Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) _THE REVIVAL OF IRISH LITERATURE AND OTHER ADDRESSES_ THE REVIVAL OF IRISH LITERATURE ADDRESSES BY SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G., DR. GEORGE SIGERSON, AND DR. DOUGLAS HYDE LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. MDCCCXCIV CONTENTS. PAGE 1. THE REVIVAL OF IRISH LITERATURE. BY SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G. 9 i. What Irishmen may do for Irish Literature. ii. Books for the Irish People. 2. IRISH LITERATURE: ITS ORIGIN, ENVIRONMENT. BY GEORGE SIGERSON, M.D., FELLOW OF THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY 61 3. THE NECESSITY FOR DE-ANGLICISING IRELAND. BY DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D. 115 The Revival of Irish literature. TWO ADDRESSES DELIVERED BEFORE THE IRISH LITERARY SOCIETY, LONDON, _IN JULY, 1892, AND JUNE, 1893_, BY THE PRESIDENT, THE HON. SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G. WHAT IRISHMEN MAY DO FOR IRISH LITERATURE. Speaking to a Society of young Irishmen who love their country and burn to serve her, I am tempted to broach a subject which has long lain in my mind, waiting for the fit audience. The famine of 1846 paralysed many forces in Ireland, and none more disastrously than our growing literature. How little has been done in the region of mind since that calamity, and by what isolated and spasmodic efforts? The era on which the famine fell was intellectually a singularly fruitful one. A group of young men, among the most generous and disinterested in our annals, were busy digging up the buried relics of our history, to enlighten the present by a knowledge of the past, setting up on their pedestals anew the overthrown statues of Irish worthies, assailing wrongs which under long impunity had become unquestioned and even venerable, and warming as with strong wine the heart of the people, by songs of valour and hope; and happily not standing isolated in their pious work, but encouraged and sustained by just such an army of students and sympathisers as I see here to-day. The famine swept away their labours; and their passionate attempts to arrest and redress the destruction which the famine inflicted, delivered them over to imprisonment and penal exile. Their incomplete work, produced amid the tumult and conflict of a great political struggle, has been a treasure to two generations of Irishmen; and it supplied the impulse of work which rivalled their own. The publisher of Petrie's "Round Towers," and John O'Donovan's translation of "The Four Masters," assured me that he could not have ventured to issue books so costly, but for the enthusiasm kindled in the public mind by the young nationalists, and Butt and Lefanu, who at