In Galway a group of scholars laid, in Lynch's words, "a secure anchorage" for Irish history. Dr. John Lynch, the famous apologist of the Irish, wrote there his historical defence of his people. To spread abroad their history he translated into Latin Keating's book. For the same purpose his friend, Tuileagna O'Maelchonaire, a distinguished Irish scholar, translated the _Annals of Ulster_ into English. O'Flaherty of Moycullen in Galway, a man of great learning, wrote on Irish antiquities "with exactness, diligence and judgment." "I live," he said, "a banished man within the bounds of my native soil, a spectator of others enriched by my birthright, an object of condoling to my relations and friends, and a condoler of their miseries." His land confiscated (1641), stripped at last of his manuscripts as well as of his other goods, he died in miserable poverty in extreme old age (1709). To Galway came also Dualtach Mac Firbis (1585-1670), of a family that had been time out of mind hereditary historians in north Connacht. He learned in one of the old Irish schools of law in Tipperary Latin, English, and Greek. Amid the horrors of Cromwell's wars he carried out a prodigious work on the genealogies of the clans, the greatest, perhaps, that exists in any country; and wrote on their saints, their kings, their writers, on the chronicles and on the laws; in moderate prosperity and in extreme adversity constantly devoted to the preservation of Irish history. In his old age he lived, like other Irish scholars, a landless sojourner on the estates that had once belonged to his family and race; the last of the hereditary sennachies of Ireland he wandered on foot from house to house, every Irish door opened to him for his learning after their undying custom, till at the age of eighty-five he was murdered by a Crofton when he was resting in a house on his way to Dublin. In Connacht, too, lived Tadhg O'Roddy of Leitrim, a diligent collector of Irish manuscripts, who gathered thirty books of law, and many others of philosophy, poetry, physic, genealogies, mathematics, romances, and history; and defended against the English the character of the old law and civilisation of Ireland.