Zacynthus.—"A small island to the south of Cephalonia, (ce fal ia; i. e. the fruitful plains country.) The Greeks say the island was named from a companion of Hercules, who, dying from the bite of a serpent, was buried there. It was so called, because a strong current is there first felt by the mariner coming from the east, za cing thus, current, strong, first."
We really find some difficulty in believing that it is not Swift's Essay on the Antiquity of the English Language that we have before us.
"My present attempt is to assert the antiquity of our English tongue, which, as I shall undertake to prove by invincible arguments, hath varied very little for these two thousand six hundred and thirty-four years past. And my proof shall be drawn from etymology, wherein I shall use my matter much better than Skinner, Verstegan, Cambden, and many other superficial pretenders have done; for I will put no force upon the words, nor desire any more favour than to allow for the usual accidents of composition, or the avoiding a cacophonia.
"I will begin with the Grecians, among whom the most ancient are the Greek leaders on both sides at the siege of Troy. For it is plain, from Homer, that the Trojans spoke Greek, as well as the Grecians. Of these latter Achilles was the most valiant. This hero was of a restless, unquiet nature, and therefore, as Guy of Warwick was called a Kill-care, and another terrible man a Kill-Devil, so this general was called a Kill-Ease, or destroyer of ease, and at length by corruption Achilles.
"Hector, on the other side, was the bravest among the Trojans. He had destroyed so many of the Greeks by hacking and tearing them, that his soldiers, when they saw him fighting, would cry out, 'Now the enemy will be hackt—now he will be tore.' At last, by putting both words together, the appellation was given to their leader under the name of Hack-tore, and, for the more commodious sounding, Hector.
"The next I shall mention is Andromache, the famous wife of Hector. Her father was a Scottish gentleman of a noble family still subsisting in that ancient kingdom; but being a foreigner in Troy, to which city he led some of his countrymen in the defence of Priam, as Dictys Cretensis learnedly observes, Hector fell in love with his daughter, and the father's name was Andrew Mackay. The young lady was called by the same name, only a little softened to the Greek accent."
And now, and as no Irish antiquary can be well supposed to write a complete book without giving his own theory of the round towers of that country, we come to the chapter on these singular structures, in which, of course, all former enquirers are proved to have been egregiously wrong, and a new theory established on incontrovertible evidence; viz. that the round towers were monuments erected over different incarnations of the god Buddho. As usual, there is the alleged mistake of sound for sense to account for the reason why their common appellation of clogteach, or "bell house," should not truly express their use.
"I shall remark upon a vulgar error which has had great currency among Irish antiquarians, who have asserted that they were called clogteach, 'steeples, belfries.' Bells are of comparatively recent introduction into Ireland, and clock, from which the word has evidently been derived, still more modern. The blunder has arisen from ignorance of the language. I have a memorandum in an Irish MS., that they were called by the people leactaidh, that is, monuments of the dead, the sound of which has been mistaken by those who but imperfectly knew the language. Many writers have been mistaken by this."
The memorandum in the Irish MS. looks very like Bickerstaff's Letter to a Lord. We could wager our crutch against the baton of the Ulster king, that the memorandum is in his own or his scribe's handwriting, and the language in which it is imagined, a variety of that new dialect in which Mr Silk Buckingham declares that his Irish friends converse with the Phœnician aborigines of Mount Atlas. But the proof of the pudding is the eating of it, and it seems that under one of the towers they have found Buddho himself, body and bones, which puts the matter beyond controversy; for if Buddho be buried under the tower, the tower itself must needs be Buddho's monument. At p. 210, (Vol. ii.,) we have a representation of the Indian divinity (how comes it that Buddho is not made an Etruscan?) lying buried in the basement of the tower at a place called Ardmore. There seems to be no question that a skeleton was got in the bottom of this tower, and another in another; and the discoverers of the fact deserve credit for their addition to the slight stock of knowledge that the Irish antiquarians seem to possess of those which are perhaps the most singular monuments in their country; but that the bones are those of a Buddho! really this exceeds our largest estimate of human fatuity.
But for the communications announcing these discoveries, the two volumes would be altogether destitute of a single fact, or even useful hint, bearing on the diversified subjects which their prodigiously ignorant and audacious author has presumed to handle. How far the fact of these skeletons being found in such a situation, may affect the rational investigation of the question, we do not pretend to judge. We would merely observe, that human interments are found under most ecclesiastical foundations, and that their occurrence under the "turres ecclesiasticæ" of Cambrensis, seems at present no more wonderful than their occurrence in the vaults of an ordinary church.