violent disruptions threatened every phase of
learning. However, the old impulse of the sixth century still lived;
and we find in the tenth, Cormac, Bishop of Cashel, first among a
redoubtable band of men of letters and men of affairs who strove
successfully to maintain the Irish spirit. Cormac's 'Glossary' is the
oldest book of its kind, and invaluable as a monument; and the reputed
poems of Gorm'ly, his betrothed bride, whom he never married, and
whose tale is a sad and strange one, form in their different ways an
extremely characteristic expression of the Irish literature of the
time.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the older Irish romances
multiplied themselves and begat new ones in the most astonishing way.
'The Book of Leinster' mentions one hundred and eighty-one tales, duly
classified: Love-tales, Battle-tales, Tales of Travel, Forays, Feasts,
Visions, Tragedies, etc. What we have called the doctors of literature
devoted themselves henceforth more to prose than to poetry, and poetry
fell more and more into the hands of those who wrote not for the elect
but for the people.

There was no new development of Irish poetry, such as there was of
Welsh poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The bardic
schools, which did so much for Irish poetry from the sixth century to
the seventeenth, insisted upon its conventions to a degree that was
excessive. Geoffrey Keating, who carried on his great work at the same
time as the Four Masters, in the first half of the seventeenth
century, and who was a poet as well as a historian, still used the
bardic prosody, and wrote some delightful poems by its rules; but he
lent his influence to aid the new liberty in prose and verse that
Irish literature was learning. Keating's name is of first-rate
importance in its record, for this very reason. He was the first
really to conceive of Irish literature as a literature for the people,
and not only for the elect. He was the first to do this; and partly
because he did it, he was the last great landmark in the larger Gaelic
literature of Ireland. His 'History of Ireland,' the result of an
enforced retirement from preaching, was, says Dr. Hyde, "the most
popular book ever written in Irish." He marks too the transition, as
we pointed out, from the old bardic tradition in Irish poetry. After
his coming the bards threw away their superfluous prosody and wrote
for the people, and became poets indeed, instead of the most ingen