THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 52

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

« previous page | book contents | start of this chapter | next page »

Hastings as proudly as any Howard or De Winton of them all. It is not too much to claim that, in spite of wave after wave of confiscation and seeming extinction, hundreds of Irish clans still hover indomitably around their old tribal territories, who, beginning where the ancestry of the modern Irish aristocracy ends, can claim descent from a line of forefathers as well established historically as that of the English Royal house, and extending back in princely array to days when the Roman eagles were still fluttering over captive Europe. The Irish race, while it marches abreast, if not in advance, of democratic progress in these countries and in the United States, has its blood ennobled at the same time with the influence of all that is most venerable and chivalrous in the antique world. The Gaelic language is as it were our muniment of title to this ancient royal inheritance. The Gaelic genealogies, like those of MacFirbis, many of them to this day buried in undeciphered rotting manuscripts, supply us with an unrivalled National portrait gallery, in which all the great branches of the race of Eochy or the race of Conn can behold not only the kings and warriors of their line, but the tribal harpers, the tribal physicians, tribal judges and romancists, and cup-bearers and carvers. Yet, like Charles Surface in a flippant spendthrift hour, the Irish nation sells its inestimable gallery of ancestors for a song, without even the regretful sigh which the graceless prodigal of Sheridan's play expended upon the family portraits. The result is not merely to cut us, off from an heroic Celtic world—as bright as the pages of Scott and more authentic than those of Herodotus—but to make Irish Nationality an affair of yesterday, an invention of the last English-speaking hundred years, and to surrender those higher landmarks and title-deeds of national indi- … continue reading »

« previous page | book contents | start of this chapter | next page »