again after the Williamite wars. The last relics of the old Celtic civilization seem to shrink into the very earth before the laws and dripping sword of England. And still in Keating's cave in Aherlow Glen, and O'Flaherty's cabin in Connemara, and Lynch's cell in Louvain, the undying spark is kept alive, and the treasonous manuscripts of the Gael are cherished for happier days. Not happier, but more unhappy days arrive. A century of humiliation compared to which the Drogheda massacre was glory, and the lost battle of the Boyne inspiring-the century of the diabolical Penal Laws of Anne and the First Georges-broods over the Celtic race. The Gaelic schoolmaster becomes a legal abomination. The school-house, as well as the Mass-house, cowers in a lonely glen under the rains and storms. Still will not the imperishable spirit of Gaelic song and scholarship consent to give up the ghost. In the very dead of night of the eighteenth century burst out the songs of Carolan, amazing as the notes of a nightingale in mid-winter; and then were heard The Blackbirds;' and the 'Dawning of the Day' of the Munster Bards-that mysterious band of minstrels who started up here, there, and everywhere, for no other reason than that the overcharged Irish heart had either to sing or die—a Charleville farmer, a schoolmaster in Clare, a blind musician in Tipperary-men whose names even are unknown to the people who still find in their songs the heavenly nutriment of their sweetest emotions and of their most passionate hours. Then came the period when patriots and scholars, sprung from the ruling blood and speaking the Saxon speech, began to realize dimly the charms of national archeology, and of the venerable Gaelic literature that had been so long hunted on the hills and ridiculed in the schools-the period when the great Edmund Burke was the means of securing for Trinity College the manuscript of the priceless Brehon Law Code after its century of wanderings, neglect, and decay in the cabins of Tipperary; when O'Flaherty's Ogygia was purchased for twenty guineas, and the great compilation of the Drimmin don dilis for £3 13s. 8d.; the period of the pathetic scene in the history of an apparently lost tongue, when the Leabhar Breac, recovered as by a miracle from the proscriptions and neglect of ages, was found to be written in a dialect which was no longer intelligible to the most learned Irish scholar then alive. Finally, there came the discovery of the great French and German philologists, that the Gaelic language afforded as inestimable a key to the history of pre-Roman Europe as the baths of Caracalla and the golden house of the Cæsars do to the character of the Imperial city itself. At the same time there arose in our own country that pleiad of conscientious, accurate, and indefatigable Irish scholars, the Petries, and O'Donovans, and O'Currys-who deciphered and unearthed and made light in the dark places, confounded the scoffers, and convinced every scientific thinker in Europe for all time that the rotting manuscripts to which Irish enthusiasm had clung throughout centuries of unexampled horror were not the mere abracadabra of the fanatical worshipers of a barbarous patois, but were the authentic title-deeds of a social system, a history, and a literature more venerable and more fascinating than any European race, except the Romans and the Greeks, can produce. The Gaelic enthusiasts were vindicated. But the Gaelic tongue, while it is honored in the schools, has been dying on the hills. The masters of many languages take off their hats to it, but to the Irish youth, whom it has suckled, whose mental atmosphere, so to say, it has provided, whose blood pulses with its inspirations, it is still a stranger-an uncouth, ill-clad, poor relation at the door. I do not preach any sudden or violent diversion of our national energies from the channels in which they were now directed, for a National Parliament is the life-giver without which no national interest can flourish, and in whose heat all fair and seemly accessories of national life are sure to blossom forth again. I am fully persuaded than any general Gaelic revival will not come as a mere matter of national penance for past forgetfulness, much less on the terms of penalizing the use of that agglomeration of languages which is called the English. It will have to be proven that the language of our fathers is a pleasure and a luxury to the Celtic tongue and brain, even as the hurling and the hunting sports of our fathers have been proven to be an exhilaration to Celtic brawn and muscle. |