The Irish manuscripts on medicine contain original treatises by native physicians of the 14th and 1,5th centuries, with commentaries on the then known medical authors of Europe and in the east. The Irish translations 'from foreign languages are chiefly versions of mediaeval Latin and continental books—historic, scientific, romantic, and religious. Of original adages and proverbial sentences great numbers exist, of various ages. The privileges enjoyed by the Irish poets under the clan system enabled them to devote themselves to the production of elaborate metrical compositions, many of which possessed high excellence, and elicited the praises of the poet Spenser. During the wars against Elizabeth the bards were energetic in stimulating the chiefs to whom they were attached. The merit of the elegiac poem on the deaths of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrcounell by their bard Mac an Bhaird, who accompanied them in exile (1608 a.n.), attracted the attention of the critical lord Jeffrey, who became acquainted with it through Mangan's English.version in the meter of the original. Among the native writers in Ireland after the establishment of the English dominion, in the reign of James I., was Dr. Geoffrey Keating, compiler of a history of Ireland in the Gaelic lan guage, and author of religious treatises and poems. About the same period historical and hagiographical compilations were made by the O'Clerighs, the most important of which was that styled the Annals of the Kingdom by the Four blasters, extending from the earliest period to 1616 A.D., edited in seven large volum s (Dublin, 1848), with an English version and copious notes, by the late Dr. John O'Donovan, the ablest of Irish scholars. The Gaelic continued to be the language of the native rural population of Ireland during the 17th and 18th centuries, and many religious and romantic pieces were composed in it for popular use. Differing from the English settlers in religious and political sentiments, the native Irish found gratification in satirizing and ridiculing them in the Gaelic language, in which they composed numerous songs in favor of the Stuarts, and denunciatory of the Ilanoverians and their adherents. Members of old
Irish families who attained high distinction in military service on the continent, retained with pride the Gaelic tongue; it was also commonly spoken by the soldiers in the Irish brigades in France, and in the American army during the war of independence. Yam ions attempts were made since the middle of the last century to print Gaelic documents, but the critical knowledge of the language in its archaic forms having fallen into abeyance, such publications proved entirely unsatisfactory, until the subject was taken up about 1830 by government, during the progress of the ordnance survey of Ireland. From this may he said to date the true Irish school of accurate historic and linguistic ]carting, which has since produced many valuable volumes, under the superintends nee of the antiquarian section of the royal Irish academy and the Irish archmological and Celtic society. On the works issued by these two bodies, which for many years have included nearly all the most erudite scholars of Ireland, philological and historic students must now depend, as other publications on these subjects are, with few exceptions, illusory and misleading.
The Irish, in its modern forms, is still spoken commonly by the rural classes and native land-owners in Connaught., Munster, the remote parts of Ulster, the s, of Lcinster, as well as in the islands off the western coast of Ireland. The provincial liar lects vary considerably in words, pronunciation, and idioms. The Irish emigrants have carried their language across the Atlantic, and songs and poems in the Irish language and character occasionally appear in American newspapers. Professorships of the Irish language exist in Trinity college, Dublin; in the Queen's colleges at Belfast, Cork, and Galway; and in the Roman Catholic college at Maynooth. The chief collections of Irish manuscripts are those of the royal Irish academy and Trinity college, Dublin; numbers are also preserved in the British museum, in the Bodleian, and in some private libraries.