remote antiquity". Hitherto these metrical annals, or verses, or fasti, or by whatever name the compositions of these phillids are known, have been conşidered as the original mode of faithfully transmitting * Thus Moses, according to Josephus, composed an ode in hexameter verse on the miraculous passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea; and we read his sublime canticle in the book of Exodus. Mr. Smith, in his Dissertation on Ossian's Poems (p. 129), remarks, that McPherson and sir William Temple observe, that the frequently great length of these metrical annals did not prevent them from being learned and retained by heart. Dr. Parsons, in his Remains of Japhet, p. 581, speaks of the poems of Ossian, which had been then recently translated and published by Mr. M'Pherson, to whose composition some attributed them, which gave rise to the noted contest about their authenticity. Dr. Hugh Blair, and other Scottish writers warmly defending, and Dr. Johnson with other English au thors most vehemently denying it. Mr. Whitaker, however, powerfully supported them as genuine. Dr. Parsons, who was a profound proficient in the old Irish and Gaelic language, maintains their originality, and says, " as a proof, that they are original Irish poems, I am acquainted with a gentleman in Ireland, who has by heart several of the stories in both Fingal and Tamor, taught him in his youth in that language; who expressed much surprise, when he found them exactly agreeing with some of those Mr. McPherson had translated." This gentleman says, many of the people of Ireland retain some of these very poems, which were handed down from time immemorial in many families; and it is remarkable, that this gentleman was in the West Indies during the printing of these poems, from whence he did not return till they were published." According to Dr. Campbell (Surv. p. 77), authority is the principal argument in favor of antiquity. He reprobates the Scot, who for true Scottish history obtrudes upon us the sonnets of Hybernian bards. Whence issued forth at great M'Pherson's call, "that by tradition the most interesting events and circumstances of their nation. tainty upon duction of From the moment the nation, in which these bardic Greater cerinstitutions prevailed, was in possession of a literary the introcharacter or alphabet, by which these verses or com- writing. positions could be preserved, from that moment arose a degree of authenticity, which removed the frailty, defect, and casualties of memory, even aided by metre, rhyme, or verse. The time, at which the Milesian colony is stated to have arrived in Ireland, is about 1300 years before the christian æra, which is about the time, at which the learned Petavius informs us, Perseus reigned at Mycena. He follows Appollodorus. and Pausanias, who wrote under greater disadvantages of foreign nations, than the Irish phillids did of their own; more especially, as this very period was the beginning of their ethnic mythology, their fables, their allegories, their demigods, their heroes, their Deucalion, their Hercules, their Argonauts, and the whole mass of embellishment and fiction, with which the idolatrous priests and bards of Greece designedly enveloped and disguised the fundamental truths of history, to flatter and mislead that conceited, astute, and intellectual people. to the reali lesian race. It has been objected to the authority of the Irish Objections annals, that this Milesian race of kings are mere crea-ty of a Mitures of the imagination; that no coeval kingdoms can be traced, over which they reigned either in their native soil, or in any of their transient émigrations, or where they ultimately settled; that countries can be traced and affixed to the great names of the early ru ES lers, or first kings of men, such as Ninus, Zoroaster, Semiramis, and others of like fame and notoriety; but that no faint shadow of the Milesian descendants of Japhet, is to be caught from the closest attention to the sacred and profane penmen, who have left any records of these remote periods; their conclusion therefore is the unqualified banishment of the whole race to the region of fiction and romance. The observations in answer to this train of argument, are, Sacred and First That the sacred penmen confine their annals profane his tory confin-to the Hebrew nation; the Greek writers speak only of ed to a small the inhabit ed globe. portion of Greece, Egypt, and some Asiatic countries; and the Roman authors carry not their history, for at least one thousand years from this period, (excepting what they copied from the Grecians) beyond the confines of Italy, or at most to the coast of Africa, and the peninsula of Hesperia; consequently, no mention of or reference to the greater portion of human population can be found in any of the written annals, commonly called sacred and profane, or more familiarly the scriptures and classics. But the Hebrew, the Grecian, the oriental, and the Roman nation differed not from their cotemporary generations, communities, or states, in any essential, or generally pervading principle of government and civil institutions; yet they are no where recorded. It does not therefore follow, that they never existed. On the contrary, it is morally evident, that they did exist. The extremity of barbarism, which afterwards ran so close upon brutality, was the gradual effect of depraved man, which increased in proportion to his elongation from the days of patriarchal simplicity, experience, and knowledge. distinct na Secondly At this epoch the rights of sovereignty Origin of were exercised by a great multiplicity of individuals, tions. who very carefully kept up their genealogical rights of paternal or patriarchal dominion over their respective families, tribes, septs, or clans; which were subdivisions, or subordinate settlements, under the original division of the earth, amongst the fifty-five grand, and great grand-children of Noah. Petavius * rightly observes, that at this period many of the same family were said to reign at one and the same time, by reason of the several family settlements or distributions of the perty claimed by and holden under the head or chief of the family, tribe, sept, or clan. These again formed separate communities, subject to their immediate appointees, rulers, or chiefs †, and in process of time became either subdued by their neighbours, or remained independent nations. pro morial use these annals, strong Thirdly: The antiquity and origin of the Irish lan- The immeguage have been already considered, and as no other of the lantrace or more recent introduction of it into that island guage of has been set up by any one of the deriders of the an-proof of cient history of Ireland, from the courtly prelate of thenticity. St. David, down to the sceptic rector of Killegny, by every rule of reasoning the coevality of the language * "Nisi eodem tempore plures simul regnasse velimus; quod tunc erat usitatum, cum et oppidorum domini reges appeilarentur." Pet. Rat. Temp. 1. i. c. 8, their au Reges dicti a regendo. of the records with the events recorded, is a datum to be no longer called in question. Philological research, which often furnishes demonstration of the antiquity of a language, has been studiously avoided. The learned curate of Olveston has observed, that etymology, though no good leader, is a powerful subaltern. Such a pursuit might comprise an infinite mass of ingenuity, curiosity, and erudition, without closing in any definitive result. If these annals be written, (no matter for the present argument whether truly or falsely), in a language immemorially used in a particular country up to the present day, and this language in its roots, its dialect, its letters, its terminations, its pronunciation, and its spirit, can be traced to no other living language, but can be proved to have been immemorially used by a nation existing three thousand years ago, what other proof, short of holy writ, can be called for of the colonial or derivative descent or pedigree from that nation, the language of which they still retain? It is notorious that in the most ancient languages, most names of places are descriptive or topographical; if then an existing language can adapt the ancient appellative to the situation or peculiarity of the place, it is demonstration that the language and appellative are cotemporary; and if it be further found, that places in similar situations, or with like peculiarities in the mother country, notwithstanding the change of language, still retain the same appellations as in the colony, and that proper names of families and persons are the same in each, what stronger proof |