that source of so many centuries of domestic discord and bloodshed, the Boromean tribute, or customary bienneal penalty imposed upon that province by his royal ancestor, Tuathal the Acceptable; and which, according to an old historical poet, cited by Keating, consisted of Three score hundred of the fattest cows, And three score hundred ounces of pure silver, And three score hundred cauldrons strong and spotted. (21) In addition to this heavy subsidy, the same people were compelled to send to Tara every year during Cormac's life," thirty white cows, with calves of the same colour; thirty brass collars for these cows; and," adds my authority, "thirty chains of the same metal, to keep them quiet whilst milking." The Lagenians were obliged to pay this eric, or fine, as an atonement for the massacre in their convent, near Tara, of thirty heathen nuns of the highest birth, whose lives were devoted to the worship of the sun, and the guardianship of the sacred fire, more particularly dedicated to his honour, under the Phoenician name of Baal or Bel. The barbarous and cowardly murder of those unfortunate ladies having been perpetrated by the profligate Dunling, prince of Leinster, in consequence of their successful resistance to the (21) Keating, vol. i. p. 334. Mr. O'Connell, in one of his speeches, stated, that he was informed by Mr. William Murphy, of Smithfield, that from the offal of the cattle which were killed in Dublin before the Union, the poor derived a cheap and nutritive food, which they are now deprived of, as the greater portion of our "live stock" are now transported, to be slaughtered in England, for the benefit of our absentee and rack-rent landlords. The ancient Irish, it would seem, were obliged to furnish their kings with a great number of cattle, but then they had some value-some return for what they gave to support those kings, inasmuch as the aforesaid cattle were consumed at home! We are not exactly informed that Cormac himself, his general Fion Mac Cumhal, and the provincial kings of Ireland, with their chief nobility, ever went over to spend their time with the Roman governor of Britain, in London, and that their subjects or tenantry, though starving at home, were obliged to send their oxen, cows, and sheep across the channel, for the support of such a modern description of "fostering governors" and natural protectors!" No, no, we do not hear of such things; nor is it said that, in those times, the Milesian peasants were compelled to live on what Cobbett calls "pig's meat" and water, and were forced, in order to pay their rents, to sell the very pigs which they fattened-that these porkers might be shipped to Britain, and turned into bacon, to feed the Roman legions. "These things we have not heard," to use the Scriptural phraseology, of which the Saints are so fond; on the contrary, the "mere Irish" of those days never went to Britain or to Gaul, except to fight with the Roman legions, whom they eventually expelled from the former, and drove to the foot of the Alps in the latter country. Ah! but our benighted forefathers were ignorant of the inestimable benefits that might be derived from a Union with a "sister" country-they actually never dreamed, in the midst of their Heathen darkness, of the soul-saving nature of a legislative connexion, according to which the majority of the people are compelled to practise that "first of Christian virtues-self-denial," and die "fasting for their sins," by actually expiring in the open streets, and on the public roads, of hungerwhile, as was last year the case in Galway, whole ship-loads of provisions are wafted away before their eyes, to defray rack-rents. The following list of the articles of agricultural produce exported from our shores in 1831, through the single port of Liverpool-and these, it will be recollected, in a year of famine and pestilence, for the relief of which public collections were made in England and France-is extracted from a late number of the Liverpool Times: Cows 90,715 | Pigs Horses .. Hams and Tongues (hhds.) Butter (cools) Ditto (half do.) Ditto (firkins) Lard (tierces) Ditto (firkins) VOL. 1. NO. I. 296 Calves 134,762 Lambs 243 13,090 Eggs (crates) 14,554 Wheat (quarters) 936 Oats (do.) 6,391 Barley (do.) 1,189 Rye (do.) 590 Beans (do.) 5,754 Peas (do.) 258,087 Malt (do.) 156,001 1,196 25;725 2,506 277,060 380,679 21,328 413 8,452 1,724 6,850 19,217 Meal (loads) 149,816 465 Flour (sacks) 93,154 4,542 F brutal violence of himself and his abandoned associates.(22) Abroad Cormac ravaged by sea the coasts of Albany, or modern Scotland, for three successive years, and effectually revenged himself on, and curbed the power of, the restless Picts, for assisting the rebellions of his northern subjects, by planting a Milesian colony in their territory, under his gallant relative, Carbry Riada, the original ancestor of the kings of Scotland.(23) After the manner of his royal predecessors, the son of Art, with a large fleet, also attacked and pillaged the Roman provinces of Britain and Gaul;(24) and, besides these exploits, he twice invaded, subdued, and eventually put an end to the monarchy of the Damnonians of Connaught-thus extinguishing the power of that ancient people, who had ruled over all Ireland for nearly two hundred years prior to the arrival of the Milesians, and who, when driven into Connaught by their Spanish conquerors-as the descendants of those Spanish conquerors were several centuries afterwards by Cromwell-had given a "long line of sceptred princes" to that remote province, for an uninterrupted period of 1640 years. In the second of those expeditions, as is supposed, Cormac having, like Hannibal, Philip of Macedon, and other celebrated heroes of classic antiquity, the misfortune to lose the use of an eye, was in consequence obliged to abdicate the imperial crown, it being always deemed indispensible by the ancient Irish constitution, as well as it is by the modern laws of the Church, that the sovereign should be then (as the priest must be now) in the perfect possession of all his bodily as well as mental faculties.(25) When Aladine, king of Jerusalem, in Tasso's immortal epic, bursts into exclamations of grief and despair, on viewing the Christians breaking into his capital, the poet makes the intrepid Solyman, who had been driven from his kingdom by the same enemy, encourage his royal friend in these noble words : "Though of his realms by fortune dispossess'd, And never were these lines more applicable to any one than to the illustrious Cormac. The humble cottage in which he fixed his residence, near the modern town of Kells, became the temple of literature, and the palace of philosophy, where the royal sage spent the " evening of his days," in the study and revision of the ancient history and the jurisprudence of his country.(26) Nor, without pity, could his lofty mind } (22) O'Halloran, vol. ii. p. 421. Tighernach Codex Bodleianus Rawlinson, fol. 6. col. i. (23) See note 19, Bede Hist. Eccles. Brit. lib. i. cap. 1., and O'Flaherty's Isles of Aran, p. 9. (24) O'Halloran, vol. ii. p. 421. (25) Idem. ibid. p. 428-9. (26) O'Halloran, vol. ii. p. 428-9. Keating, vol. i. p. 248-9. Without whose aid, weak man, Misfortune's child, Such, we may suppose, were the feelings which led the powerful and highly cultivated intellect of Cormac, to reject with contempt the doctrines of the “law established" impostors of his time, and to trace and worship, in the contemplation of his wonderful works, the one great "Father of all in every age, In every clime ador'd; Like Demosthenes, copying, in his retreat, the history of Thucidydes, for his instruction, Cormac transcribed, with his own hand, the entire of the Psalter of Tara: like Justinian, in ancient, and Napoleon, in modern times, he amended and digested the legal code of his country; and more fortunate than Augustus, in the successor whom he endeavoured to instruct, the Irish monarch wrote for the use of his son, Carbry Liffecar, (so called from his being nursed on the banks of the Liffey,) an excellent treatise, yet extant, and entitled, "Advice to a King." Keating says, that it is worthy to be inscribed in letters of gold; and O'Halloran, who possessed a copy of it, informs us, that it is composed in the form of a dialogue, in which the royal author "considers the duty of a king, as a legislator, a soldier, a statesman, and a scholar;" and treats of the legal enactments relating to "poets, philosophers, antiquarians, and druids." He also revised a useful work upon the Laws, and "the Obedience due to Princes," written by Fiatach, one of the civilians of the famous legal academy at Tara.(27) More dignified and really enlightened in his retirement than Charles V., Cormac boldly opposed, with his pen, the Druids, or Magi, and maintained, in opposition to their abuses and corruptions, the cause of "natural religion," as Conla, and the rest of the Irish philosophers of his school, had previously done. The effect of such productions upon the meek and sanctified minds of their "law-established" Right Reverences and Reverences of that day, may be easily imagined. The "men of God" foresaw the destruction of their temporal power and emoluments would result from the illumination of the public mind, which would naturally ensue from the sceptical writings of Cormac, and his avowed contempt of their worship. Having, therefore, attempted (but in vain) to convert the monarch from such unpalatable opinions, by the controversial abilities of their Metropo (27) O'Halloran, vol. ii. p. 429. O'Conor's Dissertations, p. 136. of Milesian no longer the Estawhich de litan, the "Right Reverend Father" Malcon-(a sort MAGEE!)-it was resolved that "the Church" should be in danger" (!) and, accordingly, Malcon, with the aid of blished" in general, formed a "seasonable conspiracy," prived of life" the greatest legislator of all our kings, as he was indisputably the greatest philosopher of our nation!"(28) But neither the glory of Cormac, nor the cause in which he perished, was forgotten by his admiring countrymen; and three centuries after, when Ireland had been converted to Christianity, the great St. Columba, or Columbkil, founder of the celebrated monastery of Iona, apostle of the Picts, and himself of the blood-royal of Ireland, discovered the tomb of Cormac in a little island of the Boyne, said thirty masses upon his grave for the repose of his soul, and erected a small chapel over his honoured remains."(29) The ruins of this edifice existed in Keating's time; and I am told still exist, as if to remind Irishmen of what their country once was, and of what she now is as if to bid them compare the splendour of the past, with the darkness of the present-as if, by appealing to their historical recollections of" other and brighter days," to teach them that they could never have been conquered but for their contemptible domestic divisions; and, finally, as if to shew them, that, notwithstanding the "ages of grief and of shame," which have been unhappily occasioned by those divisions, Irishmen have it yet in their power to raise the "land of their fathers" from her trampled wretchedness and provincial debasement, by embracing as brothers, whose temporary disagreement has been owing to mutual misconception--and, above all, by sacrificing their miserable sectarian squabbles and polemical animosities upon the longforsaken altar of union, and the too-long-desecrated shrine of national independence! It has hitherto been the custom of English ignorance or impertinence, and of Anglo-Irish meanness, to affect, first, to deny the very existence and, when even the faintest respect for truth rendered that impossible, to controvert the authenticity of any written monuments of our ancient civilization and glory, that escaped the flames kindled for their destruction by the gothic ancestors of the antiquarians of that neighbouring country, which cowardly servility, official corruption, speculating sycophancy, and unmeaning cant, have had the effrontery to insult the minds of educated Irishmen, by calling our "sister" island. At once resembling the Egyptian tyrant of Holy Writ, skilled in "wisely oppressing"-and like those barbarous Scythians, of ancient times, who put out the eyes of their slaves,(30) our avaricious and sanguinary plunderers-to make us crouch more submissively to their "iron yoke," by ungratefully extinguishing the light of learning among the descendants of those generous and pious Irishmen, who gave England, as the patriot Swift said, her “knowledge human and divine"-actuated, in a word, by the same Machiavelian policy, which has, of course, kindly led the "sister" country, for seven centuries, to keep Ireland, in Mr. Pitt's phraseology, "subjected to her power and subservient to her interests"-our English Omars, with a spirit of intellectual ferocity, at which a Genseric, or an Attila, would blush, uniformly endeavoured, not merely to deface, but to destroy, every venerable monument of antiquity, either in the arts or in literature, that bore testimony of the times when Ireland, to use the favorite quotation of the great man to whom she owes so much, and we hope will soon owe more, was really Great, glorious and free, First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea, But this disgraceful Vandalism, though in too many instances successful, was happily not universally so; the Irish, inspired, like true Ghebers, by feelings of patriotism, as ardent as the devotional enthusiasm and constancy of the persecuted Fireworshippers of Persia, preserved the "sacred flame" of their country's literature from extinction. In spite of the heavy tomes of libellous assumptions, and falsified citations, which have been laboured into the world by that arch-detractor of his country, Ledwich, in spite of every effort, first to annihilate, then to deny, the existence of, and, lastly, to undervalue our ancient historical literature-that literature, through the munificence of the Duke of Buckingham, has been given to the public curiosity, and has had its authenticity incontrovertibly established, in the valuable "Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores Veteres," of the learned Doctor O'Conor. From the relations of our ancient records, and indeed the names of places,(31) the proverbial expressions, and the traditionary customs of the native peasantry at this day, it would appear that sun and fireworship, or Magianism, (of course considerably modified by its distance of time and space from the East,) was the religion of our ancestors before the introduction of Christianity. According to General Vallancey, and the authorities which he cites, [Collectanea, vol. iv. p. 398 & 9,] the Damnonians, who were in possession of Ireland previous to the arrival of the Milesians, professed Sabianism, or a branch of the Magian faith, that by admitting of the veneration of images, which the more puritanical followers of Zoroaster abhorred, bore the same analogy to the "biblical" interpretation of the doctrines of the Persian prophet, that Catholicity at present does to Protestantism. With the same spirit that actuated Ostanes, the Archimagus of Balch, and the "visible head of the Church" of Persia, as the successor of Zoroaster, to incite his sovereign, Xerxes, to demolish all the statues found either in the temples of the polytheistical Greeks, or in those of the Sabians of Babylon, (32) we are told that the Milesian Iconoclasts, Rollin's Ancient (31) See Doctor Joachim Villanueva's very curious work, entitled, "Ibernia Phoenicia." In some instances, the learned author's etymologies are rather far-fetched, but, altogether, they form a body of stubborn presumptive evidence in favour of an Oriental colonization of this country, which it will be more easy for ignorance to ridicule than for scepticism to confute. (33) Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chap. viii. vol. i. p. 121.-Jones's edition. History, book vi. sect. x. vol. i. p. 344.-Bell's edition: one, it may be added, that reduces the refere of its predecessors to insignificance. The notes, if properly weeded of the frequent references which they contain upon the now stale and exploded subject of Jewish prophecy, particularly with regard to the geography, the antiquities, and the modern state of the East, as poti be faultless; as it is, however, they are a library ex useful and instructive information, contrasted with its ancient condition. |