ways, and in dark difficult language," and secondly upon the upper classes "who bring their native natural language (which is powerful, perfect, honourable, learned, and sharply-exact in itself) into contempt and disrespect, and spend their time cultivating and learning other foreign tongues."[21]

Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh, in his book printed at Louvain in 1632, says that Irish is the language of the whole of Hibernia, but there were some differences of pronunciation in the various provinces, and between the learned and the common people, the universal opinion being that the people of Connacht spoke it best, they having both power of expression and propriety of phrase, while the men of Munster had the power of expression without the propriety, and the people of Ulster the propriety without the power of expression. The people of Leinster were considered deficient in both.[22]

O'Molloy in his "Lochrann na gCreidmheach," published in 1675, says that "no language is well understood by the common people of the island except Irish alone."[23] The students of the Irish College at Rome were at this time bound by rule to speak Irish, and an Irish book was to be read in the refectory during dinner and supper,[24] and all candidates for the priesthood were directed by the Synod of Tuam, in 1660, to learn to read and write Irish well.

Sir William Petty, writing in 1672, has an interesting passage on the people of Wexford and of Fingal: "The language of Ireland is like that of the North of Scotland, in many things like the Welsh and Manques, but in Ireland the Fingallians" [the dwellers along the coast some miles north of Dublin] "speak neither English, Irish, nor Welsh, and the people about Wexford, though they speak in a language differing from English, Welsh, and Irish, yet it is not the same with that of the Fingallians near Dublin. Both these sorts of people are honest and laborious members of the kingdom." Petty's strictures upon the Irish language, of which he was utterly ignorant, and which he ludicrously asserts "to have few words," need not here be noticed. He appears to show, however, that the Irish had already begun to borrow some words from English, and expressed many of the "names of artificial things" in "the language of their conquerors by altering the termination and language only."

It need hardly be said that once the English Government got the upper hand in the seventeenth century, and placed bishops and clergy of its own in the sees and dioceses throughout Ireland, they made it a kind of understood bargain with their nominees that they should have no dealings and make no terms with the national Irish language. Bedell, who was an Englishman and had been created an Irish bishop, neglected this unwritten compact far enough to learn Irish himself and to translate, with the help of a couple of Irishmen, the Bible into Irish, and he also circulated a catechism in English and Irish amongst the natives. He reaped his reward in the undying gratitude of the Irish and the equally bitter animosity of his own colleagues. Ussher, then primate, in answer to a pathetic letter of Bedell's asking what were the charges against him, said in his reply, "the course which you took with the Papists was generally cried out against, neither do I remember in all my life that anything was done here by any of us, at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense, or by which the adversaries were more confirmed in their superstitions and idolatry, whereas I wish you had advised with your brethren before you would aventure to pull down that which they have been so long a building,"[25] meaning the discrediting and destruction of the Irish language. The Irish, however, did not forget the efforts Bedell had made in behalf of their tongue, for, having taken him prisoner in the war of 1648, they treated him with every courtesy in their power, and when he died their troops fired a volley over his grave, crying out, Requiescat ultimus Anglorum, while a priest who was present was heard to exclaim with fervour, "Sit anima mea cum Bedelo."

Indeed, the attitude adopted by the Government and the bishops who were its loyal henchmen, placed the defenders of the Established Church in a very awkward and embarrassing position. They wanted to make Protestants of the people, but they could not talk to them nor preach to them. The only possible course for the bishops to pursue, supposing them to have been in earnest, and to have been ecclesiastics and not Government place-men, would have been to appoint Irish-speaking clergy under them, a thing which with scarcely an exception they utterly and obstinately refused to do. So that for a hundred and fifty years the native inhabitants of Ireland were obliged to pay a tenth of their produce to a foreign clergy whom they could not understand and who never troubled themselves to understand them. How gentlemen and scholars like Ussher could take up the position they did, is marvellous. He declares with one breath that "the religion of the Papists is superstitious and idolatrous, their faith and doctrines erroneous and heretical, their church in respect of both apostatical, to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion and profess their faith and doctrine is a grievous sin,"[26] and with the next breath he tells Bedell when he circulated books in the Irish language meant to convert these same Papists, that nothing was ever done "at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense." This can only be accounted for, so far as I can see, by strong social prejudice and race hatred. The desire to see the Irish and their language crushed and in extremis was stronger than the desire to make Protestants of them, and this feeling continued for at least a hundred and fifty years.[27] Even so late as the latter half of the eighteenth century we find Dr. Woodward, Protestant bishop of Cloyne, stating that "the difference of language is a very general (and where it obtains an insurmountable) object to any intercourse with the people," on the part of the Protestant clergy, but, he adds coolly, "if it be asked why the clergy do not learn the Irish language, I answer that it should be the object of Government rather to take measures to bring it into entire disuse,"[28] one of the most cynical avowals I can remember on the part of an Irish prelate as to what he was there for—not for the spiritual good of the people who paid him tithes, but as the official tool of the Government to crush their nationality.

Even Dean Swift, so clear-sighted a politician where Ireland's financial wrongs were concerned, was in his policy towards the people's language quite at one with men like Ussher and Woodward. Yet he knew perfectly well that over three-fourths of the island he and his confrères were, so far as polemical arguments or conversion went, powerless either for good or evil. He was, like the other Protestant dignitaries of his day, a declared enemy of the Gaelic speech, which he considered prevented "the Irish from being tamed," and at one time he said he had a scheme by which their language "might easily be abolished and become a dead one in half an age, with little expense and less trouble." In another place he says, "it would be a noble achievement to abolish the Irish language in the kingdom, so far at least as to oblige all the natives to speak only English on every occasion of business, in shops, markets, fairs, and other places of dealing: yet I am wholly deceived if this might not be effectually done in less than half an age and at a very trifling expense; for such I look upon a tax to be, of only six thousand pounds to accomplish so great a work." Whatever the Dean's plan was, he did not further enlighten the public upon it, and the scheme appears to have died with him.

The absorbing power of Irish nationality continued so strong all through the seventeenth century that according to Prendergast many of the children of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers who had settled in Ireland could not speak a word of English.[29] It was the same all over the country. In 1760 Irish was so universally spoken in the regiments of the Irish Brigade that Dick Hennessy, Edmund Burke's cousin, learnt it on foreign service.[30] Still later, during the Peninsular War, the English officers in one of the Highland regiments attempted to abolish the speaking of Gaelic at the mess table, but the Gaelic-speaking officers completely outvoted them. Irish was spoken at this time by all the Milesian families of high rank, except when they wished to deliberately Anglicise themselves. Michael Kelly, the musical composer and vocalist, who was born in Dublin in 1764, tells us in his "Reminiscences:"[31]—

"I procured an audience of the Emperor of Germany at Schoenbrunn, and found him with a half-dozen of general officers, among whom were Generals O'Donnell and Kavanagh, my gallant countrymen. The latter [he was from Borris in the Queen's County] said something to me in Irish which I did not understand, consequently made him no answer. The Emperor turned quickly on me and said, 'What! O'Kelly, don't you speak the language of your own country?' I replied, 'Please, your Majesty, none but the lower orders of the Irish people speak Irish.' The Emperor laughed loudly. The impropriety of the remark made before two Milesian Generals flashed into my mind in an instant, and I could have bitten off my tongue. They luckily did not, or pretended not to hear."

It is from the middle of the eighteenth century onward that the Irish language begins to die out. I doubt whether before that period any Milesian family either in Ireland or the Scotch Highlands spoke English in its own home or to its own children.

I have been at much pains to trace the decay of the language, and the extent to which it has been spoken at various periods from that day to this, and have consulted all the volumes of travellers and statisticians upon which I have been able to lay hands. The result, however, has not been very satisfactory so far as information goes. It is simply amazing that most Irish and many English writers, who have had to deal with Ireland from that day to this, have in their sketchy and generally unreliable accounts of the island, its people, and its social conditions, simply ignored the fact that any other language than English was spoken in it at all. Perhaps the most trustworthy accounts of the anomalous condition of the Irish-speaking race in their own island are by foreigners who have recorded what they saw without prejudice one way or the other, whereas one cannot help thinking that English and Irish writers who, while going over the same ground, have yet absolutely ignored[32] all allusion to the question of language, did so because they found it a difficult and awkward question to deal with.

The first authorities I know of who speak of Irish as dying out are Dr. Samuel Madden, who, writing in 1738, states that not one in twenty was ignorant of English, and Harris, who, in his description of the county Down six years later, says that Irish prevailed only amongst the poorer Catholics. Both these statements, however, are preposterously exaggerated. In the very year that Madden wrote died O'Neill of Clanaboy, one of the best-known and most influential men of the county Down, and I found in the Belfast Museum the Irish manuscript of the funeral oration pronounced over his body,[33] and any O'Neill would probably at that period have turned in his grave had his funeral discourse been spoken in English.

Madden's statement that in 1738 nineteenth-twentieths of the population knew English is an incredible one and so utterly disproved by all the other evidence, that it is astonishing that so sound and careful a historian as Mr. Lecky should have accepted it as substantially true. The evidence upon the other side is overwhelming. Forty-seven years after Madden wrote this the German, Küttner, travelling through Ireland, wrote a series of letters in which he distinctly says that he found the common people either did not understand English at all or understood it imperfectly.[34]

More than two generations had passed away after Madden's statement that nineteen-twentieths of the population knew English, when we find a Scotchman, Daniel Dewar, in a book entitled "Observations on the Character, Customs and Superstitions of the Irish," writing thus in 1812:—

"The number of people who speak this language [Irish] is much greater than is generally supposed. It is spoken throughout the province of Connaught by all the lower orders, a great part of whom scarcely understand any English, and some of those who do, understand it only so as to conduct business. They are incapable of receiving moral or religious instruction through its medium. The Irish is spoken very generally through the other three provinces except amongst the descendants of the Scotch in the north. It cannot be supposed that calculations on this subject should be perfectly accurate, but it has been concluded on good grounds that there are about two millions of people in Ireland [out of about six millions] who are incapable of understanding a continued discourse in English."

"I have always found," says Dewar, with much shrewdness, "that in places where gentlemen hostile to this tongue assured me there was not a word of it spoken, in these very districts I heard very little English." He gives an amusing account of the various contradictory objections that he found at that time urged against it.

"Some of the Anglo-Hibernians at that time (1808) strongly maintained that this dialect is so barbarous that it cannot answer the purpose of instruction, others that it would awaken the enthusiasm of the Wild Irish (as they call them) to make any attempt of this kind, and consequently that it might prove dangerous to the Government, and others, that they had no desire to be taught in Irish, and that it would be useless to send teachers among them for this purpose."

Dutton, in his statistical history of the county Clare, published in 1808, says that almost all the gentlemen of that county spoke Irish with the country people, but he adds, "scarcely one of their sons is able to hold a conversation in this language. The children of almost all those who cannot speak English are proud of being spoken to in English and answering in the same, even although you may question them in Irish. No Irish is spoken in any of the schools, and the peasants are anxious to send their children to them to learn English." This apparently does not refer to the hedge schools of the natives, but to the charter and other English schools. "I think the diversity of language and not the diversity of religion," writes Grattan, in 1811, "constitutes a diversity of people. I should be very sorry that the Irish language should be forgotten, but glad that the English language should be generally understood."[35] This seems to have been also the position taken up by his great rival Flood, who, when dying, left some £50,000 to Trinity College for the cultivation of the Irish language. Trinity College, however, never secured the money, and its so-called Irish professorship, lately established, in the fifties, is only an adjunct of its Divinity School, and paid and practically controlled, not by the college, nor by people in the least interested in the cultivation of Celtic literature, but by a society for the conversion of Irish Papists through the medium of their own language.

In 1825, that is eighty-seven years after Madden's statement that nineteen-twentieths of the population knew English, the Commissioners of Education in Ireland, in their first report laid before Parliament, state "it has been estimated that the number of Irish who employ the ancient language of the country exclusively is not less than 500,000, and that at least a million more, although they have some understanding of English and can employ it for the ordinary purposes of traffic, make use of their [own] tongue on all other occasions as the natural vehicle of their thoughts."

Lappenberg, a German who travelled in Ireland, reckoned that out of a population of seven millions of inhabitants in 1835, four millions spoke Irish "als ihre Muttersprache."

In 1842 Mac Comber's "Christian Remembrancer," discussing the possibility of "converting" the Irish, says, "there are about 3,000,000 of Irish who still speak the Irish language and love it as their mother tongue," and "that part of the Irish population which still speaks and understands little else than Irish" is "nearly a third of the entire population of Ireland."

A German, J. C. Kohl, who travelled extensively in Ireland in 1843, shortly before the famine, says that in Clare the "children would run by the side of the car crying, 'Burnocks[36] halfpenny,' burnocks being an appellation applied to every stranger, and 'halfpenny' the only English that the little rogues seemed to know." The neglect of the use of Irish in the churches, which had even then set in, largely owing to the teaching and wishes of O'Connell and his parliamentarians, struck the German spectator as something astonishing, for apparently he could not understand how an ancient nation with whose fame all Europe had recently been filled owing to the exertions of O'Connell, should be casting away its national birthright. "The great city of Cork," he notes, "which lies in a district where much Irish is still spoken, contains only two churches where sermons are preached in Irish. A short time ago the Irish prisoners in Cork gaol petitioned the chaplain that he would preach his Sunday sermon to them in Irish."

This acute foreign observer gives a very interesting account of the state of the Irish language round Drogheda, a coast town some twenty miles north of Dublin, which is worth quoting here since it accurately describes the condition of affairs over the greater part of Leinster sixty years ago, but which is now so absolutely extinct that few modern Irishmen could believe it except on the most unimpeachable testimony. "Drogheda," he writes, "is the last genuine Irish town, the suburbs of Drogheda are genuine Irish suburbs ... and a great many people are to be found in the neighbourhood who speak the old Irish tongue more fluently and more frequently than the English." Kohl was hospitably entertained by a priest in Drogheda—whose name unfortunately he does not mention, but who appears to have been a man of superior intelligence. His house had several harps in it, and he was delighted by a young blind harper who first played Brian Boru's march for him, and then an air called the Fairy Queen. At Kohl's request the priest also sent for a reciter of Irish poetry, who asked what he would wish recited. "If you were to repeat all you know," said the priest, "we should have to listen all night, I suppose, and many other nights as well."

"The man," says Kohl, "began to recite and went on uninterruptedly for a quarter of an hour. His story, of which I, of course, understood not a word, but which my friendly host afterwards explained to me, treated of a Scottish enchantress named Aithura,[37] who forsaken by her Irish lover, Cuchullin, laid a cruel spell upon his son Konnell which compelled him by an irresistible enchantment, and entirely against his will, to follow, to persecute, to fight, and at last to destroy his father, Cuchullin. At the last moment, after stabbing his father to the heart in spite of the efforts by which he struggled to resist the horrible impulse of his destiny, his own heart broke in the struggle, and he and his father died together, while the revengeful spirit of the cruel enchantress hovered in exultation over the dying, repeating to her treacherous lover the story of his inconstancy and her revenge." "I was glad," adds Kohl, "of assuring myself by oral demonstration of the actual existence of Ossianic poetry like this, at the present day. The reciter was, as I have said, a simple and ignorant man, with a good deal of the clown about him, and his recitation was as simple, unadorned, and undeclamatory as himself. Sometimes, however, when carried away by the interest of his story his manner and voice were animated and moving. At such times he fixed his eyes on his hearers as if demanding their sympathy and admiration for himself and his poem. Sometimes I noticed that the metre completely changed, and I was told that this was the case with all Irish poems, for that the metre was always made to suit the subject.[38] I also heard that the most beautiful part of this ballad was the dialogue of father and son upon the battlefield, but that a prose translation would give me no idea at all of its beauty."

The priest told him that "Ossianic poetry was very abundant in the neighbourhood of Drogheda." "This," he says, "I had heard before, and from all I heard in Ireland I am much inclined to believe—which indeed many have also conjectured—that Macpherson obtained the materials for his version of Ossian's poems from popular tradition and ballads of the North of Ireland. The whole Irish nation both in the south and north, is certainly much more imbued with the spirit of this poetry and still possesses many more traces of it than the Scottish people, whether of the Highlands or Lowlands."[39]

Another very acute German traveller, Rodenberg, describes the people of Kerry as always speaking Irish among themselves in 1860, while their English was so bad that he could hardly understand it. He notices, however, that several words of corrupted English were interwoven with their Irish conversation, which so disgusted him that he remarks, "everything about these people is patchwork, their clothing, their dwellings, their language."[40] He reports at full length a most interesting conversation which he had with a priest near Limerick, who assured him that they had to pull down in order to build up, that is, pull down the edifice of the Irish language in which the people were denied education in order to build up a new education in the English language. "Nor is it," said the priest, "the first time that the Irishman has had to turn his hand against his most sacred things. Red Hugh of Donegal destroyed the house of his forefathers that the enemy might not make of it a fortress against his own people, but he wept while he destroyed it."[41]

In the Galway fish market Rodenberg could not hear a single word of English spoken. The population of Connacht was at this time a little unnder a million, and the census of 1861 showed that about one-tenth of the whole population were ignorant of English. The population of the city of Galway in this year was 23,787, of whom 3,511 were ignorant of English.

According to the census of 1891 something over three-quarters of a million people in Ireland were bi-linguists, and 66,140 could speak Irish only, thus showing that in thirty years Irish was killed off so rapidly that the whole Island contained fewer speakers in 1891 than the small province of Connacht alone did thirty years before.

This extinguishing of the Irish language has not been the result of a natural process of decay, but has been chiefly caused by the definite policy of the Board of "National Education," as it is called, backed by the expenditure every year of many hundreds of thousands of pounds. This Board, evidently actuated by a false sense of Imperialism, and by an overmastering desire to centralise, and being itself appointed by Government chiefly from a class of Irishmen who have been steadily hostile to the natives, and being perfectly ignorant of the language and literature of the Irish, have pursued from the first with unvarying pertinacity the great aim of utterly exterminating this fine Aryan language.

The amount of horrible suffering entailed by this policy, and the amount of hopeless ignorance stereotyped in hundreds of thousands of children, and the ruination of the life-prospects of hundreds of thousands more, by insisting upon their growing up unable to read or write, sooner than teach them to read and write the only language they knew, has counted for nothing with the Board of National Education, compared with their great object of the extermination of the Irish language, and the attainment of one Anglified uniformity. In vain have their own inspectors time after time testified to the ill results of denying the Irish-speakers education in their own language, in vain have disinterested visitors opened wide eyes of astonishment at schoolmasters who knew no Irish being appointed to teach pupils[42] who know no English. In vain have the schoolmasters themselves petitioned to be allowed to change the system, in vain did Sir Patrick Keenan (afterwards himself Chief Commissioner of National Education) address the Board saying, "the shrewdest people in the world are those who are bi-lingual, borderers have always been remarkable in this respect, but the most stupid children I have ever met with are those who were learning English while endeavouring to forget Irish. The real policy of the educationist would in my opinion be to teach Irish grammatically and soundly to the Irish-speaking people, and then to teach them English through the medium of their native language."[43] All in vain! Against the steady, unwavering, unrelenting determination to stamp out the Irish language which has been paramount in the Board ever since the days of Archbishop Whately, every representation passed unheeded, and it would appear that in another generation the Board—at the cost of unparalleled suffering—will have attained its object.

This is not the place to discuss the bearings of this question still less to drag in the names of individuals, but the reader who has followed the history of Irish literature to this will be perhaps anxious to have it continued up to date, and so I may as well here place on record what I and many others have seen with our own eyes over and over again.

An Irish-speaking family, endowed with all the usual intelligence of the Irish-speaking population, with a gift for song, poetry, Ossianic lays, traditional history, and story, send their children to school. A rational education, such as any self-governing country in Europe would give them, would teach them to read and write the language that they spoke, and that their fathers had read and spoken for fifteen hundred years before them. The exigencies of life in the United Kingdom would then make it necessary to teach them a second language—English. The basis of knowledge upon which they started, and which they had acquired as naturally as the breath of life, would in any fair system of education be kept as a basis, and their education would be built up upon it. They would be taught to read the Ossianics lays which they knew by heart before, they would be given books containing more of the same sort, they would be taught to read the poems, and they would have put into their hands books of prose and poetry of a kindred nature. They had picked up many items of information about the history of Ireland from their fathers and mothers, they would be given a simple history of Ireland to read. All this they would assimilate naturally and quickly because it would be the natural continuation of what they already in part possessed. But the exigencies of life in the United Kingdom makes it necessary to read English poems and English books, and to know something of English history also, this they would learn after the other.

Will it be believed, the Board of National Education insists upon the Irish-speaking child starting out from the first moment to learn to read a language it does not speak.[44] It is forbidden to be taught one syllable of Irish, easy sentences, poems, or anything else. It is forbidden to be taught one word of Irish history. Advantage is taken of nothing that the child knew before or that came natural to it, and the result is appalling.

Bright-eyed intelligent children, second in intelligence, I should think, to none in Europe, with all the traditional traits of a people cultured for fifteen hundred years, children endowed with a vocabulary in every-day use of about three thousand words[45] (while the ordinary English peasant has often not more than five hundred) enter the schools of the Chief Commissioner, to come out at the end with all their natural vivacity gone, their intelligence almost completely sapped, their splendid command of their native language lost for ever, and a vocabulary of five or six hundred English words, badly pronounced and barbarously employed, substituted for it, and this they in their turn will transmit to their children, while everything that they knew on entering the school, story, lay, poem, song, aphorism, proverb, and the unique stock-in-trade of an Irish speaker's mind, is gone for ever, and replaced by nothing.

I have long looked and inquired in vain, on all hands, for any possible justification of this system, and the more I have looked and inquired the more convinced I am that none such exists unless it be an unacknowledged political one. Its results at all events are only too obvious. The children are taught, if nothing else, to be ashamed of their own parents, ashamed of their own nationality, ashamed of their own names. The only idea of education they now have is connected not with the literary past of their own nation, but with the new board-trained schoolmaster and his school, which to them represent the only possible form of knowledge. They have no idea of anything outside of, or beyond, this. Hence they allow their beautiful Irish manuscripts to rot[46]—because the schoolmaster does not read Irish. They never sing an Irish song or repeat an Irish poem—the schoolmaster does not; they forget all about their own country that their parents told them—the schoolmaster is not allowed to teach Irish history; they translate their names into English—probably the schoolmaster has done the same; and what is the use of having an Irish name now that they are not allowed to speak Irish! Worst of all they have not only dropped their Irish Christian names, but they are becoming ashamed of the patron saints of their own people, the names even of Patrick and of Brigit.[47] It is a remarkable system of education, and one well worth the minutest study that can be paid it, which is able to produce these effects, but with even the smallest philological regard for the meaning of words, it cannot be called "education."

Ar n-a críochnughadh ag Ráth-Treagh anaice le Dungar, i bparráiste Tigh-Baoithin i gcondae Roscomáin, an ficheadh lá Lúghnasa, le Dúbhglas de h-Íde, d'á ngoirthear go coitchionn an Craoibhín Aoibhinn, de phór na nGall-Ghaedhal i n-Eirinn.

Buidheachas le Dia!

CRÍOCH.

INDEX

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

Abél or aibél, meaning of, 407

Abbots and Abbesses of Kildare, 460

Academy, Royal Irish; Irish MSS. in, xi; neglects to purchase MSS., 376, 592, 599, 605

Acta Sanctorum, 106, 576

Accentuated verse replaces syllabic, 541 ff.; not necessarily derived from an English source, 544

Adonic poem of Columbanus, 216

Adamnan, St., 154, 234; his life of Columcille, 182 ff.; his work on sacred places, 183, 219; his "Mystical Interpretation" and other works, 197; attitude on the Boru Tribute, 236 ff.; death, 185

Adam, description of, in Saltair na rami, 416 ff.

Adventures of Dubh mac Deaghla, 376

Advocates in the Brehon Law, 585

Aedh Baclamh, saga of, 403

Aedh Guaire, 228 ff.

Aedh Finnliath's sister a poet, 441

Aedh mac Ainmirech, High King, 489

Aengus Tuirmeach, High King, 64

Aed, bishop of Sletty, 151

Aedh Mac Aonghasa, 494

Aeneid, an Irish, 603

Aedh Slane, 95

Aedh, High King, and Columcille, 235

Agilbert, 222

Aimairgin, Whiteknee, 241, 243-4

Aird-rinn in Irish metric, 483

Aitheach Tuata, 22, 27, 28 ff., 402

Ailbe, 106

Aillinn, 117

Aileran, St., 154; his books, 197, 217

Aileach, 169, 232, 527

Alcuin, 206, 219

Aldfrid of Northumbria, 220

Aldhelm, 221

Alexander the Great and the Celts, 7, 8

Allia, battle of, 8

Altars, 55

Alphabet, Ogam, 112

Allegorical poetry in Irish, 596 ff.

Altus, the, of Columcille, 180

Amra of Columcille, 405 ff., 479

"Amras" on, St Seran, and Conall of Inskeel, 410

Ambicatus, a Celtic aird-righ 6, 12

Ammianus Marcellinus, 22, 92

Amergin, 8; his poems, 478 ff.

Amergin Mac Amhalgaidh, author of the Dinnseanchus, 93

Anchorites, Irish, 193

Anglo-Saxons, flock to Irish schools, 220; borrow rhyme from the Irish, 481, 485; translation, 268

Anglo-Normans become Irish, 493-4; misrepresented by the later English, 557; their pedigrees, 563; assume Irish names 609; peers ignorant of English, 610

Anglo-Irish rhyme, 540

Anderson's "Native Irish,"620

Antipodes, the, doctrine of familiar to the Irish, 224

Annals, Irish, early mythic history in, 371; reliability of, 38-43; list of the principal annals, 573 ff.

Annals of Boyle, 581

Annals of Clonmacnois, 206, 227, 426, 447

Annals of the Four Masters, 573-578, 119, 138-151, 206, 227, 232, 266, 409, 427, 430, 441, 463, 493, 557

Annals of Innisfallen, 213

Annals of Loch Cé, 479, 581

Annals of Tighearnach, 580, see Tighearnach

Annals compiled by John O'Neaghtan, 597

Annals of Ulster, 39, 210, 227, 265, 445; by whom composed, 470; contents, 581

Anglicisation, 31

Antiphonary of Bangor, 41

Angus of the Boyne, 48, 78

Angus the Culdee, 130, 165, 173, 209, 217, 264-5, 268, 412 ff.

Animosus, Life of St. Brigit, 163

Ana, mother of the gods, 53

Anastasius, Roman Librarian, 218

Aoife, female warrior, 299

Aoibheall, the fairy, 438, 440, 602-3

Ap Harry, Captain, 610

Apollo, 79

Apuleius, 276

Aran, or Arran, "of the Saints," 194; Caoilte's poem on Arran, 506

Ardee, 57

Areiōn, steed of Adrastus, 351

Arnold, Matthew, 268

Art, history of Irish, 453 ff.

Art the Lonely, High King, 32, 60, 119

Architecture, Irish, 458 ff.; ecclesiastical, 460; of houses, 130, 132

Armagh, school of, founded, 134, 216; plundered for the last time, 463

Argonauts, the, 58

Argonautics of the pseudo-Orpheus, 20

Aristotle, 20; his descent, 78

Arles, Council of, 106

Arthur King, Irish histories of, 572

Arthurian Stories in Irish, 572

Aracht, Athracht or Atracta, St., 171; lost life of, 575

Aryan customs in Brehon Law, 587

Ascoli, 607

Assimilation of words in Irish, 415

Assonance in Irish-Latin poetry, 216

Athairne, the poet, 243, 245, 336-7

Athgabhail, or Distress, 584

Ath Comair, battle of, 402

Atkinson, Dr., 42, 172, 269: Three Shafts, 559; Book of Hymns, xvi

Atticotti, the, 22

Augustine, St., 106

Augustine an Irish monk, 217

Aughrim, the Irish after, 592

Avienus, 20

B

Babington, Fallacies of Race Theories, 217

Baile mac Buain, 117

Baithine, 173, 182, 187

Ballad, the, not cultivated in Ireland, 510; nor the Highlands, 549

Banshee of the Kings of Munster, 438, 440

Bangor, the school of, 207 ff., 215; abbots of, 41

Balor the Fomorian, 286 ff.

Bards, the, contrasted with the filés, 486; their numbers, 488; as peacemakers, 258; their power, 167, 194, 257 ff.; their mode of reciting stories, 277; their colleges, 490; their importance, 491, 495 ff.; acts passed against them, 493, 609; Saor and Daor bards, 486 ff.; their metres, 487; their lack of initiative after the Conquest, 465; hereditary, 465; were not harpers, 496; arrogance of, 518; bardic families, 465

Bardic schools, 239 ff., 260; intercommunication between, 279, 496, 525; not an unmixed blessing, 488, 525; inside of a later bardic school described, 528 ff.; bardic sessions, 600; their break-up lamented, 522; their end, 524

"Bardic Association," proceeding of the great, 260, 399, 411; Saga of, 403

Bard Ruadh, the, 476 ff.

Banba, name for Erin, 48

Barrett, Connacht poet, 605

Barron, Phillip, of Waterford, 620

Bavaria, origin of name, 19

Bealtaine—May Day, 90

Bede, 35, 39, 41, 106, 130, 137, 183, 198, 220

Béarla Féine, legal or bardic dialect, 240, 405, 410, 580, 588

Bealach Múghna, battle of, 423

Bedell, Bishop, 618 ff.

Becfola, saga of, 403

Belanagare, poem to the House of, 545

Bél, pagan god, 90

Béli, 90

Belgae, the, 2, 14

Bells struck, not rung, 189

Beg mac De, the prophet, 232, 441, 579

Bellerus, Bellerophon, 292

Benedictines and St. Aileran, 197

Benignus, St., 154, 420

Bernard, St., 207, 209

Berchan, St., the prophet, 210, 211, 441, 611

Bertrand, M., xvi, 5

Betham, Sir William, 175

"Besom of devotion," 206

Bible translated, 618 ff.

Bishops of the Established Church, 619

Bingham, cruelties of, 476

Bird, soul compared to a, 214

Blood, lapping, a sign of affection, 352

Blackbird, monk's poem to, 485; of Derrycarn, 505

Board of National Education, see "National Board"

Bobbio, Irish monastery at, 208

Bolgdún, battle of, 489

Boniface, Pope, 217

Bohemia, whence called, 19

Boher-na-breena, origin of the name, 389

Bonefire, 91

Books, early multiplied in Ireland, 220; first printed in Irish, 571 ff; translated into Irish, 572; list of oldest Irish, 263; of law, 590; lost books, 471, 575, 635 ff., 592, 605, 606; Irish, in German Monasteries, 450; given as gifts, 520

Book of Acaill, 412, 584-588

Book of Armagh, 36, 91, 140, 147, 150, 184, 218, 267, 462; described, 136 ff.; contents of, 140; two books of same name, 265; on the druids, 91

Book of Ballymote, 59, 70, 86, 93, 108, 122, 240, 241, 246, 264

Bookshrines, 457

Book of Clanranald, 537, 568 ff., 571

Book of Cluain-Aidneach-Fintan, 557

Book of Cluain Eidhneach, 265

Book of Clonsost, 265

Book of Conquests, see "Book of Invasions"

Book of Cuana, 265

Book of the Connellians, 59

Books of Cuchonnacht O'Daly, 439

Book of Downpatrick, 265

Book of Durrow, 265

Book of Dubhdaleithe, 265

Book of Dimma, 268

Book of Epochs, 557

Books of Eochaidh O'Flanagain, 265

Book of Fermoy, 403

Books of Flann of Monasterboice, 265

Books of Flann of Dungiven 265

Book of Glendaloch, 266

Book of Howth, 210

Book of Hymns, see "Liber Hymnorum"

Book of Invasions, or Leabhar Gabhála, 27, 47, 245, 280 ff., 430, 441; various copies of, 576

Book of Innis an Dúin, 265

Book of Kells, 268; Westwood on, 462; date of, 463

Book of Kilkenny, 198, 227

Book of Leinster, 70, 85, 93, 111, 129, 234, 241, 264, 278, 310, 316, 330, 341, 354, 380, 434, 444

Book of Lecan, 70, 93; when copied, 470

Book of Lismore, 158, 164, 167, 180, 227, 239, 383, 512

Book of Lecan, the Yellow, 168, 197, 401

Book of Leithlin, Long, 265

Book of Mac Egan, the Red, 266

Book of Mac Murrough, the Yellow, 266

Book of Saint Molling, 210, 266, 268, 557

Book of Saint Molaga, the Black, 176, 265, 266, 557

Book of Monasterboice, the Short, 265

Books of O'Scoba of Clonmacnois, 265

Book of the O'Byrnes, 472 ff.

Book of Pedigrees of Women, 557

Book of the Provinces, 557

Book of Reigns, 557

Book of Rights, 73, 227, 420

Book of Sabhal Patrick, 265

Book of Sligo, 227, 232

Book of Slane, the Yellow, 265

Book of Synchronisms, 557

Book of Uachongbhail, 72

Borwick on Sts. Patrick and Columcille, 185

Boru, or Borúmha, tribute, 280, 489; historical truth of, 252; remission of, 211, 234, 236; Saga of, 393 ff.; pronunciation of Borúmha, 30

Bow, Mac Leod's, 543; the bow in Montrose's wars, 570

Boyne, condition of the Irish after the battle of the, 592-597

Brady, Phillip, poet, 605

Bran's colour, 271

Bran mac Febail, Voyage of, 81, 97, 111

Brash on Ogams, 120

Brehon, originally a poet and historian, 240; liabilities of a, 586

Brehon Law, 107; applied to a dispute on books, 176; survives till the days of Duald Mac Firbis, 562; books, account of, 583-590; antiquity of, ch. XLII n. 3

Brendan of Clonfert, St., the voyager, 194, 196, 229

Brendan of Birr, St., 196, 229

Breagh, or Bregia, or the plain of Meath, whence called, 49, 206

Brennus, 262

Breas the Fomorian, 284 ff.; 409

Breogan of Brigantia, 46, 49

Brethadh or Breithe Nimhedh, 73, 245

Brian Boru, or Borúmha, 140; where educated, 213; why so named, 394; a lost life of, 430; his tribute, 431; his court described by Mac Liag, 431; his generosity to a bard, 433 ff.; his death, 437 ff.; verses ascribed to him, 441; his statesmanship, 443; result of his semi-usurpation, 552

Brian, son of Eochaidh Muighmheadhoin, 33, 59

Brian, a Tuatha De Danann god, 47, 52, 287

Brigit, St., her life, 156 ff.; fifteen Saint Brigits, 136; inspires a book, 462; birth foretold by a druid, 92; her poems, 165

Brigit, disuse of as a Christian name, 162

Brigit, a goddess, 53; derivation of name, 53; her characteristics pass to St. Brigit, 161; inscriptions to, 262

Brigantes, the, 19

Brigantes, or Clanna Breogain, 46, 67

British Saints, influence of on Irish Saints, 193

British Museum, catalogue of Irish MSS. in, 521

Britain, Irish derivation of the name, 282; plundered by the Irish, 22, 26, 33, 34

Britons call in the Saxons, 23

Bricriu, his feast, 254; raises strife, 357

Brigantia, a goddess, 262

Broccan, or Brogan, hymns to Brigit, 161, 163

Broccan's poem on the Boru tribute, 394

Brontë, Charlotte, 258

Bruidhean, or hostelry, described, 355, 388

Bruidhean Da Choga, saga, 402

Bruidhean Da Derga, saga, 26, 388 ff.

Brooke, Miss, Reliques of Irish Poetry, 301, 361, 364

Bronzes, designs on Irish, 455

Bruadar, or O'Bruadar, poet, 592, 615

Brunn, Johann Adolf, 460, 462

Bryant, Mrs. Sophie, 463

Brunhild, or Bruni-Childis, 3

Buchanan, 19

Buanann, 53

Bulls, cause of the táin Bo Chuailgne, 320 ff.; 339 ff.; description of the Dun Bull, 479

Burke, ix

Burns, 534

Burgundian Library, Irish MSS. in, 574

Bute, Marquis of, 180

Byzantium, its influence on Irish art, 454

C

Cæsar quoted, 14; on the druids, 82; on the Gaulish belief in a future life, 94; on the verses of the druids, 259; on the Gaulish mode of fighting, 255

Calpornus, St. Patrick's father, 142

Calatin, or Cailitin, the druid, 327, 342; his children, 342 ff.

Callaghan of Cashel, 61, 404

Caithréim of Turlough O'Brien, 470

Cairprè Niafer, High King, 337, 342

Cainnech, St., 168, 196

Cáiminè of Iniscaltra, 168

Caimin, or Caminus, St., 214-218

Cairneach, St., 232

Cairbre Cinn-cait, 27, 29, 402

Cairbré of the Liffey, 32, 65, 66, 75, 246 ff., 376 ff.

Cambrai sermon, glosses on, 267

Cameron, Dr., 303-4, 353

Campbells, the, 67, 508

Campbell, Iain, folk-lorist, 499

"Cambrensis eversus," 554

Cambrensis, see "Giraldus"

Campion, 530

Canon Phádraig, 140

Candida Casa, 194

Canterbury, School of, 221

Caoiltè, 243, 381 ff.; poems by, 506 ff.

Carolan, or O'Carolan, 89, 497, 533, 598 ff.

Carmen Paschale, 106

Carman, Fair of, 219

Carthach St., of Lismore, 195, 211, 233

Carlingford Mountains, 49

Carthain, St., 268

Cas, ancestor of the Dalcassians, 62

Castlepollard, 232

Caseys, the, 32

Cathba, or Cathbad, the druid, 96, 302, 314, 336, 344

"Cathach" the, of the O'Donnells, 195, 268

Cathbarr O'Donnell, 175

Cathal, or Cathaldus, St., 211, 222

Cáthaoir Mór, his will, 30; ancestor of the great Leinster families, 31; of St. Fiacc, 152; of Columcille's mother, 167; of Dermot Mac Murrough, 452; succeeded by the Father of Finn mac Cumhal, 366

Cathal Maquire, Compiler of Annals of Ulster, 39

Carew, Sir George, 476, 553, 560, 564

"Catholic bishop but English senator," 561

Catholic University of Washington, xiv

Cauci, the, ch. II n. 4

Ceallach, death of St., saga, 395 ff.

"Cead-cathach," real meaning of, 31

Céile Dé, meaning of, 412

Celestius, 106

Celts, who were they, 1; name how pronounced, 3: invade Italy, 6; their archæological remains, 2; colonise Asia Minor, 9; break-up of their empire, 9, 15; best understood by studying the Irish, 253, 257, 260; their ornaments and designs, 454

Celtic place-names, 2; speech, extent of country over which it was spoken, 2; spoken in Galatia in fourth century, 14; extinction of in Gaul, 15; its influence on French, 16; allied to the speech of Italy, 11

Celto-Germanic civilisation 12

Celtiberi, the, 3

Cenn Cruach, 85 ff.

Cétnad, an incantation, 241-2

Cennfaeladh, or Cionnfaola, the poet, 266, 341, 412, 579, 581, 584

Celtchair mac Uthecair, 259, 322, 357

Cet mac Mugach, 357 ff.

Cearbhall [Carroll], King of Leinster, 421 ff.

Charles the Bald of France, 218

Charlemagne, 208, 448; triumphs of, in Irish, 572

Chad, St., 220

Chessboard, plundered by Criomhthann, 27, 409

Chariots among the Irish, 255 ff.

Chimæra, the, 292

Christian names, Irish, becoming disused, 162

Christian allusions in pagan literature, 250

Chronicon Scotorum, 182, 204, 227; its reputed author, 206; copied by Mac Firbis, 262, 581; account of, 581

Chrysostom, St., 106

Ciaran St., the carpenter's son, of Clonmacnois, 167, 168, 173, 180, 195-6, 204 ff., 219, 375

Ciaran, of Belach Duin, St., 154

Ciaran becomes Piaran in Wales, 5

Ciaran of Saighir, St., 176

Cian, ancestor of the Cianachts, 32, 58

Cian's leg, leeching of, saga, 404

Cinaeth O' Hartigan, poet, 380, 429

Cimbaeth, 24, 42, 244, 430

Ciothruadh, a poet, 246

Cin of Drom Snechta, the, 70, 264

Cios, derivation of the word, 589

Cionnfaola, see "Cennfaeladh"

Civil power, conflicts with, 225 ff.

Civilisation, early Irish, 122 ff.

Claudian, 23

Clancys, the, 32, 67

Clanranald, 547; book of, 568 ff.

Clanrickard's brothers, 611; memoirs, 528

Classical bards of Ireland, 515-536

Classical Irish metres, 530 ff., 537

Classics taught in the Irish schools, 215

Clan Creidé, 206

Clanna Breógain, the, 46, 67

Clanna Rudhraighe, or Rury, the, 66, 196

Clan system effected the clergy, 234

Claudius, bishop of Turin, 208

Clerics, exemption of from military service, 234

Cliodhna or Cliona, 49

Clontarf, description of battle of, 437 ff., 440

Close, Rev. Maxwell, 376

Clonard [Cluain Eraird] school of, 196 ff.

Clonfert, school of, 197, 204

Clonmacnois, description of, 204 ff., 219, 234

Clonenagh [Cluain Eidhneach], school of, 209

Cnoca or Cnucha, battle of, 258, 365

Cobhthach Caol-mBreagh, 25

Cnámhross, battle of, 381

Coffey, George, 123-5, on New Grange, 454; the Coffeys, 67

Coelan of Iniscaltra, 164

Coin in Ireland, 125; French coins found in, 220

Cogitosus, life of St. Brigit, 156, 159 ff., 163

Coirpne, the poet, 285

Collinses, the, 62, 64

Colgan, 107, 153, 163, 170, 171, 180, 184, 189, 406; life and works, 574 ff.

Colloquy of the Ancients, 116, 130, 383 ff., 507

Colman, St., 154, 441

Colman Ua Cluasaigh, 202-3, 209, 212

Colman, Clan, 206

Colman, mac Lenene, poet and saint, 404

Colgan or Colgu of Clonmacnois, 206

Columba of Tir-da-glas, 196, 213

Columbanus, 207, 215 ff., 219

Collas the three, 33, 66, 430; their modern descendants, 67; burn Emania, 378

Coll ciotach, or Colkitto, 568

Colours of the winds, 415

Colours, a study of Irish, wanted, 416

Columcille, 36; nobility of his lineage, 36, 167; his first teacher, 91; date of his birth, 16; his life, 167 ff.; his poems, 180 ff., 409; lives of, 182; death, 186 ff.; his farewell to Aran, 195, 234; his conversation with Aedh, High King, 235; visit to Longarad, 264; makes Latin rhyme, 480; saves the Irish bards, 489; poetic prayer of, at Culdreimhne, 581

Comgall, St., 168, 177, 207

Comyn, Michael, author, 260, 512, 601

Comyn, David, 597, 601

Conall Cearnach, 58, 60, 69, 95, 255, 300, 310, 315, 337, 351 ff., 357, 360

Conan the Fenian, 258, 290

Condon, David, poet, 266

Conang's tower, 282

Conachlonn, in Irish prosody, 414

Conn, clan of, 206

Conn of the Hundred Battles, 31, 65, 66, 75, 368, 587

Conall Gulban, 36, 166

Conairè the Great, 26, 280, 388 ff.

Connellians, book of the, 59

Conor [Concobar or Conchubhair] mac Nessa, King, 96, 243; death of, 69, 581; father a druid 83; race dies out, 69, 315; deprives the poets of the brehonship, 240; invited by Bricriu, 254; name how pronounced, 254; as depicted in the Red Branch saga, 295 ff.; visits mac Datho, 356

Congal Clairingneach, Triumphs of, 401

Connellan, Professor Owen, 410, 412, 578

Connla and the fairy lady, 100

Consonants, Irish classification of, 540

Consonantal rhyme, 540

Conry, Florence, author, 571

Connacht poems, 605

Conmees, the, 524

Contention of the Bards, 516 ff., 530

Continent, Irish scholars on the, 448 ff.

Conlaoch, Cuchullain's son, 300

Cooldrevna, or Cuil Dremhne, battle of, 177, 182

Cork College, 212

Cork, Irish language in, 626

Cormac, son of Dima, the voyager, 171, 172

Cormac's glossary, 53, 110, 111, 381, 420, 589

Corca Laidhi, or Laidh, 67, 69, 213

Coroticus, epistle to, 144

Cormac, O' Lumlini, 204

Cormac's chapel, 213

Cormac mac Art, or Airt, 32, 40, 65, 72, 75; his appearance, 122; his court, 127; his instruction to his son, 246 ff.; his Saltair, 264; his date, 364; his part in the Brehon Law, 584; enacts special laws, 587

Cormac mac Culenain, 234; his Saltair of Cashel, 265, 420, 557; his life, 419 ff.; his death, 424, 441

Corcran, a cleric, rules Ireland, 447

Corb Olum, ancestor of the Eoghanachts, 27

Cormac an Eigeas poet, 428

Coolavin [Cúl-O-bhFinn], 521

Copenhagen, Irish MSS. in, 536

Cork, Irish language in, 626

Court, description of High Kings, 390

Courtship of Etain, 401

Courtship of Crunn's wife, 402

Courtship of Becfola, 403

Courtship of Momera, 402

Cows in Iona, 193

Crane and fox, 384

Crann-tábhail, or sling, 325

Credé's house, 130; lament for her husband, 383 ff.

Creeveroe, 57

Crete, 45

Crith gabhlach, the, 584

Crimhthan or Criomhthann, High King, 33; saga of his death, 402

Crimthann Niadhnair, 26, 409

Criminal jurisdiction of priests, 14

Cruithni, Cruithnigh, or Picts, 282, 292

Crom-Cruach, 85 ff., 134

Crowe, O'Beirne, 402, 407

Crosses, Irish sculptured, 457

Cromwell, 497, 517, 562, 621

Crunn's wife, courtship of, 402

Cruelty of later English settlers, 601

Cry of the deer, 146

Cuala, Cualann, 49

Cuan O'Lochain, poet, 72, 264, 441, 447 ff.

Cuana, author, 39, 265

Cuanna, St., 211

Cucoigcriche as a proper name, 577

Cuchulain, 49; first cousin of Conall Cearnach, 69; death of recorded by Tighearnach, 69; takes arms, 90; his sick bed, 101; cuts ogams, 110; historical character of, 252; his charioteer, 255, 350; his chariot, 256; son of a god, 294; stories of, in Red Branch cycle, 296 ff.; age, 341; slays Curoi, 245; Louth version of his death, 627; leaves no descendants, 69

Culmenn, or skin book, 263

Culdee, 412, see "Céile De"

Cumhal or Cool, 57, 365; sailing of, 366

Cummain, or Cummian, the tall, 168, 201 ff., 217

Cuimine or Cummene Finn of Iona, 182, 189; his epistle, 203

Cumhsgraidh or Cumscraith of the Red Branch, 322, 359

Curoi mac Daire, 245, 342

Currency, Irish system of, 125

Cursing of Tara, 226 ff.; of Cletty, 232; of Raghallach, 233; a saint's curse, 237

Curigh or Curoi mac Daire, 64, 245

Cycles, Roman and Alexandrian, 202

Cycles of story telling,various, 280

D

Dagda, the, 48, 78; called Eochaidh the ollamh, 52; figures in mythological saga, 285 ff.; dies, 80

Dá Derg, 389 ff.

Dáithi, expedition to the Alps, 403; ancestor of Mac Firbis, 562

Dagobert, 11; of France, 220

Dalrymple, Sir James, 183

Dál Araide, or old Ulster tribes, 27

Dalcassians, the, 62, 63, 76, 428

Dál Fiatach, 27

Dál Riada clans, the, 34, 60, 68

Dalach, ancestor of the O'Donnells, 64

Dallán Forgaill, poet, 380, 405 ff.; his truculence, 410

Dana, the Paps of, 47

Dana, mother of the gods, 47, 286

Danes or Northmen, 209, 211, 212, 419; why aided by Leinster, 394; called "black" foreigners, 435; their oppressions, 435; after Clontarf, 442; despoil bards and poets, 444; plunder Armagh for the last time, 403

Dan Direach verse, 537

Dante, 198

Daniel Dewar, 624

Daor-chlanna or servile tribes, 27

Darmesteter, M., on Irish remains, 216; on the antiquity of Irish literature, 253; on "the decadence," 280

Date of Irish writings, difficulty of fixing, 269

Daughter, eldest married before younger, 393

David, St., of Wales, 193

Davies, Sir John, 585

De Mensura Pœnitentiarum, 203

Dean of Lismore, see "Macgregor"

De Danann, see "Tuatha"

Declan, 106

De Bourgos or Burkes, 606

Delphi stormed, 9, 262

Deaf Valley, 345

Deibhidh metre, 414, 446, 469; meaning of the word, 483; found in the oldest poems, 484; the official metre of the bards, 530; in Colloquy of the Ancients, 507; in the "Contention of the Bards," 530; used in Scotland, 547

Déirdre, 26; saga of, 302 ff.; various versions of, 304

Delbaeth, son of Ogma, 52

Denmark, history of, 78

Degrees, poetic, 242, 260

Dergthini, 63

Design, Irish, not all Celtic, 454

Dési, expulsion of the, 40; saga of, 402

Desmond, kings of, 61

Destruction of books, 107

Derry, 169

Derrynane, etymology of, 213

Devonshire, etymology of, 283

Development, continuous, of Fenian saga, 375

Devil appears to St. Brendan, 200

Diarmuid, High King, 93, 176, 206, 228 ff.; saga of his death, 403

Dialogue of the Sages, see "Colloquy of the Ancients"

Dialogue of the two sages, 240

Diarmuid O'Duibhne, 380-1, 385

Diarmuid and Grainne's beds, 57; memorials of their flight, 58; their elopement, 508

Diancécht the leech, 54, 286 ff.

Diarmuid, the Irish called Diarmuids by the English, 511

Dictionary, O'Naghten's Irish-English, 599; Mac Curtin's and O'Begley's English-Irish, 599

Dicuil the geographer, 107, 222, 448

Dichetal do Chennaibh na tuaithe, 241

Diefenbach, 21, 23

Diodorus, calls Ireland Iris, 21; on the Gauls, 94

Dionysius the pseudo, 218; on the druids, 257

Dionysus, 79

Dinnseanchus, contents and origin of, 93: on Moy Slaught, 85, 92; on Tara, 127; on Finn, 381; published by Stokes, 557

Dinn Righ, saga, 401

Division of Ireland by Ugony, 25; by Tuathal, 29; by Conn and Owen, 31

Dog's flesh, 348

Domhnach Airgid the, 268

Donnelly the boxer, 294

Donn's House, 49

Donatus, St., on Ireland, 164

Donough O'Brien, ode to, 28, 518

Dorbene, scribe, 184

Dottin, M. Georges, 17

Dowth, 48

Downpatrick, battle of, 66

Downpatrick, St. Patrick buried in, 190; Latin distych on, 191

Dowden, Dr., bishop of Edinburgh, 181

Drama, nearest approach to, in Ireland, 511

Drom Damhgaire, siege of, 402

Druim Ceat, Synod of, 234, 241, 489

Druids and druidism, 82; etymology of, 89, 91; functions of, 92; as intermediaries, 101; schools, 240-1; as peacemakers 257; in Britain, 94; slain by Cuchulain, 349; see also "Cathbadh"

Dryden, 271

Dryhthelm, 199

Duachs, two, 71

Dubhthach, the Brehon, 152, 588

Dubhthach, father of St. Brigit, 156

Dubhthach, a fifteenth century poet, 470

Dubhlacha, love of, for Mongan, 403, 634

Dubdaléithe, archbishop of Armagh, 414, 445

Duil of Drom Ceat, 265

Dun in place-names, ch. I n. 1

Dumbarton, 147

Dun-Angus, 459

Dungal, the astronomer, 207 ff., 222, 448

Dun-na-sgiath, 232

Dunraven, Lord, 459

Durrow, monastery of, 170, 217, 234

Dutton's Survey of Clare, 625

Dyfed in South Wales, 40

E

Eachtra Giolla an Amaráin, 603

Eagle, the, 541

Easter, the Irish, 202

Eber and the Eberians, 44, 58, 63-5, 140, 171, 204, 388, 515, 563

Eber Scot, 45

Eber of the White Knee, 46

Eclipses recorded in the Annals, 39

Eevil, see "Aoibheall," 602

Egyptians in Ireland, 219

Egbert, 220

Eire, or Erin, 48; whence so called, 284

Elim, 29

Eleran, St., 164

Elphin, 508

Elysium, Irish, 100

Elizabethan English in Ireland, 494

Emania [Emain Macha], founded by Cimbaeth, 24-5; taken and burnt, 33, 66, 75; cursed by a druid, 314

Emer, Cuchulain's wife, 296, 343, 352 ff., 592

Enda, St., 194, 201

Enna Cennsalach, 75

English plunder poets, 470; speak Irish even in Dublin, 611; wars in Munster, 470; English language opposed to Irish, 608 ff., see Ch. XLIV; works translated from, 572

Eochaidh Muighmheadhhoin, xv., 33, 65; saga of his sons, 402

Eochaidh, chief of the Dési, 40

Eochaidh, the ollamh, i.e., the Dagda, 52

Eochaidh, son of Mairid, death of, 402

Eochaidh, the poet, see "Dallan Forgaill"

Eochaidh Féidhleach, 26

Eoghan [Owen], rival of Conn, 31, 62, see "Owen"

Eoghanachts, the, 27, 62, 63

Eoghan, or Owen, Mór, 62

Epistle, Cummian's, 203

Epistolary style, 376

Epic, approach made by the Irish to a great, 400; material for an, 509 ff.

Erc, High King, 337, 349 ff.

Erimon and the Erimonians, 44, 58, 64, 204, 515, 563

Erigena, see "Scotus"

Erard, or Errard, see "Mac Coisè"

Ernaan tribes, 64, 388

Ernin, son of Duach, 71

Esru, 15

Escir Riada, the, 31

Etán, daughter of Diancécht, 54

Etain, wooing of, 102, 401

Etruscans defeated by the Celts, 6; allies, 9

Eugenians, book of the, 59

Euhemerus, 51

Euhemerising tendency of Cormac's Glossary, 54; of Keating, 51

Eumenius, 22

Eusebius, 217

Evil eye, 290

Eve, description of, in Saltair na Rann, 416 ff.

Evin, St., 153

Exaggeration in Irish style, 440

Explosive consonants in German, 11

F

F sound in dubh, 221

Fáchtna, St., of Ross, 213

"Fair hills of holy Ireland," 603

Fairy sweetheart or "bain-leannán," 27, 440

Falba Flann, 61

Famine, effects of the great, xii, 606

Faroe isles discovered by the Irish, 224

Fasting on a person, 229, 233, 236, 242, 417; the Brehon Law on, 587

Fé, 110

Fearadach, 27, 28, Ch. III n. 13

Féithlinn, fairy prophetess, 322

Fenius Farsa, 45, 581

Féis of Tara, 73, 126, 176

Féiliré of Angus, 173-4; date of, 265, 412 ff.

Fenians, the, 75, 116, 128; the Fenian cycle of saga, 363 ff.; origin of the name, 364; who were they, 371 ff.; Keating on them, 372; entry into the Fianship, 374; long-extended development of the saga, 375; kept for guarding coasts, 389; help Leinster against the High King, 394; imitation Fenian tale, 597

Ferdomhnach the scribe, 36, 138, 152

Feredach, 111

Feredach, King, a poet, 246

Ferceirtne or Feirceirtne, 240, 244, 336, 408

Ferdiad, 327 ff.

Fergil or Virgilius, 224, 448

Fergus the Great of Scotland, 34

Fergus mac Roy or Róigh, 60, 69, 198, 245, 295, 311 ff.

Fergus mac Léide, death of, 401

Fergus Finnbheoil, Fenian poet, 259, 512, 513

Ferguson, Sir Samuel, poem on Crom Cruach, 87; on ogams, 120; translation from O'Gnive, 522; on the Brehon Law, 586

Fiacc, or Fiach, of Sletty, 89; his Life of Patrick, 152 ff., 227; learns the "alphabet," 112

Fiachra, brother of Niall of the Nine Hostages, 93

Fiachaidh, 62

Fiachaidh Sreabhtine, 65, 75

Fiachaidh, High King, 29

Fiacadh, a Tuatha De Danann, 52

Filé, the, in Ireland, 486

Fierebras, chanson de geste, in Irish, 572

Fiesole, 164

Finn or Fionn mac Cúmhail, or Cool, in topography, 57, 76; his grandfather a druid, 83; his fool, 111; goes to the Lady Credé, 140; a poet 246, 270; fights with Goll, 258; two poems ascribed to, 275, 408, 479; death of, 379; character of, 379; helps Leinster against the High King, 394, Ossian describes his favourite pursuits, 503

Finnén, or Finian, St., of Clonard, 167, 194, 196, 204; verse from his "office," 106

Finnian, St., of Moville, 175, 195, 209

Fintan, St., 209

Finglas, Baron, 210

Finnachta, King, 211; remits the Bora tribute, 236 ff., 294

Finnbarr, St., of Cork, 212

Finan, St., of Innisfallen, 213

Finghin, a poet, 246

Finnabra Mèves daughter, 334-5

Finghin, King Conor's leech, 337

Fingal, language spoken in (perhaps Danish), 618

Fithil, a judge, 246

Firbolg, the, 47, 282 ff.; Mac Firbis's description of, 563

Fir Domnann, or Domhnan, 282, 328, 563

Fire-worship, 455

Fitzgeralds, the, 473, see "Geraldines"

Fitzgibbons, the, the Red Bard on, 477; Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, id.

Flag in Gartan, 179

Flannagan, King, a poet, 427

Flann mac Lonáin, a poet, 427

Flann of Monasterboice, 445 ff.

Fleming, John, 407, 603

Floods legacy to Trinity College, 625

Fodhla, 48

Folklore, 93, 448; the Other world in, 96

Fomorians, the, 51, 78, 282 ff., 429, 563

"Fooboon," 526 ff.

Forchern, 244

Fortchern, Bishop, 196

Forus Feasa, i.e., Keating's "History of Ireland," 61

Forus Focal, poem, 470

Fothadh na canóine, 234

Fragments of Irish annals, 234, 237,

Franciscans convent, Irish MSS. in, 513, 567, 575, 577

France, a refuge for the Irish, 553, 567

Frazer, Dr., on Irish gold, 124

French, the; largely of pre-Celtic race, 16

Frigidius, i.e., Finnian, 209

Furnival, Lord, 470

Fursa, St., vision of, 198

G

Gabhra, battle of, 32, 365, 366, 378, 383

Gaedhal, son of Niul, 45

Gaels, old, jealous of the Galls, 556

Gaelic spoken in Highland regiment, 622

Gaethluighe, 46

Gaileoin, 323, 563

Galls, the new and the old, 558-9

Gall, St., 197, 207; MSS. in, 267, 268

Gallia, as understood by the Romans, 3

Galatians, 2

Galatia founded by the Celts, 14

Galway, 554; English in, 610; Irish in, 630

Gartan Columcille's birth-place, 167, 179, 180

Gaul becomes Romanised, 15

Gaulish upper classes resemble the Irish, 15

Gaul, Irish commerce with, 218

Geasa (or tabus), Cuchulain's, 301, 344, 347, 348; of the Fenians, 373; of the Kings of Ireland, 447

Geanan, druid, 344

Gemman, a poet, 167

Genealogy, Irish, 59 ff.; Welsh, 72; extended to Noah, 78; great Irish books of, 59; strictly kept, 71

Geography, Irish treatise on, 597; poem on, 213

Gerald, Earl of Desmond, poet, 547

Gerald Mac Shane Fitzgerald, 610

Geraldines of Italian lineage, 35, 473, 476

Germans, their relations to the Celts, 8-10; defeat the Celts, 14; less intellectually cultured than the Celts, 253; unacquainted with rhyme, 481; their loan-words from the Celts, 12-13

Germanus, St., 144

Gernon, Anthony, writer, 572

Gilbert, Sir John, facsimiles of national MSS., 141, 463; catalogue of MSS., 567

Giles, Dr. 183

Gilla Keevin, or Giolla Caoimhghim, the poet, 379, 446; translates Nennius, 48; author of the Book of Reigns, 557

Gilla in Chomded, poet, 381

Giraldus Cambrensis on the physical beauty of Irishmen, 181; on Welsh pedigrees, 72; on St. Brigit, 161; on Brendan's Voyages, 198; on Moling, 210; on Irish illumination and the Book of Kildare, 461

Glam dichinn, a satire, 242

Glendalough, school of, 209

Glossaries copied by Mac Firbis, 562

Glosses, the oldest Irish, 267

Gods, confusion between them and men, 51, 79; races trace their origin to, 77; they die, 80; come and go in saga, 294; wounded by men, 325-6

Goddesses of the Tuatha De Danann, 53

Goibniu, the smith, 286, 289

Gold, wealth of in Ireland, 123 ff.; Irish gold in Denmark, 125

Goldsmith, ix

Goll Mac Morna, the Fenian, 258, 365

Gordons, the, 569

Gormly, or Gormfhlaith, Queen, 421, 425; a poetess, 426

Gort, 168

Gothic art, 454

Grattan on the Irish language, 625

Gráinne, Finn's wife, 380, 382, 385, 409

Graves, Rev. Dr., on ogams, 120; discovers date of the Book of Armagh, 137

Grave of the three Patron Saints, 190

Greeks, make alliance with the Celts, 6; their topography compared with that of Ireland, 58; belief in a divine ancestry, 78; story cycles, 80; legend of the gold and silver ages, 292

Greek taught in Ireland, 217 ff.; alphabet used by the Gaulish druids, 259; known to some of the Munster bards, 604

Greenwell on Irish urns, 126

Gregory, Pope, the Great, 215, 217

Grimm on the life of the gods, 80

Guaire, King of Connacht, 168, 395 ff.

Guardsman's Cry, the, 197

Guinnesses, the, 66

Guy of Warwick in Irish, 572

Gwynedd, 105

H

Haddan and Stubbs "Councils," 141, 145

Halliday's Keating, 364, 558, 615

Hardiman, 221, 432-3, 472, 493, 555, 596, 597-9

Harlaw, battle of, 479

Harris's "County Down," 623

Harpers, race of, not extinct in 1843, 628 ff.

Haughton, Dr., 434-5

Hawthorn tree, 242

Hebraic adulteration of Irish legend, 47

Hebrew in Ireland, 217 ff.

Healy, Rev. Dr., 106, 135, 144, 160, 171, 197, 209

Hell, descriptions of, 200, 416; cold, not hot, 504

Hellanikus, 51

Hennessy, Mr., 562, 581

Hennessy, Dick, Edmund Burke's cousin, 621

Heracles, 114

Hercules, 79

Herakleitus, mot of, 79

Herminones, 59

Herodotus, 51, 79

Heroes confounded with gods, 51

Hero's bit, the, 254 ff., 356 ff., 589

Hesiod, 351

Hibernia, derivation of, 516

Hibernica minora, 267

Highlands of Scotland, poetry of, 542 ff.; written language same as Irish, 547, 571; lyrical outburst in, 549; lyrics compared with the Irish, 605

High-kingship of Ireland, the, 452

Hilary, St., 149

Himera, battle of, 6

Himilco's account of Ireland, 20

Hippocrates, 78

History, none written in Irish before Keating's, 582

Hippolytus, an Irish, 403

Hogan, Father, 57; documenta de S. Patricio, 75, 136, 144; Rosnaree, 342; on Curtin, 600; on the Irish-speaking Franciscans, 612; and Jesuits, 615

Holywood, Father, 612

Homer quoted, 111, 326, 351, 366; translated into Irish, 600

Horace uses conachlonn once, 414

Hostelry, see "bruidhean"

Hound, Mac Datho's, 354

Howel Dda, 41

Howel, James, on the sound of Irish, 613

Hull, Miss, her Cuchullin saga xvi

Hyperboreans, 2

Hy-Brasil, 96

I

Iceland discovered by the Irish, 223

Iconoclasts, the, 208

Idols in Ireland, 83 ff.

Illyrians beaten by the Celts, 6

Illumination of Irish MSS., 462 ff.

Illusions caused by magic, 344 ff., 347

Images, 55, 92

Imbus Forosnai, 84, 241

Immortality a Celtic doctrine, 96

"Imchiuin," the happy other world, 99

Incantation to idols, 84

Indaei, 52

Ingaevones, 59

Ingcel the Briton, 389 ff.

Innisfallen, school of, 213; annals of, 65

Iniscaltra, school of, 213

Inscriptions, oldest, 107

Inscriptions, Celtic, 262

Instruction of a Prince, 247 ff.

Intoxication of the Ultonians, 256

Inver Colpa, whence called, 49

Iona, 180

Ir and the Irians, 44, 58, 64, 65, 68, 198, 204, 515, 563

Ireland, synonyms for, 525

Irish, writers of English, ix; literature still remaining, xi; proper names, xv; Texts Society, 190; monks and scholars on the Continent, 448 ff.; in Germany, etc., 449; Brigade, Irish spoken in the, 621; art, collapses with the Normans, 453 ff.

Irish language, recent speeches made in it, 180; why dying, 606; how far spoken in Ireland at various periods, see Ch. XLIV, p. 608-637; begins to borrow words from English, 618; ignored by the Protestant bishops, 619; so-called professorship of, in Trinity College, Dublin, xiv, 625

Iscaevones, the, 59

Ita, St., 201

Ith and the Ithians, 32, 44, 58, 64, 65, 67, 204, 244, 563

Italo-Celtic period, 12

Italy, Celts appear in, 5

Iuchar and Iucharba, 47, 52, 287

J

Jacobite poems of Ireland, 596 ff., 604

James I., commission on education, 554

James II., rekindles hope in the Irish, 593; an Irish poet on, 594, 596; elegy on his widow, 598

James, the Pretender, 596

Janus, 79

Jarlath, St., 195

Jasonia, 58

Jerome, St., finds the Galatians speaking Celtic, 14; sees the Attacotti, 22; his revision of the Psalter, 176; on the language of Gaul, 28

Jesters described, 392

Jesuits in Ireland, 615

Jews, 225

Jocelin's life of St. Patrick, 153

Joceline of Furness, 207

John Scotus Erigena, 218, 284, 448

John of Tinmouth, 189

Johnson, Mr., on Irish gold-work, 125

Jonas, Abbot, 216

Jones, Dr., "Vestiges of the Gael in Gwynedd," 105

Jubainville, M. d'Arbois de, xi, 3, 10, 11, 130, 215; on the Cuchulain cycle, 252; on the Irish language, 261; on the word Tuatha De Danann, 286; on the Irish Sohrab and Rustum, 300; on Cuchulain at Emania, 347; on the name of the Fenian cycle, 280; number of MSS. catalogued by him, 404; on O'Hartigan's death, 430; on Tighearnach, 580; on the age of the Seanchas Mór, 589

Juggler, a, described, 391

K

Kavanagh, General, 622

Keating, on Buchanan, 19; on the names of Ireland, 20; euhemerises 51-2; on the Cin of Dromsneachta, 70, 264; on the convention of Uisneach, 90; on the attendants of the Irish kings, 127; on the Tara assembly, 129; on Cúl Dremhne, 176; silent on the cursing of Tara, 227; on Raghallach, 233; on the Ulster and Connacht wars, 318; on the Fenians, 372 ff.; on the Danes, 444; on the number of bards, 488; attended the bardic schools, 551; life and works, 551-560; his language compared with O'Clery's, 580

Keevin, or Kevin [Caoimhghin], St., 195, 209

Keegan, Father James, 301, 401, 498

Kells, 170

Keenan, Sir Patrick, on the use of the Irish language, and on bilingualism, 631 ff.

Kelly, Michael, composer, 622

Keller, Dr. Ferdinand, 184-5

Kemble, Mr., 456

Kenneth, King of Scotland, 34

Kenneth, St., or Cainneach, 196

Killeen Cormac, inscription of, 108

Kildare, church of, 158 ff.; decorative art of, 160; round tower of, 160; book of, 461 ff.; Earl of, his library, 611

Kilmacrenan [Cill mhic Neóin], 167

Kilkenny, English in, 608; confederation of, 613

Kilkellies, the, 33

Kings, number who reigned at Tara, 42; prayer for Irish king and army, 436; obliged by law to retain bards and ollamhs, 490

Kincora, or Ceann Coradh, palace of Brian Boru, 431; Mac Liag's ode to, 432

Kinsale, battle of, effects of, 566

"Knight," Irish for, 363

Knock Aine, 48

Knock Gréine, 48

Knowth, 48

Kohl, J. C, a German traveller, 626

Küttner, a German traveller, 623

L

Labhraidh, or Lowry the mariner, 25, 401, 408

Labialism in Greek, Latin, Welsh, and Irish, 5

Laeg, 102, 331 ff., 350

Laeghaire, of the Red Branch, 255, 257, 357

Laeghaire [Leary], Lorc, 25

Laeghaire, or Laoghaire [Leary], High King, 75, 91, 196

Laidcend mac Bairchida, 243

Language, modification of, according to date of scribe, 269 ff.; see also "Irish" and "English."

Languages spoken at Marseilles, 218

Lanigan, 85

Lands set apart by law for the bardic orders, 490

Lappenberg, a German traveller, 626

Lasserian, St., 196

Latin language nearly allied to Celtic, 11

Latin, first poems made in, in Ireland, 149; familiar to the Irish, 530; works translated from, 572, 598; the late bards knew, 603; rhymed verses in, 482-3

Laurence of Durham, 164

Laurence O'Toole [or Tuathail], St., 211, 238

Lavarcham, or Leborcham, 303 ff., 343

Law, how administered in Ireland, 584 ff.; see "Brehon"; specially enacted, 587; books of, very numerous, 590

Laymen scholars, 455

"Lay of the Heads," 353

Layamon, 272

Leabhar Breac, the, 138, 150, 151, 157, 164, 173, 257; when copied, 470, 489

Le gach boin a boinin, 176

Leabhar na Féinne, 499

Leabhar gabhála, 281, see "Book of Invasions"

Leabhar na h-Uidhre, 70, 168, 264, 366, 380, 388, 405, 444; when compiled, 207

Lecky, Mr., 623

Ledwich, 135-6, 185

Lecan, book of, 59

Lee, as a surname, 13

Leinster, book of genealogies, 59

Leinster, the Boru tribute imposed on, 393 ff.

Leprecháns, King of the, his journey to Emania, 401

L'Estrange as a name, 577

Letters in Ireland, 105 ff.; ogam letters, 113

Lhuyd, 4

Liath Macha, the, 345, 350-351

Liber Hymnorum, 146, 149, 165, 180, 202, 444, 480, 485

Liber Dubhdaleithe, 39

Linche, Dominicke, 611

Lindon, Patrick, poet, 605

Lismore, college of, 211

Lisnacroghera, bronze sword-sheaths of, 455

Lives of the saints, 239; list of them, 35; number still extant, 574

Livy on the Celtic wars, 8

Loch Cé, annals of, 28, see "Annals"

Loch Corrib, whence called, 48

Loch Derg, 467

Lochlannachs, the, in poetry, 499

Logographers, the Greek, 51

Lombards, the, 208

Lombard, Peter, archbishop of Armagh, 560 ff.; on the Irish language, 617

Longarad, St., books of, 264

Lorica, St. Patrick's, 146

Lothaire, King of France, 208

Love of Dubhlacha for Mongan, 403, 634

Lowry, or Labhraidh, the mariner, 25, 401, 408

Lucan, 94

Lucian, 79; description of Gaulish god Ogmios, 114

Lugh the Longhanded, 47, 78; dies, 80; reappears, 81, 262; in saga, 286 ff.

Lughaidh [Lewy], son of Ith, 44, 244

Lughaidh, son of Curoi, 342 ff., 357

Lughnasa = August, 48

Lugudunum, or Lyons, 80, 262

Lughar, a poet, 245

Lyons, see "Lugudunum"

Luguædon, 107

Lynch, John, 554

M

Mac Adam, Mr., 375

Mac Allans, the, of Scotland, 67

Macalister, on ogams, 120

Macaulay, 511

Mac Auliffes, the, 61, 64

Mac-an-Bhaird, or Ward, Father Hugh, 574

Mac Brodin, see "Teig"

Mac Brody, Conor, historian, 578

Mac Cabe, poet, 605

Mac Carthys, the, 32, 58, 64, 67, 205, 479; of Duhallow, 61; Riabhach, 61; genealogy of Mac Carthy, Mór, 61

Mac Carthy, Cormac, King of Munster, 213

Mac Carthy, Diarmuid, poet, 593

Macha, 53, 54; her curse on Ulster, 294; saga of, 402

Mac Cathmhaoil, Hugh, archbishop, author, 571

Mac Ceibhfinn, poet, 545

Mac Con, High King, 32, 60, 67

Mac Comber's Christian Remembrancer, 626

MacConmara, Donough, poet, 602

Mac Coise, poet, 434, 447

Mac Coise, tale of, 278

Mac Craith, wars of Thomond, 466, 470, 582

Mac Curtin, Hugh, poet, 599

Mac Curtin, Andrew, poet, 49, 50, 546

Mac Curtin, Hugh, óg, poet, 470

Mac Cuairt, poet, 605

Mac Cumhaidh, Art, poet, 605

Mac Dáire, see "Teig"

Mac Datho's pig and hound, 354

Mac Davids, the, 62, 64

Mac Dermot, 28; Mac Dermot, Roe, 66, 599

Mac Dermots, princes of Moylurg, 33, 66, 204, 527

Mac Dermot, writes in Latin, 530

Mac Dermot, prince of Coolavin, 575

Mac Donnell, John Clarach, 600

Mac Donnell, Captain Alexander, book of, 471

Mac Donnells, the, 60, 546

Mac Donalds, the, 33

Mac Donaghs, the, 33, 66

Mac Donald, Alaster, 568 ff.

Mac Dugalds, the, 33

Mac Egan, Flann, Brehon of Ormond, 421, 578, 615

Mac Eochaidh, or Keogh, Donogh, poet, 475

Mac Finneens, the, 61, 64

Mac Firbis, Duald, 52, 206, 421; his Book of Genealogies, 73; its size, 562; on the Irish historians, 74; his life and works, 562 ff.

Mac Gee, D'Arcy, poem, 88

Macgeoghegan, Connell, or Mac Echagain, Connla, 207, 227, 616

Mac Gilla Patrick, 610

Mac Gilla Keefe, poet, 432 ff.

Mac Giolla Meidhre, poet, 601

Mac Gilla Cody, Richard, author, 572

Mac Grath, Andrew, poet, 604

Mac Graths, the, 524

Mac Govern, poet, 605

Macgregor, dean of Lismore, 271, 426, 492, 506, 508

Mac Hale, archbishop, 511

Mac Innes, Gaelic stories, 371

Mackenzie's "Sár-obair," 543

Mac Laughlin, P. O'C., 190

Mac Liag, poet, 428, 430 ff.

MacLeod, Mary, poetess, 543 ff.

Mac Leod, D. B., poet, 550

Mac Mahons, the, 33, 67

Mac Murroughs, or Murphys, the, 31, 610

Mac Namee, Brian, poet, 520

Mac Neill, John, 559

Macpherson's Ossian, 628

Mac Raicin, story of, 559

Mac Regol, Gospels of, 268

Mac Ritchie, Mr., 371

Mac Roth, Mèves messenger, 336

Mac Robartaighs, the, 175

Mac Rories, the, 33

Mac Sweeny [Mac Suibhne], poet of Connacht, 605

Mac Vuirichs, bards of Clanranald, 568

Machut, St., 199

Madden, Dr. Samuel, 623

Maelruain, 209

Maelsuthain O'Carroll, 141, 213

Maeldubh, or Maelduf, 221

Maelfathartaigh mac Ronain, death of, 403

Maelsheachluinn, pronunciation of, 431

Maelbrigte Ua Maelruanaigh, scribe, 463

Maedhóg, or Mogue, life of, 85

Magennises, the [Mac Aonghusa], 66

Maguires [MacUidhir or Meguidhir], the, 33, 60, 67, 522, 536

Maguire, of Inniskillen, satirised, 476

Maguire, Cathal, annalist, 470

Maguire, Cuchonnacht, lord of Fermanagh, 519, 523

Maineach, [O'Kelly's Country], 59

Mailmura of Fahan, poet, 427

Malachy [Maoilsheachlainn], King, 447

Malachy O'Morgair, 208

Malcolm IV., of Scotland, 34

Manannán, 54, 81, 99, 102

Mangan quoted, 221, 432, 523

Mannus, 59

Manuscripts, illuminated, 461

Maolmordha MacSweeny's house described, 520

Marainn Phadraig, the, 148, 270

Marco Polo in Irish, 572

Maundeville's travels in Irish, 572

Marianus Scotus, 209, 449 ff.

Martyrology of Tallaght, 151; by whom composed, 209

Mary of the Gael, the, 162

Marseilles, trilingual, 310

Masters, see "Annals of the Four Masters"

Maud, modern form of Mève [Meádhbh], 26

Masree, bardic college, 490

Max Müller, 270

Meath, book of, 59; made into a province, 29

Memory for ancestors, 72; Celtic memory is long, 271

Meehan, Father, 567

Menapii, the, 19

Merlin the prophet, 210

Metempsychosis, Irish belief in, 95, 381, 400

Metal-work, Irish, 456 ff.

Metre, poems dependent on, 273 ff.; no alteration of feet, beat, or stress, in Irish metres, 408; metre of the Féilirè, 413; of Saltair na Rann, 414, 418; Droighneach metre, 479; metres of the bards, 487; classical metres merge in popular, 497; the Ossianic metres, 510, 513; Dr. MacHales, id.; Little Rannaigheacht, 526; Great R., 530; Roman metres, 530; Seadna and great Séadna, Ae-fri-Slighe, Great and Little Deachna, 531; how to read the classical metres, 532, 545; necessitate condensed thought, 537; examples of late metres, 548 ff.

Metrical text books, 241 ff.

Mève or Méadhbh, 26; how pronounced, 31; in topography, 57; in saga, 319 ff.; furious temper of, 323; fights like Boadicea, 335; she and Oilioll receive the Firbolg, 283

Mève's poem on Cuchorb, 273 ff.

Meyer, Kuno, Dr., 41, 86, 97, 114, 301, 354, 411, 413; on Irish scansion, 232-3

Mi-chuarta or Midh-Chuarta, the house of, 32, 248

Midir, 102

Middle-Irish, 268

"Midnight Court," the, 601

Migne, 203

Milan, Irish MSS. in, 267

Mill first, in Ireland, 32

Miledh Easpáin, 46

Milesius, Latinised form of Miledh, 17; his genealogy, 45; his son Donn addressed as a god, 49, 50, 77

Milesians, different dates assigned to their landing, 17, 60; by what route did they come, 18 ff.; their characteristics, 563

Milton, 569

Missal, ancient Irish, 436

Missionaries, British, in Ireland, 106

Missionaries, Irish, abroad, 223, 488 ff.

Mobhi, St., school of, 168, 196

Mochuda, St., or Carthach, 211, 233

Modan, poet, 246

Moengal of St. Gall, 448

Molesworth, Robert, 621

Moling, St., 209, 210, 236 ff. 394

Molaise, St., 174, 177, 178

Momera, courtship of, 402

Monasterevin, 153

Monasteries, rival, fight, 234; established by Irish monks on the Continent, 449, 451

Montrose's wars in Gaelic 568

Montelius, Prof., 124

Mongan, 99, 380, 403; Dallán and Mongan, 410 ff.; "Love of Dubhlacha" for, 634-5

Moran, the jurist, 246

Moran, Cardinal, 198

Moreen ni Culenáin, air, 549

Moore, Irish History, 65; his melody, "Rich and Rare," 444

Morini's life of St. Cathaldus, 211

Morighan, or Mór-rigu, the, war-goddess, consorts with the Dagda, 288; assists the Tuatha De Danann, 291; is wounded by Cuchulain, 325; speaks to the Dun Bull, 339; cry of, 478

Mountjoy, Lord, 476, 564

Moville, school of, 167, 209

"Mower, the," a poem, 604

Moy [mágh] Bolg, massacre of, 29

Moy Cullen, whence called, 48

Moy Léana, battle of, 31, 368

Moy Mell, 99, 199, 201

Moy Muirtheimhne, Great Breech of, 326

Moy Mochruime, battle of, 32, 60, 355, 376; date of, 380, 382

Moy Rath, battle of, 382, 403, 413

Moytura, first battle of, 284

Moytura, battle of South, 80, 116, 289 ff.

Moy Slaught or Sleacht, 84, 85

Mucaille, bishop, 158

Muiredach takes the surname Mac Carthy, 61

Muirchu Maccu Machteni, his life of St. Patrick, 136, 142, 148, 151

Muircheartach Mór mac Earca, 232

Muircheartach of the Leather Cloaks, 428

Muirthemni, derivation of, 49

Muiredach Mac Robertaigh, see "Marianus Scotus"

Munster, book of, 59; the two Munsters, 29

Mura, St., 167, 182

Muratori, 149

Murough, or Murrough [Murchadh], son of Brian Boru, 440

Murough the Scotchman, see "O'Daly," 492

Murphy, John, poet, 604

Murphy, Father Denis, 564

Murphys, the, see "Mac Murroughs"

Music, Irish, 463

Musicians in Ireland, 496

Myth, runs into history, 57

Mythology, Hellenic and Teutonic, 78

Mythological cycle of sagas, 271 ff.

N

Names of Ireland, various, 20

Names, Christian, disused, 162; the Irish ordered to adopt English names, 609; the Normans change their names, 609

"National" Schools, the, x, xi, 220

National Board, unsympathetic teaching of, 162, 179, 606; sets itself to exterminate the Irish language, 630 ff.

Navigatio Brendani, 198

Nechtan's dún, 111

Neith, god of battle, 54

Neide, 240, 245

Nemedians, the, 47, 82, 280, 430

Nemon, wife of Neith, 54

Nennius the Briton, 18, 46, 47; Irish translation of, 48

Netlau, Max, 328

Netterville, poet, 605

New Grange, 48, 454

Newfoundland, 603

Niall of the Nine Hostages, 33, 34, 60, 65, 71, 75, 166, 446, 452, 515, 527, 579, 603

Niall of the Black Knee, 35, 58, 425

Niamh, Cuchulain's sweetheart, 346

Nice, Council of, 202

Nigra, Constantine, 596; on the Celtic invention of rhyme, 481; on the monks' ode to the blackbird, 485

Nile, the, Irish sail up it, 223

Ninian, St., 194

Ninnidh, St., of Loch Erne, 196

Nindid "the scholar," 161

Niul, son of Fenius Farsa, 45

Noli pater, Columcille's, 181

Nomad, a measure of time, 84

Norman invasion, the, its effects, 453 ff; arrests Irish development, 463; effect on the bards, 491

Norman ancestry of Keating, 553, 556; Norman names amongst the Irish poets, 493