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 IRELAND

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IRELAND

who acquired great influence there, was of Irish descent. "Habet", says St. Jerome, "progoniem Scottio:i> gentis de Brittanorum viciuia" (P. L., XXIV, (i'^'J, 758). He came probably from those Irish who hail settled in Wales and South Britain. His friend and teacher Celestius is said by some to have been an Irish- man also, but this is doubtful. Sedulius, however (Irish Siada!, now Shiel in English), the author of the "Carmen Paschale", who flourished in the first half of the fifth century, and who has been called the Virgil of theological poetry, was almost certainly an Irishman. Indeed the Irish geographer Dicuil in the eighth century calls him nostcr Sedulius, all of which shows that some Irish families at least were within reach of a cosmopolitan literary education in the fourth and fifth centuries and that they were quick to grasp it.

Existing Manuscript Literature. — Although so many scholars have during the last fifty years given them- selves up to Celtic studies, yet it remains true that the time has not yet come, nor can it come for many years, when it will be possible to take anything like an accu- rate survey of the whole field of Irish literature. Enormous numljers of important WSS. still remain unedited; many gaps occur in the literature which have never been filled up, unless perhaps here and there by some short piece published in a IcarncLl maga- zine; of many periods we know little or nothing. There are poets known to us at. present practically only by name, whose work lies waiting to be unearthed and edited, and so vast is the field and so enormous the quantity of matter to be dealt with that there is room for an entire army of workers, and until much more pioneer work has been done, and further re- searches made in Irish grammar, prosody, and lexicog- raphy, it will be impossiljle to reduce the great mass of material into order, and to date it with anything like certainty. The exact nimiber of Irish MSS. still ex- isting has never been accurately determined. The number in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, alone is enormous, probably amounting to some fifteen hiui- dred. O'Curry, O'Longan, and O'Beime catalogued a little more than half the manuscripts in the Academy, and the catalogue of contents filled thirteen volumes containing 3448 pages; to these an alphabetic index of the pieces contained was made in three volumes, and an index of the principal names, etc., in thirteen vol- umes more. From an examination of these books one may roughly calculate that the pieces catalogued would number about eight or ten thousand, varjdng from long epic sagas to single quatrains or stanzas, and yet there remains a great deal more to be indexed, a work which after a delay of very many years is hap- pily now at last in process of accomplishment. The library of Trinity College, Dublin, also contains a great number of valuable MSS. of all ages, many of them vellums, probably about 160. The British Mu- seum, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Advo- cates Library in Edinburgh, and the Bibliotheciue Royale in Brussels are all repositories of large nvun- bers of valuable MSS.

Contents of tite Manuscripts. — From wliat we know of the contents of the existing manuscripts we may set down as follows a rough classification of the literature contained in them. We may well begin with the an- cient epics dating substantially from pagan times, and probably first retluced to writing in the seventh cen- tury or even earlier. These epics are generally shot through with verses of poetry and often with whole poems, just as is the case in the French chantcfable, "Aucassin et Nicolette". After the substantially pagan epics may come the early Christian literature, especially the lives of the saints, which are both nu- merous and valuable, visions, homilies, commentaries on the Scriptures, monastic rvdes, prayers. h\Tnns, and all possible kinds of religious and didactic poetry. After these we njiy xjlace the many ancient armals,

and there exists besides a great mass of genealogical books, tribal histories, and semi-historical romances. .\fter this may come the bardic poetry of Ireland, the poetry of the hereditary poets attached to the great Ciaelic families and the provincial kings, from the ninth century down to the seventeenth. Then follow the Brelion laws and other legal treatises, and an enor- mous quantity of writings on Irish and Latin gram- mar, glossaries of words, metrical tracts, astronom- ical, geographical, and medical works. Nor is there any lack of free translations from classical and medie- val literature, such as Lucan's "Bellum Civile", Bede's "Historia Ecclesiastica ", Mandeville's "Trav- els", Arthurian romances, and the like. Fmally, there exists a rich poetical literature of the last three centuries, and certain prose works such as Keating's invaluable history of Ireland, with great quantities of keenes, hymns, love-songs, ranns, bacchanalian, Jacob- ite, poetical, and descriptive verses, of which thou- sands are still to be found, although immense numbers have perished. To this catalogue may perhaps be added the unwritten folk-lore of the island both in prose and verse which has only lately begun to be col- lected, but of which considerable collections have al- ready been made. Such, then, is a brief and bald resume of what the student will find before him in the Irish language.

There may be observed in this list two remarkable omissions. There is no epic handed down entirely in verse, and there is no drama tic literature. The Irish epic is in prose, though it is generally interwoven with nu- merous poems, for though many epopees exist in rhyme, such as some of the Ossianic poems, they are of mod- ern date, and none of the great and ancient epics were constructed in this way. The absence of the drama, however, is more curious still. Highly cultivated as Irish literature undoubtedly was, and excellent schol- ars both in Greek and Latin as the early Irish were, nevertheless they do not seem to have produced even a miracle play. It has been alleged that some of the Ossianic poems, especially those containing a semi- .serious semi-humorous dialogue between the last of the great pagans, the poet Oisin (Ossian he is called in Scotland), and the first of the great Christian leaders, St. Patrick, were originally intended to be acted, or at least recited, by different people. If this be really so, then the Irish had at least the rudiments of a drama, but they never appear to have carried it beyond these rudiments, and the absence of all real dramatic at- tempt, however it may be accounted for, is one of the first things that is likely to strike with astonishment the student of comparative literature.

Early Irish Epic or Saga. — During the golden period of the Greek and Roman genius no one thought of writing a prose epic or a saga. Verse epics they left behind them, and history, but the saga of the North- men, the sgeul or ursgeid of the Gael, was unknown to them. It was only in a time of decadence that a body of Greek prose romance appeared, and the Latin lan- guage produced in this line little of a higher character than the "Golden Ass" or the "Ciesta Romanorum". In Ireland, on the other hand, the prose epic or saga de- veloped to an abnormal degree, and kept on develop- ing, to some extent at least, for well over a thousand years. It is probable that very many sagas existed before the coming of Christianity, but it is highly im- probable that any of them were written down at full length. It was no doubt only after the full Christian- ization of the island, when it abounded in schools of learning, that the Irish experienced the desire to write down their primitive pro.se epics and as much as they could recapture of their ancient poetry. Inthe"Book of Leinster", a manu.script of the middle twelfth cen- turj', we find a list given of the names of 187 epic sagas. The nlhunh (oUav), or arch-poet, who was the highest dignitary among the poets, and whose training lasted for some twelve years, was obliged to learn two