CURIOSITIES OF IRISH LITERATURE. 



IT has often been my good fortune, both at the Dublin Corn Ex- 

 change, and in other places, to witness the endeavours of O'Connell 

 to shove " Old Ireland" some degrees across the ocean, so as to bring 

 her in juxtaposition with the United States. " It is bounded on the 

 east/' he would say, if he could, " by St. George's Channel, and on 

 the west by North America." Campion, a worthy old Jesuit, whose 

 head has not ached these three hundred years and upwards, seems to 

 favour such a speculation. " Ireland," he says, (( lieth aloose in the 

 West Ocean." Aloose, like Gulliver's floating island, inviting the 

 trident of any adventurous Triton who might be tempted to interfere 

 with its latitute and longitude. From the frequent and familiar inter- 

 course between our coasts and those of Palestine and Phrenicia in 

 the very infancy of navigation, it might appear as if we were once 

 posited in the lower end of the Levant, and had been gradually and 

 imperceptibly drifted by contrary currents to our present situation in 

 the rear of Europe. Whether we be not still retrograding from the 

 confines of civilisation, is a question to which I must be excused, if, 

 in the imperfect state of our geographical knowledge, I decline an 

 answer. One fact is clear, that mosquitoes were seen, and felt too, in 

 the interior of the Bog of Allen last summer. But I was speaking of 

 the Holy Land. Our acquaintance with that favoured soil commenced 

 in the time of Noah, and our first saint was imported directly from 

 thence at that early age. His legend is thus preserved in Dr. Han- 

 mer's most grave and weighty Chronicle of Ireland : 



" Whereas in the yeare of the world 1525 Noah began to ad- 

 monish the people of vengeance to come by a generall deluge, for the 

 wickednesse and detestable sinne of man, and continued his admo- 

 nition 120 yeares, building an arke for the safegarde of himselfe and 

 his family ; one Cesara say they according unto others, Cesarea, 

 a neece of Noah (when others seemed to neglect this forewarning) 

 rigging a ?iavy, committed herselfe with her adherents to the seas 

 to seeke adventures and to avoid the plagues that were to fall. She 

 arrived in Ireland with her three men, Bithi, Laigria, and Fintan, 

 and fifty women. Within forty dayes after her arrivall the universal! 

 flood came upon them in those parts, as well as upon the rest of 

 the world, and drowned them all ; in which perplexity of minde and 

 imminent danger, beholding the waves overwhelming all things 

 before their eyes, Fintan is said to have been transformed into a 

 salmon, and to have swoome all the time of the deluge about Ulster, 

 and after the fall of the water recovering his former shape, to have 

 lived longer than Adam, and to have delivered strange things to 

 posterity ; so that of him the common speech riseth " If I had Fin- 

 tan's yeeres, I could say much." 



Thus far the legend of St. Fintan. The circumstance of his swim- 

 ming over Ulster in the form of a salmon, will probably remind 

 the reader of the late Sir Joseph Yorke's pious wish that all Ireland 



