"The place of this book is Aicill close to Temhair [Tara], and its time is the time of Coirpri Lifechair, son of Cormac, and its author is Cormac, and the cause of its having been composed was the blinding of the eye of Cormac by Ængus Gabhuaidech, after the abduction of the daughter of Sorar, son of Art Corb, by Cellach, son of Cormac." The author then tells us how the spear of Aengus grazed the eye of Cormac and blinded him. "Then Cormac was sent out to be cured at Aicill [the Hill of Skreen] ... and the sovereignty of Erin was given to Coirpri Lifechair, son of Cormac, for it was prohibited that anyone with a blemish should be king at Tara, and in every difficult case of judgment that came to him he [Coirpri] used to go to ask his father about it, and his father used to say to him, 'my son that thou mayest know' [the law], and 'the exemptions;' and these words are at the beginning of all his explanations. And it was there, at Aicill, that this book was thus composed, and wherever the words 'exemptions,' and 'my son that thou mayest know,' occur was Cormac's part of the book, and Cennfaeladh's part is the rest." This proves beyond doubt that the greatest portion of this _Book of Aicill_ was written by Cormac at Skreen, near Tara, when disqualified for holding the sovereignty on account of his wound. It was a treatise written for the benefit of his son unexpectedly called to fill the monarch's place at Tara. The text, too, bears out this account. Cormac, apparently furnished the groundwork of the present volume by writing for his son's use a series of maxims or principles on the criminal law of Erin, which were afterwards developed by Cormac himself, and by subsequent commentators. That the archaic legal maxims so enunciated in the _Book of Aicill_ were once written by Cormac himself there can be no reasonable doubt; although it is now quite impossible to ascertain how far the development of the text was the work of Cormac or of subsequent legal authorities, who doubtless added to and modified the commentary, whilst they left Cormac's text itself unchanged. This _Book of Aicill_, the authenticity of which cannot, we think, be reasonably questioned, proves to a certainty that in the third century of the Christian era there was a considerable amount of literary culture in Celtic Ireland. These works are still extant in the most archaic form of the Irish language; they have been universally attributed to Cormac Mac Art for the last ten centuries by all our Irish scholars; the intrinsic evidence of their authorship and antiquity is equally striking--why then should we reject this mass of evidence, and accept the crude theories of certain modern pretenders in the antiquities of Ireland, who without even knowing the language undertake to tell us that there was no knowledge of the use of writing in Ireland before St. Patrick?