The value of Keating's history is very great to the student of Irish antiquity, not because of any critical faculty on the part of Keating himself, for (perhaps luckily) this was a gift he was not endowed with, but on account of the very lack of it. What Keating found in the old vellums of the monasteries and the brehons, as they existed about the year 1630—they have, many of them, perished since—he rewrote and redacted in his own language like another Herodotus. He invents nothing, embroiders little. What he does not find before him, he does not relate, οὐδε γαρ οὐν λέγεται, as is the formula of Herodotus. He composed his history in the south of Ireland, at nearly the same time that the Four Masters in the north of Ireland were collecting the materials for their annals, and though he wrote currente calamo, and is in matters of fact less accurate than they are, yet his history is an independent compilation made from the same class of ancient vellums, often from the very same books from which they also derived their information, and it must ever remain a co-ordinate authority to be consulted by historians along with them and the other annalists.[5]
The opening words of his history may serve as a specimen of his style. It begins thus—
"Whoever sets before him the task of inquiring into and investigating the history and antiquity of any country, ought to adopt the mode that most clearly explains its true state, and gives the most correct account of its inhabitants. And because I have undertaken to write and publish a history of Ireland, I deem myself obliged to complain of some of the wrongs and acts of injustice practised towards its inhabitants, as well towards the Old Galls [Anglo-Normans], who have been in possession of the country for more than four centuries since the English invasion, as towards the Gaels themselves, who have owned it for three thousand years. For there is no historian who has written upon Ireland since the English invasion, who does not strive to vilify and calumniate both Anglo-Irish colonists and the Gaelic natives. We have proofs of this in the accounts of the country given by Cambrensis, Spenser, Stanihurst, Hanmer, Camden, Barclay, Morrison, Davis, Campion, and all the writers of the New Galls [i.e., later English settlers] who have treated of this country. So much so that when they speak of the Irish one would imagine that these men were actuated by the instinct of the beetle[6]; for it is the nature of this animal, when it raises its head in the summer, to flutter about without stooping to the fair flowers of the meadow or to the blossoms of the garden—not though they be all roses and lilies—but it bustles hurriedly around until it meets with some disgusting ordure, and it buries itself therein. So it is with the above-named writers. They never allude to the virtues and the good customs of the old Anglo-Irish and Gaelic nobility who dwelt in Ireland in their time. They write not of their piety or their valour, or of what monasteries they founded, what lands and endowments they gave to the Church, what immunities they granted to the ollamhs, their bounty to the ecclesiastics and prelates of the Church, the relief they afforded to orphans and to the poor, their munificence to men of learning, and their hospitality to strangers, which was so great that it may be said, in truth, that they were not at any time surpassed by any nation of Europe in generosity and hospitality, in proportion to the abilities they possessed. Witness the meetings of the learned which they used to convene, a custom unheard of amongst other nations of Europe. And yet nothing of all this can be found in the English writers of the time, but they dwell upon the customs of the vulgar, and upon the stories of ignorant old women, neglecting the illustrious action of the nobility, and all that relates to the ancient Gaels that inhabited this island before the invasion of the Anglo-Normans."
Keating's history[7] was perhaps the most popular book ever written in Irish, and, as it could not be printed, it was propagated by hundreds of manuscript copies all over the island. He is the author of two other voluminous books of a theological and moral nature, called the "Key to the Shield of the Mass," and the "Three Shafts of Death." Keating was witty, and very fond of a good story. Here is a specimen which I translate from his latter work. Pirates were a familiar feature in the life of Keating's day, and he tells the following amusing tale of one engaged in this trade, probably an O'Driscoll. Talking of the fruit of this world Keating remarks that though it tastes sweet it ends bitterly.
THE STORY OF MAC RAICÍN.
"I think it happens to many a one in this world as it did to the wild and ignorant Kerne from the west of Munster who went aboard a warship to seek spoils on the ocean. And he put ashore in England, and at the first town that they met on land the townspeople came to welcome them and bring them to their houses to entertain them, for the people of the town were mostly innkeepers. And the Kerne wondered at their inviting himself, considering that he did not know any of them. But he himself and some of the people who were with him went to the house of one of them, to the inn, and the people of the house were very kind to them for a week, so that what between the cleanliness of the abode, and the excellence of his bed, food, and drink, the Kerne thought his position a delightful one.
"However, when he and his company were taking their leave the innkeeper called the accountant he had, saying, 'make reckoning' that means in Irish, 'pay your bill,' and with that the accountant came, and he commenced to strip the people so that they were obliged to give full payment for everything they had had in the house while there, and they were left bare when they went away. And, moreover, the Kerne wondered what was the cause of himself and the others being plundered like that, for before this he had never known food to be bought or sold.
"And when he came to Erin his friends began asking him to give an account of England. He began to tell them, and said that he never did see a land that was better off for food and drink, fire and bedding, or more pleasant people, and I don't know a single fault about it, says he, except that when strangers are taking leave of the people who entertain them, there comes down on them an infernal horrid wretch that they call Mac Rakeen[8] (make reckoning) who handles strangers rudely, and strips and spoils them."
Keating then draws the moral in his own way, "that land of England is the world; the innkeepers, the world, the flesh, and the devil; the Kerne, people in general; and Mac Rakeen the Death."
During the time when Keating was in hiding he is said to have visited Cork and to have transcribed manuscripts which he required for the purposes of his history almost under the very eyes of the Lord President himself, and to have visited Dublin in the same manner. After the departure of Carew he reappeared, and seems to have died quietly as parish priest of Tubrid in Tipperary about the year 1650.
Almost every native scholar produced by Ireland during the seventeenth century seems to have been hampered by persecution in the same way as Keating, and loud and bitter were the complaints of the Irish at the policy of the English Government in cutting them off from education. Peter Lombard, the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, who died in 1625, and who wrote in Latin and published—of course abroad, he would not well do it at home—a "Commentary on the Kingdom of Ireland," assures his countrymen and all Europe that it had been the steady plan of the English Government to cut off education from the Irish, and to prevent them having a university of their own, despite the keen longing which his countrymen had for liberal studies, and the way in which they had always hitherto distinguished themselves in them. Even, he asserts, whilst England was still Catholic, her policy had been the same, and when the question of an Irish university was being debated in the English Council it had no bitterer enemy than a celebrated Catholic bishop. When some one afterwards remonstrated with this dignitary for opposing a work at once so holy and so salutary as the establishment of a Catholic university in Ireland, the answer made him was that it was not as a Catholic bishop he opposed it, but as an English senator.[9] "Well for him," remarks Lombard grimly, "if in the council of God and his saints, when the severe sentence of the Deity is passed upon the bishop, the senator by a like display of nimble wit may escape it."
When the university, so long and so anxiously sought for, was actually founded, "most capacious, most splendid," as Lombard puts it, at their expense, in the shape of Trinity College, Dublin, and they found themselves excluded from its benefits, their indignation, as expressed by Lombard and others, knew no bounds.[10] But their indignation was of little use, because they could not back it by their arms, and when they did so, they were beaten by Cromwell, and their last state rendered twenty times worse than their first.
Mac Firbis was another native Irish author of great learning who wrote in Irish contemporaneously with Keating. He was himself descended from Dathi, the last pagan monarch of Ireland, and his family had been for time out of mind the hereditary historians of North Connacht. The great Book of Lecan was compiled by one of his ancestors. His own greatest surviving work is his Book of Genealogies which contains enough to fill thirteen hundred pages of O'Donovan's edition of the "Four Masters." This he compiled during the horrors of the Cromwellian war, simply as a labour of love, and in the hope that at least the names and genealogies of the nation might be saved to posterity out of what then seemed the ruin of all things. Another book of his was a catalogue of Irish writers.[11] Mac Firbis mentions that even in his own day he had known Irish chieftains who governed their clans according to the "words of Fithal and the Royal Precepts," that is, according to the books of the Brehon law. He also compiled or wrote out the "Chronicon Scotorum," apparently from old manuscripts preserved in his family. He compiled, too, a glossary of the ancients laws, of which only a fragment exists, and made copies of five other ancient glossaries and law tracts. He says himself, in his Book of Genealogies, that he had compiled a dictionary of the Brehon laws in which he had given extensive explanations of them. His genealogical volume is divided into nine books. The first treats of Partholan, the second of the Nemedians, the third of the Firbolg, the fourth of the Tuatha De Danann, the fifth of the Milesians, chiefly the Eremonians, the sixth of the Irians and the Eremonian tribes that went under the generic name of the Dal Fiatach, the seventh of the Eberians and of the Ithians of Munster, the eighth of the Saints of Ireland, and the ninth and last treats ot the families descended from the Fomorians, Danes, Saxons, and Anglo-Normans.