A Concise History of Ireland: From the Earliest Times to 1908

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Educational Company, 1924 - Ireland - 335 pages

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Page 237 - I will tell you one Thing further; that if Mr. Wood's Project should take, it will ruin even our Beggars: For when I give a Beggar a Half-penny, it will quench his Thirst, or go a good Way to fill his Belly; but the Twelfth Part of a Halfpenny will do him no more Service than if I should give him three Pins out of my Sleeve.
Page 158 - O'Neill, who had grown corpulent in his prison for want of exercise, was unable to keep pace with the others : and Hugh and the attendant had to help him on at intervals by walking one on each side, while he rested his arms on their shoulders. In this manner they toiled on wearily across the snowy waste through the whole of that Christmas night and the whole of next day without food, hoping to be able to reach Glenmalure without a halt. But they became at last so worn out with fatigue and hunger,...
Page 257 - That as Men and as Irishmen, as Christians and as protestants, we rejoice in the relaxation of the Penal Laws against our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects, and that we conceive the measure to be fraught with the happiest consequences to the union and prosperity of the inhabitants of Ireland.
Page 69 - Brodir had been a Christian man and a mass-deacon by consecration, but he had thrown off his faith, and become God's dastard, and now worshipped heathen fiends, and he was of all men most skilled in sorcery. He had that coat of mail on which no steel would bite. He was both tall and strong, and had such long locks that he tucked them under his belt. His hair was black.
Page 151 - ... ere one year and a half they were brought to such wretchedness, as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them ; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves...
Page 28 - Speaking of another Irish book, Mr. Westwood says : — " I have counted [with a magnifying glass] in a small space scarcely three quarters of an inch in length by less than half an inch in width, in the Book of Armagh, no less than 158 interlacements of a slender ribbon pattern formed of white lines edged with black ones.
Page 151 - The war had made Munster a desert. In the words of the Four Masters : — " The lowing of a cow or the voice of a ploughman could scarcely be heard from Dunqueen in the west of Kerry to Cashel." To what a frightful pass the wretched people had been brought by the constant destruction and spoiling of their crops and cattle, may be gathered from Edmund Spenser's description of what he witnessed with his own eyes :— "Notwithstanding that the same [province of Munster] was a most rich and plentiful...
Page 24 - It is astonishing that in so complex and rapid a movement of the fingers, the musical proportions can be preserved, and that throughout the difficult modulations on their various instruments, the harmony is completed with such a sweet velocity, so unequal an equality, so discordant a concord, as if the chords sounded together fourths or fifths.
Page 271 - It refers to the indictments as found 'for the crime of unlawful cohabitation committed' 'during the time' stated, divided into three periods, according to each indictment For so much of the...
Page 15 - The Brehon code forms a great body of civil, military, and criminal law. It regulates the various ranks of society, from the king down to the slave, and enumerates their several rights and privileges. There are minute rules for the management of property, for the several industries — building, brewing, mills, water-courses, fishing-weirs, bees and honey — for distress or seizure of goods, for tithes, trespass, and evidence. The relations of landlord and tenant, the fees of professional men —...

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