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to have been adopted by any European nation except the Irish. Again 

 is probabiUty strengthened by the orientaUsm of the ancient rehgious 

 observances of the latter people, and the fact of their retaining, in 

 many instances, to the present day, "rites and customs in their oaths, 

 marriages, feastings, dancing, and funeral solemnities, which bear upon 

 them (as will be shewn hereafter) the stamp of Eastern importa- 

 tion ; "* while a crowning evidence of this class arises from atten- 

 tively considering the Irish language, and comparing it with another, 

 unquestionably deduced from the Phoenician. " For, I think," says 

 Camden, " no man will deny, that those who are linked by affinity 

 of language, are also connected by a community of origin. "-j- " Now 

 it is universally admitted, that the Carthaginians originally came from 

 Phoenicia, and spoke the Phoenician language, and a specimen of that 

 language has been preserved by Plautus in one of his plays, which 

 contains some speeches of Hanno, the Carthaginian, as in the lan- 

 guage of his country, and these speeches appear upon examination to 

 be evidently and undeniably the same language with the Irish,"|. only 

 making just allowance for the change, that each must have undergone 

 in the distance to which they diverged, the new words that must have 

 been introduced in both, and yet more, the natural errors and corrup- 

 tions, the too frequent running of one word into another, or disjoining 

 the parts of the same word, which must have attended transcription 

 from a language wholly without punctuation, and possibly it were fair 

 to add Plautus's own ignorance of the grammar of the words which he 

 even seems sometimes to have taken down, with an effort to accommo- 

 date them to the Latin terminations. Indeed, when it is considered how 

 almost unintelligible the writings of Chaucer or Robert of Gloucester 



• Ware's Ant. fo. 17. 



t Qui enim linguaj societate conjuncti sunt originis etiam communione fuisse conjunctos 

 homo opinor nemo inficiabitur. Camden. Britan. 

 t Parsons's Defence, p. 139. 



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