When copying this narrative from the writings of Hecatæus, it is evident that Diodorus did not believe one single syllable it contained. He looked upon it as a romance; and so far was he from identifying it with any actual locality, that he threw over the whole an air of burlesque. We are, therefore, not at all obliged for the services he has rendered--yet shall we make his labours subservient to the elucidation of truth. Little did he dream that Ireland, which he, by and by, expressly mentions by the name of Irin, and which he calumniates as cannibal, was one and the same with that isle of which he read such encomiums in the writings of former antiquaries; and, most unquestionably, it did require no small portion of research to reconcile the contradiction which the outline involves, and which is now further enhanced by his scepticism. Unable to solve this difficulty, Mr. Dalton--wishing to retain, by all means, the _Hyperborean isle_, which, indeed, he could not well discard, yet not bring it in collision with the _Iranian libel_--does not hesitate to throw at once overboard into the depth of the Atlantic the island of Irin (alias _Ireland_), and affirm that it never was the place which the historian had specified. “It is not quite certain,” says he, “what place Diodorus means by Iris;[449] from the turn of the expression it would _rather appear to be a part of Britain_,--perhaps the Erne, for which Mr. James M’Pherson contends in another place,--while the island which Diodorus does mention in the remarkable pages cited above, and which so completely agrees with Ireland, is never called Iris by him, nor does the name occur again in all his work, nor is it by any other author applied to Ireland.”[450] Mind, now, reader, how easily I reconcile the conflicting fact of Diodorus’s incredulity with his positive defamation. At the period when he flourished as an accredited historian, the occupancy of Ireland had passed into new hands. The Scythians were the persons then possessed of the soil; and they being a warlike tribe, averse to letters, to religion, and to refinement,[451]--but overwhelming in numbers,--obliterated every vestige of that primeval renown in which the island had once gloried, and which afforded theme and material to the learned of all countries for eulogy and praise. Hecatæus was one of those who depicted in glowing colours the primitive splendour and the ethereal happiness of Ireland’s first inhabitants. He belonged to an age which was well called antiquarian, even in the day in which Diodorus wrote, viz. B.C. 44; and when, therefore, this latter, looking over the pages of his venerable predecessor, saw them so replete with incidents,--at variance with our condition in his own degenerate day,--he did not only not dream of considering Ireland as the place described, but looked upon the whole story as the fiction of a dotard.