The current number of the Friends of the Library of Trinity College contains matter that is of interest to all who have seen or who hope to see the Book of Kells. Mr R. O. Dougan, who has recently been appointed deputy librarian, gives an account of the methods used by the English experts who have recently rebound the book in four parts. The decision to break so famous a book into four separate parts, corresponding with the four Gospels, was undoubtedly drastic, and has come as a shock to many lovers of ancient manuscripts. But Mr Dougan explains here at length the reasons which have compelled the College authorities to take this step; and his account of the methods used by Mr Roger Powell in the process of restoration and rebinding is impressive as a witness to the care which has been taken to safeguard this national treasure for future generations. Tourists who visit the library will perhaps be disappointed : for the old custom of constantly exhibiting some of the finer pages will be discontinued. Each page of each volume will now be exhibited in turn, and the great illuminated pages will be less frequently exposed to the tourist's gaze. On the other hand, this means that no more than a fourth part of the book will be in the exhibition case at any one time; and serious students will always have an opportunity of examining all four parts at their leisure.

With the issue of the Wexford volume the Irish Manuscripts Commission has completed its publication of the portion of the Civil Survey which has survived in the Quit Rent Office copies. We have been promised a supplementary volume, which is to contain a copy of the survey of the barony of Louth, discovered among the Ormonde manuscripts, and the barony boundary descriptions preserved in the Annesley Books of Survey and Distribution. To these might perhaps be added some extracts from the Civil Survey of Carlow and Kilkenny, which are in the Ormonde manuscripts.

Before considering the manner in which the house of lords handled Irish questions in the age of Peel a brief examination of the ties between the United Kingdom upper house and Ireland is necessary A striking fact that requires emphasis is the growth between 1783 and 1832 of the ‘Irish interest’ in the lords. In the eighteenth century, when the British house of lords was a relatively small body of little over 200 members, the number of peers with a stake in Irish land was only about one eighth of the whole body. Several of these, too, owned wide lands in England and their main interests lay there. But by the time the first reformed parliament was opened on 29 January 1833 the Irish interest’ in the lords had become a formidable body In a house that had doubled in numbers since 1783 virtually one peer out of every four had a stake in Ireland through the ownership of land, and the majority of these were men whose economic interests were exclusively centred on their Irish estates. Moreover this ‘Irish interest’ maintained its strength in the lords right down to the formation of Gladstone's first ministry as the table below makes clear.

The Irish executive during the nineteenth century resembled the imperial double-headed eagle, or even occasionally Cerberus. For the control of the Irish administration was shared between the lord lieutenant and the chief secretary. Of course, theoretically the latter was merely the assistant of the former. In fact they formed a (frequently uneasy) partnership, and, as will be shown, throughout the century the chief secretary's political importance tended to increase largely at the expense of his nominal superior, though admittedly the exact balance of power between the two offices tended to, fluctuate in accordance with the personalities of their holders. Finally, in the absence from Ireland of the chief secretary, a strong undersecretary could exercise power out of proportion to his place in the administrative hierarchy.

In several respects the great famine revolutionized Irish overseas emigration. Numbers rose abruptly from an annual average of some 50,000 in the early ’forties to more than 100,000 in 1846, more than 200,000 in 1847 and an aggregate of well over one and a quarter millions in the six succeeding seasons. A relatively small, steady and considered emigration was replaced, especially during 1846-9, by a headlong outrush, sometimes more a hasty, even hysterical flight of economic refugees than a population movement as ordinarily understood. Unprecedented disasters overtook these emigrations, as epidemics swept over a passenger trade still painfully adjusting its shipping and standards to the new phenomenon and the growing predominance of Liverpool as the point of embarkation.

St Finnian of Clonard died, according to the Annals of Ulster, in 549. With the possible exception of the sixth, seventh and eighth century annal entries and of the Catalogus Sanctorum all the evidence for a study of his work dates from or after the ninth century. It is however possible to say with reasonable assurance what traditions of his life were accepted about three hundred years after his death, and to trace the development of his cult from the late eighth century onwards.

St Finnian's Irish Life gives the most primitive account now extant of his career. All manuscripts go back ultimately to the same original, which was compiled by a Leinsterman writing in Leinster, almost certainly a monk of one of Finnian's foundations, possibly Clonard, who drew on both oral and written traditions for his material. The Life is an unsophisticated collection of miracle stories, combined with extravagant claims concerning the spiritual power and prestige of the saint, and giving full particulars, including a considerable amount of accurate information on local topography, of the churches which Finnian is reputed to have founded.

Almost nothing is known of trade between Ireland and the continent during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is true that the existence of direct commercial links can be deduced from isolated references in the state papers and elsewhere, but these give little or no material for constructing a detailed picture. The importance of the wine trade may be inferred from the fact that when customs duties were increased in 1632, wine, along with salt, was the only imported commodity to be affected; from this one may conclude that the administration considered that the quantity of wine imported was sufficiently great for an increased duty to be worthwhile. This is indirect evidence, however. The value of the present document is that it throws some direct light upon the state of an important branch of Irish overseas trade in a particular year. The destruction of all but a few of the Irish port books makes such direct evidence all the more valuable. Mention may here be made of copies of some of the earliest Irish port books which are to be found in the papers of Sir Arthur Ingram who was one of the original farmers for Ireland in 1613. The examination of continental economic arcives may in due course help to fill the gap still futher.

Although the liberal government returned in 1868 took serious steps to reconcile dissatisfied Irish opinion by disestablishing the Irish church, passing a land act, and introducing an Irish university bill, Ireland, at the beginning of 1874; was far from being contented. The land act had made it more difficult and expensive to evict a tenant, and recognised the principle of compensation for improvements, but was considered by the tenant righters as only an instalment of their claims for ‘ fixity of tenure, fair rents, and free sale ‘ By disestablishing the Protestant episcopalian church, Gladstone pleased the Catholic clergy and those Catholics who considered the existence of the established church a galling insult, but it antagonized a good portion of Protestant opinion. The Catholic bishops were dissatisfied with the university bill and severely criticised its provisions; this influenced the majority of the Irish liberal M.P.s, who voted against the second reading. These votes helped to defeat the bill, a defeat that heralded the downfall of the liberal government.

The magna carta of the Irish system of national education, established in 1831, was what came to be known as ‘ the Stanley letter ’, addressed on 31 October 1831 by the Right Honourable Edward G. Stanley, chief secretary for Ireland, to the duke of Leinster, president of the board of seven commissioners appointed by the government to administer the system.

The tide of Irish immigration to the United States, which reached its crest during and following the famine years of the eighteen-forties, was second only to that of the Germans in the nineteenth century. Consequently, the Irish immigrants who arrived by the hundreds of thousands and the succeeding generations of Irish-Americans became one of the most important national groups in the American population, at the same time maintaining a keen interest in their native land.

The letters which follow are concerned with conditions on, and with the management of, an estate in, county Leitrim in the early years of the nineteenth century. They form part of a body of correspondence now belonging to Dr Patrick Logan of Poole Sanatorium, near Middlesborough, and I am grateful to him for permission to quote from and to use the originals of these letters. My attention was first drawn to the documents by Professor T. W. Moody of Trinity College Dublin, when he received copies of them through Professor Séamus Delargy from the late Mr J. J. Mahon, who lived near Drumshambo, and was keenly interested in the history of county Leitrim. Mr Mahon died towards the end of 1952 and since then I have received much help in tracing the whereabouts of the originals from his son-in-law Mr P. J. Brennan, from Dr Joseph Logan, from Mr M. J. Molloy and from Very Rev. John Canon Pinkman, P.P., V.F.; I wish to record my thanks to all of these.

This handlist of the voters of Maryborough Corporation in 1760 is taken from a notebook which forms part of the Drogheda MSS in the National Library of Ireland. There are three items of interest in the notebook; in the first place, a short diary of events within the borough from 1 March 1738/9 to 29 September 1754; secondly, a rough alphabetical list of the freemen and burgesses of the borough, which was kept up to date by additions and corrections to the year 1759; thirdly, an amended list, brought up to date and dated 1760. It is this last item which is printed here. The notebook apparently found its way into the Drogheda family papers sometime after 1765, when Charles Moore, sixth earl of Drogheda, was appointed governor of Maryborough, an office which had long been vacant; in 1773 he was described as having lately got possession’ of the borough.

The eight letters printed below consist of seven written to, and one written by, Edmund Dwyer Gray, M.P., editor and proprietor of the Freeman's Journal and an influential member of the Irish parliamentary party. They relate to the inner history of the by-election for Galway city held in February 1886. These letters, with ten others of historical interest unrelated to the Galway group, were given in 1904 by Gray's son, also named Edmund Dwyer, to Charles Tenison, who passed them on to his brother, Alfred Tenison Collins. Collins, then secretary of the Hibernian Bank, was one of the most eminent figures in Irish banking when he retired in 1937. He died in 1945 in his 93rd year. Deeply interested in the history of the home-rule movement, with which, in his business capacity, he had close contacts, he had contemplated writing a life of Parnell, and appears to have collected material for that purpose, of which the Gray letters alone have survived. They were placed at my disposal through the kindness of his daughter, Mrs James Boydell, who has since presented them to the library of Trinity College.