The Old Irish World

								


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                          THE OLD IRISH WORLD

                          THE OLD IRISH WORLD



                                  BY



                         ALICE STOPFORD GREEN



          Author of “The Making of Ireland and its Undoing”

                       “Irish Nationality,” &c.



                                DUBLIN

                        M. H. GILL & SON, LTD.

                                LONDON

                         MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.



                                 1912

PREFACE

SOME Irish friends have asked me to print certain lectures concerning
Ireland to which they had listened with indulgence; and to reprint also
former papers in a manner more convenient for country readers. This
volume is the answer to their request. It will be seen that I have not
attempted to alter the lectures from their first purpose and form.
The various studies, thus accidentally united, have a connecting link
in such evidences as they may contain of civilisation in the old Irish
world. A hundred years ago, in 1821, Dr. Petrie noted that while the
historians of ancient native origin were unable in their poverty and
degradation to pursue the laborious study of antiquities, there were
others of a different class and origin who had taken up the subject to
bring it into contempt; and these indeed succeeded in the cause for
which they, unworthily, laboured. Forty years later he recognised the
same influences at work. It would appear, he said in a letter written
to Lord Dunraven shortly before his death in 1865, to be considered
derogatory to the feeling of superiority in the English mind to accept
the belief that Celts of Ireland or Scotland could have been equal, not
to say superior in civilisation to their more potent conquerors, or
that they could have known the arts of civilised life till these were
taught them by the Anglo-Normans. After the lapse of half a century we
can still trace the same spirit--so powerful have been the hindrances
to serious and impartial enquiry--so slow has been the decline of
racial prejudice and political complacency. But in these latter days
a great change has silently passed over the peoples. The difficulties
of historical research and instruction do indeed remain as great as
ever; but in the new society which we see shaping itself in Ireland on
natural and no longer on purely artificial lines, there is no reason
to fear truth as dangerous or to neglect it as unnecessary. There is
now a public ready to be interested not only in Danish and Norman
civilisation in Ireland, but also in the Gaelic culture which embraced