cording to Prideaux, was once '"'' the prime seat of learning in all Chris- 

 tendom."* But Irishmen in the midst of such memories are "proudly 

 shallow" in every thing that should consecrate their home, they are 

 blind to the footsteps of history ; like Helots they creep through the 

 land that has been the theatre of their ancestors' power and piety ; like 

 the labourers that for centuries worked over Herculaneum, they too 

 continue insensible to the magnificence that unexampled visitations 

 have buried beneath their feet. 



It is not to be wondered at that a history so slighted at home 

 should be deemed by others, as by Gibbon, " the affairs of a remote 

 and petty province :"-f* yet, although thus long obsolete, the evidences 

 of Ireland's national honour are not wholly extinct ; they claim but 

 the labour of the explorer, and as it were "out of the depth and dark- 

 ness of the earth" they will record the fame and antiquity of the Irish 

 nation. The Author of this Essay sincerely feels their importance, not 

 only as memorials of a lettered and thinking people, secluded from the 

 habits of the rest of Europe and Avintered beyond the tropics of Roman 

 power, but also as a treasury of language, customs, manners, and reli- 

 gious rites, well calculated to illustrate many points of ancient history 

 now enveloped in obscurity; fondly could he wish he were as qualified 

 for their illustration, and that, in the words of Pliny, he were compe- 

 tent " vetustis novitatem dare, obsoletis nitorem, obscuris lucem, fas- 

 tiditis gratiam, dubiis fidem \"X 



The most obvious and perhaps the most satisfactory sources for 

 inquiry would be the annals, poems, and legends of the country itself; 

 but to explore these is for the present, by the terms of the question, 

 prohibited, and all information must be drawn from the scanty sup- 

 plies of foreign testimonies prior to the sixteenth century. The limi- 



* Connect, of Old and New Test., vol. 2. p. 241. 

 ■t 2 Gibb. Misc. Works, p. 336. 1 Pliny Praef. Ad Hist. Nat. 



