Page:Irish essays; literary and historical.pdf/14

 showed him his castle, his lands, and his daughter let us hope, though last, not least in his estimation—and he said; "You can live with me here as my son-in-law on one condition, that if God blesses your marriage with a son, you shall train him up from his infancy as the intended Ollave of Tirconnell in all the learning necessary for that high office." These terms were not hard; O’Clery accepted them; and from that auspicious union was derived the illustrious line of scholars that have shed so much lustre on the literary history of their native land.

The great-grandson of this Cormac O’Clery was called Diarmaid of the Three Schools, because he kept in his castle of Kilbarron "a school of literature, a school of history, and a school of poetry." It is worth recording, too, and remembering, that O’Donnell nobly endowed those schools at Kilbarron; for we are expressly told that, in addition to the lands held from his ancestors, he also granted to Diarmaid, for the maintenance of his schools, as well as for a house of general hospitality, the lands of Kildoney and Wardtown, along the winding Erne, and also the rich pastures between Bundoran and Ballyshannon—lands which, at the present day, according to John O’Donovan, would produce more than £2,000 a-year. So you see our Celtic princes were no niggard patrons of learning and of learned men. And oh! such a glorious site for a school. How could a man be weary there—roaming through those swelling meadows a hundred feet above the sea, inhaling the bland Atlantic breezes, with the blue of the sky above, and the deeper blue of that ever-glorious sea around him? Beyond rise the giant cliffs of Slieve League, gleaming like fairy palaces in the sunlight, and then, far away on the dim horizon’s verge, where the billows bathe the clouds, is that golden line of light which, even in the peasants’ rude imaginings, leads to the Islands of the Blessed far beyond the western waves. Many a time I have seen it in the sunshine, and, when it is far grander still, in the storm, and I can only say that, to my taste at least, Diarmaid of the Three Schools had a far better site for his college at Kilbarron than, could by any possibility be found on the plains of Kildare.

That school at Kilbarron flourished during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, down to the flight of the Earls, in