ous religious foundations, the seats and monuments of the early piety of her sons, that was not frequently during this period made the scene of flagrant and brutal excesses. The repeated destruction by fire of the same monasteries and churches may naturally be accounted for by the material of these structures having been wood. But as few things of any value could have survived such conflagrations, the mere wantonness of barbarity alone could have tempted them so often to repeat the outrage. BRIAN BORU.-Like every other nation that has been thus invaded, the Irish preserve the name and deeds of a great liberator. About the middle of the tenth century, there arose a young hero of princely origin, since renowned as King A.D. Brian Boru, who, while still a youth, encountered the 969. Danes in a battle in which 3000 of them were slaughtered. Another hero, Malachi of the Golden Collar, so named from a celebrated trophy which he won from the Danes, had a long rivalry and many battles with Brian for the sovereignty of Ireland. In this contest Brian was successful, and 1001. he was at last crowned at Tara as king of the whole island. It is thus that, at the close of a thousand years from the Christian era, Ireland saw herself an independent state under one ruler,-a position which the country had never previously enjoyed within the period of authentic records, and which it held for a short period only. While praying in his A.D. tent, Brian was assassinatad by the leader of a defeated 1014. army of Danes. A. D. EXERCISES. 1. Why have people been induced to doubt the early history of Ireland? State the reasons why the inhabitants of that island had a better opportunity of being civilized than those of Britain. What is known about the heroes of Ossian's Poems? 2. Who was the first successful missionary to Ireland? Give some incidents in the life of St Patrick. When did he begin to teach Christianity? Who were incensed at his proceedings? How did he obtain his great influence? 3. Describe some peculiarities about the early Irish Church which distinguished it from that of England. What is remarkable about Catholicism in Ireland? What did St Patrick introduce besides Christianity? What do we know about early Irish literature? Give the name of a celebrated Irishman. 4. What race invaded Ireland? What is said of the ravages of the Danes. What prince reigned as sole king of Ireland? When and how was he slain? CHAPTER VIII. THE DIFFERENT RACES AND THEIR LANGUAGES. Early Inhabitants of the British Isles--Celts and Goths-Antiquity of the English Language-Various Dialects of Great Britain-Norman French -Greek and Latin-Saxon-Saxon Names of Persons and PlacesCeltic Names-Superiority of the Gothic over the Celtic Race. 1. Ir will now be proper to give a general account of the different tribes by which the British islands were peopled. The whole population may be considered as divided into two great races, the one Celtic and the other Gothic (Teutonic) or German. A Celtic race appears at one time to have inhabited every portion of the British isles, for even in districts where there have been no Celts for more than a thousand years, the names of places are still in the Celtic tongue. The two tribes of people, though they have continued so long to reside in the same locality, subject to the same laws, are extremely unlike each other. The Gothic race are generally of large full make and fair complexions, while the Celts are thin, graceful, and swarthy. Thus, notwithstanding the mixture which the races. have undergone by intermarriage, a traveller crossing the Highland line in Scotland may observe that the people become all at once changed in character, and that in the Celtic Highlanders he finds himself among a people as distinct from the Lowlanders in appearance, language, and customs, as if they lived ten thousand miles away from them. We do not know very well what race predominated at the time of the Roman invasion. Tacitus tells us that the Caledonians, meaning in general the inhabitants of the northern part of the island, were men of large limbs, light complexions, and reddish hair, while those nearest to the coast of Gaul were small and swarthy. This description, which he probably derived from his father-in-law Agricola, would lead to the conclusion that nearly all Scotland was at that time inhabited by races of Gothic origin, who had come over from Scandinavia, while, at all events, the southern parts of England were inhabited by Gallic Celts, and the whole of Ireland was peopled by a Celtic race. Subsequently, the Saxons and other Gothic tribes passed into England, and became so far preponderant over the Celts, that their language was superseded by the Anglo-Saxon, except in the principality of Wales and some other parts of the west, where the Celtic continued to preponderate. At the same time an infusion of the Celtic tribes was in progress in another part of the island. There were probably some people of this race in Scotland at the time of the Roman invasions; but afterwards large bodies came over from Ireland, and occupied the western coast. This happened to be the most sterile and mountainous portion of the country. On the plains the people of Gothic race, who were more industrious than their neighbours, naturally pressed them from the more valuable lands towards the mountains, and thus the Celtic people of Scotland, whether original inhabitants of the country, or immigrants from Ireland, became concentrated in what is called "The Highlands" of Scotland. 2. The dispute whether the Picts were of Gothic or Celtic origin has already been referred to. Whatever they were, it is certain that the Lowlanders of Scotland spoke a Gothic dialect from a very early period, and that their language was indeed almost the same as that of the English-at least the distinction was not greater than between York and Somerset, or between Peebles and Forfar. The great difference between the English and the Scottish tongue did not arise until after the nations were set at enmity, as we shall find, by the tyranny of Edward I. Indeed, there was a time when the Scots may be said to have spoken better English than the English themselves. This was after the Norman conquest, when a mixture of French was infused into the conversation and literature of the higher orders of England, while the Scots preserved a purer Gothic speech. A ballad made in Scotland about the year 1290, when the wars with England had begun, is very good English, and is perhaps the oldest specimen of that kind of composition in our language. It represents the misery of the country at the time of the death of Alexander the Third; and if the spelling be slightly altered from what it is in the work of the old annalist Andrew Wyntoun, it will be very easily understood at the present day. When Alexander our king was dead, That Scotland led in love and lee, Away was sons of ale and bread, Of wine and wax, of gaming and glee: Our gold was changed into lead. The various adventurers who came from the north, some of them through the Orkneys and Sutherlandshire, others arriving at various points southward along the east coast, would thus find a people of kindred tongue, with whom they could easily converse and associate. They have left, however, some traces in the dialects of different districts, and there are many words to this day used in parts of Scotland, which are not employed in England, but may be heard in Germany or Denmark. Thus, in the north of Scotland, the plural of eye is eene, and so it is in Denmark. Schwer, which is the German for heavy or ponderous, is pronounced sweer in Scotland, and has a like meaning. Luft is German for the sky, and in Scotland it is called the lift. The Germans use jammern, pronounced yammern, meaning to bewail, and in Scotland they sometimes say when a discontented person frets and grumbles, that he is yammerin'. Thus with some variations the same Gothic tongue was spoken throughout the whole island, except in Cornwall, Wales, part of Cumberland and Northumberland, and a small district in Scotland, where the ancient British continued to be the language, and the Highlands of Scotland, where the Irish Gaelic was spoken. 3. In Ireland there appears to have been a purely Celtic population until the incursions of the Danes, who must have infused a considerable quantity of Gothic blood throughout a portion of Ireland, especially in the neighbourhood of Dublin, which was the Danish capital of the country. With the English conquest a number of Saxons and a few Normans were brought into the island. In the forfeitures in Queen Elizabeth's reign, and at subsequent periods down to the reign of Queen Anne, a large number of English and Scottish settlers were established in Ireland; so that the people of Gothic descent are now dispersed over a considerable part of the country, and the Celtic tongue is now the language of a portion only of the uneducated peasantry. Irish antiquarians, however, study this language, and they have naturally a respect for it, from its great antiquity, and the number of ancient annals which have been written in it. 4. A considerable alteration was made in the language of a portion of the people by the Norman conquest. The Normans were a Gothic race like the Saxons, but having been settled in a part of France for about a century before they came to England, they had learned the French language, and their own had fallen into disuse. When they reached this country, they formed the court and the aristocracy, and thus their method of speaking became the fashionable tongue. It was in Norman French that all the great people spoke, and in this language the laws were written and the pleadings conducted in the courts. The Saxon tongue has gradually overcome it, and now forms the staple of the conversation and literature of the country; but there are still several curious relics of the use of the Norman. Thus, the form in which the royal assent is given to a bill after it has passed through Parliament is in the words, la reine le veut, "the queen wills it so." To descend to smaller formalities, some public officers, when making proclamations, begin by saying "Oh yes," three times. This is a corruption of the French, ouiez, "listen." Our terms of cookery are a relic of the Norman language, showing how it was used by the great at their entertainments, while the common people spoke in Saxon. Thus, when the flesh of the ox is produced at table, it is called beef, from the French bœuf, an ox. The pig, hog, or sow, while it is in the sty, and in charge of the swine-herd, bears a pure Saxon name, but when cooked it is Frenchified into pork. The sheep becomes mutton (mouton), and the calf veal (veau); while in Scotland, among the household words not employed in England, is the gigot (Fr. gigot). In other countries, where the upper and the lower classes have always spoken the same language, there is no such difference. The French call the animals by the same name whether they are alive or cooked, and the Germans speak of calves' flesh and swine's flesh. While Norman French was employed by the aristocracy and the lawyers, Latin was the language chiefly used by the clergy and men of science and literature. Both in England and Scotland, the few who wrote in the vernacular tongue before the time of Henry VIII. found it necessary to apologize for so doing. The English language derived some of its peculiarities from the Norman spoken by the aristocracy, and others from the Latin used by the learned. The nature of the Greek language renders it peculiarly useful for scientific purposes, and in a few instances, from having been so used, it has crept into ordinary discourse-thus, for example, the word surgeon, of old spelt chirurgeon, is derived from the Greek, cheir, meaning hand, and ergon, work. Such terms as. orthography, syntax, lithography, &c., are also derived from the Greek; and it is worthy of notice that one of the most important English words, church, is formed from two Greek |