The only more recent work on the subject is a volume written by Edward O'Reilly, for the Iberno-Celtic Society, on the Native Irish Poets: an interesting work, and containing morsels invaluable to a picturesque historian.
By the way, we may hope that the studies for this prize history will be fruitful for historical ballads.
Too many of the original works can only be bought at an expense beyond the means of most of those likely to compete. For instance, Harris's "Ware," "Fynes Moryson," and "The State Papers of Henry the Eighth," are very dear. The works of the Archæological Society can only be got by a member. The price of O'Connor's "Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores Veteres" is eighteen guineas; and yet, in it alone the annals of Tigernach, Boyle, Innisfallen, and the early part of the "Four Masters" are to be found. The great majority of the books, however, are tolerably cheap; some of the dearer books might be got by combination among several persons, and afterwards given to the Repeal Reading-rooms.
However, persons resident in, or able to visit Dublin, Cork, or Belfast, can study all, even the scarcest of these works, without any real difficulty.
As to the qualities of such a history, they have been concisely enough intimated by the Committee.
It is to be A History. One of the most absurd pieces of cant going is that against history, because it is full of wars, and kings, and usurpers, and mobs. History describes, and is meant to describe, forces, not proprieties—the mights, the acted realities of men, bad and good—their historical importance depending on their mightiness, not their holiness. Let us by all means have, then, a "graphic" narrative of what was, not a set of moral disquisitions on what ought to have been.
Yet the man who would keep chronicling the dry events would miss writing a history. He must fathom the social condition of the peasantry, the townsmen, the middle-classes, the nobles, and the clergy (Christian or Pagan), in each period—how they fed, dressed, armed, and housed themselves. He must exhibit the nature of the government, the manners, the administration of law, the state of useful and fine arts, of commerce, of foreign relations. He must let us see the decay and rise of great principles and conditions—till we look on a tottering sovereignty, a rising creed, an incipient war, as distinctly as, by turning to the highway, we can see the old man, the vigorous youth, or the infant child. He must paint—the council robed in its hall—the priest in his temple—the conspirator—the outlaw—the judge—the general—the martyr. The arms must clash and shine with genuine, not romantic, likeness; and the brigades or clans join battle, or divide in flight, before the reader's thought. Above all, a historian should be able to seize on character, not vaguely eulogising nor cursing; but feeling and expressing the pressure of a great mind on his time, and on after-times.
Such things may be done partly in disquisitions, as in Michelet's "France"; but they must now be done in narrative; and nowhere, not even in Livy, is there a finer specimen of how all these things may be done by narrative than in Augustine Thierry's "Norman Conquest" and "Merovingian Scenes." The only danger to be avoided in dealing with so long a period in Thierry's way is the continuing to attach importance to a once great influence, when it has sunk to be an exceptive power. He who thinks it possible to dash off a profoundly coloured and shaded narrative like this of Thierry's will find himself bitterly wrong. Even a great philosophical view may much more easily be extemporised than this lasting and finished image of past times.
The greatest vice in such a work would be bigotry—bigotry of race or creed. We know a descendant of a great Milesian family who supports the Union, because he thinks the descendants of the Anglo-Irish—his ancestors' foes—would mainly rule Ireland, were she independent. The opposite rage against the older races is still more usual. A religious bigot is altogether unfit, incurably unfit, for such a task; and the writer of such an Irish history must feel a love for all sects, a philosophical eye to the merits and demerits of all, and a solemn and haughty impartiality in speaking of all.
Need we say that a history, wherein glowing oratory appeared in place of historical painting, bold assertion instead of justified portraiture, flattery to the living instead of justice to the dead, clever plunder of other compilers instead of original research, or a cramped and scholastic instead of an idiomatic, "clear and graphic" style, would deserve rejection, and would, we cannot doubt, obtain it.