Excerpt from The History of Ireland, Vol. 2: Containing the First Book of the History From Sect. XV to the End Though some good copies of the work were made in the early part of the eighteenth century, still a rough division might be made between the copies written in the seventeenth and in the later centuries, the former being naturally the more reliable. If, then, we divide the copies of the fopar reara broadly into early and late, the year 1700 will form a good line of division between them. But there is another division which has to be made of the manuscript copies of this work. They may be divided into copies written in an archaic style, and copies written in a more modern style. If we take a copy of each of these classes of the same date or thereabouts, we shall find the matter of both substantially the same, paragraph for paragraph, and the words mostly the same, the language having, however, got an archaic setting in the one, while it tends towards the modern in the other; the syn tactical system, too, difl'ers somewhat in both classes: thus sometimes the passive construction of the one corresponds to the active of the other. The language of the archaic Copies is, on the whole, more elegant There is a marked effort in them to avoid unnecessary repetitions of the same noun several times in the same sentence. There is, too, an efi'ort made to use a more precise terminology. Thus, in the modern copies, the petty prince is usually called pi, in the archaic copies the word used is rlait. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.