“Then you really suppose,” said I, smiling incredulously, “we are indebted to you for the name of our country?”
“I know,” said the priest, returning my smile, “the fallacies in general of all etymologists, but the only part of your island anciently called by any name that bore the least affinity to _Albion_, was _Scotland_, then called _Albin_, a word of _Irish_ etymology, _Albin_ signifying mountainous, from Alb, a mountain.”
“But, my dear friend,” I replied, “admitting the great antiquity of your country, allowing it to be early inhabited by a lettered and civilized people, and that it was the _Nido paterno_ of western literature when the rest of Europe was involved in darkness; how is it that so few monuments of your ancient learning and genius remain? Where are your manuscripts, your records, your annals, stamped with the seal of antiquity to be found?”
“Manuscripts, annals, and records are not the treasures of a colonized or conquered country,” said the priest; “it is always the policy of the conqueror, or the invader, to destroy those mementi of ancient national splendour which keep alive the spirit of the conquered or the invaded; * the dispersion at various periods ** of many of the most illustrious Irish families into foreign countries, has assisted the depredations of time and policy, in the plunder of her literary treasures; many of them are now mouldering in public and private libraries on the Continent, whither their possessors conveyed them from the destruction which civil war carries with it, and many of them (even so far back as Elizabeth’s day) were conveyed to Denmark. The Danish monarch applied to the English court for some learned men to translate them, and one _Donald O’Daly_, a person eminently qualified for the task, was actually engaged to perform it, until the illiberality of the English court prevented the intention on the poor plea of its prejudicing the English interest.”
* Sir George Carevy, in the reign of Elizabeth, was accused of bribing the family historian of the McCarthies to convey to him some curious MSS. “But what,” says the author of the Analect, “Carevy did in one province [Munster] Henry Sidney, and his predecessors did all over the kingdom, being charged to collect all the manuscripts they could, that they might effectually destroy every vestige of antiquity and letters throughout the Kingdom.” And St. Patrick, in his apostolic zeal, committed to the flames several hundred druidical volumes.