"Dear Sir,
"I am much flattered by your compliment to my national erudition, a very scanty stock in my best of times, and now nearly used up, in 'furnishing forth' the pages of many an idle tale, worked out in the 'Irish Interest,' as the mouse nibbled at the lion's net,—the same presumption, if not with the same results! However, I will rub up my old 'Shannos,' as Elizabeth said of her Latin, and endeavour to recollect the little I have ever known on the subject of the Irish wolf-dog.
"Natural history is too much a matter of fact to have ever interested the poetic temperament of the Irish; Schools of Poetry, Heraldry, and Music, were opened (says the Irish historians), 'time immemorial.' St. Patrick found the Academies of Lismore and Armagh in a flourishing condition, when he arrived on his great mission; and the more modern College of Clonard (founded in the fifth century by Bishop Finnan), had a great reputation for its learning and learned professors. But it does not appear that there was any Chair of Natural History or Philosophy in these scholastic Seminaries. Their Transactions recorded the miracles of saints rather than the miracles of nature. And had some daring Cuvier, or enterprising Lyell or Murchison, opened those spacious cabinets, once
'In the deep bosom of the ocean buried,'
or entombed in mountain layers for unnumbered ages, the Druid priests would probably have immolated the daring naturalist under his highest oak. Is it quite sure that the Prior of Armagh, or the founder of the Royal Academy of Clonard, the good Saint Finnan himself, would have served them much better? Certain, however, it is, that the Druids, Bards, Filiahs, Senachies and Saints of Ireland, who left such mighty reputations behind them for learning, have not dropped one word on the subject of the natural history of their 'Isle of Song;' and though they may have dabbled a little in that prosaic pursuit, they probably soon discovered its perilous tendency, and sang with the last and most charming of Irish Bards,—
'No, Science, to you
We have long bade a last and careless adieu.'
"Nearly two thousand years after the foundation of the most learned Academies of Ireland, a pretty little Zoological Garden was opened in the capital of the country; but no living type of the Irish wolf-dog is to be found there, nor were any 'fossil remains' of the noble animal discovered in the Wicklow Mines,[G] which were worked some fifty years back, but which, for want of capital or perseverance, only furnished a few Cronobane halfpence, and materials for a musical farce to one of the most delightful farcical Irish writers of his time;[H] for in Ireland,
'Tout finis par un chanson,'
(as Figaro had it of the France of his age,) when worse results do not follow disappointment.
"The Irish wolf-dog, therefore, it may be asserted, belongs to the poetical traditions of Ireland, or to its remote Milesian histories. 'Gomer, the eldest son of Japhet, and others, the immediate posterity of Noah, after the dispersion of mankind at Babel, ventured (it is said), to 'commit themselves by ships upon the sea,' to search out the unknown corners of the world, and thus found out a western land called Ireland.'—(Dr. Warner.)