II. In the Gaelic literature of the country we count Geoffrey Keating, Duald McFirbis, and "the Four Masters" of Donegal. Few writers have been more rashly judged than Keating. A poet, as well as a historian, he gave a prominence in the early chapters of his history to bardic tales, which English critics have seized upon to damage his reputation for truthfulness and good sense. But these tales he gives as tales—as curious and illustrative—rather than as credible and unquestionable. The purity of his style is greatly extolled by Gaelic critics; and the interest of his narrative, even in a translation, is undoubted. McFirbis, an annalist and genealogist by inheritance, is known to us not only for his profound native lore, and tragic death, but also for the assistance he rendered Sir James Ware, Dr. Lynch, and Roderick O'Flaherty. The master-piece, however, of our Gaelic literature of this age, is the work now called "The Annals of the Four Masters." In the reign of James I., a few Franciscan friars, living partly in Donegal Abbey and partly in St. Anthony's College, at Louvain, undertook to collect and collate all the manuscript remains of Irish antiquity they could gather or borrow, or be allowed to copy. Father Hugh Ward was the head of this group, and by him the lay brother Michael O'Clery, one of the greatest benefactors his country ever saw, was sent from Belgium to Ireland. From 1620 to 1630, O'Clery travelled through the kingdom, buying or transcribing everything he could find relating to the lives of the Irish saints, which he sent to Louvain, where Ward and Colgan undertook to edit and illustrate them. Father Ward died in the early part of the undertaking, but Father Colgan spent twenty years in prosecuting the original design, so far as concerned our ecclesiastical biography.
After collecting these materials, Father O'Clery waited, as he tells us, on "the noble Fergall O'Gara," one of the two knights elected to represent the county of Sligo in the Parliament of 1634, and perceiving the anxiety of O'Gara, "from the cloud which at present hangs over our ancient Milesian race," he proposed to collect the civil and military annals of Erin into one large digest. O'Gara, struck with this proposal, freely supplied the means, and O'Clery and his coadjutors set to work in the Franciscan Convent of Donegal, which still stood, not more than half in ruins.