It is a work of very considerable merit, an imitation in style and manner of Le Sage, but original in its matter. It is published in six volumes 8vo.
William Newman.
[William Coombe, Esq., the memorable author of The Diaboliad, and The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque.]
Replies.
STONE PILLAR WORSHIP AND IDOL WORSHIP.
(Vol. v., p. 121.; Vol. vii., p. 383.)
Stone Pillar Worship.—Sir J. E. Tennent inquires whether any traces of this worship are to be found in Ireland, and refers to a letter from a correspondent of Lord Roden's, which states that the peasantry of the island of Inniskea, off the coast of Mayo, hold in reverence a stone idol called Neevougi. This word I cannot find in my Irish dictionary, but it is evidently a diminutive, formed from the word Eevan (Iomhaigh), image, or idol: and it is remarkable that the scriptural Hebrew term for idol is identical with the Irish, or nearly so—אָוֶנ (Eevan), derived from a root signifying negation, and applied to the vanity of idols, and to the idols themselves.
I saw at Kenmare, in the county of Kerry, in the summer of 1847, a water-worn fragment of clay slate, bearing a rude likeness to the human form, which the peasantry called Eevan. Its original location was in or near the old graveyard of Kilmakillogue, and it was regarded with reverence as the image of some saint in "the ould auncient times," as an "ould auncient" native of Tuosist (the lonely place) informed me. In the same immediate neighbourhood is a gullaune (gallán), or stone pillar, at which the peasantry used "to give rounds;" also the curious small lakes or tarns, on which the islands were said to move on July 8, St. Quinlan's [Kilian?] Day. (See Smith's History of Kerry.)
However, such superstitious usages are fast falling into desuetude; and, whatever may have been the early history of Eevan, it is a sufficient proof of no vestige of stone pillar worship remaining in Tuosist, that, to gratify the whim of a young gentleman, some peasants from the neighbourhood removed this stone fragment by boat to Kenmare the spring of 1846, where it now lies, perched on the summit of a limestone rock in the grounds of the nursery-house.