【正文】 Ireland, Island of Saints and SagesJames Joyce Nations have their ego, just like individuals. The case of apeople who like to attribute to themselves qualities and gloriesforeign to other people has not been entirely unknown in history,from the time of our ancestors, who called themselves Aryans andnobles, or that of the Greeks, w ho called all those who livedoutside the sacrosanct land of Hellas barbarians. The Irish, witha pride that is perhaps less easy to explain, love to refer totheir country as the island of saints and sages. This exalted title was not invented yesterday or the daybefore. It goes back to the most ancient times, when the islandwas a true focus cf sanctity and intellect, spreading throughoutthe continent a culture and a vitalizing energy. It would be easyto make a list of the Irishmen who carried the torch of knowledgefrom country to country as pilgrims and hermits, as scholars andwisemen. Their traces are still seen today in abandoned altars,in traditions and legends where even the name of the hero isscarcely recognizable, or in poetic allusions, such as thepassage in Dante39。s Inferno where his mentor points to one ofthe Celtic magicians tormented by infernal pains and says: Quel39。altro, che ne39。 fianchi e cosi poco, Michele Scotto fu, che veramente Delle magiche frode seppe il gioco. In truth, it would take the learning and patience of aleisurely Bollandist to relate the acts of these saints andsages. We at least remember the notorious opponent of St. Thomas,John Duns Scotus (called the Subtle Doctor to distinguish himfrom St. Thomas, the Angelic Doctor, and from Bonaventura, theSeraphic Doctor) who was the militant champion of the doctrine ofthe Immaculate Conception, and, as the chronicles of that periodtell us, an unbeatable dialectician. It seems undeniable thatIreland at that time was an immense seminary, where scholarsgathered from the different countries of Europe, so great was itsrenown for mastery of spiritual matters. Although assertions ofthis kind must be taken with great reservations, it is more thanlikely (in view of the religious fervour that still prevails inIreland, of which you, who have been nourished on the food ofscepticism in recent years, can hardly form a correct idea) thatthis glorious past is not a fiction based on the spirit ofselfglorification. If you really wish to be convinced, there are always the dustyarchives of the Germans. Ferrero now tells us that thediscoveries of these good professors of Germany, so far as theydeal with the ancient history of the Roman republic and the Romanempire, are wrong from the beginning almost pletely wrong.It may be so. But, whether or not this is so, no one can denythat, just as these learned Germans were the first to presentShakespeare as a poet of world significance to the warped eyes ofhis patriots (who up to that time had considered William afigure of secondary importance, a fine fellow with a pleasantvein of lyric poetry, but perhaps too fond of English beer),these very Germans were the only ones in Europe to concernthemselves with Celtic languages and the history of the fiveCeltic nations. The only Irish grammars and dictionaries thatexisted in Europe up until a few years ago, when the GaelicLeague was founded in Dublin, were the works of Germans. The Irish language, although of the IndoEuropean family,differs from English almost as much as the language spoken inRome differs from that spoken in Teheran. It has an alphabet ofspecial characters, and a history almost three thousand yearsold. Ten years ago, it was spoken only by the peasants in thewestern provinces on the coast of the Atlantic and a few in thesouth, and on the little islands that stand like pickets of thevanguard of Europe, on the front of the eastern hemisphere. Nowthe Gaelic League has revived its use. Every Irish newspaper,with the exception of the Unionist organs, has at least onespecial headline printed in Irish. The correspondence of theprincipal cities is written in Irish, the Irish language istaught in most of the primary and secondary schools, and, in theuniversities, it has been set on a level with the other modernlanguages, such as French, German, Italian, and Spanish. InDublin, the names of the streets are printed in both languages.The League organizes concerts, debates, and socials at which thespeaker of beurla (that is, English) feels like a fish out ofwater, confused in the midst of a crowd that chatters in a harshand guttural tongue. In the streets, you often see groups ofyoung people pass by speaking Irish, perhaps a little moreemphatically than is necessary. The members of the League writeto each other in Irish, and often the poor postman, unable toread the address, must turn to his superior to untie the knot. This language is oriental in origin, and has been identified bymany philologists with the ancient language of the Phoenicians,the originators of trade and navigation, according to historians.This adventurous people, who had a monopoly of the sea,established in Ireland a civilization that had decayed and almostdisappeared before the first Greek historian took his pen inhand. It jealously preserved the secrets of its knowledge, andthe first mention of the island of Ireland in foreign literatureis found in a Greek poem of the fifth century before Christ,where the historian repeats the Phoenician tradition. Thelanguage that the Latin writer of edy, Plautus, put in themouth of Phoenicians in his edy Poenulus is almost the samelanguage that the Irish peasants speak today, according to thecritic Vallancey. The religion and civilization of this ancientpeople, later known by the name of Druidism, were Egyptian. TheDruid priests had their temples in the open, and worshipped thesun and moon