How opposite has been the conduct of the learned Abbé MacGeoghegan as to the origin of this abstruse word! After reviewing in his able work[129] the opinions offered by the several persons who wrote before him upon the question, and none of them giving him satisfaction, he freely acknowledges, when unable to supply the deficiency, that “the derivation of this name is unknown.” He was right; but the spell is at last broken.
As a sequel to this avowal, I must be allowed to quote at full length the extract from Avienus,[130] which has been already referred to—
“Ast hinc, duobus in Sacram—sic Insulam
Dixere prisci—solibus cursus rati est;
Hæc inter undas multum cespitem jacit;
Eamque latè gens Hibernorum colit,
Propinqua rursus insula Albionum patet,”—
that is, two days’ sail will take you thence (from the Sorlings) to the Sacred Island; as so denominated by the men of old. A rich gleby soil distinguishes this favourite of the waters; and the race of the Hibernians cultivate it in its wide extent. Close by, again, is situated the isle of the Albiones.
Without dwelling upon the importance which he attaches to this “Sacred Island,” while he disposes of England in one single line, I ask any person at all conversant with letters, whether it was as a vernacular epithet, or not rather in compliance with his hexameters and the rules of metrical versification, which rendered inconvenient the exhibition of the name itself that the poet paraphrased its meaning, and gave insula sacra as its equivalent?
Is not the country inhabited by the Gauls called Gallia; that occupied by the Britons, Britannia; that possessed by the Indians, India; that peopled by the Germans, Germania; and that tenanted by the Arcadians, Arcadia? Consequently, the land inhabited by the people styled Hibernians must, by universal analogy, be denominated Hibernia. And if this signifies “Sacred Island,” of course “Hibernian” must mean “an inhabitant of the Sacred Island.”
Avienus wrote about the three hundredth year of the Christian era, and cites the authorities whence he derived his information to the following purpose, viz.:—
“Himilco, the Phœnician, has recorded that he has himself traversed the ocean, and with his own eyes and senses verified those facts. From the remote annals of the Phœnicians I copy the same, and present them to you as handed down from antiquity.”
Himilco, be it remarked, flourished six hundred years before the name of Christianity was mentioned in the world; and when his acquaintance with this isle, and that of his countrymen in general, is thus irrefutably premised, we shall be the more ready to do justice to that observation made by Tacitus, when, in his Life of Agricola, talking of Ireland relatively to England, he affirmed that “her coasts and harbours were better known, through commerce and mercantile negotiation,” than those of the latter country.[131]
Why do I introduce this notice here? To show that it was not to the Latins Avienus was indebted for his insight into that term, which we thus pursue. The Romans knew nothing even of the situation of the place that bore it, until their avarice and their rapacity brought their eagles to Britain; and, after effecting the subjugation of that heroic island, it is no small incentive to our vanity to see their historian constrained to confess that the exhibition of a similar project against the liberties of Ireland was more with a view to overawe, than from any hopes of succeeding;[132] while the ignorance which he evinces in another clause of that very sentence, whence the above extract has been quoted,—placing Ireland midway between Spain and England,—is proof incontrovertible of the position which has been assumed.