167 



report, but he was too diligent an inquirer to give his own faith to the 

 assertion; and as to the custom alluded to of their sleeping all in com- 

 mon, fathers and their daughters, brothers and their sisters, it might 

 be very innocently witnessed at this day through the country in 

 huts where poverty may be, but incest is never known. Indeed 

 Strabo neutralizes himself as to any testimony he attempts to furnish 

 of the manners and habits of the Irish, not only by pleading ignorance 

 of the subject as above, but by clearly proving it, where he places 

 Ireland north of Britain, and at such a distance as to occupy the situ- 

 ation of the Isles of Faroe. Of these Greek authors, as well as of the 

 Romans Mela and Solinus, although triumphantly cited by Mr. 

 James Mac-Pherson, he himself, in a previous part of his work, fur- 

 nishes his own and their refutation, (sicut ejus est mos!) "The 

 Greeks and Romans affected to degrade with the name of barbarous, 

 all the nations beyond the pale of their own respective dominions. 

 The luxurious Persian, in the midst of the pomp and grandeur of the 

 east, was not free from the ignominy of this injurious appellative."* 



Mela's ignorance of the country he thus reviles, is shewn by his 

 defining Ireland as lying above Britain, being as broad as it is long, 

 and of almost equal size with Britain, ("supra Britanniam Juverna est, 

 pene par spatio sed utrinque 3equalis."-|') Solinus, with equal mis- 

 conception, states the impossibility of navigating the sea between 

 Britain and Ireland, unless in a few summer days ; and unless his 

 account be referrible to the recorded.^ period of the famine in Ireland, 

 he is equally erroneous as to the " rara avis, nusquam apis." His 

 allusion to blood-drinking might be innocently explained by the 

 practice almost peculiar to Ireland, (mentioned by Campion and 

 Spencer, and still frequent,) of making puddings of the blood of ani- 



* Introduction, p. 183. f Lib. 3. p. 192. ♦ Ante, p. 53. 



