Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

those strange processes which take place in the minds of even honest men, who are warped and overborne by the stress of some tyrannical idea.

Again, there are two very valuable historical poems, written in the person of Duvack, chief poet of Ireland at the arrival of St. Pat rick, who flourished in the fifth century, consequently at or before the date of the composition of the maxims of Cormac. Yet, while the latter are written in a dead language, the former are written in a good medieval Irish, such as the ordinary Gaelic scholar may run and read. These are therefore, certainly not genuine. The facts stated in them may be true; but they are themselves assuredly not written by Duvack.

O'Curry's enthusiasm gets the better of his judgment also when he comes to consider the dates of the actual writing of the existing Irish manuscripts and manuscript books, apart from the other consideration of when the compositions contained in them were actually composed. His great object is to get these dates pushed back into the preNorman period as much as possible. Now it does not require much acquaintance with old Irish literature, even in the medium of the translations supplied to us by O'Curry and others, to see that literary forgeries were extremely common among the Irish scholastic class. The number of so-called Psalters of Cashel, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were supposed to exist in Ireland, would have stocked a small library, and with the growth of a liberal and enquiring disposition amongst the Elizabethan English settled in Ireland this process flourished. speak not now of the common and genuine literary device of writing poems in the name of some ancient worthy, expressed in the first per

I

son, and of which the poems ascribed to Duvack are the most remarkable; but the forging of internal evidence of an ancient origin for modern manuscripts. Two very remarkable examples of this occur to me, and both of them imposed upon the credulous mind of O'Curry. The most ancient Irish manuscript in existence in Ireland, according to O'Curry, is the "Book of Leinster;" the sole proof of this is a passage written on one of the blank sheets of vellum, in the form of a lamentation by the writer, that Dermot MacMurrough should have been this day banished out of Ireland and sent across the sea. O'Curry thinks this conclusively establishes the fact that the inanuscript in question was written on the verge of the Norman period. I, on the other hand, hold this passage to be a deliberate forgery.

It is remarkable that the date fixed upon should be one of such enormous national importance. Many another year passed as the centuries rolled on, many another chieftain was expelled from his patrimony, yet this particular year that first saw the English dominion in Ireland was that which saw the composition of this book. If it is a forgery, the forger has just done what we might have expected, he has fixed on the most remarkable year in modern Irish history, and given his book a date which would most strongly affect the minds of all, whether English or Irish. If this book were offered for sale to a person in the 16th century, or the 17th, who believed the passage to be genuine, it would have considerably enhanced the value of the book. Therefore, when we know that forgeries were frequent, that it was the interest of persons to forge ancient dates for the writing of such manuscripts as they had in their possession, that such a date was in. this remarkable manner

[ocr errors]

assigned to the "Book of Leinster as would have strongly affected the mind and enhanced the value of the manuscript, I think the antecedent probability of the existence of fraud so strong, that the onus is thrown on O'Curry and his followers to prove the genuineness of the passage in question. Now in the whole book there is nothing to show that the composition is to be ascribed to such an early date; nothing but this detached and suspicious paragraph.

If there were hundreds of spurious Psalters of Cashel, there is no reason why there should not have been hundreds of spurious manuscripts of all kinds, or that some more ingenious forger should not attach to his manuscript, whether written by himself or merely in his possession, a passage giving it a character of antiquity to which it had no claim. Now the "Book of Leinster," so called, contains in it no other confirmation of the passage in the blank sheet. It is merely one of those common Irish scrapbooks containing poems, topographical and historical tracts, hymns, treatises on medicine, &c. When all the contents are translated and published, evidence will be sure to be forthcoming which will bring down the date of its compilation to a late date. This, of course, is but a suggestion of my own; but experience has shown me that no reliance is to be placed on those isolated statements in old Irish manuscripts concerning the time at which they were written. Now O'Curry treats the "Book of Leinster" as a genuine production of the twelfth century, and it forms one of his sheet anchors in his historical speculations. He thinks no other proof is requisite to establish its genuineness when, in fact, nothing at all is proved, but a strong suspicion raised in the mind that the volume in question was the

production of a very late age-I say a very late age-because the flight of MacMorrough did not, in the Irish mind, form such a remarkable event at all. As soon as the convulsions caused by the introduction of the Norman element were appeased, and the Burkes, Butlers, and Fitzgeralds had established themselves in their new dominions, things went on much as before. The arrival of the Normans did not form such a remarkable epoch in the history of Ireland, viewed by the native Irish writers, as we would imagine. Therefore, if the "Book of Leinster" was not the production of the twelfth century, I should set it down to a considerably later age, and in or subsequent to the reign of Elizabeth, when the conquest of the country by the English raised anew in the minds of all the commencement of that dominion which was now assuming such enormous proportions, and was hastening on to the extirpation of the old Irish race and nationality, a result which the Norman invasion neither effected nor contemplated.

The second example, which I would bring forward of O'Curry's tendency to throw back the date of Irish manuscripts, is his treatment of the" Book of Armagh." The work dignified by this grandiose title is smaller in volume and meaner in contents than the "Book of Leinster." It is, like it, a scrap-book. The most important of its contents is a copy of the" Tripartite Life of St. Patrick." O'Curry labours to throw back the date of the composition of the Tripartite Life to the seventh century. A close perusal of this work, which is now available through the medium of the translation published in Miss Cusack's "Life of St. Patrick," shows that it was certainly written after the eleventh century; such are the allusions to the kings and chieftains; while the copy which is found in the manuscript called

the "Book of Armagh " must have been written after the Norman invasion, for it alludes to the Saxons as in occupation of the island, and gives expression to a prophecy foretelling their final expulsion.

Now in this book occurs a manifestly spurious passage at the close of one of the separate manuscripts of which it is composed, which states the arrival of Brian Boróm at Armagh, and that the passage in question was written in his presence, calling him Imperator Scotorum. Now, if the Tripartite Life which is found in this book was written after the Norman settlement, it is manifest that the book itself was actually written after the twelfth century, and therefore centuries after the time of Brian. The passage itself has a meaningless and absurd appearance. Any person who cares to investigate it has now an opportunity by inspecting the splendid fac-similes of old Irish manuscripts which have been executed by the Government, and in which the passage in question will be found carefully introduced as one of the utmost value, a piece of writing set on paper in the presence of the celebrated Irish monarch, and dating several centuries before the Normans set foot in Ireland.

The mistakes of O'Curry are numerous and patent, and quite destroy his authority as a philosophical and trustworthy investigator of Irish manuscripts. On the other hand, he has translated many remarkable passages from various Irish books, and as an indefatigable, enthusiastic collector of materials upon which other men are to pronounce an opinion he deserves all praise. Moreover, he has given an impulse to the study of the old Irish muniments by his devotion and zeal, and the good work which he has done will yet bear fruit.

Since the dawn of the scientific

and sceptical method of investigating historical muniments, there has been no history of Ireland written in sympathy with the modern spirit. Hafferty has added nothing to our stock of knowledge; he has blindly followed the annals, and merely reproduced these with painstaking and minute accuracy. To write a great and valuable history of Ireland, one should combine the science of Niebuhr and the imagination of Livy. I am very far from saying that a history of Ireland, written as Livy wrote his history of Rome, would not be in the highest degree valuable. Those splendid and glowing myths deserve a literary as well as a scientific treatment; Livy made the history of his country as interesting as the best tale. And there are sufficient materials preserved in the Irish manuscripts for the construction of a similar and far more pictorial history of ancient Ireland. Had some clever disciple of O'Curry's taken this hint, and on the bare horror of the annals induced the fresh bright bardic growths, luxuriant and endless, covering the bare landscape of the Four Masters with the weird forest scenery, all the romantic life-the creation of the bardic mind-the result would have been great and desirable. Of course, it would not have supplied the place of a more scientific and rational narrative, but it would have fulfilled many important ends, and, also, might be a delight when the scientific history is forgotten.

No such work, however, has been composed either in recent or more modern times. O'Halloran's history is wild and theoretical, and does not embody and give form to the bardic imaginative wealth; M'Geoghan's is succinct and dry; Keating's, which is far the best, is too replete with names of men, places, and battles. For pages no human interest of any kind is ex

cited. He has mingled the base portions of the bardic literature with the more noble, and indeed, introduces the bardic history, as it were, under protest, in many cases stripping away the poetic folds in which some unimportant fact was veiled, and which was alone valuable, as the Connemara fishermen, when they boarded a wreck laden with tea, poured away the water in which they boiled the tea, thinking the tealeaves were the valuable portion. In the old bardic stories the treatment is everything, the facts enclosed are generally untrue or garbled, or can be learned elsewhere; the mode in which the imagination wrought, and the forms it created, are the really interesting and important outcome of all the old Irish bardic literature.

Among others who have laboured in the cause of Irish antiquities are Wilde and Petrie. Wilde, though his efforts were concentrated on the actual productions of the Irish soil, in the form of old weapons, &c., which were found in different parts of the country, and were placed in the museum of the Royal Irish Academy, did much more to advance antiquarian science generally, than contribute anything distinctive to the accumulation of specially Irish antiquarian learning. The celts and arrow-heads, the shoes and bogwealth to which he devoted his attention, and concerning which he compiled his celebrated catalogue, are of more importance to the science of antiquarianism in its cosmopolitan character than to those who desire to see Irish history written as it should be. There is

[ocr errors]

nothing distinctive as far as regards the tools and weapons in the stone age of Ireland, or the bronze age, which would attach a special interest to it. Rude hatchets of metal and flint, bronze swords, &c., were common to all the northern nations of Europe, and the collection of the Royal Irish Academy in this respect, may be defended by Irishmen only as Audrey was defended by her not over-polite lover, "A poor thing, sir, but my own: the hatchets and celts were found on Irish soil, and that is all. They might as well have been found in the ground which was Sarmatia. Moreover, these gaunt and chilly collections numb and clip the imagination. A cloak which has slept for ages in the depths of a bog is disinterred and provided with a glass case in the Academy, where its vile and windowed raggedness depends patiently from a peg. The most wretched beggarman in Munster would be ashamed to put it on his back, and the dogs would bark at it if it were exposed in a public place. A mind fresh from the perusal of the "Tân-bo-Cuailgue" and its gorgeous descriptions of the accoutrements of the Ultonian chiefs, shrinks with disgust from this spectacle, while on the mind of the man who has never read any of the bardic tales, it and the cheerless things by which it is surrounded, create a prejudice against all Irish antiquarian studies. There is a sort of truth which is not true; from the old literature we know that this unpleasant garment does not represent the apparel of the ancient Irish. ARTHUR CLIVE.

OUR PORTRAIT GALLERY.

SECOND SERIES.-No. 35.

THE RIGHT HON. WILLIAM EDWARD BAXTER, M.P.

THE gentleman whose portrait we give this month is the Right Honourable William Edward Baxter, Member of Parliament for the Montrose District of Burghs in Scotland, and one of Her Majesty's Privy Council. He has long occupied a distinguished position as a Statesman, and is one of the most enlightened and consistent Liberals in the House of Commons-one of the few members of the House who have shown themselves to be masters of those questions of finance which are year by year obtaining greater influence over national policy. He has travelled much, and has been a careful student of the political and social condition of the Continent and of America. It would be difficult to name one who has paid more attention to such subjects. He is descended from a family which holds an honourable position in Scottish mercantile history. In the early part of the present century his grandfather, Mr. William Baxter, was well known in the linen trade. He is described as an intelligent and much respected merchant, who during his long and honourable career was highly esteemed by his compeers."

66

Vast improvements in flax-spinning were effected during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1787 John Kendrew and Thomas Porthouse, the former an optician, the latter a clock-maker, both of them resident in Darlington, took out a patent for "a mill or machine, upon new principles, for spinning yarn from hemp, tow, flax, or wool," and established a small spinning-mill on the river Skerne. Mr. James Aytoun introduced the new machinery into Kinghorn in 1792. Improvements were rapidly effected upon it. Steam was employed as a motive power, and a powerful impulse was given to the manufacture. Dundee became the chief seat of the trade in Scotland, and the country around it soon became dotted with mills, bleachfields, and other marks of a prosperous industry.

« ForrigeFortsæt »