LETTERS OF IRELAND, THE. The literature of Ireland is a literature in two tongues, and the elder of the two is the eldest vernacular literature of western Europe: Ireland wrote her own speech in books while the greater nations of the Continent were still borrowing Latin to pray in. The monuments of that antiquity survive in the great vellum books — the Book of the Dun Cow, written before ever a Norman keel touched the Irish coast; the Book of Leinster; the codices of the laws and the genealogies — and in them the tales of the elder time, chief among these the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the great cattle-spoil of Cúailnge, an epic that wants nothing but readers to stand beside the epics of the northern nations, and, in the deliberate judgment of the present writer, above most of them. The line of the native learning closed greatly: the annals compiled at Donegal by the Four Masters under Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, finished in 1636 within sight of the old order's fall, are the most scrupulous body of annals any nation of Europe possesses, and were made by men who knew they were building a tomb.
The learned families who kept these books were already broken in fortune when the incorporation of 1654 (see IRELAND) found them, and what followed the Union completed what the wars had begun. The transplantations of the sixteen-fifties carried the keeping families westward with the rest, their books in the creels; and the reader who would understand how a literature can be made a stranger in its own island must be told plainly that the commissioners of those years [A passage is here omitted. — ED.]
The manuscripts, at all events, largely survive. Of the manner of their surviving, and of what did not survive, the present article will not be found to say more.
The tongue, put out of the schools, kept school under the hedge, and the eighteenth century, which polite Dublin (q.v.) passed in its coffee-rooms, the countryside passed in verse. The hedge-poets were schoolmasters, labouring men, walking men: Maoilsheachlainn Ó Fearghail of the county of Longford (c. 1690-1756), master of the vision-poem, in which Ireland walks as a woman by twilight and foretells her own deliverance — a form the reader will find safely domesticated, with the cause that once fed it, among the Stuart ballads (q.v.) of the parlour; Tadhg Ó Coigligh of Thomond (1708-1782), who held in his farm kitchen the last of the poets' courts of Munster, and examined a stranger's verses as gravely as any college of the Profession examines divinity; and Onóra Ní Ruairc of Breifne (fl. 1770-1795), whose keens for the dead went into every county's mouth, the one woman the tradition admitted to its first rank, being unable to help itself. Their measures — the long stressed line, the vowel-music carried through a stanza like a peal of bells — have no equivalent in English and defeat translation; their learning, in men who dug ditches for bread, would not have disgraced the schools their grandfathers were bred in; and they were sustained by no patron, no press, and no public but the parish, which is to say by the purest love of letters of which this island, or perhaps any, can show record.
What the hedge preserved, the societies have printed. The Ó Cléirigh Society, founded at Dublin in 1808 and named for the chief of the Four Masters, put the annals into type with an English rendering between 1826 and 1851; the tales, the law tracts, and the poets have followed from the same and from younger presses; and the collections of the University and of the societies now hold the greater part of the surviving vellums, catalogued and past the reach of accident, if not of neglect.
Within the last twenty years the movement has passed from the printing of a literature to the raising of one. The Fellowship of the Irish Tongue (Comhaltacht na Gaedhilge), founded at Dublin in 1892, teaches the language in above nine hundred branches; a new prose and a new verse are printed month by month in its journals; and the present writer, who has lived to hear Gaelic verse said aloud in drawing-rooms that within his own memory would have blushed to own the tongue, cannot treat this as a matter of letters only, for a people that has recovered its speech has recovered the instrument by which a people [The remainder of this passage is omitted. — ED.]
The letters of Ireland in the English tongue, from the wits of the Dublin coffee-rooms to the novelists of the present day, belong to the general stock of the Commonwealth and are treated under LITERATURE OF THE COMMONWEALTH, THE (q.v.), where the reader will find Irishmen counted among the Commonwealth's ornaments with a readiness the elder literature of their own island has not always commanded. For that elder literature the present article has been able to do no more than open the door. A fuller account than the plan of this work has found room for must be sought in the publications of the societies themselves, where it stands set out at a length no editor has abridged. (C. O'D.)