In 1801, the Act of Union came into force, stripping Ireland of its own parliament and bringing the country under direct control of Westminster; thus it was dissolved into perhaps the greatest European empire after that of Rome. Over the following century it would shed its native language and adopt English. Even after achieving independence 121 years later, it would keep English as its first language de facto (though Irish would be designated the first official language in 1937); it would also keep the principles of English law at the centre of its jurisprudence. Of course, English had been a native language in Ireland for almost a millennium, but only in parts of the Pale on the east coast. Now, within a century, it spread westwards across the whole country, leaving only small pockets of Gaelic speakers on the Atlantic shores. After a slow start in the nineteenth century, when there was little of great literary worth, Irish writers were at last completely at home in English, and produced some of that language's greatest works in the twentieth century. The claim was occasionally made that the national spirit had been brought over from Gaelic into English. However, Irish speakers themselves rarely confirmed such a smooth conveyance of the national spirit. As the novelist Tomás Ó Duinnshléibhe made one of his characters remark: