Page:Foras feasa ar Éirinn - Keating; Comyn, Dinneen.djvu/17

Rh drawn from the most genuine sources of Irish history, some of which have been since lost. . . . The most valuable copy of it ... is now preserved in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin (H. 5. 26.). It is in the handwriting of John, son of Torna O'Mulconry, of the Ardchoill family, in the county of Clare, a most profound Irish scholar, and a contemporary of Keating."

In his 'Literary History of Ireland,' Dr. Douglas Hyde thus contrasts the O'Clerys and Keating:—"As if to emphasise the truth that they were only redacting the Annals of Ireland from the most ancient sources at their command, the Masters wrote in an ancient bardic dialect, full at once of such idioms and words as were unintelligible, even to the men of their own day, unless they had received a bardic training. In fact, they were learned men writing for the learned, and this work was one of the last efforts of the esprit de corps of the school-bred shanachy which always prompted him to keep bardic and historical learning a close monopoly amongst his own class. Keating was Michael O'Clery's contemporary, but he wrote—and I consider him the first Irish historian and trained scholar who did so—for the masses, not the classes, and he had his reward in the thousands of copies of his popular History made and read throughout all Ireland, while the copies made of the Annals were quite few in comparison, and after the end of the seventeenth century little read."

Dr. Hyde further says:—"What Keating found in the old vellums of the monasteries and the brehons, as they existed about the year 1630—they have, many of them, perished since—he rewrote and redacted in his own language, like another Herodotus. He invents nothing, embroiders little. What he does not find before him, he does not relate . . .: though he wrote currente calamo, and is in matters of fact less accurate than they [the Four Masters] are, yet his history is an independent compilation made from the same class of