An effort, however, has been advanced to identify their language with ours, by the analysis of the fragment of a speech which occurs in one of the plays of Plautus.[465] The idea was ingenious, but totally unfounded. _Affinity_, undoubtedly, there does appear,--as there does between all the ancient languages,--but nothing like _identity_; and the very circumstance of its having a _distinct_ denomination assigned to it in Ireland, viz. _Bearla-na-Fene_, or dialect of the Phœnicians (who traded here, it is admitted), proves it to be different from our _local_ phraseology--the Iranian _Pahlavi_, the polished elocution of the Tuath-de-danaans. The Phœnicians, besides being a mercantile people, never had any monuments of literary value, whereas the Irish are known to have abounded in such from the earliest era.[466] It is true that we have been denied the possession of alphabetic characters before the time of St. Patrick: but by whom? By Bolandus; on a false deduction from the writings of Ward, Colgan, Nennius, etc., who state that this apostle was the first who gave the “abjectoria,” or alphabet to our nation. Who says otherwise? But what alphabet was here meant? The Latin, certainly, and no other. Until then the Irish were strangers to the _Roman_ letters;[467] but that they were not to _written characters_, or the _cultivation of them in every variety of literature_, is evident from the very fact of St. Patrick himself having committed to the flames no less than one hundred and eighty volumes of our ancient theology;[468] as well as from the recorded instance of his disciple, Benignus,--his successor also in the See of Armagh,--having, according to Ward, written a work on the virtues of the Saint, half Latin and half Irish, and which Jocelyne afterwards availed himself of, when more fully detailing his biography. It has been the custom in all ages with those who would pass as the luminaries of their respective generations, to maintain that _letters_ and their application were but a _recent_ discovery! Their antiquity, however, is an historical fact, than which there can be no other better authenticated. The Bible makes frequent allusion to the cultivation of alphabetic cyphers--thus in Ex. xxiv. 4, it is said, “And Moses _wrote_ all the words of the Lord”; and in Josh. xxiv. 26, “And Joshua _wrote_ these words in the book of the law of God.”