[6] "Cours de Littérature celtique," tome vii. "Études sur le droit Celtique," II. partie, chap. 2.
[7] Modern cíos, "rent." "Census," according to M d'Arbois de Jubainville, was pronounced "kêsus," and had a variant cinsus in Low Latin pronounced "cîsus," whence Irish cîs and German Zins.
[8] See under the words Athgabail, Flaith, Ferb, Ness, as Jubainville has pointed out.
[CHAPTER XLIII]
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The Irish of the eighteenth century being almost wholly deprived by law of all possibilities of bettering their condition, and having the necessary means of education rigidly denied them, turned for solace to poetry, and in it they vented their wrongs and bitter grief. I have met nothing more painful in literature than the constant, the almost unvarying cry of agony sent out by every one of the Irish writers during the latter half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century.
There seems to have been very great literary activity amongst the natives in almost every county of Ireland during this period, and the poets it produced were countless; during this period, too, the Irish appear to have translated many religious books from French and Latin into Irish. In one way the work of the eighteenth century is of even more value to us than that of any earlier age, because it gives us the thoughts and feelings of men who, being less removed from ourselves in point of time, have probably more fully transmitted their own nature to their descendants—the Irish of the present day. Unhappily, however, though many volumes of the work of the eighteenth century have survived, yet countless others have been lost during the last fifty years, and the only body in Ireland competent to secure Irish manuscripts by purchase, takes unfortunately not the slightest heed of any modern Irish writings, which are daily perishing in numbers.
Of the poets of what I have called the New School, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the most noted was certainly David O'Bruadar, or Broder, whose extant poems would fill a volume. They are in the most various forms of the new metres, but their vocabulary and word-forms are rather those of the more ancient bards, which renders his poetry by no means easy of translation. He appears to have been the bard par excellence of the Williamite wars, and bitter is his cry of woe after the Boyne and Aughrim.