of her legislators, the institutions of her various orders of chivalry, and the collegiate retreats of her scholars,-while thus, the Keatings, Walkers, O'Hallarans, availing themselves as well of the falsehood as of the facts of Irish tradition and history, have agreed in picturing the early times of their country as a perfect golden age of glory, political wisdom, and refinement; their opponents, the Ledwiches and Pinkertons, alike confident in the strength of their evidence, pronounce the whole of the very same period to have been one unreclaimed waste of ignorance and barbarism.

66

The chief authorities upon which this latter view of the question rests, are, among the Greek writers, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo; and among the Romans, Pomponius Mela and Solinus. By all these four writers, who flourished, at successive intervals, from a period just preceding the Christian era to about the middle of the third century, Ireland is represented to have been, at the respective times when they lived, in a state of utter savageness. According to Strabo* and Diodorust the natives were in the habit of feeding upon human flesh; the former writer adding, that the corpses of their parents were their favourite food, and that they committed incest publicly. The description of them by Pomponius Mela is more general, but fully as strong: They had no sense whatever," he says, "of virtue or religion:" and Solinus also, in mentioning some of their barbarous customs, declares "that they made no distinction between right and wrong."{ Were there not strong grounds for calling in question their claims to authority, as regards Ireland, the evidence of these writers would possess, of course, considerable weight. But the truth is, to none of them, and, least of all, to the two most ancient and respectable of the number, Diodorus and Strabo, is any attention, on the subject of a country so wholly unknown to them, to be paid. The ready reception given by Diodorus to all stray fictions, even in those parts of his work not professedly fabulous, would, in itself, justify some degree of distrust in any statements of his not otherwise sustained. But in the case of Ireland there was, in addition to this too easy belief, an entire ignorance on the subject. Writing his work before the Romans had made any settlement in Britain, he but shared in the general darkness then prevailing, both among Romans and Greeks, with regard to the state, history, and even geographical position of the British Isles.|| More than half a century after Diodorus had completed his history, we find Pomponius Mela declaring, that until the expedition of the emperor Claudius, then in progress, Britain had been shut out from the rest of the world.¶ When such, till that period, had been the general ignorance respecting Britain, it may be judged how secluded from the eyes of Europe must have been the still more western island in her neighbourhood; and how little known its internal state, except to those Celtic and Iberian tribes of Spain, with whom the commerce which then frequented the Irish harbours, must have been chiefly interchanged. It is, indeed, curious, as contrasted with the reports of her brute barbarism just cited, that the first authentic glimpse given of the state of Ireland by the Romans, should be to disclose to us such a scene of busy commerce in her harbours, and of navigators in her waters; while, to complete the picture, at the same moment, one of her subordinate kings was a guest, we are told, in the tent of Agricola, and negotiating with him for military aid.

The geographer Strabo, another of the witnesses adduced in proof of Irish barbarism, was equally, disqualified with Diodorus from giving evidence upon the subject, and from precisely the same cause,- his entire ignorance of all relating to it. Even on matters lying within the sphere of his own peculiar science, this able geographer has, in his account of Ireland, fallen into the most gross and presumptuous errors;* ** presumptuous, inasmuch as some of them were maintained in direct and wilful defiance of what had been delivered down, upon the same points, by the ancient Greek geographers, who, from following closely in the steps of the Phoenicians, were, in most instances, correct.

* The charges of Strabo against Ireland are contained in the following passage:-Пegs ns ouder exoμer λέγειν σαφές, πλην ότι αγριώτεροι των Βρεττανών υπαρχουσιν οι κατοικούντες αυτήν, ανθρωποφάγοι τε οντες και πολυφάγοι, (al. ποηφαγοι) τους δε πατέρας τελευτήσαντας κατεσθίειν εν καλω τιθεμενοι και φανερώς μισγεσθαι ταις τε άλλαις γυναιξί γαι μητρασι και αδελφοις.—Lib. iv.

They eat men," says Diodorus, in speaking of the Gauls, like the Britons inhabiting Iris, or Irin." Φασι τινας ανθρώπους εσθίειν, ώσπες και του βρεττανών τους κατοικούντας την ονομαζομένην Ιδιν.—Lib. iv. Of the application of this passage to Ireland, Rennel thus doubtfully speaks:-" It is not altogether certain, though highly probable, that the country intended is Ireland."

Omnium virtutum ignari, pietatis admodum expertes.-Lib. iii. c. 6.

Fas atque nefas eodem animo ducunt.

Diodorus himself acknowledges that, at the time when he wrote, the British isles were among the regions least known to the world :Ηκιστα πέπτωκεν υπό την κοινην ανθρωπων επιγνωσιν —Lib. iii.

¶ Britannia, qualis sit qualesque progeneret, mox certiora et magis explorata dicentur. Quippe tamdiu clausam aperit ecce Principum Maximus, Clandius.-De Sit. Orb. lib. iii.

**Among others of these errors, he represents Ireland so far to the north of Britain, as to be almost uninhabitable from extremity of cold.-Lib. ii. As far as we have at present the means of judging, his predeces sors Eratosthenes and Pytheas were far more correctly informed as to the geography of the western parts of Europe.

It ought, however, in justice to Strabo, to be mentioned, that he prefaces his account of the Irish brutalities by admitting that he had not received it from any trust-worthy authority.* How little could have been known of Ireland at the time when Mela wrote, may be inferred from the fact which he himself tells us, that even Britain was then, for the first time, about to be made known to her invaders. But many a British campaign took place after that event, before Ireland was even thought of; and, till the time of Agricola's expedition, it was, to the Romans, an undiscovered land. With regard to Solinus, besides that the period at which he lived seems to be altogether uncertain, he is allowed, in general, to have been but an injudicious compiler from preceding writers, and little stress, therefore, is to be laid on his authority.

It is, then, manifest, that all the evidence derived from foreign sources, to prove the barbarous state of the Irish before the Christian era, must, from the very nature of the authorities themselves, be considered worthless and null; while the numerous testimonies which Ireland still can produce, in her native language, her monuments, her ancient annals and traditions, all concur in refuting so gross and gratuitous an assumption. Having disposed thus of the chief, if not the only strong grounds of one of the two conflicting hypotheses, to which the subject of Irish antiquities had given rise, I am bound to deal no less unsparingly with that other and far more agreeable delusion, which would make of Ireland, in those early ages, a paragon of civilization and refinement,-would exalt the splendour of her Royal Palaces, the romantic deeds of her Red-Branch Knights, the Celestial Judgments of her Brehons, and the high privileges and functions of her Bards. That there is an outline of truth in such representations, her most authentic records testify; it is the filling up of this mere outline which is, for the most part, overcharged and false. The songs and legends of the country are, in such descriptions confounded with her history; her fictions have been taken for realities, and her realities heightened into romance. Those old laws and customs of the land, so ruinous, as we have seen, to peace and industry, could not have been otherwise than fatal to the progress of civilization; nor can any one who follows the dark and turbid course of our ancient history, through the unvaried scenes of turbulence and rapine which it traverses, suppose for an instant, that any high degree of general civilization could coexist with habits and practices so utterly subversive of all the elements of civilized life.

At the same time speculating on the aspect of Irish society at any period whatsoever, full allowance is to be made for those anomalies which so often occur in the course of affairs in that country, and which, in many instances, baffle all such calculations respecting its real condition, as are founded on those ordinary rules and principles by which other countries are judged. Even in the days of Ireland's Christian fame, when, amidst the darkness which hung over the rest of Europe, she stood as a light to the nations, and sent apostles in all directions from her shores,-even in that distinguished period of her history, we shall find the same contrasts, the same contrarieties of national character, presenting themselves; insomuch that it would be according as the historical painter selected his subjects of portraiture-whether from the calm and holy recesses of Glendalough and Inisfallen, or the rath of the rude chief and the fierce councils of rebel kings— that the country itself would receive either praise or reprobation, and be delineated as an island of savages or of saints.

But there is an era still more strongly illustrative of this view of Irish character, and at the same time recent enough to be within the memory of numbers still alive. That it is possible for a state of things to exist, wherein some of the best and noblest fruits of civilization may be most conspicuously displayed in one portion of the community, while the habitual violences of barbarism are, at the same time, raging in another, is but too strongly proved by the history of modern Ireland during the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, a period adorned, it will hardly be denied, by as many high and shining names as ever graced the meridian of the most favoured country, and yet convulsed, through its whole course, by a furious struggle between the people and their rulers, maintained on both sides with a degree of ferocity, a reckless violence of spirit, worthy only of the most uncivilized life. Such an anomalous state of society, so fresh within recollection, might abate, at least, if not wholly remove, any confidence in the conclusion, that, because the public annals of ancient Ireland leave little else in the memory but a confused chaos of factions and never-ending feuds, she could not therefore have arrived at a higher rank in civilization than such habits of turbulence and lawlessness are usually found to indicate.

In the ill repute of the ancient Irish for civilization, their neighbours, the Britons,

* Και ταυτα δ' δυτω λεγομεν, ως ουκ έχοντες αξιόπιστους μάρτυρας.—Lib. iv.

equally shared; and the same charges of incest, community of wives, and other such abominations, which we find alleged against the Irish are brought also against the natives of Britain by Cæsar and Dion Cassius.* It is possible that, in both instances, the imputations may be traced to that policy of the commercial nations of antiquity which led them to impute all manner of atrocities and horrors to the inhabitants of places where they had established a profitable commerce. We have seen with what jealous care the Phoenician merchants, and subsequently, also, the Carthaginians and Greeks, endeavoured to turn the attention of the world from their trade with the British Isles, so as to prevent all commercial rivals from interfering with their monopoly. A part of this policy it may have, perhaps, been to represent the Irish as brutes and cannibals, and their neighbours, the Britons, as little better; and the traders who crowded the ports of the former island in the first century would be sure to encourage the same notion. So well and long did these traditional stigmas adhere, that the poet Ausonius, in the fourth century, pronounces the appellation Briton to be then synonymous with that of bad or wicked man ;‡ and about the same period,—not many years previously to the great naval expedition of the Irish monarch, Niul Giallach, against the coasts of Britain,—we find St. Jerome gravely describing an exhibition which he had himself witnessed in his youth, in Gaul, of some cannibal Scots, or Irishmen, regaling themselves upon human flesh.

Much the same sort of inconsistencies and contradictions as are found to embarrass and render difficult any attempt to estimate the social and moral condition of the ancient Irish, will be found also in the facts illustrative of their state of advancement in those arts, inventions, and contrivances, which are the invariable results of civilized life. That, so early as the first century, their harbours were much resorted to by navigators and merchants, the authority of Tacitus leaves us no room to doubt; and their enjoyment of a foreign trade may be even referred to a much remoter period, as we find Ptolemy, in citing testimony of one of those more ancient geographers, from whom his own materials on the subject of Ireland are mostly derived, remarking, among his other claims, to credibility, his having rejected all such accounts of that country as were gathered from merchants who had visited her ports with a view to traffic alone.||

Notwithstanding this clear and authentic evidence of her having been, not merely in the first century, but in times preceding our era, in possession of a foreign commerce, it appears equally certain that neither then, nor for many ages after, had the interior trade of the country advanced beyond the rude stages of barter; nor had coined money, that indispensable ingredient of civilized life, T been yet brought into use. It is true, both O'Flaherty and Keating tells us of a coinage of silver in the reign of the monarch Eadna Dearg, no less than 466 years before the birth of Christ, at a place called Argeatre, as they say, on the banks of the river Suir, in Ossory. But it is plain that the name here, as in many other such traditions, was the sole foundation of the fable,-etymology having been, in all countries, one of the most fertile sources of fiction and conjecture.** Equally groundless may be pronounced the account given by Keating of mints erected and money coined for the service of the state, about the time of the commencement of St. Patrick's apostleship. It is certain that, for many centuries after this period, the custom of paying gold by the weight may be traced; and so long did cattle, according to the primitive meaning of the term pecunia, continue to be the measure of value, that, so late as the

* Uxoris habent deni duodenique inter se communas, et maxime fratres cum fratribus parentesque cum liberis."-De Bell. Gal. lib. v. cap 16. In referring to the charges of these two historians against the Britons, Whitaker says, "The accusation is too surely as just as it is scandalous."-Hist of Manchester, book I. chap. x. sect. 5. In a sermon of St. Chrysostom, quoted by Camden (Introduct. lxx.) that father exclaims, "How often in Britain did men eat the flesh of their own kind!"

† In the opinion of Pownal, this policy of the ancients, in "keeping people away from their possessions," will account for the tales of the Anthropophagi, the Syrens, and all the other " metamorphosic fables, turning policied and commercial people into horrid and savage monsters."

This poet has a whole string of pointless epigrams on the same quibble. Cellarius, in quoting one of them says, "Male illo tempore Britanni audiebant:" ideo, epigrammate 112,-"Nemo bonus Brito est."

Quid loquar de ceteris nationibus cum ipse adolescentulus in Gallia viderim Scotos, gentem Britannicam, humanis vesci carnibus."-S. Hieron contra Jovinian, lib. ii.

Thus in the Latin version of Ptolemy:-" Atqui et ipse Marinus Tyrius mercatorum relationibus nequa. quam fidem adhibere videtur. Itaque Philemonis sermoni longitudinem Insulæ Hiberniæ ab ortu occasum usque xx. dierum esse tradenti haudquaquam adstipulatur, dicens hoc eos a mercatoribus percepisse, hos enim ait veritatis in derogationem haud curari, intentos mercimoniis."-Geog. lib. ii. c. 11.

Soyez seul, et arrivez, par quelque accident, chez un peuple inconnu, si vous voyez une pièce de mon. noie, comptez que vous êtes arrivé chez une nation policée."-Montesquieu, 1. xviii. c. 15.

** By the same ready process, another Irish monarch, Aepy Fuarchis, who reigned A. M. 3508, was made the inventor of Currachs, or wicker boats; his name, Fuarchis, signifying a boat not well joined.-Ogy. part iii. chap. 34.

beginning of the sixteenth century, the celebrated Book of Ballymote* (a compilation from the works of some earlier Irish seanachies,) was purchased by a certain Hugh O'Donnel for 140 milch cows;-a transaction combining in itself, rather curiously, at once the high estimation of literary merit which marks an advanced state of society, and a mode of payment belonging only to its very earliest ages.

While in their home commerce such evidence of backwardness presents itself, their means of carrying on a foreign trade appear to have been equally limited. For any distance beyond their own and the immediately neighbouring coasts, the resources of their navigation were but rude and insecure, consisting chiefly of those large, open boats, called Currachs, which, like the light vessels of osier and leather used by the ancient Liburnians, were composed of a frame-work of wood and wicker, covered over with the skins of cattle or of deer. These boats, though in general navigated by oars, were capable of occasionally carrying masts and sails,-the latter being, like those of the Veneti, formed of hides. There was also in use, among the Irish, for plying upon the rivers and lakes small canoes, made out of trees; and it must have been of this sort of rude craft that Giraldus spoke, when he said that the tail of a live salmon could upset them. That the currachs were considered to a certain degree seaworthy, may be judged from the expeditions in which they were sometimes employed. It was in a skiff of this kind, described by Columba's biographer as furnished with sails, that St. Cormac is said to have more than once ventured forth in quest of some lonely isle in the ocean where he might fix his retreat; and in one of these exploratory cruises he was out of sight of land, we are told, for fourteen days and nights.

It is among the many remarkable proofs of that identity of character and customs which the Irish preserved through so many ages, that, so far back as the time when Himilco visited these seas, the very same sort of boats were in use among the natives; and that the holy men of the "Sacred Island" were then seen passing, in their hide-covered barks, from shore to shore, in the very same manner as was practised by her saints and missionaries more than a thousand years after.

A reverend historian cited in a preceding part of this work, has described, as we have seen, with much pomp and circumstance, the fleet of the Irish monarch, Nial Giallach, with the shield of the admiral at the mast-head, the rowers chiming their oars to the music of the harp, and other such probable appurtenances. On the same poetical authority from whence this description is derived, we are told by another writer of the names given by the Irish mariners to particular stars, by whose light they were accustomed to steer in their voyages,-such as the Guide to Erin, the Guide to Scandinavia, the Guide of Night. Such false pictures of manners, put forth in grave works, and on such authority as that of Ossian, are little less than deliberate insults on a reader.

To the facts above stated, as apparently inconsistent with the notion of the Irish having been, in those times, a trading people, may be opposed, on the other side, the actual traces still remaining of ancient causeways and roads throughout the country.** One great commercial road, having walls, we are told, on each side, strengthened with redoubts, was carried from Galway along the south boundaries of the people called anciently the Auteri, and along by the borders of the counties of Meath and Leinster, to Dublin.tt If the conjecture of Whitaker, too, be adopted, that the great road, called the Watling Street, extending from Dover, through London, as far as Anglesey in Wales, was originally denominated, by the ancient Britons, the Way of the Irish, it is equally probable that the causeway from Galway to Dublin formed a part of the same line of conveyance; and that articles of commerce from the western and central parts of Ireland may have been, by this route, transmitted through Britain, and into Gaul.

Among the tests by which the civilization of a people may be judged, their degree of

*For an account of the origin and transmission of this celebrated Book of Records, which was chiefly compiled by Solomon O'Drum, see Trans. Iberno-Celt Society.

Giraldus speaks more particularly of the British currach.-(Descript. Camb.) "Cum autem naviculam salmo injectus cauda fortiter percusserit non absque periculo plerumque vecturam priter et vectorem evertit." Eremum in oceano quærere.

Nam cum ejus navis a terris per quatuordecem æstei temporis dies totidemque noctes, plenis, velis Austro flante vento, ad septentrionalis plagan cæli directo excurrere cursu.-Adamnan. De. S. Columb. Abbate Hiensi.

Armstrong's Gaelic Dictionary.

*See Brewer, Introduct., for remarks on the vestiges of "ecclesiastical and commercial paved roads still observable in several parts of Ireland." "These public ways," he adds, "appear to have led from such seaports as were formerly of principal consideration to the interior of the country."

Wood, Primitive Origin of the Irish, p. 96.

admission of natural children, however, to a legal right of inheritance, may be pronounced a custom peculiar to Ireland. General Vallancey, in his zeal to ennoble all that is connected with Irish antiquity, endeavours to show that this custom is of patriarchal origin, citing, as his only instance, that of the children of Jacob by the handmaids of his wives Leah and Rachel, who enjoyed, among the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel, a station equal to that of the children of his solemnly married wives. But the instance, besides being a solitary one, as well as attended with peculiar circumstances, is by no means sufficient to prove that such was the patriarchal custom; while, on the other hand, the significant act of Abraham, in presenting only gifts to his natural children, and separating them from his son Isaac, marks, as definitely as could be required, the distinction then drawn between legitimate and illegitimate children.*

As, in all communities, property is the pervading cement of society, a state of things such as has been just described, in which its tenure was kept, from day to day, uncertain, and its relations constantly disturbed, was perhaps the least favourable that the most perverted ingenuity could have devised, for either the encouragement of civilization or the maintenance of peace. The election of a Tanist, too, with no more definite qualifications prescribed than that he should be chosen from among the oldest and most worthy of the sept, opened, whenever it occurred, as fertile a source of contention and rivalry as a people, ready at all times for such excitement, could desire. However great the advantages attending an equal division of descendible property, in communities advanced sufficiently in habits of industry to be able to profit by those advantages, the effect of such a custom among a people like the Irish, the great bulk of whom were in an uncivilized state, was evidently but to nurse in them that disposition to idleness which was one of the main sources of their evils, and to add to their other immunities from moral restraint, the want of that powerful influence which superior wealth must always enable its possessor to exercise. Had there been any certainty in the tenure of the property, when once divided, most of the evils attending the practice might have been escaped. But the new partition of all the lands, whenever a death occurred in the sept, and the frequent removal or translation of the inferior tenants from one portion to another, produced such uncertainty in the tenure of all possessions, as made men reckless of the future, and completely palsied every aim of honest industry and enterprise. By the habits of idleness thus engendered, the minds of the great mass of the people were left vacant and restless, to seek employment for themselves in mischief, and follow those impulses of wild and ungoverned passion, of which their natures were so susceptible.

One of the worst political consequences of these laws of property was, that, by their means, the division of the people into tribes or clans, so natural in the first infancy of society, was confirmed and perpetuated. The very warmth and fidelity with which the members of each sept combined among themselves, but the more alienated them from every part of the community, and proportionably diminished their regard for the general welfare.

Another evil of the social system, under such laws, was the false pride that could not fail to be engendered by that sort of mock kingship, that mimic sovereignty, which pervaded the whole descending scale of their grandees, down to the Ruler of a small Rath, or even the possessor of a few acres, who, as Sir John Davies says, "termed himself a Lord, and his portion of land his country." As even the lowest of these petty potentates would have considered it degrading to follow any calling or trade, a multitude of poor and proud spirits were left to ferment in idleness; and, there being but little vent, in foreign warfare, for such restlessness, till towards the decline of the Roman power in

Inter Burgundiones id volumus custodiri, ut si quis filium non reliquerit, in loco filii filia in patris matrisque hereditate succeedat." The reader will find this, and other instances to the same purpose, cited in an able article on Mr. Hallam's Middle Ages, Edin. Review, No. lix.

It is asserted by Eustathius, that, among the Greeks, as low as the time of the Trojan war, illegitimate children stood on equal grounds of favour with the legitimate; but, except occasionally, as in such instances as that of Teucer, where the high rank of both parents throws a lustre round the offence, or in cases where a god was called in to bear the burden of the offspring, there appears, among the Greeks, to have been as much disgrace attached to illegitimacy, as among any other people. So far were their laws from allowing children of this description to inherit, that, in fixing the utmost amount of money which it was lawful for a father, at any time, to give them, it was strictly provided that such sum could only be given during his lifetime.

In speaking of the aunual partition of their lands, by the ancient Germans, as described by Cæsar (lib. vi. cap. 22..) Sir F. Palgrave says, "If, as we are told by Cæsar, the Germans wished to discourage agriculture and civilization, the means were excellently adapted to the end; and to understand the rural economy of the barbaric nations, we must always keep in mind that their habitations were merely encampments upon the land. Instead of firm and permanent mansions, constituting not only the wealth, but the defence of the wealth of the owner, we must view the Teuton and the Celt dwelling in wattled hovels and turf-built sheelings, which could be raised in the course of a night, and abandoned without regret or sacrifice, when the partition of the district compelled every inhabitant to accept a new domicile. Such was the state of Ireland." Vol. i. chap. 3.