The History of Ireland, Vol. 2: Containing the First Book of the History From Sect. XV to the End (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The History of Ireland, Vol. 2: Containing the First Book of the History From Sect. XV to the End

Though some good copies of the work were made in the early part of the eighteenth century, still a rough division might be made between the copies written in the seventeenth and in the later centuries, the former being naturally the more reliable. If, then, we divide the copies of the fopar reara broadly into early and late, the year 1700 will form a good line of division between them. But there is another division which has to be made of the manuscript copies of this work. They may be divided into copies written in an archaic style, and copies written in a more modern style. If we take a copy of each of these classes of the same date or thereabouts, we shall find the matter of both substantially the same, paragraph for paragraph, and the words mostly the same, the language having, however, got an archaic setting in the one, while it tends towards the modern in the other; the syn tactical system, too, difl'ers somewhat in both classes: thus sometimes the passive construction of the one corresponds to the active of the other. The language of the archaic Copies is, on the whole, more elegant There is a marked effort in them to avoid unnecessary repetitions of the same noun several times in the same sentence. There is, too, an efi'ort made to use a more precise terminology. Thus, in the modern copies, the petty prince is usually called pi, in the archaic copies the word used is rlait.

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