Ireland
by Emily Lawless (9781459088313)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill PRE-CHRISTIAN IRELAND. Getting out of this earliest and foggiest period, whose only memorials are the stones which still cumber the ground, or those subtler traces of occupation of which philology keeps the key, and pushing aside a long and uncounted crowd of kings, with names as uncertain as their deeds, pushing aside, too, the legends and coming to hard fact, we must picture Ireland still covered for the most part with pathless forests, but here and there cleared and settled after a rude fashion by rough cattle-owning tribes, who herded their own cattle and " lifted" their neighbour's quite in the approved fashion of the Scotch Highlanders up to a century and a half ago. Upon the whole, we may fairly conclude that matters were ameliorating more or less; that the wolves were being killed, the woods cleared?not as yet in the ferocious wholesale fashion of later days?that a little rudimentary agriculture showed perhaps here and there in sheltered places. Sheep and goats grazed then as now over the hills, and herds of cattle began to cover the Lowlands. The men, too, were possibly beginning to grow a trifle less like two-legged beasts of prey, SLAVERY. 23 though still rough as the very wolves they hunted; bare-legged, wild-eyed hunter-herdsmen with?who can doubt it flocks of children trooping vociferously at their heels. Of the daily life, habits, dress, religion of these people?the direct ancestors of four-fifths of the present inhabitants of Ireland?we know unfortunately exceedingly little. It is not even certain, whether human sacrifices did or did not form?as they certainly did in Celtic Britain?part of that religion, though there is some evidence that it did, in which case prisoners taken in battle, or slaves, were probably the victims. That a consid...

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