say that I have heard five survive in an English dress where the language has been lost. And if this is the case with aphorisms and sayings, much more does it hold good of the songs, the legends, and the heroic cycle of stories. I believe, for example, that the character of the people is no longer the same in the east of the county Leitrim and in the county Longford, where Irish died out a generation or two ago. There Dermod of the Love Spot is unknown, Finn Mac Cool is barely remembered as a ‘giant,’ Ossian is never heard of, the ancient memories have ceased to cling to the various objects of nature; the halo of romance, the exquisite and dreamy film which hangs over the Mayo mountains has been blown away by the blast of the most realistic materialism; and the people, when they gather into one another's houses in the evening for a cailee (céiliḋe—a night-visit), can talk of nothing but the latest scandal, or the price Tim Rooney got for his calf, or the calving of Paddy Sweeny's cow. . . .
“I do not believe in resuscitating a great national language by twopenny-halfpenny bounties. If the Irish people are resolved to let the national language die, by all means let them. I believe the instinct of a nation is often juster than that of any individual. But this, at least, no one can deny, that hitherto the Irish nation has had no choice in the matter. What between the Anglo-Irish gentry, who came upon us in a flood after the confiscations of 1648, and again after 1691, whose great object it was to stamp out both the language and institutions of the nation, with their bards and shanachies, ollamhs and professors; what with the brutalized, sensual, unsympathetic gentry of the last century, the racing, blustering, drunken squireens, who usurped the places of the O'Connors, the O'Briens, the O'Donnells, the O'Cahans, the MacCarthys, our old and truly cultured nobility, who
