e the more ancient,
and Ogham the more modern; books and Roman characters would be the more
poetical, and inscriptions on stone and timber in the Ogham characters
the more prosaic. The bards relating the lives and deeds of the ancient
heroes, would have ascribed to their times parchment books and the Roman
characters, not stone and wood, and the Ogham.

In these compositions, whenever they were reduced to the form in which
we find them to-day, the ethnic character of the times and the ethnic
character of the heroes are clearly and universally observed. The
ancient, the remote, the archaic clings to this literature. As Homer
does not allude to writing, though all scholars agree that he lived in
a lettered age, so the old bards do not allude to parchment and
Roman characters, though the Irish epics, as distinguished from their
component parts, reached their fixed state and their final development
in times subsequent to the introduction of Christianity.

When and how a knowledge of letters reached this island we know not.
From the analogy of Gaul, we may conclude that they were known for some
time prior to their use by the bards. Caesar tells us that the Gaulish
bards and druids did not employ letters for the preservation of their
lore, but trusted to memory, assisted, doubtless, as in this country, by
the mechanical and musical aid of verse. Whether the Ogham was a native
alphabet or a derivative from another, it was at first employed only to
a limited extent. Its chief use was to preserve the name of buried kings
and heroes in the stone that was set above their tombs. It was, perhaps,
invented, and certainly became fashionable on this account, straight
strokes being more easily cut in stone than rounded or uncial
characters. For the same reason it was generally employed by those who
inscribed timber tablets, which formed the primitive book, ere they
discovered or learned how to use pen, ink, and parchment. The use of
Ogham was partially practised in the Christian period for sepultural
purposes, being venerable and sacred from time. Hence the discovery of
Ogham-inscribed stones in Christian cemeteries. On the other hand,
the fact that the majority of these stones are discovered in raths and
forts, i.e., the tombs of our Pagan ancestors, corroborates the fact
implied in all the bardic literature, that the characters employed in
the ethnic times were Oghamic, and affords another proof of the close
conservative spirit of th