cruelties which had goaded that noble race to desperate measures. The chief accusation of his adversary against the chiefs of Anglo-Norman descent was that they concurred in the Parliament of 1613 along with the newer English colonists in confiscating the nine counties of Ulster, but so far from denying this, Dr. Lynch hails it as the completion of the conquest commenced four hundred years before. Only it was not so much a conquest as the final reduction of the power of a still earlier race of conquerors. But to do Dr. Lynch justice, he was proud of these earlier invaders the Scoto-Irish. In the year 1664 he addressed a brief and learned letter to Boileau, historian of the University of Paris, who, by an error not uncommon at the time, had confounded the Scoti and Scotia of the ancients with modern Scotland; pointing out his mistake and claiming for Ireland the fame of the scholars of that race and name who first taught in the University of Paris and Court of Charlemagne. In 1667 he wrote a pathetic poem in answer to the question, Why do you not come home to Ireland? peculiarly interesting as showing forth the feelings of an exile, and as the only work in which we see himself. Although addressed to a friend, and without any view of future publication, he notices in the exordium the chronologies of his anonymous works as well as their titles, and thereby enables us to trace and to identify them. It is an apology of a noble-hearted priest for not in his old age encountering the perils of the Irish mission, after having laboured there during thirty years of his prime, and solicitous to avail himself of the leisure given to him in a foreign land by devoting the remainder of his days to the literature of his country. He considers also his life to be in danger from the anger of some person-supposed to be the Governor of Galway, whose father was Sir Charles Coote-to whom his writings had given offence; for Dr. Lynch had denounced in no measured terms the sanguinary deeds of Sir Charles and his accomplices. In 1669 he published, and, like all his other works, in Latin, the life of his uncle Francis Kirwan, Bishop of Killala. In his other works we see the scholar, patriot, and historian; in this we have a zealous Irish priest, sketching, but not with too partial a hand, his own ideas of ecclesiastical virtue, exhibited in the life of a beloved relative, under whose care he had been educated, and who, in every phase of his event. ful life, in persecution as in prosperity, as a bishop and as a priest, had laboured to prove himself worthy of his vocation. His great work "Cambresis Eversus," composed when he was nearly sixty years of age, was republished, with an English translation and notes, by the Rev. Matthew Kelly, of St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, in 1848 for the Irish Celtic Society. In his preface the translator justly states that it has been generally considered one of the most valuable works on the history of Ireland; that, viewed merely as a refutation of Giraldus de Barry, it is on some points unsuccessful; but that its comprehensive plan, embracing a great variety of undigested and accurate information on every period of Irish history, imparts to it a value entirely independent of the controversial character inscribed on its title-page. This Introduction embraces a short account of the life of the author, to which we are indebted for the facts in the present notice. From the manner in which Dr. Lynch's name is introduced into the inquisition held in Galway, he appears to have been dead in 1674. In his poem written seven years before, he declares that, as he was tottering on the brink of the grave, it would not be worth his trouble to go so far as Ireland for a little clay to cover him. From the following epitaph, composed by his friend and fellow-labourer, Dr. Flaherty, it would appear that he died, where his works were published, at St. Maloes. " OCCIDIT ARMORICIS PIUS HEU! LYNCHEUS IN ORIS, OF MICHAEL CLEARY very little is satisfactorily known, and we should, for this reason, consider ourselves absolved from any notice of him, but for the place which he occupies in the history of our Irish literature. This topic, so far as relates to the commencement of the present division of these memoirs, must be regarded as rather belonging to the antiquarian than to the historical biographer. But it is necessary, as briefly as we may, to account for our neglect of the very numerous poets who lived in the earlier half of the 17th century, and whose writings are yet extant. For this there are sufficient reasons: there are no materials for their personal histories, and their writings are not extant in any published form. The great celebrity of a renowned author of unpublished poetry might impose it upon us to give some account of his works; but great indeed must be the importance of the writings to which such a tribute would be excusable here, and whatever may be the collective worth of the bards and historians of the period included in these remarks, there are, individually, few instances which demand the distinction of a memoir. We might, by the help of some very accessible authorities, easily continue in this period the barren list of unknown poets, which helped to fill the vacuity of our previous period; but, on looking very carefully over those materials, we are unable to perceive what purpose would be served by such a waste of our space, already contracting too fast for the important matter yet before us.* In that portion of the introductory observations allotted to the gene • We should here apprize the reader that the seeming disproportion, between the space which we have given to the ecclesiastics and the literary persons belong. ing to this period, is to be explained by the fact, that the most respectable of our writers hold also a prominent rank among our ecclesiastical dignitaries of the same period. ral consideration of Irish literature, we have endeavoured to give some general notices of the character and importance of this unknown but numerous class of writings, which lie concealed, though not inaccessible, in the archives of colleges, and in public and private libraries. The individual whose name affords us occasion for these remarks, was a native of Ulster, and a Franciscan friar. He was early in life known as learned in the antiquities of his country, and as having a critical acquaintance with the Irish tongue. These qualifications recommended him to Mr Hugh Ward as a fit person to collect information for his projected history of the Irish saints, for which purpose he was sent to the Irish college in Louvain. The materials which he collected in the course of fifteen years passed into the hands of Colgan, by the death of Ward. Cleary at the same time collected materials, which he reduced into three volumes of Irish history, of which the letters are mentioned by Ware. He was one of the compilers of the "Annals of Donegal"—a MS. of the greatest authority in the antiquities of Ireland. His last work was a Dictionary of the obsolete words in the Irish Language, published in 1643, the year of his death. COLGAN was a Franciscan in the Irish convent of St Anthony of Padua, in Louvain, where he was professor of divinity. He collected and compiled a well-known work of great authority among antiquarians, and of considerable use in some of the earlier memoirs of this work. His writings were numerous; and all, we believe, on the ecclesias tical antiquities of Ireland. His death, in 1658, prevented the publication of many of them. KEATING, well known as the writer of an antiquarian history of Ireland of great authority for the general fulness with which it preserves the traditionary accounts of the earliest times, though liable to some rather hasty censures for the indiscriminate combination of the probable and improbable into one digested narrative, and in the language of implicit belief. Such a work is, nevertheless, the most certain and authentic record of the ancient belief of the learned and unlearned of the land; and if the facts be not true in themselves, they evidently characterize the mind of a period; while, generally speaking, there is every reason to give credit to the more important parts of the narrative; and, above all, to the genealogical traditions of the ancient families of chiefs and kings. It is by no means a just inference that |