THE DOOM OF THE ANCIENT RACES OF IRELAND.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VI, Issue 405, 20 September 1856, Page 2

THE DOOM OF THE ANCIENT RACES OF IRELAND.

(From the Dublin University Mogazine.) Two terrible calamities fell upon Ireland —famine and pestilence; ami by these two dread ministers of God's great purposes, tf-e Irish race were uprooted, and driven forth to fulfil their appointed destiny. A million of our people emigrated ; a million of our people died under these judgments of God. Seventeen millions' worth of property passed -from time-honored names into the hands of strangers. The echoes of the old tongue —call it Pelasgian, Phoenician, Celtic, Itse, or Irish, what you will, still the oldest in Kurope, is dying out at last along the stony plains of Mayo and the wild sea cliffs of the storm-rent -western shore. Scarcely--.a-million* and a half are left, of old people, too old to -emigrate, amidst roofless cabins and ruined villages, who speak that language now. Exile, confiscation, or 3eath. was the final''fate written on the page of history, for the much-enduring children of Ireland. One day they may re-assert themselves in the New world or in other lands. Australia, with its skies of beauty, and its pavement of gold, may be given to them as America to the Saxon, but how low must a nation have Mien at home when even famine and piague come to be welcomed as the levers of ..progression.'.and social elevation ! Some wise purpose of God's providence lies, no doubt, at the reverse side, but we have not yet turned the leaf. The ancient race who,thousands of years before, left the cradle of the sun to track him to the ocean, are now finng on the coast of.another hemi-, sphere, to begin once more their destined westward march* and, like the Israelites of old, they too might tell in that new country —"A Syrian ready to perish was our father!" They fled across the Atlantic like a driit of autumn leaves-—" pestilencestricken multitudes"—and the sea was furrowed by the dead as the plague-ships passed along. One would say a doom had been laid upon their race—the wandering Io of humanity—a destiny of expiation, a doom 'of weeping' and unrest. Of old the kings at Para sat throned with their faces to the west'; was it a symho! or prophecy of the future of their nation, when from every hill in'lreland could be seen The remnant of our people Sweeping westward, wild and wo nil, Like the cloud-rack of a tempest, Like withered leaves of Autumn ? From the Atlantic to the Pacific, where the Kocky Mountains bar like a portal the land of gold—through the Islands of the Southern Ocean to the great desolate wofld of Australia, seeking as it-were the last home of their fathers, and doomed to make the circuit of .the earth—stili onward flows the tide-of human life—that inexhaustible race who have cleared the forests of Canada, who have built cities, and made all the railroads of the State, who have given thousands to the red plains of the Crimea, who have overcome California and peopled Aus-tralia-—die race whose destiny has made them the instruments of all civilization, though they have never reaped its benefits. No colo:m*s recross the Atlantic. Immutable u.s th--> path of the planet, is the destined cycle of human progression, never ending, never ceasing, until perhaps the ancient race, after its weary wr.niierin.trs will arrive once more at li the partings of the' ways" in the far eastern Jnrul of Paradise and the dispersion. It is but a sombre vaticination, yet it is evident that from Ireland the old people will j-uon pass away. The "old language will become a tradition. The Scythian races, with their free spirit and purer laith,-will pour in to ropcopie the desolate lands, and to build up the waste plains; und tSio ancient children of the south of

Tyre, of Carthage, of the Isles of the Sea, must flee before them, as they have ever done, step by step, across the broad plains oflSurope. till from their lust refuge, that rock of the Atlantic to which they hare clung lovingly, trustingly, txi last despairingly, during two thousand years, the old race must be rent and severed to make room for their triumphant successor, the. conquering Scythian. Yet, though kings, princes, and races perish, though a nation may be obliterated, still the singular and beautiful literature of that ancient people, the literature of two thousand years ago, will live for ever in Ireland, to interest and instruct the poet, the historian, and- the antiquary—the records of a people more ancient than the pyramids.