Cuimhní cinn a breacadh 1918-19 : an cheathrú cuid

perfect obsession with him and he never tired of discussing it. It was quite useless agreeing with him a little [and] or confessing that there might have been some political bias involved in the making of the Scotish translation, but that there was also in it [an] genuine attempt to conform to the spoken language of Scotland more closely than the classical synthetic Irish of Bedells’ Bible did. He would concede nothing it had all been a mean dirty political trick which had been continuously worked for over a hundred years to gradually deface and defile Scotch Gaelic and make it as unlike Irish as possible. Where the minsters had not corrupted the language by their printed jargon it was spoken as pure Irish with the eclipsis retained.

So far as I have been able to observe there is a certain amount of eclipsis retained in spoken Scotch Gaelic, [but] it appears several times in Campbell’s folk stories, but it seems incredible that it was as much a part of Scotch Gaelic as of Irish in the 18th century. When I published my Literary History of Ireland in [botún] 1. . . . he wrote me a letter declaring in no measured terms that if it was through fear of drawing trouble on myself that I refrained from making known the facts about Scotch Gaelic it did me very little credit.

Many years lat[t]er he got the idea into his head that it was he who started the Gaelic League at a meeting held in his rooms. This was not so. It was John Mac Neill who sent out a consular[?] inviting

friends of the language to meet in the O Connell St. He had some dispute with Mac Neill apparently over the historical question and he wrote to me in the country appealing to me. I consulted my diary which I used to keep in Irish at some length and found that the meeting in Russells rooms took place two or three days later. He did not believe me so much the slave was he of his own imagination, and though I copied out the entries in my diary he believed that I forged them [botún] especially to bring discredit upon him, and wrote me such a letter that it was hard to see how I could keep up acquaintance with him afterwards. “In [?] to you” he said, “I have only showed your letter to one person, but that one” etc etc. I wrote back to say that it took two to make a quarrel and I was not going to be one of them. All the same

it put an end to the cordial relationship between us which had lasted for so many years.

My dear friend Dr Sigerson whose protecting hand