Page:Ireland and England in the past and at present.djvu/23

Rh and learned men at Tara, and of Tuathal, who consolidated the monarchy, and formed the new province of Meath to be the demesne of the over-kings at Tara. Legend merges into history about the time of the Romans. As afterwards the Germanic barbarians who conquered the western provinces of the Roman Empire never advanced into Erin, so the Romans themselves never came there from Britain, though Tacitus declares that Agricola, his father-in-law, was wont to say that the conquest might be made with one legion, and that it would be well for the Roman power to be established on all sides and "liberty put away out of sight." When Roman power was declining in Britain, we hear much of the Scots who came from Erin to Britain again and again for warfare and plunder, and of Laeghaire in the fifth cenTury, in whose time the work of Saint Patrick began.

There has come down a large amount of old Gaelic literature, annals, historical and genealogical writings, religious and ecclesiastical pieces, romances and tales, and treatises of law, medicine, and science, from which directly or indirectly much can be learned about the early history and life of the people. The oldest of them are in a difficult language, much of which had been partly forgotten, until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a Bavarian, Kaspar Zeuss, published his Grammatica Celtica. Using the Irish glosses, or explanations which Gaelic teachers had written in the margins or between the lines of