Excerpt from History of Ireland From the Invasion of Henry II, Vol. 1: With a Preliminary Discourse on the Ancient State of That Kingdom IF all nations have affected to deduce their History from the earliest periods, and to claim that origin which they deemed most honourable, the old Irish have been particu larly tempted to indulge this vanity. De pressed for many ages, and reduced to a mo1 tifying state of inferiority, stung with the reproaches, with the contempt, and some; times with the injurious slander of their neighbours, they passionately recurred to the monuments of their ancient glory, and spoke of the noble actions of their ancestors in the glowing style of indignation. O' F laghel ty, their celebrated antiquarlan, (in a vindication of his Ogygia against Sir George Mackenzie, which I have seen in manuscript) speaks with an enthusiastic zeal of his country, as the venerable mother of Britain, f'that engen dered of he1 own bowels one hundred and seventy-one monarchs for above two thou? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.