The Book-Hunter, John Hill Burton [essential reading TXT] 📗

years, till the world was drowned. We are told that the first who set foot upon the island were three fishermen that were driven thither by a storm from the coast of Spain. They were pleased with the discovery they had made, and resolved to settle in the country; but they agreed first to go back for their wives, and in their return were unfortunately drowned by the waters of the Deluge at a place called Tuath Inbhir. The names of these three fishermen were Capa, Laighne, and Luasat. Others, again, are of opinion that Ceasar, the daughter of Bith, was the first that came into the island before the Deluge.... When Noah was building the ark to preserve himself and his family from the Deluge, Bith, the father of Ceasar, sent to desire an apartment for him and his daughter, to save them from the approaching danger. Noah, having no authority from Heaven to receive them into the ark, denied his request. Upon this repulse, Bith Fiontan, the husband of Ceasar, and Ladhra her brother, consulted among themselves what measures they should take in this extremity."

The result was, that, like the Laird of Macnab, they "built a boat o' their ain," but on a much larger scale, being a fair match with the ark itself. But justice should be done to every one. The learned Dr Keating does not give us all this as veritable history; on the contrary, being of a sceptical turn of mind, he has courage enough to stem the national prejudice, and throw doubt on the narrative. He even rises up into something like eloquent scorn when he discusses the manner in which some antediluvian annals were said to be preserved. Thus:—

"As for such of them who say that Fiontan was drowned in the Flood, and afterwards came to life, and lived to publish the antediluvian history of the island—what can they propose by such chimerical relations, but to amuse the ignorant with strange and romantic tales, to corrupt and perplex the original annals, and to raise a jealousy that no manner of credit is to be given to the true and authentic chronicles of that kingdom?"

I shall quote no more until after the doctor, having exhausted his sceptical ingenuity about the antediluvian stories, finds himself again on firm ground, prepared to afford his readers, without any critical misgivings, "an account of the first inhabitants of Ireland after the Flood." He now tells us with simple and dignified brevity that "the kingdom of Ireland lay waste and uninhabited for the space of three hundred years after the Deluge, till Partholanus, son of Seara, son of Sru, son of Easru, son of Framant, son of Fathochda, son of Magog, son of Japhet, son of Noah, arrived there with his people." From such a patriarchal nomenclature the reader of Keating is suddenly introduced to a story of domestic scandal, in which a "footman" and a "favourite greyhound" make their frequent appearance. Then follow many great epochs—the arrival of the Firbolgs, the dynasty of the Tuatha de Danans, with revolutions and battles countless, before we come to the commencement of a settled dynasty of kings, of whom more than ninety reigned before the Christian era. It is, after all, more sad than ridiculous to remember that within the present generation many historians believed not only what Keating thus tells as truth, but also what he ventured to doubt; and if the English antiquaries, according to their wont, called for records,—did these not exist abundantly, if they could be got at, in those authentic genealogies, which were from time to time adjusted and collated with so much skill and scrupulous accuracy by the official antiquaries who met in the Hall of Tara? The reader unacquainted with such an out-of-the-way and rather weedy corner of literature, may think this vague exaggeration; and I shall finish it by quoting the latest printed, so far as I know, of the numerous solemn and methodical statements about the manner in which the records of these very distant matters were authenticated.

"When the said princes got the kingdom into their hands, they assigned large territories to their antiquaries and their posterity to preserve their pedigree, exploits, actions, &c.; and so very strict they were on this point, that they established a triennial convention at Tara, where the chief kings of Ireland dwelt, where all the antiquaries of the nation met every third year to have their chronicles and antiquities examined before the king of Ireland, the four provincial kings, the king's antiquary-royal, &c.; the least forgery in the antiquary was punished with death, and loss of estate to his posterity for ever—so very exact they were in preserving their venerable monuments, and leaving them to posterity truly and candidly; so that even at this day (though our nation lost estate and all almost) there is not an ancient name of Ireland, of the blood-royal thereof descended, but we can bring, from father to father, from the present man in being to Adam—and I, Thaddy O'Roddy, who wrote this, have written all the families of the Milesian race from this present age to Adam."[80]

To all this preposterous, and now scarcely credible extravagance of fiction, there attaches a melancholy political moral. Poor Ireland, trodden by a dominant party whose hand was strengthened by her potent neighbour, sought relief from the gloom of the present, by looking far back into the fabulous glories of the past—and it seemed the last drop in her cup of bitterness when this pleasant vista was also to be closed by the hard utilitarian hand of the unsympathising Saxon.

After "this sort of thing" it was naturally difficult to get sensible men to listen to proposals for opening valuable new sources of early history in Ireland. In fact, down to the time when Moore wrote his History in 1835, no one could venture to look another in the face when speaking of the early Irish annals, and the consequence was that that accomplished author wilfully shut his eyes to the rich supply of historical materials in which he might have worked to brilliant effect.

Yet, upon the general face of history, it must on examination have been fairly seen that Ireland is the natural place where a great proportion of whatever is to be known about the primitive Church in the British Islands was to be found. Indeed, in the history of Christianity, not the least wonderful chapter contains the episode of the repose in the West, where a portion of the Church, having settled down, grew up in calm obscurity, protected by distance from the desolating contest which was breaking up the empire of the world, and raged more or less wherever the Roman sway had penetrated. Of the southern Britons it could no longer be said, as in the days of Augustus, that they were cut off from all the world. England was an integral part of the empire, where, if the proconsul or legionary commander had not the hot sun and blue sky of Italy, there were partial compensations in the bracing air which renewed his wasted strength, the new and peculiar luxuries in the shape of shellfish and wildfowl that enriched his table, and the facilities which his insular authority afforded him for strengthening his political position, and plotting for a fragment of the disintegrating empire. An admiral of the Roman fleet had at one time established his power in Britain, where he set up as Cæsar, and sought to create a new imperial centre. Thus the southern part of Britain was a province of the true Roman empire awaiting the coming of the wild hordes who were gathering for the general overthrow, and was not the place where either the Christian Church or Italian civilisation could find permanent refuge. The destined destroyer was indeed close at hand. Though the Romans had their walls, their roads, their forts, and even a few villas in Scotland, yet one going northward at that time through the territories of the Gadeni and the Otadeni, would observe the Romanised character of the country gradually decreasing, until he found himself among those rough independent northern tribes, who, under the name of Picts and Scots, drove the Romanised Britons into the sea, and did for the insular portion of the empire what the hordes who were called Goths, Franks, and Alemanni, were doing in the Roman provinces of the Continent.

Behind the scene of this destructive contest, Christianity, having been planted, flourished in peaceful poverty. It grew here and there over Ireland, and in a small portion of the remote part of Scotland; and the distance from the scene of warfare necessary for its safety is shown by the fate of St Ninian's little church in the Mull of Galloway. It was too near the field of strife to live. The isolation in which the western Christians thus arose, was productive of ecclesiastical conditions very remarkable in themselves, but perfectly natural as the effects of their peculiar causes. The admirable organisation for carrying out the civil government of the Roman empire, was a ready-made hierarchy for carrying out the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. It was far from the object of those who seized on the power of the Cæsars to abolish that power. On the contrary, they desired to work it on their own account, and thus the machinery of the empire lived, exercising more or less vitality and power, down to the first French Revolution.

No part of its civil organisation, however, retained the comprehensive vitality which the learning and subtlety of the priesthood enabled them to preserve, or rather restore, to its spiritual branch. Hence, wherever the conquerors of Rome held sway, there the priests of Rome obtained a sway also. But the one little fragment of the primitive Church, which had been so curiously cut off during the great contest, was beyond the sway of the conquerors of Rome, as it had been beyond the sway of the Emperors themselves. Hence, while the Church, as united to Rome, grew up in one great uniform hierarchy, the small, isolated Church in the West grew up with different usages and characteristics; and when afterwards those who followed them were charged with schism, they asserted that they had their canons and usages directly from the apostles, from whom they had obtained the Gospel and the regulations of the Church pure and undefiled. Thus arose the renowned contest between the early Scottish Church and the rest of Christendom about the proper period of observing Easter, and about the form of the tonsure. Hence, too, arose the debates about the peculiar discipline of the communities called Culdees, who, having to frame their own system of church government for themselves, humble, poor, and isolated as they were, constructed it after a different fashion from the potent hierarchy of Rome. The history of these corporations possesses extreme interest, even to those who follow it without a predetermined design to identify every feature of their arrangements with a modern English diocese, or with a modern Scottish presbytery; and not the least interesting portion of this history is its conclusion, in the final absorption, not without a struggle, of these isolated communities within the expanding hierarchy of the Popes.

In a few humble architectural remains, these primitive bodies have left vestiges of their peculiar character to the present day. Neither deriving the form of their buildings nor their other observances from Rome, they failed to enter with the rest of the Church on that course of construction which led towards Gothic architecture. The earliest Christian churches on the Continent were constructed on the plan of the Roman basilica, or court of justice, and wherever the Church of Rome spread, this method of construction went with her. The oldest style of church-building—that