Page:Ireland and England in the past and at present.djvu/24

 Latin texts for the guidance of their students, he recovered the lost grammatical forms and also the meanings of numerous words, and was thus the founder of Celtic philology. The writings are in poetry or in prose, the early poetical compositions often obscure, with some of the most complicated and difficult versification ever invented. It has been held that a primitive form of writing was used in Erin in very early times, but these letters, the so-called oghams, which are largely groups of parallel lines, are by most critics traced either to the Roman alphabet or to the Scandinavian runes, so that reading and writing are believed to have been introduced into the island not before the time when Christianity was brought there.

The character of early Irish culture has been the subject of much dispute. In later days, when Ireland was unhappy and debased, when there was little in contemporary life to be proud of, and at other times when hope was put in the future, ardent spirits were wont to look back through a glow of patriotic romance beyond the traditions of the past, and they saw a golden age in a happy island of the west. Recently, in the midst of the Irish revival there have been writers, such, for example, as Mrs. Green, who have not hesitated to ascribe to early Irish society an excellence and a fine character which can scarcely have existed anywhere in primitive times. Much of what these writers declare may have been so, though probability is often against it, and their belief is many times founded rather upon generous feeling and pa-