can moor alongside at spring tides. The principal imports are grain, sugar, timber and coal. The exports consist mainly of agricultural produce. The principal industrial establishments include flour-mills (Limerick supplying most of the west of Ireland with flour), factories for bacon-curing and for condensed milk and creameries. Some brewing, distilling and tanning are carried on, and the manufacture of very beautiful lace is maintained at the Convent of the Good Shepherd; but a formerly important textile industry has lapsed. The salmon fisheries of the Shannon, for which Limerick is the headquarters of a district, are the most valuable in Ireland. The city is governed by a corporation, and the parliamentary borough returns one member.
Limerick is said to have been the Regia of Ptolemy and the Rosse-de-Nailleagh of the Annals of Multifernan. There is a tradition that it was visited by St Patrick in the 5th century, but it is first authentically known as a settlement of the Danes, who sacked it in 812 and afterwards made it the principal town of their kingdom of Limerick, but were expelled from it towards the close of the 10th century by Brian Boroimhe. From 1106 till its conquest by the English in 1174 it was the seat of the kings of Thomond or North Munster, and, although in 1179 the kingdom of Limerick was given by Henry II. to Herbert Fitzherbert, the city was frequently in the possession of the Irish chieftains till 1195. Richard I. granted it a charter in 1197. By King John it was committed to the care of William de Burgo, who founded English Town, and for its defence erected a strong castle. The city was frequently besieged in the 13th and 14th centuries. In the 15th century its fortifications were extended to include Irish Town, and until their demolition in 1760 it was one of the strongest fortresses of the kingdom. In 1651 it was taken by General Ireton, and after an unsuccessful siege by William III. in 1690 its resistance was terminated on the 3rd of October of the following year by the treaty of Limerick. The dismantling of its fortifications began in 1760, but fragments of the old walls remain. The original municipal rights of the city had been confirmed and extended by a succession of sovereigns, and in 1609 it received a charter constituting it a county of a city, and also incorporating a society of merchants of the staple, with the same privileges as the merchants of the staple of Dublin and Waterford. The powers of the corporation were remodelled by the Limerick Regulation Act of 1823. The prosperity of the city dates chiefly from the foundation of Newtown Pery in 1769 by Edmund Sexton Pery (d. 1806), speaker of the Irish House of Commons, whose family subsequently received the title of the earldom of Limerick. Under the Local Government Act of 1898 Limerick became one of the six county boroughs having a separate county council.
LIMERICK, a name which has been adopted to distinguish a certain form of verse which began to be cultivated in the middle of the 19th century. A limerick is a kind of burlesque epigram, written in five lines. In its earlier form it had two rhymes, the word which closed the first or second line being usually employed at the end of the fifth, but in later varieties different
rhyming words are employed. There is much uncertainty as
to the meaning of the name, and as to the time when it became
attached to a particular species of nonsense verses. According
to the New Eng. Dict. “a song has existed in Ireland for a very
considerable time, the construction of the verse of which is
identical with that of Lear’s” (see below), and in which the
invitation is repeated, “Will you come up to Limerick?”
Unfortunately, the specimen quoted in the New Eng. Dict. is not
only not identical with, but does not resemble Lear’s. Whatever
be the derivation of the name, however, it is now universally
used to describe a set of verses formed on this model, with the
variations in rhyme noted above:—
“There was an old man who said ‘Hush! |
The invention, or at least the earliest general use of this form, is attributed to Edward Lear, who, when a tutor in the family of the earl of Derby at Knowsley, composed, about 1834, a large number of nonsense-limericks to amuse the little grandchildren of the house. Many of these he published, with illustrations, in 1846, and they enjoyed and still enjoy an extreme popularity. Lear preferred to give a geographical colour to his absurdities, as in:—
| “There was an old person of Tartary |
but this is by no means essential. The neatness of the form has led to a very extensive use of the limerick for all sorts of mock-serious purposes, political, social and sarcastic, and a good many specimens have achieved a popularity which has been all the wider because they have, perforce, been confined to verbal transmission. In recent years competitions of the “missing word” type have had considerable vogue, the competitor, for instance, having to supply the last line of the limerick.
LIMES GERMANICUS. The Latin noun limes denoted generally
a path, sometimes a boundary path (possibly its original
sense) or boundary, and hence it was utilized by Latin writers
occasionally to denote frontiers definitely delimited and marked
in some distinct fashion. This latter sense has been adapted
and extended by modern historians concerned with the frontiers
of the Roman Empire. Thus the Wall of Hadrian in north
England (see Britain: Roman) is now sometimes styled the
Limes Britannicus, the frontier of the Roman province of
Arabia facing the desert the Limes Arabicus and so forth. In
particular the remarkable frontier lines which bounded the
Roman provinces of Upper (southern) Germany and Raetia,
and which at their greatest development stretched from near
Bonn on the Rhine to near Regensburg on the Danube, are often
called the Limes Germanicus. The history of these lines is the
subject of the following paragraphs. They have in the last
fifteen years become much better known through systematic
excavations financed by the German empire and through other
researches connected therewith, and though many important
details are still doubtful, their general development can be
traced.
From the death of Augustus (A.D. 14) till after A.D. 70 Rome accepted as her German frontier the water-boundary of the Rhine and upper Danube. Beyond these rivers she held only the fertile plain of Frankfort, opposite the Roman border fortress of Moguntiacum (Mainz), the southernmost slopes of the Black Forest and a few scattered têtes-du-pont. The northern section of this frontier, where the Rhine is deep and broad, remained the Roman boundary till the empire fell. The southern part was different. The upper Rhine and upper Danube are easily crossed. The frontier which they form is inconveniently long, enclosing an acute-angled wedge of foreign territory—the modern Baden and Württemberg. The German populations of these lands seem in Roman times to have been scanty, and Roman subjects from the modern Alsace and Lorraine had drifted across the river eastwards. The motives alike of geographical convenience and of the advantages to be gained by recognizing these movements of Roman subjects combined to urge a forward policy at Rome, and when the vigorous Vespasian had succeeded the fool-criminal Nero, a series of advances began which gradually closed up the acute angle, or at least rendered it obtuse.
The first advance came about 74, when what is now Baden was invaded and in part annexed and a road carried from the Roman base on the upper Rhine, Strassburg, to the Danube just above Ulm. The point of the angle was broken off. The second advance was made by Domitian about A.D. 83. He pushed out from Moguntiacum, extended the Roman territory east of it and enclosed the whole within a systematically delimited and defended frontier with numerous blockhouses along it and larger forts in the rear. Among the blockhouses was one which by various enlargements and refoundations grew into the well-known Saalburg fort on the Taunus near Homburg. This
