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find the alliance of that people frequently resorted to as a means of turning the scale of internal strife. On the other hand, the hardy highlanders of Caledonia, in the constant warfare they waged with their southern neighbours, were no less ready to resort to the assistance of a people fully as restless and pugnacious as themselves, and whose manners and habits, from a long course of connexion, were, it is probable, but little different from their own.

As some defence against the incursions of these two hostile tribes, the Romans had, at different intervals during the second and third centuries, erected those three great walls or ramparts on the northern frontier of their province, whose remains still continue to occupy the curious research and speculation of the antiquary. But the hostility of these highlanders had, at the period of which we are now treating, assumed a still more audacious and formidable character; and, about the middle of the fourth century, so destructive had become their inroads, that it required the presence of the son of Constantine, to make head against and repel them. Whatever differences their relative position, as rival neighbours, had given rise to, were entirely merged in their common object of harassing the Britons, whom a native historian describes as trembling with the fear of a new visitation, while still fainting from the dire effects of the tempest which had just swept over them.

To deliver the province from this scourge, one of the bravest of the Roman generals, Theodosius, was now appointed to the military command of Britain; and after two active campaigns, during which he had to contend, not only with the Picts and Scots by land, but also with their new allies, the Saxon pirates, by sea, he at length succeeded in delivering Britain from her inveterate invaders. To such daring lengths had some of these incursions into her territory extended, that, on the arrival of the Roman general, he had found the Picts and their allies advanced as far as London and Kent.* In all this war

fare the Scots of Ireland were no less active than their brethren of Albany; and it is, therefore, remarkable that the Roman commander, though fitting out a fleet to chastise the Saxons in the Orcades, should yet have left Ireland, whose currachs wafted over such hostile swarms to his shores, still exempt from invasion. That his fleet chased, however, some of her vessels into their own northern harbours, may be concluded from a passage of the poem of Claudian, which commemorates this war:

"Nec falso nomine Pictos

Edomuit, Scotumque vago mucrone secutus,
Fregit Hyperboreas remis audacibus undas."

The few following lines from the same poem describe, briefly and picturesquely, the signal triumph over the three hostile nations which Theodosius had achieved:

"Maduerunt Saxone fuso

Orcades, incaluit Pictorum sanguine Thule,
Scotorum cumulos flevit glacialis Ierne."

From this period there occurs nothing very remarkable in the course of Irish affairs till about the beginning of the fourth century, when the violent usurpation of the sovereign throne by Huas Colla, one of three brothers bearing the same name, produced a long series of tumultuous and sanguinary scenes. The battle, in which the rightful monarch, Fiach, lost his crown and his life to the usurper, is distinguished among the countless fields of carnage upon record, by the title of the Battle of Dubcomar; from the circumstance of the monarch's favourite Druid of that name having been among the number of the slain. This and other such known instances of Druidical warriors, show that justly as Macpherson has, in general, been accused of giving false pictures of Irish manners, his introduction of "Fighting Druids" is not to be reckoned among the number. The name of Landerg, or Bloody Hand, affixed by tradition, as we are told, to the Druid who has lived enchanted, it is thought, for ages, in one of the mountains of the county of Donegal, proves the sort of warlike reputation that was attached to some of this priesthood; and we learn from Cæsar, that even so solemn a question as the election of a High Priest used, among the Gaulish Druids, to be decided sometimes by an appeal

to arms.

* See Ammian. lib. xxvii. c. 8., who describes them as penetrating "ad Lundinium vetus oppidum, quod Augustam posteritas appellavit."

O'Reilly's Essay upon Ossian, where this objection is brought forward. "From the very name of Lamderg," says Toland, "we learn what sort of man the Druid was, who, by the vulgar, is thought to live enchanted in the mountain between Buniranach and Fathen, in the county of Donegal." He adds, that the Druids were many of them warriors.

After a reign of five years, the usurper Colla was compelled to abdicate the sovereignty by the rightful successor of the late monarch, Muredach Tiry, and the three Collas took flight, attended by 300 followers, to North Britain.* From thence returning in the course of a year, they found means to conciliate, through the intervention of the Druids, the good-will of the monarch Muredach, and were also by his aid enabled to make war on the King of Ulster, and dispossess him of his dominions. It was in the course of the struggle consequent on this invasion, that the princely palace of Emania, whose construction formed one of the great epochs of Irish chronology, was, after a battle, upon which, we are told, six successive suns went down, destroyed by the victorious army, and not a trace of its long-celebrated glories left behind.

An invasion of Britain, on a far more extensive and formidable scale than had A. D. yet been attempted from Ireland, took place towards the close of the fourth cen396-7. tury, under the auspices of Nial of the Nine Hostages, one of the most gallant of

all the princes of the Milesian race. Observing that the Romans, after breaking up their lines of encampment along the coast opposite to Ireland, had retired to the eastern shore and the northern wall, Nial perceived that an apt opportunity was thus offered for a descent upon the now unprotected territory. Instantly summoning, therefore, all the forces of the island, and embarking them on board such ships as he could collect, he ranged with his numerous navy along the whole coast of Lancashire, effected a landing in Wales, from whence he carried off immense plunder, and, though compelled ultimately to retreat, left marks of depredation and ruin wherever he passed.† It was against the incursions of this adventurous monarch, that some of those successes were achieved by the Romans, which threw such lustre around the military administration of Stilicho, and inspired the muse of Claudian in his praise. "By him," says the poet, speaking in the person of Britannia," was I protected when the Scot moved all Ireland against me, and the ocean foamed with his hostile oars." From another of this poet's eulogies, it appears that the fame of that Roman legion which had guarded the frontier of Britain against the invading Scots, procured for it the distinction of being one of those summoned to the banner of Stilicho, when the Goths threatened Rome.

Joined with the Picts and Scots, in these expeditions, were also another warlike Irish tribe, the Attacots; who, at an earlier period of their country's history, had distinguished themselves by their turbulent bravery; having been the chief movers of those two rebellions known by the name of the Attacottic Wars. The fierce valour of these wild warriors, who, after their settlement in North Britain, inhabited chiefly the districts close to Adrian's Wall, seems to have attracted the especial attention of the Romans, who, acting upon the policy, which proved so fatal to them in the decline of the empire, of incorporating with their own legions, and even with Palatine troops, auxiliaries or deserters from the barbarian camps, succeeded in detaching some of these Attacotti from the Scoto-Pictish league, and enrolling them in the regular force of the empire. T

A poem is extant, written in the twelfth century, by Giolla na Naomh O'Dunn, giving "an account of the chief tribes descended from the three Collas, sons of Carbre Leffeachar, monarch of Ireland, who was killed at the battle of Gabhra, A. D. 296."-Trans. of lb. Celt. Society. A manuscript copy of this poem is in the possession of Mr. O'Reilly, the Secretary of the Iberno-Celtic Society.

In the days of Stilicho particularly, leaving the country between the Walls to be ravaged by their brethren of Argyle and the Picts, they (the Scots of Ireland) made a descent on the provinces that were inac cessible to them, landed in both of the divisions of Wales, and now, for the first time, possessed themselves of the Island of Man."-Genuine Hist. of the Britons.

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§ The following remarks are not the less worthy of being cited for their having come from the pen of a writer who was either so ignorant or so prejudiced as to contend, that the Scots who fought by the side of the Picts against the Romans were not really Irish:-"There can be no greater proof of the Scots never having been conquered, than the very Roman walls themselves, built as fences against their hostilities; which, while there is a stone of them remaining, will be undeniable monuments of the valour and prowess of that nation."-Gordon, Itinerarium Septentrionale, chap. xiv.

Venit et extremis Legio prætenta Britannis,
Que Scoto dat fræna truci, ferroque notatas
Perlegit exanimes Picto moriente figuras.
De Bello Geiico.

In the Notitia Imperii, the Attacotti are expressly named. "Procedente tempore cum bellicosos et formidandos Romani invenissent, præmiis propositis et sese auxiliariis adscriberent allexerunt, ideoque Attacottes in Notitia Imperii nominatos invenimus, curante Honorio, ut ex inimicis amici et vacillantis Imperii defensores haberentur."-Rer. Hibern. Script, Prol. 1. lxxi.

The tottering state of the Roman dominion in Gaul, as well as in every other quarter, at this period, encouraged the Hero of the Nine Hostages to extend his enterprises to the coast of Britany; where, after ravaging all the maritime districts of the north-west of Gaul, he was at length assassinated, with a poisoned arrow, by one of his own followers, near the Portus Iccius, not far, it is supposed, from the site of the present Boulogne. It was in the course of this predatory expedition that, in one of their descents on the coast of Armoric Gaul, the soldiers of Nial carried off with them, among other captives, a youth, then in his sixteenth year, whom Providence had destined to be the author of a great religious revolution in their country; and whom the strangely fated land to which he was then borne, a stranger and a slave, has now, for fourteen hundred years, commemorated as its great Christian apostle.

An accession of territory was, during this reign, added to the Irish possessions in North Britain; the two sons of Cork, King of Munster, having acquired seigniories in the neighbourhood of the Picts, the one of Levinia, or Lenox; the other, of Moygergin, in Mar, a county of the present Scotland.

To Nial the Great succeeded Dathy, the last of the Pagan monarchs of Ireland, and not unworthy to follow, as a soldier and adventurer, in the path opened to him by A. D. his heroic predecessor. Not only, like Nial, did he venture to invade the coasts 406. of Gaul; but, allured by the prospect of plunder, which the state of the province, then falling fast into dismemberment, held forth, forced his way to the foot of the Alps, and was there killed, it is said, by a flash of lightning, leaving the throne of Ireland to be filled thenceforward by a line of Christian kings.

CHAPTER VIII.

CREDIBILITY OF THE HISTORY OF PAGAN IRELAND.

BEFORE entering upon the new epoch of Irish history, which is about to open upon us with the introduction of Christianity, a review of the general features of the period over which we have passed may be found not uninteresting or unuseful. With regard to the first and most material question, the authenticity of those records on which the foregoing brief sketch of Pagan Ireland is founded, it is essential, in the first place, to distinguish clearly between what are called the Bardic Historians,-certain metrical writers, who flourished from the ninth to the eleventh century,-and those regular chroniclers or annalists of whom a long series was continued down, there is every reason to believe, from very early ages, and whose successive records have been embodied and transmitted to us in the Annals of Tigernach,* in those of the Four Masters,† of Inisfallen, of Ulster, and many others.

To the metrical historians above mentioned is to be attributed the credit, if not of originally inventing, at least of amplifying and embellishing, that tale of the Milesian colonization which so many grave and respectable writers have, since their time, adopted. In his zeal for the credit of this national legend, the late learned librarian of Stowe has endeavoured to enlist some of the more early Irish poets in its support.|| On his own

"The Attacotti make a distinguished figure in the Notitia Imperii, where numerous bodies of them appear in the list of the Roman army. One body was in Illyricum, their ensign a kind of mullet; another at Rome, their badge a circle; the Attacotti Honoriani were in Italy."-Pinkerton, Inquiry, part iv. chap. 2.

In the Annals of the Four Masters for the year 1088, the death of this annalist is thus recorded:-" Tigernach O'Braoin, Comorhan, or Successor of Kieran of Clonmacnois and of St. Coman (i. e. Abbot of Clonmacnois and Roscommon,) a learned lecturer and historian."

† Compiled in the seventeenth century, by Michael O'Clery, with the assistance of three other antiquaries, and "chiefly drawn," says Harris, "from the annals of Clonmacnois, Inisfall, and Senat, as well as from other approved and ancient chronicles of Ireland." For a fuller account of the various sources from whence these records were derived, see Mr. Petrie's Remarks on the History and Authenticity of the Autograph Original of the Annals of the Four Masters, now deposited in the library of the R. I. A. Academy. Published, for the first time, by Dr. O'Connor, from a Bodleian manuscript of the year 1215.

A long list of these various books of Annals may be found in Nicholson's Historical Library, chap. 2; also in the preface to Keating's History, xxi.

For the very slight grounds, or, rather, mere pretence of grounds, upon which Dr. O'Connor lays claim to Fiech and Confealad, Irish poets of the sixth and seventh centuries, as authorities for the Milesian story, see, among other passages, Ep. Nunc. xxxiv., Prol. 2. xv. xxvi Having once claimed them, thus gratuitously, as favouring his views of the subject, he continues constantly after to refer to them, as concurrent authorities

showing, however, it is manifest that in no Irish writings before those of Maolmura,* who died towards the close of the ninth century, are any traces whatever of the Milesian fable to be found.

There appears little doubt, indeed, that to some metrical writers of the ninth century the first rudiments of this wild romance respecting the origin of the Irish people are to be assigned; that succeeding writers took care to amplify and embellish the original sketch; and that in the hands of the author or authors of the Psalter of Cashel, it assumed that full-blown form of fiction and extravagance in which it has ever since flourished. It is worthy of remark, too, that the same British writer, Nennius, who furnished Geoffry of Monmouth with his now exploded fables of the descent of the Britons from King Brute and the Trojans, was the first also who put forth the tale of the Scythian ancestors of the Irish, and of their coming, in the fourth age of the world, by the way of Africa and Spain, into Hibernia. Having conversed, as he himself tells us, with the most learned among the Scots, and been by them, it is evident, informed of their early traditions respecting a colony from Spain, he was tempted to eke out their genealogy for them by extending it as far as Scythia and the Red Sea, just as he had provided the Britons with Trojan progenitors, under the command of King Brute, from Greece.

To our metrical historians may be assigned also the credit of inventing that specious system of chronology upon which the fabric of their fabled antiquity entirely rests, and which, though well calculated to effect the object of its inventors,—that of carrying back to remote times the date of the Milesian dynasty,-proves them not to have been overscrupulous in the means they used for that purpose. It is, indeed, as I have already, more than once, remarked, far less in the events themselves, than in the remote date assigned to those events, that much of the delusion attributed in general to Irish history lies. The ambition of a name ancient as the world, and the lax, accommodating chronology, which is found ever ready, in the infancy of science, to support such pretensions, has led the Irish, as it has led most other nations, to antedate their own existence and fame."

Together with the primitive mode of numbering ages and ascertaining the dates of public events, by the successions of kings and the generations of men, the ancient Irish possessed also a measure of time in their two great annual festivals of Baal and of Samhin, the recurrence of which at certain fixed periods furnished points, in each year, from whence to calculate. How far even History may advance to perfection where no more regular chronology exists, appears in the instance of Thucydides, who was able to enrich the world with his "treasure for all time" before any era from whenee to date had yet

with those later bardic historians, in whom alone the true origin and substance of the whole story is to be found.

The Psalter-na-Rann attributed to the Culdee, Angus, which is another of the writings appealed to by Dr. O'Connor, on this point, was, however, not the work of that pious author (who wrote solely on religious subjects,) nor of a date earlier, as is evident, than the tenth century. See Lanigan, Ecclesiast. Hist., chap.

XX. note 107.

*This writer, who died in the year 884, was the author of a poem, beginning, "Let us sing the origin of the Gadelians:" in which, deriving the origin of the Milesians from Japhet, son of Noah, he gives an account of the peregrinations of the ancestors of the Irish from the dispersion at Babel to the arrival in Ireland. Contemporary with Maolmura was Flann Mac Lonan, of whose compositions there remain, says Mr. O'Reilly, three poems, which are to be found in the account of the spreading branches of Heber, son of Milesius, în the Leabhar Muimhneach, or Munster Bock."

From this work, which was compiled, about the beginning of the tenth century, by Cormac Mac Culinan, Bishop of Cashel and King of Munster. Keating professes to have drawn a great part of his History of Ireland. "Since most," says Keating," of the authentic records of Ireland are composed in dann, or verse, I shall receive them as the principal testimonies to follow in compiling the following history; for, notwithstanding that some of the chronicles in Ireland differ from these poetical records in some cases, yet the testimony of the annals that were written in verse is not for that reason invalid."-Preface. About the middle of the tenth century flourished Eochaidh O'Floinn, whose poems, relating to the marvels of the first Irish colonies, the battles between the Nemethians and the sea rovers, the destruction of Conan's Tower, are still preserved in the books of Glendalough, Ballymote, and Leacan, the Dinn Seanchas, Book of Invasions, &e. "Sic mihi peritissimi Scottorum nuntiaverunt." Nennius wrote about the year 858.

The extravagant chronology of the metrical catalogues of kings given by Gilla-Coeman, and other later bards, is fully acknowledged by Dr. O'Connor himself:-"Hæc plane indicant nostras, de Scotorum origine, et primo in Hiberniam ac inde in Britainniam adventu, traditiones metricas historica esse fide suffultas; sed dum bardi prodigiosam antiquitatem majoribus adscribere conarentur id tantum fingendi licentia efficere ut quas illustrare debuerant veritates offuscarent, et dum Hiberniam fabulis nobilitare cupiunt ipsi sibi fidem ita derogant ut postea, cum ad tempora historica descendunt, etsi vera dixerint, nimia severitate redarguantur."-Prol. 2. xlvi.

It was by Coeman, notwithstanding, that author of Ogygia chiefly regulated his chronology; and the erudite efforts which he makes to reconcile his system to common sense, show how laboriously, some. times, the learned can go astray. "It is no wonder," says Mr. O'Connor of Balenagare," that Gilla-Coeman, and many others of our old antiquaries, have fallen into mistakes and anachronisms: to their earliest reports Mr. O'Flaherty gave too much credit, and to their later accounts Sir James Ware gave too little."Reflections on the Hist of Ireland, Collectan. No. 10.

The Danes," saith Dudo S. Quintin," derived themselves from the Danai; the Prussians from Prusias, King of Bithynia, who brought the Greeks along with them. Only the Scots and Irish had the wit to derive themselves from the Greeks and Egyptians together."-Antiq. of British Churches.

been established in Greece. It was, however, in this very mode of computing by regal successions that the great source of the false chronology of the Irish antiquaries lay. From the earliest times, the government of that country consisted of a cluster of kingdoms, where, besides the monarch of the whole island and the four provincial kings, there was also a number of inferior sovereigns, or dynasts, who each affected the regal name and power. Such a state of things it was that both tempted and enabled the genealogists to construct that fabric of fictitious antiquity by which they imposed not only on others, but on themselves. Having such an abundance of royal blood thus placed at their disposal, the means afforded to them of filling up the genealogical lines, and thereby extending back the antiquity of the monarchy, were far too tempting to be easily resisted. Accordingly, as some of those most sanguine in the cause of our antiquities have admitted, not only were kings who had been contemporaries made to succeed each other, but even princes, acknowledged only by their respective factions, were promoted to the rank of legitimate monarchs, and took their places in the same regular succession.* By no other expedient, indeed, could so marvellous a list of royalty have been fabricated, as that which bestows upon Ireland, before the time of St. Patrick, no less than a hundred and thirty-six monarchs of Milesian blood; thereby extending the date of the Milesian or Scotic settlement to so remote a period as more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ.

Between the metrical historians, or rather romancers, of the middle ages, and those regular annalists who, at the same and a later period, but added their own stock of contemporary records to that consecutive series of annals which had been delivered down, in all probability, for many ages,-between these two sources of evidence, a wide distinction, as I have already inculcated, is to be drawn. It is true that, in some of the collections of Annals that have come down to us, the fabulous wonders of the first four ages of the world, from Cæsara down to the landing of the sons of Milesius, have been, in all their absurdity, preserved,-as they are, indeed, in most histories of the country down to the present day. It is likewise true, that by most of the annalists the same deceptive scheme of chronology has been adopted, by which the lists of the kings preceding the Christian era are lengthened out so preposterously into past time. But, admitting to the full all such deductions from the authority of these records, more especially as regards their chronology for the times preceding our era, still their pretensions, on the whole, to rank as fair historical evidence, can hardly, on any just grounds, be questioned.

From the objections that have just been alleged against most of the other Books of Annals, that of Tigernach is almost wholly free; as, so far from placing in the van of history the popular fictions of his day, this chronicler has passed them over significantly in silence; and beginning his Annals with a comparatively late monarch, Kimboath, pronounces the records of the Scots, previously to that period, to have been all uncertain.‡ The feeling of confidence which so honest a commencement inspires, is fully justified by the tone of veracity which pervades the whole of his statements; and, according as he approaches the Christian era, and, still more, as he advances into that period, the remarkable consistency of his chronology, his knowledge and accuracy in synchronizing Irish events with those of the Roman history, and the uniformly dry matter of fact which forms the staple of his details, all bespeak for these records a confidence of no ordinary kind; and render them, corroborated as they are by other annals of the same grave description, a body of evidence, even as to the earlier parts of Irish history, far more trustworthy and chronological than can be adduced for some of the most accredited trans

A nearly similar mode of lengthening out their regal lists was practised among the Egyptians. "Their kings," says Bryant," had many names and titles; these titles have been branched out into persons, and inserted in the lists of real monarchs; . . . . by which means the chronology of Egypt has been greatly embarrassed."

Till of late years they have been, by most writers, both English and Irish, confounded. Thus the sensible author of "An Analysis of the Antiquities of Ireland," who, though taking a just and candid view of his subject, had no means of access to the documents which alone could strengthen and illustrate it, has, in the following passage, mixed up together, as of equal importance, our most fabulous compilations and most authentic annals:-" Let us have faithful copies, with just versions of the hidden records of Keating, of the Psalter of Cashel, of the Book of Lecan, of the Annals of Inisfallen, of those of the Four Masters, and of every other work which may be judged to be of importance. The requisition is simple as it is reasonable. They have long amused us with declamations on the inestimable value of these literary treasures; and surely, after having excited our curiosity, their conduct will be inexcusable, if they do not in the end provide for its gratification."

Doctor O'Connor, it is right to mention, is of opinion that Tigernach had, like all the other annalists, begun his records from the creation of the world, and that the commencement of his manuscript has been lost. But, besides that, the view taken by the annalist as to the uncertainty of all earlier monuments, sufficiently accounts for his not ascending any higher, all the different manuscripts, it appears, of his Annals agree in not carrying the records farther back than A. c. 305.

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