Open [36.0 MB]

LIFE OP CHARLES HALIDAT.
soon added a knowledge of Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, and
Sanscrit. These were the fruits of his own unaided exertions;
for there were not then those many books of instruction, and
accomplished teachers such as are abundant now. But he
made the study of all these tongues only subsidiary to a
perfect knowledge of the original language of his own count rv,
Irish, being possessed of a patriotic
ardour to revive its
In the year 1 808, when he was only twenty,
ancient glory.
he published an Irish grammar under the fictitious signa-
ture of "E. O'C."
In the year 1811 he published anonymously the first Keatinge's
volume of a translation from the Irish of Dr. Jeffry HiiHday, /un.
Keatinge's History of Ireland from the earliest time to the
English invasion, a work written in the first half of the
seventeenth century. He only lived to execute half the
work. A complete translation of Dr. Keatinge's work has
been since executed at New York by the late John O'Mahony,
and published there in 1857, and it is no small testimony
to the merit of William Haliday's work that so complete a
master of Irish as O'Mahony, should have selected it as the
best translation of Keatinge's history.
In this publication William Haliday gave the original
Irish text on one page, and the translation on the other, in
the manner since followed by Dr. John O'Donovan, LL.D.,
in that great work, " The Annals of the Four Masters."
As the mode adopted by William Haliday was then new,
he gives the following account of its adoption.
"
The plan
here adopted," he observes in his
"
preface, has been often
suggested and repeatedly wished for, heretofore, and among
the rest by our late illustrious countryman, Edmund Burke,
who in one of his addresses to General Vallancey, expressed
his ardent wish '
that some Irish historical monuments
should be published as they stand, with a translation in
Latin or English ; for until something of this sort be done,
"
criticism can have no sure anchorage.' "The great Leibnitz,"
I