Celtic Irish Songs and Song-Writers; A Selection. with an Introduction and Memoirs (Paperback)

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: THE CELTIC IRISH SONG-WRITERS, 1600?1870. Biographical And Critical. KEATING. Geoffry Keating is in these days better remembered as an historian than as a poet, though, to do him justice, his poetry is somewhat more readable than his ' History of Ireland.' Both are patriotic; but whereas in the songs transcribed in this volume we discover the usual subjects, the usual tone of lamentation, the usual sorrowful love for the motherland?characteristics fully intelligible and appreciable?in the ' History of Ireland' each page is full of absurd traditions, impossible legends, preposterous chronologies, ridiculous genealogies, ludicrous miracles, extraordinary wars. ' An extravagantly mad performance, ' it has been truly called. Even Keating himself was aware of the incredulity of some of his records, for he naively confesses that he inserts his narrative of the settlement of Ireland, previous to the Flood, ' not with any desire that it should be believed, but only for the sake of order and out of respect to some records that make mention of it.' The ' History' proves, nevertheless, that Keating was a person of exhaustless credulity in matters historical, or quasihistorical, relating to his native land. But in his poetry he is human and rational. His epitaph records that he was ' a poet, a prophet, and a priest, ' from which it would appear that his fame as an historian was left for later ages to discover. Very little is known of his earlier years. It is generally accepted that he was born at Tybrud, or Tubbrid, near Clogheen, in the county Tipperary, sometime about 1570. In his youth he was sent to Spain, and, at the college of Salamanca, studied for the priesthood for twenty-three years. He was, on his return in 1610, appointed priest of his native parish of Tybrud. He was a man..