166 



Solinus, the inhabitants of Ireland are barbarous and uncouth; "a 

 nation inhospitable and fond of war; those of them who conquer in 

 battle, drink the blood of the slain, and besmear their faces with it. 

 They make no distinction between justice and injustice. The mother, 

 to whom a son is born there, gives it its first food on the sword of her 

 husband, and this she gently puts into the mouth of the babe, as an 

 auspice of its future nourishment, and prays with a species of national 

 voAv, that it may never die but in war and in the heat of battle."* 



Here is the mass of vague invective thrown out against the 

 island by four historians who never visited it, who are unsupport- 

 ed by any contemporary author, and contradicted by Tacitus; who 

 do not set up that they received their information from any per- 

 sons of credit, but the contrary in the case of Strabo ; yet these are 

 the premises from which later, but not less prejudiced libellers deduce 

 their illogical conclusions. The fallacy of the authorities will better 

 appear by analysis. It is not quite certain what place Diodorus means 

 by Iris; from the turn of the expression, it would rather appear to be a 

 part of Britain, (perhaps that Erne for which Mr. James Mac-Pherson 

 contends in another place,) while the island which Diodorus does 

 mention in the remarkable passage cited, (ante p. 80,) and which so 

 completely agrees with Ireland, is never called Iris by him, nor does 

 the name occur again in all his work ; nor is it by any other author 

 applied to Ireland. Strabo acknowledges that, in the account he 

 gives of the Irish being cannibals, he had no evidence, no witness 

 worthy of credit, no (" alioTriorovg fiaprvpag ; ") he mentions it as a 



• " Hibemia inhumana est, incolaram ritu aspeia j ***** * gens inhospita 

 et bellicosa, sanguine interemptorum hausto prius, victores vultus suos oblinunt : fas ac nefas 

 eodem animo ducunt. Puerpera, si quando marem edidit, primes cibos gladio imponit mariti, 

 inque os parvuli summo mucrone auspicium alimentorum leviter infert, et gentilibus votis 

 optat, nee aliter quam in bello et inter arma mortem appetat." — Solinus xxxvi. 



