310 WILD FLOWERS. 



moment after the hour of twelve on Saturday night, 

 the mann would assuredly break the spinning- 

 wheels, or spoil the corn.* 



I think, as I write, that I can see the gravely 

 criticising looks of some venerable and venerating 

 lover of antiquity ; I think I hear scarce suppressed 

 murmurings respecting the folly of permitting a 

 popular and worthless even if a pleasant legend 

 to obscure the presumed historical fact of the intro- 

 duction of the flax plant, and its manufacture, into 

 Ireland by the Phoenicians. For it may be asked 

 why the mann should not be the spiritual remains 

 of those commercial men of old ? Why the " five- 

 horned*)* chief " of the Shahbna mountain should not 

 have been one of the " princes of Tyre/' or colonists 

 from some other land ? men having been deified e'er 

 now for less benefits conferred on their fellows ! 

 However, I agree with the learned Professor Hodges, 

 and Dr. O'Donovan, of Queen's College, as to the 

 improbability of their having been from Tyre ;J and 

 the former asserts that the Phoenician theory is an 

 unsupported assumption, while the antiquarian and 

 philological researches of the latter shew that the 

 term anart, which is applied to the kind of coarse 



* " Anglo-Irish History." 



f The ouris, say the old chroniclers, wore a stated -number 

 of horns on their head-dresses, in accordance with their rank, 

 those of a chieftain amounting to five. In connexion with 

 the Phoenician theory, it will be remembered that the horn is 

 the oriental symbol of power. 



The occupation of Ireland by the Phoenicians, and their 

 relationship to the Irish, are now reckoned among fables. 



From Anairty Irish, soft. (?) 



