Hence we need not wonder if, leaving out of account merely technical works like Lionel Power’s treatise on music, written in 1395, we find that the English literature of Ireland takes its comparatively humble origin late in the sixteenth century.  For more than two centuries thereafter, owing to the fact that the native Irish, because they were Catholics, were debarred by law from an education, the writing of English remained almost exclusively in the hands of members or descendants of the Anglo-Irish colony, who, with scarcely an exception, were Protestants and had as their principal Irish seat of learning the then essentially Protestant institution, Trinity College, Dublin.  Alien in race and creed though these writers mainly were, they have nevertheless spread a halo of glory around their adopted country, and have won the admiration, and often the affection, of Irishmen of every shade of religious and political belief.  For example, there is no Irishman who is not proud of Molyneux and Swift, of Goldsmith and Burke, of Grattan and Sheridan.  From the nineteenth century onward Irish Catholics have taken their full share in the production of English literature.  Here, however, it will be necessary to consider the writers of none but the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as in other pages of this volume considerable attention has been given to those of later date.

I. SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Richard Stanyhurst (1547-1618), born in Dublin but educated at Oxford, is the first representative of the sixteenth century with whom we are called upon to deal.  He belonged to a family long settled in or near Dublin and of some note in municipal annals.  Under the direction of the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, Stanyhurst wrote a Description, as well as a portion of the History, of Ireland for Holinshed’s Chronicles, published in 1577.  He also translated (1582) the first four books of Virgil his Aeneis into quantitative hexameters, on the unsound pedantic principles which Gabriel Harvey was at that time trying so hard to establish in English prosody; but the experiment, which turned out so badly in the master’s hands, fared even worse in those of the disciple, and Stanyhurst’s lines will always stand as a noted specimen of inept translation and ridiculous versification.  Equally inartistic was his version of some of the Psalms in the same metre.  In Latin he wrote a profound commentary on Porphyry, the Neo-Platonic mystic.  Stanyhurst, who was uncle to James Ussher, the celebrated Protestant archbishop of Armagh, was himself a convert to Catholicity, and on the death of his second wife became a priest and wrote in Latin some edifying books of devotion.  Two of his sons joined the Jesuit order.  He died at Brussels in 1618.  Stanyhurst viewed Ireland entirely from the English standpoint, and in his Description and History is, consciously or unconsciously, greatly biased against the native race.