The Old Irish World. Green Alice Stopford

shadow of the predominant sharer of all the effort and fortune of his people. In the published Catalogue of the MSS. in the Royal Library at Brussels, he must look for the Irish Annals and historical documents under the one heading Angleterre, without even a sub-heading Irlande. In Switzerland, surrounded by relics of the six hundred and thirteen dependent houses of St. Gall, whence Irish monks restored civilization to that land, he will be told at S. Beatenberg by the guide-books that S. Beatus was British, and by local tradition that he was Scotch. At the shrine of San Pellegrino in the Apennines, he will hear praises of a Scotch king’s son. In Rome he will learn that England was “the Isle of Saints.” Against these ignorances his training in Ireland gives him no protection. Similar fallacies pursue him across the Atlantic. Let him go to America, and Washington Irving will tell him of the mariner whose story was one of the moving causes that led Columbus to enquire of the land beyond the Ocean, and will inform him that this famous St. Brendan was a Scotch monk. Many others he will find ignorant of history, and above all anxious not to identify Ireland with any of her children that have done great things. Mr. Whitelaw Reid will explain to him that the emigrants from Ulster to America, the Ulster-born leaders who fought for American independence in counsel, in convention, and in the field; the “Sons of St. Patrick” who poured out their money and their blood for Washington – that all these were Scotchmen, of no Irish kin or race, whose followers and descendants have manfully rejected the term “Scotch-Irish” because it “confused the race with the accident of birth,” and called themselves “Ulster Scots” to show they had no part or lot with the Irish by blood (Celtic Review, Jan., 1912). He apparently sees in the Presbyterian religion of the “Ulster Scot” some subtle evidence of a nobler and more distinguished origin than the “Scotch Irish,” some guarantee of Low-German or English stock.

      The new school of American Irish, who under the influence of the “Anglo-Saxon” enthusiasm, or with a desire to be on the winning side, lay claim to a “Scotch” descent, ignore the historical meaning of the word “Scot,” or the origin of the name “Scotland.” In vain for them authentic history may tell of the ceaseless wanderings of the Gaelic people across the narrow seas. From Ireland the Scots in early times spread over the Hebrides and western Highlands, and carried their settlements and speech over the Lowlands of the Picts and Britons to the very borders of the little English colony of the Lothians, leaving the western and middle Lowlands the most Celtic region in Scotland. Irish folk settled freely in Scotland until the confiscation of Ulster; as for example when the Monroes and Currys crossed the sea, about 1300, with a number of other noble families who obtained grants of land. Inter-marriage was very frequent at all times. Back to Ireland again came streams of immigrants from the “Scot” or Irish settlements across the water. The mingled race of Celts and Norse from the Hebrides and the Highlands, all alike talking Irish and claiming Irish descent, poured colonies into Ireland without ceasing from 1250 to 1600, forefathers of hundreds of thousands to-day of Irish family. The western and middle Lowlands (along with the Highlands) sent from 1600 the main body of settlers of the Ulster Plantation, chiefly of Picto-Celtic stock; most of the first settlers must have been bi-lingual, speaking not only “Broad Scots” but their native Gaelic, which in 1589 was still the chief language of Galloway. Scots and Irish were the same to Henry VIII., whose servant Alen protested in 1549 against any “liberty” for the Irish, which, he said, was “the only thing that Scots and wild Irish constantly contended for.” The Scots of the Isles were known to Elizabeth as “those Yrishe people,” “the Yrishes”; the “English Scots” whom she employed in her Irish wars were so called from their political faction and Protestant religion, not from any difference of blood from their brethren. In 1630 the scholar Bedell included Irish and Scots in one single group; “and surely it was a work agreeable to the mind of God that the poor Irish, being a very numerous nation, besides the greater half of Scotland, and all those islands called Hebrides, that lie in the Irish Sea, and many of the Orcades also that speak Irish, should be enabled to search the Scriptures.” The old Irish of Ulster in 1641 excepted the Scots from their hostile measures as being of their own race, and this only a generation after the Plantation, when most of the evicted Irish must have been still alive. Jeremy Taylor in 1667 describes the Scots and Irish of north-east Ulster as “populus unius labii and unmingled with others.” Over whole districts, where half the population at least were Presbyterian descendants of Scottish immigrants, the speech of the people even in the eighteenth century was Gaelic. For some fourteen centuries indeed common schools of learning, a common literature, common national festivals, maintained the unbroken tradition of unity of race; it was from Ireland, in an Irish translation, that the Bible reached the Highlands. The kings of Scotland long kept the remembrance of their connexion with the remote generations of the race of Gaedhel Glas. Dr. Norman Moore in his “Medicine in the British Isles,” (149) has preserved a Highland tradition told him by Field-Marshal Sir Patrick Grant whose memory was full of the old Gaelic stories and verses; that at the Scottish coronation of Charles I. ancient Gaelic phrases of installation were used for the last time.