[477] See p. 332.
[478] An allegory, by the way, which I could explain satisfactorily, were it not that it would detain me.
[479] O Richard of Cirencester, oh! what pleasure it affords me to see the moderns running after the chariot wheels of the monks, whenever they can pick out amongst their lucubrations any stray sentences to support their own fantasies!
[480] “Near the road (at a place called Margan) is an old cross, bearing an inscription, which has been doomed to serve as a bridge for foot passengers over a little rivulet; and in the village are fragments of a most beautiful cross richly decorated with fretwork.”—Cambrensis.
[481] Some copies read Scoto, the meaning, however, is the same; the only difference being that the latter partakes of the modern enunciations of the word, as Scots, instead of Scuits or Scythians.
[482] In the anxiety with which my translation of “Phœnician Ireland” was hurried through the press, it inadvertently escaped me that the Scythians had only touched at Spain. The above will correct the oversight; to which I shall add that, “as for entitling the Spanish-Irish Scots, there wants no authority, the Irish authors having constantly called the Spanish colony Kin-Scuit, or the Scottish nation.”—Lhuydh.
[483] “Every argument of the origin of emigrant nations must, after all, be referred to language.”—Camden.
[484] The derivation of those two terms is not exclusively mine. It is but the repetition of the received interpretation of all men of letters.
[485] “For it is to be thought, that the use of all England was in the raigne of Henry the Second, when Ireland was planted with English, very rude and barbarous, so as if the same should be now used in England by any, it would seem worthy of sharpe correction, and of new lawes for reformation, for it is but even the other day since England grew civill” (Spenser).
[486] The name of Arran was given to this island as expressive of the land of the unfaithful, in opposition to our Iran, or the land of the faithful: both corresponding to the Iran and An-Iran of the Persians.