wise well attested. The British Brigantes were probably descendants of the Irish Brigantes, as the Scots of Britain were certainly descended from those of Ireland. Tacitus, in the first age of the Christian era, has thought from the difference of complexion and frame of body observable among the British tribes of his time, that some were of Spanish original; and an earlier writer, Seneca, in his satire on the Emperor Claudius, makes mention of the Scuta-Brigantes, which Scaliger, by a needless correction, makes Scoto-Brigantes, as the Irish wrote Scuit and Scoit indifferently. This testimony of Seneca is a proof that the name Scots or Scuits, was known to some Roman writers so early as the first century; and the Irish appellations of Kinea-Scuit and Clan-Breogan plainly point out the proper country of those Scuta-Brigantes in the time of the Emperor Nero. Mac Geoghegan looks upon the Irish to be a mother tongue; and it may justly be so denominated, notwithstanding the adoption of some foreign terms, and some variations of construction introduced by time in all languages, before they arrive at their classical standard. Some writings of the fifth century show that this language was at its full perfection before the introduction of the gospel by Roman missionaries in the fourth and fifth centuries. The notion that this language is a dialect of the modern Biscayan is undoubtedly groundless. The latter tongue owes its original to some nation of those barbarians, who settled in Guipuscoa and other parts of the Pyrenean regions, on the decline of the Roman empire, nor are the few words common in the Basque and Irish tongues any proof that the one is descended from the other. This observation will hold good relatively to the Welch and Irish languages. They differ entirely in Syntax, and show that the two nations speaking those tongues have different Celtic originals. Bollandus says that St. Patrick taught the first alphabet to the Irish: he means the Roman alphabet, and should not forget that it was taught very near an age before, by earlier missionaries in the parts of Ireland which they converted to the faith. In the antecedent times the Fileas or ancient Irish writers, inscribed their ideas on tablets of wood, by the means of seventeen cyphers, of which their ancestors learned the use before their arrival in Ireland; nor is this fact obscured, but is rather enlightened by a fable of the Fileas, setting forth that some of those ancestors were instructed in letters by a celebrated Phenius, famous for literary knowledge in the East. Through this poetical veil we plainly discern the Phenicians, who first instructed the Europeans (the Greeks, Lybians, Italians, and Spaniards particularly) in the use of letters and other arts. Spain, according to Strabo, had the use of letters at a very early period; and that a colony from that country should import into, and cultivate also, those elements of knowledge in Ireland, is not improbable: the perfection of the Irish language before the introduction of Christianity, is an incontrovertible proof of the fact. The Scots are represented as a rude and barbarous people in the fourth and fifth ages, even by some eminent ecclesiastical writers. But these as well as other foreign historians have not, if at all, been resident long enough in Ireland to pronounce the natives barbarous, if those writers took that epithet in the worst sense it can bear. St. Jerom avers that when an adolescentulus, he saw a Scot in Gaul feeding upon human flesh, but the child in this case might impose upon the man; or if otherwise, a nation is not to be characterised from the barbarity of an individual, or even of a single tribe in an extensive country. That some barbarous customs prevailed in Ireland during the ages mentioned, cannot be denied; and that some prevail at this day in most of the modern states of Europe, called enlightened, is a matter of fatal experience. In the documents still preserved in the native language of the ancient Irish, we learn that after the reform made of the Order of Fileas in the first ce