THE IRISH "CORONATION STONE."

TpHE Irish have discovered a fresh grievance, and the honourable Member for Ennis is the mouthpiece of their wrongs. Mr. Kenny has given notice that in his place in 'Parliament he intends to demand of the First Commissioner of Works on what grounds the public notice formerly affixed to the Coronation Stone in Westminster Abbey has been altered 'by the omission of all reference to that which has been hitherto generally recognised and admitted as an historical fact—viz.. that this stone, transported from Scone to Westminster by Edward I. as a symbol of his suzerainty over Scotland, had its 'earlier home in Ireland, and after having been used for the coronation of a long series of Irish kings, was carried to Scotland by Fergus, the Irish king who subdued that country. Such a grievance is none the less real because it is a senti- mental one, and—shall we say P—because it has not the slightest foundation in fact. Myths are often more power- ful to stir the feelings than the most palpable realities ; and though if one thing is absolutely certain, it is that the Coronation Stone, whatever its history may have been, never was in Ireland at all, and that the whole legend of its transportation to Scotland by an Irish conqueror to emphasize the fact of his subjugation of the country is a baseless fiction, we shall not be a bit surprised if Mr. Kenny succeeds in lashing his countrymen into fury at tlij.s fresh insult done to their nation by the "base and brutal" Saxon. The thing touches a sensitive people just in their tenderest place, national vanity. That the Coronation Stone of England should be a native Irish stone, and that the long line of English Sovereigns who have been inaugurated upon it should be mere creatures of yesterday —heirs of the third degree—compared with those monarchs who, in far distant ages, took their seat upon it on the royal hill of Tara, and were recognised as rightful claimants of the throne by its mysterious sounds, would, if true, be something to be not unreasonably proud of. It might, in some illogical way, bolster up delusive fancies of that Irish political supremacy which, indeed, recent events have done so much to foster. To lose this visible evidence of Ireland's superior antiquity and dignity cannot be tolerated,—at least, not without a protest. That Ireland should be practically England's mistress ; that all Imperial legislation should be in her hands to permit or to hinder ; that the fate of a powerful Ministry may bang upon Irish votes ; that she should be allowed to threaten our public buildings and blow up our railway stations by "holy dynamite"—the nineteenth-century representative of" la Sainte Guillotine,"—all this pales before the national insult recently perpetrated. That must be redressed, or Ireland will know the reason why. Again, like a spoiled child crying for the moon, she will have what she cries for, or she will make those who refuse it very uncomfortable.

And what is it that the honourable Member for Ennis and those whose spokesman he is are asking for P Nothing less than the perpetuation of a ridiculous fiction which never ought to have disgraced our great national temple. Westminster Abbey, historically at least, ought to be the Temple of Truth. What- ever mendacity may, by common consent, be permissible in epitaphs, the Abbey is no place' for silly fables-

" et quicquid Hibernia mendaz Andet in historia."

We cannot recall what the words of the inscription the alteration of which is made the ground of complaint may have been ; but we are dimly conscious of some grandly-sound- ing sentences of the late highly-gifted Dean, whose strong point was not historical accuracy, of this stone forming "a link between the Throne of England and the traditions of Tara and Iona," which may have formed part of it. But accepting Mr. Kenny's own account, we feel that the present Dean and Chapter deserve our thanks for removing what was calculated to call up a blush on the cheek of every sensible visitor. In truth, few tales can be more silly than those con- nected with this so-called "Stone of Destiny ;" so silly, indeed, as hardly to deserve the trouble of repetition. And yet, in the words of Mr. Skene, whose essay on the "Coronation Stone" has brought the dry light of trustworthy documentary history— and, we may add, of common-sense—to bear upon the popular myth, the "legend has such a hold of the Scottish," and as the present protest shows, of the Irish, "mind, that it is not easily dislodged." It stands in all its naked improba- bility, a solitary waif from the sea of myth and fable with which modern criticism has hardly ventured to medd!e, and which modern scepticism has not cared to question."

The tale of the wanderings of the stone from Egypt by way of Spain and Ireland, first to Dunstaffnage, and then to Scone, halting, perhaps, at Iona on its way, is a sample of that spirit of absurdity which characterised the works of most of our earlier chroniclers when they ventured to go back into the mists of the prehistoric period in support of some favourite theory, or in defence of some threatened possession. The legend, first emerging in the struggle for Fcottish independence, was wrought into a consistent narrative by Fordun, and finally elaborated by the weak and credulous Hector Boece, when evoking that formidable series of shadowy kings whose forty portraits—all the product of one pencil— hang on the walls of the gallery at Holyrood. In point of fact, there are two legends, one Scottish and one Irish, each equally fabulous, which in process of time, though quite an- tagonistic to each other, have got mixed up, and, inconvenient details being prudently dropped, have been fashioned into a tolerably consistent whole. We must almost ask our readers' pardon for introducing such ridiculous distortions of history to their notice ; but it is necessary that the legend should be seen in all its naked absurdity. The- tale, as given by Boece and Fordun, and other such manipulators of history, is briefly this. A certain Greek, Gathelns by name, a contemporary either of the Athenian Cecrops or of the Argive Neolus, went to Egypt at the time of the Exodus, where he married Scota, the daughter of Pharaoh, and, after the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, fled with her and the remnant who had escaped drowning along the north coast of Africa till they reached Gibraltar. Thence they crossed to Spain, where Gathelus founded a kingdom at Brigantinm, now Compostella. Here he and his descendants for many generations reigned. having as their royal seat "the Stone of Destiny," "Lap's fatalis cathedras instar,"—the fatal stone like a chair, which wherever it was found, promised sovereignty to the Scots, the descendants of the eponymic daughter of Pharaoh, the Princess Scota. On the earlier history of this stone chair—for as such, not a mere rough block of stone like that now at Westminster, it is always described in the earlier forms of the story—the Scottish historians are discreetly silent. It is to English chroniclers alone that we owe the strange legend—the authority for which Sir Roger de Coverley, on his visit to the Abbey, asked, and asked in vain, but which the Anglo-Israelite fanatics bid us accept as a sacred truth—that the Coronation Stone was Jacob's pillow at Bethel, which he afterwards set up as a standing stone, or "menhir." We do not find any attempt to bridge over the gulf, and explain how the sacred stone—certainly not a very portable commodity, nor one which a priori one would think there was much object in removing—got into our northern latitudes. The wondrous romance which the Rev. G. Albert Rogers, and Mr. Hine, and the other adherents of the popular craze of Anglo-Ismelism have spun out of their inner consciousness was then still undeveloped. The world had not yet been enlightened with the mar- vellous story of Jacob's pillar having been taken down by the patriarch into Egypt, brought back again by Moses and the Israelites, whom it accompanied in all their wanderings, and, after having been "rejected by the builders," and carried by Jeremiah into Egypt a second time and then back again to Jerusalem, being finally conveyed by the prophet in the ships of Dan as the title-sleeds of the "Princess Tephi, Princess Royal of Judah "—a lady, we need not say, utterly unknown to Holy Scripture—to the shores of Ireland, where the young King, Eochard II.," having been converted from Baal-worship by Jeremiah and his companion, Baruch the scribe, received the hand of the Princess Royal as his reward, and was crowned with his Queen on the much-travelled Stone of Destiny, set up on • the hill of Tara. How much of this precious nonsense—accepted as religious truth by a large and increasing number of half- educated simpletons—forms part of Mr. Kenny's contention ire cannot say. There is nothing to show whether he identifies the Coronation Stone with Jacob's pillar or no. The point where he takes up the thread appears to be at its fabled transportation from the older to the modern Scotia—from Ireland to Scotland. This, it is asserted, was on the sub- jugation of Scotland by Fergus the Irish king. The stone which had served for the coronation of successive generations of monarchs, the descendants of a certain most queerly named "Simon Breck," himself sprung from Pharaoh's son-in-law Gathelus, who according to Boece first brought the chair from Spain to Ireland, and was crowned in it as king of that country,

• was, the legend says, taken by Fergus to Argyle, and ultimately set up at Dunstaffnage, bearing the legend-

" Ni fallat fatam Scoti, quocunque locatnm Invenient lapidem, regnare tenentur ibidem."

Forty kings, whose only existence is in Boec,e's own inventive mind, were successively crowned on it. The last of these was driven back to Ireland. His nephew, Fergus MacErc, returned and was crowned in the marble chair, which be subsequently transferred to Scone, where it rested from its wanderings for some seven centuries, till it was again transported, as one of the most precious spoils of victory, by our own Edward I. to Westminster.

This last is really the only certain fact in the history of the Coronation Stone. There is no doubt that the stone was at Scone. and was regarded with mysterious veneration as in some way connected with the Scottish monarchy, and that it was carried by Edward I. to his father's newly-built Abbey of Westminster. Fergus MacErc, it is true, was a real personage, the conqueror, not (pace Mr. Kenny) of Scotland, but of the corner of it now known as Argyle, in the sixth century, and the first of the historic kings of Dalriada. But there is not a thread of trust- worthy evidence to connect him in any way with the stone. . There is not the slightest allusion to its history in any one of the Scottish Chronicles written before the fourteenth century. We learn from them that Scone was the meeting- place of the National Council as early as the tenth century, and that the Scottish kings were there inaugurated by being placed in the "royal chair of stone," but we find no reference to its sacred character, or to its long and singular migrations. Absolutely the first to mention the legend is Baldred Bisset, in the memorial which, in 1301, he drew up as Commissioner from the Scottish Government to plead the cause of the independence of the kingdom before the Pope. As Mr. Skene remarks—" The derivation of the kingdom from the Scots, and their progress from Egypt through Spain and Ireland to Scotland, was the tale opposed to that of the King of England. It seems to have occurred to Baldred that he would strengthen his argument if he made the epcmyma of the Scots, Scota herself, bring the Coronation Stone with her on her wanderings ; and I venture to suggest that we owe the origin of the legend to the patriotio ingenuity of Baldred Bisset."

Once invented, it was "eagerly caught up and applied to the Scottish fable in its different stages of development." In one of these stages it became identified with the Lia Fail, the Irish Stone of Destiny, at Tarn; and it is the virtual ignoring of this identification by the Abbey authorities which Mr. Kenny is denouncing as a fresh insult to Ireland.

But if one thing is certain, it is that the Irish and Scotch legends point to two different stones used for the same purpose, and that they are utterly incompatible with one another. As Mr. Skene has said, "while the Scotch legend brings the stone at Scone from Ireland, the Irish legend brings the stone at Tara from Scotland." It is also equally certain, first, that the Lia Fail never left Tam at all, where it was to be seen, though its place had been shifted, in 1839, when Mr. Petrie contributed his memoir on the subject to the " Trans- actions of the Royal Irish Academy" (Vol. xviii., p. 149) ; and secondly, that there was no such stone known in Scotland when, in obedience to a vision, in 574 A.D., St. Columba con- secrated Aidan as King of the Scots of Argyle. We have two detailed accounts by contemporary writers of the ceremony, in which, if ever, the Stone of Destiny might have been expected to play a prominent part, but throughout the whole there is not the slightest allusion to it. According to Mr. Petrie, the Lia Fail—otherwise known as the "roaring stone," from its miraculous property of sounding under a rightful king when placed upon it at his inauguration, and remaining silent under a usurper—was originally placed on the side of the "Hill of the Hostages," and remained in the same spot "till some time after 1798, when it was removed to its present situation in the Rath, called the Forradh,' to mark the grave of a rebel slain at Tara in the insurrection of that year." He continues,— "it is a phallic stone, as its popular name, 'Bed Fhearghais; indicates." If the Irish have in later times adopted the fables of Boece and Fordun, it has been in direct violation of their own records, in none of which do these silly legends receive the slightest support. Keating was the first Irish writer to accept them, in his "History of Ireland," in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, and that with the palpable object of supporting the right of Charles I. to his throne. In the words of Mr. Petrie, it must be regarded "in the highest degree improbable that the Irish should have voluntarily parted with a monument so venerable for its antiquity, and considered essential to the legitimate succession of their kings, to gratify the desire of a colony,"—and, we may add, to transfer, by the destiny attaching to the stone, the seat of sovereignty from the Irish soil to that of their newly-conquered dependency.

One additional argument in favour of the Scottish origin of the Coronation Stone is its geological character. It has been examined by two of the most eminent geologists of the day, Professor Ramsay and Professor Geikie, who agree in describing it as a block of red sandstone, perfectly resembling the sand- stone to be found in the neighbourhood of Scone itself, or that of which Dunstaffnage Castle is built. Professor Ramsay adds that it cannot have been derived from any of the rocks of Tara, which are of the carboniferous age, nor from those of Iona, where no red sandstone exists ; and that it is equally impossible that it should have belonged to the limestone rocks round Bethel, or the nummnlitic strata of Egypt.

The whole matter cannot be better summed up than it has been by Mr. Skene in the concluding .paragraph of his "Coronation Stone" :—" It was the custom of Celtic tribes to inaugurate their kings on a sacred stone, supposed to symbolise the monarchy. The Irish kings were inaugurated on the Lia Fail, which never was anywhere but at Tara, the " Sedes principalis" of Ireland ; and the kings in Scotland, first of the Pictish Monarchy and afterwards of the Scottish kingdom which succeeded it, were inaugurated on this stone, which never was anywhere but at Scone, the "Seder, principalis both of the Pictish and Scottish kingdoms." Unless Mr. Kenny and his

friends are more led by passion than by argument, and give more weight to baseless fiction than to sober historical facts, the unreality of this supposed grievance, in the face of ascer- tained history, will be evident, and—dare we hope it ?—the angry passions that have been aroused will subside.

"Di mottle animornm atqne Mee certamina tanta

Fnlveris exigui jactn compressa quiet:want."