456 Mr. Bicheno on the 



.. Air an t seamrag's agus an ne6inean 



Santig aisling na h-oige a' m' choir. 



The translation of which I find to be, On the shamrock, and 

 amidst the daisies, when the dream of youth shall come unto 

 me.' Now I would suggest, that either the word shamrock 

 here employed is not the Trifolium repens, as is thought, and 

 which its connexion with the daisy would lead me to infer ; or, 

 the poem is not so ancient as has been supposed ; for the 

 Trifolium repens, probably, nay almost certainly, was not 

 common in Scotland before the middle of the seventeenth 

 century. 



In the early Irish authors we find the shamrock mentioned 

 incidentally. I will take the liberty to quote a passage from 

 Spenser's View of the State of Ireland, to prove that it was a 

 plant eaten by the Irish, which is very unlikely to have been 

 the case with any of the clovers. It is a description of the 

 state of the poor Irish during the great Desmond war in 

 Elizabeth's reign : ' Out of every corner of the woods and 

 glynnes,' says he, ' they come creeping forth upon their 

 hands, for their legs could not bear them, they looked like 

 anatomies of death, they spoke like ghosts crying out of their 

 graves, they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could 

 find them, yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the 

 very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves ; 

 and if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there 

 they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to 

 continue there withal, that in short space there were none left, 

 and a most populous plentiful country suddenly left void of 

 man and beast ; yet sure in all that war there perished not 

 many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine, which 

 they themselves had wrought.' That shamrocks were eaten, 

 appears from various other authors, as in the following couplet 

 from Wythe's Abuses Stript and PThipt, 8vo. Lond. 1613, 

 p. 72, quoted in Brand's Popular Antiquities, by Ellis, p. 90 : 



And, for my clothing, in a mantle goe, 

 And feed on sham-roots, as the Irish doe. 



So the author of the Irish Hudibras, printed 1689, says 

 Shamrogs and watergrass he shows, 

 Which was both meat, and drink, and close. 



