His influence has already been most happy; and as I have enlarged on
a certain failure in criticism of Eugene O'Curry's,--whose business,
after all, was the description and classification of materials rather
than criticism,--let me show, by another example from Eugene O'Curry,
this good influence of Zeuss upon Celtic studies. Eugene O'Curry
wants to establish that compositions of an older date than the
twelfth century existed in Ireland in the twelfth century, and thus
he proceeds. He takes one of the great extant Irish manuscripts, the
Leabhar na h'Uidhre; or, Book of the Dun Cow. The compiler of this
book was, he says, a certain Maelmuiri, a member of the religious
house of Cluainmacnois. This he establishes from a passage in the
manuscript itself: 'This is a trial of his pen here, by Maelmuiri,
son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht.' The date of Maelmuiri he
establishes from a passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, under
the year 1106: 'Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht, was
killed in the middle of the great stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a
party of robbers.' Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow.
This book contains an elegy on the death of St. Columb. Now, even
before 1106, the language of this elegy was so old as to require a
gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss
written between the lines.
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