The language of Cromwell’s officers and men, from whom the Celt had such abundant opportunities of learning English, was (less the cant of Puritanism) the language of Shakspeare, of Raleigh, and of Spenser.  The conservative tendencies of the Hibernian preserved the dialect intact, while causes, too numerous for present detail, so modified it across the Channel, that each succeeding century condemned as vulgarism what had been the highest fashion with their predecessors.  Even as Homeric expressions lingered for centuries after the blind bard’s obit had been on record, so the expressions of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakspeare, may still be discovered in provincial dialects in many parts of the British Isles.  I do not intend to quote Tate and Brady as models of versification and of syntax; but if the best poets of the age did not receive the commission to translate the Psalms into verse, it was a poor compliment to religion.  We find the pronunciation of their rhymes corresponding with the very pronunciation which is now condemned as peculiarly Irish.  Newton also rhymes way and sea, while one can scarcely read a page of Pope[513] without finding examples of pronunciation now supposed to be pure Hibernicism.  In the Authorized Protestant version of the Bible, learn is used in the sense of to teach, precisely as it is used in Ireland at the present day:  “If thy children shall keep my covenant and my testimonies that I shall learn them” and their use of the term forninst is undoubtedly derived from an English source, for we find it in Fairfax’s Tasso.[514]

History and theology were the two great studies of the middle ages, and to these subjects we find the literati of Ireland directing special attention.  The importance and value of Latin as a medium of literary intercommunication, had been perceived from an early period:  hence that language was most frequently employed by Irish writers after it had become known in the country.  It is unquestionably a national credit, that no amount of suffering, whether inflicted for religious or political opinions, deprived the Irish of historians.[515] Some of their works were certainly compiled under the most disadvantageous circumstances.

None of the writers whom we shall presently enumerate, worked for hope of gain, or from any other motive save that of the purest patriotism.  Keating, whose merits are becoming more and more recognized since modern research has removed Celtic traditions from the region of fable to the tableland of possibility, wrote his History principally in the Galtee Mountains, where he had taken refuge from the vengeance of Carew,[516] Lord President of Munster.  Although he had received a high education in the famous College of Salamanca, for the sake of his people he preferred suffering persecution, and, if God willed it, death, to the peaceful life of literary quiet which he might have enjoyed there.  He wrote in his mother-tongue,