deserves some weightier voice to praise him than the voice of an
unlearned bellettristic trifler like me; he belongs to the race of
the giants in literary research and industry,--a race now almost
extinct. Without a literary education, and impeded too, it appears,
by much trouble of mind and infirmity of body, he has accomplished
such a thorough work of classification and description for the
chaotic mass of Irish literature, that the student has now half his
labour saved, and needs only to use his materials as Eugene O'Curry
hands them to him. It was as a professor in the Catholic University
in Dublin that O'Curry gave the lectures in which he has done the
student this service; it is touching to find that these lectures, a
splendid tribute of devotion to the Celtic cause, had no hearer more
attentive, more sympathising, than a man, himself, too, the champion
of a cause more interesting than prosperous,--one of those causes
which please noble spirits, but do not please destiny, which have
Cato's adherence, but not Heaven's,--Dr. Newman. Eugene O'Curry, in
these lectures of his, taking as his standard the quarto page of Dr.
O'Donovan's edition of the Annals of the Four Masters (and this
printed monument of one branch of Irish literature occupies by
itself, let me say in passing, seven large quarto volumes, containing
4,215 pages of closely printed matter), Eugene O'Curry says, that the
great vellum manuscript books belonging to Trinity College, Dublin,
and to the Royal Irish Academy,--books with fascinating titles, the
Book of the Dun Cow, the Book of Leinster, the Book of Ballymote, the
Speckled Book, the Book of Lecain, the Yellow Book of Lecain,--have,
between them, matter enough to fill 11,400 of these pages; the other
vellum manuscripts in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, have
matter enough to fill 8,200 pages more; and the paper manuscripts of
Trinity College, and the Royal Irish Academy together, would fill, he
says, 30,000 such pages more. The ancient laws of Ireland, the so-