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424 Book of the Old Edinburgh Club
most important paper in the volume is Mr. W. B. Blaikie's charming
description of Edinburgh at the time of the occupation of Prince Charles.
It is a vivid picture of the city, its people, and their customs in 1745. The
temptation to stray into the many attractive by-paths, by
which such a
subject is surrounded, has been resisted, but no side of life Edinburgh has
been omitted in this entertaining and scholarly contribution to
history.
Other articles in the volume include two valuable papers by Mr. W. Moir
Bryce on the * '
Flodden Wall of Edinburgh and the '
Covenanters' Prison
'
in the Inner Grey-Friars' Yard, Edinburgh ;
'The Cannon-Bail House/
by Mr. Bruce J. Home ; another instalment of Mr. John Geddie's paper
on the *
Sculptured Stones of Edinburgh '
and ; an amusing account of
' An Eighteenth Century Edinburgh Betting Club.' The volume is well
illustrated.
Local historical clubs have many opportunities of doing useful work,
but we have not seen any such publications which have more successfully
fulfilled the true objects of such clubs, than the first and second volumes of
the Old Edinburgh Club.
IRISH NATIONALITY. By ALICE STOPFORD GREEN. Pp. 256. Fcap. 8vo.
Williams & Norgate. 1911. is.
MRS. GREEN'S new volume is full of interest. It sketches the
history of
Irish social life, commerce, literature, art, and politics for the last two
thousand it is
years. Necessarily only an outline of the subject, but here
and there we have brilliant pictures filling
in details.
Writing of Irish art in the first six centuries, Mrs. Green says :
* The
gold and enamel work of the Irish craftsmen has never been surpassed, and
in writing and illumination they went beyond the imperial artists of Constantinople.'
Of their church at the same period, 'there was scarcely a
boundary felt between the divine country and the earthly, so entirely was
the spiritual life commingled with the national.'
*
Of their literature, Mrs. Green writes : Probably in the seventh and
eighth centuries no one in Western Europe spoke Greek who was not Irish
or taught by an Irishman.'
' For the first time also Ireland became known
to Englishmen. Fleets of ships bore students and pilgrims, who forsook
their native land for the sake of divine studies. The Irish most willingly
received them all, supplying to them without charge food and books and
teaching, welcoming them in every school from Derry to Lismore/
'Every English missionary from the seventh to the ninth century had
been trained under Irish teachers or had been for years in Ireland,
enveloped by the ardour of their '
fiery enthusiasm and ; later ' the Irish
clergy still remained unequalled in culture, even in Italy. One of them in
868 was the most learned of the Latinists of all Europe.'
Happiness seemed to lie before the land, but all this fair prospect was
'
ruined by the later work of the English. We may ask whether in the
history of the world there was cast out of any country such genius,
learning, and industry, as the English flung, as it were, into the sea.'
*The great object of the government was to destroy the whole tradition,