We must now follow the fortunes of the Irish language as a spoken tongue, "questo linguaggio difficile e davvero stupendo," as Ascoli calls it,[1] which after imposing itself upon both Dane and Norman, was brought face to face as early as the fourteenth century with its great competitor English, before which, despite its early victory in the contest, it has at last nearly but not quite gone down, after an unremitting struggle of nearly five centuries.
As early as the year 1360, the English appear to have taken the alarm at the inroads which the Irish language—at that time a much more highly-cultured form of speech than their own—had made upon the colonists, and we find King Edward issuing orders to the Sheriff of the Cross and Seneschal of the Liberty of Kilkenny in these terms[2]—
"As many of the English nation in the Marches and elsewhere have again become like Irishmen, and refuse to obey our laws and[Pg 609] customs, and hold parliaments after the Irish fashion, and learn to speak the Irish tongue, and send their children among the Irish to be nursed and taught the Irish tongue, so that the people of English race have for the greater part become Irish; now we order (1) that no Englishman of any state or condition shall ... [under forfeiture of life, limbs, and everything else] follow these Irish customs, laws, and parliaments; (2) that any one of English race shall forfeit English liberty, if after the next feast of St. John the Baptist he shall speak Irish with other Englishmen and meantime every Englishman must learn English and must not have his children at nurse amongst the Irish."
In 1367, the last year of the administration of the Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, a parliament held at Kilkenny passed the famous act that inter-marriage with the Irish should be punished as high treason, and that any man of English race using the Irish language should forfeit all his land and tenements to the Crown, and forbidding also the entertainment of bards, ministrels, and rhymers.
These first attacks upon the language cannot possibly have produced much effect, for we find the English power within a hundred years after their passing, reduced to the lowest point, and there was scarcely an English or Norman noble in Ireland who had not adopted an Irish name, Irish speech, and Irish manners. The De Bourgo had became Mac William, and minor branches of the same stem had become Mac Philpins, Mac Gibbons, and Mac Raymonds; the Birminghams had became Mac Feóiris, the Stauntons Mac Aveeleys, the Nangles Mac Costellos, the Prendergasts Mac Maurices, the De Courcys Mac Patricks, the Bissetts of Antrim Mac Keons, etc.
A hundred years after the Statute of Kilkenny, the English, driven back into the Pale, which then consisted of less than four counties, passed a law in 1465, enjoining all men of Irish names within the Pale to take an English name, "of one towne as Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skryne, Corke, Kinsale; or colour as White, Black, Brown; or art or science as Cooke, Butler," and he and his issue were ordered to use these names[Pg 610] or forfeit all their goods. This, however, the parliament was unable to carry through, none of the great Irish names within or alongside the Pale, Mac Murroughs, O'Tooles, O'Byrnes, O'Mores, O'Ryans, O'Conor Falys, O'Kellys, etc., seem to have been in the least influenced by it.
Next an attempt was made to maintain English in at least the seaports and borough towns, for we find an enactment of the year 1492-93 amongst the Archives of the Urbs Intacta, commanding that in Waterford, "no manner of man, freeman or foreign, of the city or suburb's dwellers, shall emplead nor defend in Irish tongue against any man in the court, but all they that any matters shall have in court to be administered, shall have a man that can speak English to declare his matter, except one party be of the country [i.e., of Irish race] then every such dweller shall be at liberty to speak Irish."[3] Galway followed suit in 1520, and enacted that "no Irish judge or lawyer shall plead in no man's cause nor matter within this our court, for it agreeth not with the king's laws."[4]
How far these petty attempts were successful may be judged from the fact that Captain Ap Harry, a Welsh officer, describing in October, 1535, Lord Butler's march for the recovery of Dungarvan Castle, says, "We were met by his lordship's brother-in-law, Gerald Mac Shane, (Fitzgerald) Lord of the Decies, who, though a very strong man in his country, could speak never a word of English, but made the troops good cheer after the gentilest fashion that could be. All this journey from Dungarvan forth there is none alive that can remember that English man of war was ever in these parts." Still more striking is the statement that in the Dublin parliament of 1541, all the peers except Mac Gillapatric were of Norman or English descent, and yet not one except the Earl of Ormond could understand English.[5] A letter to the English Privy[Pg 611] Council, written in 1569, by Dominicke Linche, of Galway, confirms this. "Even they of the best houses," he writes, "the brothers of the Erle of Clanrickarde, yea and one of his uncles, and he a bysshop, can neither speak nor understand in manner any thinge of their Prince's language, which language by the old Statutes of Galway, every man ought to learn and must speak before he can be admitted to any office within the Corporation."[6]
Nor had the extirpating policy succeeded even in the Pale, for we read in the State Papers that in the county of Kildare in 1534, "there is not one husbandman in effect that speaketh English nor useth any English sort nor manner, and their gentlemen be after the same sort."[7]
The great Earl of Kildare had nearly as many volumes of Irish as he had of English in his library. A catalogue of his books was drawn up in 1518. Amongst the Irish manuscripts were St. Berachán's book,[8] the Speech of Oyncheaghis (?) Cuchuland's Acts, the History of Clone Lyre, etc. Murchadh O'Brien, king of Thomond, promised Henry VIII. as early as 1547, when in London, that he and his heirs should use the English habit and manner, and to their knowledge the English language, and to their power bring up their children in the same.[9] And indeed that family seems to have been always the greatest prop of the English power in the South of Ireland. Thomas Moore, settling in Ireland in 1575, got his lands in King's County on the condition that his sons and servants "should use for the most the English tongue, habit, and government," and make no appeals to the Brehon law. Three years after this, in 1578, we find Lord Chancellor Gerard affirming that all the English, and the most part with delight,[Pg 612] even in Dublin speak Irish, and greatly are spotted in manners, habit, and conditions with Irish stains.[10]
In the Vatican Library my friend Father Hogan found a MS. of about the year 1580 with a memorandum concerning certain Franciscan friars, three of whom spoke Irish only, including the Provincial who preached all over Ireland, five more knew Irish better than English, while five are entered as knowing English better than Irish, none are entered as knowing English only.
In 1585 the Irish chieftains of Hy Many, the O'Kellys country, agreed that "Teige mac William O'Kelly and Conor Oge O'Kelly shall henceforth behave themselves like good subjects and shall bring up their children after the English fashions and in the use of the English tongue."[11] Of course such enforced promises had no effect. We find in the State Papers that at St. Douay in 1600 were sixty young gentlemen, eldest sons of the principal gentlemen of the Pale, and that they all spoke Irish.[12]
In 1608 it was found that the superior of the Irish Jesuits, apparently a Pales-man, Father Christopher Holywood of Artane, near Dublin, could speak no Irish, and a document was sent at once to the General of the Jesuits, pointing out how this destroyed his usefulness in the Irish mission. Care was taken that the same mistake should not be made in appointing his successor, Robert Nugent.[13]
In 1609 we find Richard Conway, a Jesuit, writing that the English in Ireland took care that all [their own] children are taught English and chastise them if they speak their own native tongue[14] (sic). Five or six years later Father Stephen[Pg 613] White writes, "Scarcely one in a thousand of the old Irish know even three words of any tongue except Irish, the modern Irish learn to speak Irish and English."[15]
Nevertheless the cause of the English language cannot have much progressed during the next fifty years, for we find in 1657 a petition presented to the Municipal Council of Dublin to the effect that "whereas by the laws all persons ought to speak and use the English tongue and habit,—contrary whereunto and in open contempt thereof, there is Irish commonly and usually spoken and the Irish habit worn not only in the streets and by such as live in the country and come to this city on market days, but also by and in several families in this city, to the scandalising of the inhabitants and magistrates of this city. And whereas there is much of swearing and cursing used and practised (as in the English tongue too much, so also in the Irish tongue)," etc. Irish, indeed, seems to have been the commonest language in Dublin at this time. James Howel in a letter written August 9, in 1630, says:
"Some curious in the comparisons of tongues, say Irish is a dialect of the ancient British, and the learnedest of that nation in a private discourse I happened to have with him seemed to incline to this opinion, but I can assure your Lordship I found a great multitude of their radical words the same with the Welsh, both for sense and sound. The tone also of both nations is consonant, for when I first walked up and down the Dublin markets methought I was in Wales when I listened to their speech. I found the Irish tone a little more querulous and whining than the British, which I conjecture proceeded from their often being subjugated by the English."
During the Cromwellian wars most of the members of the Confederation of Kilkenny who took the side of the Nuncio Rinuccini knew little if anything of the English language, "qui," says Rinuccini in his MSS., "boni publici zelo flagrarent, plerique linguam quidem Ibernicam quia vernaculam,[Pg 614] bene, sed Anglicam male vel nullo modo callerent." When an order was issued by the Supreme Council for the new oath of association to be translated from English into Irish by each bishop for his diocese, it was found upon inquiry that some of the bishops did not understand a word of English. The Nuncio appears to have been very much impressed by the sweetness of the Irish language, but he had not leisure to devote himself to the study of it. Some of the Italian members of his household, however, became complete masters of it. Numbers of the poor people who had been plundered by the soldiery came to complain to him of their losses, and he notes in his diary that their wail and lamentation in Irish was far more plaintive and expressive than any music of the great masters which he had ever heard among the more favoured nations of the Continent.[16]
Irish was at this time the usual "vehicle of business and of negociation with the natives, even amongst the learned," as we see in Carte's life of the Duke of Ormond, who was born in England in 1607 and educated as a Protestant by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
"The Duke," says Carte, "when about twenty or twenty-four years of age learned the Irish language by conversing with such Irish gentlemen as spoke it in London; he understood it perfectly well and could express himself well enough in familiar conversation, but considered himself not so well qualified as to discourse about serious matters; he afterwards on many occasions found himself at a great loss, as he had to negociate business of national importance with gentlemen who were far less intelligent in the English language than he was in the Irish. On such occasions he would use the same methods which he took with the titular bishop of Clogher, the great favourite of Owen O'Neil, and successor to that general in the command of the Ulster forces. This bishop he brought over to the king's interest, and gained his entire confidence by a conversation carried on between both parties in private. The Duke always spoke in English and the bishop in Irish, as neither understood the language[Pg 615] of the other so as to venture upon communicating his sentiments in it with any degree of accuracy or precision."[17]
The Irish themselves never neglected literature, and whenever their political star was in the ascendant the fortunes of their bards and learned men rose with it. Thus we find Rory O'More, the close friend of Owen Roe O'Neill, and the chief of the O'Mores of Leix, engaged in 1642 in an attempt to re-establish Irish schools and learning, and writing on the 20th of September, 1642, to Father Hugh de Bourgo at Brussels, "If we may, before Flan Mac Egan dies, we will see an Irish school opened, and therefore would wish heartily that these learned and religious fathers in Louvain would come over in haste with their monuments (?) and an Irish and Latin press." The Mac Egan here alluded to was the eminent Brehon and Irish antiquarian who lived at Bally-mac-Egan in the county Tipperary in Lower Ormond, whose imprimatur was considered so valuable that the Four Masters procured for their work his written approbation.[18] Seven years after this letter, the town of Wexford, from which O'More wrote in the interests of humanity and learning, sank in fire and ruin and its inhabitants both men and women were put to the sword in one universal massacre.
There were in the year 1650, forty-seven Jesuit priests in Ireland, according to a memorandum given me by Father Hogan, S.J., of these two—one from Meath the other from Kerry—spoke Irish only: and four from Dublin, all of course of English extraction, spoke English only, while the remaining forty-one spoke both languages. Seven of these bi-linguists were from Dublin and ten from Meath.
[Pg 616]
These instances show that Irish was the usual spoken language of the country, even in Dublin, but there are indications that the ardour with which it had been cultivated and the respect with which its professors had been regarded was dying out. Even as early as 1627 we find one Connla Mac Echagan of West Meath, translating the "Annals of Clonmacnois" into English,[19] and in his dedication to his friend and kinsman Torlogh Mac Cochlan, lord of Delvin, he says that formerly many septs lived in Ireland whose profession it was to chronicle and keep in memory the state of the kingdom, but, he adds, "now as they cannot enjoy that respect and gain by their profession, as heretofore they and their ancestors received, they set nought by the said knowledge, neglect their books, and choose rather to put their children to learn English than their own native language, insomuch that some of them suffer tailors to cut the leaves of the said books (which their ancestors held in great account) and sew them in long pieces to make their measures of, [so] that the posterities are like to fall into more ignorance of many things which happened before their time."
A little later, in 1639, Father Stapleton, in his "Doctrina Christiana," published in Irish and Latin—the first Irish book ever printed in Roman characters—throws the blame for the neglect of Irish literature first upon the Irish antiquarians "who have placed it under difficulties and hard words,[20] writing it in mysterious ways, and in dark difficult language," and secondly upon the upper classes "who bring their native natural language (which is powerful, perfect, honourable, learned, and sharply-exact in itself) into contempt and disrespect, and spend their time cultivating and learning other foreign tongues."[21]
[Pg 617]
Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh, in his book printed at Louvain in 1632, says that Irish is the language of the whole of Hibernia, but there were some differences of pronunciation in the various provinces, and between the learned and the common people, the universal opinion being that the people of Connacht spoke it best, they having both power of expression and propriety of phrase, while the men of Munster had the power of expression without the propriety, and the people of Ulster the propriety without the power of expression. The people of Leinster were considered deficient in both.[22]
O'Molloy in his "Lochrann na gCreidmheach," published in 1675, says that "no language is well understood by the common people of the island except Irish alone."[23] The students of the Irish College at Rome were at this time bound by rule to speak Irish, and an Irish book was to be read in the[Pg 618] refectory during dinner and supper,[24] and all candidates for the priesthood were directed by the Synod of Tuam, in 1660, to learn to read and write Irish well.
Sir William Petty, writing in 1672, has an interesting passage on the people of Wexford and of Fingal: "The language of Ireland is like that of the North of Scotland, in many things like the Welsh and Manques, but in Ireland the Fingallians" [the dwellers along the coast some miles north of Dublin] "speak neither English, Irish, nor Welsh, and the people about Wexford, though they speak in a language differing from English, Welsh, and Irish, yet it is not the same with that of the Fingallians near Dublin. Both these sorts of people are honest and laborious members of the kingdom." Petty's strictures upon the Irish language, of which he was utterly ignorant, and which he ludicrously asserts "to have few words," need not here be noticed. He appears to show, however, that the Irish had already begun to borrow some words from English, and expressed many of the "names of artificial things" in "the language of their conquerors by altering the termination and language only."
It need hardly be said that once the English Government got the upper hand in the seventeenth century, and placed bishops and clergy of its own in the sees and dioceses throughout Ireland, they made it a kind of understood bargain with their nominees that they should have no dealings and make no terms with the national Irish language. Bedell, who was an Englishman and had been created an Irish bishop, neglected this unwritten compact far enough to learn Irish himself and to translate, with the help of a couple of Irishmen, the Bible into Irish, and he also circulated a catechism in[Pg 619] English and Irish amongst the natives. He reaped his reward in the undying gratitude of the Irish and the equally bitter animosity of his own colleagues. Ussher, then primate, in answer to a pathetic letter of Bedell's asking what were the charges against him, said in his reply, "the course which you took with the Papists was generally cried out against, neither do I remember in all my life that anything was done here by any of us, at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense, or by which the adversaries were more confirmed in their superstitions and idolatry, whereas I wish you had advised with your brethren before you would aventure to pull down that which they have been so long a building,"[25] meaning the discrediting and destruction of the Irish language. The Irish, however, did not forget the efforts Bedell had made in behalf of their tongue, for, having taken him prisoner in the war of 1648, they treated him with every courtesy in their power, and when he died their troops fired a volley over his grave, crying out, Requiescat ultimus Anglorum, while a priest who was present was heard to exclaim with fervour, "Sit anima mea cum Bedelo."
Indeed, the attitude adopted by the Government and the bishops who were its loyal henchmen, placed the defenders of the Established Church in a very awkward and embarrassing position. They wanted to make Protestants of the people, but they could not talk to them nor preach to them. The only possible course for the bishops to pursue, supposing them to have been in earnest, and to have been ecclesiastics and not Government place-men, would have been to appoint Irish-speaking clergy under them, a thing which with scarcely an exception they utterly and obstinately refused to do. So that for a hundred and fifty years the native inhabitants of Ireland were obliged to pay a tenth of their produce to a foreign clergy whom they could not understand and who never troubled themselves to understand them. How gentlemen[Pg 620] and scholars like Ussher could take up the position they did, is marvellous. He declares with one breath that "the religion of the Papists is superstitious and idolatrous, their faith and doctrines erroneous and heretical, their church in respect of both apostatical, to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion and profess their faith and doctrine is a grievous sin,"[26] and with the next breath he tells Bedell when he circulated books in the Irish language meant to convert these same Papists, that nothing was ever done "at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense." This can only be accounted for, so far as I can see, by strong social prejudice and race hatred. The desire to see the Irish and their language crushed and in extremis was stronger than the desire to make Protestants of them, and this feeling continued for at least a hundred and fifty years.[27] Even so late as the latter half of the eighteenth century we find Dr. Woodward, Protestant bishop of Cloyne, stating that "the difference of language is a very general (and where it obtains an insurmountable) object to any intercourse with the people," on the part of the Protestant clergy, but, he adds coolly, "if it be asked why the clergy do not learn the Irish language, I answer that it should be the object of Government rather to take measures to bring it into entire disuse,"[28] one of the most cynical avowals I can remember on the part of an Irish prelate as to what he was there for—not for the spiritual good of the people who paid him tithes,[Pg 621] but as the official tool of the Government to crush their nationality.
Even Dean Swift, so clear-sighted a politician where Ireland's financial wrongs were concerned, was in his policy towards the people's language quite at one with men like Ussher and Woodward. Yet he knew perfectly well that over three-fourths of the island he and his confrères were, so far as polemical arguments or conversion went, powerless either for good or evil. He was, like the other Protestant dignitaries of his day, a declared enemy of the Gaelic speech, which he considered prevented "the Irish from being tamed," and at one time he said he had a scheme by which their language "might easily be abolished and become a dead one in half an age, with little expense and less trouble." In another place he says, "it would be a noble achievement to abolish the Irish language in the kingdom, so far at least as to oblige all the natives to speak only English on every occasion of business, in shops, markets, fairs, and other places of dealing: yet I am wholly deceived if this might not be effectually done in less than half an age and at a very trifling expense; for such I look upon a tax to be, of only six thousand pounds to accomplish so great a work." Whatever the Dean's plan was, he did not further enlighten the public upon it, and the scheme appears to have died with him.
The absorbing power of Irish nationality continued so strong all through the seventeenth century that according to Prendergast many of the children of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers who had settled in Ireland could not speak a word of English.[29] It was the same all over the country. In 1760 Irish was so universally spoken in the regiments of the Irish Brigade that Dick Hennessy, Edmund Burke's cousin, learnt[Pg 622] it on foreign service.[30] Still later, during the Peninsular War, the English officers in one of the Highland regiments attempted to abolish the speaking of Gaelic at the mess table, but the Gaelic-speaking officers completely outvoted them. Irish was spoken at this time by all the Milesian families of high rank, except when they wished to deliberately Anglicise themselves. Michael Kelly, the musical composer and vocalist, who was born in Dublin in 1764, tells us in his "Reminiscences:"[31]—
"I procured an audience of the Emperor of Germany at Schoenbrunn, and found him with a half-dozen of general officers, among whom were Generals O'Donnell and Kavanagh, my gallant countrymen. The latter [he was from Borris in the Queen's County] said something to me in Irish which I did not understand, consequently made him no answer. The Emperor turned quickly on me and said, 'What! O'Kelly, don't you speak the language of your own country?' I replied, 'Please, your Majesty, none but the lower orders of the Irish people speak Irish.' The Emperor laughed loudly. The impropriety of the remark made before two Milesian Generals flashed into my mind in an instant, and I could have bitten off my tongue. They luckily did not, or pretended not to hear."
It is from the middle of the eighteenth century onward that the Irish language begins to die out. I doubt whether before that period any Milesian family either in Ireland or the Scotch Highlands spoke English in its own home or to its own children.
I have been at much pains to trace the decay of the language, and the extent to which it has been spoken at various periods from that day to this, and have consulted all the volumes of travellers and statisticians upon which I have been able to lay hands. The result, however, has not been very satisfactory so far as information goes. It is simply amazing that most Irish and many English writers, who have had to deal with Ireland from that day to this, have in their sketchy and[Pg 623] generally unreliable accounts of the island, its people, and its social conditions, simply ignored the fact that any other language than English was spoken in it at all. Perhaps the most trustworthy accounts of the anomalous condition of the Irish-speaking race in their own island are by foreigners who have recorded what they saw without prejudice one way or the other, whereas one cannot help thinking that English and Irish writers who, while going over the same ground, have yet absolutely ignored[32] all allusion to the question of language, did so because they found it a difficult and awkward question to deal with.
The first authorities I know of who speak of Irish as dying out are Dr. Samuel Madden, who, writing in 1738, states that not one in twenty was ignorant of English, and Harris, who, in his description of the county Down six years later, says that Irish prevailed only amongst the poorer Catholics. Both these statements, however, are preposterously exaggerated. In the very year that Madden wrote died O'Neill of Clanaboy, one of the best-known and most influential men of the county Down, and I found in the Belfast Museum the Irish manuscript of the funeral oration pronounced over his body,[33] and any O'Neill would probably at that period have turned in his grave had his funeral discourse been spoken in English.
Madden's statement that in 1738 nineteenth-twentieths of the population knew English is an incredible one and so utterly disproved by all the other evidence, that it is astonishing that so sound and careful a historian as Mr. Lecky should have accepted it as substantially true. The evidence upon the other side is overwhelming. Forty-seven years after Madden wrote this the German, Küttner, travelling through Ireland, wrote[Pg 624] a series of letters in which he distinctly says that he found the common people either did not understand English at all or understood it imperfectly.[34]
More than two generations had passed away after Madden's statement that nineteen-twentieths of the population knew English, when we find a Scotchman, Daniel Dewar, in a book entitled "Observations on the Character, Customs and Superstitions of the Irish," writing thus in 1812:—
"The number of people who speak this language [Irish] is much greater than is generally supposed. It is spoken throughout the province of Connaught by all the lower orders, a great part of whom scarcely understand any English, and some of those who do, understand it only so as to conduct business. They are incapable of receiving moral or religious instruction through its medium. The Irish is spoken very generally through the other three provinces except amongst the descendants of the Scotch in the north. It cannot be supposed that calculations on this subject should be perfectly accurate, but it has been concluded on good grounds that there are about two millions of people in Ireland [out of about six millions] who are incapable of understanding a continued discourse in English."
"I have always found," says Dewar, with much shrewdness, "that in places where gentlemen hostile to this tongue assured me there was not a word of it spoken, in these very districts I heard very little English." He gives an amusing account of the various contradictory objections that he found at that time urged against it.
"Some of the Anglo-Hibernians at that time (1808) strongly maintained that this dialect is so barbarous that it cannot answer the purpose of instruction, others that it would awaken the enthusiasm of the Wild Irish (as they call them) to make any attempt of this kind, and consequently that it might prove dangerous to the Government, and others, that they had no desire to be taught in Irish, and that it would be useless to send teachers among them for this purpose."
[Pg 625]
Dutton, in his statistical history of the county Clare, published in 1808, says that almost all the gentlemen of that county spoke Irish with the country people, but he adds, "scarcely one of their sons is able to hold a conversation in this language. The children of almost all those who cannot speak English are proud of being spoken to in English and answering in the same, even although you may question them in Irish. No Irish is spoken in any of the schools, and the peasants are anxious to send their children to them to learn English." This apparently does not refer to the hedge schools of the natives, but to the charter and other English schools. "I think the diversity of language and not the diversity of religion," writes Grattan, in 1811, "constitutes a diversity of people. I should be very sorry that the Irish language should be forgotten, but glad that the English language should be generally understood."[35] This seems to have been also the position taken up by his great rival Flood, who, when dying, left some ￡50,000 to Trinity College for the cultivation of the Irish language. Trinity College, however, never secured the money, and its so-called Irish professorship, lately established, in the fifties, is only an adjunct of its Divinity School, and paid and practically controlled, not by the college, nor by people in the least interested in the cultivation of Celtic literature, but by a society for the conversion of Irish Papists through the medium of their own language.
In 1825, that is eighty-seven years after Madden's statement that nineteen-twentieths of the population knew English, the Commissioners of Education in Ireland, in their first report laid before Parliament, state "it has been estimated that the number of Irish who employ the ancient language of the country exclusively is not less than 500,000, and that at least a million more, although they have some understanding of English and can employ it for the ordinary purposes of traffic, make use[Pg 626] of their [own] tongue on all other occasions as the natural vehicle of their thoughts."
Lappenberg, a German who travelled in Ireland, reckoned that out of a population of seven millions of inhabitants in 1835, four milli............