THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 74

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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happier, but more unhappy days arrive. A century of humiliation compared to which the Drogheda massacre was glory, and the lost battle of the Boyne inspiring—-the century of the diabolical Penal Laws of Anne and the First Georges—broods over the Celtic race. The Gaelic schoolmaster becomes a legal abomination. The schoolhouse, as well as the Masshouse, cowers in a lonely glen under the rains and storms. Still will not the imperishable spirit of Gaelic song and scholarship consent to give up the ghost. In the very dead of night of the eighteenth century burst out the songs of Carolan, amazing as the notes of a nightingale in mid-winter; and then were heard 'The Blackbirds;' and the Drimin Donn Dilir and the 'Dawning of the Day' of the Munster Bards—that mysterious band of minstrels who started up here, there, and everywhere, for no other reason than that the overcharged Irish heart had either to sing or die—a Charleville farmer, a schoolmaster in Clare, a blind musician in Tipperary—men whose names even are unknown to the people who still find in their songs the heavenly nutriment of their sweetest emotions and of their most passionate hours.

Then came the period when patriots and scholars, sprung from the ruling blood and speaking the Saxon speech, began to realise dimly the charms of national archaeology, and of the venerable Gaelic literature that had been so long hunted on the hills and ridiculed in the schools—the period when the great Edmund Burke was the means of securing for Trinity College the manuscript of the priceless Brehon Law Code after its century of wanderings, neglect and decay in the cabins of Tipperary; when O'Flaherty's Ogygia was purchased for twenty guineas, and the great compilation of the Leabar Breac for 3l. 13s. 8d.; the period of the pathetic scene in the … continue reading »

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