which the provincial kings took part with the insurgents against the monarchial cause. At the head of this royal insurrection was Elim, the King of Ulster; and so A. D. successful for a time, with the aid of the populace, was his rebellion, that the young 126. monarch, Tuathal, found himself compelled to fly to North Britain, where, taking refuge at the court of his maternal grandfather, the King of the Picts, he determined to await a turn of fortune in his favour. Nor was it long before a great majority of the people themselves, wearied with their own excesses, and moreover chastened into a little reflection by that usual result of such seasons of outbreak, a famine, began to bethink themselves of the claims of their rightful sovereign, the grandson of their favourite king, Feredach the Just. Full of compunction for their ingratitude, they despatched messengers to solicit his return; in prompt obedience to which summons, the monarch landed at the head of a body of Pictish troops, and marching directly to Tara, was elected sovereign amidst the acclamations of his subjects. From thence, taking the field instantly against the rebels, he pursued his course, from victory to victory, throughout the kingdom, till the usurpation was wholly extinguished, the former relations of A. D. society every where restored, and the monarch himself hailed with general accla- 130. mation under the title of Tuathal, the Acceptable.

This second Plebeian War-to use the term applied to it by Irish historians-having been thus happily terminated, Tuathal convoked, according to custom, the General Assembly of the States at Tara, for the purpose of consulting with them respecting the general affairs and interests of the kingdom, but more especially with a view to the arrangement of the important question of the succession. In a country where kings were so very numerous, and all of them elective, every new demise of royalty was, of course, but a new signal for discord; and the sovereign crown being more than the rest an object of rivalry and ambition, was in proportion the greatest source of strife. Efforts had more than once been made to confine the right of succession to one family, and thereby limit at least the range of the mischief; but the temptation to violate all such restrictions had been found stronger than the oath pledged to observe them. The fatal consequence, however, of the late interruptions of the old Heremonian line of descent seemed to call imperatively for some protection against the recurrence of such disorders; and accordingly Tuathal found no difficulty in inducing the States of the kingdom to proffer their ancient and solemn oath, "by the sun, moon, and stars," that, as long as Ireland should be encircled by the sea, they would acknowledge him alone as their lawful monarch. The same pledges had been given to his predecessors, Heremon and Hugony; and, in all three instances, had been alike violated as soon as the breath had left the royal frame.

Under this monarch, the county of Meath, which occupied the centre of the island, was enlarged by a grant of land from each of the other provinces; and, under the name of "The Mensal Lands of the Monarch of Ireland," was appropriated thenceforth as an appanage of the royal domain. To gratify the taste of his people for conventions and festivals, he ordained that, in addition to the Triennial Council of Tara, there should be held annually thrce assemblies of the kingdom; one at Tlactha, on the night of Samhin, where fires were lighted and sacrifices offered to that divinity; another, on the day of the Baal-fire, at the sacred hill of Usneach; and a third, on the plains of Taltin, in the Ultonian district,* where those annual sports, introduced in the time of the Damnonian kings, were revived.

A far less creditable sample of his policy was the enormous mulct imposed by him on the province of Leinster, in revenge for the conduct of its ruler, Achy; thus dooming an unoffending people and their posterity to atone for the crimes of one worthless prince. This oppressive fine, known by the name of the Boarian or Boromean tribute, was exacted every second year, and continued to be the cause of much confusion and bloodshed till the year 693; when, in the reign of King Finnacta, through the intercession of St. Moling, it was remitted.

The offence by which Achy, King of Leinster, drew down on that province so many centuries of taxation, though expanded by Keating and Warner into a romance of some pages, may thus, in a few brief sentences, be narrated. Having espoused one of the daughters of the monarch Fuathal, and carried her home to his own kingdom, the Leinster prince, in little more than a year after their union, made his appearance again at Tara; and informing the monarch, with every demonstration of sorrow, that his young queen was dead, obtained permission to pay his addresses to her sister, and succeeded in making her also his bride. On arriving with her royal husband in his own province, the young princess found his queen still living; so great was her surprise and shame at this

* Tertia apud Talten, in Ultonie portione.-Rer. Hib. Script. Prol. ii. 79.

discovery, that she but for a few minutes, we are told, survived the shock. The deceived queen also, who, in her ignorance of the real circumstances, had flown with delight to receive her sister, as a visiter, on being informed of the sad truth of the story, took it no less deeply to heart; and, wounded alike by the perfidy of her lord, and the melancholy fate of his young victim, pined away and died. For this base act, which ought to have been avenged only upon the unmanly offender, not merely were his subjects, but all their posterity for more than five hundred years, compelled to pay every second year to the reigning monarch that memorable tribute,* which, contested as it was in most instances, superadded to the numerous occasions of collision for ever arising, throughout the country, an almost regularly recurring crisis of confusion and bloodshed.

During the reign of Tuathal, there were appointed courts of municipal jurisdiction for the better regulation of the concerns of tradesmen and artificers; an institution which, could we place reliance on the details relating to it, would imply rather an advanced state of interior traffic and merchandise. One fact which appears pretty certain from these accounts is, that previously to the system now introduced, none of the Milesian or dominant caste had condescended to occupy themselves in trade;-all mechanical employments and handicrafts being left to the descendants of the old conquered tribes; while for the issue of the minor branches of the Milesians were reserved the appointments in the militia of Erin, and the old hereditary offices of antiquaries, bards, physicians, and judges.

Whatever, in other respects, may have been the civilization of the Irish before the reign of King Feidlim, (A. D. 164,) their notions of criminal jurisprudence were A. D. as yet but rude and barbarous; since we learn, that the old law of retaliation was 164. then, for the first time, exchanged for the more lenient as well as less demoralizing mode of punishment by a mulet or Eric. Some writers, it is true, have asserted that the very reverse of what has been just stated was the fact; and that Feidlim, finding the Law of Compensation already established, introduced the Lex Talionis in its stead. But this assuredly would have been to retrograde rather than to advance in civilization;-one of the first steps towards civility, in the infancy of all nations, having been the substitution, in criminal justice, of fines proportionate to the offences, for the savage law of retaliation and the right of private revenge. Should even this improved stage of jurisprudence, under which murders of the darkest kind might be compounded for, appear sufficiently barbarous, it should be recollected that neither the Greeks) at the time of the Trojan war, nor the English under their great ruler Alfred, had yet advanced a step farther.

To Feidlim the Legislator succeeded, after a short period, his son Con of the Hundred Battles; a prince whose long reign was devoted, as his distinctive title imports, to a series of conflicts which seem to have been as various in their success, as they were murderous and devastating in their consequences. From the family of this hero descended that race of chieftains who, under the title of the Dalriadic kings, supplied

Albany, the modern Scotland, with her first Scotish rulers; Carbry Riada,-the A. D. son of Conary the Second by the daughter of the monarch Con,-having been the 358. chief who, about the middle of the third century, established that Irish settlement

in Argyleshire, which, taking the name of its princely founder, grew up, in the

* According to the old history, cited by Keating, called the Fine of Leinster, this tribute, which was paid through the reigns of forty kings, consisted of 3000 cows, as many hogs and sheep, 3000 copper caldrons, as many ounces of silver, and the saine number of mantles. The number of each kind of cattle demanded is stated variously by different authorities; some making it so few as 300 (MacCurtin's Brief Discourse,) and others as high as 15.000.-MS. quoted by Dr. O'Connor.

† See Warner (History of Ireland, vol. i. book 4.,) whose confused notions respecting this law are adopted, and rendered still "worse confounded," by the author of the Dissertations on the Hist. of Ireland, sect. 11. The following is Spenser's account of the Law of the Eric, as existing among the Irish. Having remarked that, in the Brehon Law, there were "many things repugning both to God's law and man's," he adds," as for example, in the case of murder, the Brehon, that is, their Judge, will compound between the murderer and the friends of the party murdered, which prosecute the action, that the malefactor shall give unto them, or to the child or wife of him that is slain, a recompense which they call an Eriach; by which wild law of theirs many murders amongst them are made up and smothered."-View of the state of Ireland. Both by Spencer and Sir John Davis this custom of compounding the crime of homicide by a fine is spoken of as peculiar to the Irish; and the latter writer even grounds upon it a most heavy charge against that people; either forgetting that this mode of composition for manslaughter formed a part of the Anglo-Saxon code, or else wilfully suppressing that fact for the purpose of aggravating his list of charges against the old Brehon law. As there will occur other opportunities for considering this question, I shall here only remark that, however it may have been customary among the ancient Pagan Irish to punish homicide by a mulet, or Eric, alone, there are proofs that, in later times, and before the coming of the English, not only was wil. ful murder, but also the crimes of rape and robbery, made legally punishable by death.-See Dissertations on the Laws of the ancient Irish, Collectan, vol. i.-O'Reilly, on the Brehon Laws, sect. 8.-Ledwich, Antiquities.— Hume, vol. i. Appendix.

§ Iliad, I. ix. v. 630., where, by Homer, the blood fine is called a penalty or mulct, and the relatives of the murdered person are represented as satisfied with the imposition.

"In these Scoto-Irish chiefs of Argyleshire," says Sir Walter Scott, "historians must trace the original roots of the royal line."-History of Scotland, vol. i. chap. 2.

course of time, into the kingdom of Dalriada; and finally, on the destruction of the Picts by Keneth Mac-Alpine, became the kingdom of all Scotland.

The incursions of the Irish into those northern parts of Britain had commenced at a very remote period; and in the reigns of Olmucad, Tigernhimas, Reatch, and other monarchs, such expeditions to the coast of Albany are recorded to have taken place.* Without depending, however, solely on Irish authorities, the language of the Roman panagyrist, Eumenius, in extolling the victory gained in Britain by Constantius Chlorus, would fully suffice to prove that, previously to the coming of Cæsar, the neighbourhood of Ireland had been found troublesome to the Britons, and that they had been "accustomed "- for such is the phrase used by the orator-to invasions from that quarter. But the first permanent settlement of the Irish in North Britain was the small colony, just mentioned, under Carbry Riada; which, fixing its abode in a part of those regions inhabited previously only by the Picts, or Caledonians, acquired, as Bede tells us, partly by friendship and partly by the sword, a settled home in the country; while their founder, already possessing, in the north of Ireland, a seigniorial territory named, after himself, Dalriada,§ transmitted the same name to the infant kingdom he was thus the means of establishing in Albany.||

As at this period, and for a long course of centuries after, the name of Scoti, or Scots, was applied exclusively to the Irish, I shall, to avoid confusion in speaking of the country now known as Scotland, call it either North Britain, or else by the name which it bore in those early days, Alba, or Albany.

The most tedious, as well as most sanguinary of the many wars in which the monarch of the Hundred Battles was engaged, was that maintained by him against the heroic Mogh-Nuad, king of the province of Leinster, during which, the latter carried away the palm of victory in no less than ten successive pitched battles. In consequence of these numerous defeats, to so low an ebb was the power of the monarch reduced that his antagonist became at length possessor of one half of the kingdom. A new division of the country accordingly took place, which continued, nominally at least, to be recognised to a late period, assigning the northern part, under the name of Leath-Cuinn, or Con's half, to the monarch; while the southern, under the designation of Leath-Mogh, or Mogh's half, fell to the jurisdiction of the crown of Munster.

The most accomplished of all the Milesian princes, whether as legislator, soldier, or scholar, was, according to the general report of all his historians, the monarch Cormac Ulfadha, who flourished about the middle of the third century, and was the only one of the few sensible princes whom the line of Milesius produced 254. that was able to inspire enough of respect for his institutions to secure their ex

A. D.

These early incursions are thus acknowledged by Buchanan:-"Nec semel Scotorum ex Hibernia transitum in Albium factum nostri annales referunt."-Hist. Scot. 1. 2.

Adhuc natio (Britannica) etiam tunc rudis et solis Britanni Pictis modo et Hibernis adsueti hostibus, adhuc seminudi, facile Rouanis armis signisque cesserunt."-Panegyric. Vet.

"Procedente autem tempore Britannia post Britones et Pictos, tertiam Scotorum nationem in Pictorum parte recepit, qui, duce Reuda, de Hibernia egressi, vel amicitia vel ferro, sibimet inter eos sedes quas hectenus habent vindicarunt, a quo videlicet duce usque hodie Dalreudini vocantur."-L. i. c. 1.

§ This territory, which comprehended the north, north-west, and part of the south of the county of Antrim, is sometimes confounded with Dalaradia, which, as described by Harris, comprehended the south-east parts of the same county, and the greatest part, if not all, of the county of Down.

For the truth of this important and now undoubted historical fact, we need but refer to the admissions of Scotch writers themselves. After mentioning the notice, Ammianus, of Scots in Britain, A. D. 360, the judicious Innes adds, "This may very well agree with the placing the coming in of Eocha Riada (the same as Bede's Reuda.) the first leader of the colony of the Scots into Britain, about the beginning of the third age. It is like he brought over at first but a small number, not to give jealousy to the ancient inhabitants of these parts, the Caledonians; but in the space of one hundred, or about one hundred and fifty years, that passed betwixt the time of their first coming in, and their being mentioned by Ammian, A. D. 360, they might have so increased both within themselves, and by accession of new auxiliaries from Ireland, that the Caledonians or Picts, finding them serviceable in their wars against the Romans and provincial Britons, were easily disposed to enlarge their possessions."-Crit. Essay, vol. ii. Dissert. ii. chap. 2.

Thus Pinkerton, also, whose observations prove him to have been thoroughly well informed upon the subject:-"Concerning the origin of the Dalreudini of Ireland, all the Irish writers, Keating, Usher, O'Flaherty, &c. &c. are concordant, and say the name sprung from Carbry Riada. Beda, a superior authority to all the Irish annalists put together, informs us that this very Riada led also the first colony of Scots to North Britain. So that the point stands clear, independently of the lights which Kennedy and O'Connor throw upon it."-Inquiry, part iv. chap. 2. Chalmers, also, concurs in the same view. "The new settlers," he adds, “continued, to the age of Bede, to be commonly called from the original district (in Ireland) the Dalreudini, though they will be herein denominated the Scoto-Irish."-Caledonia, vol i. book ii. chap. 6.

But the most ancient testimony of the Scots of North Britain to the descent of their kings from the royal Irish racelor Conary, is to be found in a Gaelic Duan, or Poem, written by the court bard of Malcolm III. about A. D. 1057,) which has been pronounced the most ancient monument of Dalriadic history remaining. For this very curious genealogical poem, see Ogyg. Vind. chap. x. Rer. Hibern. Script. prol. i. Pinkerton's Inquiry, part iv. chap. 5.

According to O'Flaherty, this division of the kingdom continued in reality but a year;-" in reputation, however," says Harris, "it subsists among the Irish to this day."

istence beyond his own life-time. To his munificence and love of learning the country was indebted, it is said, for the foundation of three Academies at Tara: in the first of which the science of war was taught; in the second, historical literature; while the third academy was devoted to the cultivation of jurisprudence. It was a remarkable tribute to the powerful influences of literature (if the learning of the Fileas and Seanachies may be dignified with that name,) that the various schemes of state reform brought forward by these legislators all commenced with the reformation of the Literary Order. Among the rest, the monarch Cormac, who was himself a distinguished ornament of that class, applied his earliest care to the correcting of those abuses which had, in the course of time, deteriorated its spirit. Under his auspices, too, a general revision of the annals of the kingdom was entered upon; and the national records which, since the days of the illustrious Ollamh, had been kept regularly, it is said, in the Psalter of Tara, received such corrections and improvements as the growth of knowledge since that remote period must have suggested. It is even alleged that, in the course of this reign, which introduced that mode of ascertaining the dates of regal successions, called Synchronism, which consists in collating the times of the respective reigns with those of contemporary Princes in other countries. This form of chronology was adopted also by an Irish historian of the eleventh century, named Flann, whose annals, formed upon this principle, are said to be still extant in the valuable library at Stowe. It is, however, not easy to conceive, that so general a knowledge of foreign history as this task of synchronizing seems necessary to imply, and which, even in writers so late as Tigernach and Flann, is sufficiently remarkable, could have been found among a people so entirely secluded from most of the other European nations, as were the Irish in the time of their King Cormac.

The abdication of the supreme power by this monarch, in the full vigour of his age and faculties, was the consequence, it appears, of an ancient law or custom of the country, which forbade that any one who was affected with a personal blemish should hold possession of the throne; and as, in resisting a rebellious attack on his palace, he incurred the loss of an eye, this accomplished monarch was thereby disqualified from longer retaining the sovereignty. In the law thus euforced may be observed another instance, rather remarkable, of coincidence with the rules and customs of the East. In a like manner, we read in the Persian history, that the son of the monarch Kobad, having by a singular accident lost the use of an eye, was in consequence precluded, by an old law of the country, from all right of succession to the throne.

The nature of the religious opinions held by this monarch have been made a subject of some discussion; and the reverend librarian of Stowe has thought it no waste of his learned leisure to devote a distinct chapter to the consideration of " the Religion of King Cormac." By some writers it is alleged, that he was converted to Christianity seven years before his death; being, it is added, the third person in Ireland who professed that faith before the coming of St. Patrick. That this prince was enlightened enough to reject the superstitions of the Druids, and that, in consequence of his free thinking on such subjects, he had that powerful body opposed to him throughout the whole of his reign, there appears little reason to doubt; but whether he substituted any purer form of faith for that which he had repudiated, is a point not so easily ascertained. A circumstance recorded of him, however, shows how vigorously he could repress intolerance and cruelty, even when directed against a body of religionists to whom he was himself opposed. Among the ancient institutions of Tara was a sort of College of Sacred Virgins, whose vocation it appears to have been, like the Dryads or fortune-tellers among the Gauls, to divine the future for the indulgence of the superstitious or the credulous. In one of those incursions, or forays, of which the territory of the monarch was so often the

Flanus Junior, Flann. Mainistreach cognominatus, cuius Synchrona pariter extant in vetusto codice membraneo ejusdem Bibliothecæ, No. i. quique obiit anno 1056, plura itidem subministravit, quibus traditio historica auctoritate contanea fulcitur.-Rer. Hibern. Script. Ep. Nunc.

A list of no less than fourteen poems attributed to this synchronist, who is known also by the title of Flann of Bute, is given, in Mr. O'Reilly's chronological list of Irish writers, as being still preserved in the Book of Leacan, in the O'Cleary's Book of Invasions, and other such collections.

We find this accident otherwise accounted for, in a curious narrative, containing some picturesque eircumstances, which General Vallancey gives as a translation from an old Irish law book. Ceallach Mac-Cor. mac, a kinsman, as it appears, of the monarch, having carried away by force, the niece of another Irish chieftain, the latter, determined to take revenge for the insult, hurried to Tara, the royal residence, where the offender was then a guest. "He made directly towards Tara," says the MS., "where he arrived after sun. set. Now, there was a law prohibiting any person from coming armed into Tara after sunset, so he went un armed, and, taking down Cormac's spear from the place where it hung in the hall of Tara, he killed Ceallach Mac-Cormac on the spot, and drawing back the spear with great force, the ferrol stuck out Cormac's eye, and wounded the Reactaire, or Judge of Tara, in the back, of which he died."-Fragment of the Brchon

Laros.

object, the place where these holy Druidesses resided,* and which bore the name of "The Retreat until Death," was attacked by the troops of the King of Leinster, and the whole of its sacred inmates, together with their handmaids, most inhumanly massacred. This brutal sacrilege the monarch punished by putting twelve of the Lagenian chieftains most concerned in it to death, and exacting rigorously the Boarian tribute from the province to which they belonged.

In the course of this reign considerable additions are said to have been made to that body of laws, or legal axioms, which had been, from time to time, compiled, under the name of Celestial Judgments; and, among other contributors to this great legislative work, is mentioned Finn Mac-Cumhal-or, as known to modern ears, Fingal-the sonin-law to the monarch Cormac, and general of the famed Fianna Eirinn, or ancient Irish militia. It has been the fate of this popular Irish hero, after a long course of traditional renown in his own country, where his name still lives, not only in legends and songs, but in the yet more indelible record of scenery connected with his memory, to have been, at once, transferred by adoption to another country, and start, under a new but false shape, in a fresh career of fame. Besides being himself an illustrious warrior and bard, this chief transmitted also to his descendants, Oisin and Osgar, the gifts of heroism and song; and died, by the lance, as we are told, of an assassin, in the year 273.

In the humble abode where King Cormac passed his latter days,-a thatched cabin, as it is said, at Aicill, or Kells,§-he produced those works which entitle his name to a place in the list of Royal Authors. "The Advice to a King," which he wrote for the instruction of his son, Carbre, on resigning to him the throne, is said to have been extant so late as the seventeenth century; as well as a poem likewise attributed to him, on the virtues of the number Three,-somewhat resembling, most probably, the Gryphus of the poet Ausonius on the same mysterious subject.

Among the remarkable events that passed during the reign of this monarch, it is worthy of mention that, after having defeated the Ultonians, in a great battle at Granard, he banished numbers of the people of that province to the Isle of Man and the Hebrides. That the island of Eubonia, as Man was then called, belonged in early times to Ireland, appears from Ptolemy, by whom it is marked as a dependency of that country; and, in a work attributed to the cosmographer Æthicus, we are told, "The Isle of Man, as well as Hibernia, is inhabited by tribes of the Scots." In the time of St. Patrick it was still an Irish island, and the favourite resort of such holy persons as wished to devote themselves to a life of seclusion and prayer.

It was in the reign of Carbre, the son and successor of Cormac, that the famous Fianna Eirinn, or Militia of Erin, whose achievements formed so often the theme of our ancient romances and songs, was, in consequence of the dissensions within its own body, as well as of the formidable degree of power which it had attained, put down summarily by force. This national army had been for some time divided into two rival septs, the Clanna Boisgne, commanded by Oisin, the son of Finn, and the Clanna Morna, which was at

"Dryades erant Gallicanæ mulieres fatidicæ.”—Salmas. in Lamprid. "Dicebat quodem tempore Aurelianum Gallicanas consuluisse Dryadas."-Vopisc. in Aurel. We have Toland's authority for their having been of Druidesses in Ireland; and Gealcossa's Mount, as he tells us, situated in Inisowen, in the county of Donegal, was so called from a female Druid of that name. "Her name," he adds, "is of the Homerical strain, signifying The White-legged. On this hill is her grave, and hard by is her temple, being a sort of diminutive Stonehenge, which many of the old Irish dare not, even at this day, any way profane."-Letters to Lord Molescorth.

f Annal. IV. Magist. ad ann. 241.

‡ I must not omit that, in the centre of this county (the county of Donegal) the cloud-capt mountain of Alt Ossoin presides, and around him is the whole scenery of Ossian and Fingal, which has been so beautifully described by Mr. Macpherson, and to the northward of Lough Dearg are the mountains, caverns, and lakes of Finn, or Fingal."-Collectan. de Reb. Hibern. No. xii.

A writer in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (vol. xv.,) mentions a great rock in the county of Meath, under shelter of which Finn and his faithful wolf-dog, Brann, once rested from the chase; and it is added that on the top of the hill of Shanthamon, in the county of Cavan, may be seen his "Fingers," in the shape of five enormous stones, each about five feet high, and of four tons weight. A similar tribute has been paid to our Irish heroes by that country of poesy and song which has adopted them as her own. "All over the Highlands," says Sir John Sinclair (Dissert. on the Authenticity, &c.,) the names of Ossian, Fingal, Comhal, Trenmor, Cuchullin, are still familiar, and held in the greatest respect. Straths or valleys, mountains, rocks, rivers, are named after them. There are a hundred places in the Highlands and Isles which derive their name from the Feinne, and from circumstances connected with their history."

§ In his first version, from an Irish MS., of the details of the accident by which Cormac lost his eye, General Vallancey printed and published the following sentence; "But the famous Aicill performed a cure for his eye." Finding, subsequently, however, that Aicill was not a physician, but a small town in the county of Meath, he thus corrected the passage; "Cormac was sent to Aicill to be cured." This mistake of the great Irish scholar has been made the subject of some dull facetiousness in Doctor Campbell's Strictures, Sect. 3. Bishop Nicholson has, by an oversight, transferred both this work and the son for whom it was written, to Cormac Mac-Cuillenan, the Royal Compiler of the Psalter of Cashel, who died in the beginning of the tenth century. The confusion is carried still farther by representing the latter also as having died in "a thatched house at Anachiul, in Ceananus near Tara."-Hist. Lib. Appendix.

།། ་་ Hibernia a Scotorum gentibus colitur.-Menavia insula æque ac Hibernia a Scotorum gentibus habitatur."-Cosmog.