en hundred
years are destroyed; we must now set to, to bake new ones, if we can, on
other ground and of other clay. Imagine for a moment the restoration of a
German-speaking Greece.

The bulk of the Irish race really lived in the closest contact with the
traditions of the past and the national life of nearly eighteen hundred
years, until the beginning of this century. Not only so, but during the
whole of the dark Penal times they produced amongst themselves a most
vigorous literary development. Their schoolmasters and wealthy farmers,
unwearied scribes, produced innumerable manuscripts in beautiful writing,
each letter separated from another as in Greek, transcripts both of the
ancient literature of their sires and of the more modern literature
produced by themselves. Until the beginning of the present century there
was no county, no barony, and, I may almost say, no townland which did
not boast of an Irish poet, the people's representative of those ancient
bards who died out with the extirpation of the great Milesian families.
The literary activity of even the eighteenth century among the Gaels was
very great, not in the South alone, but also in Ulster--the number of
poets it produced was something astonishing. It did not, however, produce
many works in Gaelic prose, but it propagated translations of many pieces
from the French, Latin, Spanish, and English. Every well-to-do farmer
could read and write Irish, and many of them could understand even archaic
Irish. I have myself heard persons reciting the poems of Donogha More
O'Daly, Abbot of Boyle, in Roscommon, who died sixty years before Chaucer
was born. To this very day the people have a word for archaic Irish, which
is much the same as though Chaucer's poems were handed down amongst the
English peasantry, but required a special training to understand. This
training, however, nearly every one of fair education during the Penal
times possessed, nor did they begin to lose their Irish training and
knowledge until after the establishment of Maynooth and the rise of
O'Connell. These two events made an end of the Gaelicism of the Gaelic
race, although a great number of poets and scribes existed even down to
the forties and fifties of the present century, and a few may linger on
yet in remote localities. But it may be said, roughly speaking, that the
ancient Gaelic civilisation died with O'Connell, largely, I am afraid,
owing to his example and his neglect of inculcating the