Note 7 — Chapter XL

The first volume of Keating's History was published in Dublin by Halliday, in 1811, but that brilliant young scholar did not live to complete it. John O'Mahoney, the Fenian Head Centre, published a splendid translation of the whole work from the best MSS. which in his exile he was able to procure, in New York in 1866, but its introduction into the United Kingdom was prohibited on the grounds that it infringed copyright. Dr. Todd remarks on this translation, "notwithstanding the extravagant and very mischievous political opinions avowed by Mr. O'Mahoney, his translation of Keating is a great improvement upon the ignorant and dishonest one published by Mr. Dermod O'Connor more than a century ago,"—a foolish remark of Dr. Todd's, who must have understood that most readers of Keating are to be found amongst men to whom his own political opinions thus unnecessarily vented, were equally "mischievous." Dr. Robert Atkinson published the Text of the "Three Shafts of Death" without a translation, but with a most carefully-compiled and admirable glossary in 1890. Keating's third work has never been published, but I printed some extracts from a good MS. of it lent me by the O'Conor Don in an American paper. My friend Mr. John Mac Neill has pointed me out what is apparently a fourth work of Keating's on the Blessed Virgin.