An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800. Mary Frances Cusack
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travelled through Ireland collecting materials for Father Hugh Ward, also a Franciscan friar, and Guardian of the convent of St. Antony at Louvain, who was preparing a series of Lives of Irish Saints. When Father Ward died, the project was taken up and partially carried out by Father John Colgan. His first work, the Trias Thaumaturgus, contains the lives of St. Patrick, St. Brigid, and St. Columba. The second volume contains the lives of Irish saints whose festivals occur from the 1st of January to the 31st of March; and here, unfortunately, alike for the hagiographer and the antiquarian, the work ceased. It is probable that the idea of saving—
"The old memorials
Of the noble and the holy,
Of the chiefs of ancient lineage,
Of the saints of wondrous virtues;
Of the Ollamhs and the Brehons,
Of the bards and of the betaghs,"[21]
occurred to him while he was collecting materials for Father Ward. His own account is grand in its simplicity, and beautiful as indicating that the deep passion for country and for literature had but enhanced the yet deeper passion which found its culminating point in the dedication of his life to God in the poor order of St. Francis. In the troubled and disturbed state of Ireland, he had some difficulty in securing a patron. At last one was found who could appreciate intellect, love of country, and true religion. Although it is almost apart from our immediate subject, we cannot refrain giving an extract from the dedication to this prince, whose name should be immortalized with that of the friar patriot and historian:—
"I, Michael O'Clerigh, a poor friar of the Order of St. Francis (after having been for ten years transcribing every old material that I found concerning the saints of Ireland, observing obedience to each provincial that was in Ireland successively), have come before you, O noble Fearghal O'Gara. I have calculated on your honour that it seemed to you a cause of pity and regret, grief and sorrow (for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland), how much the race of Gaedhil, the son of Niul, have passed under a cloud and darkness, without a knowledge or record of the obit of saint or virgin, archbishop, bishop, abbot, or other noble dignitary of the Church, or king or of prince, of lord or of chieftain, [or] of the synchronism of connexion of the one with the other." He then explains how he collected the materials for his work, adding, alas! most truly, that should it not be accomplished then, "they would not again be found to be put on record to the end of the world." He thanks the prince for giving "the reward of their labour to the chroniclers," and simply observes, that "it was the friars of the convent of Donegal who supplied them with food and attendance." With characteristic humility he gives his patron the credit of all the "good which will result from this book, in giving light to all in general;" and concludes thus:—
"On the twenty-second day of the month of January, A.D. 1632, this book was commenced in the convent of Dun-na-ngall, and, it was finished in the same convent on the tenth day of August, 1636, the eleventh year of the reign of our king Charles over England, France, Alba, and over Eiré."
There were "giants in those days;" and one scarcely knows whether to admire most the liberality of the prince, the devotion of the friars of Donegal, who "gave food and attendance" to their literary brother, and thus had their share in perpetuating their country's fame, or the gentle humility of the great Brother Michael.
It is unnecessary to make any observation on the value and importance of the Annals of the Four Masters. The work has been edited with extraordinary care and erudition by Dr. O'Donovan, and published by an Irish house. We must now return to the object for which this brief mention of the MS. materials of Irish history has been made, by showing on what points other historians coincide in their accounts of our first colonists, of their language, customs, and laws; and secondly, how far the accounts which may be obtained ab extra agree with the statements of our own annalists. The Book of Invasions, which was rewritten and "purified" by brother Michael O'Clery, gives us in a few brief lines an epitome of our history as recorded by the ancient chroniclers of Erinn:—
"The sum of the matters to be found in the following book, is the taking of Erinn by [the Lady] Ceasair; the taking by Partholan; the taking by Nemedh; the taking by the Firbolgs; the taking by the Tuatha Dé Danann; the taking by the sons of Miledh [or Miletius]; and their succession down to the monarch Melsheachlainn, or Malachy the Great [who died in 1022]." Here we have six distinct "takings," invasions, or colonizations of Ireland in pre-Christian times.
It may startle some of our readers to find any mention of Irish history "before the Flood," but we think the burden of proof, to use a logical term, lies rather with those who doubt the possibility, than with those who accept as tradition, and as possibly true, the statements which have been transmitted for centuries by careful hands. There can be no doubt that a high degree of cultivation, and considerable advancement in science, had been attained by the more immediate descendants of our first parents. Navigation and commerce existed, and Ireland may have been colonized. The sons of Noah must have remembered and preserved the traditions of their ancestors, and transmitted them to their descendants. Hence, it depended on the relative anxiety of these descendants to preserve the history of the world before the Flood, how much posterity should know of it. MacFirbis thus answers the objections of those who, even in his day, questioned the possibility of preserving such records:—"If there be any one who shall ask who preserved the history [Seanchus], let him know that they were very ancient and long-lived old men, recording elders of great age, whom God permitted to preserve and hand down the history of Erinn, in books, in succession, one after another, from the Deluge to the time of St. Patrick."
The artificial state of society in our own age, has probably acted disadvantageously on our literary researches, if not on our moral character. Civilization is a relative arbitrary term; and the ancestors whom we are pleased to term uncivilized, may have possessed as high a degree of mental culture as ourselves, though it unquestionably differed in kind. Job wrote his epic poem in a state of society which we should probably term uncultivated; and when Lamech gave utterance to the most ancient and the saddest of human lyrics, the world was in its infancy, and it would appear as if the first artificer in "brass and iron" had only helped to make homicide more easy. We can scarce deny that murder, cruel injustice, and the worst forms of inhumanity, are but too common in countries which boast of no ordinary refinement; and we should hesitate ere we condemn any state of society as uncivilized, simply because we find such crimes in the pages of their history.
The question of the early, if not pre-Noahacian colonization of Ireland, though distinctly asserted in our annals, has been met with the ready scepticism which men so freely use to cover ignorance or indifference. It has been taken for granted that the dispersion, after the confusion of tongues at Babel, was the first dispersion of the human race; but it has been overlooked that, on the lowest computation, a number of centuries equal, if not exceeding, those of the Christian era, elapsed between the Creation of man and the Flood; that men had "multiplied exceedingly upon the earth;" and that the age of stone had already given place to that of brass and iron, which, no doubt, facilitated commerce and colonization, even at this early period of the world's history. The discovery of works of art, of however primitive a character, in the drifts of France and England, indicates an early colonization. The rudely-fashioned harpoon of deer's horn found beside the gigantic whale, in the alluvium of the carse near the base of Dummyat, twenty feet above the highest tide of the nearest estuary, and the tusk of the mastodon lying alongside fragments of pottery in a deposit of the peat and sands of the post-pliocene beds in South Carolina, are by no means solitary examples. Like the night torch of the gentle Guanahané savage, which Columbus saw as he gazed wearily from his vessel, looking, even after sunset, for the long hoped-for shore, and which told him that his desire was at last consummated, those indications of man, associated with the gigantic animals of a geological age, of whose antiquity there can be no question, speak to our hearts strange tales of the long past, and of the early dispersion and progressive distribution of a race created to "increase and multiply."
The question of transit has also been raised as a difficulty by those who doubt our early colonization. But this would seem easily removed. It is