Keating, Geoffrey

, an Irish historian, was born in the province of Munster, of English ancestry, and flourished in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, He was educated with a view to the Roman catholic church, and having received at a foreign university the degree of D. D. he returned to his native country, and became a celebrated preacher. Being well versed in the ancient Irish language, he collected the remains of the early history and antiquities of the island, and formed them into a regular narrative This work, which he finished about the time of the accession of Charles I. commences from the first planting of Ireland, after the deluge, and goes on to the seventeenth year of king Henry II. giving an account of the lives and reigns of one hundred and seventy-four kings of the Milesian race, replete with fictitious personages and fabulous narratives, which, however, it has been said, he gives as such, and does not impose them on his | readers as true history. The work remained in ms. in the original language, till it was translated into English by Dermot O’Connor, and published in London in 1723; but a better edition appeared in 1738, with plates of the arms of the principal Irish families, and an appendix, not in the former, respecting the ancient names of places. Keating died about the middle of the seventeenth century, or, as some think, much earlier, about 1625. He wrote some pieces of the religious cast, and two poems, one, an “Elegy on the Death of the Lord Decies,” the other a burlesque on his servant Simon, whom he compares with the ancient heroes. ¹