We are living in brighter days than the Four Masters lived in. Now there is everything to encourage students to pursue the study of Irish literature and of Irish history. A wider and more general interest is being awakened in all that concerns the antiquities of Ireland. Continental scholars eagerly scan the Celtic glosses of our ancient manuscripts, and our old romantic tales are translated and read with the greatest interest. Not so in the time of the Masters. Their lot was cast on dark and evil days. They had no motive to inspire them but a lofty sense of duty, and the hope of a supernal reward:—
"Not of fame and not of fortune
Do these eager pensmen dream;
Darkness shrouds the hills of Banba,
Sorrow sits by every stream;
One by one the lights that led her,
Hour by hour were quenched in gloom,
But the patient sad Four Masters
Toil on in their lonely room—
Duty thus defying doom.”
Ail that time Donegal itself was a vivid picture of Erin’s
and castle and abbey were despoiled and dismantled. The six counties of the North were confiscated
and were just then in process
after the flight of the Earls
of sub-division and occupation by the stranger.
The hungry
Scot and greedy Saxon were settling down in every fair
valley of green Tirconnell, and the remnant of its owners
were being driven to the bogs and mountains. The bawns
of the newcomers were rising up in hated strength by all
The gallant chiefs of the North, who
their pleasant waters.
at Kinsale had made their last vain stand for Irish
independence, were now all dead some from the poisoned
cup of hired assassins, and some from broken hearts. At
the very time that the Masters were writing, Strafford was
woe
school
—
in Dublin for further despoiling the native yet escaped the sword and the halter. The present hour was dark, and the future was darker still
maturing his plans chiefs
who had
“ Each morrow brought sorrow and shadows of dread, And the rest that seemed best was the rest of the dead.”
And yet it was in the deepening gloom of those darkest days, when the religion, the patriotism, and the learning of the Gael were all proscribed together, that the Masters sat down in that ruined Convent of Donegal the fit emblem of
—
