IRISH IN THE SCHOOLS 17 



modelled on the large book-hand of the medieval scribe, 

 a hand well adapted for writing with a quill pen on a 

 sloping sheet of parchment, but almost impossible to re- 

 produce with a steel pen on a flat sheet of paper. Few 

 teachers and fewer pupils ever see a good specimen of the 

 modern Irish hand, say, of the seventeenth century. They 

 cannot expect to invent it, but they do their best. I have 

 heard, indeed, of a school in which writing in Irish was 

 considered as a useful exercise in drawing. 



But, after all, most of us, fortunately for the country 

 in general, have to read considerably more Irish than we 

 write, and it is in reading that young and old find the 

 charms or the fatigues that printers and publishers have 

 in store. Now the best Irish or Gaelic type is beautiful 

 to look upon, more beautiful than the ordinary modern 

 Roman, just as a good manuscript ranks higher artistically 

 than the printed transcript. But those who ought to 

 know best will confess that the older form of the alphabet 

 is more trying to the eyes. You may not notice this in 

 skimming a page or two, but in hard reading, where close 

 attention is needed, where the meaning of the sentence 

 may depend on the presence or absence of an aspiration 

 mark too weighty a burden, surely, for a sign so easily 

 omitted or overlooked then the inconvenience of the 

 Gaelic lettering is only too evident. Any of you who 

 have had much to do with proof-reading know well the 

 constant worry caused by the confusion between f and t\, 

 c and c, 1 and t, above all by those terrible dots breaking 

 off or going astray. After reading carefully one's proofs 

 and revises and re-revises one can only hope that " not mqre 

 misprints have slipped through than are to be expected in 

 an Irish book/' 



Of course, there are people who cannot believe that " Irish " 

 letters are less legible than "English." Well, I invite such 

 good patriots to make two easy experiments in legibility. 

 First, let them go to one of the streets in Dublin in which 

 the name has been put up in Irish and English if possible, 

 a strange street and standing opposite the name-plate, 

 let them honestly test the respective distances at which 

 3 



