OBSERVATIONS OF CLASSICAL WRITERS ON THE HABITS OF THE CELTIC NATIONS, AS ILLUSTRATED FROM IRISH RECORDS
Eleanor Hull
When Agricola, standing on that portion of the British coast which was opposite Ireland, contemplated ‘the beneficial connection that the conquest of that Island would have formed between the most powerful parts of the Roman Empire,’ the fate of Irish literature hung for a moment in the balance. Elsewhere, wherever the Roman arms made themselves felt, wherever by colonisation or conquest Roman law, religion, and ideas extended themselves, there followed as an inevitable result the gradual extinction of the native habits, mythology, and records. In Gaul, in Britain, such native records as existed, and we cannot doubt, from a comparison of the state of things at a parallel epoch in Ireland, that they did, in some form or other, exist, were swept away; we retain at this day only the most fragmentary knowledge, and that generally derived from outside from the pages of the Roman historians, of their laws, their customs, their romance, their beliefs and ideas. Their dialects were gradually submerged beneath the onrush of new tongues, which became the means of mental exchange between the educated classes; and with the dying out of the language was involved the slow but sure destruction of the native thought and imaginative or historical records which were clothed in the national or tribal tongue. It is only to-day, when the study of ethnology, folklore, and mythology have taken their place among the scientific studies of mankind, and when their results are found to profoundly modify our conceptions in the realms of history, of anthropology and religion, that we can justly estimate the immensity of the loss we have sustained by the destruction of the records of nations so closely mixed up with, indeed a very part of, our own. The link that binds us to our own past has been irreparably broken.
