In this devastating course, the Round Towers, as the temples of their figurative veneration, were particularly obnoxious; and, accordingly, we may be assured, that it was owing to the durability of those edifices, and not to the clemency of the assailants, that any one of them has been able to survive the hurricane.
Who, you will ask, were those destroyers? They were the Pish-de-danaans. And so energetically did they prosecute their extinguishing plan, aided, besides, by the antiquity of its remote occurrence, that all writers upon that country, before the compilers of the Dabistan, have set them down as its first dynasty, making the Kaianians, the Askanians, and the Sassanians, their successors.
Here I am obliged, in compliance with the justice of my subject, to expose an error of a gentleman, whom I would rather have overlooked.
“The Tuatha-dadan of the Irish,” says Vallancey, “are the Pish-dadan of the Persians”; which he pretends to prove as follows:—“First, then,” says he, “Tuath and Pish are synonymous in the Chaldee, and both signify mystery, sorcery, prophets, etc.; they are both of the same signification in the Irish; therefore by Pish-dadan and Tuatha-dadan, I understand the Dadanites, descended of Dedan, who had studied the necromantic art, which sprang from the Chesdim, or Chaldeans.”
Of a piece with this was his assertion that Nuagha Airgiodlamh of the Irish, was Zerdust of the Persians! And wherefore, think you, reader? Because, forsooth, Airgiodlamh signifies silver-hand, and Zerdust, gold-hand! Yes, but he made out another analogy, and it is worth while to hear it, viz. that Nuagha had his hand cut off by a Fir-Bolg general; while Zerdust’s life was taken away by a Turanian chieftain!!!
This is but an item in that great ocean of incertitude in which that enterprising etymologist had, unfortunately, been swallowed up. Having perceived by the perusal of the manuscripts of our country, that there must have been a time when it basked in the sunshine of literary superiority; yet unable tangibly to grapple with it, having no clue into the origin of its sacred repute, or the collateral particulars of its date, nature, or promoters, he was tossed about by the ferment of a parturient imagination, without the saving ballast of a discriminating faculty.
The General’s work, accordingly, is one which must be read with great reserve; not because that it does not offer many valuable hints, but because that its plan is so crude, and its matter so ill-digested,—the same thing being contradicted in one place, which was affirmed in another, or else repeated interminably, without regard to method or to style,—that when you have waded through the whole, you feel you have derived from it no other benefit than that of whetting your avidity for a correct insight into those subjects, of which the author, you imagine, must have had some idea, but which also, it is evident, however indefatigable he was in the attempt, he had not, himself, the power to penetrate.
The great praise, therefore, which I would award to this writer, is that, with one leg almost in the grave, he sat down, in the enthusiasm of a youthful aspirant, to master the difficulties of the Irish tongue, which, mutilated though it be, and begrimed by disuse, he knew was, notwithstanding, the only sure inlet to the genius of the people, as well as to the arcana of their antiquities, the most precious, as they are, and fruitful, of any country on the surface of the globe.
But though his perseverance had rendered him the best Irishian of his age, and of many ages before him, yet has he committed innumerable blunders, even in the exposition of the most simple words; and the question now in point will verify this declaration, with as much exactitude as any other that could be adduced.
Tuath, then, and pish are by no means synonymous; neither do they signify mystery or prophets, except in a secondary light. In their original acceptation, they are the antipodes of each other, as much as male is to female, and as relative is to correlative.[268]