*^ %^ 
 
JOHN O'DONOVAN. 
 
 {Enlarged f7'0in an Ivory Miniature by Bernard Mnlrcnan, R.H.A.) 
 
A Group of 
 
 Nation-Builders 
 
 O'D ONOVAN— O'CURRY— PETRTE 
 
 BY 
 
 Rev. PATRICK M. MacSWEENEY 
 
 O 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBUAUY 
 CHEST^IIT iliLL, MAm. 
 
 B. HERDER 
 
 T7 SOUTH BROADWAY, ST. LOUIS, MO- 
 CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY OF IRELAND 
 
 24 UPPER O'CONNELL STREET, DUBLIN 
 I9I3 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 During the Nineteenth Century Ireland fought 
 along three great lines for the recovery of her 
 freedom as a nation. She fought for free ownership 
 of the land ; she fought for freedom of religion ; 
 and she fought for the freedom of her intellectual 
 life. In doing so she was unerringly laying the 
 foundations of her national well-being. In her 
 battles she has had her heroes : and it is well that 
 their memories should 7iot be allowed to die. In 
 the battle for intellectual freedom it is true to say 
 that O'Donovan, O'Curry, and Petrie are national 
 heroes. They loved Ireland and the Irish people 
 with a lasting love. They cherished the Past of 
 Ireland, they reverenced it^ and they believed 
 in it. They determined that the Ireland of the 
 Future should be bound to the Ireland of the 
 Past by the strong links of knowledge and of love. 
 They forged these links in the white-heat of 
 patriotic research. They were, in every true sense 
 of the word, N ation-builders ; and we, their 
 heirs, must not forget them. To prevent our doing 
 so I have written this little book, and to their 
 memories I dedicate it. 
 
 P. M. Macs. 
 
 St Patrick's College, Maynooth^ 
 July, 1913. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 O'Donovan's Early Years . . . 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 His Work on the Survey ... 9 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Influence op Petrie on O'Donovan and 
 
 O'CURBY .... . . 18 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 Annals of the Four Masters . . 26 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Dublin, Home of the Revival . . 33 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 O'Curry's Position in the Irish Revival 40 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 O'Curry's Vast Labours on Irish Texts . S2 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 O'CuRRY IN London and Oxford . . 60 
 
 / -O fl C 
 
 ^J». V? -O' '*!-,'' 
 
IV CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 Professor in the Catholic University . 66 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 George Petrie, the Artist ... 76 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 Pioneer of Irish Archaeology . . 83 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 The Essay on Tara ..... 96 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 Pbtrie's Work on the Round Towers . 107 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 Further Arch^ological Researches . 120 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 The Ancient Music of Ireland . .132 
 
A Group of Nation- Builders 
 
 O'DONOVAN— O'CURRY—PETRIE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 o'donovan's early years 
 
 The life of a nation is a continuous effort at 
 self-realisation. As the individual strives 
 to give utterance to the rising thoughts 
 within him, so a nation, through the collec- 
 tive mouthpiece of its greatest thinkers, 
 strives to reveal to the world its inner self. 
 Sometimes the attempt is but a partial 
 success appearing in fragmentary scraps 
 of autobiography, or sometimes it seems 
 almost complete in the union in one great 
 man of the representative qualities of his 
 race. The theory of environment as a 
 necessary factor in the appearance from 
 time to time of thoroughly representative 
 types cannot be passed over in the case of 
 John O'Donovan. To understand him, it 
 is necessary to grasp intellectually and 
 imaginatively the past from which he 
 derives. 
 
 This strange, idealising, and wandering 
 race of ours has left us sufficient traces of 
 
2 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 its past to reconstruct that homeland of 
 thought which was to be the birth-place of 
 O'Donovan. Dwelling in an island ringed 
 round by far-stretching seas whose rock- 
 petals, like a rose, are washed by magic 
 waves, it is no wonder that our people are 
 stamped with something of the mystery 
 that surrounds their island home. Its every 
 feature has been brooded over in imagina- 
 tion by them, and with the loving tenderness 
 of a mother they have called them by sweet- 
 sounding names. The shadow in the glen, 
 the peak piercing the sky, the gap through 
 which the sea-wind blows, the head-land 
 facing the wave, the river fretting the rocky 
 boulders of its mountain bed, the lonely 
 bog where the great elk sleeps his age-long 
 sleep, the sand-dune gleaming white-faced 
 with its necklet of ocean-foam are all re- 
 flected in the sensitive, shimmering imagina- 
 tion of the Celt. 
 
 Amidst the turmoil of tribal war and the 
 struggles of conflicting races Celtic culture 
 proceeded on its way, gathering up those 
 elements in life which were susceptible of 
 orderly imaginative treatment, whether it 
 be in the growth of Irish art from the simple 
 treatment of the La T^ne period, or the 
 growth of Epic Romance from the earliest 
 mythic period through the Tain to its 
 dissolution in the modern " sceal." 
 
o'donovan's early years 8 
 
 This culture has remained remarkably in- 
 dependent of external influences. The one 
 great influence which modified the native 
 culture was that of the Church, and it is a 
 commonplace to say that even the Church, 
 potent as she was in absorbing the interests 
 of the best intellects in Europe in her cause, 
 in Ireland found the stream of secular 
 literature flowing side by side with her own, 
 and, to her credit be it said, in no way 
 impeded it ; but, by pruning it of elements 
 objectionable to her teaching, brought about 
 that commingling of the two currents which 
 has been a stumbling block to some, and a 
 cause of justifiable pride to others. 
 
 From the year 450 to the year 900 the 
 early literature of Ireland took shape, and 
 it will be perhaps a surprise to some to 
 hear that its final gleaning commenced 
 when the Danish and Norse influence in 
 Ireland was at its height. As German 
 literature received a new^ impetus from 
 the threatened domination of France, so 
 it would seem as if Ireland was stimulated 
 into literary activity by the opposition of 
 the Danes ; just as, amidst the excitement 
 of the Jacobite struggle, a new band of 
 poets came to voice her national claims and 
 ambitions. 
 
 In the interval between the compilation 
 of such great collections as the Leabhar 
 
4 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 na h'Uidhre and the Book of Leinster and 
 the outburst of popular Jacobite poetry, 
 Irish literature suffered, in my opinion, 
 from being too self-contained. The older 
 motifs became played out, and a debased, 
 rhetorical style began to supplant the 
 nervous narrative one of the elder epic. 
 Making all allowance, however, for the 
 natural decay of narrative prose literature, 
 one can safely say that Ireland possesses a 
 body of early epic prose which is without 
 parallel in any early European literature 
 in its romantic and imaginative breadth. 
 
 Outside of pure literature the years 
 stretching from the English Invasion to 
 the age of Keating are marked by a rich 
 stock of ecclesiastical, topographical, gene- 
 alogical and historical literature ; and it 
 was this that O'Donovan, whether through 
 the bent of his own mind or the influence 
 of others, set himself to reveal to a public 
 hitherto totally ignorant of it. He and 
 O' Curry had, it is true, all the familiarity 
 of native speakers with the usual 
 traditional versions of the poems of 
 O'Rahilly, Seaghan Claireach, Eoghan 
 Ruadh O'Sullivan, Tadhg Gaodhlach and 
 the rest, which were then current amongst 
 the peasantry of the South of Ireland; 
 but the unknown, as usual, excited their 
 curiosity ; it was superfluous to investigate 
 
O DONOVAN S EARLY YEARS 5 
 
 works that were as household words amongst 
 them. It was left to a later age and move- 
 ment, when the Famine had rendered in- 
 distinct the memory of eighteenth-century 
 lyric, to revive the fame of Eoghan Ruadh 
 and bis contemporaries. Four men more par- 
 ticularly have contributed to that revival. 
 O'Daly and Walsh printed a considerable 
 amount of Jacobite poetry, which awakened 
 interest in it in their day. Then came the 
 beautiful verse translations of the learned 
 and esteemed President of the National 
 Literary Society, Dr. Sigerson, and lastly 
 there is the work of Father Dinneen. 
 
 John O'Donovan was born at Atateemore, 
 in the County of Kilkenny, in the year 1806, 
 not in 1809 as he himself says. The correct 
 date is proved by the Baptismal register 
 quoted by Father Carrigan in his History of 
 the Diocese of Ossory. He grew up therefore 
 at a time when Ireland was awakening to 
 a growing sense of political freedom. The 
 penal days, just passing away, though they 
 had destroyed all political liberty amongst 
 the native Irish, had failed to crush the 
 spirit of domestic joy and of literary eiffort 
 amongst the peasantry. A first-hand ac- 
 quaintance with native Irish literature of 
 the eighteenth century and earlier nine- 
 teenth will show how much of real intel- 
 lectual life, of literary aspiration, and of 
 
6 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 strong religious emotion was to be found 
 amongst a people who up to this had been 
 commonly reputed as naught but hewers 
 of wood and drawers of water. 
 
 In the sanded kitchen of the local inn or 
 in the wide ingle-nook of a farmer's house, 
 where the fire threw weird dancing figures 
 on the smoked rafters, would be heard tales 
 of other days recalling epic figures of an 
 heroic past, or the legends of the patron 
 saint whose well stood near, or the im- 
 promptu repartees in verse bandied between 
 two famous local " files." Nor was the 
 travelling schoolmaster without his part in 
 the life of the time. In many instances he 
 was both poet and schoolmaster, the latter 
 by necessity, the former by choice. 
 
 With the growth of political freedom and 
 the establishment of Maynooth (1795), Latin 
 Schools, as they were called, became more 
 numerous, and helped to prepare the way 
 for the collegiate system of to-day. The 
 great mass of the Irish Catholic Clergy 
 found opportunities at home for education, 
 and the old French type became less and 
 less prominent. Coming to Dublin in 1823, 
 young O'Donovan was sent to one of these 
 Latin schools. His first intention was to 
 enter Maynooth but, finding he had no 
 vocation for the priesthood, he turned his 
 attention to the study of Irish. A fondness 
 
o'donovan's early years 7 
 
 for quoting Latin phrases or rendering 
 Irish place-names by their Latin equivalents 
 revealed in his after-life the influence of his 
 early training. His knowledge of Latin also 
 bore fruit, as we shall see, in the production 
 of his Irish Grammar, and in the growth of 
 that feeling for textual accuracy which a 
 study of the classics is sure to awaken. 
 
 At the early age of nine years we find 
 O 'Donovan commencing the study of Irish 
 and of Latin, and he is able to say that in 
 two years* time he could transcribe " Irish 
 pretty well." He was, therefore, in a posi- 
 tion to benefit to the fulJ by that Celtic 
 culture whose twilight gleam filled the life 
 of our people in the pre-famine years with 
 a suffused poetic glow. He was the in- 
 heritor and child of a glorious past, of that 
 traditional culture which has withdrawn 
 itself to its solitude on the borders of the 
 Western Sea. 
 
 Up to this time the two races in Ireland 
 had taken but little interest in their respec- 
 tive literatures. The old Georgian city of 
 Dublin, redolent of the memories of its 
 Anglo-Irish corporation, of its idolatry of 
 King Billy and of its hatred of King James, 
 of its harbouring of that literary rebel Swift, 
 and of that vagrant sojourner in many 
 places, Goldsmith, led a life apart. Its 
 printing presses — and their fame is once 
 
8 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 again being resuscitated — turned out ex- 
 cellent reprints of Addison, Defoe, Swift, 
 Steele, Johnson, Parnell, and Goldsmith, 
 whilst the resident Anglo-Irish nobility, by 
 their patronage of the Arts, laid the founda- 
 tion of that musical tradition which it is to 
 be hoped our city will maintain ; but it 
 was uninfluenced by the Celtic culture of 
 the West. It looked askance at it, as at 
 something barbarous, and it has taken a 
 century of propaganda to break down, even 
 in part, the prejudices which, emanating 
 from the metropolis, infected a naturally 
 imitative people. Nor did the rebellion of 
 *98, a rebellion arising amongst palesmen 
 and amongst Northern Presbyterians, do 
 much to stir up an interest in the Celtic 
 land beyond. It developed its own cycle 
 of literary legend, a cycle which can be 
 connected with the native Celtic one by a 
 synthesis which is not literary but national. 
 The movement for Catholic emancipation 
 and the repeal of the Union stirred the masses 
 of the Irish people and laid the foundation 
 of that long series of political agitations 
 which mark the years of the last century, 
 but which, with the exception of the Young 
 Ireland movement, were mainly political ; 
 if anything, they centred the interests of our 
 people on material and industrial, rather 
 than on purely intellectual progress ; whilst 
 
HIS WORK ON THE SURVEY 9 
 
 the introduction of a system of education 
 which eliminated all virile reference to the 
 past history, literature, and language of the 
 country seemed to ring the death-knell of 
 all possibility of resuscitating Irish studies, 
 and of thus winning for native Irish culture 
 its fitting place in the history of European 
 civilisation. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 HIS WORK ON THE SURVEY 
 
 Fortunately, however, apart from the 
 tenacity of native tradition, two forces were 
 at play which helped to awaken the self- 
 consciousness of our race. The Romantic 
 movement in English literature, repre- 
 sented on its antiquarian side by Scott, 
 kindled a reverent feeling for the past in the 
 minds of the men of the early Victorian 
 era. In poetry this tendency was repre- 
 sented in Ireland by Thomas Moore, and 
 however little his Tara's Hall or his Red 
 Branch Knights would answer to the reality, 
 we must at least admit that Moore melodi- 
 ously invited us to remember the days of old, 
 and made it rather fashionable to do so. 
 He is responsible for propagating a legend, 
 but a legend is often an alluring bait to a 
 
10 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 deeper study of the reality underlying it. 
 As a collateral result of the Romantic move- 
 ment, the apparently more prosaic study 
 of antiquities began to flourish. The Royal 
 Irish Academy, founded in 1795 for the study 
 of Science, Polite Literature and Antiquities, 
 opened the breach in the walls of Anglo- 
 Irish Dublin through which the first scientific 
 knowledge of the history of the Gael was 
 to enter. Unfortunately its exposition was 
 undertaken in the early years of the last 
 century by men who, foreigners by birth 
 and faddists by nature, were but little com- 
 petent to understand it. The school of 
 Vallancey and of Betham produced one 
 useful result — it awakened the undying 
 opposition of Petrie, O'Donovan, and 
 O'Curry, and thus gave birth to their 
 immortal work. 
 
 O 'Donovan's introduction to the Academy 
 circle was through James Hardiman, Com- 
 missioner of Public Records and author of 
 Irish Minstrelsy and of a History of Galway, 
 a man of scholarly instincts, and one for 
 whom O'Donovan entertained the liveliest 
 and sincerest feelings of friendship. In the 
 letters which he wrote to Hardiman, and 
 which are preserved in the Royal Irish 
 Academy, he unburdens himself with a 
 freedom which makes them a priceless 
 record of his real opinions on the various 
 
HIS WORK ON THE SURVEY 11 
 
 subjects which agitated him throughout his 
 life. Previous to his employment on the 
 Survey, Hardiman engaged him, at a ridicu- 
 lously low wage it is true, to do miscellaneous 
 work, and during this time he made the 
 transcript of Peter Connell's Irish Dictionary 
 which is now deposited in Trinity College 
 Library. O 'Donovan was then but twenty- 
 four years of age, and a few years later we 
 find him denouncing, with characteristic 
 energy, a certain Mr. Otway, who had 
 ventured to attack Hardiman's Irish 
 Minstrelsy in a paper called the Examiner : 
 " Mr. Otway," he says, " (Out-way, i.e., 
 Af ATI c-flige.i.Ai|i feAcjA^n) is a very bad 
 judge of the merit of your publication, and 
 I tell him emphatically that until he is 
 master of the subject and of the original 
 language of the poems, he is not entitled to 
 a hearing at the bar of true criticism." 
 O'Donovan was not long in establishing his 
 own claim to a hearing at the bar of true 
 criticism. 
 
 Having read a notice in the Dublin Penny 
 Journal to the e:ffect that the Editor was 
 prepared to publish articles on Irish History 
 and Literature, he seized the opportunity 
 for publishing his first essay in the transla- 
 tion of Irish texts, namely — ^the translation 
 of King Aid f red's Poem which appeared 
 in the number for September 15th, 1832. 
 
12 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 This was followed in the following week 
 by his translation of the Charter of Newry 
 in which is seen that wide knowledge of 
 sources and that scholarly exactitude which 
 mark an epoch in the department of Irish 
 Historical Research. A full list of his 
 papers in this Journal, as well as of his 
 papers in the Journal of the Kilkenny 
 ArchfiBological Society and the Ulster 
 Journal [of Archwology, will be found in the 
 excellent Bibliography of his works com- 
 piled by Mr. Henry Dixon for " An teAb^iA- 
 lAnn.** His papers in the Dublin Penny 
 Journal were continued up to August, 1838, 
 when his work on the Ordnance Survey 
 commenced to absorb all his attention and 
 left him little time for editorial work. 
 
 The foundation of the Historical Depart- 
 ment of the Ordnance Survey gave O 'Dono- 
 van his real chance. The desirability of 
 mapping the abundant antiquarian remains 
 for which Ireland is famous and of register- 
 ing the expressive names of places had been 
 felt since Petty 's time. An accurate ear, a 
 knowledge of Middle and Modern Irish, 
 and above all a love of investigation were 
 necessary for success in the work, and all 
 three were found combmed in a unique 
 degree in O'Donovan ; it might also be 
 added, considering the conditions under 
 which he worked, a constitution inured to 
 
HIS WORK ON THE SURVEY 18 
 
 hardship and privation. Only a man of iron 
 constitution and of indomitable will would 
 have gone through with this work for which 
 a beggarly remuneration was given, and 
 which entailed exposure to damp and chill 
 and discomfort of every kind. The outdoor 
 work of the Survey was done by O 'Donovan 
 practically single-handed. Petrie, the head 
 of the Department, with his little band 
 of fellow -workers had their offices in 21 
 Great Charles Street, Dublin. Of the per- 
 sonnel of the sta:ff, Wakeman, a member 
 of it, has left us the following account, from 
 which I make this extract : "I should like 
 to dwell," he says, "a moment on the scene 
 of that very happy time, when we used to 
 meet in Dr. Petrie's back-parlour. There 
 was our venerable chief with his ever ready 
 smile and gracious word ; there poor Charles 
 Mangan with his queer puns and jokes, and 
 odd little cloak, and wonderful hat. It 
 was in that office Mangan penned his since 
 famous ballad. The Woman of Three Cows, 
 and 1 verily believe the composition did 
 not occupy him half an hour. . . 
 
 "At this time O'Donovan was about 
 thirty years of age. As in the case of almost 
 every man who has risen to distinction he was 
 an unwearied worker, never sparing himself 
 and evidently holding his occupation a 
 labour of love. With all employed in the 
 
14 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 office he was a general favourite, and in the 
 intervals between his most serious business 
 would often give us some of his experiences 
 as a traveller, telJing his tale in a rich 
 emphatic manner peculiarly his own." 
 
 From 1832, when he succeeded O'Reilly, 
 the compiler of the Irish Dictionary, 
 O'Donovan was continuously engaged on 
 the Survey till its suppression by Govern- 
 ment in 1842. At first lists of names of 
 places were drawn up, and for this purpose 
 he consulted printed and manuscript 
 sources. His knowledge of the Irish 
 language stood him here in good stead, and 
 his information with time became encyclo- 
 psedic. But this work was only preparatory 
 to his work, as we might term it, in the 
 field. With a mind replete with historical, 
 antiquarian, and literary lore, and with an 
 imagination quick to recreate scenes of a 
 distant past, he started on his tour of in- 
 vestigation and verification in the various 
 counties of Ireland. Like O'Dubhagain, 
 that ancient topographer in verse, whose 
 work he was afterwards to edit with loving 
 care, he could preface the account of his 
 epic journeying with the legend : 
 
 UimaIIxmti cimcheAlt tia |ro"otA — 
 " Let us journey round Ireland " ; 
 
 and journey he did with the zest of a man 
 to whom every inch of Irish ground was 
 
HIS WORK ON THE SUEVEY 15 
 
 pregnant with suggestion, and to whom the 
 manners and customs of his countrymen 
 were a perennial source of interest. 
 
 The Survey letters, 103 volumes of which 
 are deposited in the Royal Irish Academy, 
 are the greatest single monument of his 
 labour. They are probably the most re- 
 markable and largest series of official letters 
 in the world. A hundred books could be 
 written from the material ♦they afford ; 
 for in them we find history, antiquities, 
 genealogies, legends, and that which now 
 deserves special mention — observations on 
 contemporary types and customs. O'Dono- 
 van is famous for his learning, — but in 
 these letters we see how little of the pedant 
 he was. They are the least official letters 
 ever penned. O 'Donovan possessed that 
 naivete of expression, that child-like zest 
 in the study of human nature, and that 
 opened-eyed readiness to receive impres- 
 sions which would have made of him a 
 first-rate delineator of social types and 
 customs. As it is, forgetting for a moment 
 the official and learned side of his work, it 
 is, 1 think, safe to say that the most intimate 
 picture of Ireland immediately before the 
 Famine is to be got from his letters. 
 
 This quickness of observation for present 
 things was united to an imaginative 
 sympathy with the past. Standing in the 
 
16 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 graveyard of Uisge-chaoin in the County of 
 Donegal, in which the grave-stones exhibit 
 the names of the principal septs of Inish- 
 owen, " I was moved," he says, " by various 
 emotions upon viewing the graveyard 
 which encloses the ashes of Prince Eoghan, 
 the first Christian convert in Inishowen, and 
 of fifty generations of his descendants, and 
 these emotions were heightened by viewing 
 the princely figure of MacLoughlin, the 
 eldest branch of his descendants, who is 
 now the actual possessor of the old grave- 
 yard and of the field in which the celebrated 
 Uisge-chaoin or Clarifont springs." 
 
 Nothing but the power of thus emotion- 
 alising his work would have enabled him 
 to go through with the investigation of the 
 spelling of 62,000 townlands and of 144,000 
 names on maps. It gives us the key to the 
 zest with which he confronted difficalties that 
 would have been insurmountable to most 
 men. Quite frequently we find references 
 such as the following, in a letter dated 
 September 3rd, 1835, from Rosnakill : 
 " We finished the Index to the Barony of 
 Kilmacrenan at 2 o'clock last night after 
 having worked sixteen hours on it without 
 intermission." It was no wonder, therefore, 
 that O'Donovan, who had, before going on 
 the Survey, recruited his health at the house 
 of his friend Myles John O'Reilly, should 
 
HIS WORK ON THE SURVEY IT 
 
 again feel the effects of overwork and hard- 
 ship. In the letter quoted above we find 
 him stating : "1 am feverish to-day from 
 the effect of damp beds, the absorption of 
 water always creates pains in my bones " ; 
 and in a letter dated September 11th, 1835), 
 from Ballyconnell^ in which we see his 
 kind-hearted consideration for others, he 
 says : "1 am glad that O'Keeffe has not 
 ventured to come here in this stormy 
 season, for the irregularity of the diet, the 
 damp of the beds, and the annoyance to be 
 met with in country public-houses would 
 kill him in one month." 
 
 Of the niggardly treatment of O 'Donovan 
 in the matter of remuneration, the following 
 remark from one of the Down Letters is, 1 
 think, sufficient : " By going so often to 
 Hillsborough I lost three days and incurred 
 an expense of nine shillings, which caused 
 me great anxiety of mind." To comment 
 on that would be an impertinence. Such 
 was the treatment meted out to one of the 
 greatest Irish scholars of the century, a 
 man on whose titanic work a whole host ot 
 parasitic scholars have battened without in 
 the least exhausting the noble vein of golden 
 information of which he was the creator. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 INFLUENCE OF PETRIE ON o' DONOVAN AND 
 O' CURRY 
 
 Though it would rather surprise some of 
 their contemporaries were 1 to put it in this 
 way, I have no hesitation in saying that 
 O 'Donovan and O' Curry gathered round 
 them that small band of earnest workers 
 who were to lay the foundations of Irish 
 scholarship in the coming years. It is true 
 O'Donovan looked on Hardiman as his 
 sponsor in Irish studies, but it was to 
 O'Donovan and O' Curry that Todd and 
 Petrie came for the solution of all their 
 linguistic difficulties, and it was O'Curry, 
 Hardiman, Petrie, and O'Donovan who 
 established the Republic of Irish Letters. 
 
 Up to this time the department of 
 Antiquities in the Royal Irish Academy 
 had been dominated by Betham, the Ulster 
 King-at-Arms, but Petrie and Todd soon 
 set to work to oust him from the position 
 he held and to lay the foundation of an 
 accurate and scholarly school in that in- 
 stitution. The coup de-grdce was given to 
 Betham in the battle royal fought in the 
 Academy on the evening of June 24th, 1844 ; 
 
 to this famous bout O'Donovan thus graphic- 
 is 
 
INFLUENCE OF PETEIE !• 
 
 ally refers in a letter written to Hardiman 
 from 49 Bayview Avenue, North Strand, 
 Dublin, and dated June 25th, 1844 : *' I 
 hear no news here worth telling but that 
 His Majesty of Ulster, Congal the Perverse 
 [i.e., Betham], is giving vast annoyance to 
 the Antiquarian Druid [i.e., Petrie]. He 
 has also, I understand, thrown vast diffi- 
 culties in the way of the Ordnance Memoir 
 by personal exertions in London. I can 
 nearly believe that he has made an impres- 
 sion on the mind of Sir Robert Peel, both 
 by speaking and writing, as can scarcely be 
 removed by the party who are for the 
 Memoir — ^Tory and influential as they con- 
 fessedly are ! What a majestic warrior 
 his Majesty of Ulster is ! What an ad- 
 mirable leader he would have been in the 
 time of William Fitz-Adelm in Connaught ! 
 He spoke for two hours against the poor 
 Antiquary last night, but was most ably 
 met by Sam Ferguson (the Forger of the 
 Anchor), who explained the cause of all 
 his Majesty's opposition to the Antiquary, 
 and actually drove his Majesty out of the 
 room by the keenness and vigour of his 
 tongue. This was griffin against lion ram- 
 pant ! The wivems, hawks, and choughs 
 looked on and chuckled with delight at the 
 battle but took very little part in it." 
 From various sources and at different 
 
20 A GROUP OF NATION=BUILDERS 
 
 times Trinity College and the Royal Irish 
 Academy had acquired a considerable 
 number of Irish Manuscripts. To mention 
 but a few, they possessed the originals of the 
 Book of Armagh, the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, 
 the Book ofLeinster, the Leabhar Breac, the 
 Book of Lecan, the Yellow Book oj Lecan, the 
 holograph copy of the Four Masters; and 
 as early as 1836 O'Donovan commenced the 
 catalogue of the Manuscripts in Trinity 
 College, just as later O'Curry, whose work 
 was completed by O'Longan, commenced 
 his famous catalogue of the Royal Irish 
 Academy Manuscripts. 
 
 Todd was anxious, however, that O'Dono- 
 van's great powers should not be confined 
 to the routine work of cataloguing, but that 
 he should be enabled to devote himself 
 to the translation and editing of Irish texts. 
 To this end he got the Royal Irish Academy 
 to apply in 1836 to the Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer for a grant to aid him in his 
 patriotic undertaking. The application, as 
 may be expected, produced no result, and 
 then Todd decided to start the Irish Arch- 
 aeological Society so that private enterprise 
 might in some way make up for the failure 
 in duty of a so-called paternal government. 
 
 It was the commencement of that long 
 series of Societies, which, founded by the 
 people themselves, were to do for the modern 
 
INFLUENCE OF PETRIE 21 
 
 Irish scholar what the ancient Irish chiefs 
 and abbots did for the " ollamh " in the 
 good days of yore. 
 
 The refusal in 1836 to give a grant in aid 
 for the editing of Irish manuscripts was 
 followed up in 1842 by the suppression of 
 the Historical Department of the Ordnance 
 Survey. This marked a turning-point in 
 the life of O 'Donovan. His great work on 
 the Survey was thus brought peremptorily 
 to a close ; but we can scarcely regret it 
 when we consider that it left him free to 
 enter upon that career of original investiga- 
 tion and editing of our manuscript literature 
 which opened a new chapter in the history 
 of the origins of European civilisation. 
 
 It is a mistake to think that the antiquarian 
 spirit is opposed to interest in living human 
 things ; it is rather the over-flow of the 
 humanistic spirit, and is found in its 
 highest development in men who have the 
 keenest relish for the study of man as he is 
 — Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum 
 puto ; it is a healthy antidote to the wretched 
 circumscription of many contemporary 
 writers ; it widens man's horizon and 
 teaches him that he is the heir of all 
 the ages. I have noted before, in deal- 
 ing with his Letters, O'Donovan's keen 
 interest in the humours of the characters 
 he happened on in his journeying. He 
 
22 A GROUP OF NATION -BUILDERS 
 
 introduces us to a motley, Chaucerian crowd, 
 representative types of the Irish population 
 in pre-famine days ; priest, parson, Presby- 
 terian minister, landlords and their tenants, 
 farmer and peasant ; and he expresses 
 himself with a freedom and a directness, 
 and with a lively sense of humour that 
 recalls the attitude of mind, if not exactly 
 the manner, of the morning-star of English 
 song. What the working out of such a 
 vein would have led him to, I will not here 
 venture to say. His energies were diverted 
 into more purely learned channels by the 
 influence of Hardiman and more especially 
 of Petrie. 
 
 Petrie was a man of wide culture and of 
 great artistic tastes, and one likely to exer- 
 cise an overwhelming influence on the young 
 Irish boy whose sound judgment early 
 recognised in him a master and a safe guide. 
 The life-work of Petrie lay in the department 
 of Antiquities, and it is no wonder therefore 
 that O'Donovan caught to the full the 
 spirit of his first chief ; nor need we be 
 surprised at finding him referrmg in the 
 following words to Petrie as " the most dis- 
 tinguished antiquary in Ireland, from whom 
 he first acquired whatever skill he possesses 
 in the distinguishing History from Fable." 
 
 In addition to the Archaeological Society 
 founded by Todd, a second Society, the 
 
INFLUENCE OF PETRIE 28 
 
 Celtic, was started in 1847. Todd had 
 avowed his intention of winning over the 
 Irish nobility and gentry to some feeling 
 of pride in the past of the country from 
 which they derived their incomes. We 
 meet, therefore, with a decidedly formidable, 
 if not popular, array of names on the first 
 Council and member list of the Archaeo- 
 logical Society. The popular party evidently 
 felt slighted, and the Celtic Society was 
 started with the Rev. Laurence O'Renehan, 
 of Maynooth, as President, whilst on the 
 Council we find the names of Daniel 
 O'Connell, M.P., and William Smith O'Brien, 
 M.P. John O'Daly later became Secretary. 
 The two Societies ultimately amalgamated 
 and formed a new one called the Irish 
 Archaeological and Celtic Society. It is 
 sufficient to say that these Societies enabled 
 O'Donovan to launch his editions of Irish 
 texts on the market, and that Ireland owes 
 a debt of gratitude to those of their members 
 who supported them by their subscriptions. 
 Anyone familiar with O 'Donovan's letters 
 will remember how fond he was of tracing 
 the genealogies of Irish families ; we fre- 
 quently find him in bantering mood signing 
 himself as : John the son of Edmund, the 
 son of Edmund, the son of William, the son 
 of Cornelius, and so on, and it was therefore 
 " con aniore " that he set himself to edit 
 
24 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 The Tribes and Customs of Hy Many, of 
 Hy Fiachrach, and of ancient Ossory. 
 Membership of a tribe, be it remembered, 
 depended on proving one's genealogy, and 
 it is therefore not surprising to find much 
 material for the history of Irish families in 
 our manuscripts. Even in O'Donovan's 
 time — witness his encounter with John 
 O'Dogherty of Bree in Inishowen, as 
 narrated in a letter of August 21st, 1835 — 
 men were to be met with who could recite 
 thel list of their forbears back to the first 
 founder of the family. Besides these 
 genealogical tracts, he edited the Topo- 
 graphical Poems of O'Dubhagain and 
 O'Heerin, and the Circuit of Ireland by 
 Muirchertach Mac Neill. Here he found 
 himself peculiarly at home, and we find him 
 lavishly displaying that wealth of knowledge 
 of Irish place-names, the foundation of 
 which was laid in his work on the Ordnance 
 Survey. His editions of the Banquet of Dun 
 na nGedh and of the Battle of Magh Rath 
 display his powers as an editor of Irish saga 
 literature ; to the latter work he prefixed 
 a critical dissertation on Irish Epic prose 
 style in which he unreservedly condemns 
 the turgid manner of the later sagas ; his 
 criticism of the style is fundamental, and 
 nothing better has been said about it since 
 his time, From the same work we may be 
 
INFLUENCE OF PETRIE 25 
 
 pardoned for quoting a criticism of Moore's 
 History of Ireland, if only as a warning to 
 those who would write the History of the 
 Irish people without consulting the race's 
 records of its own life as contained in the 
 native Irish manuscripts : " Mr. Moore," 
 he says, " is confessedly unacquainted with 
 the Irish language ; and the remains of our 
 ancient literature were therefore, of course, 
 inaccessible to him. That great ignorance of 
 these unexplored sources of Irish history 
 should be found in his pages is, therefore, not 
 surprising ; but he ought to have been more 
 conscious of his deficiencies, than to have 
 so boldly hazarded the unqualified assertion 
 that there exist in the Irish Annals no 
 materials for the civil history of the 
 country." 
 
 Amongst his remaining contributions to 
 the publications of these Societies were the 
 Leabhar na gCeart and the Martyrology of 
 Donegal ; and it is to be feared that Moore's 
 fancy would not be caught by such erudite 
 works as these, which would scarcely 
 harmonise with his melodious rendering 
 of our history. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 ANNALS OF THE FOUR MASTERS 
 
 Whilst thus actively engaged in the editing 
 and translation of texts for the Irish Societies 
 O'Donovan was occupied in the preparation 
 of the two works by which he is perhaps 
 best known — the Irish Grammar and his 
 edition and translation of the Annals of the 
 Four Masters, His study of Latin must 
 have directed his attention at an early age 
 to the apparent instability of Irish gram- 
 matical forms ; the printed literature in 
 Irish at the beginning of the last century 
 was scant indeed, and the spelling of the 
 grammatical forms not well defined. O'Don- 
 ovan set himself to normalise the hetero- 
 geneous collection of spellings and forms 
 which the manuscript literature presented. 
 He did not intend the grammar to be a 
 phonetic replica of the colloquial dialects 
 then existing, and hence his scheme was 
 to register historical forms, and not drifting 
 colloquial ones. It was a splendid perform- 
 ance at the time ; it preceded the great work 
 of Zeuss — ^Jupiter Tonans, as O'Donovan 
 calls him — and any defect it has is due to 
 the fact that he had not the advantage, 
 which a worker in the same field would 
 
 26 
 
ANNALS OF THE FOUR MASTERS 27 
 
 possess to-day, of having a library of de 
 tailed and specialised works on every 
 feature of Celtic grammar. 
 
 The holograph copy of the Annals of the 
 Four Masters was procured for the Royal 
 Irish Academy by George Petrie in the 
 year 1832. 
 
 O'Donovan recognised it at once as a 
 work in the editing of which he would be 
 enabled to display the best qualities of his 
 scholarship, covering as it did the field of 
 Irish history up to 1616. In a character- 
 istic letter to Hardiman, written in the year 
 1839, he thus proclaims with pardonable 
 egotism his fitness for the work : " The 
 Royal Irish Academy have, it seems, at 
 length come to the resolution of publishing 
 the Annals of the Four Masters from be- 
 ginning to end at the suggestion, it appears, 
 of the Lord Lieutenant. This is good news 
 for me, if they do not attempt to make a 
 cat's paw of me, but that they will hardly 
 succeed in doing as long as I have as much 
 as will keep me from starving. I defy 
 them to get any one else who knows all the 
 topography, and is acquainted with all the 
 fairies and banshees of Ireland. If they do 
 not pay me well, they may go to the devil, 
 and I say to them 'non vobis vigilavi.' " 
 
 The work was published by Mr. George 
 Smith, the Dublin publisher, at his own 
 
28 A GROUP OF NATION -BUILDERS 
 
 expense in magnificent style, and is a lasting 
 tribute to his practical patriotism. The 
 first part, for the years 1172 to 1616, ap- 
 peared in 1848, and the second part dealing 
 with the earlier period appeared in 1851. 
 O'Donovan, though its editor, was no slavish 
 admirer of it ; he recognised it as an ex- 
 cellent outline of the history of the country, 
 but his fingers itched to give the dry details 
 a human touch from the wealth of historical 
 and legendary anecdote of which he was the 
 repository. In presenting Hardiman with 
 a copy we find him thus frankly expressing 
 himself in a letter dated June 7th, 1847 : 
 " They [i.e., Hardiman's works] will throw 
 considerable light on the barren context 
 of the Four Masters, who appear to me to 
 have courted the muse of History with 
 great coldness. I often regret that I am not 
 at liberty to infuse some of my own wicked- 
 ness into the text, but the sacred cause of 
 truth will oblige me to give them to the 
 world in the barren style of the original." 
 Notwithstanding this, O'Donovan would 
 have been the first to admit the truth of his 
 friend Sam Ferguson's remarks when, in a 
 review of the Annals, comparing the origins 
 of the literature of the Greeks with that of 
 the Irish, he says : " Our cattle spoils and 
 histories, our family pedigrees, royal and 
 princely successions are as precious to us 
 
ANNALS OF THE FOUR MASTERS 29 
 
 now as theirs were to them then. We will 
 treasure them as they did ; and the time 
 may yet come when our Egypt herself will 
 thank us for having cherished the seeds of a 
 new Literature after her own may possibly 
 have fallen into decay." 
 
 In the editing of the Annals O 'Donovan 
 had the assistance of his distinguished 
 contemporary and brother-in-law Eugene 
 O'Curry. Both these men had to create 
 their own schools and to attract the at- 
 tention of the learned of their own country 
 and of Europe to a subject hitherto 
 totally neglected. It was not, therefore, till 
 practically in the last decade of O 'Dono- 
 van's life that any public recognition of 
 the great scholar's work was bestowed 
 on him. His Grammar, published in 1845, 
 elicited at once the praise of Bopp and 
 Grimm ; and later in 1856 he was, on the 
 recommendation of Grimm, elected a corre- 
 sponding member of the Royal Academy 
 of Berlin, an honour which he shared with 
 Caspar Zeuss, whose Grammatica Celtica had 
 appeared in that year. The publication 
 of the first part of his edition of the Annals 
 of the Four Masters in 1848 won for him the 
 Cunningham Gold Medal of the Royal Irish 
 Academy as well as the Honorary LL.D. 
 of Trinity College, whilst its completion 
 induced the Government to bestow on him 
 
30 A GEOUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 a pension of £50 a year. In the meantime 
 he was chosen as Professor of Celtic in the 
 Queen's College, Belfast, which, with the 
 Examiner ship in Celtic given to him in 
 1852, made his income from all sources 
 £170 a year — the beggarly monetary reward 
 of a life -time of enduring work. 
 
 It is no wonder, therefore, that he medi- 
 tated at this time emigrating to America, 
 the home of so many of his exiled country- 
 men, with numbers of whom, as he himself 
 tells us, he kept up a voluminous corre- 
 spondence. But his services were retained 
 for Ireland during the remaining years of 
 his life by the establishment of the Brehon 
 Law Commission. He had already been 
 called to the Bar and had, therefore, attained 
 a certain knowledge of legal technicalities 
 which would help him in interpreting the 
 niceties of the Brehon Code. It was a 
 daring undertaking, and it is ever to be 
 regretted that Whitley Stokes, whose work 
 on Indian Law is a classic, did not devote 
 himself at some time or other to the per- 
 fecting and revising of the work of his 
 famous predecessors and fellow-countrymen, 
 O 'Donovan and O' Curry. Up to his death 
 O'Donovan was engaged upon the Brehon 
 Law Tracts. They were published after his 
 death, and therefore without his revision. 
 
 As far back as 1834 we find O'Donovan 
 
ANNALS OF THE FOUR MASTERS 81 
 
 complaining of rheumatism contracted 
 through exposure on the work of the Ord- 
 nance Survey. In the midst of his work on 
 the Brehon Laws he was stricken down with 
 rheumatic fever, and died at midnight on 
 the 9th of December, 1861 . He was attended 
 in his last illness by his old school-mate 
 Father Nicholas OTarrell, C.C, of Marl- 
 borough Street, and later Parish Priest of 
 Lusk. He was buried in Glasnevin, where 
 a simple stone with an inscription in Irish 
 letters marks his grave. But six months 
 afterwards O 'Curry followed his colleague 
 to the grave, and the cause of Irish studies 
 seemed to have suffered an irreparable loss : 
 " O 'Donovan and O 'Curry," says Dr. 
 Reeves, " gone ! — and Dr. Todd in poor 
 health and Whitley Stokes thousands of 
 miles away ; it seems to me as if a black 
 curtain had fallen over the sunny scene and 
 the lively movement which Irish Literature 
 presented a short time ago." 
 
 I fear that I have failed to bring adequa- 
 tely before the reader of this short essay 
 the greatness of the work O 'Donovan did 
 for Ireland. He caught the warm glow of 
 a tradition that famine was soon to impair 
 and gave it an immortality in his work. He 
 devoted talents which would have won him 
 renown in any field to the revealing of the 
 wealth of the Literature that lay unnoticed 
 
32 A GROUP OF NATION "BUILDERS 
 
 in the libraries of Oxford, of the British 
 Museum, and of Ireland. His powerful 
 influence helped to lend to the Irish 
 political party of his day a poetic idealism 
 which was an inspiration to them and is 
 still an inspiration to us. The circle of his 
 influence embraced men of all creeds and of 
 all classes, and all were united in one thing — 
 in admiration of the greatness of his scholar- 
 ship. He evoked from hill and glen, from 
 river and cave, from ancient diin and 
 medieval fortress and ruined church the 
 historic or legendary associations of their 
 names. He laid the foundation of a true 
 History of his Country and of her Laws. 
 He found her crooning the weird stories of 
 her past by the turf-fire, and he left her 
 with the copies of the title-deeds of her 
 glory deposited in the libraries of Europe : 
 
 " He toiled to make our story stand 
 As from Time's reverent, runic hand 
 
 It came undecked 
 By fancies false, erect, alone, 
 The monumental arctic stone 
 
 Of ages wrecked. 
 Kings that were dead two thousand years, 
 Cross-bearing chiefs and pagan seers. 
 
 He knew them all ; 
 And bards whose very harps were dust, 
 And saints whose souls are with the just, 
 
 Came at his call." 
 
EUGENE O'CLRRY. 
 
 {From a Photograph.) 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 DUBLIN, HOME OF THE REVIVAL 
 
 The end of the eighteenth century saw the 
 close of a brilliant period in the history of 
 Modern Irish Poetry. The disappearance 
 of the native Irish aristocracy, consequent 
 on the wars of 1641 and 1688-1691, left the 
 people without territorial leaders, and led 
 them to seek inspiration in imaginative 
 retrospect — in a poetry, written by men of 
 the people, for the people, and in a metre 
 which possessed in its union of stress accent 
 with the older alliterative and assonantal 
 system qualities which made a peculiar 
 appeal to the sensitive ear of the Irish- 
 speaking population. Thanks to the labours 
 of Father Dinneen and others attention has 
 been again called to the importance of this 
 chapter in the history of Irish poetry. 
 Father Dinneen especially deserves great 
 credit for the persistence with which he has 
 claimed for eighteenth-century lyric quali- 
 ties which interest not merely the archaeo- 
 logist but also the humanist and critic of 
 poetic art. He had, however, predecessors 
 in the persons of appreciative translators 
 or adapters. Wilson and Miss Brooks in 
 the eighteenth century ; in the nineteenth 
 
 * 33 
 
84 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 century, Hardiman, John O'Daly, and 
 Edward Walsh, Jeremiah Callanan, Clarence 
 Mangan, and Cornelius MacSweeney, Charles 
 Gavan Duffy, Thomas Davis, Henry 
 Montgomery, and Dr. Sigerson, President 
 of the National Literary Society, whose 
 poetic renderings of the songs of the Mun- 
 ster bards convinced at least one of his 
 readers, at an early age, of the intrinsic 
 worth of Irish Jacobite lyrics. Into the 
 fabric of Irish life in the eighteenth century 
 strands from the past were interwoven, and 
 the lyric of that time is instinct with 
 historical reminiscence as well as actual 
 reference. The national memory never 
 forgot the great figures of the Cuchulain 
 and Ossianic cycles, and the Irish-speaking 
 people never found any incongruity in a 
 full appreciation of the heroic qualities of 
 a Cuchulain and a Finn, with a higher and, 
 in a spiritual sense, different appreciation 
 of the heroism of a Columba. This catho- 
 licity of Irish manuscript literature is most 
 striking and reflects the peculiar temper of 
 the Celt — his receptivity — his power of re- 
 taining past traditions and of giving them 
 living application to the present. The 
 influence of a passionate imagination, in the 
 case of the great lyric poets, did much to 
 maintain the old literary tradition, the 
 extinction of which was threatened by the 
 
DUBLIN, HOME OF THE REVIVAL 35 
 
 passing away of the endowed scholarship 
 of the O'Clerys and MacFirbises. For to 
 my mind scholarship and great imaginative 
 literature are not as divorced as some 
 would lead us to think. Without scholar- 
 ship certain forms of popular lyric may 
 flourish, but the tendency otherwise will be 
 towards a neurotic impressionism or a florid 
 rhetoric, devoid of substance and of thought. 
 The popular lyric of the eighteenth century, 
 when at its best, derived its inspiration 
 and its power from the intensity of the 
 national struggle for existence, or from the 
 strongly felt personal griefs and joys of the 
 poets themselves ; but the literature of that 
 century would have been of much wider 
 range had it been supported by contem- 
 porary representatives of the great schools 
 and scholars of the past. Yet the tradition 
 of Irish scholarship was not completely 
 lost, despite the oppressive enactments of 
 the Penal Laws. Here and there an Irish- 
 man was to be found who nursed a passion 
 for the monuments of Ireland's early 
 history. Charles O' Conor, of Balanagar, 
 with the encouragement of that great 
 Englishman, Dr. Samuel Johnson, devoted 
 himself to the study of Irish manuscript 
 literature; but, with the best will in the 
 world, he was unable to cope with the 
 problems that confront the scholar in every 
 
86 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 page of Irish text, whilst the time was 
 scarcely ripe to produce an audience fit 
 to appreciate his labours. It was, as I 
 have pointed out elsewhere, the growth 
 of the romantic temper in European litera- 
 ture and, in a more direct way, the stir 
 created by the publication of MacPherson's 
 Ossian that renewed the interest in Celtic 
 origins and prepared a home for O' Curry 
 and O'Donovan in Dublin — the centre of 
 the English-speaking Pale. The new temper, 
 represented by Gray's Odes, by Bums' 
 Scotch Ballads, by Percy's Reliques, by 
 MacPherson's Ossian, and later by Scott's 
 Lays and, above all, by Moore's Melodies, 
 modified the literary temper of the old 
 Georgian capital. The Celt began to win 
 sympathisers amidst the families of the 
 Pale. A Beresford and a Whaley were to 
 be succeeded by a Petrie and a Todd, and 
 the stuccoed mansions of a cultured 
 tyranny — cemented, as they were, with the 
 sweat and blood of a Celtic people — were 
 to become the homes of the priceless 
 manuscript collections of the Royal Irish 
 Academy and of the Catholic University. 
 The gradual conquest of Dublin, its rise as a 
 centre of Celtic studies, is, to my mind, one 
 of the noblest episodes in the history of 
 Ireland. It is a phase of the stiTiggle for 
 the emancipation of the Irish people. That 
 
DUBLIN, HOME OF THE REVIVAL 37 
 
 struggle is not yet ended, but it has become 
 in our own day not so much a struggle with 
 forces outside of ourselves as a struggle 
 with ourselves — a struggle to retain some- 
 thing of our partially lost inheritance and 
 a struggle to achieve a fuller realisation and 
 expression of our individual national mind. 
 There is something, therefore, symbolical 
 in the fact that the leader of the Irish Vol- 
 unteers should have been the first President 
 of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
 In tracing the growth of the literary and 
 archaeological movement in Dublin it is 
 important to remember that it was this 
 movement which in later years was to 
 react on the Irish-speaking districts. The 
 foundation of the Gaelic Society, whose 
 volume of Transactions appeared in 1808, 
 marked the opening of the new century. 
 It began to be felt that something should be 
 done to reveal the wealth of song and story 
 lying hidden in the great national manu- 
 scripts. If MacPherson's famous forgery 
 or partial forgery did nothing else it suc- 
 ceeded in stimulating an interest in Ossianic 
 saga, and it is interesting to note that the 
 first volume of the Transactions of the 
 Royal Irish Academy, published in 1787, 
 contains translations, by Dr. Young, of 
 Scotch Ossianic poems. From the opening 
 of the nineteenth century to the coming of 
 
38 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 O'Donovan and O' Curry a certain amount 
 of grammatical and lexicographical work 
 appeared. This included the work of Owen 
 Connellan, and the small English-Irish 
 Dictionary of Thaddaeus Connellan (1814) 
 and his bilingual Grammar (1825), and, in 
 1817, the Irish-English Dictionary of 
 Edward O'Reilly. This latter was based on 
 Tadhg O'Nachten's manuscript Dictionary 
 and on the Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic by 
 Shaw. The preface shows the influence 
 of the quaintly absurd theories of Vallancey 
 and Betham — theories which were shattered 
 by the more accurate scholarship of O' Curry 
 and O'Donovan. The list of subscribers is 
 a curious document. It contains the names 
 of men of diverse reputation and political 
 temper. It is interesting to note that the 
 Alma Mater of Eugene O'Growney, May- 
 nooth College, supplies a solid phalanx of 
 fifty priests and student-subscribers, headed 
 by the Reverend Doctor Bartholomew 
 Crotty, President of the College, whilst the 
 Right Honorable Henry Grattan and Daniel 
 O'Connell, Esq., of Merrion Square, find 
 themselves in the company of the Right 
 Hon. Lord Norbury, Chief Justice of the 
 Common Pleas, and of Leonard McNally, 
 Esq., of Harcourt Street. 
 
 During these first years of the century, 
 whilst Grattan and O'Connell were fighting 
 
DUBLIN, HOME OF THE REVIVAL 39 
 
 the battle of political and religious freedom, 
 two young men, the one in Kilkenny, the 
 other in Clare, were cultivating a know- 
 ledge of the Irish language which was to 
 make of them the future champions of the 
 literary and historical glories of their 
 country. O'Donovan came to Dublin, in 
 1826, with an introduction from James 
 Scurry to James Hardiman. Edward 
 O'Reilly died in 1829, and it was on the 
 evening of the 7th January, 1832, that 
 young O'Donovan, with a letter of introduc- 
 tion from Larcom, the head of the Ordnance 
 Survey, called on Petrie in Great Charles 
 Street. Petrie, as O'Donovan says, re- 
 ceived him with great kindness and pre- 
 sented him with his copy of Cormac's 
 Glossary. It was practically his initiation, 
 as successor to O'Reilly, into the work of 
 the Ordnance Survey. At the same time 
 O' Curry was devoting every spare moment 
 to the study of Irish, whilst endeavouring 
 to eke out a livelihood as an employe in 
 the Lunatic Asylum at Limerick. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 o'CURRY's position in the IRISH REVIVAL 
 
 Eugene O' Curry was bom in the year 
 1794, at Dunaha, in the County of Clare.* 
 From his father, Owen M6r, to whose great 
 traditional knowledge of Irish literature 
 and music his son never tired of referring, 
 O' Curry derived that inner sympathy and 
 living acquaintance with the literature of 
 his country, which could only be found in 
 an Irishman to the manner bom. The 
 county of Donnchadh O'Daly, of Andrew 
 MacCurtin, of Michael Comyn, and of 
 Brian Merriman, was then practically a 
 purely Irish-speaking one, and O' Curry 
 grew up amidst a people whose literary 
 recreation was the recitation of Irish saga, 
 of Ossianic lays, and the singing of Jacobite 
 songs. The war with Napoleon seems to 
 have reacted favourably on Irish agricul- 
 ture, and the boyhood of O' Curry was 
 passed in comparative comfort. But, in 
 1815, Owen M6r O' Curry gave up his farm 
 and retired to Limerick, where his son 
 
 * This is the first time the correct date is given. It 
 is proved from the following entry which I found in 
 O'Curry MSS., Maynooth, 2. G. 8. p. 56 : "I was born 
 at Dunaha West, about three miles south of Kilkee, 
 on the 11th November, 1794." 
 
 40 
 
O'CURRY AND THE IRISH REVIVAL 41 
 
 obtained a position in the Lunatic Asylum. 
 It is strange to think of the future Pro- 
 fessor at the CathoHc University in DubHn, 
 one of the best known Irish scholars of 
 his day, passing twenty years of his life in 
 such uncongenial surroundings. Yet it 
 was no unmixed blessing that kept him in 
 touch with his native county of Clare. He 
 seems early to have earned a local reputa- 
 tion as an authority on the Irish language, 
 and as a collector of Irish manuscripts ; 
 and when Mr. George Smith, of the firm of 
 Hodges and Smith, Dublin, received a 
 commission to purchase Irish manuscripts 
 for the Royal Irish Academy collection, he 
 was fortunate in being introduced by the 
 medical superintendent of the Asylum to 
 Eugene O' Curry. Through Smith, O' Curry 
 received an invitation to join the Ordnance 
 Survey staff, under Petrie, and he came to 
 Dublin and entered on his duties in Novem- 
 ber, 1835. We find O'Donovan sending a 
 characteristic letter from Ballyconnel dated 
 September 10th, 1835, to Mr. Curry, 
 Limerick, and addressing him familiarly 
 as " My dear Eugenius." It is a striking 
 commentary on the labours of these two 
 great men to think that at this time 
 O'Donovan could have written to 0' Curry 
 asking him had he ever heard of Balor 
 B6menn ; and to imagine how the O'Donovan 
 
42 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 and the O' Curry of later years would 
 have opened their eyes in astonishment at 
 any Irish scholar who would profess ignor- 
 ance of " Him of the Mighty Blows." 
 
 There has always seemed to me some- 
 thing appropriate in the fact that it was on 
 the rising ground stretching from the mouth 
 of the Tolka River towards Mount joy 
 Square and Phibsboro', the scene of Brian's 
 great victory in 1014, that the little army 
 of Irish scholars encamped and commenced 
 the battle for the recognition of the historic 
 and literary glories of Ireland's past. In 
 Summer Hill lived John D' Alton; in Gard- 
 iner Street, James Hardiman ; in Bayview 
 Avenue, Newcomen Place, and later in 
 Buckingham Street, John O'Donovan ; in 
 Portland Street, O' Curry ; in Summer Street 
 the O'Longans, whilst in 21 Great Charles 
 Street, in the house of George Petrie, was the 
 office of the Historical Department of the 
 Ordnance Survey. In the centre of this 
 district, in the year 1828, O' Council laid the 
 foundation stone of the famous O'Connell 
 Schools, or, as they are sometimes called, 
 Richmond Street Schools. Here the chil- 
 dren of O' Curry and O'Longan received their 
 early education, and, as an alumnus of these 
 schools, I am in a position to state that the 
 spirit of devotion to Ireland was ever to be 
 found in them. You will pardon me, I am 
 
O' CURRY AND THE IRISH REVIVAL 43 
 
 sure, if I lay so much stress upon the spirit 
 and atmosphere of the time. To us, Irish- 
 men, the history of Irish studies is not the 
 history of philological dissection of a 
 corpus vile, it is the history of the living 
 soul of Ireland, and we turn to it to awaken 
 and keep alive in ourselves the enthusiasms 
 which animated the best representatives of 
 our race. 
 
 The appointment of O' Curry to the staff 
 of the Ordnance Survey, in 1835, made it 
 possible to create a division of labour 
 between himself and O'Donovan. O'Dono- 
 van was a bom topographer, whilst 
 O' Curry's tastes lay in the domain of textual 
 criticism and in that of the history of Irish 
 literature and culture. Not that O'Donovan 
 was by any means of the dry-as-dust order 
 of scholars. As I have pointed out else- 
 where, his wondrous collection of letters 
 is full of sparkling wit and vivacious 
 criticism of men and things ; and, as he 
 himself tells us, his fingers itched to enliven 
 the sober details of the Annals of the Four 
 Masters with the quips and cranks of his 
 own imaginative fancy. Whilst O'Donovan 
 was away in the country making investiga- 
 tions on the spot into the forms of Irish 
 place-names and the traditions associated 
 with them, O' Curry remained at home 
 supplying him with illustrative extracts 
 
44 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 from ancient Irish manuscripts. This 
 enabled him to become early familiar with 
 the chief manuscripts in the Royal Irish 
 Academy and Trinity College, and laid the 
 foundation of that general knowledge of 
 their scope and contents which, it may be 
 safely said, has never since been equalled 
 by any single scholar. The story of his life 
 is the story of the patient investigation of 
 the national manuscripts of Ireland which 
 in him found their first adequate inter- 
 preter. Almost immediately on his arrival 
 in Dublin he set himself to the task of copy- 
 ing the great vellum manuscripts which 
 fortunately had escaped the ravages of 
 time. As early as 1836 he made a copy for 
 the Royal Irish Academy of the manuscript 
 containing the Genealogies compiled by 
 Duald MacFirbis, which was then in the 
 possession of the Earl of Roden.* For the 
 Royal Irish xlcademy O' Curry also made a 
 copy of the Book oj Lismore, whilst he en- 
 riched the library of Trinity College with 
 copies of the Book of Lecan, the Leabhar 
 Breac and the Leabhar na h-Uidhre — the 
 latter left uncompleted at his death. 
 O' Curry was no slavish transcriber however. 
 A mere catalogue of the pieces copied by 
 him would fill many a page, but, apart from 
 
 * The original manuscript is now in the possession 
 of the Right Honorable Michael F, Cox. 
 
O' CURRY AND THE IRISH REVIVAL 45 
 
 his official transcriptions, he had the habit 
 of noting whatever struck him as throwing 
 light on the manners and customs of the 
 Irish people. An adequate idea of the written 
 sources of his masterly lectures can only be 
 had by those who have worked through 
 the volumes of extracts which he has left 
 behind him. Fresh, as I myself am, from 
 the cataloguing of one collection of his un- 
 published transcriptions and translations, 
 I am, perhaps, in a peculiarly favourable 
 position to estimate the gigantic labour of 
 the man. The oldest and most difficult 
 texts seemed but to whet his curiosity and 
 to awaken in him the desire to make them 
 yield their long-hidden secrets. In this 
 respect he out-distanced O'Donovan, whose 
 labours, if we except the Brehon Laws, lay 
 in a region where textual difficulties were 
 not so great. And it must always be re- 
 membered that it was only in the last ten 
 years of his life that O' Curry had the ad- 
 vantage of having at his command the great 
 Grammar of Zeuss. When one considers the 
 difficulties that beset the path of a textual 
 editor, even in our day, one can only wonder 
 that the mistakes made by him were not a 
 thousand times greater than they were. 
 
 From 1835 till the suppression of the 
 Historical Department of the Ordnance 
 Survey he was mostly engaged on the 
 
46 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 manuscripts of Trinity College and the 
 Royal Irish Academy. By that time he 
 had become familiar with the contents of 
 the great vellum codices, and had, as I 
 have said, acquired an encyclopaedic know- 
 ledge of their subject-matter — a knowledge 
 sufficient to make clear to him that what 
 was most urgently needed was a general 
 resume of their contents and a key to their 
 language in the shape of a dictionary and 
 of a collection of the ancient glossaries. 
 He must have frequently seen the valuable 
 Dictionary of Peter O'Connell, which was 
 begun in 1785 and completed in 1819. 
 O'Connell's Dictionary has been a mine 
 from which editors of Irish texts have de- 
 rived material help, sometimes, indeed, 
 without acknowledgment. Born at Carna, 
 in the Co. Clare, O'Connell was a frequent 
 visitor at Eoghan Mor O' Curry's house, not 
 ten miles distant from his own, and it was 
 he who introduced the future Professor to 
 those more difficult and earlier forms of the 
 language which men like O'Flanagan took 
 to be a peculiar dialect of Irish. O' Curry 
 tried later to procure the Dictionary. It 
 had been pledged by O'Connell in Tralee, 
 was purchased by Hardiman, and sold by 
 the latter to the British Museum. We 
 possess however copies of it, by O'Donovan, 
 in the Royal Irish Academy and in Trinity 
 
O' CURRY AND THE IRISH REVIVAL 47 
 
 College. The knowledge thus gained by- 
 young O' Curry threw a new light on the 
 modern Irish language and literature. He 
 must have come to recognise that the his- 
 toric names occurring in the lyrics and 
 folk-tales of the eighteenth century en- 
 shrined the memories of a great past ; and 
 that that past could not be adequately 
 revealed till the records of it in the ancient 
 tongue of Ireland were made known to a 
 public up till then sadly ignorant of them. 
 It was at this time that the famous inter- 
 view between O' Curry and Tom Moore 
 took place — an interview which showed at 
 once the honesty of Moore, and the impres- 
 sion which the work of the great Irish scholar 
 made upon the most talented Irishman of 
 his day. The time has not even as yet 
 arrived for the writing of an exhaustive 
 history of the Irish people. Many of the 
 histories we possess present but a ghastly 
 outline of their real life ; when a synthesis 
 of that life is effected it will be found to 
 contain, as an integral and most important 
 part, the results of the line of work which 
 O'Curry and O'Donovan opened up. 
 O'Curry joined the Ordnance Survey in 
 1835 and specialised in manuscript work 
 rather than in work in the field. It would, 
 however, be a mistake to think that he 
 did not contribute to the famous Survey 
 
48 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 Letters, more popularly known as 0*Dono- 
 van's Letters. For example, the Wicklow 
 Letters contain quite a number sent by 
 him to Larcom, with interesting accounts 
 of the places he visited and of the incidents 
 he met with in his tours. Larcom, the head 
 of the Survey, seems to have been anything 
 but an official martinette, and he evidently 
 encouraged and enjoyed O'Donovan and 
 O' Curry's quaint remarks in their letters 
 on men, places, the weather, and things in 
 general. In fact, the men of the mid- 
 nineteenth century seem to have been by 
 no means a heavy-footed race — they took 
 their scholarship seriously but themselves 
 not too much so. Witness the echoes of 
 the wit-combats of O'Donovan, Mangan, 
 Meehan, Gilbert, and Wakeman — hearsay 
 for many of us, echoes for some of us, per- 
 chance a memory for a few. 
 
 It should be remembered in apportioning 
 the praise due to O'Donovan for his magnifi- 
 cent collection of Letters that it was 
 O' Curry's aid, in sending him illustrative 
 extracts, that helped O'Donovan to solve 
 the topographical and historical difficulties 
 presented to him in the places he visited. 
 As an example of the thoroughness with 
 which these two men did their work, and of 
 the aid which they gave to one another, I 
 may instance the following. On March 
 
O' CURRY AND THE IRISH REVIVAL 49 
 
 80th, 1840, we find O'Donovan writing to 
 Larcom from Glendalough, explaining to 
 him his reason for delaying in that historic 
 spot, and the reason he gives is that he is 
 waiting to get from O' Curry a copy of the 
 ^ife of St, Kevin, " in order," he says, " to 
 compare it with the topography of the 
 district." It may interest the general 
 public to know that it is in this volume of 
 the Letters that O'Donovan clears St. Kevin 
 of the crime of having drowned the famous 
 Kathleen, and proves that the punishment 
 went no further than a scourging with 
 nettles ! As a further example of the way 
 in which topographical and manuscript 
 research went hand in hand at this time, I 
 may quote the following passage from 
 O' Curry's Manuscript Materials ; speaking 
 of the FSlire of Aengus, he says : "It was 
 during the progress of the late Ordnance 
 Survey that this tract came first into 
 notice, and it is no ordinary satisfaction to 
 me to have to say that I was the first 
 person in modern times that discovered the 
 value of its contents when, under the able 
 superintendence of Col. Larcom and Dr. 
 Petrie, I brought them to bear with im- 
 portant results on the topographical section 
 of that great national undertaking." 
 
 "This great national undertaking," as 
 O'Curry calls it, came to an end in 1842, 
 
50 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDEES 
 
 owing to the action of the Government of 
 the day, which, it is said, feared the effect of 
 it in re-awakening the national spirit in 
 Ireland. Fortunately, Government bureaus 
 are not the custodians of the national spirit ; 
 and patriotic private effort made up for the 
 loss of State aid. Two movements, the one 
 scholarly, the other popular, came into being 
 at this time. The foundation of the Irish 
 Archaeological Society in 1840, of the Celtic 
 Society in 1845, of the Irish Archaeological 
 and Celtic Society and of the Ossianic 
 Society, in 1854, gave an opportunity to 
 O 'Donovan and O 'Curry of making known 
 to the general public some of the scholarly 
 results of their labours. At the same time 
 the Nation newspaper, founded in 1842 by 
 Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy, 
 as the organ of the Young Ireland Party, 
 willingly lent its aid in popularising the new 
 world of Irish life revealed in the ancient 
 manuscripts of Ireland, and in giving it an 
 emotional and poetic setting. The poets of 
 the Nation naturally sought in ancient tra- 
 dition a spur to political passion, and their 
 poetry, at its best, glows with the white 
 heat of a pure patriotism. On the other 
 hand, the work of O 'Curry and O 'Donovan 
 created in men like Ferguson a desire 
 for a more detached and literary treat- 
 ment. And here I should like to make a 
 
O' CURRY AND THE IRISH REVIVAL 51 
 
 slight critical remark. One of the things 
 which we must admire in O 'Curry is 
 his belief in the intrinsic value of Irish 
 literature. To him English was more or 
 less an acquired language, and hence, in 
 rendering Irish sagas and poems into Eng- 
 lish, he was in an inverse position to most 
 modern translators — he was translating from 
 his native language, Irish, into an acquired 
 language, English ; most of the moderns 
 translate from an acquired language — 
 Irish — into their " native " language, Eng- 
 lish. In rendering, therefore, Irish sagas 
 and poems into English he must have felt 
 hov/ inadequate his versions were. It is a 
 commonplace to say that even the best 
 translations fail to render adequately their 
 original ; but let me say this that, personally, 
 I infinitely prefer O 'Curry's straightforward, 
 if old-fashioned, versions to much of the 
 smirking preciosity and sophistication of 
 certain moderns. I am perfectly certain 
 that Cuchulain and Queen Maeve would 
 howl with anger if they came across 
 some of the modern caricatures of their 
 august persons. The desire to improve 
 on the original is to be found in 
 those who know it only in translation 
 and who know it, on that account, im- 
 perfectly. The growth of Irish scholarship 
 during the last fifty years or so has made it 
 
52 A GROUP or NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 possible for many of us to read the Irish 
 sagas and poems in the original, and the 
 result is a return to the belief of O 'Curry — 
 the belief in the intrinsic value of Irish 
 literature. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 o'cURRY's vast labours on IRISH TEXTS 
 
 From 1835 to 1842 the work of O'Curry 
 and O 'Donovan was in great measure di- 
 rected by the requirements of the Ordnance 
 Survey. The results are to be found em- 
 bodied in the Survey Letters and in papers 
 such as Petrie's on the Antiquities of Tar a 
 Hill, which appeared as early as 1837 in the 
 Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 From 1840 on O 'Donovan continued his 
 publication of his editions of Irish texts for 
 the Archaeological Societies, his Grammar 
 of the Irish Language, and his monumental 
 edition of the Annals of the Four Masters, 
 O'Curry bent himself to the task of acquiring 
 a knowledge of the whole range of Irish 
 manuscript literature. For the perfor- 
 mance of such a task nothing could have 
 been more favourable than the work which 
 he now undertook. It was felt that the time 
 had come for cataloguing the great coUec- 
 
o'cURRY's labours on IRISH TEXTS 53 
 
 tion of manuscripts in the Royal Irish 
 Academy. The publication of isolated texts, 
 chosen without a full knowledge of the 
 actual range of the manuscript literature, 
 was likely to lead to a want of perspective. 
 O'Donovan had, as early as 1836, commenced 
 his catalogue of the manuscripts in Trinity 
 College, but he left it uncompleted in 1840. 
 In 1842 the Council of the Royal Irish 
 Academy employed O 'Curry to compile a 
 catalogue of their manuscripts ; and thus 
 was inaugurated that wondrous task carried 
 out by O'Curry, contributed to by Owen 
 Connellan and O'Beirne Crowe, and com- 
 pleted by the great Index Catalogue of 
 O'Longan, which lies still, in manuscript, on 
 the shelves of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 I have heard from time to time egotistical 
 editors of a few pages of easy Irish complain 
 of some small defect in this gigantic work, 
 but I prefer the testimony of Mr. Purton, of 
 the Royal Irish Academy, who has been for 
 many years in daily contact with it and 
 who declares its accuracy wonderful. Some 
 of my readers are, no doubt, quite familiar 
 with this catalogue, but, for the sake of 
 those who are not, it is well to point out 
 that it is a descriptive one. The plan 
 adopted was, in the first place, to give an 
 account, if possible, of the origin and 
 history of each manuscript, and then to 
 
54 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 give an analysis of each tale, poem, or 
 tract that occurs in the manuscript. For 
 example, in Volume II of the "Academy " 
 Catalogue there are 386 pages, and of these 
 225 pages are devoted to an analysis of the 
 contents of the great Middle-Irish manu- 
 script — the Leabhar Breac. You will see, 
 therefore, that such work as this entailed 
 the enormous labour of reading each and 
 every poem, tale or tract, in each and 
 every one of the manuscripts. I take a 
 particular pleasure in thus emphasizing 
 the greatness of the work of men like 
 O'Donovan, O'Curry, and O'Longan, for it 
 has frequently been exploited by others 
 without sufficient and, at times, without any 
 acknowledgment. As an example of this 
 I should like to point, though for certain 
 reasons I feel some diffidence in doing so, 
 to those peerless specimens of facsimile re- 
 production of the great vellum manuscripts 
 by O'Longan. Take, for instance, the fac- 
 simile of the Book oj Leinsier. To this the 
 late Dr. Atkinson prefixed an Introduction 
 and analysis of contents — a good piece of 
 work though not altogether his. The 
 raison d'etre of the Introduction was the 
 facsimile of the manuscript by O'Longan. 
 One would have imagined that O'Longan' s 
 name should have appeared upon the 
 title-page, but the real worker is re- 
 
O' curry's labours on IRISH TEXTS 55 
 
 legated to an obscure position in the 
 tail-end of the Introduction, whilst the 
 title-page tells, in no modest way, the legend 
 that the work is " The Book of Leinster,*' 
 et cetera, with Introduction, et cetera, by 
 Robert Atkinson, et cetera. The result is 
 that I have seen it ignorantly referred to as 
 the Book of Leinster by Robert Atkinson. 
 Somewhat the same treatment was meted 
 out to O'Longan in the case of the Leabhar 
 na h'TJidhre, Leabhar Breac and Book of 
 Ballymote. 
 
 But to return to the Catalogue. There 
 are four catalogues of manuscripts in 
 the Royal Irish Academy — the first, techni- 
 cally called the " Academy " Catalogue as 
 it deals with the Academy's original 
 collection of manuscripts ; the second, the 
 "Hodges and Smith " Catalogue, dealing 
 with the collection of manuscripts acquired 
 through that firm ; the third, the '' Betham " 
 Catalogue — so named from Sir William 
 Betham ; and the fourth, the ' ' Miscellaneous' ' 
 Catalogue . The first, the ' 'Academy ' ' Cata- 
 logue, O' Curry commenced in November, 
 1842. It consists of three large folio volumes 
 totalling 1,092 pages of closely written 
 description. The second volume O' Curry 
 finished on the 12th February, 1844, adding 
 the following note : " This ends my descrip- 
 tion of the Leabhar Breac [covering pages 
 
56 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 527-752] and whatever light I have been 
 able to throw on its contents it will be seen 
 that I have not spared any labour or 
 trouble." The third volume has no date. 
 Concomitantly with the writing of the 
 descriptive "Academy " Catalogue O' Curry 
 commenced that of the Hodges and Smith 
 collection. This consists of two folio vol- 
 umes, containing 519 pages, of which Vol. I is 
 dated 1843. Finally, of the five folio vol- 
 umes of the *'Betham" Catalogue, O'Curry 
 wrote two, amounting to 561 pages. Vol. 
 Ill was written by Owen Connellan and 
 Joseph O'Longan, and vols. IV, and V by 
 O'Longan. The " Miscellaneous " Cata- 
 logue, it may be mentioned, is the work of 
 poor O'Beirne Crowe, whilst the great Index 
 Catalogue, in 13 large folio volumes, is the 
 work of Joseph O'Longan. I trust I may 
 be pardoned for going into these details, 
 for it is, I believe, the only way to give 
 an idea of portion of the enormous work 
 carried out by these industrious Irishmen 
 of a past generation. 
 
 From 1844 to 1849 O'Curry still continued 
 to transcribe and translate Irish texts. 
 Most of these remain unpublished or have 
 been made the basis of editions by later 
 scholars. For proof of his generous aid to 
 his contemporaries one has only to consult 
 the Introductions to practically every work 
 
O'CURRY's labours on IRISH TEXTS 57 
 
 dealing with the native literature or history 
 of Ireland published between the years 
 1840 and 1862. To the Grammar of his 
 colleague O'Donovan he supplied illustra- 
 tions of Thomond forms ; he assisted him in 
 the preparation of the text of the Annals 
 of the Four Masters, whilst for the edition 
 of the Leabhar na g-Ceart he transcribed the 
 texts from the Book of Ballymote and the 
 Booh of Lecan. Without the assistance of 
 0*Curry and O'Donovan men like Petrie, 
 Todd, Graves, and Reeves would have been 
 utterly helpless. " Should you see Mr. 
 MacDowell again," writes Petrie to O' Curry, 
 on 28th August, 1855, " pray remember me 
 kindly to him, and tell him that I am getting 
 on with the second volume — that is to say, 
 between ourselves, as well as I can without 
 having you beside me. But in truth, 
 except in the way of preparation, I can do 
 nothing of consequence till I have you 
 again to aid me." To bring home to you 
 the kind of aid afforded by O' Curry, aid 
 often acknowledged in some stereotyped 
 phrase in an Introduction full of the man's 
 own thought and work, let me refer to 
 Adamnan's scholarly Latin Life of St. 
 Columba, edited by Dr. Reeves for the Irish 
 Archaeological and Celtic Society. The 
 manuscript, numbered 1106 in Trinity 
 College Catalogue, contains the following 
 
58 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 transcripts and translations by Eugene 
 O' Curry :— 
 
 1. Life of St. Columba, from the Book of Lis- 
 rnore, and translation. 
 
 2. Preface to the Amhra of Columcille, from 
 
 Lebhar na h-Uidhre. 
 
 3. Preface to the Altus, from the Lebhar Breac. 
 
 4. Story of Columba and his work, from the 
 Lebhar Breac. 
 
 5. Story of Columba, King Brandubh and the 
 devils, from the Book of Lecan. 
 
 6. Wandering of Snedgus and MacRiaghla, 
 from Yellow Book of Lecan. 
 
 7. Preface to the Amhra, from the Y.B.L. 
 
 8. Colmubcille and the King of Alban's daugh- 
 ter, from Y.B.L. 
 
 9. Story of Connor Mac Nessa, from Y.B.L. 
 
 10. Extract from Life of Diarmid MacFergusa 
 
 Cerrbheoil, from Y.B.L. 
 
 11. Death of Aedh mac Ainmire, from Y.B.L. 
 
 12. Legend of Inbher Ailbhine, from Book of 
 Ballymote. 
 
 13. Vision of Adamnan, from Lebhar Breac. 
 
 14. St. Ruadhan and King Diarmid. 
 
 15. Adanman and Finnachta, from the manu- 
 script of Mr. Mason. 
 
 To these transcripts and translations is 
 appended the following note : " All the 
 above were copied and translated by Eugene 
 Curry for Wm. Reeves, and this collection 
 so made is unique." The words " for Wm. 
 Reeves " are omitted in Abbot's catalogue, 
 but will be found in the manuscript. I think 
 that this gives us some idea of the material 
 
O'cURRY's labours on IRISH TEXTS 59 
 
 which O' Curry in his off time passed on to 
 men like Reeves, and by means of which 
 they gained considerable reputation as 
 Irish scholars and antiquaries. I could 
 add further evidence from the same manu- 
 script and from others but I am sure this 
 will suffice for the present. It was at this 
 time that O' Curry became acquainted with 
 the collection of Irish manuscripts at 
 Brussels. In 1840 there was published 
 U Inventaire des manuscrits de Vancienne 
 hibliotMque royale des dues de Bourgogne, 
 and this contained a list of Irish manuscripts 
 formerly belonging to the Franciscans of 
 Louvain and then in the Burgundian 
 Library at Brussels. It was Mr. Laurence 
 Waldron, M.P., of Ballybrack, as O' Curry 
 says, who about the year 1844 brought the 
 collection under the notice of Irish scholars 
 in Dublin, At O' Curry's request he made 
 transcripts and tracings " of great accuracy 
 and of deep interest." In 1846 Mr. Samuel 
 Bindon made a further examination of these 
 manuscripts and compiled a short cata- 
 logue, read before the Royal Irish Academy 
 on May 10th, 1847. These accounts were 
 supplemented by those of Todd and Graves 
 who visited Brussels shortly afterwards. 
 Amongst these manuscripts, chiefly hagio- 
 graphical, was a perfect copy of the War 
 of the Gael with the Gaill, and of this manu- 
 
60 A GROUP OF NATION -BUILDERS 
 
 script, lent by the Belgian Government, 
 O' Curry made a transcript for Trinity 
 College Library from which Todd edited 
 his edition for the Rolls Series in 1867. 
 One can discount the croaking pessimism 
 of despondent idlers in our own day when 
 we remember the industry and generous 
 idealism of these Irishmen whose faith in 
 the vitality of the spirit of Irish nationality 
 not even the depressing years of the Great 
 Famine could destroy. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 O'CURRY IN LONDON AND OXFORD 
 
 In the month of May, 1849, O' Curry was 
 summoned to London to give evidence 
 before the Public Library Committee of the 
 House of Commons. It is worth while 
 recalling the figure of the simple Celtic 
 scholar who, heedless of the material wealth 
 of the great Saxon city, bent his steps to 
 seek amidst the manuscripts of the British 
 Museum evidences of the spiritual greatness 
 of his race. There is a restrained dignity 
 in his own description of the visit which 
 expresses better than I can the unostenta- 
 tious enthusiasm of the man. " I deter- 
 mined," he says, " to pay a short visit to 
 
O'CURRY IN LONDON AND OXFORD CI 
 
 the British Museum which I had never 
 before seen ; and on being properly intro- 
 duced to Sir Frederick Madden, that 
 learned and polite officer at once gave me 
 the most free access to the Museum collec- 
 tion of Irish Manuscripts. Among the 
 volumes laid before me my attention was at 
 once caught by a thin book of large quarto 
 size in a brass cover, not a shrine, but a mere 
 cover of the ordinary shape and construction. 
 On examing this cover I found it composed 
 of two plates of brass, projecting nearly 
 half an inch over the edges of the leaves at 
 the front and ends and connected at the 
 back by a pair of hinges thus giving the 
 volume perfect freedom of opening on a 
 principle not much put in practice by 
 ordinary bookbinders. The brass was 
 rather clean and had a modern appearance. 
 The plates measured about twelve inches in 
 length, nine in breadth, and three-eighth's in 
 thickness. The front plate had a plain 
 cross etched on it about eight inches long 
 with arms in proportion. I immediately 
 guessed that the book within was not one of 
 any insignificant character, and I hoped 
 indeed that it might be some one of the 
 many ancient works which, I well knew, 
 had been long missing. Full of expectation 
 I opened the volume and threw my eyes 
 rapidly over the first pages, from which, 
 
62 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 though much soiled and ahuost illegible, I 
 discovered at once that I had come upon 
 a Life of St. Patrick, Being well acquainted 
 with all Irish copies of the Life known to 
 exist here at home, I immediately found 
 this to be one that was strange to me, and 
 it at once occurred to me that it was a copy 
 of the long-lost Tripartite, Under this 
 impression I called for Colgan's Trias 
 Thaumaturga, which having got I at once 
 proceeded to a comparison, and although I 
 am but little acquainted with the Latin 
 language, I soon found my expectations 
 realised, for it was unmistakably a fine old 
 copy of the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick.'' 
 During this short visit to England in 1849, 
 in which he and Todd found time to examine 
 the Bodleian collection at Oxford, O' Curry 
 compiled the descriptive Catalogue of the 
 Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, 
 a volume of 519 folios, and containing a 
 description of 160 manuscripts. It re- 
 mained the only catalogue of these manu- 
 scripts till Standish Hayes O' Grady com- 
 menced his magnificent one. Red-tape 
 never strangled anything so rich and rare as 
 O'Grady's splendid but, alas, now uncom- 
 pleted work. 
 
 During these years of almost superhuman 
 labour O' Curry received about the remunera- 
 tion of a decent artisan. He saw around 
 
O'CUBRY IN LONDON AND OXFORD 68 
 
 him hundreds of nobodies in receipt of 
 rich salaries for doing next to nothing. 
 A £10 note for this transcription and transla- 
 tion, a £5 note for that, added bo the meagre 
 and precarious income on which he had to 
 support his young family. As is well known 
 O'Donovan and O'Curry married sisters ; 
 and it was felt by their friends that even 
 at the eleventh hour something should be 
 done to free them from wretched monetary 
 anxieties. O'Donovan meditated emigrating 
 to America, when the establishment of the 
 Brehon Law Commission in 1852 helped to 
 retain his services for the home-land. 
 O'Curry had already turned his attention 
 to the great Brehon Law Tracts. As early 
 as 1840 we find him transcribing for Trinity 
 College Library Duald MacFirbis's (r/o^^ar?/, 
 and from 1849 to 1851 he received the sum 
 of £30 from the Royal Irish Academy for 
 transcripts of the Senchus Mor, One of 
 the most surprising things about him was 
 the rapidity with which he worked. He and 
 O'Donovan commenced their labours under 
 the direction of the Brehon Law Commission- 
 ers in January, 1853, working daily from 
 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at a small salary ; yet 
 O'Donovan found time to continue his 
 publications for the Archaeological Societies, 
 and O'Curry to make numerous transcrip- 
 tions and translations illustrating the general 
 
64 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 history of Ireland. Though acquainted with 
 a large mass of his unpublished manuscripts, 
 I am unable to give here a complete list of 
 them. It would be out of place in a work 
 like this, but until that list is published any 
 idea of his work I have given is very in- 
 adequate. For the projected edition of the 
 Brehon Laws O'Donovan transcribed 2,491 
 pages and O' Curry 2,906. Of the preliminary 
 translation, O'Donovan' s is contained in 12 
 volumes and O' Curry's in 18. I do not wish 
 to enter in detail into the unhappy con- 
 troversy over the Brehon Laws — a con- 
 troversy which embittered the last days of 
 O' Curry and O'Donovan, and created some- 
 what of an estrangement between them. 
 Anyone would admit that by this time 
 O'Curry and O'Donovan deserved to be left 
 a free hand in the editing of Irish texts. In 
 the Ireland of that day they were without 
 peers. Yet the old-time dodge was again 
 tried of making them do the work and letting 
 others reap the glory. Those who tried it 
 reckoned without their host in O'Curry. 
 O'Curry was now backed by his own people. 
 His position as professor in the newly- 
 founded Catholic University shielded him 
 from unworthy tricks of quondam friends. 
 The position was simply this. An attempt 
 was made to make O'Curry subordinate to 
 O'Donovan. Dr. Graves gave the puerile 
 
O'CURRY IN LONDON AND OXFORD 65 
 
 reason that O' Curry did not know Latin, 
 but O' Curry retorted that what was wanted 
 was not a knowledge of Latin but a know- 
 ledge of Old Irish which " had baffled the 
 best classical scholars of Trinity College for 
 generations." This move failed, but Graves 
 and his friends were more successful in 
 getting, as regards Irish at least, two 
 absolute ignoramuses named Busteed and 
 Hancock appointed in 1860 over O'Donovan 
 and O' Curry. Their treatment of O' Curry 
 and O'Donovan was that of two pedagogues 
 trying to prevent two small boys from 
 " copying." The whole thing would be 
 laughable were it not so scandalous. For- 
 tunately we have a clear statement of 
 this wretched affair from O' Curry himself 
 printed in the Journal of the National 
 Literary Society from a manuscript in the 
 possession of Dr. Sigerson. It is to be 
 regretted that O' Curry lost his temper with 
 his great colleague O'Donovan, but the 
 latter seems to have submitted too tamely 
 to the indignity that was sought to be in- 
 flicted on them both, and failed to co- 
 operate with his distinguished brother-in- 
 law. Nor can anyone say that O' Curry 
 had any objection to the appointment of a 
 competent general editor, for, with the in- 
 sight of genius, he wished to have his brilliant 
 pupil, Whitley Stokes, appointed to the 
 6 
 
66 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 post or, failing him, his friend John Edward 
 Pigott. Had Stokes been appointed we 
 should have had an edition of the Brehon 
 Laws which would have been a standard 
 one for many a day. From a letter written 
 by O'Curry on May 12th, 1862, a few months 
 before his death, to Dr. W. K. Sullivan, 
 he seems to have practically decided to 
 withdraw in disgust from a work hampered 
 by the interference of ignorant busy-bodies : 
 " It would be highly displeasing to me,'* 
 he writes, " to come into angry contact with 
 Sir Thomas Larcom and Dr. Graves, the 
 ruling spirits of the Commission, and I 
 don't know that it would not be better for 
 me to withdraw altogether from the Brehon 
 Laws and turn my now hard-drained 
 energies to something else of a quieter and 
 smoother character." 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PROFESSOR IN THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY 
 
 Fortunately for O'Curry there was to be 
 found one who, before these harassing trials 
 came upon him, had recognised his wonder- 
 ful powers and had determined to give him 
 a position in which he could give free ex- 
 pression to his inmost convictions and full 
 
PROFESSOR IN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY 67 
 
 scope for the publication of the fruits of 
 his untiring years of scholarly research. 
 I know nothing nobler in the history of 
 human effort than the attempt made by 
 the Catholic people of Ireland, crushed and 
 decimated as they were by the Great 
 Famine, to establish a University which 
 would resuscitate the best traditions of Irish 
 scholarship and win a hearing for the claims 
 of Celtic culture. It was in 1851 that public 
 collections were commenced throughout 
 the Irish dioceses for the purpose of estab- 
 lishing this University. In the Autumn of 
 1854 the University classes were opened. 
 The rector was John Henry Newman, and 
 he at once decided to appoint Eugene 
 O' Curry to the chair of Irish History and 
 Archaeology, the first adequate and in- 
 dependent endowment of pure Irish scholar- 
 ship since the days of the O'Clerys and 
 the MacFirbises. The glowing tribute of 
 O'Curry, in his Introduction to the Lectures, 
 to the hearty sympathy and attentive 
 hearing, as a member of his class, which he 
 received from the late Fellow of Oriel Col- 
 lege, Oxford, is well known. 
 
 If proof were needed of the ultimate 
 solidarity of the interests of human cul- 
 ture, it is, I think, to be found in the fact 
 that Dr. Samuel Johnson, the greatest 
 man of letters in the England of the 
 
68 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 eighteenth century lent his support to the 
 scholarly efforts of Charles O' Conor of 
 Balanagar; and that in the nineteenth 
 century we find the greatest master of 
 English prose, the most cultured English- 
 man of his day, lending the whole weight 
 of his moral support to the efforts of the 
 simple-minded but knowledge-loving Irish- 
 man, in whom he recognised a kindred zeal 
 for the advancement of the domain of 
 human thought. Here was no cheap sneer 
 at the want of a little Latin nor yet a little 
 Greek ! What a contrast to the Busteeds, 
 the Hancocks, et hoc genus omne. In the 
 faculty of Philosophy and Letters O' Curry 
 had associated with him distinguished 
 colleagues such as Denis Florence Mac- 
 Carthy, T. W. Allies, Aubrey de Vere, John 
 O'Hagan, Peter le Page Renouf, and my 
 own former Professor of English Literature, 
 Thomas Arnold, whose brother Matthew 
 expressed his appreciation of the new 
 movement in his charming Essay on Celtic 
 Literature. In the all too short-lived 
 Atlantis appeared brilliant papers from 
 these distinguished men, including one from 
 Dr. Sigerson, who early displayed his rare 
 union of scientific knowledge and literary 
 power. In the Atlantis, whilst 0' Curry was 
 publishing his texts and translations of 
 the Three Sorrows of Story-telling, Le Page 
 
PROFESSOR IN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY 69 
 
 Renouf was contributing those famous 
 papers which were to include his " note- 
 worthy defence of Egyptological science 
 against the attacks of Sir George Cornwall 
 Lewis, and which finally disposed of all 
 objections to Young and Champollion's 
 method of deciphering the hieroglyphs." * 
 During his last years the demand on 
 O' Curry's time and energies was enormous. 
 From 1852 till his death he was engaged on 
 the work of the Brehon Laws, spending the 
 summer of 1855 with O'Donovan in the 
 British Museum and the Bodleian at 
 Oxford. In the same year he published 
 
 * It is not without significance that in our newly- 
 founded National University there has been found a 
 place for one who is likely, if we are to accept the 
 testimony of men like Professor Sachau of the 
 University of Berlin, to maintain the reputation of 
 our native University in the domain of Egyptological 
 science. I refer to Father Boylan, Professor of 
 Scripture in Maynooth and of Eastern Languages in 
 University College, Dublin. In addition one of the 
 chief features in the constitution of the new National 
 University is a well-endowed Faculty of Celtic Studies, 
 which, we trust, will continue the patriotic and 
 industrious traditions of the old Faculty of the 
 Catholic University. Finally, a notable link between 
 the two Universities is found in the fact that His 
 Grace the Most Rev. Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of 
 Dublin, the real founder of the National University 
 and its first Chancellor, was himself a pupil of the 
 old Catholic University. I may also add that during 
 the existence of the Royal University the succession 
 in Celtic Studies was continued in University College, 
 Dublin, by Prof. O'Looney, and by my own master in 
 rehua Celticia, Rev. Edmund Hogan, S.J., LL.D. 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LlBilAK^ 
 CHKSTJS'UT HILL, MASS. 
 
70 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 for the Celtic Society his editions of the 
 Battle oj Magh Leana and the Tochmarc 
 Momera, Early in his career he had worked 
 at the now well-known Irish Glossaries and 
 had kept in view the publication of a great 
 Dictionary of the Irish Language. In 1852 
 a Committee was formed to help in the 
 publication of a Dictionary ; O' Curry col- 
 lected the material, but before his death 
 sufficient funds were not forthcoming to 
 warrant them in going to press. Meanwhile 
 he found time to attend the meetings of an 
 Association for the Preservation and Culti- 
 vation of Irish Music, John Edward Pigott 
 and Dr. Robert Lyons acting as secretaries. 
 In 1857 we find him touring with Dr. Stokes, 
 Dr. Petrie, Whitley Stokes, Samuel Fer- 
 guson, Margaret Stokes, John O'Donovan, 
 Martin Haverty, Sir William Wilde, and 
 others, collecting old traditional airs and 
 songs, examining antiquarian remains, and 
 making, as Martin Haverty puts it, "a 
 most beautiful speech in Irish to the people 
 of Aran assembled in one of the old Fir- 
 bolg forts." During the years 1855-1856 
 O' Curry delivered in the Catholic Univer- 
 sity his famous Lectures on the Manuscript 
 Materials oj Early Irish History ; and from 
 1857 to July, 1862, he delivered his course 
 of Lectures on the Manners and Customs oj 
 the Ancient Irish. The first was published 
 
PROFESSOR IN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY 71 
 
 in 1861, the second in 1873, after his death, 
 with an Introduction by his friend W. K. 
 Sullivan. Needless to say they received 
 the highest praise from everyone interested 
 in Celtic studies in that day. They de- 
 finitely revealed to the world the wealth 
 of Irish manuscript literature. Accessible 
 as they are in printed form, owing to the 
 munificence of the Catholic University 
 authorities, I am dispensed from any de- 
 tailed reference to them. Suffice it to say 
 that they are in reality printed guides to 
 the enormous mass of his unprinted tran- 
 scripts and translations. They have been 
 frequently criticised for not being what they 
 never professed to be. O' Curry was not a 
 philologist in the modern sense of the word. 
 Further, the plan of his work put it out of 
 his power to sift to their origins the thousand 
 and one traditions that jostle one another 
 in his pages. It would take a hundred 
 scholars to adequately deal with the prob- 
 lems that are suggested by the material 
 he unearthed. His real title to fame is that 
 he did unearth this material ; that he gave 
 us the initial key to the solution of these 
 problems by his masterly analysis of the con- 
 tents of the great National Manuscripts, and 
 that he set an example to his countrymen 
 of tireless labour and of unbending faith in 
 the dignity of Ireland's Past. Nor must 
 
72 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 it be forgotten that with O'Donovan he was 
 the centre of an enthusiastic band of fellow- 
 workers who but for him would have been 
 powerless to penetrate the secrets sealed till 
 then in the ancient language of Ireland. 
 
 Amidst the trials of his later years he had 
 the sympathy of staunch friends. He was 
 a frequent and honoured guest at the house 
 of Cardinal Cullen, whose great wisdom and 
 practical advice were ever at his service; 
 whilst he won the affectionate esteem of 
 Cardinal Moran, then Dr. Moran, who 
 cherished his memory to the end. From the 
 Oratory in Birmingham, John Henry New- 
 man wrote him kindliest words of encourage- 
 ment and sympathy ; in the preparation of 
 his printed Lectures John Edward Pigott 
 lent him an unostentatious aid which was 
 little less than filial ; whilst the letters of 
 Whitley Stokes to his dear master or 
 " Aite," as he reverently calls him, wound 
 up with the ever- recurring " Your affec- 
 tionate dalta " (or foster-son). The interest 
 which he took in the future editor of the 
 Fdlire may be estimated from the mere 
 fact that between January 5th and July 
 5th of the year 1859, Stokes addressed to 
 him twenty-six letters from Lincoln's Inn, 
 full of queries and difficulties and of thanks 
 for answers and solutions generously given. 
 The debt of Stokes to O' Curry is manifestly 
 
GEORGE PETRIH. 
 
 (From an Oil Painting in possession of the Royal Irish Academy. 
 
PROFESSOR IN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY 73 
 
 great indeed. But O'Curiy's deepest con- 
 solation in the closing months of his life 
 must have been that he had drained in the 
 cause of Ireland to its very dregs all the 
 power of the great intelligence and of the 
 powerful physical frame inherited from his 
 father Eoghan Mor. He delivered his last 
 lecture in July, 1862. On the 20th of the 
 same month he took part in the procession 
 at the laying of the foundation stone of the 
 new Catholic University of Ireland on a 
 spot consecrated by the labours of St, 
 Columba and redolent of the fame of the 
 hero of Clontarf. In the vast assembly of 
 that day, composed of thirty-two Bishops, 
 and, it is said, two hundred thousand spec- 
 tators, one may single out the simple yet 
 majestic figure of the great scholar who, 
 more than any other, represented the un- 
 dying spirit of his race. There was some- 
 thing prophetic in this his last public 
 appearance. The closing days of his life 
 were spent in the quiet of his home amidst 
 his beloved manuscripts. On the evening of 
 Wednesday, July 30th, 1862, he complained 
 of a pain about the region of his heart and 
 at twenty minutes past four it had ceased 
 to beat for ever. Ireland has reason to be 
 proud of Eugene O' Curry. Fifty years 
 have passed away since he was laid in an 
 Irish grave. No stately monument marks 
 
74 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 the spot where he lies at rest ; but his 
 name is written in the hearts and memories 
 of those who love Ireland. He came to us 
 from the Western Sea where the horses 
 of Mananan beat with angry hoof on the 
 rock-bound coast of Clare. He came to us 
 from the dying years of a century rich in 
 suffering and in achievement. He came to 
 us as a leader in the Renaissance of Celtic 
 Studies, a star-soul in the East to guide us 
 to the magic cradle of the Celtic West, a 
 leader true to his mission to the end ; and 
 we, his pupils, are proud of him — proud of 
 his accomplishment, more proud of his 
 endeavour, for his aim is a greater in- 
 spiration to us than the calculating scholar- 
 ship of lesser men, and to-day we may 
 leave him at rest secure on the mountain- 
 top of his Fame :— - 
 
 *' Here — here's his place where meteors 
 shoot, 
 
 Clouds form, 
 Lightnings are loosened. 
 Stars come and go ! let joy break 
 
 With the storm. 
 Peace let the dew send ! 
 Lofty designs must close in like effects : 
 
 Loftily lying, 
 Leave him — still loftier than the world 
 suspects 
 
 Living and dying." 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 GEORGE PETRIE, THE ARTIST 
 
 George Petrie was born in Dublin in 1789. 
 His paternal grandfather had come from 
 Aberdeen, and his mother was the daughter 
 of Sacheverell Simpson, of Edinburgh. 
 Notwithstanding his Scotch origin, Petrie 
 was, in sympathy and tastes, an Irishman 
 and a Dublin man to the core. Whether it 
 be due to the complexity of its history 
 or of its race-elements, our Irish capital 
 has a charm for those who have been 
 bom in it, or have come to live in it, 
 which is all its own. Danish and Norman 
 and English elements have united to 
 give it a temper which refuses to be 
 insular, and the Irish element insures 
 its fundamental patriotism. In its Georgian 
 houses rebels have been born and bred, and 
 the home of its National Parliament is a 
 work of classical beauty. It is the open door 
 to the Continent and to England, and in 
 the eighteenth century, it seemed as if 
 English and Continental influences domi- 
 nated its intellectual life. It seemed to have 
 forgotten the remains of that great Celtic 
 civilisation whose monuments and whose 
 language kept their quiet secrets amidst the 
 mountains and grass-lands of the West. 
 
 76 
 
76 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 The education which Petrie received at 
 Whyte's famous school in Grafton Street 
 would, at first blush, appear to be a poor 
 preparation for the work of his life ; yet 
 such is the fructifying power of real culture 
 that it was, as far as one can judge, his 
 love of an English poet, Wordsworth, that 
 quickened in him a sensibility for the study 
 of man and of nature. From his father, an 
 antiquary and a portrait painter, he in- 
 herited his love for antiquarian study and 
 that artistic power which he used with 
 such effect in his charming sketches of Irish 
 antiquarian scenes ; but from Wordsworth 
 he derived that gentle sympathy with the 
 human association of his subjects which 
 lends to his works a distinctive quality. 
 In all Petrie' s sketches one perceives the 
 rare union of the artist, the antiquary, and 
 the poet. 
 
 It was fortunate for us that a mind so 
 firmly imbued with the spaciousness of 
 fundamental artistic conceptions should 
 have found its local application in Ireland. 
 As a boy of nineteen years Petrie visited 
 Wicklow, and the Diary which he wrote 
 when on tour reveals how wide, from the 
 beginning, were his sympathies — whether 
 with music, antiquities, or scenery. In 
 1813 he visited London and, later, Wales ; 
 but in all his travels his mind " fondly 
 
GEORGE PETRIE, THE ARTIST 77 
 
 turned to home " ; and during these early 
 years his artistic studies in Irish scenery 
 and antiquities lent to otherwise ordinary 
 guide books* a rare distinction. Petrie's 
 artistic work is characterised by delicacy 
 of detail, truthfulness of drawing, and a 
 refined sensibility ; the want of depth of 
 tone which is felt in his work is due in him 
 not to any innate inability to value it, but 
 rather to that analytic tendency of his 
 mind which was to display its power in the 
 analysis of Irish ornament and in the dis- 
 covery of the origin of Irish antiquarian 
 remains. In other words, he clearly shaped 
 his artistic work to meet the essential 
 requirements of antiquarian illustration.f 
 In addition, his sense of responsibility and 
 of truthfulness was too great to allow him 
 to attempt to transfer to book illustrations 
 the elusive colouring of Irish landscape or 
 Irish skies. Most people who visit anti- 
 quarian remains are content with a general 
 and cursory examination ; but Petrie, 
 through his artistic work, acquired an 
 intimate knowledge of them which lent to 
 
 * Cromwell's Excursions in Ireland ; Brewer's 
 Beauties of Ireland ; Fisher's Historical Guide to 
 Ancient and Modern Dublin ; Wright's Tours in 
 Killamey, Wicklow, and Antrim. 
 
 t See The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, etc., 
 by G. Petrie. Dublin : Hodges & Smith, 1846. Pre- 
 face, pp. ix, X. 
 
78 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 his opinions a singular scientific value. 
 Perhaps one of the most important factors in 
 determining once for all his antiquarian 
 bent was his tour to the West and to the 
 Aran Islands in 1820-1821. It was on this 
 tour that he studied for the first time the 
 great group of ecclesiastical remains at 
 Clonmacnoise,* which his pencil and his 
 pen were to illustrate so profusely. The 
 round towers and the exquisitely carved 
 Celtic crosses awakened in him an affec- 
 tionate interest which only ceased with 
 death. 
 
 From the Shannon Petrie proceeded to 
 Aran — Aran of the Saints — where he found 
 an inexhaustible field of investigation. But 
 as he embodied his more mature observa- 
 tions on Clonmacnoise and on Aran in 
 later volumes, we may be permitted to 
 refer the reader to his description, in 
 his Diary of this tour, of the central figure 
 in the Aran Islands of that day — the de- 
 scription of the old parish priest, Father 
 Frank O'Flaherty. Petrie, though a Pro- 
 testant, was a man of a most tolerant mind, 
 and Catholics may well be proud of his 
 glowing tribute •}• to the simple virtues of 
 those cultured priests of long ago, who min- 
 
 * See the excellent sketch of Clonmacnoise by Prof. 
 R. A. Macalister, Catholic Truth Society of Ireland. 
 I See Stokes' Life of Petrie, pp. 69-64. 
 
GEORGE PETRIE, THE ARTIST 79 
 
 istered with disinterested zeal to the spiritual 
 and temporal welfare of their poor but 
 devoted flocks : " Let imagination fancy,'* 
 he says, " the qualities that should adorn 
 the priest, and the ideal attributes will not 
 be much unlike those that really belong 
 to Father Francis O'Flaherty." We are 
 unable to give at length Petrie's splendid 
 description of Father Frank, but shall merely 
 say that nothing finer has been written since 
 Chaucer drew his immortal portrait of a 
 perfect priest. 
 
 On his return to Dublin with a portfolio 
 of sketches and a memory stored with vivid 
 recollections of the historic landscapes of 
 the West, Petrie felt that the time had come 
 for the foundation of an institution devoted 
 to the forwarding of Irish Art. Already in 
 the Dublin Examiner of May, 1816, he had 
 pleaded for the establishment of a School 
 of Irish Art, and he criticised the system of 
 training in the schools of the Dublin Society. 
 With the Royal Hibernian Academy, whose 
 first exhibition of pictures took place in 
 1826, he was intimately associated, and 
 it was in the year 1830 that he was 
 elected its librarian. Some of his most 
 notable pictures* were exhibited on its 
 
 ♦In 1829— "The Round Tower of Kilbannon" (Co. 
 Galway) ; " Dtin Aengus in Aranmore" ; " The Elnight 
 and the Lady" (Scene, Comeen Dubh, Co. Kerry); 
 
80 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 walls, and their intensely Irish character 
 did much to prepare the way for the growth 
 of that Celtic movement of which he and 
 O'Curry and O'Donovan were the pioneers. 
 
 With the closing of those early years 
 Petrie, from the purely artistic, was to pass 
 into larger fields. As may be seen from 
 his charming description of Father Frank 
 O'Flaherty, he wielded the pen as grace- 
 fully as the pencil or the brush. His style 
 has an old-time simplicity and delicacy 
 which will appeal to those whose tastes 
 are not chained to what is merely modem. 
 By means of it he was enabled to popu- 
 larise his learned exposition of his scientific 
 methods and discoveries, and from an early 
 date his pen, as well as his pencil, travelled 
 in company with his thought. His desire 
 was to win over Irishmen of all classes to a 
 proud interest in the historic past of their 
 country. To this end he and the Rev. 
 Caesar Otway founded the Dublin Penny 
 Journal in 1832, and in it, and later in the 
 Irish Penny Journal, he and O'Donovan 
 placed within the reach of the ordinary 
 reader something like a true account of 
 
 " The Abbey, Inis na m-beo, Co. Tipperary." In 1831 — 
 *' Llanberis Lake " ; " The Eagle's Nest, Killamey " ; 
 " The Glen of the Horse, Killarney " ; " Gougane 
 Barra " ; " The Home of the Heron, Lough Atree, 
 Connemara " ; " Stone Circles, Caah Hill, Dungiven," 
 etc. 
 
GEORGE PETRIE, THE ARTIST 81 
 
 the historic and the antiquarian past of 
 Ireland.* 
 
 Since Petrie's time we are, of course, in a 
 position to establish with overwhelming 
 evidence opinions which he put forward 
 with reservation. Comparative Archae- 
 ology has revolutionised our views and made 
 the old religious and race prejudices which 
 cut across the path of scientific inquiry 
 more or less ridiculous. Amongst first- 
 hand investigators a belated specimen of 
 that religious or race-prejudiced type may 
 be found, but in really scientific circles the 
 species tends more and more to become 
 extinct. But what we must consider is 
 the state of knowledge which Petrie found 
 around him, and the state in which he left 
 it. It seems to us ridiculous to mind the 
 biassed opinions of an historian like 
 Pinkerton, who spoke of "the wild Irish 
 as being some of the veriest savages on 
 the globe " ; but only those who have 
 studied the mentality of the ascendancy 
 class in the Ireland of his day will know 
 how truly this reflected its deep-seated 
 prejudices. Petrie undertook to show that 
 Ireland could claim her share in the progress 
 of European culture. To do so he per- 
 
 * To the Irish Penny Journal O'Cnrry, Wills, Anster, 
 Ferguson, Mangan, Aubrey de Vere and Carleton 
 contributed, 
 
 7 
 
82 A GEOUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 ceived clearly that the only way to dispel 
 the clouds of ignorance which political and 
 religious prejudice had created was to 
 gather together, preserve, and elucidate 
 every monument that bore witness to the 
 past culture of the Irish people. Three 
 classes of material especially lay to hand — 
 manuscript literature, artistic work in stone 
 or metal, and Irish music. The founda- 
 tion in Dublin of the Royal Irish Academy 
 in 1795 had already provided a home for 
 the housing of such materials. Up to 1830 
 it possessed a few but important manu- 
 scripts — the Book of Lecan, the Book of 
 Ballymote, and the Leabhar Breac; to-day, 
 thanks to the efforts of Petrie, O' Curry, 
 O'Donovan, Todd, Graves, Gilbert, Reeves, 
 and others, it possesses about 2,000 manu- 
 scripts. In 1827 Petrie became a member 
 of the Academy, and in 1829 he was elected 
 a member of the Council. He at once set 
 himself to the work of collecting and pur- 
 chasing all the manuscripts available. In 
 1831 the manuscripts of Mr. Austin Cooper, 
 which included the original of the Annals 
 of the Four Masters, were secured, and 
 this purchase was followed by that of the 
 great collection of Messrs. Hodges and 
 Smith and the large collection of Sir 
 William Betham. To Petrie the language of 
 these great manuscripts was a closed book, 
 
PIONEER OF IRISH ARCHEOLOGY 88 
 
 and it must have been the desire of his 
 heart that some one should be found who 
 would open to him their secrets. When, 
 therefore, on the evening of the 7th January, 
 1832, a young man, named John O'Donovan, 
 presented himself at Great Charles Street 
 with a letter of introduction from Hardiman, 
 Petrie must have felt that at last the man 
 and the hour had come. Three years later 
 Eugene O' Curry was discovered, and came 
 to join O'Donovan and Petrie on the staff 
 of the Ordnance Survey ; and so was estab- 
 lished that unique combination which was 
 to place, once and for all, Irish linguistic 
 and antiquarian studies on a firm and 
 scientific basis. 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 PIONEER OF IRISH ARCHEOLOGY 
 
 When Petrie became a member of the 
 Royal Irish Academy in 1827 he found 
 there the nucleus of a museum of anti- 
 quities in a small collection of stone weapons 
 and implements presented by the King of 
 Denmark.* Petrie found them scattered 
 
 * These constituted almost exclusively the begin- 
 nings of our splendid National Museum. The present 
 writer has been acquainted since childhood with that 
 
84 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 on the floor of an upper room of the Aca- 
 demy House. He set himself to arrange 
 these antiquities and to add to them. In 
 this work he was warmly seconded by 
 Professor MacCullagh. In 1837 the 
 Underwood Collection was purchased. In 
 1839 the purchase for one hundred pounds 
 of the famous Cross of Cong was effected 
 through Mr. George Smith for Professor 
 MacCullagh ; and the great cross, together 
 with the magnificent gold torques found 
 at Tara, was presented by Petrie, on 24th 
 June, 1839, to the Academy. Shortly after- 
 wards there was added to the Museum 
 the collection of Dr. Dawson, Dean of St. 
 Patrick's (commenced in 1832), and on 
 this followed the acquisition of the Bom- 
 nach Airgid and of the collection of anti- 
 quities gathered by the Shannon Com- 
 missioners and the Board of Works. Since 
 Petrie's time, through private bequests, 
 private purchase, and purchase under the 
 
 Museum. Before its transference to Kildare Street 
 it was housed in a room known as the " Long Room," 
 in the " Gold Room " (now the Manuscript Room), 
 and in the basement (or " crypt " as it was called) of 
 the R, I. Academy House, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin. 
 After Petrie's time it was in charge of the Librarian, 
 Mr. Edward Clibborn ; later, on the appointment of 
 Mr. J. J. MacSweeney, in 1869, as Librarian, a Curator 
 of the Museum, Major Robert MacEniry, and a Clerk 
 of Council, Mr. Robert Macalister, LL.D., were 
 appointed. The present Curator (in Kildare Street) 
 is Mr. George Coffey. 
 
PIONEER OF IRISH ARCHJaOLOGY 85 
 
 law of Treasure-trove, the Academy's 
 Museum of Celtic Antiquities has become the 
 finest and richest of its class in the world. 
 
 On each antiquity acquired by the 
 Academy it was Petrie's custom to read a 
 paper, and these papers,* contributed 
 throughout his lifetime to its Proceedings 
 and Transactions, form no small part of his 
 scientific work. Just as O'Donovan is 
 popularly known as the editor and trans- 
 lator of the Annals of the Four Masters, 
 and O' Curry as the author of Lectures on 
 the Manuscript Materials of Early Irish 
 History, Petrie is popularly known as a 
 writer on the Round Towers of Ireland. 
 But the work on the Round Towers is only 
 a chapter in his great work on Eccle- 
 siastical Architecture, and this latter is 
 but a fraction of the work of his lifetime. 
 
 As the Academy collection grew under his 
 hands, Petrie undertook to write a de- 
 scriptive catalogue of it. The project was 
 thwarted through the impatience of the 
 Council, who did not realise its difficulty. 
 Petrie's conception of what such a cata- 
 logue should be is admirably summed up 
 in a fragment t which was to form a portion 
 of the introduction to the catalogue of his 
 own private museum : " The arrangement 
 
 * See Stokes' Life of Petrie, pp. 438, 439. 
 t Ibid. pp. 82-84, 
 
86 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 and descriptive catalogue of such a collec- 
 tion should be made with the greatest 
 possible attention to the principle of 
 chronological succession." He further 
 states that in this he is following the 
 example of his friends, Dr. Thomsen and 
 Dr. Worsaae. Petrie's friends, the Scan- 
 dinavian antiquaries, Thomsen and Worsaae^ 
 were the founders of scientific archaeology. 
 To them is due the classification of the 
 protohistoric period into Stone, Bronze, 
 and Iron Ages ; and Ireland, thanks to 
 Petrie, was from the beginning to benefit 
 by a knowledge of this fundamental classi- 
 fication. Petrie was, therefore, a pioneer. 
 Since his time archaeological investigation, 
 owing to the fruitful use of the comparative 
 method, has developed enormously, and 
 at the present time there is scarcely a 
 portion of the globe which has not attracted 
 the attention of some society or some indi- 
 vidual worker. But the essential principles 
 of the science of archaeology inaugurated 
 by Thomsen and Worsaae in Scandinavia, 
 and propagated in Ireland by their friend 
 Petrie, still hold the field. 
 
 In addition to antiquarian objects which 
 can conveniently be arranged and preserved 
 in a museum, there is also that very large 
 class of antiquarian remains which of neces- 
 sity must remain in situ. We can transfer 
 
PIONEER OF IRISH ARCHEOLOGY 87 
 
 the Tara brooch, the Ardagh chalice, or 
 the cross of Cong to a glass case in our 
 Museum at Dublin, but it would be a 
 difficult feat to do the same for Diin 
 Aengus, the Grianan of Aileach, or the 
 Hill of Tara ! From his earliest years 
 Petrie had taken an affectionate and 
 scientific interest in this latter class of 
 monuments. To register them, to sketch 
 them, to describe them, and to preserve 
 them were among the chief aims of his 
 life. 
 
 The fulfilment of these aims seemed 
 secured by the establishment of the Anti- 
 quarian Department of the Ordnance 
 Survey. In 1783 a Trigonometrical Survey 
 of Great Britain had been commenced, and 
 in 1824 the House of Commons recom- 
 mended a survey and valuation of Ireland. 
 In addition to mapping, a Geological 
 Survey was also recommended. 
 
 On the appointment, in 1826, of Captain 
 (later Major-General Sir Thomas) Larcom, 
 R.E., as Director of the Irish Survey, he 
 decided to extend the scope of the work 
 so as to include topography, history, anti- 
 quities, natural products, economic state, 
 and social conditions. The department of 
 Topography, History, and Antiquities was 
 entrusted to Petrie, and he quickly gathered 
 round him that small but distinguished 
 
88 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 band* of nation -builders with two others 
 of whom — O'Curry and O'Donovan — the 
 present Httle book deals. 
 
 In the Dublin Penny Journal (1832-1883) 
 Petrie and O'Donovan contributed article 
 after article in the hope of quickening the 
 public interest in the history and anti- 
 quities of Ireland. Those who love know- 
 ledge for its own sake have ever treasured 
 and will treasure these pages, so enhanced 
 by the delicate woodcut illustrations of 
 Petrie. But whilst trying to gain the 
 ear of the general public Petrie was not 
 unmindful of the claims of thoroughgoing 
 scientific research. From 1833 to 1837 
 he wrote his Essay on the Round Towers 
 (1833), his Essay on the Military Archi- 
 tecture of Ireland (1834, unpublished and 
 unrevised), and his Essay on the History 
 and x\ntiquities of Tara Hill (1837). The 
 Essay on the Round Towers gained the 
 Gold Medal and a prize of £50 from the 
 Royal Irish Academy ; but as it was later 
 included in an enlarged form in his book 
 on the Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland 
 (1845), we may leave it over for the present. 
 The Essay on the Military Architecture of 
 Ireland was never revised, and is still in 
 manuscript in the Royal Irish Academy. 
 We may, therefore, pass to his Essay on 
 
 * See Stokes' Life of Petrie, p. 89. 
 
PIONEER OF IRISH ARCHEOLOGY 89 
 
 Tara, which offers an excellent example of 
 the result of the collaboration between 
 Petrie, O'Donovan, and O'Curry. 
 
 In selecting Tara as a subject for treat- 
 ment Petrie was following a line which 
 would bring his work quickly under notice, 
 MacPherson and Tom Moore had cast a 
 romantic glamour over Tara ; and if there 
 was any feature in Celtic antiquity that 
 the general public of the day might be 
 said to be familiar with, it was Tara. Yet 
 Tara is comparatively recent compared with 
 Cruachan of Connaught and Emain Macha 
 of Ulster, round which the Cuchulainn 
 Saga centres. As a place of residence or 
 of sepulture it is probably very old, but as 
 a centre of power it rises into prominence 
 in the Christian era. 
 
 Only those who have read the lucubra- 
 tions of Vallancey and Betham will have 
 any idea of the chaos of guess-work that 
 Petrie found himself confronted with. 
 When Petrie came on the scene Sir William 
 Betham dominated the antiquarian section 
 of the Royal Irish Academy, and when the 
 Academy was slowly won round to adopt 
 Petrie' s views and bestowed on him its 
 Gold Medal, Sir William withdrew in anger 
 from its Council as a protest against their 
 action. Bad philology, or rather guess- 
 work etymology, was one of the main 
 
90 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 causes of Sir William Betham's far-fetched 
 views. His a priori method led him to 
 support his theories on what he called the 
 " affinity of the Phoenician, Etruscan and 
 Celtic languages " by etymologies which 
 it is difficult for us to believe could have 
 ever found their way into the Transactions 
 or Proceedings of any learned society. 
 The reader will find the neatest and most 
 striking example of the contrast between 
 the old and the new school in the papers 
 read by Betham and Petrie respectively at 
 a meeting * of the Academy, on April 24th, 
 1837. Betham's paper is a tissue of guess- 
 work, of which the following gives a fair 
 sample : " Accordingly," he says, " we 
 find the whole of Etruria replete with 
 names of Pelasgic or Phoenician origin, 
 thus : 
 
 " Tyrsenus — The old land — ci|a f e^n^oif . 
 
 " Ciris — The swift stream — cijAb tiiVB^/* 
 and so on. 
 
 What Petrie thought as he listened to 
 this fanciful outburst we may imagine. 
 When Betham had finished, Petrie pro- 
 ceeded, " by permission of Colonel Colby, 
 to read the first part of a paper On the 
 Antiquities of Tara Hill, being a portion of 
 the memoir to illustrate the Ordnance Map 
 
 * Proceedings, R.I.A., 1837, pp. 63-70. 
 
PIONEER OF IRISH ARCHEOLOGY 91 
 
 of Meath."* In the printed copy of 
 1839, which I have before me,t there are 
 208 pages. Half the work (up to page 104) 
 is devoted to an account of the historical 
 events and persons associated with Tara, 
 the remaining half deals with the anti- 
 quarian remains on the Hill itself. Text 
 after text, with translation into English, 
 is given with substantial accuracy by 
 O'Donovan, illustrating the traditional 
 history of the hill-residence, from its first 
 reputed founder Slainge, the first monarch 
 of the Firbolg, down to its abandonment 
 in A.D. 563, in the reign of King Dermot. 
 Leaving aside all fanciful etymologies and 
 theories, Petrie and O'Donovan place 
 before the reader in chronological order 
 a series of texts with a suggestive com- 
 mentary which, for the first time, clears 
 the way to anything like a scientific solu- 
 tion of the problems associated with the 
 history of Tara. Their attitude towards 
 this traditional material is sufficiently ex- 
 pressed in the following passage : — 
 
 " On the other hand, however, it would 
 be equally premature to reject these tra- 
 ditions as wholly fabulous, as to receive 
 
 * Proceedings, R.I. A., 1837, p. 68. 
 
 •\ Presented by Petrie to the Rev. Dr. Russell, 
 Vice-President of Maynooth College, with the author's 
 respectful regards. 
 
92 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 them as real history, until the whole body 
 of evidence contained in the Irish MSS. 
 shall be subjected to critical examination, 
 by being laid before the public with literal 
 translations."* 
 
 From King Slainge Petrie passes to the 
 reign of King Cimbaoth, beginning in 305 
 B.C. As is well known, this date was con- 
 sidered as the earliest certain date in Irish 
 history. Following on that of Cimbaoth, the 
 reigns of Ollamh Fodhla, Tuaihal Techtmhar 
 and Cormac Mac Airt (a.d. 218) are dealt 
 with. In connexion with Cormac, the author- 
 ship of the Teagasc Riogh, the Psalter of 
 Tar a, and Cormac' s claim to be the founder 
 of the ancient Irish code of laws are dis- 
 cussed. 
 
 A short notice is then given of the 
 kings intermediate between Cormac Mac 
 Airt and King Laoghaire, in whose reign 
 St. Patrick came to Ireland (a.d. 432). 
 The preaching of the Faith by St. Patrick 
 at Tara gives Petrie an opportunity of 
 discussing at lengthf the life of the saint. 
 Amongst the documents published for the 
 first time in this connexion is the Irish 
 text of the famous Hymn of St. Patrick. 
 Colgan had published a Latin translation 
 of it, but the Irish text is given by 
 
 * Petrie, Essay on Tara, p. 6. f Ibid. pp. 28-94. 
 
PIONEER OF IRISH ARCH-OOLOGY 98 
 
 O 'Donovan for the first time in Petrie's 
 work. The Latin translation gives sub- 
 stantially the meaning of the text, but the 
 translation of the opening word Atomriug, 
 by "At Tara," is erroneous, and destroys 
 much of its value as bearing internal 
 evidence of its composition at Tara. Atom- 
 riug is in reality a verb with infixed 
 pronoun meaning " I invoke." 
 
 Petrie then deals with the compilation of 
 the Senchus M6r and St. Patrick's part 
 in it, and with the well-known Feis or 
 Meeting at Tara and its identity with the 
 Druidical festival of Beltine. Finally, he 
 discusses Dr. Lanigan's theories about 
 Sen-Patrick and the Roman Mission of St. 
 Patrick. From the Book of Lecan, the 
 Confessio, the Leabhar Breac, the Liber 
 Hymnorum, the Book of Armagh (the Tripar- 
 tite Life), the Feilire of Aengus, the Irish 
 Annals, and Colgan, passages are quoted to 
 prove the historical reality of Patrick and 
 his mission. 
 
 The result of Petrie's arguments on the 
 question of the Roman mission of St. 
 Patrick is admirably summed up by his 
 biographer, Dr. William Stokes : — 
 
 "But this much may be said, as opposed 
 to some modem views, that however the 
 early Church of Ireland came to differ in 
 matters of discipline from that of Rome — 
 
94 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 whatever irregularities may occasionally 
 have occurred — it was an offshoot from the 
 parent Catholic Church of Rome, similar 
 in piety, devotion, and in doctrine."* 
 
 * stokes, Life of Petrie, p. 116. Dr. William Stokes 
 and Professor J. B. Bury, both Protestants, reviewing 
 the evidence at different periods and from different 
 standpoints, have come to practically the same con- 
 clusion. Dr. WilHam Stokes was the father of the late 
 Whitley Stokes, the intimate friend and former pupil 
 of O' Curry, and of the late Margaret Stokes, the well- 
 known writer on Irish antiquities. Like his father, 
 Whitley Stokes, writing to O'Curry, expressed his 
 dissent from those opposed to the Roman mission of 
 St. Patrick. On the other hand, Dr. Todd was a 
 strong upholder of the an ti- Roman claims ; and it is a 
 tribute to the broad-minded tolerance of O'Curry and 
 O'Donovan, that their thorough disagreement with 
 him on this subject did not prevent them appre- 
 ciating his services in neutral fields. It is not, perhaps, 
 generally known that Father W. G. Todd, Dr. Todd's 
 brother, was a convert to the Catholic faith and cor- 
 responded with Eugene O'Curry on Irish matters. 
 He worked and lived on the English Mission for some 
 time at Chiselhurst, Kent. We may be permitted to 
 say here that the fundamental error of the anti-Roman 
 school of writers has been to adduce " particularism " 
 in different branches of the Church as evidence of 
 separate origin. Liturgical and disciplinary differences 
 were and have been eagerly seized upon as evidence 
 of independent origin, and hence the extraordinary 
 prominence given to the Easter question and the 
 question of the Celtic Tonsure as matter for contro- 
 versy. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE ESSAY ON TARA 
 
 In dealing with the historical associations 
 of the Hill, Petrie relied chiefly upon 
 O'Donovan. Had not O'Donovan opened 
 up to him by text and translation the 
 secrets of the manuscript literature, Petrie 
 could have done little or nothing. In the 
 second part of his work he was, however, 
 to take the initiative. Petrie' s powers lay, 
 as we have already said, in the department 
 of monumental antiquities, and in describ- 
 ing the famous remains on the Hill of Tara 
 he found himself quite at home. Yet even 
 here O'Donovan is ever by his side. Toge- 
 ther they examined every vestige of the 
 former greatness of Tara. Their plan was 
 simplicity itself. In the first place, an 
 accurate map * was drawn up, without 
 reference to the manuscript literature. On 
 it the remains then actually existing were 
 marked down. When this had been done 
 all the documents that threw light on the 
 names and history of the existing remains 
 were collected and translated by O'Donovan. 
 Amongst these the chief were the Dinn- 
 
 * Page 129, Plate 6, Trans., R.I.A., Vol. XVIII, and 
 facing p. 128 in ed. 1839, Dublin. 
 
 95 
 
96 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 seanchus, a poetic and prose account of the 
 origin of Irish place-names, and Cuan 
 O'Lochain's poem, Uem<M|A cocoa n^ ctilx^c, 
 " Tara, first of Hills." 
 
 Petrie took as his starting point the 
 identification of the well Neamhnach, which 
 the prose Dinnseanchus described as lying 
 to the north-east, and as supplying a stream 
 on which the first mill in Ireland was 
 erected. This was at once identified, *' as 
 it is the source of a stream which has 
 turned a mill on the site of the ancient one 
 to the present day."* Following on this 
 came the identification of Uau riA Hi 5 or 
 Rath of the Kings, and Uau L^egAipe or 
 the Rath of Laoghaire, and, within the Rath 
 of the Kings, the smaller monuments : — 
 Ue^c Co|\inAic or House of Cor mac, Teamur,'\ 
 the Forradh, IDuttia ha ngiAtl or Mound of 
 the Hostages, *OuiTiAiiAbo or the Mound of 
 Glas Teamhrach, and the Lia Fail ; then 
 t^Au riA SeAriAit) or Rath of Synods ; the 
 Cross of Adamnan ; Teach Miodchuarta 
 or Banqueting House; the Sheskin or 
 Marsh of Tara [UobAii 1fmv\ or Well of Finn 
 in the Marsh]; tlAt gpAine or Rath of 
 Graine; Fothath Rath Graine; the Rath 
 and the Leacht of Caelchu, and the well 
 •' Laegh." J 
 
 * Petrie, Essay on Tara, p. 126. f C)nly site known. 
 J Site marked by marsh-soil. 
 
THE ESSAY ON TARA 97 
 
 All these monuments exist to the pre- 
 sent day, with the exception of Teamur 
 and the well, " Laegh," the sites of which 
 are well marked and known. Having drawn 
 a map of the Hill with the existing remains 
 marked on it, Petrie and O'Donovan pro- 
 ceeded to draw a second map,* on which 
 not only the existing remains were marked, 
 but also the sites of all those monuments 
 or features of which mention was made 
 in Irish literature. 
 
 The monuments or features whose sites 
 were identified or approximately identified 
 were : the well Caprach-Cormaic, Cucz^^\\. 
 Co^AtnAic or Cormacs Kitchen, Cnoc bo or 
 the Hill of the Cow, X^e^cz Con and Lex5.cc 
 Cecen or the Grave of Cu and the Grave of 
 Cethen, LeAcc ITlAine or Grave of Maine, 
 l^e^cc tn^CA ITIoiAgtonnAig or the Grave of 
 Mata of the Great Deeds, 'OutriA Ax)Amn<Mn 
 or Mound ofAdamnan, the Seat of Adamnan 
 and the House of Benen,^ the three stones 
 marking the grave of Mael, Blocc, and 
 Bluicni,X the grave of the Dwarf (to the E. 
 of Mael, Blocc, and Bluicni), the mounds 
 
 ♦Petrie's Tara, ed. 1839, Dublin, facing p. 152, 
 plate 7 ; and Trans. R.I.A. Vol. XVIII. p. 152. 
 
 f Near these, in a mound or bank] near the church, 
 were found the two gold torques now in the R.I.A 
 Museum, Kildare Street. 
 
 % Situated within churchyard, but not marked on 
 the map. 
 
 8 
 
98 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 called Dall and Dorcha, 1T1ti|A ha -o-ciai rCo^tiiA 
 or Wall of the Three Conspiracies, Li-d. n^ 
 bpiAn or Stone of the Heroes, t)tiTriA n^ 
 m-bATi-Amtif or Mound of the Woinen- soldiers, 
 the two Claenfearts or Declivities, 'Pah riA 
 ^CA^AbAt) or Slope of the Chariots, the Cross 
 of Fergus, the Cairn of the Leinster Youths 
 and the Cairn of the Hy-Niall Youths (CA|An 
 mAC|AAi'6e LAigen and Cajah rriAciAAi'oe Ua 
 tleiit), 'Oeifiot UeAtr!|\AC, Kac CoimAin mic 
 CAelcon or Rath of Colman son of Caelchu, 
 'OuiiiA An Ltic-otiinn or Mound of Luchdonn, 
 the wells Adhlaic and Diadhlaic, the sites of 
 which are clearly marked, U-pe-ouitiA or 
 Triple Mound of Nesi, Rac ConcobAijA THic 
 tlefi or Bath of Connor MacNessa, CeAnn 
 A^uf THet)! ConcuiAinn or the Head and Neck 
 of Cuchulann, Kau A^uf Sciac CorjcutAinn 
 or Rath and Shield of Cuchulann, LeAcc 
 ItlAiL A^uf tTlToriA or Grave of Mai and 
 Miodna. The last features, the identifica- 
 tion of which is dealt with by Petrie, 
 are the five roads from Tara, or, as the 
 Book of Lecan * names them, the " five 
 chief roads of Ireland : the Slighe Dala and 
 Slighe Asail and Slighe Midluachra and 
 Slighe Cualann and Slighe Mor." 
 
 Petrie concludes his essay with a de- 
 
 * Book of Lecan, fol. 239, b., col. 1 : " Coic primroit 
 Erenn, .i. Sligi Dala, ocus Sligi Asail ocus Sligi Mid- 
 luachra ocus Sligi Chualann, Sligi Mor." 
 
THE ESSAY ON TARA 99 
 
 scription of two raths in the neighbourhood 
 of Tara : tlAch tTle^'obA or Rath of Maeve, 
 about a mile to the south-east of the Hill ; 
 and Rath Miles, about a mile to the north. 
 
 This mere catalogue of names gives the 
 reader some idea of the wealth of life that 
 circled round the famous hill that com- 
 mands the rich grass-lands of Meath ; but 
 he must go to the pages of Petrie if he 
 wishes to learn something of the wealth 
 of legend and historical tradition with 
 which our manuscript literature abounds 
 in regard to Tara. Yet what Petrie and 
 O'Donovan have garnered represents but 
 a portion of the otherwise ungleaned 
 material. 
 
 The Essay on Tara established Petrie' s 
 reputation, and for this reason we have 
 given at some length a detailed account of it. 
 In the praise which Petrie won, O'Donovan 
 deserves a large share, for in every page 
 his hand is seen. Meanwhile, Petrie, 
 O'Donovan and O' Curry were carrying 
 on the work of the Ordnance Survey. This 
 work entailed enormous labour, and to 
 anyone who knows what original work in 
 any field is it is amusing to find Sir William 
 Betham charging Petrie with dilatoriness. 
 
 Throughout his lifetime he was ever in- 
 quiring from O'Donovan or O' Curry about 
 some antiquarian object. We possess 
 
100 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 hundreds of his letters, full of terse refer- 
 ence or searching questions. He travelled 
 north, south, east, and west, and pen 
 and pencil were continuously occupied. 
 Of his numerous letters a number, no 
 doubt, have been lost, a small number 
 have been published by Stokes, the rest 
 are in the Library at Maynooth and in the 
 Ordnance Survey volumes in the Royal 
 Irish Academy. In the Academy are also 
 some bound volumes of his unpublished 
 sketches. It is to be hoped that at a 
 near date a fitting monument may be 
 erected to him by the printing of his still 
 unpublished work. 
 
 Nothing could exceed the friendly spirit 
 which existed between Petrie and his 
 fellow- workers. In their letters to one 
 another there breathes a sense of fellow- 
 ship and of disinterested love of their 
 work which fills the reader with whole- 
 hearted admiration. As an example of 
 Petrie' s correspondence I may cite a short 
 letter written by him to Captain Larcom, 
 the head of the Ordnance Survey : — 
 
 " Galway, 20th August, 1839. 
 
 " My Dear Larcom, — I arrived here on 
 Monday night, and would have written to 
 you yesterday but that I thought it better 
 to wait till I had seen O'Donovan. I had 
 
THE ESSAY ON TARA 101 
 
 Wakeman to dine with me at the hotel, 
 and I afterwards went to Hardiman's and 
 spent the evening there. Upon the whole 
 I have a good account to give of the pair. 
 They work incessantly, and you will have 
 in a few days the result — a dissertation on 
 the antiquities and history of the Aran 
 Isles — of singular interest and value. 
 O'Donovan has a little room to himself in 
 Hardiman's, filled with historical works, 
 and he works from morning till two o'clock 
 each night, and does not even rest on 
 Sundays. I saw his letters and they are 
 admirable, as well for the matter as for the 
 beauty of the illustrations. They already 
 amount to 240 pages. He writes at the 
 rate of twenty pages a day. He only sees 
 Hardiman at meal times. Wakeman is 
 domiciled at Taylor's Hill, too. They think 
 they will be done in five or six days more. 
 O'D. wishes to know where he shall go to. 
 Kilkenny, of course ; and I would recom- 
 mend you to let Wakeman continue with 
 him. His sketches will delight you. 
 
 " Yours faithfully, 
 
 " George Petrie. 
 
 " To Captain Larcom." 
 
 A fundamental error in estimating the 
 labours of Petrie, O'Donovan, and O' Curry 
 
102 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 is to judge them by their printed works 
 alone. It is necessary to repeat this fre- 
 quently, for the general reader cannot, 
 from the nature of the case, become 
 acquainted with the enormous mass of 
 unpublished material which these three men 
 left after them. When one considers that 
 Petrie's observations extended from the 
 Stone Age up, we may say, to the present 
 day, that at one time he is sketching and 
 writing about a dolmen of the Stone Age, 
 at another time a cinerary urn of the 
 Bronze Age, at another time a sword of the 
 Iron Age, at another time an early Christian 
 stone oratory or bee-hive cell, at another 
 time an Irish Romanesque church ; when 
 one remembers that such sketches and such 
 accounts are scattered in the pages of 
 periodicals, in letters, or on stray pieces of 
 paper, or in manuscript volumes, some 
 estimate may be formed of the hundred 
 and one lines of research which he opened 
 up. In our day of systematic specialisa- 
 tion his method of work may seem some- 
 what erratic, but it must be remembered 
 that he was a pioneer, and that the circum- 
 stances of the time forced him to survey 
 the whole rather than specialise in a part. 
 Furthermore, his observations were made 
 from year to year and as opportunity 
 offered, and in the end it became almost 
 
THE ESSAY ON TARA 103 
 
 impossible to co-ordinate them. As an 
 example of this, take his collection of Irish 
 inscriptions, published after his death by 
 Miss Margaret Stokes.* Of this collection 
 Dr. Wm. Stokes t says: "Dr. Petrie left 
 behind him a valuable collection of ancient 
 Irish inscriptions ranging in date from the 
 seventh to the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
 turies. They are outline drawings copied 
 on the spot by his sure and accurate pencil 
 on sheets of note-paper, backs of old 
 letters, and such other scraps as he had at 
 hand. He frequently went, for a few days, 
 on trips or excursions into the country, 
 generally in company with some intimate 
 friends, for the express purpose of searching 
 for such monuments and copying their in- 
 scriptions. To him, indeed, may be said 
 to belong the praise of having revived the 
 true reading and interpretation of those 
 inscriptions which for centuries had been 
 regarded as illegible by our best anti- 
 quaries." But let us point out that here, 
 again, Petrie must share with O'Donovan 
 and O' Curry " the praise of having revived 
 the true reading and interpretation of 
 
 * Christian Inscriptions in the Irish Language ; 
 chiefly Collected and Drawn by G-eorge Petrie, LL.D., 
 and edited by M. Stokes. Vol. I, 1872 ; Vol. II, 1878. 
 4to. Dublin : University Press. 
 
 f Life of Petrie, p. 410, 
 
104 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 those inscriptions."* Petrie had intended 
 to write an essay on the inscriptions, as is 
 clear from fragments still remaining, and 
 from a blank book containng drawings of the 
 crosses or other ornamentation as well as 
 of the inscriptions. Apart from their value 
 for general history and topography, these 
 delicate drawings supply the materials 
 for a chapter on the decline of La T^nef 
 ornament and the rise of the interlaced 
 Byzantine-Romanesque design. 
 
 Of the inestimable value of these records 
 made in the first half of the nineteenth 
 century, one example will suffice. In 
 Christian Inscriptions, Vol. I, p. 39, and 
 Plate XXXI, Fig. 82, will be found an 
 account and sketch of a tombstone at 
 Clonmacnoise bearing the inscription, 
 Suihne mac Mailae h-Umai and the figure 
 
 * Life of Petrie, p. 414. 
 
 f La Tene : a proto-historic Celtic camp near 
 Neuchatel, Switzerland, where finds have been made 
 with a later form of spiral ornament, characterised by 
 double lines with a comma-like loop. The ornament 
 was brought to Ireland probably by Celts of the Iron Age 
 {La Tene) about 300 b.c. On the other hand, the well- 
 known marvellously interlaced patterns, generally 
 considered as typically Celtic, came to Ireland in the 
 Early Christian period, and gradually supplanted the 
 La Tene ornament. The freedom of the interlaced 
 pattern made it more suitable for filling up large 
 spaces. It is interesting to note that the La Tene spiral 
 makes its last stand as an ornament on raised bosses 
 and small circumscribed areas. 
 
THE ESSAY ON TARA 105 
 
 of a Celtic cross. In the circular centre of 
 the cross is a beautiful and typical speci- 
 men of the La Tene spiral, and the whole 
 design points to the finest period of monu- 
 mental art at Clonmacnoise. It was a 
 record of the first importance, for the 
 person whom it commemorated was one 
 of the best -known of the famous scholars 
 of Clonmacnoise. His identification is 
 certain from the fact that his father's name, 
 Mael-Umai, is given. References to him 
 are found not only in the Irish Annals, 
 but in the English Chronicle oj Florence of 
 Worcester, in the Saxon Chronicle and in the 
 Annates Camhrai,^ Professor Macalister, 
 whose own work on Clonmacnoise entitles 
 him to speak as a first-hand authority 
 on the subject, has emphasized the im- 
 portance of these monumental slabs as 
 evidences of the excellence of Irish culture. 
 Referring to this monument, he says that 
 it " was to be seen at Clonmacnoise as late 
 as 1822, and was drawn by Dr. Petrie ; it 
 has since disappeared, with no less than 
 
 *A.D. 892, "Eodem anno Swifneh doctor Scot- 
 torum peritissimxis obiit," Florentii Wigorniensis 
 Chronicon, Tom. I, p. 109. Ed. Thorpe. A.D. 891, 
 " 1 Swifneh se betsta lareow pe on Scottom waes 
 gefor," i.e. " Suibne the best scholar of the Irish died," 
 Saxon Chronicle. A.D. 889, " Suibn Scottorum 
 sapientissimus obiit," " Suibne wisest of the Irish 
 died," Annates Cambrai, p. 15. Ed. J. WilHams ab 
 Ithel. 
 
106 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 sixty-four others, of which records are 
 preserved, and what has become of it no 
 one can tell."* We may rejoice to-day 
 that the industry and patriotic zeal of 
 Petrie and his fellow-workers have placed 
 the record of them out of the reach of de- 
 struction, but the loss of the monuments 
 themselves is a lasting disgrace. 
 
 Petrie himself was fully alive to the ne- 
 cessity of popularising his views on Irish 
 archaeology. As we have seen, he and 
 O'Donovan wrote article after article in 
 the Dublin Penny Journal of 1832-1833, 
 and in 1840 they returned to this work in 
 a new venture — the Irish Penny Journal. 
 Petrie illustrates his articles with charming 
 wood-cuts, which add much to the value 
 of this famous magazine. 
 
 Meanwhile the work on the Ordnance 
 Survey was drawing to a close. One volume, 
 that on Londonderry, was published in 
 1839, and was hailed with universal praise. 
 The Survey had banded together Petrie, 
 O' Curry, and O'Donovan in a common 
 cause ; it had provided them with a small 
 income which barely left them free to pursue 
 their disinterested and highly intellectual 
 pursuits, and common sense would have 
 persuaded any paternal Government to 
 
 * Cluain Maccu Nois (Clonmacnois). By R. A. 
 Macalister, M. A. Dublin : Catholic Truth Soc. of Ireland. 
 
THE ROUND TOWERS 107 
 
 continue them in their work. But, not- 
 withstanding the representations of the 
 most enlightened men of the day in Ireland, 
 the grant to the Topographical and Archae- 
 ological Department was withdrawn, and 
 the three great scholars were left hence- 
 forth to fend for themselves. As we shall 
 see, neither O'Curry nor O'Donovan ceased 
 from their labours ; on the contrary, freed 
 from official duties, they betook themselves 
 to the composition and editing of those 
 works by which they are best known, and 
 in this light we may not regret the freedom 
 which came to them at this time. Petrie, also 
 finding himself free, turned to the arrange- 
 ment and publication of the great mass of 
 material which had during these years (up 
 to 1842) accumulated under his hand. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 petrie' S WORK ON THE ROUND TOWERS 
 
 In 1883, as we have seen, Petrie won a 
 Gold Medal and a prize of fifty pounds 
 offered by the Royal Irish Academy for an 
 Essay on the Origin and Uses of the Round 
 Towers of Ireland. These striking monu- 
 ments had awakened much antiquarian 
 curiosity, and men like Vallancey, Betham, 
 
108 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 O'Brien, John Windele and the other mem- 
 bers of the South Munster Archaeological 
 Society had put forward theories which 
 Petrie considered wanting in scientific 
 proof. Since 1833 he had acquired an 
 enormous mass of material bearing on 
 ecclesiastical antiquities, and, freed from 
 the Survey work, he determined to present 
 it to the public in a comprehensive form 
 as an amplification of his original Essay 
 on the Round Towers. " For this ampli- 
 fication of my original Essay," he says, 
 " into a work of great national scope, I 
 am alone answerable ; and whatever may 
 be the faults found with its execution, I 
 trust the Academy and the Public gener- 
 ally will give me credit, at least, for the 
 motives which influenced me in thus ex- 
 tending the field of my enquiries, and I 
 believe that I was actuated solely to under- 
 take this additional labour by an ardent 
 desire to rescue the antiquities of my native 
 country from unmerited oblivion, and 
 give them their just place among those of 
 the old Christian nations of Europe."* 
 
 * Preface, p. v, The Ecclesiastical Architecture of 
 Ireland Anterior to the Anglo-Norman Invasion^ 
 Comprising an Essay on the Origin and Uses of the 
 Round Towers of Ireland, which obtained the Gold 
 Medal and Prize of the Royal Irish Academy. By 
 George Petrie, R.H.A., V.P.R.I.A. (2nd Ed.) Dublin : 
 Hodges & Smith, Grafton Street. MDCCCXLV. 
 
THE ROUND TOWERS 109 
 
 This work of Petrie's was epoch-making. 
 Its establishment and use of scientific cri- 
 teria give him the right to be considered the 
 founder of a school which marks a new era 
 in antiquarian work. General Vallancey has 
 been described as the founder of the school 
 to which Petrie, O'Donovan, and O'Curiy 
 belonged. Nothing could be further from 
 the truth. No one wishes to rob Vallancey, 
 Betham, and others of their claim to a due 
 meed of praise for having taken an interest 
 in the language and antiquities of Ireland ; 
 but in the department of knowledge in 
 which they and Petrie encountered one 
 another, their standpoint was as different 
 from his as would be that of a medieval 
 astrologer from that of Copernicus or 
 Galileo. Only a mistaken and almost 
 meaninglessly comprehensive application 
 of the word " school " could justify such 
 a use of it. 
 
 Petrie sums up the results of his studies 
 on the Round Towers in the following 
 conclusions : — 
 
 I. That the Towers are of Christian and 
 ecclesiastical origin and were erected at 
 various periods between the fifth and thir- 
 teenth centuries. 
 
 II. That they were designed to answer, 
 at least, a twofold use, namely, to serve 
 as belfries, and as keeps, or places of 
 
110 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 strength, in which the sacred utensils, 
 books, relics, and other valuables were 
 deposited, and into which the ecclesiastics 
 to whom they belonged could retire for 
 security in case of sudden predatory attack. 
 
 III. That they were probably also used, 
 when occasion required, as beacons and 
 watch-towers. 
 
 These conclusions, which have been 
 already advocated separately by many 
 distinguished antiquaries — among whom 
 are Molyneux, Ledwich, Pinkerton, Sir 
 Walter Scott, Montmorenci, Brewer, and 
 Otway — will be proved by the following 
 evidences : — 
 
 For the First Conclusion (I), namely, 
 that the Towers are of Christian origin : 
 
 1. The Towers are never found uncon- 
 nected with ancient ecclesiastical foimda- 
 tions. 
 
 2. Their architectural styles exhibit no 
 features or peculiarities not equally found 
 in the original churches with which they 
 are locally connected, when such remain. 
 
 3. On several of them Christian emblems 
 are observable, and others display in the 
 details a style of architecture universally 
 acknowledged to be of Christian origin. 
 
 4. They possess, invariably, architec- 
 tural features not found in any buildings in 
 Ireland ascertained to be of Pagan times. 
 
THE ROUND TOWERS 111 
 
 For the Second Conclusion (II), namely, 
 that they were intended to serve the 
 double purpose of belfries and keeps, 
 or castles, for the uses already specified : 
 
 1. Their architectural construction, as 
 will appear, eminently favours this con- 
 elusion. 
 
 2. A variety of passages, extracted from 
 our annals and other authentic documents, 
 will prove that they were constantly applied 
 to both these purposes. 
 
 For the Third Conclusion (III), namely, 
 that they may have also been occasionally 
 used as beacons and watch-towers : 
 
 1. There are some historical evidences 
 which render such an hypothesis extremely 
 probable. 
 
 2. The necessity which must have existed 
 in early Christian times for such beacons 
 and watch-towers, and the perfect fitness 
 of the Round Towers to answer such pur- 
 poses, will strongly support this con- 
 clusion. 
 
 These conclusions — or, at least such of 
 them as presume the Towers to have had 
 a Christian origin, and to have served the 
 purpose of a belfry — will be further cor- 
 roborated by the uniform and concurrent 
 tradition of the country, and, above all, by 
 authentic evidences which shall be adduced, 
 relative to the erection of several of the 
 
112 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 Towers, with the names and eras of their 
 founders.* 
 
 Up to Petrie's time the suggested origins 
 of the Round Towers divided themselves 
 into three classes : Danish, Eastern, and 
 Christian. The popular habit of ascribing 
 early or pre-historic monuments to the 
 Danes f is well known to every Irish anti- 
 quary. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, 
 and Christian monuments, the use of which 
 were not well determined, were frequently 
 set down as of Danish origin. J 
 
 The theory of the Eastern origin of 
 the Round Towers originated, as Petrie 
 states, " in the fanciful brain of General 
 Vallancey." Vallancey supported his views 
 by parallels between " the fire-towers of 
 the Persians and the Irish Round Towers," 
 and by fanciful etymological resemblances 
 between Irish and Oriental languages. 
 Sir William Betham's theory Petrie dis- 
 
 * Petrie, Eccles. Architecture, pp. 78 et seq. 
 
 f The Danish origin of the Round Towers was 
 advocated by Peter Walsh in his Prospect of Ireland, 
 1684, pp. 416, 417 ; Dr. Molyneux in Natural 
 History of Ireland by Boate and Molyneux, pp. 210, 
 211 ; and Ledwich, Antiquities (2nd Ed.), pp. 158, 
 169, etc. 
 
 X The approximate dates of these Ages in the Irish 
 area will show how ridiculous these ascriptions were. 
 The Stone Age ends about 1300 B.C. ; the Bronze 
 Age extends from about 1300 B.C. to about 500 b.o. ; 
 the Iron Age from about 600 B.C. into the Christian 
 Era. 
 
THE ROUND TOWERS 118 
 
 misses as unsupported by evidence worthy 
 of refutation. With those who maintained 
 the Christian origin of the Round Towers 
 Petrie was in general agreement. He 
 differed from them on the question of their 
 exclusive use or uses. 
 
 As in his work on Tara, Petrie in his 
 Essay on the Round Towers, adopted a 
 simple yet scientific method. Two main 
 classes of evidence were examined, namely, 
 (1) the monuments themselves ; (2) the 
 references to them in the manuscript 
 literature. But before discussing his 
 application of his method it is not un- 
 necessary in a popular exposition to make 
 one or two things clear. In the first place, 
 the scope of Petrie' s enquiry did not 
 extend to the ultimate origin of the archi- 
 tectural form of building known as the 
 Round Tower. The history of the evolu- 
 tion of the Irish Round Tower belongs 
 to Comparative Archaeology ; and Petrie, 
 wisely enough, felt that he had quite enough 
 to do with the study of the restricted 
 Irish area. His excursions into Compara- 
 tive Archaeology are rather of a negative 
 and destructive character, undertaken with 
 the purpose of stopping the hasty general- 
 isations of Vallancey and others. But 
 when he sees his way clearly and scienti- 
 fically, as in the proto-historic origin of 
 9 
 
114 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 the beehive cells, or the Christian origin of 
 the quadrangular form and upright walls 
 of early Christian churches in Ireland, he 
 shows us that, had he lived in our day, he 
 would be a pioneer in the most up-to-date 
 comparative work. In the second place, 
 guess-work may, by mere accident, hit 
 upon a solution which is true, but in 
 ninety-nine per cent, of its results it will 
 be wrong. 
 
 The Comparative Archaeology and the 
 Comparative Philology of Vallancey, 
 Betham, and the rest are based on the 
 fallacious principle of taking general or 
 partial and superficial resemblances as a 
 proof of unity of origin ; and it is the 
 adoption of this principle which vitiates 
 their work, and leads to the monstrous 
 etymologies which stud their pages. The 
 filiation between East and West, which is 
 being brought about by modern scientific 
 Archaeology, may appear to have a kind 
 of resemblance to the guess-work of the 
 school of Vallancey, but it is in reality a 
 distinct and independent result attained 
 by a method which is the very negation 
 of his method. Even in our day it is not 
 out of place to issue a note of warning. 
 Popular manuals on Archaeology, Ethno- 
 logy, Anthropology, and, indeed, on many 
 other sciences, are placing before the public 
 
THE ROUND TOWERS 115 
 
 mind tentative theories as almost certain 
 facts. The wonderful excavations in Crete 
 and in the JEgean generally have opened 
 up a new world of fact ; but it is well to 
 point out that many of the theories based 
 upon these facts are more or less tentative. 
 For example, there is a decided tendency 
 to refer to the .Egean area as a centre of 
 origin, when it may well be merely a focus 
 of result. Fortunately scientific voices are 
 being raised here and there in warning 
 against this over-attractive theory. What 
 we want is more spade work. It must be 
 remembered that we are only at the begin- 
 ning of an age marked by the develop- 
 ment of the science of origins ; and the 
 scholar is wanting in a sense of responsi- 
 bility who does not make it clear to the 
 general public at what point his facts end 
 and his theories begin. Many an attractive 
 and facile theory must have presented itself 
 to the mind of Petrie, but he put them 
 behind him and pressed on to the accumu- 
 lation of facts. 
 
 As we have said, two lines of investigation 
 were followed by Petrie. In the first he 
 deals with the monuments themselves. The 
 Irish Round Tower, singular as it is in its 
 rotund form, is one of the stone monuments 
 of Ireland. What, then, was its relation 
 to other monuments of stone in Ireland ? 
 
116 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 The answer to this question led Petrie to 
 open up the subject of Ecclesiastical 
 Architecture, and as a corollary to touch 
 upon the stone monuments of Celtic 
 antiquity. For the sake of the general 
 reader we may briefly give an outline of 
 the sequence of stone monuments (i.e., 
 standing structures) in Ireland. The 
 earliest standing structure belongs to the 
 Polished Stone Age (which extends in 
 Ireland up to about 1800 B.C.). A typical 
 example is the dolmen — popularly known 
 as a cromlech — consisting of four or more 
 standing stones capped by a covering 
 stone. To the transition period between the 
 Stone Age and the Bronze in Ireland is to 
 be ascribed the great hill-tumuli, such as 
 New Grange, Knowth, and Dowth, on the 
 Boyne. These elaborate chamber tombs 
 of cruciform shape are formed in the 
 entrance passage of rows of standing 
 stones capped by covering slabs, and the 
 terminating dome-chamber is built up of a 
 series of stones, placed horizontally, one 
 projecting slightly beyond the other till 
 they meet at the summit and are capped by 
 one flat slab. In no case is there any 
 evidence of the use of mortar. 
 
 The Bronze Age extends in Ireland from 
 about 1300 B.C. to about 500 B.C. The 
 frequent practice of cremation in the Bronze 
 
THE ROUND TOWERS 117 
 
 Age, in the Irish area at least, is marked 
 by small tombs, consisting generally of 
 four side slabs capped by a fifth, and 
 enclosing a cinerary urn. 
 
 Finally, a striking series of monuments, 
 to be found especially along the coast from 
 Kerry to the Aran Islands, forms an im- 
 portant feature amidst the stone struc- 
 tures of Ireland. These are the " cashels *' 
 or stone " Diins," such as Staigue Fort, or 
 the Diin Mor in Dingle peninsula, or Dun 
 Aengus in Aran. They are huge circular 
 structures, built of uncemented stones, 
 and unlike the previous stone structures, 
 residences for the living and not for the 
 dead. That they belong to the Pagan 
 period there is no doubt, but their particular 
 age is still uncertain, though it is possible 
 that they are to be ascribed to the 
 Bronze Age. As we have seen, in dealing 
 with Tara Petrie was dealing with a 
 monument of the Iron Age, or at least 
 with its history in the Iron Age and Chris- 
 tian era more particularly. 
 
 This brings us to the introduction of 
 Christianity, and with it the introduction 
 into Ireland of a new class of building. The 
 following pregnant passage suggests the 
 comprehensiveness of Petrie' s outlook. 
 Having given the text and translation, by 
 0*Donovan, of the famous tract SencAf 
 
118 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 HA ^eLec or "History of the Cemeteries,** 
 from the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, he continues : 
 " The preceding document will, I think, be 
 sufficient to satisfy all rational inquirers 
 of the visionary character of the hypo- 
 thesis of the Round Towers having been 
 erected as places of sepulture, at least in 
 pagan times ; for, though it does not throw 
 any light on the character of the monu- 
 ments in use preceding Christianity, it 
 refers us distinctly to their principal 
 localities, in many of which we may still 
 examine the monuments themselves. Our 
 ancient manuscripts, in like manner, ac- 
 quaint us with the localities of the prin- 
 cipal battle-fields in Ireland, and with the 
 particular monuments of the most dis- 
 tinguished kings and warriors, from the 
 earliest periods to the establishment of 
 Christianity in the country ; and in most 
 of these localities the monuments still 
 remain. But do we in any of those places 
 discover a Round Tower, or the vestige of 
 one ? Most assuredly not, nor any monu- 
 ment having a characteristic in common 
 with one. We find the stone cam and the 
 green mound with their sepulchral cham- 
 bers within them, and their monumental 
 character indicated by the upright stones, 
 sometimes single — like the stele of the 
 Greeks — and sometimes forming a circle, 
 
THE ROUND TOWERS 119 
 
 or concentric circles. We find the giants' 
 graves or beds, as they are called by the 
 Irish, the cromlechs, and Druids' altars 
 of speculative antiquaries. And when we 
 explore any of these monuments we find, 
 according to their age, either the rude 
 unglazed sepulchral urn of baked clay, and 
 occasionally of stone, containing bones 
 more or less calcined, or unbumed skele- 
 tons, or occasionally both, in the same 
 sepulchre. We also find very frequently 
 weapons of stone or metal ; and, in monu- 
 ments of importance, indicating the dis- 
 tinguished rank of the persons interred, 
 ornaments of silver and gold. And that 
 such and no other were the varieties of 
 sepulchral monuments in use in Ireland 
 in pagan times, a volume of historical 
 evidences from our ancient manuscripts 
 might be adduced to prove."* 
 
 Petrie then quotes from the Dinnsenchus 
 and the Annals of Ulster, to show the 
 traditional ascription of the cemetery of 
 Brugh na Boinne, and the monuments at 
 New Grange, Knowth, and Dowth on the 
 Boyne, to the Tuatha de Danaan race ;f 
 
 * Petrie, Ecclesiastical Architecture, pp. 101, 102. 
 (2nd Ed., 1845). 
 
 f In Zeitschrift filr celtische Philologie and in the 
 Journal of the Society of Antiquaries, Miss Dobbs has 
 studied the relation between the spiral ornament, 
 so characteristic at New Grange, and the Tuatha de 
 
120 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 and then quotes a poem from Leabhar na 
 h-Uidhre, describing the traditionally later 
 Milesian cemetery of Rathcroghan. Only 
 the professional antiquary will fully 
 recognise how brilliant, in the light of 
 modern archaeological investigation, is the 
 rSsumS contained in the above passage, 
 written in 1845. Ireland may well be proud 
 of Petrie as a pioneer archaeologist. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 FURTHER ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCHES 
 
 Having thus shown that not a particle of 
 evidence, manuscript or otherwise, could 
 be adduced to show a connexion between 
 the Round Towers and the known pagan 
 stone monuments of Ireland, Petrie pro- 
 ceeded* to the establishment of his thesis 
 that the Round Towers are members of 
 the early ecclesiastical and Christian stone 
 edifices in Ireland. Here, again, his dual 
 method came into play. He appealed to 
 
 Danaan. Her work goes to show that the localities 
 associated in Irish tales with the Taatha de Danaan 
 race are those in which the Bronze Age spiral is 
 found. The method she is following is an extension 
 of that of Petrie. 
 
 * Petrie, Ecclesiastical Architecture, p. 122 to the end. 
 (2nd Ed. 1845.) 
 
ARCH^OLOGICAL RESEARCHES 12l 
 
 (1) the monuments themselves, and (2) the 
 manuscript literature. He was met at the 
 outset with a widespread belief, propa- 
 gated by Sir James Ware, " the first and 
 most judicious," to quote Petrie's words, 
 " of all the writers who have treated of Irish 
 antiquities, and whose work still ranks as 
 our text-book for information on such 
 subjects,"* namely, that the Irish did 
 not begin to build with stone and mortar 
 until the twelfth century.f Now, the 
 Round Towers are built with stone and 
 mortar; it would therefore follow, if 
 Ware's theory were true, that either 
 they formed isolated and exceptional 
 examples of building with mortar and 
 cement, or that they were erected in or after 
 the twelfth century. Petrie had already 
 shown that in no known pagan stone 
 structure in Ireland was there evidence of 
 the use of lime cement. It remained for 
 him now to show that there was evidence 
 of its use from the first introduction of 
 Christianity, and therefore previous to the 
 twelfth century. This led him to an ex- 
 amination of ecclesiastical buildings from 
 
 * Since Petrie's time modern research has much 
 reduced the value of Ware's and Ussher's works as in 
 any sense authorities. 
 
 t This opinion was held also by Sir Wm. Petty, Dr. 
 Molyneux, Dr. Ledwich and others. 
 
122 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 the fifth century to the twelfth century, 
 and thus gave rise to his work on the Eccle- 
 siastical Architecture of Ireland. It would 
 be impossible to give here anything like 
 an adequate account of the mass of detailed 
 material which he has gathered into his 
 book. We must be content with indicating 
 his main line of work. His first care was, 
 with the aid of O'Donovan and O'Curry, 
 to establish the authenticity of the refer- 
 ences in Irish manuscript literature to the 
 erection or destruction of Irish ecclesi- 
 astical buildings. 
 
 The terminology was first elucidated — 
 terms like Domnach, damliac, tempull, 
 eclais, regies, baslic, derteach, etc., were 
 assigned a definite meaning, and their 
 particular value established. Then the 
 transition from the uncemented stone 
 structures of the pagan period to the 
 cemented buildings of the Christian period 
 was established. " I have also shown," 
 he says, " in that Essay,* that the earlier 
 colonists in the country, the Firbolg and 
 Tuatha de Danaan tribes, which our his- 
 torians bring hither from Greece at a very 
 remote period, were accustomed to build 
 not only their fortresses, but even their 
 dome-roofed houses and sepulchres, of 
 stone without cement, and in the style 
 
 * Ancient Military Architecture. 
 
ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCHES 123 
 
 now usually called Cyclopean and Pelasgic. 
 I have also shown that this custom, as 
 applied to their forts and houses, was con- 
 tinued in those parts of Ireland in which 
 those ancient settlers remained, even after 
 the introduction of Christianity, and, as 
 I shall presently show, was adopted by 
 the Christians in their religious structures. 
 As characteristic examples of these ancient 
 religious structures, still remaining in suffi- 
 cient preservation to show us perfectly 
 what they had been in their original state, 
 I may point to the monastic establishment 
 of St. Molaise, on Inishmurry, in the bay 
 of Sligo, erected in the sixth century ; to 
 that of St. Brendan, on Inishglory, off the 
 coast of Erris, in the county of Mayo, 
 erected in the beginning of the same cen- 
 tury ; and to that of St. Fechin, on Ard- 
 Oilean, or High Island, off the coast of 
 Connemara, in the county of Gal way, 
 erected in the seventh century. In all 
 these establishments the churches alone, 
 which are of the simplest construction, are 
 built of lime cement. The houses or cells, 
 erected for the use of the abbots and 
 monks, are of a circular or oval form, 
 having dome roofs, constructed, like those of 
 the ancient Greek and Irish sepulchres, 
 without a knowledge of the principle of the 
 arch, and without the use of cement ; and 
 
124 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 the whole are encompassed by a broad 
 wall composed of stones of great size, 
 without cement of any kind." 
 
 Petrie then traces the evolution of the 
 perfect Irish Romanesque church, such as 
 Cormac's Chapel, Rock of Cashel, from 
 these early churches built with stone and 
 lime cement, such as St. Cianan's Church 
 of Daimhliag, now Duleek in Meath, which 
 he considers one of the first buildings of 
 stone and lime cement erected in Ireland. 
 He also devotes separate notices to Orato- 
 ries, Belfries (Round Towers), Houses, 
 Erdamhs, Kitchens, and Cashels. In deal- 
 ing with the evolution of the early Irish 
 churches, Petrie set himself to establish 
 certain criteria. His criteria in the main 
 were based on the size of the building, the 
 Cyclopean or non-cyclopean character of 
 the stone-work, and the use of lime cement, 
 the character of the roof, door, and win- 
 dows, the introduction of the principle of 
 the arch, the introduction of the chancel 
 arch, and finally the use of ornamentation. 
 For example, with delicate discrimination 
 he marks the transition from the doorways 
 with inclined sides and horizontal lintel, 
 as in Gallerus Oratory in Kerry, to those 
 with inclined sides and arched lintel, as in 
 the church of Clooncagh, County Limerick ; 
 or, again, he discriminates between the 
 
ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCHES 125 
 
 horizontal-headed, triangular-headed, and 
 arched-headed windows. The beginnings of 
 moulding on doors and windows and the 
 variety of splaying in the latter are noted. 
 Finally, the identity between the famous 
 Celtic ornamentation as found in manu- 
 script and metal work and that on Irish 
 stone work is noticed. The treatment of 
 ornamental detail in the exquisite drawings 
 with which his work is illustrated shows 
 Petrie's singular accuracy and conscien- 
 tiousness at their best. It has been reserved 
 for later workers to develop this line of in- 
 vestigation. He insists on the Irish char- 
 acter (not necessarily, of course, the purely 
 Irish origin) of the chevron, step-pattern, 
 triquetra and interlaced ornaments, and 
 points out their identity with the orna- 
 mentation in early Irish manuscripts, such 
 as the Book of Kells, He disposes of 
 Ledwich*s attempt to prove that orna- 
 ments such as the triquetra are runic sym- 
 bols. His acuteness of observation is well 
 exemplified in the following remarks on 
 the ornamentation on the tombstones of 
 Flanncadh, Abbot of Clonmacnoise (oh, 
 circa 1002), and of Suibne Mac Mailae 
 h-Umai,* of Clonmacnoise {oh, circa 890) : 
 " Another and more common ornament on 
 our inscribed tombstones anterior to the 
 
 ♦ Vide supra. 
 
126 A GROUP OF NATION -BUILDERS 
 
 twelfth century, and which is equally 
 common in our most ancient ecclesiastical 
 manuscripts of the earliest date, is that 
 boss-shaped figure formed of radiating 
 eccentric lines, merging into one another 
 as they approach the margin, and leaving 
 between them pear-shaped spaces, generally 
 three in number, but sometimes two or 
 four, or even a greater number. This 
 ornament is usually found with in a circle, 
 which forms the centre of a cross carved 
 on such monumental stones, and, like the 
 triquetra, may possibly be symbolic of the 
 Trinity."* This is, as we now know, the 
 characteristic pagan La T^ne spiral or 
 trumpet pattern, which survived in Irish 
 ornament down to about the beginning 
 of the twelfth century. By his analysis of 
 Irish ornament Petrie prepared the way 
 for the solution of the problems as to its 
 origin. We can only here refer our readers 
 to modem works on Comparative Archae- 
 ology for an account of the present state 
 of knowledge in this regard. Let us merely 
 say that here again Petrie showed himself 
 a brilliant pioneer. Having described the 
 evolution of the Irish Romanesque church 
 from the early Irish stone churches of the 
 fifth and sixth centuries, he treats 
 
 * Ecclesiastical Architecture, pages 326, 327. Vide 
 supra. 
 
ARCH^OLOGICAL RESEARCHES 127 
 
 along similar lines of the Oratories, 
 Erdamhs, Kitchens, and Cashels. He 
 also devotes a special section to the Round 
 Towers. Briefly, he shows that, apart from 
 their rounded and tapering figure, they 
 possess the same characteristics as the 
 line of churches stretching from the fifth 
 or sixth centuries to the twelfth century. 
 They are the same in their stone-work, 
 in their use of lime cement, in their char- 
 acteristic doors and windows, in their orna- 
 mentation, and, finally, he notes, their almost 
 universal association with churches of a 
 similar architectural character. This over- 
 whelming evidence is backed up by con- 
 tinuous extracts from the manuscript 
 literature dealing with their erection or 
 burning, or with the erection or burning 
 of the churches with which they were 
 associated. 
 
 In 1834 Petrie received a Gold Medal from 
 the Royal Irish Academy for his work 
 on the Military and Sepulchral Architec- 
 ture of Ireland. It remains unre vised and 
 unpublished in manuscript on the shelves 
 of the Academy. Exigency of space com- 
 pels us to deal briefly with it in this essay. 
 It contains a survey of the proto-historic 
 pagan remains of Ireland ; and in it Petrie 
 adopts practically the same line of scientific 
 criticism as in his Essay on Ecclesiastical 
 
128 A GROUP OF NATION -BUILDERS 
 
 Architecture. Let us again point out that 
 in Ireland a Stone Age is followed by a 
 Bronze Age, and the Bronze Age by the 
 Iron Age, passing into the Christian Era. 
 
 Ireland is studded with monuments of 
 all three ages. Monuments or remains of 
 all three periods and, indeed, of the Chris- 
 tian period may be found in close proxi- 
 mity to one another. The science of Com- 
 parative Archaeology in our own day has 
 succeeded in establishing criteria by which 
 to separate this accumulation of monu- 
 ments and remains into regular strata. 
 But even now there are numbers of prob- 
 lems that await solution. Take, for 
 instance, those great stone forts or Buns 
 such as Bun Aengus in Aran ; these are still 
 shrouded in mystery, though it may yet be 
 shown that they are monuments of the 
 Bronze Age.* 
 
 It is not to be wondered at, therefore, 
 that Petrie did not see clearly through the 
 entanglement of problems that confronted 
 him in connexion with the pagan anti- 
 quities of Ireland. The marvel is that he 
 entered so frequently on the right path to 
 a correct solution. His destructive work 
 was perfect. He swept away theories, 
 ridiculous from a scientific point of view, 
 
 * See article (to be continued) by Prof. R. A. S. 
 Macalister, in Irish Ecclesiastical Record, April, 1913. 
 
ARCH^OLOGICAL RESEARCHES 129 
 
 as to the Danish origin of these remains. 
 His line of research tended more and more 
 to estabHsh the vaUdity of native manu- 
 script tradition as to their antiquity ; and 
 the most modern research work is on the 
 way to prove that these traditions can no 
 longer be brushed aside as a mass of abso- 
 lutely unfounded legend. In the light of 
 modem archaeology terms such as Firbolg, 
 Tuatha de Danaan, and Milesian are 
 receiving a new interpretation, and the 
 dawn of Petrie's research is opening 
 into the light of day. All honour, then, 
 to Petrie as a pioneer ! In the Stone Age 
 he recognised the sepulchral character of 
 the dolmens (or, as they are popularly called, 
 cromlechs), and disposed of the theory 
 that they were Druids' altars. In the great 
 Bronze Age tumuli, or tombs, of New 
 Grange, Knowth, and Dowth, on the Boyne, 
 he noted their characteristic structure and 
 ornament and their similarity to the so- 
 called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, 
 which he calls correctly " a tumulus of 
 immense size " ; whilst he also noted the 
 similarity between Irish bronze ornament 
 and bronze weapons and those of " Greece." 
 He, naturally, drew the conclusion that 
 here he had evidence of the truth of the 
 native tradition that these monuments 
 and weapons were the work of Greek in- 
 10 
 
130 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 vaders. In his time the fallacy of identi- 
 fying a form of ornament or a particular 
 type of antiquarian remains with race 
 was quite natural. The truth is that the 
 Bronze Age ornament, for example, came 
 to Ireland through commerce and not 
 through invasion. This does not prevent 
 the native tradition as to the " Greek " 
 origin of the Bronze Age peoples bearing 
 a true interpretation. What that inter- 
 pretation may be we need not enter into 
 here. Suffice it to say that the growth 
 of allied sciences, such as Ethnology, 
 Anthropology and Comparative Philology, 
 has in our day helped us to travel with 
 surer step through the entangled laby- 
 rinths due to the crossings of race, of 
 language, and of antiquarian forms. It is 
 only quite recently that the fundamental 
 fallacy of identifying race with language 
 has been removed from our Historical 
 Grammars. In associating, as to age, the 
 great cathairs of the West, such as Dun 
 Aengus, with the Bronze Age tumuli, 
 Petrie seems again to have been in the 
 right track, though, as we have said, the 
 Bronze Age origin of these cathairs is not 
 yet established. In similar fashion he 
 dealt with the remains at Carrowmore and 
 Clover Hill, Sligo, and on the battle-field 
 of Moytura, where tradition says the 
 
ARCH^OLOGICAL RESEARCHES 131 
 
 Firbolg were defeated by the Tuatha de 
 Danaan.* The great stone circles he 
 considered to be of sepulchral origin. Pro- 
 fessor Macalister believes them to have 
 been temples, but does not deny their 
 association with a place of sepulture,t and 
 thinks them in all probability of the 
 Bronze Age. Considering its unfinished and 
 unrevised state and the earliness of its 
 composition, Petrie's Essay on Military and 
 Sepulchral Architecture gives us an earnest 
 of what his maturer work would have been. 
 As Dr. Stokes says : " It is plain that at 
 this time [i.e., 1834] Petrie had not gone 
 into the entire subject of Ancient Irish 
 sepulture. He had done much in showing 
 the true nature of the ' cromlech,' or so- 
 called Druidic altars, and has brought the 
 light of history to bear, not on them alone, 
 but on the four principal monuments of 
 the Boyne, even to their very identifica- 
 tion ; and from what he has done in this 
 Essay, written in 1834, some estimate 
 may be made of what he would afterwards 
 have accomplished had opportunity been 
 afforded to him. "J 
 
 * Vide articles by Miss Dobbs referred to supra. 
 t Irish Ecclesiastical Record, April, 1913 : " Footprints 
 of History in Ireland," p. 381. 
 X stokes' Life of Petrie, p. 237. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE ANCIENT MUSIC OF IRELAND 
 
 As we have seen, Petrie, in his early years, 
 was an artist. In later years he devoted 
 himself to antiquarian work, and to anti- 
 quarian illustrations in which his artistic 
 powers found a vent. Later, with the 
 exception of a few paintings, he kept rigidly 
 along the path of antiquarian investiga- 
 tion. His artistic sense found scope for 
 its exercise, however, in his descriptions 
 of those relics of Christian culture which 
 made Ireland famous for stone and metal 
 work and manuscript illumination from 
 the sixth to the twelfth centuries. He 
 lays stress upon the rise of the Fine Arts in 
 Ireland under the fostering care of the 
 Christian Church, and we possess his charm- 
 ing and accurate descriptions of the great 
 classes of artistic work which add to the 
 glory of the Church in Ireland. That 
 Church is famous for its splendid faith and 
 its wonderful missionary spirit. It is also 
 famous for its fine artistic work from the 
 sixth to the twelfth centuries. Amidst the 
 persecutions of later years it displayed its 
 heroic qualities of endurance and its living 
 
 132 
 
THE ANCIENT MUSIC OF IRELAND 133 
 
 faith, but the decline of its artistic powers 
 is to be ascribed to the unfavourable cir- 
 cumstances under which it was forced to 
 live. 
 
 Petrie was the first to bring under the 
 notice of artistic Europe the beauty of our 
 illuminated manuscripts, of our croziers 
 and crosses and shrines, of our stone 
 crosses and sepulchral monuments. He 
 tried to awaken popular interest in the 
 subject in a series of papers contributed 
 to the Dublin Penny Journal, In addition 
 he wrote accurate descriptions of the chief 
 antiquities of the Christian period acquired 
 by the Museum of the Royal Irish 
 Academy, amongst the most notable being 
 the Domnach Airgid, the Gospels of St. 
 Molaise, the ancient consecrated Bells of 
 Ireland, such as the Bell of St. Patrick, 
 the Cross of Cong, the Shrine of St. 
 Manchan, the Fiacal Padraig, the Miosach 
 of St. Columba, and the Tara Brooch. 
 With all the keen perception of the artist 
 he emphasized those evidences of refined 
 and spiritual delicacy of drawing, of sense 
 for balance and freedom, which make Irish 
 line ornamentation — as in the Book of 
 Kells, or on the Ardagh Chalice — ^the finest 
 the world has ever seen. 
 
 The charm of social intercourse between 
 Petrie, O'Donovan, and O' Curry was en- 
 10* 
 
134 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 hanced by their common love of Irish 
 Music. O' Curry devoted a notable sec- 
 tion of his Lectures on the Manners and 
 Customs of the Ancient Irish to " Music 
 and Musical Instruments in Ancient Erin.'* 
 When but seventeen years of age, Petrie 
 gave Tom Moore some Irish airs. In a 
 journal of a tour in Wicklow in 1808, we 
 find the following entry : " Got one Peter 
 Power to spend the evening with me, 
 having heard that he had many Irish airs ; 
 got but two from him." Petrie viewed 
 Irish music from two points of view : as an 
 antiquary he saw in the folk-music of 
 Ireland another evidence of the early and 
 traditional culture of the Irish race ; and as 
 a man of artistic feeling he saw in it a 
 perennial source of pleasure. His first 
 essay on Irish Music appeared in the 
 Dublin Examiner of the year 1816. 
 
 To Bunting's Ancient Music of Ireland, 
 he contributed a notice on the ancient 
 harp in Trinity College, known as Brian 
 Boroimhe's Harp. " In December, 1851, a 
 society for the preservation and publica- 
 tion of the melodies of Ireland was founded 
 with Petrie as President. One volume, 
 consisting entirely of airs collected by 
 Petrie, appeared under the superintendence 
 of this society in 1855. On the subject of 
 his collection he corresponded with Thomas 
 
THE ANCIENT MUSIC OF IRELAND 135 
 
 Moore, MacDowell, Chappell, Eugene 
 O' Curry, J. P. Joyce and others."* 
 
 Unlike Moore and Stephenson, he made 
 no attempt at modernising his collec- 
 tion : he gives us plough tunes, spinning 
 tunes, smiths' tunes, millers' and carters' 
 songs, luUabys, dance airs, and others, 
 just as they have come down the centuries. 
 He was not in a position to discuss the 
 apparently thorny subject of the origin 
 of the Irish scale ; but he knew that in Irish 
 Music he was dealing with something which 
 was both primitive and beautiful. 
 
 In 1857, on the occasion of a meeting of 
 the British Association at Dublin, the 
 Ethnological Section organised a visit to 
 the Aran Islands. Amongst the Irish 
 visitors were Petrie, O'Curry, O'Donovan, 
 F. W. Burton, Samuel Ferguson, Whitley 
 Stokes, Dr. Wm. Stokes, Sir Wm. Wilde, 
 Haverty and others. And it was this occasion 
 which gave rise to the following pen-picture 
 by Dr. William Stokes of the enthusiasm 
 of Petrie and O'Curry for Irish Music : 
 " To this cottage [in the little village of 
 Kilronan], when evening fell, Petrie with 
 his manuscript book and violin, and always 
 accompanied by his friend O'Curry, used 
 to proceed. Nothing could exceed the 
 
 * stokes' Life of Petrie, p. 340j 
 
136 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 strange picturesqueness of the scenes which 
 night after night were thus presented. On 
 approaching the house, always lighted up 
 by a blazing turf fire, it was seen sur- 
 rounded by the islanders, whilst its interior 
 was crowded with figures, the rich colours 
 of whose dresses, heightened by the fire- 
 light, showed with a strange vividness and 
 variety, while their fine countenances were 
 all animated with curiosity and pleasure. 
 It would have required a Rembrandt to 
 paint the scene. The minstrel — some- 
 times an old woman, sometimes a beauti- 
 ful girl or a young man — was seated on a 
 low stool in the chimney-comer, while 
 chairs for Petrie and O' Curry were placed 
 opposite ; the rest of the crowded audience 
 remained standing. The song having been 
 given, O' Curry wrote the Irish words, when 
 Petrie's work began. The singer recom- 
 menced, stopping at a signal from him at 
 every two or three bars of the melody to 
 permit the writing of the notes, and often 
 repeating the passage until it was correctly 
 taken down, and then going on with the 
 melody, exactly from the point where the 
 singing was interrupted. The entire air 
 being at last obtained, the singer — a second 
 time — ^was called to give the song con- 
 tinuously, and when all corrections had 
 been made, the violin — an instrument of 
 
THE ANCIENT MUSIC OF IRELAND 137 
 
 great sweetness and power — ^was produced, 
 and the air played, as Petrie alone could 
 play it, and often repeated. 
 
 ** Never was the inherent love of music 
 among the Irish people more shown than on 
 this occasion ; they listened with deep 
 attention, while their heartfelt pleasure 
 was expressed less by exclamations than 
 by gestures ; and when the music ceased, 
 a general and murmured conversation, in 
 their own language, took place, which 
 would continue until the next song was 
 commenced."* 
 
 It is a pity that the clever pencil of Burton 
 did not sketch for us the group of dis- 
 tinguished scholars who met in Aran in 
 1857. It would stand as a symbol of the 
 undying spirit of Irish intellectual life, and 
 to that there could be no more fitting 
 background than this rock-bound island 
 home of the past ages of Celtic civilisation. 
 
 Petrie loved every inch of Irish ground. 
 With the exception of a few visits to 
 England and to Scotland, his whole life 
 was spent in Ireland and for Ireland. 
 His vitality to the end was astonishing. 
 He was an old man of seventy years 
 on the occasion of his next and last 
 visit to the West in 1859, and Stokes, 
 
 * stokes' Life of Petrie, pp. 317, 318. 
 
138 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 who was with him at the time, has 
 left on record this evidence of his 
 joyous spirit : " In the district of Burren 
 [County Clare] — the Arabia Petraea of 
 Ireland — so rich in the remains of Pagan 
 and early Christian times, and with its 
 invigorating air and singular rock scenery, 
 his spirits became almost boyish. On 
 leaving Ballyvaughan the party had to 
 meet the train at Oranmore ; the day was 
 showery, and he had remained within 
 doors ; but even when the last moment 
 for departure had arrived, he was found 
 dancing round the room to his own spirit- 
 stirring music, while Irish planxties, 
 Spanish fandangos and boleros fell in 
 showers from his violin, and not till the 
 very last moment could he be got to 
 mount the car." 
 
 Great workers must, at some time or 
 other, pay the penalty of originality. The 
 crowd cannot follow them up the heights, 
 and hence they will suffer from the lone- 
 liness of isolation and neglect. In O' Curry 
 and O'Donovan he had fellow-workers in 
 kindred subjects ; they too were climbing 
 the heights, but along somewhat different 
 paths. In Lord Adare and Dr. William 
 Stokes he had the kindest of friends and 
 sympathisers, and in his daughters he 
 found a wealth of filial affection and love. 
 
THE ANCIENT MUSIC OF IRELAND 139 
 
 But the strain of years of work began to 
 tell upon the old man, as it did on O' Curry 
 and O' Donovan, and with it came the 
 temptation to regret : " Can you wonder,'* 
 he says, " if I should regret that I ever 
 abandoned the practice of that delightful 
 art [Painting], which would have secured 
 me distinction, competence, and peace, 
 and probably length of years, to do things 
 that I thought of more value to the world ? 
 And yet I do not regret it. But I suffer ; 
 and it may deprive my poor girls of a life 
 which is, at least, of great value to them."* 
 It was a cry of weakness ; but he soon 
 regained his old self. He loved the Irish 
 people and the freedom of Irish Art, and 
 one of his last public acts was to resign 
 the Presidency of the Royal Hibernian 
 Academy as a protest against the with- 
 drawal of the evening exhibitions for 
 working-men, and against the new Charter 
 which gave the Government a veto in all 
 elections of members and nominees on 
 committee. To the end the Celtic lands 
 exercised a wondrous fascination over him, 
 and in the autumn of the year 1864, Petrie, 
 now seventy-five years of age, paid his 
 first and last visit to the home of St. 
 Columba, Glencolumbkille, in the County of 
 
 * stokes' Life of Petrie, p. 374. 
 
140 A GROUP OF NATION-BUILDERS 
 
 Donegal. On his return to Dublin he 
 devoted himself to the preparation of a 
 catalogue of his beloved antiquities, and 
 in the midst of his work Death called 
 him on the 17th January, 1866. He was 
 buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin. 
 He has found, let us hope, something 
 greater than the distinction, competence, 
 and peace, which, in a moment of regret, he 
 had sighed for ; he has found a place in 
 the loving memory of the Irish People. 
 
 THE END 
 
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