THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 143

THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD

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scholars consumed with a sacred passion for the Gaelic learning. They dug up old glosses—so many that they discovered 80,000 Irish words not to be found in a modern dictionary. They compared, and guessed, and bit by bit deciphered. The manuscript of the Tipperary cabin turned out to be the only existing copy of the ' Shanachus Mor' —that venerable Gaelic law-code which is far and away the richest European body of laws that is not borrowed from the Romans; and the Brehon Law Commission (good worthy men of whom, I believe, only two understand a word of Gaelic) have ever since been engaged in purchasing driblets of translations of the priceless manuscripts which the MacEgans for generations risked their goods and lives in order to preserve. The race of the MacEgans, however, is one which most educated Englishmen are not ashamed to think of as the enemies of learning and the spawn of barbarism. They would be greatly amused if they were told that it was to Irish schools and Irish colonies Anglo-Saxon England owed the better part of its poetry, its religion, and its civilisation. They have only to ask any well-informed German man of letters, nevertheless, to know that to deny it would be like denying that William the Bastard won the Battle of Hastings.

From the sixth to the ninth century, speaking roughly, Ireland was a more compact body of united States than Britain, Gaul, Germany, Spain, or the Western Empire. For the one Roman emperor who died in his bed, ten sovereigns of Ireland lived and throve, and hunted and feasted, to a hale old age. Her universities of Armagh, and Lismore, and Mayo-of-the-Saxons (though they were housed in log-huts, as are three-fourths of the population of the United States of America at this hour) were as famous as were those of Paris, or Bologna, or Oxford in … continue reading »

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