The Book-Hunter
things than our ancestors of centuries past could know, is still a
notion comparatively new which has not been popularly realised. The
classic literature in which our early training lies has nothing in it to
show us the power of historical inquiry, and much to make us slight it.
The Romans, instead of improving on the Greeks, fell in this respect
behind them. Father Herodotus, credulous as he was, was a better
antiquary than any who wrote in Latin before the revival of letters.
Occupied entirely with the glory of their conquests, and blind to the
future which their selfish tyranny was preparing for them, the Romans
were equally thoughtless of the past, unless it were exaggerated and
falsified into a narrative to aggrandise their own glory. Their authors
abdicated the duty of leaving to the world the true narrative of the
early struggles and achievements out of which the Republic and the
Empire arose. It is easy to be sceptical at any time. We can cut away
Romulus and Remus from accepted history now, hundreds of years after the
Empire has ceased to govern or exist. But the golden opportunity for
sifting the genuine out of the fabulous has long passed away. It is
seldom possible to construct the infant histories of departed
nationalities. The difference between the facilities which a nation has
for finding out its own early history, and those which strangers have
for constructing it when the nationality has allowed its deathbed to
pass over without the performance of that patriotic task, is nearly as
great as a man's own facilities for writing the history of his youth,
and those of the biographer who makes inquiries about him after he is
buried.
We are becoming wiser than the Romans in this as in other matters, and
are constructing the infant histories of the various European nations
out of the materials which each possesses. The biographies of those
saints or missionaries who first diffused the light of the Gospel among
the various communities of the Christian north, form a very large
element in these materials; and no wonder, when we remember that the
Church possessed all the literature, such as it was, of the age. In
applying, however, to the British Empire, this new source of historical
information, there arose the difficulty that it was chiefly supplied
from Ireland. If all hagiology were under a general suspicion of the
fabulous, Irish history was known to be a luxuriant preserve of fables,
and these causes of dubiety being multiplied by each other in the mind,
it seemed almost impossible to obtain a hearing for the new voice. In
fact, during a long period the three nations were engaged in a
competition which should carry its history through the longest track of
fictitious glory, and this was a kind of work in which Ireland beat her
neighbours entirely. Hence, when all were pressing pretty close upon the
Deluge, Ireland took the leap at once and cleared that gulf. As a
fairish record of these successful efforts, I would recommend to the
reader's notice a very well-conditioned and truly learned-looking folio
volume, called "The General History of Ireland, collected by the learned
Jeffrey Keating, D.D., faithfully translated from the original Irish
Language, with many curious Amendments taken from the Psalters of Tara
and Cashel, with other authentic Records, by Dermod O'Connor, Antiquary
to the Kingdom of Ireland." Opposite to the title-page is a full-length
portrait of Brian Boroomh, whose fame has been increased of late years
by the achievements of his descendant in the cabbage-garden. The monarch
is in full burnished plate armour, with scarf and surcoat--all three
centuries at least later in fashion than the era attributed to him. But
that is a trifle. It would involve much hard and useless work to make
war on the anachronisms of historical portraits, and we are not to judge
of historical works by their engraved decorations. Here, however, the
picture is sober truth itself to what the inquiring reader finds in the
typography. After the descriptive geographical introduction common in
old histories, the real commencement comes upon us in this form:--
"Of the first invasion of Ireland before the Flood!" "Various," the
author tells us, "are the opinions concerning the first mortal that set
a foot upon this island. We are told by some that three of the daughters
of Cain arrived here, several hundred years before the Deluge. The white
book, which in the Irish is called Leabhar Dhroma Sneachta, informs us
that the oldest of these daughters was called Banba, and gave a name to
the whole kingdom. After these, we are told that three men and fifty
women arrived in the island; one of them was called Ladhra, from whom
was derived the name of Ardladhan. These people lived forty years in the
country, and at last they all died of a certain distemper in a week's
time. From their death, it is said that the island was uninhabited for
the space of an hundred years, till the world was drowned. We are told
that the first who set foot upon the island were three fishermen that
were driven thither by a storm from the coast of Spain. They were
pleased with the discovery they had made, and resolved to settle in the
country; but they agreed first to go back for their wives, and in their
return were unfortunately drowned by the waters of the Deluge at a place
called Tuath Inbhir. The names of these three fishermen were Capa,
Laighne, and Luasat. Others, again, are of opinion that Ceasar, the
daughter of Bith, was the first that came into the island before the
Deluge.... When Noah was building the ark to preserve himself and his
family from the Deluge, Bith, the father of Ceasar, sent to desire an
apartment for him and his daughter, to save them from the approaching
danger. Noah, having no authority from Heaven to receive them into the
ark, denied his request. Upon this repulse, Bith Fiontan, the husband of
Ceasar, and Ladhra her brother, consulted among themselves what measures
they should take in this extremity."
The result was, that, like the Laird of Macnab, they "built a boat o'
their ain," but on a much larger scale, being a fair match with the ark
itself. But justice should be done to every one. The learned Dr Keating
does not give us all this as veritable history; on the contrary, being
of a sceptical turn of mind, he has courage enough to stem the national
prejudice, and throw doubt on the narrative. He even rises up into
something like eloquent scorn when he discusses the manner in which some
antediluvian annals were said to be preserved. Thus:--
"As for such of them who say that Fiontan was drowned in the Flood, and
afterwards came to life, and lived to publish the antediluvian history
of the island--what can they propose by such chimerical relations, but
to amuse the ignorant with strange and romantic tales, to corrupt and
perplex the original annals, and to raise a jealousy that no manner of
credit is to be given to the true and authentic chronicles of that
kingdom?"
I shall quote no more until after the doctor, having exhausted his
sceptical ingenuity about the antediluvian stories, finds himself again
on firm ground, prepared to afford his readers, without any critical
misgivings, "an account of the first inhabitants of Ireland after the
Flood." He now tells us with simple and dignified brevity that "the
kingdom of Ireland lay waste and uninhabited for the space of three
hundred years after the Deluge, till Partholanus, son of Seara, son of
Sru, son of Easru, son of Framant, son of Fathochda, son of Magog, son
of Japhet, son of Noah, arrived there with his people." From such a
patriarchal nomenclature the reader of Keating is suddenly introduced to
a story of domestic scandal, in which a "footman" and a "favourite
greyhound" make their frequent appearance. Then follow many great
epochs--the arrival of the Firbolgs, the dynasty of the Tuatha de
Danans, with revolutions and battles countless, before we come to the
commencement of a settled dynasty of kings, of whom more than ninety
reigned before the Christian era. It is, after all, more sad than
ridiculous to remember that within the present generation many
historians believed not only what Keating thus tells as truth, but also
what he ventured to doubt; and if the English antiquaries, according to
their wont, called for records,--did these not exist abundantly, if they
could be got at, in those authentic genealogies, which were from time to
time adjusted and collated with so much skill and scrupulous accuracy by
the official antiquaries who met in the Hall of Tara? The reader
unacquainted with such an out-of-the-way and rather weedy corner of
literature, may think this vague exaggeration; and I shall finish it by
quoting the latest printed, so far as I know, of the numerous solemn and
methodical statements about the manner in which the records of these
very distant matters were authenticated.
"When the said princes got the kingdom into their hands, they assigned
large territories to their antiquaries and their posterity to preserve
their pedigree, exploits, actions, &c.; and so very strict they were on
this point, that they established a triennial convention at Tara, where
the chief kings of Ireland dwelt, where all the antiquaries of the
nation met every third year to have their chronicles and antiquities
examined before the king of Ireland, the four provincial kings, the
king's antiquary-royal, &c.; the least forgery in the antiquary was
punished with death, and loss of estate to his posterity for ever--so
very exact they were in preserving their venerable monuments, and
leaving them to posterity truly and candidly; so that even at this day
(though our nation lost estate and all almost) there is not an ancient
name of Ireland, of the blood-royal thereof descended, but we can bring,
from father to father, from the present man in being to Adam--and I,
Thaddy O'Roddy, who wrote this, have written all the families of the
Milesian race from this present age to Adam."[80]
[Footnote 80: Miscel. of Irish Arch. Soc., i. 120.]
To all this preposterous, and now scarcely credible extravagance of
fiction, there attaches a melancholy political moral. Poor Ireland,
trodden by a dominant party whose hand was strengthened by her potent
neighbour, sought relief from the gloom of the present, by looking far
back into the fabulous glories of the past--and it seemed the last drop
in her cup of bitterness when this pleasant vista was also to be closed
by the hard utilitarian hand of the unsympathising Saxon.
After "this sort of thing" it was naturally difficult to get sensible
men to listen to proposals for opening valuable new sources of early
history in Ireland. In fact, down to the time when Moore wrote his
History in 1835, no one could venture to look another in the face when
speaking of the early Irish annals, and the consequence was that that
accomplished author wilfully shut his eyes to the rich supply of
historical materials in which he might have worked to brilliant effect.
Yet, upon the general face of history, it must on examination have been
fairly seen that Ireland is the natural place where a great proportion
of whatever is to be known about the primitive Church in the British
Islands was to be found. Indeed, in the history of Christianity, not the
least wonderful chapter contains the episode of the repose in the West,
where a portion of the Church, having settled down, grew up in calm
obscurity, protected by distance from the desolating contest which was
breaking up the empire of the world, and raged more or less wherever the
Roman sway had penetrated. Of the southern Britons it could no longer be
said, as in the days of Augustus, that they were cut off from all the
world. England was an integral part of the empire, where, if the