the harvest in England and take shipping
at Drogheda, told me that at that time, fifty years ago, Irish was spoken
by every one round that town. I have met an old man in Wicklow, not twenty
miles from Dublin, whose parents always repeated the Rosary in Irish. My
friend Father O'Growny, who has done and is doing so much for the Irish
language and literature at Maynooth, tells me that there, within twenty
miles of Dublin, are three old people who still speak Irish. O'Curry found
people within seven miles of Dublin city who had never heard English in
their youth at all, except from the car-drivers of the great town. I gave
an old man in the street who begged from me, a penny, only a few days ago,
saying, "_Sin pighin agad_," and when he answered in Irish I asked him
where he was from, and he said from _Newna_ (_n' Eamhain_), _i.e._, Navan.
Last year I was in Canada and out hunting with some Red Indians, and we
spent a night in the last white man's house in the last settlement on the
brink of the primeval forest; and judging from a peculiarly Hibernian
physiognomy that the man was Irish, I addressed him in Gaelic, and to the
intense astonishment both of whites and Indians we entered into a
conversation which none of them understood; and it turned out that he was
from within three miles of Kilkenny, and had been forty years in that
country without forgetting the language he had spoken as a child, and I,
although from the centre of Connacht, understood him perfectly. When my
father was a young boy in the county Leitrim, not far from Longford, he
seldom heard the farm labourers and tenants speak anything but Irish
amongst themselves. So much for Ulster and Leinster, but Connacht and
Munster were until quite recently completely Gaelic. In fact, I may
venture to say, that, up to the beginning of the present century, neither
man, woman, nor child of the Gaelic race, either of high blood or low
blood, existed in Ireland who did not either speak Irish or understand it.
But within the last ninety years we have, with an unparalleled frivolity,
deliberately thrown away our birthright and Anglicised ourselves. None of
the children of those people of whom I have spoken know Irish, and the
race will from henceforth be changed; for as Monsieur Jubainville says of
the influence of Rome upon Gaul, England "has definitely conquered us, she
has even imposed upon us her language, that is to say, the form of our
thoughts during every instant of o