M5 



from the light that was shining round them, Camden and Spencer, 

 even Camden and Spencer, insist that Ireland must have had letters 

 before England, and that thence the Saxons received an alphabet. 



The reader is not called upon to decide, that this source alone 

 sufficed to remove the possibility of the Irish being without letters, 

 though it satisfied Leibnitz, Camden, and Spencer ; another channel 

 presents itself, which, in the very ancient times, peculiarly supplied 

 Ireland. It has been stated, and Mr. Mac-Pherson admits it,* that 

 the Phoenicians taught learning and the arts where they colonized, 

 that they did colonize Spain, and that, as Strabo tells us, Spain was 

 instructed, that they did colonize Ireland, and is the conclusion 

 obvious ? Tacitus says, that the ports of the latter country were in the 

 first century well known to commerce and merchants, (" melius per 

 commercia et negociatores cogniti,''-f") and these merchants, from the 

 context of the passage in Tacitus, evidently not Roman, and was a par- 

 ticipation of their knowledge so contraband, that Ireland should not 

 receive it? Superadded to all this, we have the evidence of the Irish 

 annals to the early revelation of letters, and the traces of these letters, 

 though now untranslatable, stamped upon the rocks and altars of their 

 Pagan worship ; and last, but not least, the internal evidence arising 

 from the name, order, number, power, and formation of those letters, 

 and the character of the language that results from their combination. 

 And yet, after all this chain of proof, may we further adopt the cele- 

 brated defence of the Roman, "en adversarius," and confront the cause 

 here espoused, with not to say the motives or prejudices of the opposite 

 party, but with the weakness of their arguments. It shall be done brief- 

 ly, and the curious reader referred for the fairness of the abridgment, 

 (paradoxical as it may appear,) to the article in Rees on " Ogham," 

 where the whole objections are collected, "to lower (as is there said) the 

 claims of the Irish to the level of truth, justice, and common sense! " 



* Introd. p. 265. + See Tacitus, ante, p. 51. 



VOL. XVI. P 



