216
to appreciate Shakespeare and Milton, to study Wordsworth and Tennyson, then, indeed, we might let it go without any very acute pang. But this is not the case. We lay aside a language which for all ordinary purposes of everyday life is more pointed and forcible than any with which I am acquainted, and we replace it by another which we learn badly, and speak with an atrocious accent, interlarding it with barbarisms and vulgarity.
“The language of the western Gael is the language best suited to his surroundings; it corresponds best to his topography, his nomenclature, his organs of speech, and the use of it guarantees the remembrance of his own weird and beautiful traditions. Around the blazing bog-fire, of a winter's night, Dermod O’Duibhne of the Love Spot, Finn with his coat of hairy skin, Conán the Thersites of the Fenians, the old blind giant Essheen (Ossian), the speckled bull with the movable horn, the enchanted cat of Rathcroghan, and all the other wild and poetic offspring of the bardic imagination pass in review before us. Every hill, every lios, every crag, and gnarled tree, and lonely valley has its own strange and graceful legend attached to it, the product of the Hibernian Celt in its truest and purest type, not to be improved on by change, and of infinite worth in moulding the race type, of immeasurable value in forming its character. But with the loss of the Irish language all this is lost.
“The native Irish deal in sententious proverbs perhaps more than any other nation in Europe; their repertoire of apothegms is enormous. It is a characteristic which is lost with their change of language, and, consequently, has not been observed or noticed. Let their language die, and not one of their proverbs will remain. Of the hundreds of stereotyped sayings and acute aphorisms which I have heard aptly introduced upon occasions where Irish was spoken, I cannot
