Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/325

Rh CELTIC LITERATURE 313 16th century, for Campion, who wrote in 1571, says of both classes of schools, &quot; They speake Latine like a vulgar lan guage, learned in their common schooles of Leachcraft and Law, whereat they begin children, and hold on sixteene or twentie yeares conning by roate the Aphorismes of Hypocrates, and the Civill Institutions, and a few other parings of those two faculties.&quot; Many of the books of these families still exist in the libraries of the Eoyal Irish Academy, the King s Inns, &c., in Dublin. These books show that the Irish leeches were well acquainted with the works of Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Galen, Avicenna, Rhazes, and most of the medical writers of the Continent of their time. They also contain early translations into Irish of several medical works of repute. With the exception of the hymn of St Colman O Cluasaiyhe, published in the Liber Hymnorum of the early Irish Church, some fragments of poems attributed to St Bee Mac De, and some others, everything ecclesiastical which could with certainty be referred to an early period is in Latin, and therefore outside the scope of this article. The Leabhar Breac, or Speckled Book, now in the library of the Royal Irish Academy, contains chiefly religious writings, which give us the means of estimating what may be called the popular religious literature in the 13th and 14th centuries. It contains homilies on moral, scriptural, doctrinal, and ritualistic subjects, e.g., on the duties of kings and subjects, on charity, almsgiving, the ten com mandments, the commandments of the church, the different festivals, prayer, fasting, and abstinence, baptism, the cere monies of the mass, &c. ; an epitome of Bible history from the Creation to the Ascension, which often so closely follows the text of the Scriptures, that we may regard it almost as a translation ; the legends of the Finding and Exaltation of the Holy Cross, embodying much of the Gospel of Nicodemus, which was popularized in every country in Europe in the Middle Ages ; the acts of several saints, which are found in Early English, French, and German literature ; the lives of the three principal Irish saints, Patrick, Brigit, and Columcille, and of some others ; the elegies of St Colum Cille, and St Sendn, &c. There are also many legendary lives of the saints of the early Irish Church in some of the principal vellum manuscripts. It will thus be seen that the popular religious literature in Ireland did not differ from that of neighbouring countries, and on the whole bears favourable comparison with it. GAELIC We have no direct evidence that the Pictish language LITERA- W as ever written, but inductive reasoning is rather against the supposition, for no trace of a poem or legend has sur vived. The cause of this is not far to seek. The Pictish language, as we have already pointed out, was a Goidelic dialect, which at the period of the principal Dalriadic settlement in the west of Scotland did not perhaps differ from Irish more than Low German or Alemanian does from High German, if even so much. There was just difference enough to make intercourse between the Scots and the Picts at first somewhat difficult. This close relationship of language is no doubt the explanation of the readiness with which Scots and Picts allied against the Britons. In the 5th and Gth centuries, when the Irish kingdom established in Alba began to become an impor tant factor in the affairs of that country, the Irish were a lettered people. The Irish Fili, or poet, followed in the track of the Irish missionary, and carried the poems and historic tales of Ireland among a kindred people, having the same eponymous ancestors, and nearly identical mythological traditions. For several centuries after the conversion of the Picts, Alba, as Scotland was then called, was a second home to the Irish Ccile De, or monk, and the Irish poet and harper. Even in the 12th and 13th centuries the Irish poets and musicians included Scotland in their circuit, and took refuge, or sought their fortune there. We shall mention one instance as it happens to be instruc tive in another way, that of Muiredhach O Daly, better known, on account of his long residence in Scotland, as Muiredhach Albanach, or Muireach the Albanian, or as we should now say, the Scotchman. Did we not know the whole history of this man, who is believed by the Rev. Dr T. M Lauchlan to be the ancestor of the great race of Mac Vurrichs, bards to MacDonald of Clanranald, we should never have suspected him to have been an Irish Fili. It is easy to understand how under these circum stances the literary and cultivated language came to be Irish. But beneath this literary language there was the under-current of the original Pictish, which was gradually modified under the influence of the Irish, in the same way that a literary language always influences the spoken language. Nor should we forget that in this case the action was more potent because it was directly exerted on the people through the preachers, and by the bards reciting their poems and telling their stories. Towards the middle of the 15th century Irish literature began to decline and the Irish language to recede. Irish poets and musicians still continued, however, to include Scotland in their visitations, but the connection between the two countries began to be weakened, and the Scottish dialect accordingly gradually rose into literary importance. Poems and tales began to be written in it ; and those originally written in Irish were recast in the local&quot; dialect. There can be no doubt, too, that the legends and historical traditions brought over from Ireland, w-hich had been transformed by, or had absorbed into them, the primitive Fictish traditions of the same kind which grew from the same original stem, began to be recast and modified, and a new growth of legends to spring up indigenous ID Scot land. In this way a Gaelic literature arose, of which some examples are to be found in the Dean of Lismore s Book. Its development was, however, arrested by the Reforma tion. This would have been only a temporary check, but for the political changes which followed, and which by gradually bringing the most remote part of the Highlands into the current of a wider and more active political life, and by drawing to the capital and within the direct influence of modern European culture the Scottish nobility, gave an additional stimulus to the spread of English, and reduced the Gaelic to a peasants patois. Under other and more favourable circumstances the translation of the Bible into Gaelic, and the composition of a Gaelic liturgy, together with the change in the whole current of religious ideas, might have given rise to a new type of Celtic literature. The success hich attended some translations made by MacPher- James MacPherson led him to make a tour in the High- son s lands, and to gather as many poems and other specimens of Gaelic literature as he could find. It was no doubt during this tour that he matured his idea of using the legends preserved in the popular memory, written down in Scottish Gaelic, and existing in the Irish MSS., which he came across in his travels, as materials out of which to compose the poems which have since become so celebrated under the name of the poems of Ossian. We mean of course the English poems, for in the usual sense of that word no Gaelic originals existed. The so-called originals are a very curious kind of mosaic, constructed evidently with great labour afterwards, in w-hich sentences, or parts of sentences of genuine poems are cemented together in a very inferior word-paste of MacPherson s own. We have pointed out that the personages of the two cycles of romance, the heroic and the Feunian, are never mingled as actors in genuine national poetry or tales. This is, however, done commonly by MacPherson. Thus in Dar-thula, which V. 40