Such a harangue was a manifesto. He did not abolish every temple, nor every worship, as some people are pleased to insinuate; but he erased at a single stroke the exclusive privilege of the temple of Jerusalem, he extended it's boundaries, and for the old Jewish monopoly substituted the catholicity of a new church, as large as the world.
The Jews understood him too well. They were already trembling with rage against him, when, from the accused becoming the accuser, Stephen charged them with the murder of the prophets, and principally with that of the God, our Saviour, whom they had crucified. "You have received the law by the disposition of angels," he said to them, "and have not kept it." On hearing these words, their rage, incapable of longer restraint, burst out; "they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed with their teeth at him," as the Acts relate. Stephen felt that his last hour was at hand.
The Holy Ghost filled him as it were with a holy rapture. He looked steadfastly to heaven, where the glory of God began to shine on him, and there, in the midst of that glory, recognizing and saluting Jesus Christ, who extended his hand to him, "Behold," he exclaimed, "I see the heavens opened, the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God." These words sealed his doom. On hearing him, the Jews, shaking with horror, "cried out with a loud voice, stopped their ears, and with one accord ran violently upon him," as wild beasts do on their prey.
No judgment was passed on him. A text in the book of Deuteronomy allowed any one to be put to death, who enticed the people into idolatry. This summary justice sometimes tolerated by the Roman pro-consul, was termed the judgment of zeal. To apply this judgment to the young deacon, was found more convenient than to go through the formalities of a regular sentence; and they seized him to put him to death. By a last relic of Pharisaism, however, they took care to observe the practices of the law, even in such an arbitrary and cruel deed. To the end, therefore, that the holy city should not be stained with blood, the innocent victim was "cast forth without" the walls of Jerusalem.
They went out by the northern gate along that side which leads to country of Kedar. At the west of the valley crossed by the Kedron, on a desolate places and at the right of the distant mountains of Galaad, the crowd stopped. The witnesses began by raising their hands over the head of Stephen, which was the rite of devoting a victim to death; then stones innumerable, as thick as hail, fell upon him. The atrocious deed went on with unrelenting fury, and the body of the heroic martyr was now noting but a wound; but he held his eyes immovably fixed on that celestial vision, and as life was gradually receding from his breast, he was ever "invoking and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!"
The Acts of the Apostles conclude this narrative, with giving us the name of the person who was the most noted accomplice in this murder: "Saulus autem erat consentiens neci ejus. "
St. Luke, the disciple of St. Paul, says nothing further concerning his master in this business. But St. Paul came afterward, who, humbly giving a public testimony of his cruel error, denounced himself as the instigator of that iniquity. "When the blood of Stephen was shed," he said one day to the Jews, "I was the first, and over the others," Super ad stabam. [Footnote 121] It is the sense of the Greek text. Had {542} he for such a thing a mandate of the Sanhedrim, as we shall soon see him vested with full powers against the brethren of Damascus? Everything would make one believe so. The fathers and commentators say, it was for this reason that he kept the garments of those men of blood: and they, in fact, show us those murderers as going the one after the other, deferentially to lay their garments at the feet of Saul, as an homage, so to speak, paid to him, from whom they had the power and the command to strike.
[Footnote 121: Act. xxii. 20.]
Stephen saw him, and revenged himself in his way--the divine way. At the point of death, covered with blood, he lowered his eyes to the earth for the last time, and sadly resting them on his persecutors, perhaps he saw through their impious crowd one of them apart, more furious than the rest. He was moved to compassion for his soul; and then it was that "falling on his knees, he cried with a loud voice," not of anger, but of grace, and said: "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." He rose no more, and so saying, Stephen "fell asleep in the Lord."
He could sleep in peace, indeed, for he had just made a magnificent conquest. "If Stephen had not prayed," St. Augustine says, "the church had not won St Paul; the martyr fell, the Apostle rose." [Footnote 122] These substitutions are the most mysterious secrets of Providence. By an admirable law of a bond in solido, of fraternity and of love, God has willed that we, like himself, can, at the price of a little blood, or even of some tears, pay the ransom of souls, and secure to them a future for which they are indebted to us. He has permitted that the life and the death of Christians, like those of their Master, should be a redemption, completing the great redemption of Calvary, according to the saying of St. Paul himself. Coloss. i. 24
[Footnote 122: St. Aug. Sermo 1. "De Sanctis."]
It was meant that this should be the first apostleship of all, and the most fruitful. In the midst of scaffolds, ever full of victims, and the catacombs which incessantly recruited new children of God, Tertullian proclaimed that "the blood of the martyrs was a seed of Christians." He gave thus form to a beautiful law, which the blood of Stephen, after the blood of God himself, had before inaugurated. The soul of Saul, therefore, was that day a conquered soul. It is in vain that on the road to Damascus he struggles and "kicks against the goad:" he is under the yoke of God; he carries a mark of blood on him which points him out, and which saves him; and Jesus, whenever he will, has only to show himself to throw him down and make him obey. This is admirable. Moses had written in the book of Leviticus, "The priest shall command him that is to be purified to offer for himself two living sparrows which it is lawful to eat, . . . . and he shall command one of the sparrows to be immolated, . . . . but the other that is alive he shall dip . . . . in the blood of the sparrow that is immolated; . . . . and he shall let go the living sparrow, that it may fly into the field." (Levit xiv. 4-7.) It was according to this rite that the transaction was accomplished. Stephen had been the chosen victim; and when Saul had covered himself with his redeeming blood, that blood set him free: he had no more to do but to spread his wings, and to start on his flight.
Our oldest poet, and almost our best, unites in one sweet song the cuckoo and the nightingale--the former to be chidden, and spoken of despitefully; the latter to be made the theme of fervent praise, as the singer and harbinger of love. Taken altogether, the cuckoo, in fact, is far from being an attractive bird. Somehow, it has in all countries been regarded as a symbol of matrimonial infidelity, probably because it introduces itself into and defiles the nests of other, birds. Shakespeare, who loved to make eternal the fancies and prejudices of mankind, exclaims:
Loved or hated, however, it is a creature about which we know less than any other winged animal. It comes and goes in mystery, no one being able to decide what is its original country, how far it extends its travels, to what peculiarity in its structure or constitution it owes its restless propensity, or why, almost as soon as born, it becomes a sort of feathered Cain, murdering its foster-brethren, and, according to some, devouring the very dam that fed it. Wide, indeed, are its wanderings. It is heard on the banks of the Niger and the Senegal in the heart of Africa; it is familiar to the dwellers on the Obi and the Irtish; it flies screaming forth its harsh dissyllables over the Baltic surge; it repeats them untiringly in the perfumed air of Andalusia and Granada, among the ruins of the Alhambra and the Generaliffe; it startles the woodman in the forests of France; it amuses the school-boy in the green vales of Kent, of Gloucestershire, and of Devonshire.
Our associations with the cuckoo are, in some cases, pleasant; it comes to us with the first of those peregrinating birds that usher in the summer; its cry is redolent of sunshine, of the scent of primroses, of lindens, of oaks, and elms, of solitary pathways, of the lilied banks of streams. Occasionally, we know not why, it flies early in the morning over the skirts of great cities, as if to invite their inmates to shake off drowsiness, and look forth upon the loveliness of the young day. Not many weeks ago, we heard it in London, just as the clouds were parting in the east to make way for the first beams of dawn. Many summers back, we heard the self-same notes echoing among the pinnacles of the Alps, before the morning-star had faded from behind the Jungfrau. The cuckoo is a sort of familiar chronicler, that gathers up the events of our lives, and brings them to our memory by his well-known voice. As he shouts over our heads, we call to mind the many summers the sweet scents of which we have inhaled, the rambles we have taken in the woods, our idolatry of nature, our innocent pleasures.
The cuckoo and the nightingale constitute the opposite poles of the ornithological world; one the representative of eternal monotony, the other of infinite variety. Among men, there are cuckoos and nightingales--individuals whose ideas are few, who think invariably after the same pattern, who repeat day after day the formulas of the nursery and the school-room, who, from their swaddling-bands to their shrouds, never break away from the social catechism dinned into them at the outset; while there are others who seem, at least in their range of thought, to know no limit but that of creation, to generate fresh swarms of ideas every moment, now to hover among the nebulas on the extreme verge of the {544} universe, and now to nestle in the chalice of the violet, where even Ariel could scarcely find room for the tip of his pinion. Naturalists may be fanciful, like poets; and if this liberty be ever allowable, it is surely so when they speak of the nightingale. The organization of this winged miracle, whose whole weight does not exceed an ounce, may in truth be looked upon as one of the most remarkable in the whole scale of animal life. The roar of the gorilla can, it is said, be heard a full mile. But the gorilla is a colossus, equalling in stature one of the sons of Anak; while Philomela, not exceeding in bulk the forejoint of the monster's thumb, is able at night, when all the woods are still, to cause the liquid melody of her notes to be heard at an equal distance. Consider the organ, measure the length of country, and the ecstacy of the listening ear, and you will perhaps acknowledge that there are few phenomena familiar to our experience more astonishing than this. We have stood at midnight on a mountain in the south of France, and at a distance quite as great, we think, as that mentioned above, have heard the notes of the songstress of darkness borne up to us, on the breeze from the depths of an unwooded valley. Faintly and gently they came through the hushed air, but there could be no mistake about their identity; no other mortal mixture of earth's mould than her throat could have given forth such sounds, crisp, clear, long-drawn, melancholy, as if she were still lamenting the sad hap that overtook her amid die solitudes of Hellas. The French, down even to the peasants, love the nightingale; and wild country girls, who in their whole lives never read a page of poetry, will sit out half the night on a hillside to listen to their favorite bird. A priest once invited us to pass a week with him in his village presbytère, and in enumerating the inducements, mentioned first that there were nightingales in the neighborhood. His home was in the valley of Mortagne, in the Bocages of Normandy, where these birds are in fact as plentiful as sparrows.
In Italy, especially in Tuscany and the Venetian states, the nightingale trills her notes with more than ordinary beauty. The great Roman naturalist who perished amid the lava-floods of Vesuvius, often, we may be sure, enjoyed her song from his nephew's garden in this part of the peninsula. No description of the wonders she achieves can approach the one he has left us for truth or eloquence, and it was written in all likelihood by the light of some antique lamp between the prolonged gushes of her music. Unhappily, it is true, as he says, that the nightingale's song can only be heard in perfection during fifteen out of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. The female bird is then sitting in her nest, imparting vital heat to the musicians of future years; and her lover, fully impressed with the importance of her duty, intoxicates her with his voice, to dispel the tedium of confinement. In spite of natural history, however, poetry transfers to the mute female the singing powers of her lord:
Pliny, too, after stating the fact, that it is the male that sings, immediately avails himself of the aid supplied by metonymy, and changes the sex of the musician. Let us take his description, as honest Philemon Holland supplies it in the language of Elizabeth's time: "Is it not a wonder," he says, "that so loud and clear a voice should come from so little a body? Is it not as strange that she should hold her breath so long, and continue with it as she doth? Moreover, she alone in her song keepeth time and measure truly; she riseth and falleth in her note just with the rules of music and perfect harmonic: for one while in one entire breath she draweth out her tune at length treatable; another while she quavereth, and goeth away as fast in her running points; sometimes she maketh stops and short cuts in her notes, another time she gathereth in {545} her breath and singeth descant between the plain song; she fetcheth her breath again, and then you shall have her in her catches and divisions; anon, all on a sudden, before a man would think it, she drowneth her voice, that one can scarce hear her; now and then she seemeth to record to herself; and then she breaketh out to sing voluntarie. In some she varieth and altereth her voice to all keys; one while full of her larges, longs, briefs, semibriefs, and minims; another while in her crotchets, quavers, semiquavers, and double semiquavers, for at one time you shall hear her voice full and loud, another time as low; and anon shrill and on high: thick and short when she list; drawn out at leisure again when she is disposed; and then (if she be so pleased) she riseth and mounteth up aloft, as it were with a wind-organ. Thus she altereth from one to another, and singeth all parts, the treble, the meane, and the base. To conclude; there is not a pipe or instrument again in the world (devised with all the art and cunning of man so exquisitely as possibly might be) that can afford more music than this pretty bird doth out of that little throat of hers."
We have persons here in England who earn their livelihood by catching nightingales. It is the same in most other countries. Near Cairo, there is, or used to be, a pretty grove of mingled mimosas, palms, and sycamores, where the netters of nightingales station themselves at night, in the proper season, to take the bird when in full song. According to their report, which there is no reason to discredit, the male bird becomes so intoxicated by the scented air, by love, and by his own music, that the cap-net, fixed at at the summit of a long reed, may be raised and closed about him before he is sensible of his danger. From the free woods he is then transferred to a cage, where in nine cases out of ten, he dies of nostalgia. Nor is this all. The female bird, accustomed not only to be cheered by his song, but likewise fed by his industry, pines and perishes with all her brood. The wren, the swallow, the titlark intermit the business of incubation, and leave their nests for a minute or a minute and a half to help themselves while they are sitting, or to assist the male in feeding the young after the eggs are hatched: but the female nightingale used, like an eastern sultana, to be provided for entirely by her lord, feels her utter helplessness when she is deserted, and leaning her little head and neck over the edge of the nest, with her eyes fixed in the direction in which he used to come, dies in that attitude of expectancy. The reason is, that the instinct of pairing, which is strong in many other birds, reaches its culminating point in the nightingale--the same males and females keeping together for years without ever seeking other mates.
The cuckoo, as we have said, offers the most striking contrast in the development of its instincts. It does not pair at all, and as there are more males than females, we may often see two or three of the former sex following one of the latter, and fighting for her favors. As the parents care not for one another, neither do they care for their young. It was long supposed that the cuckoo laid only one egg in the season; but this has been found to be an error, for though they leave no more than one egg in one nest--we mean generally--they have been observed to make deposits in various nests, and then fly away to a distant part of the country, or even to other lands. In the female cuckoo, therefore, the maternal instinct is entirely wanting, which, though it acts in obedience to an imperious law of nature, makes it a hateful bird. As soon as it quits the shell, it begins to exhibit its odious qualities. When the cuckoo's egg is placed in the nest of the hedge-sparrow, for example, the deluded mother perceives no difference between the alien production and her own. She sits, therefore, on what she finds, and having no idea of numbers, of course never thinks of counting the eggs. {546} When hatching-time arrives, however, she is made the witness of an extraordinary scene. The villainous young cuckoo, which often escapes from the shell a whole day before the others, immediately begins to clear the nest by pitching out the unhatched eggs; or if the young ones have made their appearance, forth they are thrown in like manner. Nature has fabricated the little monster with a view to this ungrateful proceeding, for in its back there is a hollow depression, in which egg or chick may be placed while he is rising to shunt it over the battlements. The process is extremely curious: the young assassin, putting shoulder and elbow to the work, keeps continually thrusting against his victim till he gets it on his back; he then rises, and placing his back aslant, tumbles it out into empty space. This done, and finding that he has all the dwelling to himself, he subsides quietly into his place, and waits with ever-open bill for the dole which the foolish sparrow wears itself almost to death in providing for the faithless wretch. When the nest happens to be situated in a high hedge, you may often see the young sparrows spiked alive on the thorns, or the eggs still palpitating with living birds lying unbroken on the soft grass below. This inspires naturalists with no pity; they observe that neither the eggs nor the young birds are thrown away, since various reptiles that feed on such substances make a comfortable meal of what is thus placed within their reach.
As the cuckoo does nothing in life but eat, scream, and lay eggs for other birds to hatch, it needs no education, and receives none. On the other hand, the nightingale, having to perform the highest functions allotted to the class aves, requires much training and discipline, study and preparation. The young nightingale does not sing by mere instinct. If taken from the nest soon after it is hatched, and brought up among inferior creatures, it is incapable of performing its lofty mission, and deals in vulgar twittering like them; just as a baby, if removed from the society of speech-gifted mortals, and entrusted to the care of dumb persons, will lack that divine quality of expressing ideas which distinguishes man from the brute. The nightingale needs and receives a classical education. When the grass is dewy--when the leaves are green and fresh--when the soft breath of the morning steals over the woods like incense, the old bird takes forth the young ones, before it is quite light, and placing them on some bough, with strict injunctions to listen, goes a little way off, and begins his song. In this he commences with the easier notes, and is careful to keep the whole in a comparatively narrow compass. He then pauses to watch the result of his first instructions. After a brief delay, during which they are turning over the notes in their minds, the young ones take up the lay one by one, and go through it, as our neighbors say, tant bien que mal. The teacher watches their efforts with attention; applauds them when right; chides them when they have done amiss; and goes on day by day reïterating his lessons till he considers his pupils quite equal to the high duties they have to perform. Mankind, of course, imagine that those duties consist in soothing their ears, and driving away melancholy. But apropos of the performances of another bird, our philosophic poet inquires:
And replies:
So with the nightingale--
Some one speaking of our own species, says:
It is to win the love of Philomela that the male nightingale studies, watches, and pours forth his soul in song. He had much rather that men did not listen; he is a shy, solitary, and timid bird, and takes his love away into {547} the forests, where, undisturbed by the sounds of vulgar life, he ravishes her ears with music. It is a question much discussed by poets and naturalists, whether the nightingale's song be joyous or melancholy. It probably derives its character from the frame of mind in which the listener happens to be--to the joyous it is mirthful, to the sorrowful it is sad--but in its real nature it is what Milton suggests--
Still it must be owned that they who discover melancholy in her long, low, meltingly sweet notes, seem to approach nearer the truth than they who describe her as a merry bird. It is superstition, perhaps, that attributes to her the strange philosophy which makes anguish the well-spring of pleasure. When desirous, it is said, of reaching the sublimest heights of song, she leans her breast against a thorn, in order that the sense of pain may tone down her impetuous rapture into sympathy with human sorrow.
Another strange notion is, that the nightingale fixes her eyes--
on some particular star, from which she never withdraws them till her song is concluded, unless she be alarmed by the approach of some footstep, or other sound indicative of danger. We remember once, in Kent, going forth to spend a night in the fields to enjoy the strange delight imparted by the nightingale's notes. We placed ourselves on a little eminence overlooking a valley, covered at intervals by scattered woods. It was the dead watch and middle of the night; silence the most absolute brooded over the earth. We stood still in high expectation. Presently, one lordly nightingale flung forth at no great distance from the summit of a lofty tree his music on the night. The lay was not protracted, but a rich, short, defiant burst of melody; he then, like the Roman orator, paused for a reply. The reply came, not close at hand, but, as it seemed, from some copse or thicket far down in the valley. If one might presume to judge on the spur of the moment, the second songster did really outdo the first. The notes came forth bubbling, gushing, quivering, palpitating, as it were, with soul, for nothing material ever resembled it. He went over a broad area of song, with a sort of wilderness of melody; his notes followed each other so rapidly, high, low, linked, broken--now sweeping away like a torrent, now sinking till it sounded like the scarcely audible murmur of a distant bee. He then stopped abruptly, confident that he had given his rival something to reflect upon. We now waited to hear that rival's answer, but he appeared to consider himself defeated, and remained silent. Another champion now stepped forward, and took up the challenge. He must surely have been the prince of his race. From a tree on the slope of a height, not far to the right of our position, he gave us a new specimen of the poetry of his race. The former two, evidently younger and more inexperienced, had been in a hurry. He took up his parable at leisure, beginning with a few light flourishes by way of preface, after which he plunged into his epic, seeming to carry on the subject from the epoch of Deucalion and Pyrrha, down to that moment, displaying all the resources of art, and presenting us with every form into which music could be moulded. What he might have achieved at last, or to what pitch he might have raised our ecstasy, must remain a mystery, for before he had concluded his song, a thundering railway train, belching forth fire and smoke as it advanced, seemed to be on the very point of annihilating the songsters; so they all took to flight, or at least remained obstinately silent. We waited hour after hour, now pacing in one direction, now in another; stopping short, pausing in our talk, listening till the streaky dawn, climbing slowly up the eastern hills, revealed to us the inutility of further hope.
The first time we heard the nightingale was from the deck of a vessel in the Avon, near Lee Woods. It was a starlight night; we were leaning on the bulwarks, speculating on the reception we were to meet with in England--in which we had that day arrived for the first time. As we were chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy, from an indenture in the woods, called, as we have since learned, Nightingale Valley, there burst forth at once a flood of sound, the strangest, the sweetest, the most intoxicating we had ever heard--it must be, it was the voice of the nightingale---
Years not a few have rolled by since then, but we remember as distinctly as if it were yesternight the pleasure of that exquisite surprise. We heard the nightingale in England before the cuckoo--a circumstance which, according to Chaucer, should portend good-luck; and so it did--good-luck and happy days.
Perhaps much of the pleasure tasted in such cases is derived from the time of year--for both the cuckoo and the nightingale belong to the spring--when the air is full of balm, when the foliage is thick, when the grass is green and young--and when, especially in the morning, delicate odors ascend from the earth, which produce a wonderful effect upon the animal spirits. Through these scents, the cry of one bird and the song of the other invariably come to us: the one flitting at early dawn over the summits of woods, the other in loneliest covert hid, making night lovely, and smoothing the raven down of darkness till it smiles.
[ORIGINAL.]
That the early inhabitants of Ireland possessed sundry kinds of manufacture is a point that can scarcely be disputed; for, besides frequent passages in ancient and authentic historical documents referring to the matter, we have satisfactory evidence in those specimens of the manufactured articles themselves which have been preserved to the present day, and which bear testimony to the skill and industry that produced them.
A visit to the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy must convince us of the excellent workmanship of the ancient Irish bronze swords, and other weapons, and of certain ancient gold ornaments--both bronze and gold articles belonging to a date anterior to the introduction of Christianity into Ireland. From the early Christian ages we have received many of the old ecclesiastical ornaments that have been preserved; and some of them exhibit that peculiar and exquisite kind of interlaced ornamentation which began at a remote period to be known as opus Hibernicum, or the Irish style.
We know that the ancient Irish were skilled in the manufacture of their musical instruments, as well as in the use of them; and in the preparation of parchment, as well as in the almost unrivalled beauty of penmanship of which that parchment has preserved so many specimens. Then we must return to much more ancient times for the manufacture of gold and silver goblets, and, above all, for those beautiful fibulae, or brooches, which have afforded models for some of the most graceful and costly articles of female decoration at the present day. We may very naturally conclude that these charming fibular were not employed to hold together mantles of the coarsest possible manufacture, or, rather, that there was some proportion between the texture of the cloth and the beautiful workmanship of the brooch which clasped it round the person of the wearer; and, in a word, we are justified in presuming that some manufactures, besides those of which specimens were durable enough to have been preserved to the present day, existed in the country.
The incessant warfare of the Danish period, and of the centuries following the Anglo-Norman invasion, must have been destructive to the industrial arts; yet we meet occasionally with some external evidence of their existence even then. Some eighty years ago, the Earl of Charlemont lighted on a curious passage relating to the subject in an Italian poem of the fourteenth century. From this and other authorities he was able to show, in a paper published in the first volume of the "Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy," that Ireland produced a fine woollen fabric called serge, which enjoyed an European reputation at the very time the Flemish weavers were brought over by Edward III. to establish the woollen manufacture in England, and consequently before it could have been introduced here from the latter country. The investigation of such scattered facts as these would be interesting, and no doubt would flatter national vanity. It may, perhaps, occupy us on some future occasion; but for the present we shall confine our inquiry to a somewhat more modern epoch, and more tangible evidences.
Strangely enough, the first writer we have had on the natural history and industrial resources of Ireland happens {550} to have been a Dutchman. Dr. Gerard Boate--a resident of London, though by birth, it appears, a Hollander--obtained the post of state physician in Ireland from the Commonwealth, in 1649 and having purchased, as an adventurer, a few years earlier, some of the forfeited lands in Leinster and Ulster, applied himself to the subject of his book, with a view originally to the improvement of his own property. His information, however, was obtained, not from personal experience, but from Irish gentlemen whom he had met in London, such as Sir William and Sir Richard Parsons; and from his brother, Dr. Arnold Boate, who had practiced as a physician in Dublin for many years; but he himself, unfortunately, died a few months after his arrival in Ireland to enter on the duties of his office, before he was able to carry out more than half the original design of his work, which, though written in 1645, was not published until some years after his death. He collected his information and wrote while the great civil war was still raging, and when all his feelings and interests must have been strongly enlisted against the native race, so that we are not to be surprised at the acerbity of some of his expressions about them. Our concern is, not with his feelings or opinions, but with the facts which he relates, and the descriptions and statistics which he supplies.
On the state of metallurgy in Ireland in his time, Dr. Boate gives us some very curious information. He denies any knowledge of the subject on the part of the native Irish, and asserts that all the mines in Ireland were discovered by the "New English." "The Old English in Ireland," he says, "that is, those who are come in from the time of the first conquest until the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign, have been so plagued with wars from time to time--one while intestine among themselves, and another while with the Irish--that they could scarce ever find the opportunity of seeking for mines. . . . . . And the Irish themselves, as being one of the most barbarous nations of the whole earth, have at all times been so far from seeking out any, that even in these last years, and since the English have begun to discover some, none of them all, great or small, at any time hath applied himself to that business, or in the least manner furthered it; so that all the mines which to this day are found out in Ireland, have been discovered (at least, as far to make any use of them) by the New English, that is, such as are come in during and since the reign of Queen Elizabeth." (Thom's Collection of Tracts and Treatises, vol. i. 102.)
He adds, that several iron mines had been discovered in various parts of the kingdom, and also some of lead and silver, during the forty years' peace, from the death of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the great rebellion--the longest peace, he remarks, that Ireland ever enjoyed, either before or after the coming of the English. The great extent to which smelting was carried on during a portion of that time may be concluded from the almost incredible destruction of the Irish woods, to make charcoal for the purpose. This Dr. Boate describes in a preceding chapter; "As long as the land was in the full possession of the Irish themselves," he says, and we know the fact from many other sources, "all Ireland was very full of woods on every side;" but the English cleared away a great deal of these, both to destroy the lurking places of their foes, and to convert the land into tillage and pasture. Besides the woods cleared for these purposes, a vast amount of timber was felled, as Boate tells us, for merchandise, and to make charcoal for the iron works. The timber comprised under the former head does not appear to have been for building, but simply for pipe staves and the like, of which, he says, great quantities were exported even in former times; "and," he adds, "during the last peace a mighty trade was driven in them, and whole shiploads sent into foreign countries yearly;" while, "as for the charcoal," he {551} continues, "it is incredible what quantity thereof is consumed by one iron work in a year . . . so that it was necessary from time to time to fell an infinite number of trees, all the loppings and windfalls being not sufficient for it in the least manner." The result of all this was, that even in Boate's time, that is, over 200 years ago, the greater part of Ireland was left totally bare of woods; the inhabitants could obtain no wood for building, or even for firing; and in some parts one might travel whole days without seeing any trees, except a few about gentlemen's houses. For a distance of over three score miles from north to south, in the counties of Louth and Dublin, "one doth not come near any woods worth speaking of; and in some parts thereof you shall not see so much as one tree in many miles. For the great woods which the maps do represent unto us upon the mountains, between Dundalk and Nurie, are quite vanished, there being nothing left of them these many years since but one only tree, standing close by the highway, at the very top of one of the mountains, so far as it may be seen a great way off, and therefore serveth travellers for a mark."
At that period iron mines were worked extensively near Tallow, on the borders of Cork and Waterford, by the famous Earl of Cork; in the county of Clare, some six miles from Limerick; at a place called Desert, in the King's County, by Sergeant-Major Pigott; at Mountrath and Mountmellick, in the Queen's County; on the shores of Lough Allen, both on the Roscommon and Leitrim sides--the mountains of Slieve-an-ieran, or the Iron Mountain, in the latter county, having obtained its name, in the remotest ages, from the presence of that metal; on the shores of Lough Erne, in Fermanagh; in Cavan; at Lissan, on the borders of Tyrone and Londonderry, where the works were carried on by Sir Thomas Staples, the owner of the soil; at the foot of Slieve Gallen, in the county of Derry; and in several other places. Iron smelting works and foundries were erected, not only in the vicinity of the mines, but in other places on the coast, and elsewhere, where the convenience of water carriage and the supplies of charcoal afforded inducements. To some of these works on the sea-coast, the ore was brought even from England; but the principal iron works appear to have been those belonging to the Earl of Cork, in Munster; to Sir Charles Coote, at Mountrath, and in Roscommon and Leitrim; to the Earl of Londonderry, in his own county; to Lord Chancellor Loftus, ancestor of the Marquis of Ely, at Mountmellick; to Sir John Dunbar, in Fermanagh; Sir Leonard Blennerhassett, on Lough Erne; and a company of London merchants in Clare. We are not told whether these last were the representatives of the London Mining Company, to which Queen Elizabeth granted the royalties of the precious metals that might be discovered within the English Pale. Mr. Christopher Wandsworth, who had been Master of the Rolls for Ireland, and acted as Lord Deputy under the Earl of Strafford, erected a foundry in the county of Carlow, where ordnance were cast, and also a kind of small round furnaces, pots, and other articles made.
It was estimated that the owners of the iron works--we do not here refer to the mines--made a profit of forty per cent in the year; and Boate was assured, by persons who were particularly well informed on the subject, that the Earl of Cork cleared £100,000 by his iron works. Sir Charles Coote--"that zealous and famous warriour in this present warre against the Irish rebells," in the first year of which war he fell--appears to have been quite as famous as an iron-master as he was as a warrior, and his iron-works at Mountrath were a model at that time. A ton of the ore called rock mine cost him, at the furnace head, 5s. 6d.; and a ton of white mine, or ore dug from a mountain, 7s. The two ores were mixed in the {552} proportion of one of rock mine to two of white mine, and three tons of the mixed ore yielded one ton of good bar iron, which was conveyed in rude, small boats called cots, on the River Nore to Waterford, and thence shipped to London, where it was sold for £16, and sometimes for £17, or even £17 10s.; the whole cost of the iron to Sir Charles Coote, including that of digging it out of the mine and every expense until it reached the London market, Custom House duty included, being between £10 and £11 per ton. In most places the cost of the ore at the furnace varied from 5s. to 6s. per ton; and when the ore was particularly rich, 2-1/2 tons produced one ton of good iron; but Boate tells us that few of the iron smelters carried on their work as profitably as Sir Charles Coote.
In Boate's time, only three lead and silver mines appear to have been known in Ireland. One of these was in the county of Antrim, and was very rich, yielding 1 lb. of silver to 30 lbs. of lead; another was situated in Cony Island, at Sligo; and the third, the only one which was worked, was the famous silver mines of the barony of Upper Ormond, in Tipperary, about twelve miles from Limerick. This mine had been discovered about forty years before, and was at first supposed to be merely a lead mine; some of the first lead it produced being used by the Earl of Thomond to roof his house at Bunratty. It was worked in the shape of open pits, several fathoms deep, but still sloping so gradually, that the ore was carried to the surface in wheelbarrows. Each ton of ore at this mine yielded 3 lbs. of pure silver; but our authority does not inform us how much lead. The silver was sold in Dublin for 5s. 2d. per oz., and the lead for £11 per ton, though it is stated to have brought £12 in Limerick; and the royalty, or king's share, was a sixth part of the silver, and a tenth of the lead. The rest was the property of those who farmed the mine, and who cleared an estimated profit of £2000 per annum. The works at this mine, and in general all the smelting works which we have mentioned throughout the country, were of course destroyed in the civil war.
So much for the practical metallurgy of Ireland, as it existed two hundred years ago. Of the knowledge of the original inhabitants on the subject, Sir William Wilde ("Catalogue of Antiquities," etc., vol. i. p. 351) says--and his opinion is the result of all the investigation that is practicable in the matter--"When, and how, the Irish people discovered metals and their uses, together with the art of smelting and casting, has not been determined by archaeologists;" but a few remarkable and suggestive facts on the subject may be mentioned. Manuscripts, themselves five or six hundred years old, and purporting to give information handed down from the most remote antiquity, make frequent mention of the knowledge and use of metals among the ancient Irish. Thus the old annalists say, that "gold was first smelted in Ireland in Fotharta-Airthir-Liffe," a woody district in Wicklow, east of the River Liffey, supposed to coincide with the present well-known auriferous tract in that county. Indeed, it is most probable that gold was the first metal known to the Irish, as well as to all people in early stages of civilization, as, besides its glittering quality, it is almost the only metal found in a native state upon the surface, and consequently obtainable without the art of smelting. Dr. Boate writes: "I believe many will think it very unlikely that there should be any gold mines in Ireland; but a credible person hath given me to understand, that one of his acquaintances had several times assured him that out of a certain rivulet, in the county of Nether-Tirone, called Miola, he had gathered about one dram of pure gold." We also know from the celts, and other articles in these metals which have been preserved, that the ancient Irish possessed {553} copper, which they were able to convert into brass and bronze; and also that they had silver, tin, lead, and iron. The Irish version of Nennius mentions, as the first wonder of Ireland, that Lough Lein--the Lake of Killarney--is surrounded by four circles, viz., "a circle of tin, and a circle of lead, and a circle of iron, and a circle of copper"--an indication not only that these metals were known to the people, but that some rude idea had been formed of the mineralogy of the district.
THEIR AGRICULTURE.
Grain, in one shape or other, formed a main ingredient in the food of the Irish from the earliest historic period; and we may, consequently, include Agriculture among the earliest of their industrial arts. We are not aware of any time at which they were exclusively a flesh-eating people; and we find it clearly stated, with reference to periods not altogether very remote, that the native Irish subsisted to a great extent on the milk and butter of their large herds of cattle, seldom killing the animals for their flesh. On the other hand, we know that vast numbers of cattle were slain and consumed in the constant petty wars of the country; and that the lawless dwellers in the cranogues, or lake habitations--whatever period they belong to--were decidedly carnivorous, as the immense accumulations of the bones and horns of cattle found in their insulated haunts testify. But the fact we contend for is, that the ancient Irish were a granivorous quite as much as a carnivorous race, if not more so; and some ethnologists have concluded, from an examination of very ancient Irish crania, that the teeth were chiefly employed in masticating grain in a hard state.
It is a curious and well-known fact that in many parts of Ireland traces of tillage are visible on the now barren sides or summits of hills, in places which have been long since abandoned to savage nature, and in a soil which would appear never to have been susceptible of cultivation. Some such elevated spots, now covered with grass, are known to have been cultivated some years since, when the rural population was much denser than at present; but we are referring to other places where we find well-marked ridges and furrows on hillsides, four or five hundred feet above the sea level, or even more; and which are now covered with heath, and so denuded, by ages of atmospheric action on the steep slopes, as to retain only the least quantity of vegetable surface, wholly inadequate at present to nourish any kind of grain.
When, and by whom, were these wild spots cultivated? The country people have lost all tradition on the subject, and substitute their own conjectures.
It is not probable that the population of Ireland was ever so dense as to have necessitated such extreme efforts to eke out the arable land; or that the people were ever so crowded as to have been compelled, as it were, like the Chinese, to Terrace the hill-sides to grow food. Mr. Thom has collected, in his admirable "Statistics of Ireland," all the authentic accounts of Irish census returns. Taking these in their inverse order, we find that the 8,175,124 of 1841 was only 6,801,827 in 1821; 5,937,856 in 1814; 4,088,226 in 1792; 2,544,276 in 1767; 2,309,106 in 1726; 1,034,102 in 1695; and 1,300,000 in 1672. These latter early returns were merely the estimates of the hearth-money collectors, and are generally deemed to be unreliable. Newenham, in his Enquiry, expresses his disbelief in them, and shows from the statements of Arthur Young, and from official returns, that they were clearly under the truth. Yet the returns recently found by Mr. Hardinge, of the Landed Estates Record Office, among the papers of Sir William Petty, in the library of the Marquis of Lansdowne, would reduce the population to a {554} much lower figure still at an epoch only a little earlier than the date last enumerated above. Mr. Hardinge shows that the Petty returns must have been made in 1658 or 1659; and, supplying a proportional computation for some omitted counties and baronies, he finds that the total population of Ireland at that date was only half a million! It is true that this was immediately after the close of the long and desolating civil war which commenced in 1641; and at a time when, as Mr. Hardinge observes, one province had been so utterly depopulated as to leave its lands vacant for the transplanted remnants of the people of two other provinces; yet, even under all the circumstances, the number is incredibly small.
Going further back, we may conclude that the population could not have been considerable during the constant civil wars which wasted the entire country throughout the long reign of Elizabeth; nor was there any time from the Anglo-Norman invasion to that period in which the circumstances of the country were favorable to the social or numerical development of the population; while in earlier times matters can hardly be said to have been a whit better. There is no period of ancient Irish history in which the native annalists do not record almost an annual recurrence of internecine wars in all the provinces--wars equally inveterate and sanguinary, whether the country was infested by foreign foes, or not (vide the Four Masters passim)--while, on the other hand, we know that the population of a country never multiplies excessively except in long intervals of peace. It may be urged that the remains of the innumerable raths and cahirs, or caishels, which cover the land, and of the abbeys and small churches which dot the country, indicate periods of very dense population: but this is a mistaken notion; for at the time when the raths were inhabited, it can scarcely be said there were any towns in Ireland; and even when the monasteries were built, the population was almost wholly rural, and scattered; while a great many of the very small religious edifices through the country were only the isolated oratories of hermits.
The poet, Spenser, writing about A.D. 1596, would seem to give us the best clue to the time in which those mountain wildernesses we have been referring to were subjected to a kind of cultivation. In his "View of the State of Ireland," he makes Irenaeus relate how the most part of the Irish fled from the power of Henry II. "into deserts and mountains, leaving the wyde countrey to the conquerour, who in their stead eftsoones placed English men, who possessed all their lands, and did quite shut out the Irish, or the most part of them:" and how "they [the Irish] continued in that lowlinesse untill the time that the division betweene the two houses of Lancaster and York arose for the crowne of England; at which time all the great English lords and gentlemen, which had great possessions in Ireland, repaired over hither into England. . . . . . Then the Irish whom before they had banished into the mountains, where they only lived on white meates, as it is recorded, seeing now their lands so dispeopled and weakened, came downe into all the plaines adjoyning, and thence expelling those few English that remained, repossessed them againe, since which they have remained in them," etc.
It is most probable, then, that it was during that early period of refuge in the mountains that the wild tracts we have alluded to were cultivated by the Irish; and it is worth remarking that when, in Spenser's own time, the English recovered a portion of the plain at the foot of Slieve Bloom, in the O'Moore's country, of which the Irish had been for several years in quiet possession, they were surprised at the high state of cultivation in which they found it.