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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12078 ***
+
+IRELAND
+
+HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE
+
+BY
+
+CHARLES JOHNSTON
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+1902
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+I. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.
+
+II. THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.
+
+III. THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.
+
+IV. THE DE DANAANS.
+
+V. EMAIN OF MACA.
+
+VI. CUCULAIN THE HERO.
+
+VII. FIND AND OSSIN.
+
+VIII. THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.
+
+IX. THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.
+
+X. THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.
+
+XI. THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.
+
+XII. THE NORMANS.
+
+XIII. THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.
+
+XIV. THE JACOBITE WARS.
+
+XV. CONCLUSION.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+Photogravures made by A.W. ELSON & Co.
+
+
+PEEP HOLE, BLARNEY CASTLE
+IN THE DARGLE, CO. WICKLOW
+MUCKROSS ABBEY, KILLARNEY
+BRANDY ISLAND, GLENGARRIFF
+SUGAR LOAF MOUNTAIN, GLENGARRIFF
+RIVER ERNE, BELLEEK
+WHITE ROCKS, PORTRUSH
+POWERSCOURT WATERFALL, CO. WICKLOW
+HONEYCOMB, GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
+GRAY MAN'S PATH, FAIR HEAD
+COLLEEN BAWN CAVES, KILLARNEY
+RUINS ON SCATTERY ISLAND
+VALLEY OF GLENDALOUGH AND RUINS OF THE SEVEN
+  CHURCHES
+ANCIENT CROSS, GLENDALOUGH
+ROUND TOWER, ANTRIM
+GIANT'S HEAD AND DUNLUCE CASTLE, CO. ANTRIM
+ROCK CASHEL, RUINS OF OLD CATHEDRAL, KING CORMAC'S
+  CHAPEL AND ROUND TOWER
+DUNLUCE CASTLE
+MELLIFONT ABBEY, CO. LOUTH
+HOLY CROSS ABBEY, CO. TIPPERARY
+DONEGAL CASTLE
+TULLYMORE PARK, CO. DOWN
+THOMOND BRIDGE, LIMERICK
+SALMON FISHERY, GALWAY
+O'CONNELL'S STATUE, DUBLIN
+
+
+
+
+IRELAND.
+
+I.
+
+VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.
+
+Here is an image by which you may call up and remember the natural form
+and appearance of Ireland:
+
+Think of the sea gradually rising around her coasts, until the waters,
+deepened everywhere by a hundred fathoms, close in upon the land. Of all
+Ireland there will now remain visible above the waves only two great
+armies of islands, facing each other obliquely across a channel of open
+sea. These two armies of islands will lie in ordered ranks, their lines
+stretching from northeast to southwest; they will be equal in size, each
+two hundred miles along the front, and seventy miles from front to rear.
+And the open sea between, which divides the two armies, will measure
+seventy miles across.
+
+Not an island of these two armies, as they lie thus obliquely facing
+each other, will rise as high as three thousand feet; only the captains
+among them will exceed a thousand; nor will there be great variety in
+their forms. All the islands, whether north or south, will have gently
+rounded backs, clothed in pastures nearly to the crest, with garments of
+purple heather lying under the sky upon their ridges. Yet for all this
+roundness of outline there will be, towards the Atlantic end of either
+army, a growing sternness of aspect, a more sombre ruggedness in the
+outline of the hills, with cliffs and steep ravines setting their brows
+frowning against the deep.
+
+Hold in mind the image of these two obliquely ranged archipelagoes,
+their length thrice their breadth, seaming the blue of the sea, and
+garmented in dark green and purple under the sunshine; and, thinking of
+them thus, picture to yourself a new rising of the land, a new
+withdrawal of the waters, the waves falling and ever falling, till all
+the hills come forth again, and the salt tides roll and ripple away from
+the valleys, leaving their faces for the winds to dry; let this go on
+till the land once more takes its familiar form, and you will easily
+call up the visible image of the whole.
+
+As you stand in the midst of the land, where first lay the channel of
+open sea, you will have, on your northern horizon, the beginning of a
+world of purple-outlined hills, outliers of the northern mountain
+region, which covers the upper third of the island. On all sides about
+you, from the eastern sea to the western ocean, you will have the great
+central plain, dappled with lakes and ribbed with silver rivers, another
+third of the island. Then once more, to the south, you will have a
+region of hills, the last third of Ireland, in size just equal to the
+northern mountains or the central plain.
+
+The lines of the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses of
+Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern Ulster
+and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear is held by
+the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness of the
+northern seas.
+
+The plain opens from the verge of these hills; the waters that gather on
+its pleasant pastures and fat fields, or among the green moss tracts of
+its lowlands, flow eastward by the Boyne or southwestward by the Shannon
+to the sea.
+
+Then with the granite mountains of Dublin and Wicklow begin the southern
+hills, stretching through south Leinster and Munster to the red
+sandstone ridges of Cork and Kerry, our last vantage-ground against
+the Atlantic.
+
+Finally, encircling all, is the perpetual presence of the sea, with its
+foaming, thunderous life or its days of dreamy peace; around the silver
+sands or furrowed cliffs that gird the island our white waves rush
+forever, murmuring the music of eternity.
+
+Such is this land of Eiré, very old, yet full of perpetual youth; a
+thousand times darkened by sorrow, yet with a heart of living gladness;
+too often visited by evil and pale death, yet welling ever up in
+unconquerable life,--the youth and life and gladness that thrill through
+earth and air and sky, when the whole world grows beautiful in the front
+of Spring.
+
+For with us Spring is like the making of a new world in the dawn of
+time. Under the warm wind's caressing breath the grass comes forth upon
+the meadows and the hills, chasing dun Winter away. Every field is newly
+vestured in young corn or the olive greenness of wheat; the smell of the
+earth is full of sweetness. White daisies and yellow dandelions star all
+our pastures; and on the green ruggedness of every hillside, or along
+the shadowed banks of every river and every silver stream, amid velvet
+mosses and fringes of new-born ferns, in a million nooks and crannies
+throughout all the land, are strewn dark violets; and wreaths of yellow
+primroses with crimped green leaves pour forth a remote and divine
+fragrance; above them, the larches are dainty with new greenery and rosy
+tassels, and the young leaves of beech and oak quiver with fresh life.
+
+Still the benignance of Spring pours down upon us from the sky, till the
+darkening fields are hemmed in between barriers of white hawthorn, heavy
+with nectar, and twined with creamy honeysuckle, the finger-tips of
+every blossom coral-red. The living blue above throbs with the tremulous
+song of innumerable larks; the measured chant of cuckoos awakens the
+woods; and through the thickets a whole world's gladness sings itself
+forth from the throat of thrush and blackbird. Through the whole land
+between the four seas benediction is everywhere; blue-bells and the rosy
+fingers of heath deck the mountain-tops, where the grouse are crooning
+to each other among the whins; down the hillsides into every valley pour
+gladness and greenness and song; there are flowers everywhere, even to
+the very verge of the whispering sea. There, among the gray bent-spikes
+and brackens on the sandhills, primroses weave their yellow wreaths; and
+little pansies, golden and blue and purple, marshal their weird eyes
+against the spears of dark blue hyacinths, till the rich tribute of
+wild thyme makes peace between them.
+
+The blue sky overhead, with its flocks of sunlit clouds, softly bends
+over the gentle bosom of the earth. A living spirit throbs everywhere,
+palpable, audible, full of sweetness and sadness immeasurable--sadness
+that is only a more secret joy.
+
+Then the day grows weary, making way for the magic of evening and the
+oncoming dark with its mystery. The tree-stems redden with the sunset;
+there is a chill sigh in the wind; the leaves turn before it, burnished
+against the purple sky. As the gloom rises up out of the earth, bands of
+dark red gather on the horizon, seaming the clear bronze of the sky,
+that passes upward into olive-color, merging in dark blue overhead. The
+sun swings down behind the hills, and purple darkness comes down out of
+the sky; the red fades from the tree-stems, the cloud-colors die away;
+the whole world glimmers with the fading whiteness of twilight. Silence
+gathers itself together out of the dark, deepened, not broken, by the
+hushing of the wind among the beech-leaves, or the startled cluck of a
+blackbird, or a wood-pigeon's soft murmur, as it dreams in the
+silver fir.
+
+Under the brown wings of the dark, the night throbs with mystic
+presences; the hills glimmer with an inward life; whispering voices
+hurry through the air. Another and magical land awakes in the dark, full
+of a living restlessness; sleepless as the ever-moving sea. Everywhere
+through the night-shrouded woods, the shadowy trees seem to interrupt
+their secret whispers till you are gone past. There is no sense of
+loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand,
+palpable though hidden, remote from us though touching our lives,
+calling to us through the gloom with wordless voices, inviting us to
+enter and share with them the mystical life of this miraculous earth,
+great mother of us all, The dark is full of watching eyes.
+
+Summer with us is but a brighter Spring, as our Winter only prolongs the
+sadness of Autumn. So our year has but two moods, a gay one and a sad
+one. Yet each tinges the other--the mists of Autumn veiling the gleam of
+Spring--Spring smiling through the grief of Autumn. When the sad mood
+comes, stripping the trees of their leaves, and the fields of their
+greenness, white mists veil the hills and brood among the fading
+valleys. A shiver runs through the air, and the cold branches are
+starred with tears. A poignant grief is over the land, an almost
+desolation,--full of unspoken sorrow, tongue-tied with unuttered
+complaint. All the world is lost and forlorn, without hope or respite.
+Everything is given up to the dirges of the moaning seas, the white
+shrouds of weeping mist. Wander forth upon the uplands and among the
+lonely hills and rock-seamed sides of the mountains, and you will find
+the same sadness everywhere: a grieving world under a grieving sky.
+Quiet desolation hides among the hills, tears tremble on every brown
+grass-blade, white mists of melancholy shut out the lower world.
+
+Whoever has not felt the poignant sadness of the leafless days has never
+known the real Ireland; the sadness that is present, though veiled, in
+the green bravery of Spring, and under the songs of Summer. Nor have
+they ever known the real Ireland who have not divined beneath that
+poignant sadness a heart of joy, deep and perpetual, made only keener by
+that sad outward show.
+
+Here in our visible life is a whisper and hint of our life invisible; of
+the secret that runs through and interprets so much of our history. For
+very much of our nation's life has been like the sadness of those autumn
+days,--a tale of torn leaves, of broken branches, of tears everywhere.
+Tragedy upon tragedy has filled our land with woe and sorrow, and, as
+men count success, we have failed of it, and received only misery and
+deprivation. He has never known the true Ireland who does not feel that
+woe. Yet, more, he knows not the real Ireland who cannot feel within
+that woe the heart of power and joy,--the strong life outlasting darkest
+night,--the soul that throbs incessantly under all the calamities of the
+visible world, throughout the long tragedy of our history.
+
+This is our secret: the life that is in sorrow as in joy; the power that
+is not more in success than in failure--the one soul whose moods these
+are, who uses equally life and death.
+
+For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy. And we may outline now the
+manner in which that tale will be told. We shall have, first, a long,
+dim dawn,--mysterious peoples of the hidden past coming together to our
+land from the outlying darkness. A first period, which has left abundant
+and imperishable traces everywhere among our hills and valleys, writing
+a large history in massive stone, yet a history which, even now, is dim
+as the dawn it belongs to. What can be called forth from that Archaic
+Darkness, in the backward and abysm of Time, we shall try to evoke;
+drawing the outlines of a people who, with large energies in our visible
+world, toiled yet more for the world invisible; a people uniform through
+the whole land and beyond it, along many neighboring shores; a people
+everywhere building; looking back into a long past; looking forward
+through the mists of the future. A people commemorating the past in a
+form that should outlast the future. A people undertaking great
+enterprises for mysterious ends; whose works are everywhere among us, to
+this day, imperishable in giant stone; yet a people whose purposes are
+mysterious to us, whose very name and tongue are quite unknown. Their
+works still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the
+four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the
+present; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such
+large simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every
+handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows,
+bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race.
+
+After this Archaic Dawn we shall find a mingling of four races in
+Ireland, coming together from widely separated homes, unless one of the
+four be the descendant of the archaic race, as well it may be. From the
+surging together of these four races we shall see, in almost
+pre-historic times, the growth of a well-knit polity; firm
+principalities founded, strong battles fought, a lasting foundation of
+law. In this Second Epoch, every thing that in the first was dim and
+vague grows firm in outline and defined. Names, places, persons,--we
+know them all as if they were of to-day. This is the age which flowered
+in the heroic days of Emain of Maca, Emain 'neath the beech-trees, the
+citadel of northeastern Ireland. Here we shall find the court of Fergus
+mac Roeg, a man too valiant, too passionate, too generous to rule
+altogether wisely; his star darkened by the gloomy genius of Concobar
+his stepson, the evil lover of ill-fated Deirdré. Cuculain, too, the
+war-loving son of Sualtam, shall rise again,--in whom one part of our
+national genius finds its perfect flower. We shall hear the thunder of
+his chariot, at the Battle of the Headland of the Kings, when Meave the
+winsome and crafty queen of Connacht comes against him, holding in
+silken chains of her tresses the valiant spirit of Fergus. The whole
+life of that heroic epoch, still writ large upon the face of the land,
+shall come forth clear and definite; we shall stand by the threshold of
+Cuculain's dwelling, and move among the banquet-halls of Emain of Maca.
+We shall look upon the hills and valleys that Meave and Deirdré looked
+on, and hear the clash of spear and shield at the Ford of the
+river,--and this even though we must go back two thousand years.
+
+To this will follow a Third Epoch, where another side of Ireland's
+genius will write itself in epic all across the land, with songs for
+every hillside, and stories for every vale and grove. Here our more
+passionate and poetic force will break forth in the lives of Find, son
+of Cumal, the lord of warriors; in his son Ossin, most famous bard of
+the western lands, and Ossin's son Oscar, before whose might even the
+fiends and sprites cowered back dismayed. As the epoch of Cuculain shows
+us our valor finding its apotheosis, so shall we find in Find and Ossin
+and Oscar the perfect flower of our genius for story and song; for
+romantic life and fine insight into nature; for keen wit and gentler
+humor. The love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly
+the visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly,--a sense
+of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic
+life. We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and poetic
+side of Irish character as will leave little for coming ages to add. In
+these two early epochs we shall see the perfecting of the natural man;
+the moulding of rounded, gracious and harmonious lives, inspired with
+valor and the love of beauty and song.
+
+Did our human destiny stop there, with the perfect life of individual
+men and women, we might well say that these two epochs of Ireland
+contain it all; that our whole race could go no further. For no man
+lived more valiant than Cuculain, more generous than Fergus, more full
+of the fire of song than Ossin, son of Find. Nor amongst women were any
+sadder than Deirdré and Grania; craftier than Meave, more winsome than
+Nessa the mother of Concobar. Perfected flowers of human life all of
+them,--if that be all of human life. So, were this all, we might well
+consent that with the death of Oscar our roll of history might close;
+there is nothing to add that the natural man could add.
+
+But where the perfecting of the natural man ends, our truer human life
+begins--the life of our ever-living soul. The natural man seeks victory;
+he seeks wealth and possessions and happiness; the love of women, and
+the loyalty of followers. But the natural man trembles in the face of
+defeat, of sorrow, of subjection; the natural man cannot raise the
+black veil of death.
+
+Therefore for the whole world and for our land there was needed another
+epoch, a far more difficult lesson,--one so remote from what had been of
+old, that even now we only begin to understand it. To the Ireland that
+had seen the valor of Cuculain, that had watched the wars of Fergus,--to
+the Ireland that listened to the deeds of Find and the songs of
+Ossin,--came the Evangel of Galilee, the darkest yet brightest message
+ever brought to the children of earth. If we rightly read that Evangel,
+it brought the doom of the natural man, and his supersession by the man
+immortal; it brought the death of our personal perfecting and pride, and
+the rising from the dead of the common soul, whereby a man sees another
+self in his neighbor; sees all alike in the one Divine.
+
+Of this one Divine, wherein we all live and live forever, pain is no
+less the minister than pleasure; nay, pain is more its minister, since
+pleasure has already given its message to the natural man. Of that one
+Divine, sorrow and desolation are the messengers, alike with joy and
+gladness; even more than joy and gladness, for the natural man has
+tasted these. Of that one Divine, black and mysterious death is the
+servant, not less than bright life; and life we had learned of old in
+the sunshine.
+
+[Illustration: In the Dargle, Co. Wicklow]
+
+There came, therefore, to Ireland, as to a land cherished for enduring
+purposes, first the gentler side, and then the sterner, of the Galilean
+message. First, the epoch almost idyllic which followed after the
+mission of Patrick; the epoch of learning and teaching the simpler
+phrases of the Word. Churches and schools rose everywhere, taking the
+place of fort and embattled camp. Chants went up at morning and at
+evening, with the incense of prayer, and heaven seemed descended upon
+earth. Our land, which had stood so high in the ranks of valor and
+romance, now rose not less eminent for piety and fervid zeal, sending
+forth messengers and ministers of the glad news to the heathen lands of
+northern and central Europe, and planting refuges of religion within
+their savage bounds. Beauty came forth in stone and missal, answering to
+the beauty of life it was inspired by; and here, if anywhere upon earth
+through a score of centuries, was realized the ideal of that prayer for
+the kingdom, as in heaven, so on earth. Here, again, we have most ample
+memorials scattered all abroad throughout the land; we can call up the
+whole epoch, and make it stand visible before us, visiting every shrine
+and sacred place of that saintly time, seeing, with inner eyes, the
+footsteps of those who followed that path, first traced out by the
+shores of Gennesaret.
+
+Once more, if the kingdom come upon earth were all of the message, we
+might halt here; for here forgiveness and gentle charity performed their
+perfect work, and learning was present with wise counsel to guide
+willing feet in the way. Yet this is not all; nor, if we rightly
+understand that darkest yet brightest message, are we or is mankind
+destined for such an earthly paradise; our kingdom is not of this world.
+Here was another happiness, another success; yet not in that happiness
+nor in that success was hid the secret; it lay far deeper. Therefore we
+find that morning with its sunshine rudely clouded over, its promise
+swept away in the black darkness of storms. Something more than holy
+living remained to be learned; there remained the mystery of failure and
+death--that death which is the doorway to our real life. Therefore upon
+our shores broke wave after wave of invasion, storm after storm of
+cruelest oppression and degradation. In the very dust was our race
+ground down, destitute, afflicted, tormented, according to prophecy and
+promise. Nor was that the end. Every bitterness that the heart of man
+can conceive, that the heart of man can inflict, that the heart of man
+can endure, was poured into our cup, and we drained it to the dregs. Of
+that saddest yet most potent time we shall record enough to show not
+only what befell through our age of darkness, but also, so far as may
+be, what miraculous intent underlay it, what promise the darkness
+covered, of our future light; what golden rays of dawn were hidden in
+our gloom.
+
+Finally, from all our fiery trials we shall see the genius of our land
+emerge, tried indeed by fire, yet having gained fire's purity; we shall
+see that genius beginning, as yet with halting speech, to utter its most
+marvelous secret of the soul of man. We shall try at least to gain clear
+sight of our great destiny, and thereby of the like destiny of
+universal man.
+
+For we cannot doubt that what we have passed through, all men and all
+nations either have passed through already, or are to pass through in
+the time to come. There is but one divine law, one everlasting purpose
+and destiny for us all. And if we see other nations now entering that
+time of triumph which passed for us so long ago, that perfecting of the
+natural man, with his valor and his song, we shall with fear and
+reverence remember that before them also lie the dark centuries of fiery
+trial; the long night of affliction, the vigils of humiliation and
+suffering. The one Divine has not yet laid aside the cup that holds the
+bitter draught,--the drinking of which comes ever before the final gift
+of the waters of life. What we passed through, they shall pass through
+also; what we suffered, they too shall suffer. Well will it be with them
+if, like us, they survive the fierce trial, and rise from the fire
+immortal, born again through sacrifice.
+
+Therefore I see in Ireland a miraculous and divine history, a life and
+destiny invisible, lying hid within her visible life. Like that
+throbbing presence of the night which whispers along the hills, this
+diviner whisper, this more miraculous and occult power, lurks in our
+apparent life. From the very gray of her morning, the children of
+Ireland were preoccupied with the invisible world; it was so in the
+darkest hours of our oppression and desolation; driven from this world,
+we took refuge in that; it was not the kingdom of heaven upon earth, but
+the children of earth seeking a refuge in heaven. So the same note rings
+and echoes through all our history; we live in the invisible world. If
+I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To restore
+to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our immortality;
+as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall
+first learn, and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be
+satisfied; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the
+unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the
+visible beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose,
+well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle
+of Destiny.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.
+
+Westward from Sligo--Town of the River of Shells--a tongue of land runs
+toward the sea between two long bays. Where the two bays join their
+waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray limestone rocks soaring
+sheer upwards, rugged and formidable. Within the shadow of the mountain
+is hidden a wonderful glen--a long tunnel between cliffs, densely arched
+over with trees and fringed with ferns; even at midday full of a green
+gloom. It is a fitting gateway to the beauty and mystery of
+the mountain.
+
+Slowly climbing by stony ways, the path reaches the summit, a rock table
+crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in olden days as a
+memorial of golden-haired Maeve. From the dead queen's pyramid a view of
+surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over sea and land, mingled valley
+and hill. The Atlantic stretches in illimitable blue, curved round the
+rim of the sky, a darker mirror of the blue above. It is full of
+throbbing silence and peace. Across blue fields of ocean, and facing
+the noonday brightness of the sun, rise the tremendous cliffs of Slieve
+League, gleaming with splendid colors through the shimmering air; broad
+bands of amber and orange barred with deeper red; the blue weaves
+beneath them and the green of the uplands above.
+
+The vast amber wall rises out of the ocean, and passes eastward in a
+golden band till it merges in the Donegal highlands with their
+immeasurable blue. Sweeping round a wide bay, the land drawls nearer
+again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to green and
+brown. The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and Sligo hills, a
+row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler and more
+translucent in the southern distance.
+
+Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across the plain,
+where brown and purple are blended with green in broad spaces of
+mingling color. To the west the ground rises again into hills crowded
+behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the Mountains of
+Storms. Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud-wreaths in the blue, are
+the hills that guard our western ocean. From their sunset-verges the
+land draws near again, in the long range of the Mayo cliffs,--fierce
+walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean from a wild world of
+storm-swept uplands. The cliffs gradually lessen, and their colors grow
+clearer, till they sink at last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare,
+divided from us only by a channel of shallow sea.
+
+The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain, is full
+of the silence of intense and mighty power. The ocean is tremulous with
+the breath of life. The mountains, in their stately beauty, rise like
+immortals in the clear azure. The signs of our present works are dwarfed
+to insignificance.
+
+Everywhere within that wide world of hill and plain, and hardly less
+ancient than the hills themselves, are strewn memorials of another world
+that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden past. A wordless
+history is written there, in giant circles of stone and cromlechs of
+piled blocks, so old that in a land of most venerable tradition their
+very legend has vanished away.
+
+Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs and
+stone circles, a very city of dead years. There is something
+awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered stones,
+the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts; that awe is deepened by
+the feeling of the tremendous power lavished in bringing them here,
+setting them up in their ordered groups, and piling the crowns of the
+cromlechs on other only less gigantic stones; awe gives place to
+overwhelming mystery when we can find no kinship to our own thoughts and
+aims in their stately grouping. We are in presence of archaic purposes
+recorded in a massive labyrinth, purposes darkly hidden from us in
+the unknown.
+
+There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances, firmly set
+upright in the earth. They loom vast, like beads of a giant necklace on
+the velvet grass. There are cromlechs set alone--a single huge boulder
+borne aloft in the air on three others of hardly less weight. There are
+cromlechs set in the midst of titanic circles of stone, with lesser
+boulders guarding the cromlechs closer at hand. There are circles beside
+circles rising in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting
+their aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their
+companion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmuring sea.
+
+Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages. When sunrise
+reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over
+the burnished grass. From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever
+hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow
+gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness. When day
+declines, the shadows come forth again, joining ghostly hands from stone
+to stone, from circle to circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at
+last into the universal realm of night. Thus they weave their web,
+inexorable as tireless Time.
+
+There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore, under
+Knocknarea. Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials of dead
+years within our horizon. At Abbey-quarter, within the town-limits of
+Sligo itself, there is another great ring of boulders, the past and the
+present mingling together. On the northern coast, across the Bay of
+Sligo, where the headland of Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is
+another giant necklace of gray blocks ranged upon the moor. Farther
+along the shore, where Bundoran marks the boundary of Donegal, a
+cromlech and a stone circle rise among the sand-banks. All have the same
+rugged and enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery.
+
+Eastward from Sligo, Lough Gill lies like a mirror framed in hills,
+wreathed with dark green woods. On a hill-top north of the lake, in the
+Deer-park, is a monument of quite other character--a great oblong
+marked by pillared stones, like an open temple. At three points huge
+stones are laid across from pillar to pillar. The whole enclosure was
+doubtless so barred in days of old, a temple of open arches crowning the
+summit of the hill. The great ruin by the lake keeps its secret well.
+
+Another ring of giant stones rests on a hillside across the lake, under
+the Cairn hill, with its pyramid crown. All these are within easy view
+from our first vantage-point on Knocknarea, yet they are but the
+outposts of an army which spreads everywhere throughout the land. They
+are as common in wild and inaccessible places as on the open plain. Some
+rise in lonely islands off the coast; others on the summits of
+mountains; yet others in the midst of tilled fields. They bear no
+relation at all to the land as it is to-day. The very dispersion of
+these great stone monuments, scattered equally among places familiar or
+wild, speaks of a remote past--a past when all places were alike wild,
+or all alike familiar.
+
+Where the gale-swept moors of Achill Island rise up toward the slope of
+Slievemore Mountain, there are stone circles and cromlechs like the
+circles of Carrowmore. The wild storms of the Atlantic rush past them,
+and the breakers roar under their cliffs. The moorland round the
+towering mountain is stained with ochre and iron under a carpet of
+heather rough as the ocean winds.
+
+Away to the south from Slievemore the horizon is broken by an army of
+mountains, beginning with the Twelve Peaks of Connemara. Eastward of
+these hills are spread the great Galway lakes; eastward of these a wide
+expanse of plain. This is the famous Moytura of traditional history,
+whose story we shall presently tell. Ages ago a decisive battle was
+fought there; but ages before the battle, if we are not greatly misled,
+the stone circles of the plain were already there. Tradition says that
+these circles numbered seven in the beginning, but only two
+remain unbroken.
+
+Between Galway Bay and the wide estuary of the Shannon spread the
+moorlands of Clare, bleak under Atlantic gales, with never a tree for
+miles inward from the sea. Like a watch-tower above the moorlands stand.
+Slieve Callan, the crown of the mountain abruptly shorn. Under the
+shoulder of the great hill, with the rolling moorlands all about it,
+stands a solitary cromlech; formed of huge flat stones, it was at first
+a roomy chamber shut in on all four sides, and roofed by a single
+enormous block; the ends have fallen, so that it is now an open tunnel
+formed of three huge stones.
+
+The coast runs southward from the Shannon to the strand of Tralee, the
+frontier of the southern mountain world, where four ranges of red
+sandstone thrust themselves forth towards the ocean, with long fiords
+running inland between them. On a summit of the first of these red
+ranges, Caherconree above Tralee strand, there is a stone circle,
+massive, gigantic, dwelling in utter solitude.
+
+We have recorded a few only out of many of these great stone monuments
+strewn along our Atlantic coast, whether on moor or cliff or remote
+mountain-top.
+
+There are others as notable everywhere in the central plain, the
+limestone world of lakes and rivers. On a green hill-crest overlooking
+the network of inlets of Upper Erne there is a circle greater than any
+we have recorded. The stones are very massive, some of them twice the
+height of a tall man. To one who stands within the ring these huge
+blocks of stone shut out the world; they loom large against the sky,
+full of unspoken secrets like the Sphinx. Within this mighty ring the
+circle of Stonehenge might be set, leaving a broad road all round it on
+the grass.
+
+From Fermanagh, where this huge circle is, we gain our best clue to the
+age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each other in their
+massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in their utter mystery.
+Round the lakes of Erne there are wide expanses of peat, dug as fuel for
+centuries, and in many places as much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of
+clay, the waste of old glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness,
+this whole mass of peat has grown since some of the great stone
+monuments were built; if we can tell the time thus taken for its growth
+we know at least the nearer limit of the time that divides us from
+their builders.
+
+Like a tree, the peat has its time of growth and its time of rest.
+Spring covers it with green, winter sees it brown and dead. Thus thin
+layers are spread over it, a layer for a year, and it steadily gains in
+thickness with the passing of the years. The deeper levels are buried
+and pressed down, slowly growing firm and rigid, but still keeping the
+marks of the layers that make them up. It is like a dry ocean gradually
+submerging the land. Gathering round the great stone circles as they
+stand on the clay, this black sea has risen slowly but surely, till at
+last it has covered them with its dark waves, and they rest in the
+quiet depths, with a green foam of spring freshness far above
+their heads.
+
+At Killee and Breagho, near Enniskillen, the peat has once more been cut
+away, restoring some of these great stones to the light. If we count the
+layers and measure the thickness of the peat, we can tell how many years
+are represented by its growth. We can, therefore, tell that the great
+stone circle, which the first growth of peat found already there, must
+be at least as old, and may be indefinitely older. By careful count it
+is found that one foot of black peat is made up of eight hundred layers;
+eight hundred summers and eight hundred winters went to the building of
+it. One foot of black peat, therefore, will measure the time from before
+the founding of Rome or the First Olympiad to the beginning of our era.
+Another foot will bring us to the crowning of Charlemagne. Yet another,
+to the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Since then, only a few inches
+have been added. Here is a chronometer worthy of our great cromlechs and
+stone circles.
+
+Some of these, as we saw, rest on the clay, with a sea of peat twelve
+feet deep around and above them. Every foot of the peat stands for eight
+centuries. Since the peat began to form, eight or ten thousand years
+have passed, and when that vast period began, the great monuments of
+stone were already there. How long they had stood in their silence
+before our chronometer began to run we cannot even guess.
+
+At Cavancarragh, on the shoulder of Toppid Mountain, some four miles
+from Enniskillen, there is one of these circles; a ring of huge stone
+boulders with equal spaces between stone and stone. A four-fold avenue
+of great blocks stretches away from it along the shoulder of the hill,
+ending quite abruptly at the edge of a ravine, the steep channel of a
+torrent. It looks as if the river, gradually undermining the hillside,
+had cut the avenue in halves, so that the ravine seems later in date
+than the stones. But that we cannot be quite sure of. This, however, we
+do certainly know: that since the avenue of boulders and the circle of
+huge red stones were ranged in order, a covering of peat in some parts
+twelve feet thick has grown around and above them, hiding them at last
+altogether from the day. In places the peat has been cut away again,
+leaving the stones once more open to the light, standing, as they always
+stood, on the surface of the clay.
+
+Here again we get the same measurement. At eight hundred annual layers
+to the foot, and with twelve feet of peat, we have nine thousand six
+hundred years,--not for the age of the stone circles, but for that part
+of their age which we are able to measure. For we know not how long they
+were there before the peat began to grow. It may have been a few years;
+it may have been a period as great or even greater than the ten thousand
+years we are able to measure.
+
+The peat gradually displaced an early forest of giant oaks. Their stems
+are still there, standing rooted in the older clay. Where they once
+stood no trees now grow. The whole face of the land has changed. Some
+great change of climate must lie behind this vanishing of vast forests,
+this gradual growth of peat-covered moors. A dry climate must have
+changed to one much damper; heat must have changed to cold, warm winds
+to chilly storms. In the southern promontories, among red sandstone
+hills, still linger survivors of that more genial clime--groves of
+arbutus that speak of Greece or Sicily; ferns, as at Killarney, found
+elsewhere only in the south, in Portugal, or the Canary Islands.
+
+[Illustration: Muckross Abbey, Killarney.]
+
+On the southwestern horizon from Toppid Mountain, when the sky is clear
+after rain, you can trace the outline of the Curlew hills, our
+southern limit of view from Knocknarea. Up to the foot of the hills
+spreads a level country of pastures dappled with lakes, broken into a
+thousand fantastic inlets by the wasting of the limestone rock. The
+daisies are the stars in that green sky. Just beyond the young stream of
+the Shannon, where it links Lough Garra to Lough Key, there is a lonely
+cromlech, whose tremendous crown was once upheld by five massive
+pillars. There is a kindred wildness and mystery in the cromlech and the
+lonely hills.
+
+Southward again of this, where the town of Lough Rea takes its name from
+the Gray Lake, stands a high hill crowned by a cromlech, with an
+encircling earthwork. It marks a green ring of sacred ground alone upon
+the hill-top, shut off from all the world, and with the mysterious
+monument of piled stones in its centre; here, as always, one huge block
+upheld in the air by only lesser blocks. The Gray Lake itself, under
+this strange sentry on the hill, was in long-passed ages a little
+Venice; houses built on piles lined its shores, set far enough out into
+the lake for safety, ever ready to ward off attack from the land. This
+miniature Venice of Lough Rea is the type of a whole epoch of turbulent
+tribal war, when homes were everywhere clustered within the defence of
+the waters, with stores laid up to last the rigors of a siege.
+
+The contrast between the insecurity and peril of the old lake dwellings
+and the present safety of the town, open on all sides, unguarded and
+free from fear, is very marked. But not less complete is the contrast
+between the ancient hamlet, thus hidden for security amid the waters,
+and the great cromlech, looming black against the sky on the hill's
+summit, exposed to the wildness of the winds, utterly unguarded, yet
+resting there in lonely serenity.
+
+A little farther south, Lough Gur lies like a white mirror among the
+rolling pasture-lands of Limerick, set amongst low hills. On the lake's
+shore is another metropolis of the dead, worthy to compare with
+Carrowmore on the Sligo headland. Some of the circles here are not
+formed of single stones set at some distance from each other, but of a
+continuous wall of great blocks crowded edge to edge. They are like
+round temples open to the sky, and within one of these unbroken rings is
+a lesser ring like an inner shrine. All round the lake there are like
+memorials--if we can call memorials these mighty groups of stone, which
+only remind us how much we have forgotten. There are huge circles of
+blocks either set close together or with an equal space dividing boulder
+from boulder; some of the giant circles are grouped together in twos and
+threes, others are isolated; one has its centre marked by a single
+enormous block, while another like block stands farther off in lonely
+vastness. Here also stands a chambered cromlech of four huge flat blocks
+roofed over like the cromlech under Slieve Callan across the
+Shannon mouth.
+
+The southern horizon from Lough Gur is broken by the hills of red
+sandstone rising around Glanworth. Beside the stream, a tributary of the
+Blackwater, a huge red cromlech rises over the greenness of the meadows
+like a belated mammoth in its uncouth might. To the southwest, under the
+red hills that guard Killarney on the south, the Sullane River flows
+towards the Lee. On its bank is another cromlech of red sandstone
+blocks, twin-brother to the Glanworth pile. Beyond it the road passes
+towards the sunset through mountain-shadowed glens, coming out at last
+where Kenmare River opens into a splendid fiord towards the Atlantic
+Ocean. At Kenmare, in a vale of perfect beauty green with groves of
+arbutus and fringed with thickets of fuchsia, stands a great stone
+circle, the last we shall record to the south. Like all the rest, it
+speaks of tremendous power, of unworldly and mysterious ends.
+
+The very antiquity of these huge stone circles suggests an affinity with
+the revolving years. And here, perhaps, we may find a clue to their
+building. They may have been destined to record great Time itself, great
+Time that circles forever through the circling years. There is first the
+year to be recorded, with its revolving days; white winter gleaming into
+spring; summer reddening and fading to autumn. Returning winter tells
+that the year has gone full circle; the sun among the stars gives the
+definite measure of the days. A ring of thirty-six great boulders, set
+ten paces apart, would give the measure of the year in days; and of
+circles like this there are more than one.
+
+In this endless ring of days the moon is the measurer, marking the hours
+and weeks upon the blue belt of night studded with golden stars. Moving
+stealthily among the stars, the moon presently changes her place by a
+distance equal to her own breadth; we call the time this takes an hour.
+From her rising to her setting, she gains her own breadth twelve times;
+therefore, the night and the day are divided each into twelve hours.
+Meanwhile she grows from crescent to full disk, to wane again to a
+sickle of light, and presently to lose herself in darkness at new moon.
+From full moon to full moon, or from one new moon to another, the
+nearest even measure is thirty days; a circle of thirty stones would
+record this, as the larger circle of thirty-six recorded the solar year.
+In three years there are thrice twelve full moons, with one added; a
+ring of thirty-seven stones representing this would show the simplest
+relation between sun and moon.
+
+The moon, as we saw, stealthily glides among the fixed stars, gaining
+her own width every hour. Passing thus along the mid belt of the sphere,
+she makes the complete circuit in twenty-seven days, returning to the
+same point among the stars, or, if it should so happen, to the same
+star, within that time. Because the earth has meanwhile moved forward,
+the moon needs three days more to overtake it and gain the same relative
+position towards earth and sun, thus growing full again, not after
+twenty-seven, but after thirty days. Circles of twenty-seven and thirty
+days would stand for these lunar epochs, and would, for those who
+understood them, further bear testimony to the earth's movement in its
+own great path around the sun. Thus would rings of varying numbers mark
+the measures of time; and not these only, but the great sweep of orbs
+engendering them, the triumphal march of the spheres through pathless
+ether. The life of our own world would thus be shown bound up with the
+lives of others in ceaseless, ever-widening circles, that lead us to the
+Infinite, the Eternal.
+
+All the cromlechs and circles we have thus far recorded are in the
+western half of our land; there are as many, as worthy of note, in the
+eastern half. But as before we can only pick out a few. One of these
+crowns the volcanic peak of Brandon Hill, in Kilkenny, dividing the
+valleys of the Barrow and Nore. From the mountain-top you can trace the
+silver lines of the rivers coming together to the south, and flowing
+onward to the widening inlet of Wexford harbor, where they mingle with
+the waters of the River Suir. On the summit of Brandon Hill stands a
+great stone circle, a ring of huge basalt blocks dominating the rich
+valleys and the surrounding plain.
+
+In Glen Druid of the Dublin hills is a cromlech whose granite crown
+weighs seventy tons. Not far off is the Mount Venus cromlech, the
+covering block of which is even more titanic; it is a single stone
+eighty tons in weight. Near Killternan village, a short distance off, is
+yet another cromlech whose top-most boulder exceeds both of these,
+weighing not less than ninety tons. Yet vast as all these are, they are
+outstripped by the cromlech of Howth, whose upper block is twenty feet
+square and eight feet thick, a single enormous boulder one hundred tons
+in weight. This huge stone was borne in the air upon twelve massive
+pillars of quartz, seven feet above the ground, so that a man of average
+height standing on the ground and reaching upward could just touch the
+under surface of the block with his finger-tips. Even a tall man
+standing on the shoulders of another as tall would quite fail to touch
+the upper edge of the stone. If we give this marvelous monument the same
+age as the Fermanagh circles, as we well may, this raising of a single
+boulder of one hundred tons, and balancing it in the air on the crest of
+massive pillars may give us some insight into the engineering skill of
+the men of ten thousand years ago.
+
+Across the central plain from Howth Head the first break is the range of
+Loughcrew hills. Here are great stone circles in numbers, not standing
+alone like so many others, but encompassing still stranger monuments;
+chambered pyramids of boulders, to which we shall later return. They
+are lesser models of the three great pyramids of Brugh on the Boyne,
+where the river sweeps southward in a long curve, half-encircling a
+headland of holy ground.
+
+From near Howth to the Boyne and north of it, the coast is low and flat;
+sandhills matted with bent-grass and starred with red thyme and tiny
+pansies, yellow and purple and blue. Low tide carries the sea almost to
+the horizon, across a vast wilderness of dripping sand where the gulls
+chatter as they wade among the pools. Where the shore rises again
+towards the Carlingford Mountains, another cromlech stands under the
+shadow of granite hills.
+
+A long fiord with wooded walls divides the Carlingford range from the
+mountains of Mourne. The great dark range thrusts itself forth against
+the sea in somber beauty, overhanging the wide strand of Dundrum Bay.
+The lesser bay, across whose bar the sea moans under the storm-winds, is
+dominated by the hill of Rudraige, named in honor of a hero of old days;
+but under the shadow of the hill stands a more ancient monument, that
+was gray with age before the race of Rudraige was born. On five pillars
+of massive stone is upreared a sixth, of huge and formidable bulk, and
+carrying even to us in our day a sense of mystery and might. The potent
+atmosphere of a hidden past still breathes from it, whispering of
+vanished years, vanished races, vanished secrets of the prime.
+
+There are two circles of enormous stones on the tongue of land between
+Dundrum Bay and Strangford, both very perfect and marked each in its own
+way from among the rest. The first, at Legamaddy, has every huge boulder
+still in place. There is a lesser ring of stones within the first
+circle, with many outliers, of enormous size, dotted among the fields.
+It looks as if a herd of huge animals of the early world had come
+together in a circle for the night, the young being kept for safety
+within their ring, while others, grazing longer or wandering farther
+from the rest, were approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon
+them with dire magic turned them all to stone; and there they remain,
+sentient, yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies
+like this we may convey the feeling of mystery breathing from them.
+
+On the hill-top of Slieve-na-griddle is another circle of the same
+enormous boulders. A cromlech is piled in the midst of it, and an avenue
+of stones leads up to the circle. Its form is that of many circles with
+enclosed cromlechs at Carrowmore, though in these the avenue is missing.
+The thought that underlies them is the same, though they are separated
+by the whole width of the land; a single cult with a single ideal
+prompted the erection of both.
+
+At Drumbo, on the east bank of the Lagan before it reaches Belfast
+Lough, there is a massive cromlech surrounded by a wide ring of earth
+piled up high enough to cut off the sacred space within from all view of
+the outer world. Like the earthwork round the cromlech of Lough Rea, it
+marks the boundary of a great nature temple, open to the sky but shut
+off from mankind. Even now its very atmosphere breathes reverence.
+
+At Finvoy, in northern Antrim, among the meadows of the Bann, there is a
+cromlech within a great stone circle like that on Slieve-na-griddle in
+Down, and like many of the Carrowmore rings. The Black Lion cromlech in
+Cavan is encircled with a like ring of boulders, and another cromlech
+not far off rivals some of the largest in the immense size of its
+crowning block.
+
+Three cromlechs in the same limestone plain add something to the mystery
+that overhangs all the rest. The first, at Lennan in Monaghan, is marked
+with a curious cryptic design, suggesting a clue, yet yielding none.
+There is a like script on the cromlech at Castlederg in Tyrone, if
+indeed the markings were ever the record of some thought to be
+remembered, and not mere ornament. The chambered cromlech of Lisbellaw
+in Fermanagh has like markings; they are too similar to be quite
+independent, yet almost too simple to contain a recorded thought.
+
+We come once more to Donegal. On the hill-top of Beltaney, near Raphoe,
+there is a very massive circle formed of sixty-seven huge blocks. Here
+again the Stonehenge ring might be set up within the Irish circle,
+leaving an avenue eight paces wide all round it. The sacred fire was
+formerly kindled here to mark the birth of Spring. The name of the old
+festival of Beltane still lingers on the hill. At Culdaff in north
+Donegal, at the end of the Inishowen peninsula, stands another great
+stone circle, with which we must close our survey of these titanic
+monuments.
+
+We have mentioned a few only among many; yet enough to show their
+presence everywhere throughout the land, in the valleys or on mountain
+summits, in the midst of pastures or on lonely and rugged isles. One
+group, as we have seen, cannot be younger than ten thousand years, and
+may be far older. The others may be well coeval. Their magnitude, their
+ordered ranks, their universal presence, are a startling revelation of
+the material powers of the men of that remote age; they are a testimony,
+not less wonderful, of the moral force which dedicated so much power to
+ideal ends. Finally, they are a monument to remind us how little we yet
+know of the real history of our race.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.
+
+In every district of Ireland, therefore, there remain these tremendous
+and solemn survivors of a mighty past. The cromlechs, with their
+enormous masses upheld in the air, rising among the fertile fields or
+daisy-dotted pastures; the great circles of standing stones, starred
+everywhere, in the valleys or upon the uplands, along the rough sides of
+heather-covered hills. They have everywhere the same aspect of august
+mystery, the same brooding presence, like sentinels of another world. It
+is impossible not to feel their overshadowing majesty. Everywhere they
+follow the same designs in large simplicity; inspired by the same
+purpose, and with the same tireless might overcoming the tremendous
+obstacles of their erection; they are devoted everywhere not to material
+and earthly ends, but to the ideal purposes of the invisible and
+everlasting, linked with the hidden life of those who pass away from us
+through the gates of death.
+
+Can we find any clue to the builders of these grand and enduring
+memorials, the conditions of their building, the age of our land to
+which they belong? If we wisely use the abundant knowledge of the past
+already in our possession, there is good reason to believe we can,
+establishing much with entire certainty and divining more.
+
+The standing stones and cromlechs, as we know, are everywhere spread
+over Ireland, so that it is probable that throughout the whole country
+one is never out of sight of one of these solemn monuments. Their
+uniform and universal presence shows, therefore, a uniform race dwelling
+everywhere within the four seas, a universal stability and order,
+allowing such great and enduring works to be undertaken and completed.
+We must believe, too, that the builders of these giant stone monuments
+were dominant throughout the land, possessing entire power over the
+labor of thousands everywhere; and even then the raising of these
+titanic masses is almost miraculous.
+
+But the history of the standing stones and cromlechs is not a page of
+Irish history only, nor can we limit to our own isle the presence of
+their builders, the conditions of dominion and order under which alone
+they could have been raised. We shall gain our first trustworthy clue
+by tracing the limits of the larger territory, beyond our island, where
+these same gray memorials are found.
+
+[Illustration: Brandy Island, Glengarriff.]
+
+The limits of the region in which alone we find these piles and circles
+of enormous stones are clearly and sharply defined, though this region
+itself is of immense and imposing extent. It is divided naturally into
+two provinces, both starting from a point somewhere in the neighborhood
+of Gibraltar or Mount Atlas, and spreading thence over a territory of
+hundreds of miles.
+
+The southern cromlech province, beginning at the Strait of Gibraltar,
+extends eastward along the African coast past Algiers to the headland of
+Tunis, where Carthage stood, at a date far later than the age of
+cromlechs. Were it not for the flaming southern sun, the scorched sands,
+the palms, the shimmering torrid air, we might believe these Algerian
+megaliths belonged to our own land, so perfect is the resemblance, so
+uniform the design, so identical the inspiration. The same huge
+boulders, oblong or egg-shaped, formidable, impressive, are raised aloft
+on massive supporting stones; there are the same circles of stones
+hardly less gigantic, with the same mysterious faces, the same silent
+solemnity. Following this line, we find them again in Minorca, Sardinia
+and Malta; everywhere under warm blue skies, in lands of olives and
+trailing vines, with the peacock-blue of the Mediterranean waves
+twinkling beneath them. Northward from Minorca, but still in our
+southern cromlech province, we find them in southeastern Spain, in the
+region of New Carthage, but far older than the oldest trace of that
+ancient city. In lesser numbers they follow the Spanish coast up towards
+the Ebro, through vinelands and lands of figs, everywhere under summer
+skies. This province, therefore, our southern cromlech province, covers
+most of the western Mediterranean; it does not cover, nor even approach,
+Italy or Greece or Egypt, the historic Mediterranean lands. We must look
+for its origin in the opposite direction--towards Gibraltar, the Pillars
+of Hercules.
+
+From the same point, the Pillars of Hercules, begins our second or
+northern cromlech region, even larger and more extensive than the first,
+though hardly richer in titanic memorials. From Gibraltar, the cromlech
+region passes northward, covering Portugal and western Spain; indeed, it
+probably merges in the other province to the eastward, the two including
+all Spain between them. From northern Spain, turning the flank of the
+giant Pyrenees at Fontarrabia, the cromlech region goes northward and
+ever northward, along the Atlantic coast of France, spreading eastward
+also through the central provinces, covering the mountains of the Côte
+d'Or and the Cevennes, but nowhere entering north Italy or Germany,
+which limit France to the east. There is a tremendous culmination of the
+huge stone monuments on the capes and headlands of Brittany, where
+France thrusts herself forward against the Atlantic, centring in Carnac,
+the metropolis of a bygone world. Nowhere are there greater riches of
+titanic stone, in circles, in cromlechs, in ranged avenues like huge
+frozen armies or ordered hosts of sleeping elephants. From Brittany we
+pass to Ireland, whose wealth, inherited from dead ages, we have already
+inventoried, and Britain, where the same monuments reappear. More
+numerous to the south and west, they yet spread all over Britain,
+including remote northern Scotland and the Western Isles. Finally, there
+is a streamer stretching still northeastward, to Norway and some of the
+Baltic Islands.
+
+We are, therefore, confronted with the visible and enduring evidence of
+a mighty people, spreading in two main directions from the Pillars of
+Hercules--eastward through Gibraltar Strait to sunny Algeria, to
+southern Spain and the Mediterranean isles; and northward, along the
+stormy shores of the Atlantic, from within sight of Africa almost to the
+Arctic Circle, across Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain, and the
+lands of the Baltic and the North Sea. Throughout this vast territory
+there must have been a common people, a common purpose and inspiration,
+a common striving towards the hidden world; there must have been long
+ages of order, of power, of peace, during which men's hearts could
+conceive and their hands execute memorials so vast, so evidently meant
+to endure to a far distant future, so clearly destined to ideal ends.
+There must have been a great spiritual purpose, a living belief in the
+invisible world, and a large practical power over natural forces, before
+these huge monuments could be erected. Some of the stones upheld in the
+air in the Irish cromlechs weigh eighty or ninety or a hundred tons. If
+we estimate that a well-built man can lift two hundred pounds, it would
+demand the simultaneous work of a thousand men to erect them; and it is
+at least difficult to see how the effort of a thousand men could
+be applied.
+
+We are led, therefore, by evidence of the solidest material reality to
+see this great empire on the Atlantic and along the western
+Mediterranean; this Atlantean land of the cromlech-builders, as we may
+call it, for want of a better name. As the thought and purpose of its
+inhabitants are uniform throughout its whole vast extent, we are led to
+see in them a single homogeneous race, working without rivals, without
+obstacles, without contests, for they seem everywhere to have been free
+to choose what sites they would for their gigantic structures. And we
+are irresistibly led to believe that these conditions must have endured
+throughout a vast extent of time, for no nation which does not look back
+to a distant past will plan for a distant future. The spiritual sweep
+and view of the cromlech-builders are, therefore, as great as the extent
+of their territory. This mysterious people must have had a life as
+wonderful as that of Greece or Rome or Egypt, whose territories we find
+them everywhere approaching, but nowhere invading.
+
+What we now know of the past history of our race is so vast, so
+incredibly enormous, that we have ample space for such a territory, so
+widespread, so enduring, as we have seen demanded by the position of the
+cromlechs and standing stones; more than that, so overwhelming are the
+distances in the dark backward and abysm of time, to which we must now
+carry the dawn of human history, that the time needed for the building
+of the cromlechs may seem quite recent and insignificant, in view of the
+mightier past, stretching back through geologic ages. The nineteenth
+century may well be called the age of resurrection, when long-forgotten
+epochs of man were born again into our knowledge. We can carry back that
+knowledge now to the early Miocene period, to which belong the human
+relics found by the Abbé Bourgeois on the uplands of Thenay, in central
+France; and no one believes that the early Miocene age can be as recent
+as a million years ago. A vast space separates the Thenay relics from
+the later traces of man found in Pliocene sands with the bones of the
+archaic meridional elephant,--at a date when the German ocean was a
+forest, full of southern trees and huge beasts now long since departed
+from the earth. A period hardly less vast must separate these from the
+close of the glacial age, when man roamed the plains of Europe, and
+sketched the herds of mammoths as they cropped the leaves. That huge
+beast, too, has long since departed into the abyss; but man the artist,
+who recorded the massive outline, the huge bossed forehead, the
+formidable bulk of the shaggy arctic elephant, engraved in firm lines on
+a fragment of its tusk,--man still remains. Man was present when
+rhinoceros and elephant were as common in Britain as they are to-day in
+Southern India or Borneo; when the hippopotamus was as much at home in
+the waters of the Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like
+the grizzly of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked
+in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this
+epoch of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is
+a recent chapter of the great epic of man; there lies far more behind
+it, beyond the Age of Ice to the immensely distant Pliocene; beyond this
+as far as the early Miocene; beyond this, again, how much further we
+know not, towards the beginningless beginning, the infinite.
+
+We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost
+boundless ages, geologic epochs of human history succeeding each other
+in majestic procession, as the face of our island was now tropical, now
+arctic; as the seas swelled up and covered the hills, or the bottom of
+the deep drove back the ocean and became dry land, an unbroken
+continent. The wild dreams of romance never approached the splendid
+outlines of this certain history.
+
+There are dim outlines of man throughout all these ages, but only at a
+comparatively recent date have we traditions and evidence pointing to
+still surviving races. At a period of only a few thousand years ago, we
+begin to catch glimpses of a northern race whom the old Greeks and
+Romans called Hyperboreans or Far-Northerners; a race wild and little
+skilled in the arts of life; a race of small stature, slight, dusky,
+with piercing eyes, low brows, and of forbidding face. This race was
+scattered over lands far north of the Mediterranean, dwelling in caves
+and dens of the earth, and lingering on unchanged from the days of
+mammoth and cave-bear. We have slight but definite knowledge of this
+very ancient race--enough to show us that its peculiar type lingers to
+this day in a few remote islands on the Galway and Kerry coast, mingled
+with many later races. This type we find described in old Gaelic records
+as the Firbolgs, a race weak and furtive, dusky and keen-eyed, subjected
+by later races of greater force. Yet from this race, as if to show the
+inherent and equal power of the soul, came holy saints and mighty
+warriors; to the old race of the Firbolgs belong Saint Mansuy, apostle
+of Belgium, and Roderick O'Conor, the last king of united Ireland. In
+gloomy mountain glens and lonely ocean islands still it lingers,
+unvanquished, tenacious, obscurely working out its secret destiny.
+
+This slight and low-browed race, of dark or sallow visage, and with
+black crisp hair, this Hyperborean people, is the oldest we can gain a
+clear view of in our island's history; but we know nothing of its
+extension or powers which would warrant us in believing that this was
+the race which built the cromlechs. Greek and Roman tradition, in this
+only corroborating the actual traces we ourselves possess of these old
+races, tells us of another people many thousand years ago overrunning
+and dominating the Firbolgs; a race of taller stature, of handsome
+features, though also dark, but with softer black hair, not crisp and
+tufted like the hair of the dwarfish earlier race. Of this second
+conquering race, tall and handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered
+from many lands where they dwelt; bodies preserved by art or nature, in
+caverns or sepulchres of stone; ornaments, pottery, works decorative and
+useful, and covering several thousand years in succession. But better
+than this, we have present, through nearly every land where we know of
+them in the past, a living remnant of this ancient race, like it in
+every particular of stature, form, complexion and visage, identical in
+character and temper, tendency and type of mind.
+
+In Ireland we find this tall, dark race over all the west of the island,
+but most numerous in Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo; in those regions
+where, we know, the older population was least disturbed. In remote
+villages among the mountains, reached by bridle-paths between
+heath-covered hills; in the settlements of fishermen, under some cliff
+or in the sheltered nook of one of our great western bays; or among the
+lonely, little visited Atlantic islands, this dark, handsome race, with
+its black hair, dark-brown eyes, sallow skin and high forehead, still
+holds its own, as a second layer above the remnant of the far more
+ancient Firbolg Hyperboreans. We find the same race also among the
+Donegal highlands, here and there in the central plain or in the south,
+and nowhere entirely missing among the varied races towards the
+eastern sea.
+
+[Illustration: Sugar Loaf Mountain, Glengarriff.]
+
+But it is by no means in Ireland only that this tall, dark, western race
+is found. It is numerously represented in the nearest extension of the
+continent, among the headlands and bays and isles of Brittany--a land so
+like our own western seaboard, with its wild Atlantic storms.
+Following the ocean southward, we find the same race extending to the
+Loire, the Garonne, the Pyrenees; stretching somewhat inland also, but
+clinging everywhere to the Atlantic, as we also saw it cling in Ireland.
+In earlier centuries, long before our era opened, we find this same race
+spread far to the east,--as far, almost, as the German and Italian
+frontier,--so that at one time it held almost complete possession of
+France. South of the Pyrenees we find it once more; dominant in
+Portugal, less strongly represented in Spain, yet still supplying a
+considerable part of the population of the whole peninsula, as it does
+in Ireland at the present day. But it does not stop with Spain, or even
+Europe. We find the same race again in the Guanches of the Canary
+islands, off the African coast; and, stranger still, we find mummies of
+this race, of great antiquity, in the cave-tombs of Teneriffe. Further,
+we have ample evidence of its presence, until displaced by Moorish
+invaders, all along northern Africa as far as Tunis; and we come across
+it again amongst the living races in the Mediterranean isles, in
+Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy. Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central
+Sahara belong to the same type. Everywhere the same tall, dark race,
+handsome, imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of
+eyes; a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and texture
+of hair.
+
+Thus far the southern extension of this, our second Irish race; we may
+look for a moment at its distribution in the north. Across the shallow
+sea which separates us from Britain we find the same race, clinging
+always to the Atlantic seaboard. It dominates south Wales, where its
+presence was remarked and commented on by the invading Romans. It is
+present elsewhere through the Welsh mountains, and much more sparsely
+over the east of England; but we have ample evidence that at one time
+this tall, dark race held the whole of England in undisputed possession,
+except, perhaps, for a remnant of the Hyperborean dwarfs. In the west of
+Scotland, and especially in the Western Isles, it is once more numerous;
+and we find offshoots of the same race in the dark-haired
+Norwegians,--still holding to the seaboard of the Atlantic.
+
+Such is the distribution of this once dominant but now dwindled race,
+which has gradually descended from the summit of power as ancient Rome
+descended, as Greece descended, or Assyria or Egypt. But we can look
+back with certainty to a time when this race, and this race only, held
+complete possession of all the lands we have mentioned, in north or
+south, in Europe or northern Africa; holding everywhere to the Atlantic
+coast, or, as in the Mediterranean isles, evidently pressing inward from
+the Atlantic, past the Pillars of Hercules, through the Strait of
+Gibraltar.
+
+It is evident at once that the territory of this race corresponds
+exactly, throughout many countries, with the territory of the cromlechs
+and standing stones; where we find the one, as in Ireland, Brittany,
+Spain, we find the other; where the one is absent, as in Germany, or
+northern Italy or Greece, the other is likewise absent. The identity is
+complete. We are justified, therefore, in giving the same provisional
+name to both, and calling them Atlantean, from their evident origin not
+far from Atlas, and their everywhere clinging to the Atlantic coast. We
+can find traces of no other race which at all closely fulfills the
+necessary conditions of uniform and undisputed extension, through a long
+epoch, over the whole cromlech region--the only conditions under which
+we can conceive of the erection of these gigantic monuments, or of the
+long established and universally extended spiritual conditions which
+make possible such vast ideal enterprises.
+
+In this race, therefore, which we have called Atlantean, we find the
+conditions fulfilled; of this race, and of no other, we still find a
+lingering remnant in each of the cromlech countries; and we hardly find
+a trace of this race, either now or in the past, in the lands which have
+no cromlechs or standing stones.
+
+We have already seen that the standing stones of Cavancarragh, four
+miles from Fermanagh, were, within the memory of men still living or of
+their fathers, buried under ten or twelve feet of peat, which had
+evidently formed there after their erection. We have here a natural
+chronometer; for we know the rate at which peat forms, and we can,
+therefore, assign a certain age to a given depth. We have given one mode
+of reckoning already; we find it corroborated by another. In the Somme
+valley, in northern France, we have a Nature's timepiece; in the peat,
+at different levels, are relics of the Roman age; of the Gaulish age
+which preceded it; and, far deeper, of pre-historic races, like our
+Atlanteans, who preceded the Gauls. The date of the Roman remains we
+know accurately; and from this standard we find that the peat grows
+regularly some three centimeters a century, or a foot in a
+thousand years.
+
+On the mountain side, as at Cavancarragh, the growth is likely to be
+slower than in a river valley; yet we may take the same rate, a foot a
+thousand years, and we shall have, for this great stone circle, an
+antiquity of ten or twelve thousand years at least. This assumes that
+the peat began to form as soon as the monument was completed; but the
+contrary may be the case; centuries may have intervened.
+
+We may, however, take this as a provisional date, and say that our
+cromlech epoch, the epoch of the Atlantean builders, from Algeria to
+Ireland, from Ireland to the Baltic, is ten or twelve thousand years
+ago; extending, perhaps, much further back in the past, and in certain
+regions coming much further down towards the present, but having a
+period of twelve thousand years ago as its central date. It happens that
+we have traditions of a great dispersion from the very centre we have
+been led to fix, the neighborhood of Atlas or Gibraltar, and that to
+this dispersion tradition has given a date over eleven thousand years
+ago; but to this side of the subject we cannot more fully allude; it
+would take us too far afield.
+
+We have gone far enough to make it tolerably certain, first, that these
+great and wonderful monuments were built when uniform conditions of
+order, uniform religious beliefs and aspirations, and a uniform mastery
+over natural forces extended throughout a vast region spreading
+northward and eastward from Mount Atlas or Gibraltar; we have seen,
+next, that these conditions were furnished when a well-defined race,
+whom we have called Atlantean, was spread as the dominant element over
+this whole region; and, finally, we have seen reason to fix on a period
+some eleven or twelve thousand years ago as the central period of that
+domination, though it may have begun, and probably did begin, many
+centuries earlier. The distribution of the cromlechs is certain; the
+distribution of the race is certain; the age of one characteristic group
+of the monuments is certain. Further than this we need not go.
+
+When we try to form a clearer image of the life of this tall archaic
+race of cromlech-builders, we can divine very much to fill the picture.
+We note, to begin with, that not only do they always hold to the
+Atlantic ocean as something kindred and familiar, but that they are
+found everywhere in islands at such distances from the nearest coasts as
+would demand a certain seamanship for their arrival. This is true of
+their presence in Malta, Minorca, Sardinia; it is even more true of
+Ireland, the Western Isles of Scotland, the Norwegian Isles; all of
+which are surrounded by stormy and treacherous seas, where wrecks are
+very common even in our day. We must believe that our tail, dark
+invaders were a race of seamen, thoroughly skilled in the dangerous
+navigation of these dark seas; Caesar marveled at, and imitated, the
+ship-building of the natives of Brittany in his day; we equally admire
+the prowess of their sons, the Breton fishermen, in our own times. We
+find, too, that in the western districts and ocean islands of our own
+Ireland the tall, dark race often follows the sea, showing the same
+hereditary skill and daring; a skill which certainly marked the first
+invaders of that race, or they would never have reached our island at
+all. We are the more justified in seeing, in these dark
+cromlech-builders, the Fomorians of old Gaelic tradition, who came up
+out of the sea and subjugated the Firbolgs.
+
+Even to those familiar with the geological record of man it is
+sufficiently startling to find that the Firbolgs, the early dwarfish
+race of Hyperboreans, in all probability were ignorant of boats; that
+they almost certainly came to our island dry-shod, as they had come
+earlier to Britain, migrating over unbroken spaces of land to what
+afterwards became the isle of Erin; for this race we find everywhere
+associated with the mammoth--on the continent, in Britain, in our own
+island--and the mammoths certainly never came over in ships. Needless to
+say, there is abundant geological evidence as well, to show our former
+union with continental Europe,--though of course at a time immensely
+more remote than ten or twelve thousand years ago.
+
+We are, therefore, led to identify our Atlantean race of hardy seamen
+with the Fomorians who came up out of the sea and found the furtive
+Firbolgs in possession of our island; and to this race, the Fomorians of
+the sea, we credit the building of cromlechs and standing stones, not
+only among ourselves, but in Norway, in Britain, in Brittany, in Spain,
+in Africa.
+
+We shall presently pick up the thread of tradition, as we find it in
+Ireland, and try to follow the doings and life of the Fomorian invaders;
+but in the meantime we may try to gain some insight into the most
+mysterious and enduring of their works. The cromlechs which have been
+excavated in many cases are found to contain the funereal urns of a
+people who burned their dead. It does not follow that their first and
+only use was as tombs; but if we think of them as tombs only, we must
+the more marvel at the faith of the builders, and their firm belief in
+the reality and overwhelming import of the other world which we enter at
+death. For of dwellings for the living, of fortresses or storehouses, of
+defences against the foes who later invaded them, we find few traces;
+nothing at all to compare with their massive mausoleums. The other
+world, for them, was a far weightier concern than this, and to the
+purposes of that world, as they conceived it, all their energies were
+directed. We can hardly doubt that, like other races who pay extreme
+reverence to the dead, their inner vision beheld these departed ones
+still around them and among them, forming with them a single race, a
+single family, a single life. This world was for them only the threshold
+of the other, the place of preparation. To that other their thoughts all
+turned, for that other they raised these titanic buildings. The solemn
+masses and simple grandeur of the cromlechs fitly symbolize the mood of
+reverence in which they drew near to the sublime world of the hidden;
+the awe with which their handiwork affirmed how greatly that world
+outweighs this. At these houses of the dead they were joined in spirit
+and communion with those who had passed away; once more united with
+their fathers and their fathers' fathers, from the dim beginning of
+their race. The air, for them, was full of spirits. Only the dead
+truly lived.
+
+The circles of standing stones are also devoted to ideal ends. Though
+the men who set them up could have built not less wonderful forts or
+dwellings of stone, we find none of these; nor has any worldly purpose
+ever been assigned to the stone circles. Yet there seems to be a very
+simple interpretation of their symbology; the circle, through all
+antiquity, stood for the circling year, which ever returns to its point
+of departure, spring repeating spring, summer answering to summer,
+winter with its icy winds only the return of former winters: the
+circling year and its landmarks, whether four seasons, or twelve months,
+or twenty-seven lunar mansions, through one of which the wandering moon
+passes in a day. We should thus have circles of twelve or twenty-seven
+stones, or four outlying stones at equal distances, for the four
+seasons, the regents of the year. By counting the stones in each circle
+we can tell to which division of the year they belonged, whether the
+solar months or the lunar mansions.
+
+But with all ancient nations the cycle of the year was only the symbol
+of the spiritual cycle of the soul, the path of birth and death. We
+must remember that even for ourselves the same symbolism holds: in the
+winter we celebrate the Incarnation; in spring, the Crucifixion; in
+summer, the birth of the beloved disciple; in autumn, the day of All
+Souls, the feast of the dead. Thus for us, too, the succeeding seasons
+only symbolize the stages of a spiritual life, the august procession
+of the soul.
+
+We cannot think it was otherwise with a people who lived and built so
+majestically for the hidden world; these great stone circles symbolized
+for them, we must believe, the circling life of the soul, the cycle of
+necessity, with the door of liberation to the home of the blest, who
+have reached perfect freedom and go no more out. We may picture in
+imagination their solemn celebrations; priests robed, perhaps, in the
+mingled green and purple of their hills, passing within the circle,
+chanting some archaic hymn of the Divine.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THE DE DANAANS.
+
+In the dim days of Fomorian and Firbolg, and for ages after, Erin was a
+land of forests, full of wild cattle and deer and wolves. The central
+plain was altogether hidden under green clouds of oak-woods, full of
+long, mysterious alleys, dimpled with sunny glades, echoing in spring
+and summer to the songs of innumerable birds. Everywhere through the
+wide and gloomy forests were the blue mirrors of lakes, starred with
+shaggy islands, the hanging hills descending verdant to the water's
+edge. Silver rivers spread their network among the woods, and the lakes
+and the quiet reaches of the rivers teemed with trout and salmon. The
+hilly lands to the north and south showed purple under the sky from
+among their forests, oak mingling with pine; and the four seas beat
+around our island with their white fringe of hovering gulls. Over all,
+the arch of the blue, clearer and less clouded then than now. A pleasant
+land, full of gladness and mystery.
+
+We can but obscurely image to ourselves the thoughts and deeds of the
+earliest dwellers in our island. We know that they were skilled in many
+arts of peace and inured to the shock of war. The sky spread above them
+as over us, and all around them was the green gloom of the forests, the
+whiteness of lakes and rivers, the rough purple of the heather. The
+great happenings of life, childhood and age and death, were for them
+what they are for us, yet their blood flowed warmer than ours. Browned
+by wind and sun, wet by the rain and the early dew of the morning, they
+delighted in the vigor of the prime. Their love for kindred, for their
+friends and lovers, was as ours; and when friends and kindred passed
+into the darkness, they still kept touch with their souls in the
+invisible Beyond.
+
+[Illustration: River Erne, Belleek.]
+
+The vision of our days is darkened by too much poring over earthly
+things; but the men of old, like many of our simpler races now, looked
+confidently and with intent faith across the threshold. For them the
+dead did not depart--hidden but from their eyes, while very near to
+their souls. Those in the beyond were still linked to those on earth;
+all together made one undivided life, neither in the visible world alone
+nor in the hidden world alone, but in both; each according to their
+destinies and duties. The men of old were immeasurably strong in this
+sense of immortality--a sense based not on faith but on knowledge; on a
+living touch with those who had gone before. They knew both over-world
+and under-world, because they held their souls open to the knowledge of
+both, and did not set their hearts on earthly things alone. A strong
+life close to the life of the natural world, a death that was no
+separation, the same human hearts as ours,--further we need not go in
+imagining that far-off time.
+
+A third people was presently added to these two, at an epoch fixed by
+tradition some four thousand years ago. A vivid picture of their coming
+has been handed down to us, and this picture we shall reproduce, as many
+circumstances and particulars of our knowledge drawn from other sources
+concur to show that our old legend is near to the truth, both in time
+and happenings.
+
+The name these newcomers bore was Tuata De Danaan, the De Danaan tribes;
+they were golden-haired and full of knowledge, and their coming was
+heavy with destiny for the dark races of Fomor and Firbolg. Even to-day,
+mysterious whispers of the De Danaans linger among the remote valleys
+and hillsides of our island, and truth is hidden in every legend of
+their deeds. They have borne a constant repute for magical knowledge,
+and the first tradition of their coming not only echoes that repute, but
+shows how first they came by it.
+
+The De Danaans came from the north; from what land, we shall presently
+inquire. They landed somewhere on the northeast coast of our island,
+says the tradition; the coast of Antrim was doubtless the place of their
+arrival, and we have our choice between Larne and the estuary of the
+Foyle. All between, lofty cliffs face a dark and angry sea, where no one
+not familiar with the coast would willingly approach; their later course
+in the island makes it very probable that they came to the Foyle.
+
+There, still within sight of the Caledonian isles and headlands hovering
+in blue shadows over the sea, they entered, where the sun rose over long
+silver sands and hills of chalk, with a grim headland on the west
+towering up into sombre mountains. Once within the strait, they had a
+wide expanse of quiet waters on all sides, running deep among the rugged
+hills, and receiving at its further end the river Foyle, tempting them
+further and further with their ships. Up the Foyle went the De Danaan
+fleet, among the oak-woods, the deer gazing wide-eyed at them from dark
+caverns of shadow, the wolves peering after them in the night. Then,
+when their ships would serve them no further, they landed, and, to set
+the seal on their coming, burned their boats, casting in their lot with
+the fate of their new home. Still following the streams of the Foyle,
+for rivers were the only pathways through the darkness of the woods,
+they came to the Lakes of Erne, then, as now, beautiful with innumerable
+islands, and draped with curtains of forest. Beyond Erne, they fixed
+their first settlement at Mag Rein, the Plain of the Headland, within
+the bounds of what afterwards was Leitrim; and at this camp their legend
+takes up the tale.
+
+It would seem that the Fomorians were then gathered further to the west,
+as well as in the northern isles. The Firbolgs had their central
+stronghold at Douin Cain, the Beautiful Eminence, which, tradition tells
+us, later bore the name of Tara. The chief among their chiefs was
+Eocaid, son of Ere, remembered as the last ruler of the Firbolgs. Every
+man of them was a hunter, used to spear and shield, and the skins of
+deer and the shaggy hides of wolves were their garments; their dwellings
+were built of well-fitted oak. To the chief, Eocaid, Erc's son, came
+rumor of the strangers near the Lakes of Erne; their ships, burned at
+their debarking, were not there to tell of the manner of their coming,
+and the De Danaans themselves bruited it abroad that they had come
+hither by magic, borne upon the wings of the wind. The chiefs of Tara
+gathered together, within their fort of earth crowned with a stockade,
+and took counsel how to meet this new adventure. After long consultation
+they chose one from among them, Sreng by name, a man of uncommon
+strength, a warrior tried and proven, who should go westward to find out
+more of the De Danaans.
+
+Doubtless taking certain chosen companions with him, Sreng, the man of
+valor from among the Firbolgs, set forth on his quest. As in all
+forest-covered countries, the only pathways lay along the river-banks,
+or, in times of drought, through the sand or pebbles of their beds.
+Where the woods pressed closest upon the streams, the path wound from
+one bank to the other, crossing by fords or stepping-stones, or by a
+bridge of tree-trunks. So went Sreng, careful and keen-eyed, up the
+stream of the Blackwater, and thence to the Erne, and so drew near to
+the Plain of the Headland, where was the De Danaan camp. They, too, had
+word of his coming from their scouts and hunters, and sent forth Breas,
+one among their bravest, to meet the envoy.
+
+They sighted each other and halted, each setting his shield in the
+earth, peering at his adversary above its rim. Then, reassured, they
+came together, and Breas first spoke to Sreng. After the first words
+they fell, warrior-like, to examining each other's weapons; Sreng saw
+that the two spears of Breas the De Danaan were thin, slender and long,
+and sharp-pointed, while his own were heavy, thick and point-less, but
+sharply rounded.
+
+Here we have a note of reality, for spears of these two types are well
+known to us; those of Sreng were chisel-shaped, round-edged, socketed
+celts; the De Danaan lances were long and slender, like our spears.
+There are two materials also--a beautiful golden bronze, shining and
+gleaming in the sunlight, and a darker, ruddier metal, dull and heavy;
+and these darker spears have sockets for greatly thicker hafts. Both
+also carried swords, made, very likely, the one of golden, the other of
+dull, copper-colored bronze.
+
+Then, putting these pleasant things aside, they turned to weightier
+matters, and Breas made a proposal for the De Danaan men. The island was
+large, the forests wide and full of game, the waters sweet and
+well-stocked with fish. Might they not share it between them, and join
+hands to keep out all future comers? Sreng could give no final answer;
+he could only put the matter before the Firbolg chiefs; so, exchanging
+spears in sign of friendship and for a token between them, they returned
+each to his own camp.
+
+Sreng of the Firbolgs retraced his path some four-score miles among the
+central forests, and came to the Beautiful Eminence, where the Firbolgs
+had their settlement. Eocaid, Erc's son, their chieftain, called the
+lesser chiefs around him, and Sreng made full report of what he had seen
+and heard. The Firbolgs, pressed on by their fate, decided to refuse all
+terms with the De Danaans, but to give them battle, and drive them from
+the island. So they made ready, each man seeing to the straps of his
+shield, the burnishing of his thick sword and heavy spear. Eyes gleamed
+out beneath lowering brows all about the dwellings of Tara, and hot
+words were muttered of the coming fight. The dark faces of the Firbolgs
+were full of wrath.
+
+Breas, returning to the camp of the Tuata De Danaan, gave such account
+of the fierceness and strength of Sreng, and the weight and sturdiness
+of his weapons, that the hearts of the golden-haired newcomers misgave
+them, and they drew away westward to the strip of land that lies between
+the lakes of Corrib and Mask. There, tradition tells us, they made an
+encampment upon the hill of Belgadan, near the stream that flows through
+caverns beneath the rocks from the northern to the southern lake. From
+their hill-top they had clear view of the plain stretching eastward,
+across which the Firbolg warriors must come; to the right hand and to
+the left were spread the great white waters of the lakes, stretching far
+away to the northern and southern verge of the sky. Islands dotted the
+lakes, and trees mirrored themselves in the waters. Behind them, to the
+westward, rose a square-topped mountain, crowned by a clear tarn; and,
+behind that, tier upon tier of hills, stretching dark and sombre along
+Lough Mask to the north, and spreading westward to the twelve crystal
+hills of Connemara.
+
+Across the plain to the east, then called the Plain of Nia, but
+thereafter Mag Tuiread or Moytura, the Plain of the Pillars, lay the
+forests, and thence issued forth the hosts of the Firbolgs, encamping on
+the eastern verge of the open space. Nuada, the De Danaan king, once
+more sought a peaceful issue to their meeting, but Erc's son Eocaid
+refused all terms, and it was plain to all that they must fight.
+
+It was midsummer. The air was warm about them, the lake-shores and the
+plain clothed in green of many gently blended shades. The sun shone down
+upon them, and the lakes mirrored the clear blue above. From their hill
+of encampment descended the De Danaans, with their long slender spears
+gleaming like bright gold, their swords of golden bronze firmly grasped,
+their left hands griping the thong of their shields. Golden-haired, with
+flowing tresses, they descended to the fight; what stately battle-song
+they chanted, what Powers they called on for a blessing, we cannot tell;
+nor in what terms the dark-browed Firbolgs answered them as they
+approached across the plain. All that day did the hosts surge together,
+spear launched against spear, and bronze sword clashing against shield;
+all that day and for three days more, and then the fate of the Firbolgs
+was decided. Great and dire was the slaughter of them, so that Erc's son
+Eocaid saw that all was lost. Withdrawing with a hundred of his own men
+about him, Eocaid was seeking water to quench his thirst, for the heat
+of the battle was upon him, when he was pursued by a greater band of
+the De Danaans, under the three sons of Nemed, one of their chieftains.
+
+Eocaid and his bodyguard fled before Nemed's sons, making their way
+northeastward along the Moy river, under the shadow of the Mountains of
+Storms, now wrongly named Ox Mountains. They came at last to the great
+strand called Traig Eotaile, but now Ballysadare, the Cataract of the
+Oaks,--where the descending river is cloven into white terraces by the
+rocks, and the sea, retreating at low tide, leaves a world of wet sand
+glinting under the moonlight. At the very sea's margin a great battle
+was fought between the last king of the Firbolgs with his men, and the
+De Danaans under Nemed's sons; so relentless was the fight along the
+tideways that few remained to tell of it, for Erc's son Eocaid fell, but
+Nemed's three sons fell likewise, The three De Danaan brothers were
+buried at the western end of the strand, and the place was called The
+Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, in their memory. The son of Erc was
+buried on the strand, where the waves lap along the shore, and his cairn
+of Traig Eotaile still stands by the water-side, last resting-place of
+the last ruler of the Firbolgs.
+
+Meanwhile the fighting had gone on at Mag Tuiread by the lakes, till
+but three hundred of the Firbolgs were left, with Sreng, the fierce
+fighter, at their head. Sreng had gained enduring fame by meeting Nuada,
+the De Danaan king, in combat, and smiting him so that he clove the
+shield-rim and cut down deep into Nuada's shoulder, disabling him
+utterly from the battle. Seeing themselves quite outnumbered, therefore,
+the survivors of the Firbolgs with Sreng demanded single combat with De
+Danaan champions, but the victors offered them worthy terms of peace.
+The Firbolgs were to hold in lordship and freedom whichever they might
+choose of the five provinces; the conquerors were to have the rest.
+
+Sreng looked around among his band of survivors,--a little band, though
+of great valor,--and he remembered the hosts of his people that had
+entered the battle three days before, but now lay strewn upon the plain;
+and thinking that they had done enough for valor he accepted the offered
+terms, choosing the Western Province for his men. In memory of him it
+was called Cuigead Sreing for generations, until Conn of the Five-Score
+Battles changed the name for his own, calling the province Connacht, as
+it is to this day.
+
+It fared less well with the victors, and with their victory were sown
+seeds of future discord. For Nuada, the king, being grievously wounded,
+was in no state to rule, so that the chief power was given to Breas,
+first envoy of the De Danaans. Now Breas was only half De Danaan, half
+Fomor, and would not recognize the De Danaan rites or laws of
+hospitality, but was a very tyrannous and overbearing ruler, so that
+much evil came of his government. Yet for seven years he was endured,
+even though meat nor ale was dispensed at his banquets, according to De
+Danaan law.
+
+Mutterings against Breas were rife among the chiefs and their followers
+when the bard Cairbré, whose mother Etan was also a maker of verses,
+came to the assembly of Breas. But the bard was shown little honor and
+given a mean lodging,--a room without fire or bed, with three dry loaves
+for his fare. The bard was full of resentment and set himself to make
+songs against Breas, so that all men repeated his verses, and the name
+of Breas fell into contempt. All men's minds were enkindled by the bard,
+and they drove Breas forth from the chieftainship. Breas fled to his
+Fomor kindred in the isles, with his heart full of anger and revenge
+against the De Danaans.
+
+He sought help of his kindred, and their design was told to the
+Fomorian chieftains--to Balor of the Evil Eye, and to Indec, son of De
+Domnand, chiefs of the Isles. These two leaders gathered ships from all
+the harbors and settlements of the Fomorians, from the Hebrides, the
+Shetlands, and far-distant Norway, so that their fleet was thick as
+gulls above a shoal of fish along the north shores of Erin.
+
+Coming down from the northern isles, they sighted the coast of Erin, the
+peaks of the northwestern mountains rising purple towards the clouds,
+with white seas foaming around them. Past towering headlands they
+sailed; then, drawing in towards the shore, they crept under the great
+cliffs of Slieve League, that rose like a many-colored wall from the sea
+to the sky--so high that the great eagles on their summits were but
+specks seen from beneath, so high that the ships below seemed like
+sea-shells to those who watched them from above. With the wall of the
+cliffs on their left hand, and the lesser headlands and hills of Sligo
+on their right, they came to that same strand of Ballysadare, the
+Cataract of the Oaks, where the last of the Firbolgs fell. Drawing their
+long ships up on the beach, with furled sail and oars drawn in, they
+debarked their army on the shore. It was a landing of ill-omen for the
+Fomorians, that landing beside the cairn of Eocaid; a landing of
+ill-omen for Indec, son of De Domnand, and for Balor of the Evil Eye.
+
+It was the fall of the leaf when they came; the winds ran crying through
+the forests, tearing the leaves and branches from the oaks, and mourning
+among the pines of the uplands. The sea was gray as a gull's back, with
+dark shadows under the cliffs and white tresses of foam along the
+headlands. At evening a cold wind brought the rain beating in from the
+ocean. Thus the Fomorians landed at the Cataract of the Oaks, and
+marched inland to the plain now called Tirerril in Sligo. The murky sky
+spread over the black and withered waste of the plain, hemmed in with
+gloomy hills, wild rocks and ravines, and with all the northern horizon
+broken by distant mountains. Here Indec and Balor, and Breas the cause
+of their coming, fixed their camp. They sent a message of defiance to
+the De Danaans, challenging them to fight or surrender. The De Danaans
+heard the challenge and made ready to fight.
+
+Nuada, now called the chieftain of the Silver Arm, because the mischief
+wrought by Sreng's blow on his shoulder had been hidden by a silver
+casing, was once more ruler since Breas had been driven out. Besides
+Nuada, these were De Danaan chieftains: Dagda, the Mighty; Lug, son of
+Cian, son of Diancect, surnamed Lamfada, the Long Armed; Ogma, of the
+Sunlike Face; and Angus, the Young. They summoned the workers in bronze
+and the armorers, and bid them prepare sword and spear for battle,
+charging the makers of spear-haft and shield to perfect their work. The
+heralds also were ready to proclaim the rank of the warriors, and those
+skilled in healing herbs stood prepared to succor the wounded. The bards
+were there also to arouse valor and ardor with their songs.
+
+Then marching westward to the plain of the battle among the hills, they
+set their camp and advanced upon the Fomorians. Each man had two spears
+bound with a thong to draw them back after the cast, with a shield to
+ward off blows, and a broad-bladed sword of bronze for close combat.
+With war-chants and invocations the two hosts met. The spears, well
+poised and leveled, clove the air, hissing between them, and under the
+weight of the spear-heads and their sharp points many in both hosts
+fell. There were cries of the wounded now, mingled with battle-songs,
+and hoarse shouting for vengeance among those whose sons and brothers
+and sworn friends fell. Another cast of the spears, seaming the air
+between as the hosts closed in, and they fell on each other with their
+swords, shields upraised and gold-bronze sword-points darting beneath
+like the tongues of serpents. They cut and thrust, each with his eyes
+fixed on the fierce eyes of his foe.
+
+They fought on the day of the Spirits, now the Eve of All Saints; the
+Fomorians were routed, and their chieftains slain. But of the De
+Danaans, Nuada, once wounded by Sreng of the Firbolgs, now fell by the
+hand of Balor; yet Balor also fell, slain by Lug, his own
+daughter's son.
+
+Thus was the might of the Fomorians broken, and the De Danaans ruled
+unopposed, their power and the works of their hands spreading throughout
+the length and breadth of the land.
+
+Many monuments are accredited to them by tradition, but greatest and
+most wonderful are the pyramids of stone at Brugh on the Boyne. Some
+nine miles from the sandy seashore, where the Boyne loses itself in the
+waves, there is a broad tongue of meadowland, shut in on three sides
+southward by the Boyne, and to the northeast cut off by a lesser stream
+that joins it. This remote and quiet headland, very famous in the
+annals, was in old days so surrounded by woods that it was like a quiet
+glade in the forest rimmed by the clear waters of the Boyne. The Mourne
+Mountains to the north and the lesser summits on the southern sky-line
+were hidden by the trees. The forest wall encircled the green
+meadowland, and the river fringed with blue forget-me-nots.
+
+In this quiet spot was the sacred place of the De Danaans, and three
+great pyramids of stone, a mile apart along the river, mark their three
+chief sanctuaries. The central is the greatest; two hundred thousand
+tons of stone heaped up, within a circular wall of stone, itself
+surrounded by a great outer circle of standing stones, thirty in number,
+like gray sentinels guarding the shrine. In the very heart of the
+pyramid, hushed in perpetual stillness and peace, is the inmost
+sanctuary, a chamber formed like a cross, domed with a lofty roof, and
+adorned with mysterious tracings on the rocks. Shrines like this are
+found in many lands, whether within the heart of the pyramids of Egypt
+or in the recesses of India's hills; and in all lands they have the same
+purpose. They are secret and holy sanctuaries, guarded well from all
+outward influence, where, in the mystic solitude, the valiant and great
+among the living may commune with the spirits of the mighty dead. The
+dead, though hidden, are not passed away; their souls are in perpetual
+nearness to ours. If we enter deep within ourselves, to the remote
+shrine of the heart, as they entered that secluded shrine, we may find
+the mysterious threshold where their world and our world meet.
+
+In the gloom and silence of those pyramid-chambers, the De Danaans thus
+sought the souls of their mighty ones--the Dagda, surnamed the Mighty,
+and Lug the Long-Armed, and Ogma of the Sunlike Face, and Angus the
+Young. From these luminous guardians they sought the inbreathing of
+wisdom, drawing into themselves the might of these mightier ones, and
+rising toward the power of their immortal world. And to these sacred
+recesses they brought the ashes of their mighty dead, as a token that
+they, too, had passed through the secret gateway to the Land of the
+Ever Young.
+
+Some thirty miles to the west of Brugh, on the Boyne, a low range of
+hills rises from the central plain, now bearing the name of Slieve na
+Calliagh, the Witch's Hill. In the days of the great forest this was the
+first large open space to the west coming from Brugh, and, like it, a
+quiet and remote refuge among the woods. On the hillsides of Slieve na
+Calliagh are other pyramids of stone, in all things like those of
+Brugh, and with the same chambered sanctuaries, but of lesser size;
+belonging, perhaps, to a later age, when the De Danaans were no longer
+supreme in the land, but took their place beside newcome invaders. These
+lesser shrines were also sacred places, doorways to the hidden world,
+entrance-gates to the Land of the Ever Young. There also was beheld the
+vision of the radiant departed; there also were fonts of baptism, basins
+wrought of granite brought hither from the distant hills of Mourne or
+Wicklow. As in all lands, these fonts were used in the consecration of
+the new birth, from which man rises conscious of his immortality.
+
+In harmony with this faith of theirs, our present tradition sees in the
+De Danaans a still haunting impalpable presence, a race invisible yet
+real, dwelling even now among our hills and valleys. When the life of
+the visible world is hushed, they say, there is another life in the
+hidden, where the Dagda Mor and Ogma and Lug and Angus still guard the
+De Danaan hosts. The radiance of their nearness is all through the land,
+like the radiance of the sun hidden behind storm-clouds, glimmering
+through the veil.
+
+[Illustration: White Rocks, Portrush]
+
+In the chambers of those pyramid-shrines are still traces of the
+material presence of the De Danaans; not only their baptismal fonts, but
+more earthly things--ornaments, beads of glass and amber, and combs with
+which they combed their golden locks. These amber beads, like so many
+things in the De Danaan history, call us to far northern lands by the
+Baltic, whence in all likelihood the De Danaans came; for in those
+Baltic lands we find just such pyramid shrines as those at Brugh and on
+the hillsides of Slieve na Calliagh, and their ornaments are the same,
+and the fashion of their spear-heads and shields. The plan of the Danish
+pyramid of Uby is like the pyramids of Newgrange and Nowth and Dowth by
+the Boyne, and the carvings on King Gorm's stone by the Baltic are like
+the carvings of stones in our own island. On the Baltic shores, too, of
+most ancient date and belonging to forgotten times, are still found
+fragments and even perfect hulls of just such long ships as were needed
+for the Danaans' coming, like the ships they burnt along the reaches of
+the Foyle.
+
+By the Baltic, too, and nowhere else, were there races with hair yellow
+as their own amber, or, as our island bards say, "so bright that the
+new-molten gold was not brighter; yellow as the yellow flag-lilies along
+the verges of the rivers." Therefore, in character of race, in face and
+feature, in color and complexion, in the form and make of sword and
+spear and shield, in their knowledge of ships and the paths of the sea,
+as in their ornaments and decorative art, and in those majestic pyramids
+and shrines where they sought mystic wisdom, and whither they carried
+the ashes of their dead, as to a place of sacred rest--in all these the
+life of the De Danaans speaks of the Baltic shores and the ancient race
+of golden-haired heroes who dwelt there. The honoring of bards, the
+heraldic keeping of traditions and the names of ancestors, also speak of
+the same home; and with a college of heraldic bards, well-ordered and
+holding due rank and honor, we can well see how the stories of their
+past have come down even to our days, lingering among our hills and
+valleys, as the De Danaan themselves linger, hidden yet not departed.
+
+The traditional time of their coming, too, agrees well with all we know.
+Without bronze tools they could not have carved the beautifully adorned
+stones that are built into the pyramids by the Boyne; yet there is a
+certain early ruggedness about these stones that falls far short of the
+perfection of later times. Early in the bronze age, therefore, they must
+be placed; and the early bronze age, wherever its remoteness can be
+measured, as in the Swiss lakes or the peat-mosses of Denmark, cannot be
+less than four thousand years ago, thus well agreeing with our De Danaan
+tradition. We are, therefore, led to believe that the tale told by these
+traditions is in the main a true one; that the races recorded by them
+came in the recorded order; that their places of landing are faithfully
+remembered; that all traditions pointing to their earlier homes are
+worthy of belief, and in full accord with all our other knowledge.
+
+
+
+V.
+
+EMAIN OF MACA.
+
+B.C. 50--A.D. 50.
+
+The battles of Southern and Northern Moytura gave the De Danaans sway
+over the island. After they had ruled for many centuries, they in their
+turn were subjected to invasion, as the Firbolg and Fomorian had been
+before them. The newcomers were the Sons of Milid, and their former home
+was either Gaul or Spain. But whether from Gaul or Spain, the sons of
+Milid were of undoubted Gaelic race, in every feature of character and
+complexion resembling the continental Gauls.
+
+We must remember that, in the centuries before the northward spread of
+Rome, the Gauls were the great central European power. Twenty-six
+hundred years ago their earlier tribal life was consolidated into a
+stable empire under Ambigatos; Galicia in Eastern Austria and Galicia in
+Western Spain mark their extreme borders towards the rising and
+setting sun.
+
+Several centuries before the days of Ambigatos, in the older period of
+tribal confederation, was the coming of the Gaelic Sons of Milid to
+Ireland. Tradition places the date between three and four thousand years
+ago. Yet even after that long interval of isolation the resemblance
+between the Irish and continental Gaels is perfect; they are tall,
+solidly built, rather inclined to stoutness; they are fair-skinned, or
+even florid, easily browned by sun and wind. Their eyes are gray,
+greenish or hazel, not clear blue, like the eyes of the Baltic race; and
+though fair-haired, they are easily distinguished from the golden-haired
+Norsemen. Such are the descendants of the Sons of Milid. Coming from
+Gaul or Spain, the Sons of Milid landed in one of the great fiords that
+penetrate between the mountains of Kerry--long after so named from the
+descendants of Ciar. These same fiords between the hills have been the
+halting-place of continental invaders for ages; hardly a century has
+passed since the last landing there of continental soldiers; there was
+another invasion a century before that, and yet another a hundred years
+earlier. But the Sons of Milid showed the way. They may have come by
+Bantry Bay or the Kenmare River or Dingle Bay; more probably the last,
+for tradition still points to the battlefield where they were opposed,
+on the hills of Slieve Mish, above the Dingle fiord.
+
+But wherever they debarked on that southwestern coast they found a land
+warm and winning as the south they had left behind--a land of ever-green
+woods, yew and arbutus mingling with beech and oak and fir; rich
+southern heaths carpeting the hillsides, and a soft drapery of ferns
+upon the rocks. There were red masses of overhanging mountain, but in
+the valleys, sheltered and sun-warmed, they found a refuge like the
+Isles of the Blest. The Atlantic, surging in great blue rollers, brought
+the warmth of tropical seas, and a rich and vivid growth through all the
+glens and vales responded to the sun's caress.
+
+The De Danaans must ere this have spread through all of the island,
+except the western province assigned to the Firbolgs; for we find them
+opposing,--but vainly opposing,--the Sons of Milid, at the very place of
+their landing. Here again we find the old tradition verified; for at the
+spot recorded of old by the bards and heralds, among the hills by the
+pass that leads from Dingle to Tralee Bay, numberless arrow-heads have
+been gathered, the gleanings after a great combat. The De Danaans fought
+with sword and spear, but, unless they had added to their weapons since
+the days of Breas and Sreng, they did not shoot with the bow; this was,
+perhaps, the cause of their defeat, for the De Danaans were defeated
+among the hills on that long headland.
+
+From their battlefield they could see the sea on either hand, stretching
+far inland northward and southward; across these arms of the sea rose
+other headlands, more distant, the armies of hills along them fading
+from green to purple, from purple to clear blue. But the De Danaans had
+burned their boats; they sought refuge rather by land, retreating
+northward till they came to the shelter of the great central woods. The
+Sons of Milid pursued them, and, overtaking them at Tailten on the
+Blackwater, some ten miles northwest of Tara, they fought another
+battle; after it, the supremacy of the De Danaans definitely
+passed away.
+
+Yet we have no reason to believe that, any more than the Fomorians or
+Firbolgs, the De Danaans ceased to fill their own place in the land.
+They seem, indeed, to have been preponderant in the north, and in all
+likelihood they hold their own there even now; for every addition to our
+knowledge shows us more and more how tenacious is the life of races, how
+firmly they cling to their earliest dwellings. And though we read of
+races perishing before invaders, this is the mere boasting of
+conquerors; more often the newcomers are absorbed among the earlier
+race, and nothing distinctive remains of them but a name. We have
+abundant evidence to show that at the present day, as throughout the
+last three thousand years, the four races we have described continue to
+make up the bulk of our population, and pure types of each still linger
+unblended in their most ancient seats; for, though races mingle, they do
+not thereby lose their own character. The law is rather that the type of
+one or other will come out clear in their descendants, all undefined
+forms tending to disappear.
+
+Nor did any subsequent invasion add new elements; for as all northern
+Europe is peopled by the same few types, every newcomer,--whether from
+Norway, Denmark, Britain or Continental Europe,--but reinforced one of
+these earlier races. Yet even where the ethnical elements are alike,
+there seems to be a difference of destiny and promise--as if the very
+land itself brooded over its children, transforming them and molding
+them to a larger purpose. The spiritual life of races goes far deeper
+than their ethnic history.
+
+It would seem that with the coming of the Sons of Milid the destiny of
+Ireland was rounded and completed; from that time onward, for more than
+two thousand years, was a period of uniform growth and settled life and
+ideals; a period whose history and achievements we are only beginning to
+understand. At the beginning of that long epoch of settled life the art
+of working gold was developed and perfected; and we have abundance of
+beautiful gold-work from remote times, of such fine design and execution
+that there is nothing in the world to equal it. The modern work of
+countries where gold is found in quantities is commonplace, vulgar and
+inartistic, when compared with the work of the old Irish period.
+Torques, or twisted ribbons of gold, of varying size and shape, were
+worn as diadems, collars, or even belts; crescent bands of finely
+embossed sheet-gold were worn above the forehead; brooches and pins of
+most delicate and imaginative workmanship were used to catch together
+the folds of richly colored cloaks, and rings and bracelets were of not
+less various and exquisite forms.
+
+We are at no loss to understand the abundance of our old goldsmiths'
+work when we know that even now, after being worked for centuries, the
+Wicklow gold-mines have an average yearly yield of some five hundred
+ounces, found, for the most part, in nuggets in the beds of streams
+flowing into the two Avons. One mountain torrent bears the name of Gold
+Mines River at the present day, showing the unbroken presence of the
+yellow metal from the time of its first discovery, over three thousand
+years ago. It seems probable that a liberal alloy of gold gave the
+golden bronze its peculiar excellence and beauty; for so rich is the
+lustre, so fine the color of many of our bronze axes and spears, that
+they are hardly less splendid than weapons of pure gold. From the
+perfect design and workmanship of these things of gold and bronze, more
+than from any other source, we gain an insight into the high culture and
+skill in the arts which marked that most distinctively Irish period,
+lasting, as we have seen, more than two thousand years.
+
+Early in this same epoch we find traditions of the clearing of forests,
+the sowing of cornfields, the skill of dyers in seven colors, earliest
+of which were purple, blue and green. Wells were dug to insure an easily
+accessible supply of pure water, so that we begin to think of a settled
+population dwelling among fields of golden grain, pasturing their cattle
+in rich meadows, and depending less on the deer and wild oxen of the
+forest, the salmon of lake and river, and the abundant fish along
+the shores.
+
+Tradition speaks persistently of bards, heralds, poets and poetesses;
+of music and song; of cordial and generous social life; and to the
+presence of these bards, like the skalds of the Northmen, we owe
+pictures, even now full of life and color and movement, of those days
+of long ago.
+
+At a period rather more than two thousand years ago, a warrior-queen,
+Maca by name, founded a great fort and citadel at Emain, some two miles
+west of Armagh, in the undulating country of green hills and meadows to
+the south of Lough Neagh. The ramparts and earthworks of that ancient
+fortress can still be traced, and we can follow and verify what the
+ancient bards told of the greatness of the stronghold of Maca. The plans
+of all forts of that time seem to have been much the same--a wide ring
+of earthwork, with a deep moat, guarded them, and a stockade of oak
+stakes rose above the earthwork, behind which the defenders stood,
+firing volleys of arrows at the attacking host. Within this outer circle
+of defence there was almost always a central stronghold, raised on a
+great mound of earth; and this was the dwelling of the chief, provincial
+ruler, or king. Lesser mounds upheld the houses of lesser chiefs, and
+all alike seem to have been built of oak, with plank roofs. Safe
+storehouses of stone were often sunk underground, beneath the chief's
+dwelling. In the fort of Emain, as in the great fort of Tara in the
+Boyne Valley, there was a banqueting-hall for the warriors, and the
+bards thus describe one of these in the days of its glory: "The
+banquet-hall had twelve divisions in each wing, with tables and passages
+round them; there were sixteen attendants on each side, eight for the
+star-watchers, the historians and the scribes, in the rear of the hall,
+and two to each table at the door,--a hundred guests in all; two oxen,
+two sheep and two hogs were divided equally on each side at each meal.
+Beautiful was the appearance of the king in that assembly--flowing,
+slightly curling golden hair upon him; a red buckler with stars and
+beasts wrought of gold and fastenings of silver upon him; a crimson
+cloak in wide descending folds upon him, fastened at his breast by a
+golden brooch set with precious stones; a neck-torque of gold around his
+neck; a white shirt with a full collar, and intertwined with threads of
+gold, upon him; a girdle of gold inlaid with precious stones around him;
+two wonderful shoes of gold with runings of gold upon him; two spears
+with golden sockets in his hand."
+
+We are the more disposed to trust the fidelity of the picture, since
+the foundations of the Tara banquet-hall are to be clearly traced to
+this day--an oblong earthwork over seven hundred feet long by ninety
+wide, with the twelve doors still distinctly marked; as for the brooches
+and torques of gold, some we have surpass in magnificence anything here
+described, and their artistic beauty is eloquent of the refinement of
+spirit that conceived and the skill that fashioned them. Spear-heads,
+too, are of beautiful bronze-gold, with tracings round the socket of
+great excellence and charm.
+
+[Illustration: Powerscourt Waterfall, Co. Wicklow]
+
+For a picture of the life of that age, we cannot do better than return
+to Emain of Maca, telling the story of one famous generation of warriors
+and fair women who loved and fought there two thousand years ago. The
+ideal of beauty was still the golden hair and blue eyes of the De
+Danaans, and we cannot doubt that their race persisted side by side with
+the Sons of Milid, retaining a certain predominance in the north and
+northeast of the island, the first landing-place of the De Danaan
+invaders. Of this mingled race was the great Rudraige, from whom the
+most famous rulers of Emain descended. Ros was the son of Rudraige, and
+from Roeg and Cass, the sons of Ros, came the princes Fergus and
+Factna. Factna, son of Cass, wedded the beautiful Nessa, and from their
+union sprang Concobar, the great hero and ruler of Ulster--in those days
+named Ulad, and the dwellers there the Ulaid. Factna died while Concobar
+was yet a boy; and Nessa, left desolate, was yet so beautiful in her
+sadness that Fergus became her slave, and sued for her favor, though
+himself a king whose favors others sued. Nessa's heart was wholly with
+her son, her life wrapt up in his. She answered, therefore, that she
+would renounce her mourning and give her widowed hand to Fergus the
+king, if the king, on his part, would promise that Nessa's son Concobar
+should succeed him, rather than the children of Fergus. Full of longing,
+and held in thrall by her beauty, Fergus promised; and this promise was
+the beginning of many calamities, for Nessa, the queen, feeling her sway
+over Fergus, and full of ambition for her child, won a promise from
+Fergus that the youth should sit beside him on the throne, hearing all
+pleadings and disputes, and learning the art of ruling. But the spirit
+of Concobar was subtle and strong and masterful, and he quickly took the
+greater place in the councils of the Ulaid, until Nessa, still confident
+in her charm, took a promise from Fergus that Concobar should reign
+for one year.
+
+Fergus, great-hearted warrior, but tender and gentle and fond of feasts
+and merrymaking, was very willing to lift the cares of rule from his
+shoulders to the younger shoulders of Nessa's son, and the one year thus
+granted became many years, so that Fergus never again mounted his
+throne. Yet for the love he bore to Nessa, Fergus willingly admitted his
+stepson's rule, and remained faithfully upholding him, ever merry at the
+banquets, and leading the martial sports and exercises of the youths,
+the sons of chieftains, at the court. Thus Concobar, son of Nessa, came
+to be ruler over the great fort of Emain, with its citadel, its
+earthworks and outer forts, its strong stockade and moat; ruler of
+these, and of the chiefs of the Ulaid, and chief commander of all the
+fighting-men that followed them. To him came the tribute of cattle and
+horses, of scarlet cloaks and dyed fabrics, purple and blue and green,
+and the beryls and emeralds from the mountains of Mourne where the sea
+thunders in the caves, near the great fort of Rudraige. Fergus was lord
+only of the banqueting-hall and of the merrymakings of the young chiefs;
+but in all else the will of Concobar was supreme and his word was law.
+
+It happened that before this a child had been born, a girl
+golden-haired and with blue eyes, of whom the Druids had foretold many
+dark and terrible things. That the evil might not be wrought through
+this child of sad destiny, the king had from her earliest childhood kept
+her securely hidden in a lonely fort, and there Deirdré grew in
+solitude, daily increasing in beauty and winsomeness. She so won the
+love of those set in guard over her that they relaxed something of the
+strictness of their watch, letting her wander a little in the meadows
+and the verges of the woods, gathering flowers, and watching the life of
+birds and wild things there.
+
+Among the chieftains of the court of Emain was one Usnac, of whom were
+three sons, with Naisi strongest and handsomest of the three. Naisi was
+dark, with black locks hanging upon his shoulders and dark, gleaming
+eyes; and so strongly is unlike drawn to unlike that golden-haired
+Deirdré, seeing him in one of her wanderings, felt her heart go forth to
+him utterly. Falling into talk with him, they exchanged promises of
+enduring love. Thus the heart of Naisi went to Deirdré, as hers had gone
+to him, so that all things were changed for them, growing radiant with
+tremulous hope and wistful with longing. Yet the fate that lay upon
+Deirdré was heavy, and all men dreaded it but Naisi; so that even his
+brothers, the sons of Usnac, feared greatly and would have dissuaded him
+from giving his life to the ill-fated one. But Naisi would not be
+dissuaded; so they met secretly many times, in the twilight at the verge
+of the wood, Deirdré's golden hair catching the last gleam of sunlight
+and holding it long into the darkness, while the black locks of Naisi,
+even ere sunset, foreshadowed the coming night. In their hearts it was
+not otherwise; for Deirdré, full of wonder at the change that had come
+over her, at the song of the birds that echoed ever around her even in
+her dreams, at the radiance of the flowers and trees, the sunshine on
+the waters of the river, the vivid gladness over all,--Deirdré knew
+nothing of the dread doom that was upon her, and was all joy and
+wonderment at the meetings with her lover, full of fancies and tender
+words and shy caresses; but Naisi, who knew well the fate that
+overshadowed them like a black cloud above a cliff of the sea, strove to
+be glad and show a bold face to his mistress, though his heart many a
+time grew cold within him, thinking on what had befallen and what
+might befall.
+
+For the old foretelling of the star-watchers was not the only doom laid
+upon Deirdré. Concobar the king, stern and masterful, crafty and secret
+in counsel though swift as an eagle to slay,--Concobar the king had
+watched Deirdré in her captivity, ever unseen of her, and his heart had
+been moved by the fair softness of her skin, the glow of her cheek, the
+brightness of her eyes and hair; so that the king had steadfastly
+determined in his mind that Deirdré should be his, in scorn of all
+prophecies and warnings; that her beauty should be for him alone. This
+the king had determined; and it was known to Naisi the son of Usnac. It
+was known to him also that what Concobar the king determined, he
+steadfastly carried out; for the will of Concobar was strong and
+masterful over all around him.
+
+Therefore at their meetings two clouds lay upon the heart of Naisi: the
+presentment of the king's power and anger, and his relentless hand
+pursuing through the night, and the darker dread of the sightless doom
+pronounced of old at the birth of Deirdré, of which the will of Concobar
+was but the tool. There was gloom in his eyes and silence on his lips
+and a secret dread in his heart. Deirdré wondered at it, her own heart
+being so full of gladness, her eyes sparkling, and endearing words ever
+ready on her lips. Deirdré wondered, yet found a new delight and
+wonderment in the silence of Naisi, and the gloomy lightning in his
+eyes, as being the more contrasted with herself, and therefore the more
+to be beloved.
+
+Yet the time came when Naisi determined to tell her all and risk the
+worst that fate could do against them, finding death with her greatly
+better than life without her. Yet death with her was not to be granted
+to him. Deirdré heard, wondering and trembling, and Naisi must tell her
+the tale many times before she understood,--so utter had been her
+solitude and so perfect was yet her ignorance of all things beyond the
+fort where she was captive, and of all the doings of men. Concobar was
+not even a name to her, and she knew nothing of his power or the
+stronghold of Emain, the armies of the Ulaid, or the tributes of gold
+and cattle and horses. Spears and swords and those who wielded them were
+not even dreams to her until the coming of Naisi, when his gloom blended
+with her sunshine.
+
+Talking long through the twilight, until the red gold of the west was
+dulled to bronze over the hills, and the bronze tarnished and darkened
+with the coming of the eastern stars, they planned together what they
+should do; and, the heart of Deirdré at last growing resolute, they made
+their way through the night to where the brothers of Naisi were, and all
+fled together towards the northern sea. Amongst the fishermen of the
+north they found those who were willing to carry them beyond the reach
+of Concobar's anger, and with a southerly breeze set sail for the
+distant headlands of Scotland, that they had seen from the cliff-top
+lying like blue clouds along the horizon. They set forth early in the
+morning, as the sun came up out of the east over blue Alban capes, and
+when the sun went down it reddened the dark rocks of Islay; so that,
+making for the shore, they camped that night under the Islay Hills. On
+their setting forth again, the sea was like a wild grey lake between
+Jura on the left and the long headland of Cantyre on their right; and
+thus they sped forward between long ranks of gloomy hills, growing ever
+nearer them on both sides, till they passed through the Sound of Jura
+and rounded into Loch Etive.
+
+There they made the land, drawing up under the shadow of dark hills, and
+there they dwelt for many a day. Very familiar to Deirdré, though at
+first strange and wild and terrible beyond words, grew that vast
+amphitheatre of hills in their eternal grayness, with the long Loch
+stretching down like a horn through their midst. Very familiar to
+inland-bred Deirdré, though at first strange and fearful, grew the gray
+surges of the incoming tides, the white foam of the waves seething along
+boulders of granite, and the long arms of seaweed waving as she peered
+downward into the clear green water. Very familiar to Deirdré, though at
+first strange and confusing, grew the arms of Naisi around her in the
+darkness and his warm lips on her cheek. Happy were those wild days in
+the great glen of Etive, and dear did the sons of Usnac grow to her
+heart, loved as brothers by her who never knew a brother, or the
+gentleness of a mother's watching, or the solace of dear kindred.
+
+The sons of Usnac sped forth before dawn among the hills from their
+green dwelling roofed with pine branches and reeds and moss; early they
+went forth to track the deer, pursuing them with their arrows, till the
+red flank of the buck was laced with brighter red. One of the three ever
+stayed behind with Deirdré, whether it was Naisi himself, or Alny, or
+Ardan, and the two thus remaining were like children playing together,
+whether gathering sticks and dry rushes and long spears of withered
+grass for their fire, or wandering by the white curling waves, or
+sending flat pebbles skipping over the wavelets; and the sound of their
+laughter many a time echoed along the Loch's green waters and up the
+hills, till the does peered and wondered from among the heather, and the
+heron, startled at his fishing, flew upwards croaking, with flapping
+wings. Happy were those days for Deirdré, and with utter sadness she
+looked back to them afterwards, when the doom foretold had fallen upon
+her. Happy sped the days, till once in the gray of the dawn, while
+Deirdré was resting in their green refuge with Naisi, she cried out in
+her sleep and waked, telling him, weeping, that she had heard the voice
+of the bird of doom in her dreams.
+
+The voice she heard was indeed the voice of their doom; yet it was a
+cheerful voice, full of friendly gladness; the voice of Fergus, son of
+Roeg, former King of Emain, and now come to Loch Etive as messenger of
+Concobar, Fergus came up from the sea-beach towards the answering shout
+of the sons of Usnac, and glad greetings passed among them at the door
+of their refuge. Fergus looked long in admiration at the blue eyes and
+golden locks, the clear skin and gentle breast of Deirdré, nor
+wondered, as he looked, that Naisi had dared fate to possess her. Then
+Fergus told the story of his coming; how they had discovered the flight
+of the sons of Usnac from Emain, and how terrible was the black anger of
+Concobar; what passionate fire had gleamed in his eyes as he tossed the
+golden locks back from his shoulders and grasped the haft of his spear,
+and pledged himself to be avenged on Naisi and all his kin, swearing
+that he would have Deirdré back again.
+
+Thus Fergus told the tale, laughingly, as at a danger that was past, a
+storm-cloud that had lost its arrows of white hail and was no longer
+fearful. For, he said, Concobar had forgotten his anger, had promised a
+truce to the sons of Usnac, and most of all to Naisi, and had bidden
+them return as his guests to Emain of Maca, where Deirdré should dwell
+happy with her beloved. The comrades of Fergus by this time had tied
+their boat and come up from the shore, and the sons of Usnac were ready
+to depart. Yet Deirdré's heart misgave her as she thought of the days
+among those purple hills and granite rocks, by the long green water of
+the Loch, and her clear-seeing soul spoke words of doom for them all:
+words soon to be fulfilled. Amongst the comrades of Fergus were certain
+of the adherents of Concobar, treacherous as he; for he had no thought
+of pardoning the sons of Usnac, nor any intent but to draw Deirdré back
+within his reach; the image of her bright eyes and the redness of her
+lips, and her soft breast and shining hair was ever before him, and his
+heart gnawed within him for longing and the bitterness of desire.
+
+Therefore he had designed this embassy; and Fergus, believing all things
+and trusting all things, had gladly undertaken to be the messenger of
+forgiveness; fated, instead, to be the instrument of betrayal. So they
+turned their faces homewards towards Emain, Deirdré full of desponding,
+as one whose day of grace is past. They set sail again through the long
+Sound of Jura, with the islands now on their right hand and the gray
+hills of Cantyre on their left. So they passed Jura, and later Islay,
+and came at last under the cliffs of Rathlin and the white Antrim
+headlands. Deirdré's heart never lightened, nor did laughter play about
+her lips or in her eyes through all the time of her journey, but sadness
+lay ever upon her, like the heavy darkness of a winter's night, when a
+storm is gathering out of the West. But Fergus made merry, rejoicing at
+the reconciling; bidden to a treacherous banquet by the partisans of
+Concobar, his heart never misgave him, but giving the charge of Deirdré
+and the sons of Usnac to his sons, he went to the banquet, delaying long
+in carousing and singing, while Deirdré and the three brothers were
+carried southwards to Emain. There the treachery plotted against them
+was carried out, as they sat in the banquet-hall; for Concobar's men
+brought against them the power of cowardly flames, setting fire to the
+hall, and slaying the sons of Usnac as they hurried forth from under the
+burning roof.
+
+One of the sons of Fergus shamefully betrayed them, bought by the gold
+and promises of Concobar, but the other bravely fell, fighting back to
+back with one of the sons of Usnac, when they fell overpowered by the
+warriors of Concobar. Thus was the doom of Deirdré consummated, her
+lover treacherously done to death, and she herself condemned to bear the
+hated caress of Concobar, thinking ever of those other lips, in the days
+of her joy among the northern hills. This is the lament of Deirdré for
+Usnac's sons:
+
+     The lions of the hill are gone,
+     And I am left alone, alone;
+     Dig the grave both wide and deep,
+     For I am sick and fain would sleep!
+
+     The falcons of the wood are flown,
+     And I am left alone, alone;
+     Dig the grave both deep and wide,
+     And let us slumber side by side.
+
+     Lay their spears and bucklers bright
+     By the warriors' sides aright;
+     Many a day the three before me
+     On their linked bucklers bore me.
+
+     Dig the grave both wide and deep,
+     Sick I am and fain would sleep.
+     Dig the grave both deep and wide,
+     And let us slumber side by side.
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+CUCULAIN THE HERO.
+
+B.C. 50--A.D. 50.
+
+The treacherous death of Naisi and his brothers Ardan and Alny, and her
+own bereavement and misery, were not the end of the doom pronounced at
+her birth for Deirdré, but rather the beginning. Yet the burden of the
+evils that followed fell on Concobar and his lands and his warriors.
+
+For Fergus, son of Roeg, former king over Emain, who had stayed behind
+his charges feasting and banqueting, came presently to Emain, fearing
+nothing and thinking no evil, but still warm with the reconciliation
+that he had accomplished; and, coming to Emain of Maca, found the sons
+of Usnac dead, with the sods still soft on their graves, and his own son
+also dead, Deirdré in the hands of Concobar, and the plighted word of
+Fergus and his generous pledge of safety most traitorously and basely
+broken; broken by Concobar, whom he himself had guarded and set upon
+the throne.
+
+Fergus changed from gladness to fierce wrath, and his countenance was
+altered with anger, as he uttered his bitter indignation against
+Concobar to the warriors and heroes of Emain and the men of Ulad. The
+warriors were parted in two by his words, swaying to the right and to
+the left, as tall wheat sways before one who passes through it. For some
+of them sided with Fergus, saying that he had done great wrong to put
+Concobar on the throne, and that even now he should cast him down again,
+for the baseness and treachery of his deed; but others took Concobar's
+part, saying that the first betraying was Naisi's, who stole away
+Deirdré,--the hostage, as it were, of evil doom, so that he drew the
+doom upon himself. They further said that Concobar was chief and ruler
+among them, the strong and masterful leader, able to uphold their cause
+amongst men. So indeed it befell, for the sedition of Fergus and his
+fight to avenge his wrong upon Concobar failed, so that he fled defeated
+to Meave, Queen of Connacht, at her stronghold amid the lakes whence
+issues forth the Shannon.
+
+[Illustration: Honeycomb, Giant's Causeway.]
+
+Meave, whose power and genius overtopped her lord Ailill, received the
+exiled king gladly, and put many honors upon him, holding him as the
+pillar of her army, with the two thousand men of the Ulaid who came
+with him;--those who had fought for him against the party of Concobar.
+At Cruacan, on the hillside, with the lakes of the Great River all
+around them, with the sun setting red behind the Curlew hills, with
+green meadows and beech-woods to gladden them, Meave and Ailill kept
+their court, and thence they sent many forays against Emain of Maca and
+Concobar, with Fergus the fallen king ever raging in the van, and, for
+the wrong that was done him, working measureless wrong on his own
+kingdom and the kingdom of his fathers.
+
+After many a foray had gone forth against Ulad, crossing the level
+plains, it befell that Meave and Ailill her lord disputed between them
+as to which had the greatest wealth; nor would either yield until their
+most precious possessions had been brought and matched the one against
+the other. Their jewels of gold, wonderfully wrought, and set with
+emeralds and beryls and red carbuncles, were brought forth, their
+crescents for the brow, with hammered tracery upon them, their necklets
+and torques, like twisted ribbons of gold, their bracelets and arm-rings
+set with gold, their gems of silver and all their adornments, cloaks of
+scarlet and blue and purple, were all brought, and no advantage in the
+one was found over the other. Their battle-steeds also were brought,
+their horses for chariots; and likewise their herds of lowing wealth,
+their sheep with soft fleeces. When the cattle were driven up before
+them, it was found that among the herds of Ailill was one bull,
+matchless, with white horns shining and polished; and equal to this bull
+was none among the herds of the queen. She would not admit her lord's
+advantage, but sent forthwith to seek where another bull like the bull
+of Ailill might be found, and tidings were brought to her of the brown
+bull of Cuailgne,--of Cuailgne named after a chief of the Sons of Milid,
+fallen ages ago in the pursuit of the De Danaans, when the De Danaans
+retreated before the Sons of Milid from the southern headland of Slieve
+Mish to the ford at green Tailten by the Boyne, and thence further
+northwards to where Cuailgne of the Sons of Milid was killed. At that
+same place had grown up a dwelling with a fortress, and there was the
+brown bull that Meave heard the report of. She sent, therefore, and her
+embassy bore orders to Dairé, the owner of the bull, asking that the
+bull might be sent to her for a year, and offering fifty heifers in
+payment. Dairé received her messengers well, and willingly consented to
+her request; but the messengers of Meave from feasting fell to
+drinking, from drinking to boasting; one of them declaring that it was a
+small thing that Dairé had granted the request, since they themselves
+would have compelled him, even unwillingly, and would have driven off
+the brown bull by force. The taunt stung Dairé, after his hospitality,
+and in wrath he sent them forth empty-handed, and so they came
+slighted to Meave.
+
+The queen, conceiving her honor impeached, would by no means suffer the
+matter so to rest, but stirred up wrath and dissension, till the armies
+of Connacht with their allies set forth to sack and burn in Ulad, and at
+all hazards to bring the brown bull. Fergus and the men who fought by
+his side went with them, and marching thus eastwards they came, after
+three days march through fair lands and fertile, to the river Dee--the
+frontier of Ulad, and the scene of many well-fought fights.
+
+The army of Ulad was not yet ready to meet them, but one champion with
+his band confronted them at the ford. That champion was Cuculain, whose
+true name was Setanta, son of Sualtam, chief at Dundelga, and of Dectira
+the sister of Concobar. Cuculain was accounted the greatest and most
+skillful warrior of his time, and bards for ages after told how he kept
+the ford. For by the laws of honor, amongst them, the host from Connacht
+could not pass the ford so long as Cuculain held the ford and offered
+single combat to the champions. They must take up his challenge one by
+one; and while he stood there challenging, the host could not pass.
+
+Many of their champions fell there by the ford, so that queen Meave's
+heart chafed within her, and her army was hot to do battle, but still
+Cuculain kept the ford. Last of the western champions came forth
+Ferdiad, taught in the famous northern school of arms, a dear friend and
+companion of Cuculain, who now must meet him to slay or be slain. This
+is the story of their combat, as the traditions tell it:
+
+When they ceased fighting on the first day, they cast their weapons away
+from them into the hands of their charioteers. Each of them approached
+the other forthwith, and each put his hand round the other's neck, and
+gave him three kisses. Their horses were in the same paddock that night,
+and their charioteers at the same fire; and their charioteers spread
+beds of green rushes for them, with wounded men's pillows to them. The
+men of healing came to heal and solace them, applying herbs that should
+assuage to every cut or gash upon their bodies, and to all their
+wounds. Of every healing herb that was laid on the hurts of Cuculain, he
+sent an equal share to Ferdiad, sending it westward over the ford, so
+that men might not say that through the healing virtue of the herbs he
+was able to overcome him. And of all food and invigorating drink that
+was set before Ferdiad, he sent an equal portion northwards over the
+ford to Cuculain, for those that prepared food for him were more than
+those who made ready food for Cuculain. Thus that night they rested.
+
+They fought with spears on the next day, and so great was the strength
+of each, so dire their skill in combat, that both were grievously
+wounded, for all the protection of their shields. The men of healing art
+could do little for them beyond the staunching of their blood, that it
+might not flow from their wounds, laying herbs upon their red wounds.
+
+On the third day they arose early in the morning and came forward to the
+place of combat. Cuculain saw that the face of Ferdiad was dark as a
+black cloud, and thus addressed him: "Thy face is darkened, Ferdiad, and
+thine eye has lost its fire, nor are the form and features thine!" And
+Ferdiad answered, "O, Cuculain, it is not from fear or dread that my
+face is changed, for I am ready to meet all champions in the fight."
+Cuculain reproached him, wondering that, for the persuasions of Meave,
+Ferdiad was willing thus to fight against his friend, coming to spoil
+his land. But Ferdiad replied that fate compelled him, since every man
+is constrained to come unto the sod where shall be his last
+resting-place. That day the heroes fought with swords, but such was the
+skill of both that neither could break down the other's guard.
+
+In the dusk they cast away their weapons, ceasing from the fight; and
+though the meeting of the two had been full of vigor and friendship in
+the morning, yet was their parting at night mournful and full of sorrow.
+That night their horses were not in the same enclosure, nor did their
+charioteers rest at the same fire.
+
+Then Ferdiad arose early in the morning and went forth to the place of
+contest, knowing well that that day would decide whether he should fall
+or Cuculain; knowing that the sun would set on one of them dead that
+night. Cuculain, seeing him come forth, spoke thus to his charioteer: "I
+see the might and skill of Ferdiad, coming forth to the combat. If it be
+I that shall begin to yield to-day, do thou stir my valor, uttering
+reproaches and words of condemnation against me, so that my wrath shall
+grow upon me, enkindling me again for the battle." And the charioteer
+assented and promised.
+
+Great was the deed that was performed that day at the ford by the two
+heroes, the two warriors, the two champions of western lands, the two
+gift-bestowing hands of the northwest of the world, the two beloved
+pillars of the valor of the Gael, the two keys of the bravery of the
+Gael, brought to fight from afar through the schemes of Meave the queen.
+
+They began to shoot with their missiles from the dawn of the day, from
+early morning till noon. And when midday came the ire of the men waxed
+more furious, and they drew nearer together. Then Cuculain sprang from
+the river-bank against the boss of the shield of Ferdiad, son of Daman,
+to strike at his head over the rim of the shield from above. But Ferdiad
+gave the shield so strong a turn with his left arm that he cast Cuculain
+from him like a bird. Cuculain sprang again upon him, to strike him from
+above. But the son of Daman so struck the shield with his left knee that
+he cast Cuculain from him like a child.
+
+Then the charioteer of Cuculain spoke to chide him: "Woe for thee, whom
+the warrior thus casts aside as an evil mother casts away her offspring.
+He throws thee as foam is thrown by the river. He grinds thee as a mill
+would grind fresh grain. He pierces thee as the ax of the woodman
+cleaves the oak. He binds thee as the woodbine binds the tree. He darts
+on thee as the hawk darts on finches, so that henceforth thou hast no
+claim or name or fame for valor, until thy life's end, thou
+phantom sprite!"
+
+Then Cuculain sprang up fleet as the wind and swift as the swallow,
+fierce as a dragon, strong as a lion, advancing against Ferdiad through
+clouds of dust, and forcing himself upon his shield, to strike at him
+from above. Yet even then Ferdiad shook him off, driving him backwards
+into the ford.
+
+Then Cuculain's countenance was changed, and his heart swelled and grew
+great within him till he towered demoniac and gigantic, rising like one
+of the Fomor upon Ferdiad. So fierce was the fight they now fought that
+their heads met above and their feet below and their arms in the midst,
+past the rims of the shields. So fierce was the fight they fought that
+they cleft the shields to their centers. So fierce was the fight they
+fought that their spears were shivered from socket to haft. So fierce
+was the fight they fought that the demons of the air screamed along the
+rims of the shields, and from the hilts of their swords and from the
+hafts of their spears. So fierce was the fight they fought that they
+cast the river out of its bed, so that not a drop of water lay there
+unless from the fierceness of the champion heroes hewing each other in
+the midst of the ford. So fierce was the fight they fought that the
+horses of the Gael fled away in fright, breaking their chains and their
+yokes, and the women and youths and camp-followers broke from the camp,
+flying forth southwards and westwards.
+
+They were fighting with the edges of their swords, and Ferdiad, finding
+a break in the guard of Cuculain, gave him a stroke of the
+straight-edged sword, burying it in his body until the blood fell into
+his girdle, until the ford was red with the blood of the hero's body.
+Then Cuculain thrust an unerring spear over the rim of the shield, and
+through the breast of Ferdiad's armor, so that the point of the spear
+pierced his heart and showed through his body.
+
+"That is enough, now," said Ferdiad: "I fall for that!" Then Cuculain
+ran towards him, and clasped his two arms about him, and bore him with
+his arms and armor across the ford northwards. Cuculain laid Ferdiad
+down there, bowing over his body in faintness and weakness. But the
+charioteer cried to him, "Rise up, Cuculain, for the host is coming upon
+us, and it is not single combat they will give thee, since Ferdiad, son
+of Daman, son of Dairé, has fallen before thee!"
+
+"Friend," Cuculain made answer, "what avails it for me to rise after him
+that has fallen by me?"
+
+Thus did Cuculain keep the ford, still known as the ford of Ferdiad,
+Ath-Fhirdia on the Dee, in the midst of the green plain of Louth. And
+while he fought at the ford of Ferdiad the army of Ulad assembled, and
+coming southwards over the hills before Emain, turned back the host of
+Meave the queen and pursued them. The army of Meave fled westwards and
+southwards towards Connacht, passing the Yellow Ford of Athboy and the
+Hill of Ward, the place of sacrifice, where the fires on the Day of
+Spirits summoned the priests and Druids to the offering. Fleeing still
+westwards from the Yellow Ford, they passed between the lakes of Owel
+and Ennel, with the men of Ulad still hot in their rear. Thus came
+pursued and pursuers to Gairec, close by Athlone--the Ford of Luan--and
+the wooded shore of the great Lough Ree. There was fought a battle
+hardly less fatal to victors than to vanquished, for though the hosts of
+Meave were routed, yet Concobar's men could not continue the pursuit.
+Thus Meave escaped and Fergus with her, and came to their great fort on
+the green hillside of Cruacan amid the headwaters of the Shannon.
+
+The victory of Concobar's men was like a defeat. There was not food that
+pleased him, nor did sleep come to him by flight, so that the Ulad
+wondered, and Catbad the right-wonderful Druid, himself a warrior who
+had taught Concobar and reared him, went to Concobar to learn the secret
+of his trouble. Therefore Catbad asked of Concobar what wound had
+wounded him, what obstinate sickness had come upon him, making him faint
+and pale, day after day.
+
+"Great reason have I for it," answered Concobar, "for the four great
+provinces of Erin have come against me, bringing with them their bards
+and singers, that their ravages and devastations might be recorded, and
+they have burned our fortresses and dwellings, and Ailill and Meave have
+gained a battle against me. Therefore I would be avenged upon Meave
+the queen."
+
+"Thou hast already avenged it sternly, O Red-handed Concobar," Catbad
+made answer, "by winning the battle over the four provinces of Erin."
+
+"That is no battle," Concobar answered, "where a strong king falls not
+by hard fighting and by fury. That an army should escape from a goodly
+battle! Unless Ailill should fall, and Meave, by me in this encounter
+with valorous hosts, I tell you that my heart will break, O Catbad!"
+
+"This is my counsel for thee," replied Catbad, "to stay for the present.
+For the winds are rough, and the roads are foul, and the streams and the
+rivers are in flood, and the hands of the warriors are busy making forts
+and strongholds among strangers. So wait till the summer days come upon
+us, till every grassy sod is a pillow, till our horses are full of
+spirit and our colts are strong, till our men are whole of their wounds
+and hurts, till the nights are short to watch and to ward and to guard
+in the land of enemies and in the territories of strangers. Spring is
+not the time for an invasion. But meanwhile let tidings be sent to thy
+friends in absence, in the islands and throughout the northern seas."
+
+Therefore messengers were sent with the tidings, and the friends in
+absence of Concobar were summoned. They set forth with ships from the
+islands of the northern seas, and came forward with the tide to the
+Cantyre headland. The green surges of the tremendous sea rose about
+them, and a mighty storm rose against them. Such was the strength of the
+storm that the fleet was parted in three. A third of them, with the son
+of Amargin, came under the cliffs of Fair Head, to the Bay of Murbolg,
+where huge columns tower upward on the face of the cliff, high as the
+nests of the eagles; cliffs ruddy and mighty, frowning tremendous across
+the channel to Cantyre and Islay and far-away Jura. A third of the ships
+came to the safer harbor of Larne, where bands of white seam the cliff's
+redness, where the great headland is thrust forth northwards, sheltering
+the bay from the eastern waves. A third of the fleet came to the strand
+beside Dundelga, hard by the great hill of earth where was reared the
+stronghold of Cuculain.
+
+At that same time came Concobar with a thousand men to the fort of
+Cuculain, and feasting was prepared for him at the House of Delga. Nor
+was Concobar long there till he saw the bent spars of sails and the
+full-crewed ships, and the scarlet pavilions, and the many-colored
+banners, and the blue bright lances, and the weapons of war. Then
+Concobar called on the chiefs that were about him, for the territory
+and land he had bestowed upon them, and for the jewels he had given
+them, to stand firm and faithful. For he knew not whether the ships were
+ships of his foes, of the Galian of Lagin, now called Leinster, or the
+Munstermen of great Muma, or the men of Olnemact, called afterwards
+Connacht; for the estuary of the river and the strand were full of men.
+
+Then Senca son of Ailill answered for the chieftains: "I give my word,
+indeed, that Erin holds not a soldier who lays his hand in the hand of a
+chieftain that is not known to me. If they be the men of Erin thy foes
+that are there, I shall ask a truce of battle from them; but if they be
+thy friends and allies, thou shalt the more rejoice."
+
+Then Senca son of Ailill went forward to the place where the ships were,
+and learned that they were the friends in absence of Concobar, come to
+be his allies against the four provinces of Erin. Then Concobar spoke
+to Cuculain:
+
+"Well, O Cuculain, let the horses of the plain of Murtemni be caught by
+thee; let four-wheeled chariots be harnessed for them; bring with them
+hither my friends from the ships in chariots and four-wheeled cars,
+that feasting and enjoyment may be prepared for them."
+
+[Illustration: Gray Man's Path, Fair Head.]
+
+They were brought in chariots to the feast, and carvers carved for them,
+and serving-men carried the cups of mead. Songs were sung to them, and
+they tarried there till sunrise on the morrow. Then Concobar spoke again
+to Cuculain:
+
+"It is well, Cuculain. Let messengers now be sent through the lands of
+the Ulaid to the warriors of the Ulaid, that the foreign friends may be
+ministered to by them also, while I make my camp here by the river. And
+bid the thrice fifty veteran champions come hither to me, that I may
+have their aid and counsel in battle."
+
+But Cuculain would not. Therefore Concobar went himself to summon the
+veterans. When they asked the cause of his coming, Concobar answered,
+"Have you not heard how the four provinces of Erin came against us,
+bringing with them their bards and singers, that their ravages and
+devastations might the better be recorded, and burning and plundering
+our fortresses and dwellings? Therefore I would make an expedition of
+hostility against them, and with your guidance and counsel would I make
+the expedition."
+
+"Let our old steeds be caught by thee," they answered, "and let our old
+chariots be yoked by thee, so that we may go on this journey and
+expedition with thee." Then their old chargers were caught, and their
+old chariots yoked, so that they too came to the camp at the Water
+of Luachan.
+
+This was told to the four provinces. The Three Waves of Erin thundered
+in the night; the Wave of Clidna at Glandore in the South; the Wave of
+Rudraige along the bent-carpeted sandhills of Dundrum, under the
+Mountains of Mourne; and the Wave of Tuag Inbir, at the bar of northern
+Bann. For these are the Three Waves of Fate in Erin. Then the four
+provinces hosted their men. The son of Lucta, the north Munster king,
+assembled his tribes at the Hill of Luchra, between the Shannon mouth
+and the Summit of Prospects. Ailill and Meave hosted the men of the west
+at Cruacan. Find, son of Ros, king over the Galian of Leinster, gathered
+his army at Dinn-Rig by the Barrow. Cairpré Nia Fer assembled his host
+about him at Tara, in the valley of the Boyne.
+
+This was the proposal of Eocu, son of Lucta, king of north Munster by
+the Shannon: That everything should have its payment, and that
+reparation should be made to Concobar for the invasion; that a fort
+should be paid for every fort, for every house a house, for every cow a
+cow, for every bull a bull; that the great brown bull should be sent
+back, that the breadth of the face of the bull in red gold should be
+given to Concobar, and that there should be no more hostility among the
+men of Erin.
+
+This was reported to Meave, but the queen answered, "A false hand was
+his who gave this counsel. For so long as there shall be among us one
+who can hold a sword, who can wear the shield-strap about his neck, that
+proposal shall not go to him."
+
+"Thy counsel is not mine," replied Ailill, "for not greater shall be our
+part of that payment than the part of all the four provinces who went on
+that raid for the bull." Therefore Meave consented, and messengers were
+sent, and came to Tara by the Boyne, where were Find, son of Ros, king
+of Leinster, and his brother Cairpré Nia Fer, king of Tara. Thence they
+sent messengers to treat with Concobar, but Concobar rejected the terms.
+"I give my word, indeed," answered Concobar, "that I will not take terms
+from you till my tent has been pitched in every province of Erin."
+
+"Good, O Concobar," they replied; "where wilt thou now make thy
+encampment to-night?"
+
+"In the Headland of the Kings, by the clear bright Boyne," answered
+Concobar, for Concobar concealed not ever from his enemy the place in
+which he would take station or camp, that they might not say that it was
+fear or dread that caused him not to say it. Concobar, therefore,
+marched toward the Headland of the Kings, across the Boyne to the
+southward, and facing the northern bank where are the pyramids of the
+Dagda Mor and the De Danaans. But the southern armies were there
+already, so Concobar halted before the river. Then were their positions
+fixed and their pavilions pitched, their huts and their tents were made.
+Their fires were kindled, cooking and food and drink were prepared;
+baths of clean bathing were made by them, and their hair was
+smooth-combed; their bodies were minutely cleansed, supper and food were
+eaten by them; and tunes and merry songs and eulogies were sung by them.
+
+Then Concobar sent men to reconnoitre the southern and western armies.
+Two went and returned not, falling indeed into the hands of the foe. It
+seemed long to Concobar that the two were gone. He spoke, therefore, to
+his kinsman: "Good indeed, Irgalac, son of Macclac, son of Congal, son
+of Rudraige, sayest thou who is proper to go to estimate and to
+reconnoitre the army?"
+
+"Who should go there," answered Irgalac, "but Iriel good at arms,
+great-kneed son of Conall Cernac. He is a Conall for havoc, a Cuculain
+for dexterity of feats. He is a Catbad, a right-wonderful Druid, for
+intelligence and counsel, he is a Senca son of Ailill for peace and for
+good speech, he is a Celtcair son of Utecar for valor, he is a Concobar
+son of Factna Fatac for kingliness and wide-eyed-ness, for giving of
+treasures and of wealth and of riches. Who but Iriel should go?"
+
+Therefore Iriel went forward: standing on the pyramid of the Dagda, he
+began measuring and reconnoitering the army. His spirit, or his mind, or
+his thoughts did not fret over them at all. He brought their description
+with him to the place in which Concobar was.
+
+"How, my life, Iriel?" said Concobar. "I give my word truly," said
+Iriel; "it seems to me that there is not ford on river, or stone on
+hill, nor highway nor road in the territory of Breg or Mide, that is not
+full of their horse-teams and of their servants. It seems to me that
+their apparel and their gear and their garments are the blaze of a royal
+house from the plain."
+
+"Good, O Ulaid," said Concobar, "what is your advice to us for the
+battle?" "Our advice is," said the Ulaid, "to wait till our strong men
+and our leaders and our commanders and our supporters of battle come."
+Not long was their waiting, and not great was their stay, till they saw
+three chariot-warriors approaching them, and a band of twelve hundred
+along with each rider of them. It is these that were there--three of the
+goodly men of science of the Ulaid, to wit, Catbad the right-wonderful
+Druid, and Aiterni the Importunate, and Amargin the man of science and
+art. After them came other valiant leaders with troops. Then Concobar
+arose and took his gear of battle and of conflict and of combat about
+him, saying, "Why should we not give battle?"
+
+A third of the army of the Ulaid rose with him, too. And they went over
+the river Boyne. And the other armies arose against them as they were
+crossing the river. And each of them took to hacking and to cutting down
+the other, destroying and wounding till there was no similitude of the
+Ulaid at that point of time, unless it were a huge sturdy oakwood in
+the middle of the plain, and a great army were to go close to it, and
+the slender and the small of the wood were cut off, but its huge sturdy
+oaks were left behind. Thus their young were cut off, and none but their
+champions and their battle-warriors and their good heroes of valor
+were left.
+
+The shield of Concobar was struck so that it moaned, and the three Waves
+of Erin, the Wave of Clidna, the Wave of Rudraige, and the Wave of Tuag
+Inbir echoed that moan, and all the shields of the Ulaid resounded,
+every one of them that was on their shoulders and in their chariots. As
+the Ulaid were retreating, fresh troops came up for them under Conall
+Cernac. A tree of shelter and a wreath of laurel and a hand above them
+was Conall to them. So their flight was stayed. Then Conall drew the
+sharp long sword out of its sheath of war and played the music of his
+sword on the armies. The ring of Conall's sword was heard through the
+battalions on both sides. And when they heard the music of Conall's
+sword their hearts quaked and their eyes fluttered and their faces
+whitened, and each of them withdrew back into his place of battle and of
+combat. But so fierce was the onset of the southern armies that the
+fight of the Ulaid against them was as a breast against a great flood,
+or an arrow against the rock, or the striking of a head against cliffs.
+Yet through the great might of Cuculain the Ulaid prevailed, and Cairpré
+the King of Tara was slain. After the battle, Concobar spoke thus:
+"There were three sons of Ros Ruad the king--Find in Alend, Ailill in
+Cruac, Cairpré in Tara; together they performed their deeds of valor,
+the three brothers in every strife; together they used to give their
+battle. They were three pillars of gold about their hills, abiding in
+strength; great is their loss since the third son has fallen."
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+FIND AND OSSIN.
+
+A.D. 200--290.
+
+Seventeen centuries ago, two hundred summers after the death of Cuculain
+the hero, came the great and wonderful time of Find the son of Cumal,
+Ossin the son of Find, and Find's grandson Oscur. It was a period of
+growth and efflorescence; the spirit and imaginative powers of the
+people burst forth with the freshness of the prime. The life of the land
+was more united, coming to a national consciousness.
+
+The five kingdoms were now clearly defined, with Meath, in the central
+plain, predominant over the others, and in a certain sense ruling all
+Ireland from the Hill of Tara. The code of honor was fixed; justice had
+taken well-defined forms; social life had ripened to genial urbanity.
+The warriors were gathered together into something like a regular army,
+a power rivaling the kings. Of this army, Find, son of Cumal, was the
+most renowned leader--a warrior and a poet, who embodied in himself the
+very genius of the time, its fresh naturalness, its ripeness, its
+imagination. No better symbol of the spirit of his age could be found
+than Find's own "Ode to Spring":
+
+"May-day! delightful time! How beautiful the color! The blackbirds sing
+their full lay. Would that Laigay were here! The cuckoos call in
+constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble brightness of the
+season. On the margin of the leafy pools the summer swallows skim the
+stream. Swift horses seek the pools. The heath spreads out its long
+hair. The white, gentle cotton-grass grows. The sea is lulled to rest.
+Flowers cover the earth."
+
+Find's large and imaginative personality is well drawn in one of the
+poems of his golden-tongued son Ossin, though much of the beauty of
+Ossin's form is lost in the change of tongue:
+
+     "Six thousand gallant men of war
+     We sought the rath o'er Badamar;
+     To the king's palace home we bent
+     Our way. His bidden guests we went.
+         'Twas Clocar Fair,
+         And Find was there,
+         The Fians from the hills around
+         Had gathered to the race-course ground.
+     From valley deep and wooded glen
+     Fair Munster sent its mighty men;
+     And Fiaca, Owen's son, the king,
+     Was there the contest witnessing.
+     'Twas gallant sport! With what delight
+     Leaped thousand pulses at the sight.
+         How all hearts bound
+         As to the ground
+     First are brought forth the Fian steeds,
+     Then those from Luimnea's sunny meads.
+     Three heats on Mac Mareda's green
+     They run; and foremost still is seen
+     Dill Mac Decreca's coal-black steed.
+     At Crag-Lochgur he takes the lead.
+
+     "His is the day--and, lo! the king
+     The coal-black steed soliciting
+     From Dill the Druid!--'Take for it
+     A hundred beeves; for it is fit
+     The black horse should be mine to pay
+     Find for his deeds of many a day.'
+
+     "Then spoke the Druid, answering
+     His grandson, Fiaca the king:
+     'Take my blessing; take the steed,
+     For the hero's fitting meed:
+     Give it for thy honor's sake.'
+     And to Find the King thus spake
+
+     "'Hero, take the swift black steed,
+     Of thy valor fitting meed;
+     And my car, in battle-raid
+     Gazed on by the foe with fear;
+     And a seemly steed for thy charioteer.
+     Chieftain, be this good sword thine,
+     Purchased with a hundred kine,
+     In thine hand be it our aid.
+
+     Take this spear, whose point the breath
+     Of venomed words has armed with death,
+     And the silver-orbèd shield,
+     Sunbeam of the battlefield!
+     And take with thee
+     My grayhounds three,
+     Slender and tall,
+     Bright-spotted all,
+     Take them with thee, chieftain bold,
+     With their chainlets light
+     Of the silver white,
+     And their neck-rings of the tawny gold.
+     Slight not thou our offering,
+     Son of Cumal, mighty king!"
+
+     "Uprose Find our chieftain bold,
+     Stood before the Fian ranks,
+     To the king spoke gracious thanks,
+     Took the gifts the monarch gave;
+     Then each to each these champions brave
+     Glorious sight to see and tell,
+     Spoke their soldier-like farewell!
+
+     "The way before us Find led then;
+     We followed him, six thousand men,
+     From out the Fair, six thousand brave,
+     To Caicer's house of Cloon-na-Dave.
+
+     "Three nights, three days, did all of us
+     Keep joyous feast in Caicer's house;
+     Fifty rings of the yellow gold
+     To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain told;
+     As many cows and horses gave
+     To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain brave.
+     Well did Find of Innisfail
+     Pay the price of his food and ale.
+
+     "Find rode o'er the Luacra, joyous man,
+     Till he reached the strand at Barriman;
+     At the lake where the foam on the billow's top
+     Leaps white, did Find and the Fians stop.
+
+     "'Twas then that our chieftain rode and ran
+     Along the strand of Barriman;
+     Trying the speed
+     Of his swift black steed,--
+     Who now but Find was a happy man?
+
+     "Myself and Cailté at each side,
+     In wantonness of youthful pride,
+     Would ride with him where he might ride.
+     Fast and furious rode he,
+     Urging his steed to far Tralee.
+     On from Tralee by Lerg duv-glass,
+     And o'er Fraegmoy, o'er Finnass,
+     O'er Moydeo, o'er Monaken,
+     On to Shan-iber, o'er Shan-glen,
+     Till the clear stream of Flesk we win,
+     And reach the pillar of Crofinn;
+     O'er Sru-Muny, o'er Moneket,
+     And where the fisher spreads his net
+     To snare the salmon of Lemain,
+     And thence to where our coursers' feet
+     Wake the glad echoes of Loch Leane;
+     And thus fled he,
+     Nor slow were we;
+     Through rough and smooth our course we strain.
+
+     "Long and swift our stride,--more fleet
+     Than the deer of the mountain our coursers' feet!
+     Away to Flesk by Carnwood dun;
+     And past Mac Scalvé's Mangerton,
+     Till Find reached Barnec Hill at last;
+     There rested he, and then we passed
+     Up the high hill before him, and:
+     'Is there no hunting hut at hand?'
+     He thus addressed us; 'The daylight
+     Is gone, and shelter for the night
+     We lack.' He scarce had ended, when
+     Gazing adown the rocky glen,
+     On the left hand, just opposite,
+     He saw a house with its fire lit;
+     'That house till now I've never seen,
+     Though many a time and oft I've been
+     In this wild glen. Come, look at it!'
+
+     "Yes, there are things that our poor wit
+     Knows little of,' said Cailté; 'thus
+     This may be some miraculous
+     Hostel we see, whose generous blaze
+     Thy hospitality repays,
+     Large-handed son of Cumal!'--So
+     On to the house all three we go...."
+
+Of their entry to the mysterious house, of the ogre and the witch they
+found there, of the horrors that gathered on all sides, when
+
+     "From iron benches on the right
+     Nine headless bodies rose to sight,
+     And on the left, from grim repose,
+     Nine heads that had no bodies rose,..."
+
+Ossin likewise tells, and how, overcome, they fell at last into a
+deathlike trance and stupor, till the sunlight woke them lying on the
+heathery hillside, the house utterly vanished away.
+
+The scenes of all the happenings in the story are well known: the rath
+of Badamar is near Caher on the Suir, in the midst of the Golden Vale, a
+plain of wonderful richness and beauty, walled in by the red precipices
+of the Galtee Mountains, and the Knock-Mealdown Hills. From the rath of
+Badamar Find could watch the western mountains reddening and glowing in
+front of the dawn, as the sun-rays shot level over the burnished plain.
+Clocar is thirty miles westward over the Golden Vale, near where Croom
+now stands; and here were run the races; here Find gained the gift of
+the coal-black steed. It is some forty miles still westwards to the
+Strand of Tralee; the last half of the way among hills carpeted with
+heather; and the Strand itself, with the tide out, leaves a splendid
+level of white sand as far as the eye can reach, tempting Find to try
+his famous courser. The race carried them southwards some fifteen miles
+to the beautiful waters of Lough Leane, with its overhanging wooded
+hills, the Lake of Killarney, southward of which rises the huge red
+mass of Mangerton, in the midst of a country everywhere rich in beauty.
+The Hill of Barnec is close by, but the site of the magic dwelling, who
+can tell? Perhaps Find; or Cailté, or golden-tongued Ossin himself.
+
+There was abundant fighting in those days, for well within memory was
+the time of Conn of the Five-score Fights, against whom Cumal had warred
+because Conn lord of Connacht had raised Crimtan of the Yellow Hair to
+the kingship of Leinster. Cumal fought at the Rath that bears his name,
+now softened to Rathcool, twelve miles inward from the sea at Dublin,
+with the hills rising up from the plain to the south of the Rath. Cumal
+fought and fell, slain by Goll Mac Morna, and enmity long endured
+between Find and Goll who slew his sire. But like valiant men they were
+reconciled, and when Goll in his turn died, Find made a stirring poem on
+Goll's mighty deeds.
+
+Another fateful fight for Find was the battle of Kinvarra, among the
+southern rocks of Galway Bay; for though he broke through the host of
+his foeman Uincé, that chieftain himself escaped, and, riding swiftly
+with a score of men, came to Find's own dwelling at Druim Dean on the
+Red Hills of Leinster, and burned the dwelling, leaving it a smoldering
+ruin. Find pursuing, overtook them, slaying them at the ford called to
+this day Ath-uincé, the ford of Uincé. Returning homewards, Find found
+his house desolate, and the song he sang still holds the memory of
+his sorrow.
+
+Two poems he made, on the Plain of Swans and on Roirend in Offaly, full
+of vivid pictures and legends; and one of romantic tragedy, telling how
+the two daughters of King Tuatal Tectmar were treacherously slain,
+through the malice of the Leinster king. But of romances and songs of
+fair women in the days of Find, the best is the Poem of Gael, who
+composed it to win a princess for his bride.
+
+Of fair Credé of the Yellow Hair it was said that there was scarce a gem
+in all Erin that she had not got as a love-token, but that she would
+give her heart to none. Credé had vowed that she would marry the man who
+made the best verses on her home, a richly-adorned dwelling in the
+south, under the twin cones of the Paps, and within sight of Lough Leane
+and Killarney. Cael took up the challenge, and invoking the Genius that
+dwelt in the sacred pyramid of Brugh on the Boyne he made these verses,
+and came to recite them to yellow-haired Credé:
+
+     "It would be happy for me to be in her home,
+     Among her soft and downy couches,
+     Should Credé deign to hear me;
+     Happy for me would be my journey.
+         A bowl she has, whence berry-juice flows,
+     With which she colors her eyebrows black;
+     She has clear vessels of fermenting ale;
+     Cups she has, and beautiful goblets.
+         The color of her house is white like lime;
+     Within it are couches and green rushes;
+     Within it are silks and blue mantles;
+     Within it are red gold and crystal cups.
+         Of its sunny chamber the corner stones
+     Are all of silver and yellow gold,
+     Its roof in stripes of faultless order
+     Of wings of brown and crimson red.
+         Two doorposts of green I see,
+     Nor is the door devoid of beauty;
+     Of carved silver,--long has it been renowned,--
+     Is the lintel that is over the door.
+         Credé's chair is on your right hand,
+     The pleasantest of the pleasant it is;
+     All over a blaze of Alpine gold,
+     At the foot of her beautiful couch...
+         The household which is in her house
+     To the happiest fate has been destined;
+     Grey and glossy are their garments;
+     Twisted and fair is their flowing hair.
+         Wounded men would sink in sleep,
+     Though ever so heavily teeming with blood,
+     With the warbling of the fairy birds
+     From the eaves of her sunny summer-room.
+         If I am blessed with the lady's grace,
+     Fair Credé for whom the cuckoo sings,
+     In songs of praise shall ever live,
+     If she but repay me for my gift....
+         There is a vat of royal bronze,
+     Whence flows the pleasant; nice of malt;
+     An apple-tree stands over the vat,
+     With abundance of weighty fruit.
+         When Credé's goblet is filled
+     With the ale of the noble vat,
+     There drop down into the cup forthwith
+     Four apples at the same time.
+         The four attendants that have been named,
+     Arise and go to the distributing,
+     They present to four of the guests around
+     A drink to each man and an apple.
+         She who possesses all these things,
+     With the strand and the stream that flow by them,
+     Credé of the three-pointed hill,
+     Is a spear-cast beyond the women of Erin.
+       Here is a poem for her,--no mean gift.
+     It is not a hasty, rash composition;
+     To Credé now it is here presented:
+     May my journey be brightness to her!"
+
+[Illustration: Colleen Bawn Caves, Klllarney.]
+
+Tradition says that the heart of the yellow-haired beauty was utterly
+softened and won, so that she delayed not to make Cael master of the
+dwelling he so well celebrated; master, perhaps, of all the jewels of
+Erin that her suitors had given her. Yet their young love was not
+destined to meet the storms and frosts of the years; for Cael the
+gallant fell in battle, his melodious lips for ever stilled. Thus have
+these two become immortal in song.
+
+We have seen Cailté with Ossin following Find in his wild ride through
+the mountains of Killarney, and to Cailté is attributed the saying that
+echoes down the ages: "There are things that our poor wit knows nothing
+off!" Cailté was a great lover of the supernatural, yet there was in him
+also a vein of sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of
+Clidna--"Clidna the fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was
+tragically drowned at Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith
+still moans upon the bar, in hours of fate for the people of Erin.
+
+In a gayer vein is the poem of Fergus the Eloquent, who sang the legend
+of Tipra Seangarmna, the Fountain of the Feale River, which flows
+westward to the sea from the mountains north of Killarney. The river
+rises among precipices, gloomy caverns and ravines, and passes through
+vales full of mysterious echoes amid mist-shrouded hills. There, as
+Fergus sings, were Ossin and his following hunting, when certain ominous
+fair women lured them to a cave,--women who were but insubstantial
+wraiths,--to hold them captive till the seasons ran full circle, summer
+giving place again to winter and spring. But Ossin, being himself of
+more than human wisdom, found a way to trick the spirits; for daily he
+cut chips from his spear and sent them floating down the spring, till
+Find at last saw them, and knew the tokens as Ossin's, and, coming,
+delivered his son from durance among ghosts.
+
+The great romantic theme of the time binds the name of Find, son of
+Cumal, with that of Cormac, son of Art, and grandson of Conn of the
+Five-score Battles. This Cormac was himself a notable man of wisdom, and
+here are some of the Precepts he taught to Cairbré, his son:
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbré asked him, "what is good for a
+king?"
+
+"This is plain," answered Cormac. "It is good for him to have patience
+and not to dispute, self-government without anger, affability without
+haughtiness, diligent attention to history, strict observance of
+covenants and agreements, justice tempered by mercy in the execution of
+the laws. It is good for him to make fertile land, to invite ships, to
+import jewels of price from across the sea, to purchase and distribute
+raiment, to keep vigorous swordsmen who may protect his territory, to
+make war beyond his territory, to attend to the sick, to discipline his
+soldiers. Let him enforce fear, let him perfect peace, let him give mead
+and wine, let him pronounce just judgments of light, let him speak all
+truth, for it is through the truth of a king that God gives
+favorable seasons."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbré again asked him, "what is good
+for the welfare of a country?"
+
+"This is plain," answered Cormac. "Frequent assemblies of wise and good
+men to investigate its affairs, to abolish every evil and retain every
+wholesome institution, to attend to the precepts of the seniors; let
+every assembly be convened according to the law, let the law be in the
+hands of the noblest, let the chieftains be upright and unwilling to
+oppress the poor."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," again asked Cairbré, "what are duties of
+a prince in the banqueting-house?"
+
+"A prince on the Day of Spirits should light his lamps and welcome his
+guests with clapping of hands, offering comfortable seats; the
+cup-bearers should be active in distributing meat and drink. Let there
+be moderation of music, short stories, a welcoming countenance, a
+greeting for the learned, pleasant conversation. These are the duties
+of a prince and the arrangement of a banqueting-house."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, for what qualifications is a king elected
+over countries and tribes of people?"
+
+"From the goodness of his shape and family, from his experience and
+wisdom, from his prudence and magnanimity, from his eloquence and
+bravery in battle, and from the number of his friends."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what was thy deportment when a youth?"
+
+"I was cheerful at the banquet of the House of Mead, I was fierce in
+battle, but vigilant and careful. I was kind to friends, a physician to
+the sick, merciful to the weak, stern toward the headstrong. Though
+possessed of knowledge, I loved silence. Though strong, I was not
+overbearing. Though young, I mocked not the old. Though valiant, I was
+not vain. When I spoke of one absent I praised and blamed him not, for
+by conduct like this are we known to be courteous and refined."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what is good for me?"
+
+"If thou attend to my command, thou wilt not scorn the old though thou
+art young, nor the poor though thou art well clad, nor the lame though
+thou art swift, nor the blind though thou seest, nor the weak though
+thou art strong, nor the ignorant though thou art wise. Be not slothful,
+be not passionate, be not greedy, be not idle, be not jealous; for he
+who is so is hateful to God and man."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, I would know how to hold myself with the
+wise and the foolish, with friends and strangers, with old and young."
+
+"Be not too knowing or simple, too proud or inactive, too humble or
+haughty, talkative or too silent, timid or too severe. For if thou art
+too knowing, thou wilt be mocked at and abused; if too simple, thou wilt
+be deceived; if proud, thou wilt be shunned; if too humble, thou wilt
+suffer; if talkative, thou wilt be thought foolish; if too severe, men
+will speak ill of thee; if timid, thy rights will suffer."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, how shall I discern the characters of
+women?"
+
+"I know them, but I cannot describe them. Their counsel is foolish, they
+are forgetful of love, most headstrong in their desires, fond of folly,
+prone to enter rashly into engagements, given to swearing, proud to be
+asked in marriage, tenacious of enmity, cheerless at the banquet,
+rejectors of reconciliation, prone to strife, of much garrulity. Until
+evil be good, until hell be heaven, until the sun hide his light, until
+the stars of heaven fall, women will remain as we have declared. Woe to
+him, my son, who desires or serves a bad woman, woe to him who has a
+bad wife."
+
+Was there some thought of his daughter Grania in Cormac's mind, behind
+these keen-edged; words?--of Grania, beloved of Diarmuid? When the
+winters of the years were already white on Find, son of Cumal, when
+Ossin his son had a son of his own, Oscur the valiant, the two old men,
+Cormac the king and Find leader of the warriors, bethought them to make
+a match between Find and Grania, one of the famous beauties of the olden
+time. A banquet was set in the great House of Mead, and Find and his men
+were there, Diarmuid son of Duibné being also there, best beloved among
+Find's warriors. There was a custom, much in honor among the chieftains,
+that a princess should send her goblet to the guests, offering it to
+each with gentle courtesy. This grace fell to the lady Grania, whose
+whole heart rose up against her grey-bearded lover, and was indeed set
+on Diarmuid the son of Duibné. Grania compounded a dreamy draught to
+mix with the mead, so that all the chieftains and warriors, with Cormac
+and Find himself, even while praising the drink, fell straightway
+a-nodding, and were soon in silent sleep, all except Ossin and Diarmuid,
+whom Grania had bidden not to drink.
+
+Then Grania, her voice all tremulous with tears, told to Ossin the fate
+that awaited her, looking at him, but speaking for Diarmuid; bewailing
+bitterly the misery of fair youth in the arms of withered eld, and at
+last turning and openly begging Diarmuid to save her from her fate. To
+carry away a king's daughter, betrothed to the leader of the warriors,
+was a perilous thing, and Diarmuid's heart stood still at the thought of
+it; yet Grania's tears prevailed, and they two fled forth that night to
+the hills and forests. Dire and ruinous was the wrath of Cormac and of
+Find when they awoke and found that these two were fled; and whatever
+might was in the king's hand, whatever power in the hosts of Find, was
+straightway turned against them in pursuit. Yet the two fled as the deer
+might fly, visiting with their loves every wood and valley in Erin, till
+the memory of them lingers throughout all the hills. Finally, after a
+year's joyful and fearsome fleeing, the Fian warriors everywhere aiding
+them for love of Diarmuid, swift death came upon Diarmuid, and Grania
+was left desolate.
+
+But Angus the Ever-Young, guardian Genius of the pyramid-shrine of Brugh
+by the Boyne, De Danaan dweller in the secret house, Angus of the
+Immortals received the spirit of Diarmuid, opening for him the ways of
+the hidden world.
+
+But enmity grew between Find with his warriors and Cormac the king, till
+at last a battle was fought where Find's men fell, and Cairbré, the
+well-instructed son of Cormac also fell. Thus passed away the ruling
+spirits of that age, the flowering time of the genius of Erin.
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.
+
+A.D. 410-493.
+
+The valor of Fergus and Cuculain, the rich imaginative life of Find and
+Ossin, were the flower of heroic centuries. Strong men had fought for
+generations before Concobar reigned at Emain of Maca. Poets had sung
+their deeds of valor, and the loves of fair women, and the magical
+beauty of the world, through hardly changing ages. The heroes of fame
+were but the best fruit in the garden of the nation's life. So ripe was
+that life, more than two thousand years ago, that it is hard to say what
+they did not know, of the things which make for amenity and comity. The
+colors of the picture are everywhere rich, yet perfectly harmonized.
+
+The earliest forms of Irish writing seem to have come from the Baltic
+runes, and these, in their turn, from an old Greek script of twenty-five
+hundred years ago. The runes spread as far as the Orkneys, and there
+they were well within the horizon of Ireland's knowledge. Nothing would
+be more natural than the keeping of written records in Erin for three
+or four hundred years before Cuculain's birth, nineteen hundred
+years ago.
+
+The arts of life were very perfect; the gold-work of that time is
+unsurpassed--has never been surpassed. At a far earlier time there were
+beautifully moulded and decorated gold-bronze spears, that show what
+richness of feeling and imagination, what just taste and fine skill were
+there. All our knowledge goes to show that the suitor of Credé has drawn
+a true picture of her house and the generous social life belonging to
+it. We know, too, that the great dining-hall of Tara has been faithfully
+celebrated by the bards; the picture of the king in his scarlet cloak is
+representative of the whole epoch.
+
+The story of Credé also shows the freedom and honor accorded to women,
+as does the queenship of Meave, with the record of her separate riches.
+The tragedies of Deirdré and Grania would never have been remembered,
+had not the freedom and high regard of women been universal. Such
+decorative skill as is shown in the metal-work and pottery that have
+come down to us must have borne fruit in every realm of social life, in
+embroideries, tapestries, well-designed and beautifully adorned homes.
+Music is everywhere spoken of in the old traditions, and the skill of
+the poets we can judge for ourselves.
+
+In all that concerns the natural man, therefore, a very high perfection
+had been reached. A frame of life had grown habitual, which brought out
+the finest vigor and strength and beauty. Romantic love added its riches
+to valor, and dignity was given by the ever-present memory of the heroic
+past, merging on the horizon with the divine dawn of the world. Manhood
+and womanhood had come to perfect flower. The crown rested on the brow
+of the nation's life.
+
+When the life of the natural man is perfected, the time comes to strike
+the note of the immortal, to open the door of our real and enduring
+destiny. Sensual success, the ideal of unregenerate man, was perfectly
+realized in Concobar and ten thousand like him. The destiny of
+triumphant individual life, the strong man victorious over nature and
+other men, was fulfilled. Individual prowess, individual accomplishment,
+could go no further.
+
+Nor should we overlook the dark shadows of the picture. Glory is to the
+victor, but woe to the vanquished. The continual warfare between tribe
+and tribe, between chief and chief, which made every valley a home of
+warriors dominated by a rath-fortress, bore abundant fruits of evil.
+Death in battle need not be reckoned, or may be counted as pure gain;
+but the fate of the wounded, maimed and miserable, the destitution of
+women and children left behind, the worse fate of the captives, sold as
+they were into exile and slavery,--all these must be included in
+the total.
+
+Nor are these material losses the worst. The great evil of the epoch of
+tribal war is its reaction on the human spirit. The continual struggle
+of ambition draws forth egotism, the desire to dominate for mere
+domination, the sense of separation and antagonism between man and man,
+tribe and tribe, province and province.
+
+But our real human life begins only when these evil tendencies are
+abated; when we learn to watch the life of others as if it were our
+own,--as being indeed a part of our own life,--and in every act and
+motion of our minds do only that which shall be to the best advantage of
+both ourselves and our neighbor. For only thus, only by the incessant
+practice of this in imagination and act, can the door of our wider and
+more humane consciousness be opened.
+
+[Illustration: Ruins on Scattery Island.]
+
+Nor is this all. There are in us vast unexplored tracts of power and
+wisdom; tracts not properly belonging to our personal and material
+selves, but rather to the impersonal and universal consciousness which
+touches us from within, and which we call divine. Our personal fate is
+closed by death; but we have a larger destiny which death does not
+touch; a destiny enduring and immortal. The door to this larger destiny
+can only be opened after we have laid down the weapons of egotism; after
+we have become veritably humane. There must be a death to militant
+self-assertion, a new birth to wide and universal purposes, before this
+larger life can be understood and known.
+
+With all the valor and rich life of the days of Cuculain and Ossin, the
+destructive instinct of antagonism was very deeply rooted in all hearts;
+it did endless harm to the larger interests of the land, and laid
+Ireland open to attack from without. Because the genius of the race was
+strong and highly developed, the harm went all the deeper; even now,
+after centuries, it is not wholly gone.
+
+The message of the humane and the divine, taught among the Galilean
+hills and on the shores of Gennesaret, was after four centuries brought
+to Ireland--a word of new life to the warriors and chieftains,
+enkindling and transforming their heroic world. Britain had received
+the message before, for Britain was a part of the dominion of Rome,
+which already had its imperial converts. Roman life and culture and
+knowledge of the Latin tongue had spread throughout the island up to the
+northern barrier between the Forth and Clyde. Beyond this was a
+wilderness of warring tribes.
+
+Where the Clyde comes forth from the plain to the long estuary of the
+sea, the Messenger of the Tidings was born. His father, Calpurn, was a
+Roman patrician; from this his son, whose personal name was Succat, was
+surnamed Patricius, a title raised by his greatness into a personal
+name. His letters give us a vivid picture of his captivity, and the
+stress of life which gradually aroused in him the inspiration of the
+humane and divine ripened later into a full knowledge of his apostolate.
+
+"I Patricius, a sinner," he writes, "and most unlearned of believers,
+looked down upon by many, had for my father the deacon Calpurn, son of
+the elder Potitus, of a place called Bannova in Tabernia, near to which
+was his country home. There I was taken captive, when not quite sixteen.
+I knew not the Eternal. Being led into captivity with thousands of
+others, I was brought to Ireland,--a fate well deserved. For we had
+turned from the Eternal, nor kept the laws of the Eternal. Nor had we
+heeded the teachers who urged us to seek safety. Therefore the Eternal,
+justly wroth, scattered us among unbelievers, to the uttermost parts of
+the earth; here, where my poor worth is now seen among strangers, where
+the Eternal liberated the power hid in my unenkindled heart, that even
+though late I should recognize my error, and turn with all my heart to
+the Eternal....
+
+"I have long had it in mind to write, but until now have hesitated; for
+I feared blame, because I had not studied law and the sacred
+writings,--as have others who have never changed their language, but
+gone on to perfection in it; but my speech is translated into another
+language, and the roughness of my writing shows how little I have been
+taught. As the Sage says, 'Show by thy speech thy wisdom and knowledge
+and learning.' But what profits this excuse? since all can see how in my
+old age I struggle after what I should have learned as a boy. For then
+my sinfulness hindered me. I was but a beardless boy when I was taken
+captive, not knowing what to do and what to avoid; therefore I am
+ashamed to show my ignorance now? because I never learned to express
+great matters succinctly and well;--great matters like the moving of the
+soul and mind by the Divine Breath.... Nor, indeed, was I worthy that
+the Master should so greatly favor me, after all my hard labor and heavy
+toil, and the years of captivity amongst this people,--that the Master
+should show me such graciousness as I never knew nor hoped for till I
+came to Ireland.
+
+"But daily herding cattle here, and aspiring many times a day, the fear
+of the Eternal grew daily in me. A divine dread and aspiration grew in
+me, so that I often prayed a hundred times a day, and as many times in
+the night. I often remained in the woods and on the hills, rising to
+pray while it was yet dark, in snow or frost or rain; yet I took no
+harm. The Breath of the Divine burned within me, so that nothing
+remained in me unenkindled.
+
+"One night, while I was sleeping, I heard a voice saying to me, 'You
+have fasted well, and soon you shall see your home and your native
+land.' Soon after, I heard the voice again, saying, 'The ship is ready
+for you.' But the ship was not near, but two hundred miles off, in a
+district I had never visited, and where I knew no one. Therefore I fled,
+leaving the master I had served for six years, and found the ship by
+divine guidance, going without fear....
+
+"We reached the land after three days' sail; then for twenty-eight days
+we wandered through a wilderness.... Once more, after years of exile, I
+was at home again with my kindred, among the Britons. All welcomed me
+like a son, earnestly begging me that, after the great dangers I had
+passed through, I would never again leave my home.
+
+"While I was at home, in a vision of the night I saw one who seemed to
+come from Ireland, bringing innumerable letters. He gave me one of the
+letters, in which I read, 'The voices of the Irish ...;' and while I
+read, it seemed to me that I heard the cry of the dwellers by the forest
+of Foclut, by the Western Ocean, calling with one voice to me, 'Come and
+dwell with us!' My heart was so moved that I awoke, and I give thanks to
+my God who after many years has given to them according to
+their petition.
+
+"On another night, whether within me or without me I know not, God
+knows, One prayed with very wonderful words that I could not comprehend,
+till at last He said, 'It is He who gave His soul for you, that speaks!'
+I awoke for joy. And once in a vision I saw Him praying within me, as it
+were; I saw myself, as it were, within myself; and I heard Him praying
+urgently and strongly over the inner man; I being meanwhile astonished,
+and wondering who thus prayed within me, till at the end He declared
+that I should be an overseer for Him....
+
+"I had not believed in the living Divine from childhood, but had
+remained in the realm of death until hunger and nakedness and daily
+slavery in Ireland--for I came there as a captive--had so afflicted me
+that I almost broke down. Yet these things brought good, for through
+that daily suffering I was so changed that I work and toil now for the
+well-being of others, I who formerly took no care even for myself....
+
+"Therefore I thank Him who kept me faithful in the day of trial, that I
+live to offer myself daily as a living offering to Him who saves and
+guards me. Well may I say, 'Master, what am I, what is my calling, that
+such grace and divine help are given to me--that I am every day raised
+to greater power among these unbelievers, while I everywhere praise thy
+name? Whatever comes to me, whether happiness or misery, whether good or
+evil fortune, I hold it all the same; giving Thee equal thanks for it,
+because Thou hast unveiled for me the One, sure and unchanging, in whom
+I may for ever believe. So that in these latter days, even though I am
+ignorant, I may dare to undertake so righteous a work, and so wonderful,
+that makes me like those who, according to His promise, should carry His
+message to all people before the end of the world.
+
+"It were long in whole or even in part to tell of my labours, or how the
+all-powerful One many times set me free from bondage, and from twelve
+perils wherein my life was in danger, and from nameless pitfalls. It
+were ill to try the reader too far, when I have within me the Author
+himself, who knows all things even before they happen, as He knows me,
+His poor disciple. The voice that so often guides me is divine; and
+thence it is that wisdom has come to me, who had no wisdom, knowing not
+Him, nor the number of my days: thence comes my knowledge and heart's
+joy in His great and healing gift, for the sake of which I willingly
+left my home and kindred, though they offered me many gifts with tears
+and sorrow.
+
+"Many of the older people also disapproved, but through divine help I
+would not give way. It was no grace of mine, but the divine power in me
+that stood out against all, so that I came to bear the Message here
+among the people of Ireland, suffering the scorn of those who believed
+not, and bearing derision and many persecutions, and even chains. Nay, I
+even lost my patrician rank for the good of others. But if I be worthy
+to do something for the Divine, I am ready with all my heart to yield
+service, even to the death, since it has been permitted that through me
+many might be reborn to the divine, and that others might be appointed
+to teach them....
+
+"The people of Ireland, who formerly had only their idols and pagan
+ritual, not knowing the Master, have now become His children. The sons
+of the Scoti and their kings' daughters are now become sons of the
+Master and handmaidens of the Anointed. And one nobly born lady among
+them, a beautiful woman whom I baptized myself, came soon after to tell
+me that she was divinely admonished to live in maidenhood, drawing
+nearer to Him. Six days later she entered the grade that all the
+handmaidens of the Anointed desire, though their fathers and mothers
+would hinder them, reproaching and afflicting them; nevertheless, they
+grow in number, so that I know not how many they are, besides widows and
+continent women, who suffer most from those who hold them in bondage.
+Yet they stand firm, and God grants grace to many of them worthily to
+follow Him.
+
+"Therefore I might even leave them, to go among the Britons,--for
+willingly would I see my own kindred and my native land again, or even
+go as far as Gaul to visit my brothers, and see the faces of my Master's
+holy men. But I am bound in the Spirit, and would be unfaithful if I
+went. Nor would I willingly risk the fruit of all my work. Yet it is not
+I who decide, but the Master, who bid me come hither, to spend my whole
+life in serving, as indeed I think I shall....
+
+"Therefore I should ever thank Him who was so tolerant of my ignorance
+and sluggishness, so many times; treating me not in anger but as a
+fellow-worker, though I was slow to learn the work set for me by the
+Spirit. He pitied me amongst many thousands, for he saw that I was very
+willing, but did net know how to offer my testimony. For they all
+opposed my mission, and talked behind my back, saying, 'He wishes to
+risk his life among enemies who know nothing of the Master'; not
+speaking maliciously, but opposing me because I was so ignorant. Nor did
+I myself at once perceive the power that was in me....
+
+"Thus simply, brothers and fellow-workers for the Master, who with me
+have believed, I have told you how it happened that I preached and still
+preach, to strengthen and confirm you in aspiration, hoping that we may
+all rise yet higher. Let that be my reward, as 'the wise son is the
+glory of his father.' You know, and the Master knows, how from my youth
+I have lived among you, in aspiration and truth and with single heart;
+that I have declared the faith to those among whom I dwell, and still
+declare it. The Master knows that I have deceived no man in anything,
+nor ever shall, for His sake and His people's. Nor shall I ever arouse
+uncharity in them or in any, lest His name should be spoken evil of....
+
+"I have striven in my poor way to help my brothers and the handmaidens
+of the Anointed, and the holy women who often volunteered to give me
+presents and to lay their jewels on my altar; but these I always gave
+back to them, even though they were hurt by it; and I have so lived my
+life, for the hope of the life eternal, that none may find the least
+cause of offence in my ministry; that my least act might not tarnish my
+good name, so that unbelievers might speak evil of me....
+
+"If I have asked of any as much as the value of a shoe, tell me. I will
+repay it and more. I rather spent my own wealth on you and among you,
+wherever I went, for your sakes, through many dangers, to regions where
+no believer had ever come to baptize, to ordain teachers or to confirm
+the flock. With the divine help I very willingly and lovingly paid all.
+Sometimes I gave presents to the kings,--in giving presents to their
+sons who convoyed us, to guard us against being taken captive. Once they
+sought to kill me, but my time was not yet come. But they took away all
+we possessed, and kept me bound, till the Master liberated me on the
+fourteenth day, and all our goods were given back, because of the Master
+and of those who convoyed us. You yourselves know what gifts I gave to
+those who administer the law through the districts I visited oftenest. I
+think I spent not less than the fine of fifteen men among them, in order
+that I might come among you. Nor do I regret it, nor count it enough,
+for I still spend, and shall ever spend, happy if the Master allows me
+to spend my soul for you....For I know certainly that poverty and plain
+living are better for me than riches and luxury. The Anointed our Master
+was poor for us. I am poorer still, for I could not have wealth if I
+wished it. Nor do I now judge myself, for I look forward daily to a
+violent death, or to be taken captive and sold into slavery, or some
+like end. But I fear none of these ...but let me not lose the flock I
+feed for Him, here in the uttermost parts of the earth....
+
+"I am willing for His sake to shed my blood, to go without burial, even
+though my body be torn by dogs and wild beasts and the fowls of the air;
+for I know that thus I should through my body enrich my soul. And I know
+that in that day we shall arise in the brightness of the sun, in the
+glory of the Anointed Master, as sons of the divine and co-heirs with
+Him, made in His likeness. For the sun we see rises daily by divine
+ordinance; but it is not ordained to rise for ever, nor shall its light
+last for ever. The sun of this world shall fade, with those that worship
+it; but we bow to the spiritual Sun, the Anointed, that shall never
+perish, nor they who do His will, but shall endure for ever like the
+Anointed himself, who reigns with the Father and the Divine Spirit now
+and ever....
+
+"This I beg, that no believer or servant of the Master, who reads or
+receives this writing, which I, Patricius, a sinner and very unlearned,
+wrote in Ireland,--I beg that none may say that whatever is good in it
+was dictated by my ignorance, but rather that it came from Him. This is
+my Confession, before I die."
+
+That is the story of the most vital event in the life of Ireland, in the
+words of the man who was chiefly instrumental in bringing it about.
+Though an unskilled writer, as he says himself he has nevertheless
+succeeded in breathing into every part of his epistle the power and
+greatness of his soul, the sense and vivid reality of the divine breath
+which stirred in him and transformed him, the spiritual power, humane
+and universal, which enkindled him from within; these are the words of a
+man who had first-hand knowledge of the things of our deeper life; not a
+mere servant of tradition, living on the words and convictions of other
+men. He has drawn in large and universal outline the death to
+egotism--reached in his case through hunger, nakedness and slavery--and
+the new birth from above, the divine Soul enkindling the inner man, and
+wakening him to new powers and a knowledge of his genius and
+immortal destiny.
+
+Not less vivid is the sense he conveyed, of the world in which he moved;
+the feeling of his dignity as a Roman Patrician, having a share of the
+greatness of empire; the sense of a dividing-line between the Christian
+realms of Rome and the outer barbarians yet in darkness. Yet the picture
+he gives of these outer realms is as certainly true. There are the rival
+chieftains, each with his own tribe and his own fort, and bearing the
+title of king. They are perpetually striving among themselves, so that
+from the province of one he must move to the province of another with an
+escort, led by the king's son, who receives gifts in return for this
+protection. This is the world of Concobar and Cuculain; of Find and
+Ossin, as they themselves have painted it.
+
+The world of Find and Ossin, of Cael and Credé, was marked by a certain
+urbanity and freedom, a large-mindedness and imaginative power. We are
+therefore prepared to expect that the Messenger of the new life would be
+received with openness of mind, and allowed to deliver his message
+without any very violent opposition. It was the meeting of unarmed moral
+power and armed valor; and the victory of the apostle was a victory of
+spiritual force, of character, of large-heartedness; the man himself was
+the embodiment of his message, and through his forceful genius his
+message was effective. He visibly represented the New Way; the way of
+the humane and the divine, transforming the destructive instinct of
+self-assertion. He visibly represented the divine and the immortal in
+us, the new birth from above.
+
+Yet there were tragedies in his apostolate. In another letter a very
+vivid and pathetic account is given of one of these. Coroticus, a
+chieftain of Britain, and therefore nominally a Christian and a citizen
+of Rome, had sent marauding bands to Ireland to capture slaves. Some of
+the new converts were taken captive by these slave-hunters, an outrage
+which drew forth an indignant protest from the great Messenger:
+
+"My neophytes in their white robes, the baptismal chrism still wet and
+glistening on their foreheads, were taken captive with the sword by
+these murderers. The next day I sent letters begging them to liberate
+the baptized captives, but they answered my prayer with mocking
+laughter. I know not which I should mourn for more,--those who were
+slain, those who were taken prisoner, or those who in this were Satan's
+instruments, since these must suffer everlasting punishment in
+perdition."
+
+He appeals indignantly to the fellow-Christians of Coroticus in Britain:
+"I pray you, all that are righteous and humble, to hold no converse
+with those who do these things. Eat not, drink not with them, accept no
+gifts from them, until they have repented and made atonement, setting
+free these newly-baptized handmaidens of Christ, for whom He died....
+They seem to think we are not children of one Father!"
+
+The work and mission of this great man grow daily better known. The
+scenes of each marked event are certainly identified. His early slavery,
+his time of probation, was spent in Antrim, on the hillside of Slieve
+Mish, and in the woods that then covered its flanks and valleys.
+Wandering there with his flocks to the hill-top, he looked down over the
+green darkness of the woods, with the fertile open country stretching
+park-like beyond, to the coast eight miles away. From his lonely summit
+he could gaze over the silvery grayness of the sea, and trace on the
+distant horizon the headlands of his dear native land. The exile's heart
+must have ached to look at them, as he thought of his hunger and
+nakedness and toil. There in deep pity came home to him the fate of the
+weak ones of the earth, the vanquished, the afflicted, the losers in the
+race. Compassion showed him the better way, the way of sympathy and
+union, instead of contest and dominion. A firm and fixed purpose grew up
+within him to make the appeal of gentleness to the chiefs and rulers, in
+the name of Him who was all sympathy for the weak. Thus the inspiration
+of the Message awakened his soul to its immortal powers.
+
+Later, returning with the clear purpose of his message formed, he began
+his great work not far from his first place of captivity. His strong
+personality led him always to the presence of the chiefs and warriors,
+and he talked to them freely as an equal, gradually giving them an
+insight into his own vision of life, of the kinship between soul and
+soul, of our immortal power and inheritance. He appealed always to his
+own inner knowledge of things divine, to the light and power unveiled
+within himself; and the commanding genius in his words lit a like fire
+in the hearts of those who heard, awakening an enthusiasm for the New
+Way. He had a constant sense of his divine mission:
+
+"Was it without divine promise, or in the body only, that I came to
+Ireland? Who led me? Who took captive my soul, that I should no more see
+friends and kindred? Whence came my inspiration of pity for the race
+that had enslaved me?"
+
+The memory of his first victories is perpetuated in the name,
+Downpatrick,--that is: the Dwelling of Patrick.--where Dicu son of
+Tricem, chief of the district, gave him a tract of land to build a place
+of meeting and prayer for his disciples; while the church was being
+built, the chief offered his barn as a meeting-place, an incident
+commemorated in the name of Saul, on a hill above the town,--a name
+softened from Sabal, "a barn." This first victory was won among the
+rounded hills south of the Quoyle River, where it widens toward
+Strangford Lough; from the hill-top of Saul there is a wide prospect
+over the reed-covered flats with the river winding among them, the hills
+with their oak-woods in the bends of the river, and the widening lough
+with its innumerable islands, its sand-flats lit up with red under the
+dawn. The sun sets among the mountains of Mourne, flushing from behind
+the purple profile of the hills, and sending golden arrows over the rich
+fertility of the plain. The year 432 is the probable date of this first
+conversion.
+
+The strong genius of the Messenger carried him after a few months to the
+center of power in the land, to Tara with its fortresses, its
+earthworks, its great banquet-halls and granaries and well-adorned
+dwellings of chief and king. A huge oval earthwork defended the king's
+house; northward of this was the splendid House of Mead,--the
+banquet-hall, with lesser fortresses beyond it. Southward of the central
+dwelling and its defence was the new ringed fort of Laogaire the king,
+son of the more famous king Nial of the Hostages. At this circular fort,
+Rath-Laogaire, on Easter day, Saint Patrick met the king face to face,
+and delivered to him the message of the New Way, telling him of the
+unveiling of the Divine within himself, of the voice that had bidden him
+come, of the large soul of immortal pity that breathed in the teachings
+among the hills of Galilee, of the new life there begun for the world.
+Tradition says that the coming of the Messenger had been foretold by the
+Druids, and the great work he should accomplish; the wise men of the
+West catching the inner brightness of the Light, as the Eastern Magians
+had caught it more than four centuries before. The fruits of that day's
+teaching in the plain of Tara, in the assembly of Laogaire the king,
+were to be gathered through long centuries to come.
+
+In the year 444, the work of the teacher had so thriven that he was able
+to build a larger church on a hill above the Callan River, in the
+undulating country south of Lough Neagh. This hill, called in the old
+days the Hill of the Willows, was only two miles from the famous
+fortress of Emain of Maca. It was a gift from the ruler Dairé, who, like
+so many other chiefs, had felt and acknowledged the Messenger's power.
+Later, the hill came to be called Ard-Maca, the Height of Maca; a name
+now softened into Armagh, ever since esteemed the central stronghold of
+the first Messenger's followers.
+
+The Messenger passed on from chief to chief, from province to province,
+meeting with success everywhere, yet facing grave perils. Later
+histories take him to the kings of Leinster and Munster, and he himself
+tells us that the prayer of the children of Foclut was answered by his
+coming, so that he must have reached the western ocean. It was a
+tremendous victory of moral force, of the divine and immortal working
+through him, that the Messenger was able to move unarmed among the
+warriors of many tribes that were often at war with each other;
+everywhere meeting the chiefs and kings, and meeting them as an equal:
+the unarmed bringer of good tidings confronting the king in the midst of
+his warriors, and winning him to his better vision.
+
+For sixty years the Messenger worked, sowing seed and gathering the
+fruit of his labor; and at last his body was laid at rest close to his
+first church at Saul. Thus one of the great men of the world
+accomplished his task.
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.
+
+A.D. 493-750.
+
+It would be hard to find in the whole history of early Christianity a
+record of greater and more enduring success than the work of St.
+Patrick. None of the Messengers of the New Way, as they were called
+first by St. Luke, unless the phrase is St. Paul's, accomplished
+single-handed so wonderful a work, conquering so large a territory, and
+leaving such enduring monuments of his victory. Amongst the world's
+masters, the son of Calpurn the Decurion deserves a place with
+the greatest.
+
+Not less noteworthy than the wide range of his work was the way in which
+he gained success. He addressed himself always to the chiefs, the kings,
+the men of personal weight and power. And his address was almost
+invariably successful,--a thing that would have been impossible had he
+not been himself a personality of singular force and fire, able to meet
+the great ones of the land as an equal. His manner was that of an
+ambassador, full of tact, knowledge of men and of the world. Nor can we
+find in him--or, indeed, in the whole history of the churches founded by
+him--anything of that bitter zeal and fanaticism which, nearly two
+centuries nearer to apostolic times, marred the work of the Councils
+under Constantius; the fierce animosity between Christian and Christian
+which marked the Arian controversy. The Apostle of Ireland showed far
+more urbanity, far more humane and liberal wisdom, far more gentleness,
+humor and good feeling, in his treatment of the pre-Christian
+institutions and ideals of Ireland than warring Christian sects have
+generally been willing to show to each other.
+
+It was doubtless due to this urbane wisdom that the history of the
+conversion of Ireland is without one story of martyrdom. The change was
+carried out in open-hearted frankness and good-will, the old order
+giving place to the new as gently as spring changes to summer. The most
+marvelous example of St. Patrick's wisdom, and at the same time the most
+wonderful testimony to his personal force, is his action towards the
+existing civil and religious law of the country, commonly known as the
+Brehon Law. Principles had by long usage been wrought into the fabric of
+the Brehon Laws which were in flat contradiction to St. Patrick's
+teaching of the New Way. Instead of fiercely denouncing the whole
+system, he talked with the chief jurists and heralds,--custodians of the
+old system,--and convinced them that changes in their laws would give
+effect to more humane and liberal principles. They admitted the justice
+of his view, and agreed to a meeting between three great chieftains or
+kings, three Brehons or jurists, and three of St. Patrick's converts, to
+revise the whole system of law, substituting the more humane principles,
+which they had already accepted as just and right. These changes were
+made and universally applied; so that, without any violent revolution,
+without strife or bloodshed, the better way became the accepted law. It
+would be hard to find in all history a finer example of wisdom and
+moderation, of the great and worthy way of accomplishing right ends.
+
+We have seen the great Messenger himself founding monasteries, houses of
+religious study, and churches for his converts, on land given to him by
+chieftains who were moved by his character and ideals. We can judge of
+the immediate spread of his teaching if we remember that these churches
+were generally sixty feet long, thus giving room for many worshippers.
+They seem to have been built of stone--almost the first use of that
+material in Ireland since the archaic days. Among the first churches of
+this type were those at Saul, at Donaghpatrick on the Blackwater, and at
+Armagh, with others further from the central region of St. Patrick's
+work. The schools of learning which grew up beside them were universally
+esteemed and protected, and from them came successive generations of men
+and women who worthily carried on the work so wisely begun. The tongues
+first studied were Latin and Irish. We have works of very early periods
+in both, as, for instance, the Latin epistles of St. Patrick himself,
+and the Irish poems of the hardly less eminent Colum Kill. But other
+languages were presently added.
+
+[Illustration: Valley of Glendalough and Ruins of the Seven Churches.]
+
+These schools and churches gradually made their way throughout the whole
+country; some of the oldest of them are still to be seen, as at
+Donaghpatrick, Clonmacnoise and Glendalough. Roofed with stone, they are
+well fitted to resist the waste of time. An intense spiritual and moral
+life inspired the students, a life rich also in purely intellectual and
+artistic force. The ancient churches speak for themselves; the artistic
+spirit of the time is splendidly embodied in the famous Latin
+manuscript of the Gospels, called the Book of Kells, the most beautiful
+specimen of illumination in the world. The wonderful colored initial
+letters reproduce and develop the designs of the old gold work, the
+motives of which came, it would seem, from the Baltic, with the De
+Danaan tribes. We can judge of the quiet and security of the early
+disciples at Kells, the comfort and amenity of their daily life, the
+spirit of comity and good-will, the purity of inspiration of that early
+time, by the artistic truth and beauty of these illuminated pages and
+the perfection with which the work was done. Refined and difficult arts
+are the evidence of refined feeling, abundant moral and spiritual force,
+and a certain material security and ease surrounding the artist. When
+these arts are freely offered in the service of religion, they are
+further evidence of widespread fervor and aspiration, a high and worthy
+ideal of life.
+
+Yet we shall be quite wrong if we imagine an era of peace and security
+following the epoch of the first great Messenger. Nothing is further
+from the truth. The old tribal strife continued for long centuries; the
+instincts which inspired it are, even now, not quite outworn. Chief
+continued to war against chief, province against province, tribe
+against tribe, even among the fervent converts of the first teachers.
+
+Saint Brigid is one of the great figures in the epoch immediately
+succeeding the first coming of the Word. She was the foundress of a
+school of religious teaching for women at Kildare, or Killdara, "The
+Church of the Oak-woods," whose name still records her work. Her work,
+her genius, her power, the immense spiritual influence for good which
+flowed from her, entitle her to be remembered with the women of
+apostolic times, who devoted their whole lives to the service of the
+divine. We have seen the esteem in which women were always held in
+Ireland. St. Brigid and those who followed in her steps gave effect to
+that high estimation, and turned it to a more spiritual quality, so that
+now, as in all past centuries, the ideal of womanly purity is higher in
+Ireland than in any country in the world.
+
+This great soul departed from earthly life in the year 525, a generation
+after the death of the first Messenger. To show how the old order
+continued with the new, we may record the words of the Chronicler for
+the following year: "526: The battle of Eiblinne, by Muirceartac son of
+Erc; the battle of Mag-Ailbe; the battle of Almain; the battle of
+Ceann-eic; the plundering of the Cliacs; and the battle of Eidne against
+the men of Connacht." Three of these battles were fought at no great
+distance from St. Brigid's Convent.
+
+The mediaeval Chronicler quotes the old Annalist for the following year:
+"The king, the son of Erc, returned to the side of the descendants of
+Nial. Blood reached the girdle in each plain. The exterior territories
+were enriched. Seventeen times nine chariots he brought, and long shall
+it be remembered. He bore away the hostages of the Ui-Neill with the
+hostages of the plain of Munster."
+
+Ten years later we find the two sons of this same king, Muirceartac son
+of Erc, by name Fergus and Domnall, fighting under the shadow of
+Knocknarea mountain against Eogan Bel the king of Connacht; the ancient
+Annalist, doubtless contemporary with the events recorded, thus
+commemorated the battle in verse:
+
+"The battle of the Ui-Fiacrac was fought with the fury of edged weapons
+against Bel;
+
+"The kine of the enemy roared with the javelins, the battle was spread
+out at Crinder;
+
+"The River of Shells bore to the great sea the blood of men with their
+flesh;
+
+"They carried many trophies across Eaba, together with the head of
+Eogan Bel."
+
+During this stormy time, which only carried forward the long progress of
+fighting since the days of the prime, a famous school of learning and
+religion had been founded at Moville by Finian, "the tutor of the saints
+of Ireland." The home of his church and school is a very beautiful one,
+with sombre mountains behind rising from oak-woods into shaggy masses of
+heather, the blue waters of Lough Foyle in front, and across the mouth
+of the lough the silver sands and furrowed chalk hills of Antrim,
+blending into green plains. Here the Psalms and the Gospels were taught
+in Latin to pupils who had in no wise given up their love for the old
+poetry and traditions of their motherland. Here Colum studied,
+afterwards called Colum Kill, "Saint Colum of the Churches," and here
+arose a memorable dispute concerning a Latin manuscript of the Psalms.
+The manuscript belonged to Finian, founder of the school, and was
+esteemed one of the treasures of his college. Colum, then a young
+student, ardently longed for a copy, and, remaining in the church after
+service, he daily copied a part of the sacred text. When his work was
+completed, Finian discovered it, and at once claimed the copy of his
+book as also his. The matter was submitted to an umpire, who gave the
+famous decision: "Unto every cow her calf; unto every book its
+copy"--the copy belonged to the owner of the book. This early decision
+of copyright was by no means acceptable to the student Colum. He
+disputed its justice, and the quarrel spread till it resulted in a
+battle. The discredit attaching to the whole episode resulted in the
+banishment of Colum, who sailed away northward and eastward towards the
+isles and fiords of that land which, from the Irish Scoti who civilized
+it, now bears the name of Scotland. Let us recall a few verses written
+by Colum on his departure, in a version which echoes something of the
+original melody and form:
+
+     "We are rounding Moy-n-Olurg, we sweep by its head and
+         We plunge through the Foyle,
+     Whose swans could enchant with their music the dead and
+         Make pleasure of toil....
+     Oh, Erin, were wealth my desire, what a wealth were
+         To gain far from thee,
+     In the land of the stranger, but there even health were
+         A sickness to me!
+     Alas for the voyage, oh high King of Heaven,
+         Enjoined upon me,
+     For that I on the red plain of bloody Cooldrevin
+         Was present to see.
+     How happy the son is of Dima; no sorrow
+         For him is designed,
+     He is having this hour, round his own Kill in Durrow,
+         The wish of his mind.
+     The sound of the wind in the elms, like the strings of
+         A harp being played,
+     The note of the blackbird that claps with the wings of
+         Delight in the glade.
+     With him in Ros-grenca the cattle are lowing
+         At earliest dawn,
+     On the brink of the summer the pigeons are cooing
+         And doves on the lawn...."
+
+In another measure, he again mourns his exile: "Happy to be on Ben Edar,
+before going over the sea; white, white the dashing of the wave against
+its face; the bareness of its shore and its border....
+
+     "How swiftly we travel; there is a grey eye
+       Looks back upon Erin, but it no more
+     Shall see while the stars shall endure in the sky,
+       Her women, her men, or her stainless shore...."
+
+This great-hearted and impetuous exile did not waste his life in useless
+regrets. Calling forth the fire of his genius, and facing the reality of
+life, he set himself to work, spreading the teaching of the New Way
+among the Picts of the north--the same Picts who, in years gone by, had
+raged against the barrier of Hadrian between Forth and Clyde. The year
+of his setting out was 563; the great center of his work was in the
+sacred isle of Iona, off the Ross of Mull. Iona stands in the rush of
+Atlantic surges and fierce western storms, yet it is an island of rare
+beauty amid the tinted mists of summer dawns. Under the year 592, a
+century after Saint Patrick's death, we find this entry in the
+Chronicle: "Colum Kill, son of Feidlimid, Apostle of Scotland, head of
+the piety of the most part of Ireland and Scotland after Patrick, died
+in his own church in Iona in Scotland, after the thirty-fifth year of
+his pilgrimage, on Sunday night, the ninth of June. Seventy-seven years
+was his whole age when he resigned his spirit to heaven." The corrected
+date is 596.
+
+We can see in Colum of the Churches the very spirit of turbulence and
+adventure, the fierce impetuosity and readiness for dispute, which led
+to the contests between the chieftains of Ireland, the wars between
+province and province, often between valley and valley. It is the same
+spiritual energy, working itself out in another way, transmuted by the
+sacred fire into a divine mission. In the same way the strong will of
+Meave, the romantic power of Deirdré and Grania, transmuted to ideal
+purposes, was the inspiration of Saint Brigid and so many like her, who
+devoted their powers to the religious teaching of women.
+
+We should doubtless fail utterly to understand the riddle of history,
+were we to regret the wild warring of these early times as a mere
+lamentable loss of life, a useless and cruel bloodshed. We are too much
+given to measuring other times and other moods of the soul by our own,
+and many false judgments issue from this error. Peaceful material
+production is our main purpose, and we learn many lessons of the Will
+embodied in the material world when we follow this purpose honestly. But
+before our age could begin, it was necessary for the races to come to
+personal consciousness. This end seems everywhere to have been reached
+by a long epoch of strife, the contending of man against man, of tribe
+against tribe. Thus were brought to full consciousness the instinct of
+personal valor, personal honor and personal readiness to face death.
+
+Only after this high personal consciousness is kindled can a race enter
+the wider path of national life, where vivid and intense individuals
+unite their forces to a common end, reaching a common consciousness, and
+holding their power in common for the purposes of all. After the lessons
+of fighting come the lessons of work. For these lessons of work, for
+the direct touch with the everlasting Will gained in all honest work,
+our own age is to be valued, far more than for the visible and material
+fruits which that work produces.
+
+In like manner the old epoch of war is to be esteemed for the lessons it
+taught of high valor, sacrifice, heroic daring. And to what admirable
+ends these same qualities may tend we can see in a life like that of
+Colum Kill, "head of the piety of the most part of Ireland and Scotland
+after Patrick."
+
+Yet the days of old were grim enough to live in. Let this record of some
+half-century later testify. It is but one year culled from a long red
+rank of years. We give the Chronicler's own words: "645: The sixth year
+of Conall and Ceallac. Mac Laisre, abbot of Bangor, died on May 16.
+Ragallac son of Uatac, King of Connacht, was killed by Maelbrigde son of
+Motlacan, of which was said:
+
+     "Ragallac son of Uatac was pierced on the back of a white
+        steed;
+
+     Muiream has well lamented him; Catal has well avenged him.
+
+     Catal is this day in battle, though bound to peace in the
+        presence of kings;
+
+     Though Catal is without a father, his father is not without
+        vengeance.
+
+     Estimate his terrible revenge from the account of it related:
+
+     He slew six men and fifty; he made sixteen devastations;
+
+     I had my share like another in the revenge of Ragallac,--
+
+     I have the gray beard in my hand, of Maelbrigde son of Motlacan."
+
+These are evidently the very words of one who fought in the battle. Nor
+need this in any way surprise us, for we have far older Chronicles set
+down year by year in unbroken record. The matter is easy to prove. The
+Chronicles of Ulster record eclipses of the sun and moon as early as
+495,--two years after Saint Patrick's death. It was, of course, the
+habit of astronomers to reckon eclipses backwards, and of annalists to
+avail themselves of these reckonings. The Venerable Bede, for example,
+has thus inserted eclipses in his history. The result is that the
+Venerable Bede has the dates several days wrong, while the Chronicles of
+Ulster, where direct observation took the place of faulty reckoning, has
+them right, to the day and hour. It is only in quite modern times that
+we have reached sufficiently accurate knowledge of the moon's movements
+to vindicate the old Ulster Annalists, who began their work not less
+than a hundred and fifty years before the battle we have just recorded.
+
+Nor should we exaggerate the condition of the time, thinking of it as
+altogether given over to ravaging and devastation. Even though there
+were two or three expeditions and battles every year, these would only
+affect a small part of the whole country. Over all the rest, the tending
+of cattle in the glades of the forest, the sowing and reaping of wheat
+and oats, the gathering of fruit and nuts, continued in quiet
+contentment and peace. The young men practiced the arts of war and
+exercised themselves in warlike games. The poets sang to them, the
+heralds recounted the great doings of old, how Cuculain kept the ford,
+how Concobar thirsted in his heart for Deirdré, how the son of Cumal
+went to war, how golden-tongued Ossin was ensnared by the spirits. The
+gentle life of tillage and the keeping of cattle could never engage the
+whole mental force of so vigorous a race. What wonder, then, that, when
+a chieftain had some real or imagined wrong to avenge, or some adventure
+to propose,--what wonder that bold spirits were ever ready to accompany
+him, leaving the women to their distaffs and the tending of children and
+the grinding of corn? Mounting their horses, they rode forth through the
+woods, under the huge arms of the oak-trees; along the banks of
+swift-gliding rivers, through passes of the lowering hills. While still
+in familiar territory, the time of the march was passed in song and
+story. Then came increased precaution, and gradually heightened pulses
+marked the stages of the way. The rival chieftain, warned by his scouts
+and outlying tribesmen, got word of their approach, and hastily
+replenishing his granaries and driving the cattle into the great circle
+of his embankments, prepared to meet the coming foe. Swords, spears,
+bows, arrows were the arms of both sides. Though leather tunics were
+common, coats of mail came only at a later date. The attackers under
+cover of the night sped across the open ground before the fort, and
+tried to storm the fortress, the defenders meanwhile showering down
+keen-pointed arrows on them from above. Both parties, under the
+chieftains' guidance, fought fiercely, in a fever of excitement, giving
+no heed to wounds, seeing nothing but the foe and the battlements to be
+scaled. Then either a successful sortie broke the ranks of the
+assailants and sent them back to their forest camp in wild disorder, or,
+the stockade giving way, the stormers swept in like a wave of the sea,
+and all was chaos and wild struggle hand to hand. Whatever the outcome,
+both sides thought of the wild surge of will and valor in that hour as
+the crowning event of their lives.
+
+Meanwhile, within the quiet enclosures of the monasteries and religious
+schools, the spirit of the time was working with not less fervor, to
+invisible and ideal ends. At Bangor, on the neck of the northern Ards;
+at Moville, where Lough Foyle spreads its inland sea; at Saul, where the
+first Messenger won his first convert; at Devenish Island amid the
+waters of Lough Erne; at Monasterboice in the plain of Louth; at
+Grlendalough, among the solemn hills of Wicklow; at Kildare, beneath the
+oak-woods; at Durrow, amid the central marshes, and many another ancient
+seat of learning, the way of wisdom and holiness was trod with gladness.
+Latin had been taught since the early days of the Message; the native
+tongue of Ireland, consecrated in the hymns of St. Patrick and the poems
+of St. Colum of the Churches, was the language in which all pupils were
+taught, the modern ministrant to the classical speech of Rome. Nor were
+the Scriptures alone studied. Terence, Virgil, Ovid, the Augustans and
+the men of the silver age, were familiar in the Irish schools; and to
+these Latin writers were soon added the Greeks, more especially--as was
+natural--the Greek Fathers, the religious philosophers, and those who
+embodied the thought and controversies of the early Christian centuries.
+To Greek, Hebrew was added, so that both Old and New Testaments were
+known in their proper tongues. About the time when "Ragallac son of
+Uatac was pierced on the back of a white steed," Saint Camin in his
+island school at Inis Caltra, where red mountains hem in Lough Derg of
+the Shannon, was writing his Commentary on the Psalms, recording the
+Hebrew readings on the margin of the page. A few years before that
+battle, in 634, Saint Cummian of Durrow, some thirty miles to the east
+of Camin's Holy Island, wrote to his brother, the Abbot of Iona in the
+northern seas, quoting Latin writers sacred and secular, as well as
+Origen, Cyril and Pachomius among the Greeks. The learned man discusses
+the astronomical systems of the Mediterranean world, giving the names of
+months and cycles in Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, and telling of his
+researches into the true time of Easter, while on a journey to Italy and
+Rome. This letter, which has come down to our days, is first-hand
+testimony to the learning of the early Irish schools.
+
+[Illustration: Ancient Cross, Glendalough.]
+
+Fifty years later, in 683, we hear of the Saxons for the first and
+almost the last time in the history of Ireland. It is recorded that the
+North Saxons raided Mag Breag in the East of Meath, attacking both
+churches and chieftains. They carried away many hostages and much spoil,
+but the captives were soon after set at liberty and sent home again, on
+the intercession of a remarkable man, Adamnan, the biographer of Colum
+of the Churches, whose success in his mission was held to be miraculous.
+
+For more than a century after this single Saxon raid Ireland was wholly
+undisturbed by foreign invasion, and the work of building churches,
+founding schools, studying Hebrew and Greek and Latin, went on with
+increasing vigor and success. An army of missionaries went forth to
+other lands, following in the footsteps of Colum of the Churches, and of
+these we shall presently speak. The life of the church was so rich and
+fruitful that we are led to think of this as a period of childlike and
+idyllic peace.
+
+Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The raids,
+devastations and wars between province and province, tribe and tribe,
+went on without a year's interruption. This was the normal course of the
+nation's life, the natural outlet of the nation's energy: not less a
+visible sign of invisible inward power than the faith and fervor of the
+schools. We shall get the truest flavor of the times by quoting again
+from the old Annals. That they were recorded year by year, we have
+already seen; the records of frosts, great snow-storms, years of rich
+harvests and the like, interspersed among the fates of kings, show how
+faithfully the annals were kept,--as, for example, the winter of great
+cold, "when all the rivers and lakes of Ireland were frozen over," in
+the year after the Saxon raid.
+
+Here again, under the year 701, is the word of a man then living: "After
+Loing Seac son of Angus son of Domnall had been eight years in the
+sovreignty of Ireland, he was slain in the battle of Ceann by Cealleac
+of Lough Cime, the son of Ragallac, as Cealleac himself testifies:
+
+
+     "'For his deeds of ambition he was slain in the morning at
+          Glas Cuilg;
+
+     I wounded Loing Seac with a sword, the monarch of Ireland
+          round.'"
+
+Two years later Saint Adamnan died, after governing the Abbey of Iona
+for six and twenty years. It was said of him that "He made a slave of
+himself to his virtues," and his great life-work, the Latin history of
+Saint Colum of the Churches, founder of the Iona Abbey, to this day
+testifies to his high learning and wisdom.
+
+Fourteen years later "Leinster was five times devastated by the
+Ui-Neill," the descendants of Nial, and a battle was fought between the
+men of Connacht and Munster. Thus the lives of saints and warriors were
+interwoven. On very rare occasions the two lives of the race came into
+collision. Thus, a quarrel arose between Congus the Abbot and Aed Roin
+king of Ulad. Congus summoned to his aid the chief of the Ui-Neill, Aed
+Allan by name, in these verses:
+
+     "Say to the cold Aed Allan that I have been oppressed by
+         a feeble enemy:
+
+     Aed Roin insulted me last night at Cill Cunna of the sweet
+         music."
+
+Aed Allan made these verses on his way to battle to avenge the insult:
+
+     "For Cill Cunna the church of my spiritual father,
+         I take this day a journey on the road.
+     Aed Roin shall leave his head with me,
+         Or I shall leave my head with him."
+
+The further history of that same year, 733, is best told in the words of
+the Annals: "Aed Allan, king of Ireland, assembled his forces to
+proceed into Leinster, and he arrived at the Ford of Seannait (in
+Kildare). The Leinstermen collected the greatest number they were able,
+to defend their rights against him. The king Aed Allan himself went into
+the battle, and the chieftains of the north along with him. The
+chieftains of Leinster came with their kings into the battle, and
+bloodily and heroically was the battle fought between them. Heroes were
+slaughtered and bodies were hacked. Aed Allan and Aed, son of Colgan,
+king of Leinster, met each other, and Aed son of Colgan was slain by Aed
+Allan. The Leinstermen were killed, slaughtered, cut off, and dreadfully
+exterminated in this battle, so that there escaped of them but a small
+remnant and a few fugitives."
+
+To round out the picture, to contrast the two streams of the nation's
+life, let us give this, from the following year: "734: Fifth year of Aed
+Allan. Saint Samtain, virgin, of Cluain Bronaig (Longford), died on
+December 19. It was of her that Aed Allan gave this testimony:
+
+     "Samtain for enlightening various sinners,
+         A servant who observed stern chastity,
+     In the wide plain of fertile Meath
+         Great suffering did Samtain endure;
+     She undertook a thing not easy,--
+         Fasting for the kingdom above.
+     She lived on scanty food;
+         Hard were her girdles;
+     She struggled in venomous conflicts;
+         Pure was her heart amid the wicked.
+     To the bosom of the Lord, with a pure death,
+         Samtain passed from her trials."
+
+
+
+X.
+
+THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.
+
+A.D. 750-1050.
+
+Aed Allan, the king who so feelingly wrote the epitaph of the saintly
+virgin Samtain, needed an epitaph himself four years later, for he fell
+in battle with Domnall son of Murcad son of Diarmaid, who succeeded him
+on the throne. It is recorded that, in the following year, the sea cast
+ashore a whale under the mountains of Mourne, to the great wonder of
+those who dwelt by the hill of Rudraige. Thus do the Chronicles
+establish their good faith, by putting on record things trifling or
+grave, with equal impartiality.
+
+They were presently to have something more memorable to record than the
+loss of a battle or the stranding of a whale. But before we come to this
+new chapter in the life of Ireland, let us show the continuity of the
+forces we have already depicted. The old tribal turmoil went on
+unabated. In 771, the first year of Doncad son of Domnall in the
+sovereignty over Ireland, that ruler made a full muster of the Ui-Neill
+and marched into Leinster. The Leinstermen moved before the monarch and
+his forces, until they arrived at the fort called Nectain's Shield in
+Kildare. Domcad with his forces was entrenched at Aillin, whence his
+people continued to fire, burn, plunder and devastate the province for
+the space of a week, when the Leinstermen at last submitted to his will.
+Seventeen years later it is recorded that the church and abbey of
+Ardmaca, or, as we may now begin to call it, Armagh, were struck by
+lightning, and the night was terrible with thunder, lightning and wind.
+
+We see, therefore, that the double life of the people, the life of valor
+and the life of wisdom, were following their steady course in camp and
+school. We may call up a very interesting witness to the whole condition
+of Ireland during this epoch: Alfred king of the Northumbrian Saxons,
+who spent several years traveling through the land and studying in the
+schools. On his departure, he wrote an ode of acknowledgment to the
+country he was leaving, in the verse of the native Irish tongue. From
+this ode we may quote a few picturesque lines, taking them from a
+version which preserves something of the original rhythm:
+
+     "I traveled its fruitful provinces round,
+     And in every one of the five I found,
+     Alike in church and in palace hall,
+     Abundant apparel and food for all.
+     Gold and silver I found, and money,
+     Plenty of wheat and plenty of honey;
+     I found God's people rich in pity;
+     Found many a feast and many a city....
+     I found in each great church moreo'er,
+     Whether on island or on shore,
+     Piety, learning, fond affection,
+     Holy welcome and kind protection....
+     I found in Munster unfettered of any
+     Kings and queens and poets a many,
+     Poets well skilled in music and measure;
+     Prosperous doings, mirth and pleasure.
+     I found in Connacht the just, redundance
+     Of riches, milk in lavish abundance;
+     Hospitality, vigor, fame,
+     In Crimean's land of heroic name....
+     I found in Ulster, from hill to glen,
+     Hardy warriors, resolute men.
+     Beauty that bloomed when youth was gone,
+     And strength transmitted from sire to son....
+     I found in Leinster the smooth and sleek,
+     From Dublin to Slewmargy's peak,
+     Flourishing pastures, valor, health,
+     Song-loving worthies, commerce, wealth....
+     I found in Meath's fair principality
+     Virtue, vigor, and hospitality;
+     Candor, joyfulness, bravery, purity--
+     Ireland's bulwark and security.
+     I found strict morals in age and youth,
+     I found historians recording truth.
+     The things I sing of in verse unsmooth
+     I found them all; I have written sooth."
+
+The modern form of the names used by the translator gives this version a
+slightly misleading tone. Ulster, Munster, Leinster were still known by
+their old names: Ulad, Mumain and Lagin. The Danish termination by which
+we know them had not been added. In like manner, Dublin in those days
+and far later was still called At-Cliat, the Ford of the Hurdles. Yet
+the tribute which the Saxon king paid to Ireland has a true ring. It
+thoroughly supports what we have said: that incessant tribal warfare
+rather expressed than detracted from the vigor of the nation's life. It
+had this grave defect, however: it so kindled and cherished the instinct
+of separateness that union in face of a common foe was almost
+impossible. Long years of adverse fate were needed to merge the keen
+individual instinct of old into the common consciousness of to-day.
+
+Modern historians generally write as if the onslaught of the Northmen
+had had this unifying effect; as if it had been a great calamity,
+overwhelming the country for several centuries, and submerging its
+original life under a tide of conquest. Here again the history of the
+time, as recorded year by year in the Annals, leads us to a wholly
+different conclusion. We find inroads of the Northmen, it is true; but
+they are only interludes in the old national life of storm and struggle.
+That enduring tribal conflict, of which we have already seen so much,
+did not cease even for a year. Nor can it have greatly mattered to the
+dwellers in some remote valley whether they were sacked, their cattle
+driven off, and their children taken captive by strangers or by men of
+their own land.
+
+There was one chief difference: the foreigners, being still heathens,
+did not spare the churches and the schools. The golden or silver
+reliquaries, the jeweled manuscript-cases, the offerings of precious
+stones and rich ornaments laid on the altars: these things proved an
+irresistible temptation to the roving sea-kings. They often burned or
+cast away the manuscripts, eager only to take the jeweled coverings, and
+in this way many monuments of the olden time have been lost, and many
+gaps in the history of the nation made irreparable. Yet it would seem
+that even the loss of manuscripts has been exaggerated, since such
+lavish abundance remains to us from the times before the first northern
+raiders came. Many a remote shrine was never even approached by the
+northern wanderers; and, in the long times of peace between raid and
+raid, one school had time to gain from another copies of the books which
+were lost. We may hope that the somewhat rigid views of copyright
+expressed in the matter of St. Finian's Psalter were not invariably
+adhered to. We have Chronicles kept with unbroken regularity year by
+year through the whole of the epoch of Northern raids, and they by no
+means indicate a period of national depression, nor justify us in
+thinking of these raids as much more than episodes in the general
+fighting of the nation,--the martial state through which every modern
+country has passed before emerging to homogeneous life.
+
+To come to the events themselves, as they appeared to the men who
+witnessed them. We find the first record of the Northern raiders under
+the year 795: "The burning of Lambay by the Gentiles. The shrines were
+broken and plundered." This Lambay is an island of considerable extent,
+off the Dublin coast, some six or seven miles north of Howth. It rises
+gradually from the south extremity into a purple cliff of porphyry
+facing the northern sea, and on the sheltered slope under the sun a
+little church colony with schools and dwelling-houses had been built.
+Against this peaceful solitude the raiders came, burning and plundering,
+and when they rowed away again in their long ships towards the north, a
+smoldering black ruin bore testimony that they were indeed Gentiles,
+unblessed by Christian baptism.
+
+Three years later the little island of St. Patrick, six miles north of
+Lambay, met with a like fate. It was "burned by the Gentiles," as the
+Chronicles say. And from that time forth we hear of their long ships
+again and again, hovering hawk-like around the coasts of Ireland and
+Scotland. In 802, and again in 806, the Scottish Iona of Colum of the
+Churches was raided, and the next year we find the pirates making a
+descent upon Inismurray, off the Sligo coast, between the summit of
+Knocknarea and the cliffs of Slieve League. This last settlement of
+saints and scholars was founded by Molaise,--he who had pronounced
+sentence of exile on Colum of the Churches, the banishment that was the
+beginning of grace for the northern Picts. His oratory still remains on
+the island, beside the Church of the Men, the Church of the Women and
+the circular stone fort, which was very likely built to guard against
+new attacks, after this first raid. There are holy wells and altars
+there also, and Inismurray, better than any other place, gives us a
+picture of the old scholastic life of that remote and wonderful time.
+
+Five years later, the Northern raiders made their way further round the
+coast, under the shadow of the western mountains and the great cliffs of
+Achill; we read of "a slaughter of the people of Connemara by the
+Gentiles" in that year, and the year following, other battles with
+Gentiles are recorded in the same part of Ireland.
+
+In 818, if we are to believe the Annalist, a singular thing happened:
+"An army was led by Murcad, having the Ui-Neill of the North with him.
+Concobar king of Ireland with the Ui-Neill of the South and the
+Leinstermen came from the South on the other hand. When they came to one
+place, it happened, through a miracle of God, that they separated from
+each other for that time without slaughter or one of them spilling a
+drop of the other's blood." That entry better than any other shows the
+restless spirit of the times. It shows, too, that the first shock of
+Norse invasion had not in any sense warned the people and chieftains of
+Ireland of coming danger, nor had it in any degree checked the steady
+course of the nation's growth through storm and strife to personal
+consciousness, as the stepping-stone to the wider common consciousness
+of the modern world.
+
+The year following we read of "a plundering of Howth by the Gentiles,
+who carried off a great prey of women." These captives were doubtless
+the first to bring the Message of the New Way to the wild granite lands
+of the north, where the mountains in their grandeur frown upon the long
+inlets of the fiords. They taught to their children in those wild lands
+of exile the lessons of grace and holiness, so rudely interrupted when
+the long ships of the Norsemen were sighted from the Hill of Howth.
+
+A year later, in 820, the raiders had found their way to the
+southernmost extremity of the island; to Cape Clear, off the coast of
+Cork. This once again brings to our notice the position of so many of
+the early religious settlements,--on rocky islands off the coasts, well
+out of the turmoil of tribal strife which raged uninterrupted on the
+mainland. St. Patrick's Island and Lambay on the east, Clear Island on
+the south, and Inismurray on the northwest, so well protected by the sea
+from disturbance at home, were, by that very isolation, terribly exposed
+to these foreign raiders from the sea. Howth, Moville and Bangor, all on
+peninsulas, all by the seashore, enjoyed a like immunity and were open
+to a like danger. Therefore we are not surprised to find that, two years
+later, Bangor was "plundered by the Gentiles."
+
+It will be remembered that St. Patrick's first church was built on land
+given him by Dicu, chieftain of the district round Downpatrick, a name
+which commemorates the presence of the Messenger. Two sons of this same
+Dicu had been held as hostages by Laogaire the king, and their marvelous
+escape from durance was recorded in the name, Dun-da-lath-glas, the
+Dwelling of the Two Broken Fetters, given to Downpatrick. The place was
+of old renown. Known to Ptolemy as Dunum, it was, during Concobar's sway
+at Emain of Maca, the fortress of the strong chief, Celtcar, whose huge
+embattled hill of earth still rises formidable over the Quoyle River. In
+the year 823, we read, Dundalathglas was plundered by the Gentiles; but
+the story does not stop here, for we are further told that these same
+Gentiles were beaten by the Ulad armies not far from the great fort of
+Celtcar. This is the first entry of this tenor. Hitherto, the Northmen
+seem to have fallen only on outlying religious communities, in remote
+islands or on the seashore; but this last raid brought them to one of
+the very few church-schools which had been built close to a strong
+fortress, with the result that the Northmen were beaten and driven back
+into their ships.
+
+Three years later the Gentiles plundered Lusk on the mainland opposite
+Lambay, but in that same year they were twice defeated in battle, once
+by Cairbré son of Catal, and once by the king of Ulad. The raids of the
+Norse warriors grow more frequent and determined from this time; in
+itself a testimony to the wealth and prosperity of the country, the
+abundance of gold and of accumulated riches, whether cattle or corn,
+ornaments or richly dyed stuffs, red and purple and blue. Word seems to
+have been carried to the wild hills and fiords of frozen Scandinavia
+that here was booty in abundance, and the pirate hordes came down
+in swarms.
+
+Thus we read that Armagh, the center of St. Patrick's work, and the
+chief home of learning, was thrice plundered in 830, the raiders sailing
+up Carlingford Lough and then making a dash of some fifteen miles across
+the undulating country separating them from the city of churches. This
+is the first time they ventured out of sight of their boats. Two years
+later they plundered Clondalkin, nine miles inland from the Dublin
+coast, where the Round Tower still marks the site of the old church and
+school. To the growing frequency of these raids, it would seem, the
+building of Round Towers is to be attributed; they were at once belfries
+and places of refuge. We find, therefore, that the door is almost always
+many feet above the ground, being reached by a ladder afterwards drawn
+up by those inside. The number of these Round Towers all over the
+country, and the perfect preservation of many of them, show how
+universal this precaution was, and how effective were the refugees thus
+provided. It is instructive to read under this same year, 832, that "a
+great number of the family of Clonmacnoise were slain by Feidlimid king
+of Cashel, all their land being burned by him up to the door of the
+church." Thus the progress of tribal struggle was uninterrupted by the
+Gentile raids.
+
+Four years later, a fleet of sixty Norse fighting galleys sailed up the
+Boyne. Sixty long ships entered the Liffey in the same year, and a year
+later they captured the fortress of the Ford of the Hurdles,
+At-Cliat,--the old name of Dublin. Three years later we find the king of
+Munster plundering Meath and West Meath, showing that no sense of common
+danger disturbed the native kings. This strengthens the view we have
+already taken: that the attacks of the Norse sea-kings were only an
+interlude in the incessant contests between the tribes of province and
+province; contests perfectly natural and normal to the development of
+the land, and through which every country has at some period passed.
+
+[Illustration: Round Tower, Antrim.]
+
+It would seem that the Northmen who captured the Ford of the Hurdles
+departed from their former usage. Fortifying themselves, or
+strengthening the existent fortress, they determined to pass the winter
+in Ireland, instead of returning, as they had always done up to this
+time, before the autumn storms made dangerous the navigation of the wild
+northern seas. Their presence in this fort gave the native powers a
+center upon which to concentrate their attack, and as a result the year
+846 was marked by a signal victory over the Northmen, twelve hundred of
+those at At-Cliat being slain. Four other successful contests with the
+raiders are recorded for the same year, and we can thoroughly trust the
+Annalists who, up to this time, have so faithfully recorded the
+disasters of their own race.
+
+About the same time the Northmen gained a second point of vantage by
+seizing and fortifying a strong position where the town of Cork now
+stands. Indeed their instinct of seamanship, their knowledge of good
+harbors and the conditions which make them, led them to fix their first
+entrenchments at Dublin, Cork and Limerick,--which remained for
+centuries after the great ports of the country on the east, south and
+west; and the Norse flavor still lingers in the names of Carlingford,
+Wexford and Waterford, the Fiords of Cairlinn, Weis and Vadre. A
+wonderful side-light on the whole epoch is shed by this entry for 847:
+"In this year sevenscore ships of the Gentiles from abroad fought
+against the Gentiles in Ireland." It would seem that the earlier comers,
+who had drawn up their long ships on the beach, and thrown up earthworks
+round their camp, instantly resented the attempt of later arrivals to
+poach on their preserves, and that a fierce fight was the result. During
+the whole of the following century we find signs of like rivalry between
+different bands of raiders, and it becomes evident that they were as
+much divided amongst themselves as were the native tribes they
+fought against.
+
+Two years later a further light is shed on this mutual strife when we
+are told that "Dark Gentiles came to At-Cliat and slaughtered the Fair
+Gentiles, plundering their fort and carrying away both people and
+property." The next year saw a new struggle between the Dark Gentiles
+and the Fair Gentiles, with much mutual slaughter. This leads us to
+realize that these raiders, vaguely grouped by modern writers under the
+single name of Danes, really belonged to several different races, and
+doubtless came from many parts of the Baltic coasts, as well as from the
+fiords of the great Scandinavian peninsula. The Dark Foreigners are
+without doubt some of that same race of southern origin which we saw,
+ages earlier, migrating northwards along the Atlantic seaboard,--a race
+full of the spirit of the sea, and never happier than when the waves
+were curling and breaking under their prows. They found their way, we
+saw, as far northwards as the coast of Scotland, the Western Isles, and
+distant Norway over the foam, where the long fiords and rugged
+precipices gave them a congenial home. We find them hovering over the
+shores of Ireland at the very dawn of her history; and, in later but
+still remote ages, their power waned before the De Danaan tribes. This
+same dark race returning now from Norway, swooped hawk-like upon the
+rich shrines of the Irish island sanctuaries, only to come into hostile
+contact once more with sons of that golden-haired race which scattered
+the dark Fomorians at Mag Tuiread of the North. For the Fair Gentiles of
+our mediaeval Chronicle are no other than the golden-haired
+Scandinavians; the yellow-locked Baltic race that gave conquerors and a
+new ideal of beauty to the whole modern world. And this Baltic race, as
+we saw in an earlier epoch, was the source and mother of the old De
+Danaans, whose hair was like new-smelted gold or the yellow flag-lilies
+of our lakes and rivers. Thus after long ages the struggle of Fomor and
+De Danaan was renewed at the Ford of the Hurdles between the Dark and
+Fair Strangers, rivals for the plunder of the Irish religious schools.
+
+Though the personalities of this age do not stand forth with the high
+relief of Cuculain and Concobar, though we can hardly quote poems to
+equal the songs of Find son of Cumal and Ossin of the golden tongue, yet
+genuine inspiration never failed in the hearts of the warriors and on
+the lips of the bards. Thus in 860 did a poet lament the death of
+a king:
+
+     "Mournfully is spread her veil of grief over Erin
+     Since Maelseaclain, chieftain of our race has perished,--
+     Maelseaclain of the flowing Shannon.
+     Many a moan resounds in every place;
+     It is mournful news among the Gael.
+
+     Red wine has been spilled into the valley:
+     Erin's monarch has died.
+       Though he was wont to ride a white charger.
+     Though he had many steeds,
+     His car this day is drawn by a yoke of oxen.
+     The king of Erin is dead."
+
+Four years afterwards the contest between the raiders and the chieftains
+grew keener, more centered, more like organized war. "A complete muster
+of the North was made by Aed Finnliat, so that he plundered the
+fortresses of the foreigners, wherever they were in the north; and he
+carried off their cattle and accoutrements, their goods and chattels.
+The foreigners of the province came together at Lough Foyle. After Aed
+king of Ireland had heard that this gathering of strangers was on the
+borders of his country, he was not negligent in attending to them. For
+he marched towards them with all his forces, and a battle was fought
+fiercely and spiritedly between them. The victory was gained over the
+foreigners, and a slaughter was made of them. Their heads were collected
+to one place, in the presence of the king, and twelve-score heads were
+reckoned before him, which was the number slain in that battle, besides
+the numbers of those who were wounded and carried off by him in the
+agonies of death, and who died of their wounds some time afterwards."
+
+A renewal of tribal warfare in the second year after this, when this
+same Aed the king was attacked by Flann the lord of Breag in Meath,
+called forth certain battle-verses full of the fire and fervor of
+the time.
+
+A poet sang:
+
+     "At Kiladerry this day the ravens shall taste sips of blood:
+     A victory shall be gained over the magic host of the Gentiles
+        and over Flann."
+
+The mother of Flann sang:
+
+     "Happiness! Woe! Good news! Bad news! The gaining of a great
+         triumphant battle.
+
+     Happy the king whom it makes victorious; unhappy the king who
+         was defeated.
+
+     Unhappy the host of Leat Cuin, to have fallen by the sprites
+         of Slain;
+
+     Happy the reign of great Aed, and unhappy the loss of Flann."
+
+Aed the victorious king sang:
+
+     "The troops of Leinster are with him, with the added men of
+         swift Boyne;
+
+     This shows the treachery of Flann: the concord of Gentiles
+         at his side."
+
+After ten years, a bard thus sings the dirge of Aed:
+
+     "Long is the wintry night, with rough gusts of wind;
+     Under pressing grief we meet it, since the red-speared king
+        of the noble house lives not.
+     It is fearful to watch how the waves heave from the bottom;
+     To them may be compared all those who with us lament him.
+     A generous, wise, staid man, of whose renown the populous
+        Tara was full.
+     A shielded oak that sheltered the palace of Milid's sons.
+     Master of the games of the fair hilled Taillten,
+     King of Tara of a hundred conflicts;
+     Chief of Fodla the noble, Aed of Oileac who died too soon.
+     Popular, not forgotten, he departed from this world,
+     A yew without any blemish upon him was he of the long-flowing
+        hair."
+
+Nor must it be thought that these repeated raids which we have recorded
+in any way checked the full spiritual life of the nation. It is true
+that there was not that quiet serenity from which came the perfect
+beauty and art of the old Book of Kells, but a keenness and fire kindled
+the breasts of those who learned the New Way and the Ancient Learning.
+The schools sent forth a host of eminent men who over all western Europe
+laid the intellectual basis of the modern world. This view of Ireland's
+history might well be expanded almost without limit or possibility of
+exaggeration. Receiving, as we saw, the learning and traditions of Rome
+while Rome was yet mighty and a name of old imperial renown, Ireland
+kept and cherished the classical wisdom and learning, not less than the
+lore of Palestine. Then the northern garrisons of Rome were beaten back,
+and Britain and Gaul alike were devastated by hordes from beyond the
+Rhine. The first wild deluge of these fierce invaders was now over, and
+during the lull of the storm teachers went forth from Ireland to
+Scotland, as we have seen; they went also to Britain; to Belgium; to
+northern, central and southern Gaul; and to countries beyond the Rhine
+and in the south; to Switzerland and Austria, where one Irishman gave
+his name to the Canton of St. Gall, while another founded the famous see
+of Salzburg, a rallying-point through all the Middle Ages. It was not
+only for pure spiritual zeal and high inspiration that these teachers
+were famed. They had not less renown for all refined learning and
+culture. The famous universities of Oxford, Paris and Pavia count among
+the great spirits at their inception men who were worthy pupils of the
+schools of Devenish and Durrow, of Bangor and Moville.
+
+We have recorded the tribute paid by Alfred the Saxon king to the
+Ireland of his day. Let us add to it the testimony of a great divine of
+France. Elias, Bishop of Angoulême, who died in 875, wrote thus: "What
+need to speak of Ireland; setting at nought, as it does, the
+difficulties of the sea, and coming almost in a body to our shores, with
+its crowd of philosophers, the most intelligent of whom are subjecting
+themselves to a voluntary exile."
+
+We have traced the raids of the Northmen for nearly a century. They
+continued for a century and a quarter longer. Through all this time the
+course of the nation's life was as we have described it: a raid from the
+sea, or from one of their seaboard fortresses by the Dark Gentiles or
+the Fair; an assembling of the hosts of the native chieftains against
+them; a fierce and spirited battle against the pirates in their
+mail-coats and armed with great battle-axes. Sometimes the chosen people
+prevailed, and sometimes the Gentiles; but in either case the heads of
+the slain were heaped up at the feet of the victor, many cattle were
+driven away as spoil, and young men and maidens were taken into
+captivity. It would seem that at no time was there any union between the
+foreigners of one and another seaboard fortress, any more than there was
+unity among the tribes whom they raided and who defeated them in their
+turn. It was a strife of warring units, without fusion; small groups
+round chosen leaders, and these merging for awhile in greater groups.
+Thus the life of the times, in its warlike aspect. Its spiritual vigor
+we have sufficiently shown, not less in the inspirations of the saints
+than in the fiery songs of the bards, called forth by battles and the
+death of kings. Everywhere there was fierce force and seething energy,
+bringing forth fruit of piety or prowess.
+
+The raiders slowly lost their grasp of the fortresses they had seized.
+Newcomers ceased to fill their thinning ranks. Their force was finally
+shattered at the battle of Clontarf, which the Annalist thus records:
+"1013: The Foreigners of the west of Europe assembled against Brian and
+Maelseaclain, and they took with them a thousand men with coats of mail.
+A spirited, fierce, violent, vengeful and furious battle was fought
+between them, the likeness of which was not to be found in that time, at
+Cluain-tarb, the Lawn of the Bulls. In this battle was slain Brian son
+of Ceinneidig, monarch of Ireland, who was the Augustus of all the west
+of Europe, in the eighty-eighth year of his age."
+
+The scene of this famous conflict is on the coast, between Dublin and
+the Hill of Howth. A wide strand of boulders is laid bare by the
+receding tide, with green sea-grass carpeting the stones. At the very
+verge of the farthest tide are two huge sand-banks, where the waves roar
+and rumble with a sound like the bellowing of bulls, and this tumultuous
+roaring is preserved in the name of the place unto this day.
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.
+
+A.D. 1013-1250.
+
+There was, as we have seen, no "Danish Conquest" of Ireland, nor
+anything approaching a conquest. What really happened during the ninth
+and tenth centuries was this: Raiders from the shores of the Northern
+seas, from the Scandinavian peninsula and the Western Isles of Scotland,
+sailed in their long ships among the islands of the Irish coast, looking
+for opportunities to plunder the treasuries of the religious schools,
+and carrying off the gold and silver reliquaries and manuscript cases,
+far more valuable to these heathen seamen than the Latin or Gaelic
+manuscripts they contained.
+
+These raids had little connection with each other; they were the outcome
+of individual daring, mere boat's-crews from one or another of the
+Northern fiords. A few of the more persistent gradually grew reluctant
+to retreat with their booty to the frozen north, and tried to gain a
+footing on the shores of the fertile and wealthy island they had
+discovered. They made temporary camps on the beach, always beside the
+best harbors, and threw up earthworks round them, or perhaps more
+lasting forts of stone. Thus they established a secondary base for raids
+inland, and a place of refuge whither they might carry the cattle, corn
+and captives which these raids brought them from the territories of the
+native clans. These camps on the shore were the germ of a chain of
+sea-ports at Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.
+
+From these points raiding went on, and battles were fought in which the
+raiders were as often vanquished as victorious. There was little union
+between the various Norse forts, and indeed we sometimes find them
+fighting valiantly among themselves. Meanwhile, the old tribal contest
+went on everywhere throughout the island. The south invaded the north
+and was presently invaded in return. The east and the west sent
+expeditions against each other. Clan went forth against clan, chief
+against chief, and cattle and captives many times changed hands. These
+captives, it would seem, became the agricultural class in each clan,
+being made to work as the penalty for unsuccessful fighting. The old
+tribal life went on unbroken during the whole of this period; nor did
+it subsequently yield to pressure from without, but rather passed
+away, during succeeding centuries, as the result of inward growth.
+Meanwhile the religious schools continued their work, studying Latin and
+Greek as well as the old Gaelic, and copying manuscripts as before; and
+one fruit of their work we see in the gradual conversion of the heathen
+Norsemen, who were baptized and admitted to the native church. The old
+bardic schools likewise continued, so that we have a wealth of native
+manuscripts belonging to this time, embodying the finest tradition and
+literature of the earlier pagan ages.
+
+[Illustration: Giant Head and Dunluce Castle, Co. Antrim.]
+
+If the Danes and Northern raiders never conquered Ireland, on the other
+hand they never were expelled. Through the cessation of the original
+impulse of unrest which brought them, they gradually ceased to receive
+accessions from the North, and at the same time the forces of
+amalgamation were slowly merging them into the national and tribal life
+of their new home. Their separate influence grew less and less, but
+their race continued, and continues to this day in the sea-ports we
+have named.
+
+We shall presently have to record another series of Norse inroads, this
+time not directly from the North, but mediately, through France and
+Britain, and we shall find that much of our subsequent history was
+influenced by the new elements and principles then added. We shall do
+well, therefore, to linger for a moment before this new transition, to
+gain a clear view of the tendencies of the epoch then closed, the wider
+significance of that chapter of our nation's life.
+
+The culture of Ireland, during the period before the Northern raids,
+bridged over the abyss between the classical and the mediaeval world.
+During the whole of that period the rest of Europe was hidden under the
+clouds of the Dark Ages. Ireland stood alone as the one cultured nation.
+Receiving the classical learning from Roman Gaul and Britain and Italy,
+while the old world was still alive, Ireland carried that culture onward
+when Rome and the Roman Empire fell, crushed under the hordes of
+Northern barbarians: the Franks in Gaul; the Lombards, Goths and Vandals
+in Spain and Italy; the Angles, Saxons and Danes in Britain; and the
+Picts and Northmen in the Scottish lowlands. Austria was meanwhile
+overrun by Asian nomads, the Huns and Magyars; Russia and Germany, with
+the Scandinavian lands, were still pagan.
+
+Thus all Europe was submerged under a deluge of heathenism, and the old
+Latin culture was swept away. The tradition of ancient Greece still
+lingered at Constantinople behind the wall of the Balkans, but it had no
+influence at all on the northern nations beyond the wall. Ireland was
+thus the one exception, the ark of safety for the old wisdom and beauty
+of classical days. And from Ireland, when the tide of heathen invasion
+slackened, the light of classical times and the spirit of the New Way
+went forth to all the nascent nations, the great pagan tribes that were
+to form the modern world. Thus Ireland was the bridge over the Dark
+Ages, the first of modern nations, keeping the old and blending it
+with the new.
+
+Yet another view of Ireland's significance must not be forgotten. Of the
+original life of the great pagan world which swept over the Roman Empire
+we know almost nothing. How much do we realize of the thought and genius
+of Aleman, Frank and Vandal, of Angle and Lombard and Burgundian?
+
+Nothing at all. The darkness that shrouds them is complete. But what a
+contrast when we come to Ireland! If we leave out the basin of the
+Mediterranean, with its Asian and African traditions, Ireland is the one
+European nation which has clear records of its pagan history. And how
+excellent that history was, how full of humanity and the rich wine of
+life, the stories of Fergus and Concobar and Cuculain, of Find and Ossin
+and Gael, of Meave and Deirdré and Credé bear sufficient witness. The
+tide of Irish life to which they belong, and which brought them forth,
+flowed on without break to a time so recent that their whole tradition
+has come down to us, practically at first hand, from the heralds and
+bards themselves. Ireland is, therefore, our one doorway to the history
+of northern Europe through the long era of pagan times.
+
+That history was everywhere a fierce tale of tribal warfare. Its heroes
+are valiant fighters, keen leaders of forays, champion swordsmen and
+defenders of forts. The air throbs to the battle-drum, rings to the call
+of the war-trumpet. Every tribe, every clan, is in turn victor and
+vanquished, raider and victim of raids. Everywhere are struggle and
+unrest, tales of captivity and slaughter.
+
+We fall into vain lamenting over this red rapine and wrath, until we
+divine the genius and secret purpose of that wonderful epoch, so wholly
+different in inspiration from our own. The life of races, like the life
+of men, has its ordered stages, and none can ripen out of season. That
+was the epoch of dawning individual consciousness, when men were coming
+to a keen and vivid realization of themselves and their powers. Keen
+consciousness and strong personal will could be developed only through
+struggle--through long ages of individual and independent fighting,
+where the best man led, and often fought for his right to lead with the
+best of his followers. Innumerable centers of initiative and force were
+needed, and these the old tribal life abundantly gave. The territory of
+a chief hardly stretched farther than he could ride in a day, so that
+every part of it had a real place in his heart. Nor was he the owner of
+that territory. He was simply the chosen leader of the men who lived
+there, perhaps the strongest among many brothers who shared it equally
+between them. If another thought himself the better man, the matter was
+forthwith decided by fighting.
+
+The purpose of all this was not the "survival of the fittest" in the
+material sense, but a harvest purely spiritual: the ripening of keen
+personal consciousness and will in all the combatants, to the full
+measure of their powers. The chiefs were the strongest men who set the
+standard and served as models for the rest, but that standard held the
+minds of all, the model of perfect valor was in the hearts of all. Thus
+was personal consciousness gained and perfected.
+
+If we keep this in mind as the keynote of the whole pagan epoch, we
+shall be better able to comprehend the new forces which were added to
+that epoch, and which gradually transformed it. The greatest was the
+Message of the New Way. Deeds are stronger than words, and in the deeds
+of the first Messengers we can see the new spirit bearing fruit. The
+slave of Slemish mountain returned breathing not vengeance for his
+captivity but pity and generous kindness towards his captors. Colum the
+exile did not seek to enlist the Picts against his native land, but
+sought rather to give the message of that land to the wild Pictish
+warriors, and to spread humane and generous feeling among them. Thus was
+laid the foundation of a wide and universal consciousness; a bridge was
+built between soul and soul.
+
+From the waning of the Norsemen to the first coming of the Normans is a
+period of about a hundred and fifty years. We shall best gain an insight
+into the national and religious life of that time by gleaning from the
+Annals the vivid and living pictures they never fail to give,--pictures
+which are the records of eye-witnesses. The strictly contemporary
+character of the records is vouched for by the correct entry of
+eclipses: for instance, "on the day before the calends of September, in
+the year 1030, there was a darkening of the sun."
+
+We see the genius of the Norsemen suffering a like eclipse the year
+before: "1029: Olaf son of Sitric, lord of the Foreigners, was taken
+prisoner by Matgamain Ua Riagain lord of Breag, who exacted twelve
+hundred cows as his ransom, together with seven score British horses,
+three score ounces of gold, the sword of Carlus, the Irish hostages,
+sixty ounces of white silver as the ransom of his fetters, eighty cows
+for word and supplication, and four hostages to Ua Riagain as a security
+of peace."
+
+Two generations later we read: "1088: Tigearnac Ua Briain, chief
+successor of Ciaran and Coman, died. He was a paragon of learning and
+history." The work of the paragon Tigearnac, a history of Ireland, is
+extant and writ in choice Latin, a monument at once of the classical
+learning of our schools and of the historical spirit carried down from
+the days of the pagan heralds and bards. Tigearnac quotes abundantly
+from Greek and Latin authors, fortifying his conclusions with passages
+from Eusebius, Orosius, Julius Africanus, Josephus, Jerome and Bede.
+
+A half-century later we get a quaint and vivid glimpse into the
+religious life of the time: "1145: A lime-kiln which was sixty feet
+every way was erected opposite Emain Maca by Gilla Mac Liag, the
+successor of Patrick, and Patrick's clergy in general." Here is the glow
+of that devotion through work which gave us the great mediaeval
+cathedrals, the fervor and artistic power, which in former times adorned
+the Gospels of the Book of Kells, now working out its way in lasting
+stone. The date of this lime-kiln lies indeed just half-way between the
+consecration of Cormac's Chapel at Cashel in 1134 and the foundation of
+the beautiful cathedral beside it by the lord of Tuaid-Muma or Thomond
+in 1152. Cormac's Chapel is a very pure example of native style,
+untouched by foreign or continental influence.
+
+[Illustration: Rock of Cashel, Ruins of Old Cathedral, King Cormac's
+Chapel and Round Tower,]
+
+We can divine the figure of one of the great men of the religious world
+in the records for the year 1148: "A synod was convened at Saint
+Patrick's Isle by Maelmaedog, called also Malachias, successor of
+Patrick, at which were present fifteen bishops and two hundred priests,
+to establish rules and morals for all. Maelmaedog by the advice of the
+synod went a second time to Rome, to confer with the successor of
+Peter." A few months later we read this record of his death: "Malachias,
+that is, Maelmaedog Ua Morgair, Archbishop of the chair of Patrick,
+chief head of the piety of the West of Europe, legate of the successor
+of Peter, the only head whom the Irish and the Foreigners obeyed, chief
+paragon of wisdom and piety, a brilliant lamp which illumined
+territories and churches by preaching and good works, faithful shepherd
+of the church in general,--after having ordained bishops and priests and
+persons of every degree; after having consecrated many churches and
+cemeteries; after having performed every ecclesiastical work throughout
+Ireland; after having bestowed jewels and food upon the mighty and the
+needy; after having founded churches and monasteries, for by him was
+repaired in Ireland every church which had been consigned to decay and
+neglect, and they had been neglected from times remote;--after leaving
+every rule and every good moral in the churches of Ireland in general;
+after having been the second time in the legateship; after having been
+fourteen years in the primacy; and after the fifty-fourth year of his
+age, resigned his spirit to heaven on the second day of November, and
+was buried in the monastery of Saint Bernard at Claravallis in France."
+
+This is the same worthy under whose influence was built the great
+lime-kiln over against the fort of Emain, where Concobar once ruled.
+Even from the scant notices which we have quoted he stands forth clear
+and strong, full of spiritual and moral vigor, a great man in every
+sense, and one in whom we divine a lovable and admirable spirit. At that
+time there were four archbishoprics in Ireland, at Armagh, Cashel,
+Dublin and Tuam; the primacy belonging to the first, as the seat of the
+Damliag Mor or Great Stone Church, built by Saint Patrick himself. A
+sentence in the Annals shows how the revenues were raised: "A horse from
+every chieftain, a sheep from every hearth." A few passages like these
+are enough to light up whole epochs of that mediaeval time, and to show
+us how sympathetic, strong and pure that life was, in so many ways.
+
+We find, meanwhile, that the tribal struggle continued as of old: "1154:
+Toirdealbac Ua Concobar brought a fleet round Ireland northwards, and
+plundered Tir-Conaill and Inis Eogain. The Cinel Eogain sent to hire the
+fleets of the Hebrides, Arran, Cantyre and Man, and the borders of Alba
+in general, and they fell in with the other fleet and a naval battle
+was fiercely and spiritedly fought between them. They continued the
+conflict from, the beginning of the day till evening, but the foreign
+fleet was defeated." This records perhaps the only lesson learned from
+the Norsemen, the art of naval warfare. We may regret that the new
+knowledge was not turned to a more national end.
+
+Four years later, "a wicker bridge was made by Ruaidri Ua Concobar at
+Athlone, for the purpose of making incursions into Meath. There was a
+pacific meeting between Ruaidri Ua Concobar and Tigearnan, and they made
+peace, and took mutual oaths before sureties and relics." This is our
+first meeting with a king as remarkable in his way as the great
+archbishop his contemporary. Ruaidri descendant of Concobar was king of
+Connacht, holding the land from the western ocean up to the great
+frontier of the river Shannon. Eager to plunder his neighbors and bring
+back "a countless number of cows," he undertook this wonderful work, a
+pile bridge across the river, seemingly the first of its kind to be
+built there, and in structure very like the famous bridge which Caesar
+built across the Rhine,--or like many of the wooden bridges across the
+upper streams of the Danube at the present day. We shall record a few
+more of this enterprising and large-minded prince's undertakings,
+following the course of the years.
+
+In parenthesis, we find a clue to the standard of value of the time in
+this record: "1161: The visitation of Osraige was made by Flaitbeartac,
+successor of Colum Kill; the tribute due to him was seven score oxen,
+but he selected, as a substitute for these, four hundred and twenty
+ounces of pure silver." The price of an ox was, therefore, three ounces
+of silver. The old-time barter, an echo of which still lingers in the
+word "pecuniary" from the Latin name for "cattle," was evidently
+yielding to the more convenient form of exchange through the medium of
+the metals, which are easily carried and divided, and suffer no
+detriment from the passage of time. With the wicker bridge and the
+lime-kiln, this change from a tribute in cattle to a payment in silver
+may remind us that we are on the threshold of the modern world.
+
+In 1162 we find the king of Connacht in a new adventure: "An army was
+led by Muirceartac Ua Lochlain, accompanied by the people of the north
+of Ireland, the men of Meath, and a battalion of the Connacht men, to
+At-Cliat, to lay siege to the Foreigners and the Irish; but Ua Lochlain
+retired without battle or hostages after having plundered the Fair
+Strangers. A peace was afterwards concluded between the Foreigners and
+the Gaels; and six score ounces of gold were given by the Foreigners to
+Ua Lochlain, and five score ounces of gold were paid by Diarmaid Ua
+Maelseaclain to Ruaidri Ua Concobar for West Meath." Here again we see
+the "countless cows" giving place to counted gold in the levying of
+tribute. We note also, in the following year, that "a lime-kiln
+measuring seventy feet every way was made by the successor of Colum Kill
+and the clergy of Colum Kill in twenty days," in evident emulation of
+the work of the Armagh see.
+
+The synod already recorded as having been held in the little island of
+Saint Patrick off the Dublin coast, gives us a general view of the
+church at that time, the number of sees and parishes, and the spirit
+animating them. We gain a like view of the civil state in the record of
+a great assembly convened in 1167 by the energetic and enterprising
+Connacht king: "A great meeting was called together by Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar and the chiefs of Leat Cuin, both lay and ecclesiastic, and the
+chiefs of At-boy,--the Yellow Ford across one of the streams of the
+Boyne in Meath. To it came the successor of Patrick, the archbishop of
+Connacht, the archbishop of Leinster, the lord of Breifne, the lord of
+Oirgialla, the king of Ulster, the king of Tara, and Ragnall son of
+Ragnall, lord of the Foreigners. The whole of their gathering and
+assemblage was 19,000 horsemen, of which 6000 were Connachtmen, 4000
+with the lord of Breifne, 2000 with the king of Tara, 4000 with the lord
+of Oirgialla and the king of Ulster, 2000 with the chief of Ui-Failge,
+and 1000 with the Foreigners of At-Cliat. They passed many good
+resolutions at this meeting, respecting veneration for churches and
+clerics, and control of tribes and territories, so that women used to
+traverse Ireland alone; and a restoration of his prey was made by the
+chief of the Ui-Failge at the hands of the kings aforesaid. They
+afterwards separated in peace and amity, without battle or controversy,
+or without anyone complaining of another at that meeting, in consequence
+of the prosperousness of the king, who had assembled these chiefs with
+their forces at one place."
+
+Here is a foreshadowing of the representative assemblies of our modern
+times, and the same wise spirit is shown in another event of the same
+year, thus recorded: "A hosting and a mustering of the men of Ireland,
+with their chieftains, by Ruaidri Ua Concobar; thither came the lord of
+Deas-muma, the lord of Tuaid-muma, the king of Meath, the lord of
+Oirgialla and all the chieftains of Leinster. They arrived in
+Tir-Eogain, and allotted the part of it north of Slieve Gullion,--now
+the eastern part of Derry,--to Nial Ua Lochlain for two hostages, and
+allotted the part of the country of the clan to the south of the
+mountain to Aed Ua Neill for two other hostages. Then the men of Ireland
+returned back southwards over Slieve Fuaid, through Tir-Eogain and
+Tir-Connaill, and over Assaroe--the Cataract of the Erne--and Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar escorted the lord of Deas-muma with his forces southwards
+through Tuaid-muma as far as Cnoc-Ainé--in Limerick--and the lord of
+Deas-muma departed with gifts of many jewels and riches."
+
+While the Norse foreigners were a power at Dublin, Waterford, Cork and
+Limerick, there were not wanting occasions when one of the native tribes
+called on them for aid against another tribe, sharing with them the joys
+of victory or the sorrow of defeat, and, where fortune favored, dividing
+with them the "countless cows" taken in a raid. In like manner the
+Cinel Eogain, as we saw, hired the fleet of the Norsemen of the Western
+Isles of Scotland to help them to resist a raid of the Connachtmen. The
+example thus set was followed repeatedly in the coming years, and we
+find mention of Flemings, Welshmen and Saxons brought over to take one
+side or other in the tribal wars.
+
+In the same year that saw the two assemblings of the chieftains under
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar, another chieftain, Diarmaid son of Murcad brought
+in from "the land of the Saxons," as it was called, one of these bands
+of foreign mercenaries, for the most part Welsh descendants of the old
+Gaelic Britons, to aid him in his contest for "the kingdom of the sons
+of Ceinnsealaig." Two years later, Ruaidri Ua Concobar "granted ten cows
+every year from himself and from every king that should follow him for
+ever, to the Lector of Ard Maca, in honor of Patrick, to instruct the
+youths of Ireland and Alba in Literature."
+
+For the next year, 1170, we find this record: "Robert Mac Stepni and
+Ricard Mac Gillebert--Iarl Strangbow--came from Saxonland into Erin with
+a numerous force, and many knights and archers, in the army of the son
+of Murcad, to contest Leinster for him, and to disturb the Gaels of
+Erin in general; and the son of Murcad gave his daughter to Iarl
+Strangbow for coming into his army. They took Loch Garman--Wexford--and
+Port Lairge--Waterford--by force; and they took Gillemaire the officer
+of the fortress and Ua Faelain lord of the Deisi and his son, and they
+killed seven hundred persons there. Domnall Breagac with numbers of the
+men of Breag fell by the Leinstermen on that occasion. An army was led
+by Ruaidri Ua Concobar with the lord of Breifne and the lord of
+Oirgialla against Leinster and the Foreigners aforesaid, and there was a
+challenge of battle between them for the space of three days." This
+contest was indecisive. The most noteworthy event of the battle was the
+plundering and slaughter of the Danes of At-Cliat by the newcomers under
+Iarl Strangbow. The Danes had long before this given up their old pagan
+faith, converted by their captives and their Gaelic neighbors. Christ
+Church Cathedral in At-Cliat or Dublin was founded early in the
+preceding century by Sitric son of Olaf, king of the Danes of Dublin,
+and Donatus the first Danish bishop; but the oldest part of the present
+structure belongs to the time we are now speaking of: the close of the
+twelfth century. The transepts with their chevron mouldings and the
+principal doorway are of that period, and we may regard them as an
+offering in expiation of the early heathen raids on Lambay, Saint
+Patrick's Isle, and the early schools of the church.
+
+The ambitious Diarmaid Mac Murcad died shortly after the last battle we
+have recorded, "perishing without sacrament, of a loathsome disease;" a
+manifest judgment, in the eyes of the Chronicler, for the crime of
+bringing the Normans to Ireland. In the year that saw his death, "Henry
+the Second, king of the Saxons and duke of the Normans, came to Ireland
+with two hundred and forty ships." He established a footing in the land,
+as one of many contesting powers, but the immediate results of his
+coming were slight. This we can judge from the record of three years
+later: "A brave battle was fought by the Foreigners under Iarl Strangbow
+and the Gaels under Ruaidri Ua Concobar at Thurles, in which the
+Foreigners were finally defeated by dint of fighting. Seventeen hundred
+of the Foreigners were slain in the battle, and only a few of them
+survived with the Iarl, who proceeded in sorrow to his home at Port
+Lairge--Waterford." Iarl Strangbow died two years later at Dublin.
+
+Norman warriors continue to appear during the succeeding years,
+fighting against the native chieftains and against each other, while the
+native chieftains continue their own quarrels, just as in the days of
+the first Norse raids. Thus in the year of Iarl Strangbow's death, Kells
+was laid waste by the Foreigners in alliance with the native Ui-Briain,
+while later in the same year the Foreigners were driven from Limerick by
+Domnall Ua-Briain, who laid siege to them and forced them to surrender.
+
+Two years later, four hundred and fifty of the followers of De Courcy,
+another great Norman warrior, were defeated at Maghera Conall in Louth,
+some being drowned in the river, while others were slain on the
+battlefield. In the same year De Courcy was again defeated with great
+slaughter in Down, and escaped severely wounded to Dublin. For At-Cliat,
+from being a fortress of the Danes and Norsemen, was gradually becoming
+a Norman town. The doorway of Christ Church Cathedral, which dates from
+about this time, is of pure Norman style.
+
+In 1186 we find a son of the great Ruaidri Ua Concobar paying a band of
+these same Foreigners three thousand cows as "wages," for joining him in
+some plundering expedition against his neighbors. The genius of strife
+reigned supreme, and the newcomers were as completely under its sway as
+the old clansmen. Just as we saw the Dark Norsemen of the ninth century
+coming in their long ships to plunder the Fair Norsemen of At-Cliat, and
+the Fair Norsemen not less vigorously retaliating, so now we find wars
+breaking out among the Normans who followed in the steps of the
+Norsemen. In 1205 the Norman chieftain who held a part of Meath under
+his armed sway, and who had already built a strong castle at Kells, was
+at war with the De Bermingham family, who at that time held the old
+Danish stronghold of Limerick. Two years later another contest broke out
+between the De Berminghams and William Marescal, and yet another
+struggle between Hugo de Lacy and De Bermingham, very disastrous to the
+retainers of the latter, for the Chronicler tells us that "nearly all
+his people were ruined."
+
+Thus the old life of tribal struggle went on. The country was wealthy,
+full of cattle and herds, silver and gold, stored corn and fruit, rich
+dyed stuffs and ornaments. The chieftains and provincial kings lived in
+state within their forts, with their loyal warriors around them,
+feasting and making merry, and the bards and heralds recited for their
+delight the great deeds of the men of old, their forefathers; the
+harpers charmed or saddened them with the world-old melodies that
+Deirdré had played for Naisi, that Meave had listened to, that Credé
+sang for her poet lover.
+
+The life of the church was not less vigorous and vital. There are many
+churches and cathedrals of that period of transition, as of the epoch
+before the first Norman came, which show the same fervor and devotion,
+the same faith made manifest by works of beauty. In truth no country in
+the world has so full and rich a record in lasting stone, beginning with
+the dwellings of the early saints who had seen the first Messenger face
+to face, and passing down through age after age, showing the life and
+growth of the faith from generation to generation.
+
+The schools, as we saw, carried on the old classical tradition, bringing
+forth monuments like the Annals of Tigearnac; and there was the same
+vigor and vital force in every part of the nation's life. The coming of
+the Normans changed this in no essential regard. There was something
+added in architecture, the Norman modifying the old native style; the
+castle and keep gradually taking the place of the earthwork and stone
+fort. And in the tenure of land certain new principles were introduced.
+But the sum of national life went on unbroken, less modified, probably,
+than it had been by the old Norse raids.
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+THE NORMANS.
+
+A.D. 1250-1603.
+
+When summing up each epoch of Irish history, we may find both interest
+and profit in considering what the future of the land and the people
+might have been had certain new elements not been added. Thus we may try
+to picture to ourselves what would have been our history had our life
+moved forward from the times of Cuculain and Concobar, of Find and
+Cormac son of Art, without that transforming power which the fifth
+century brought. We may imagine the tribal strife and stress growing
+keener and fiercer, till the whole life and strength of the people was
+fruitlessly consumed in plundering and destroying.
+
+Or we may imagine an unbroken continuance of the epoch of saintly
+aspiration, the building of churches, the illumination of holy books, so
+dividing the religious from the secular community as almost to make two
+nations in one, a nation altogether absorbed in the present life, with
+another nation living in its midst, but dwelling wholly in the thought
+of the other world. Religion would have grown to superstition, ecstasy
+would have ruled in the hearts of the religious devotees, weakening
+their hold on the real, and wafting them away into misty regions of
+paradise. We should have had every exaggeration of ascetic practice,
+hermitages multiplying among the rocks and islands of the sea, men and
+women torturing their bodies for the saving of their souls.
+
+The raids of the Norsemen turned the strong aspirations of the religious
+schools into better channels, bringing them to a sense of their identity
+with the rest of the people, compelling them to bear their part of the
+burden of calamity and strife. The two nations which might have wandered
+farther and farther apart were thus welded into one, so that the spirit
+of religion became what it has ever since remained, something essential
+and inherent in the life of the whole people.
+
+After the waning of the Norsemen, a period opened full of great national
+promise in many ways. We see the church strengthened and confirmed,
+putting forth its power in admirable works of art, churches and
+cathedrals full of the fire and fervor of devotion, and conceived in a
+style truly national, with a sense of beauty altogether its own. Good
+morals and generous feeling mark the whole life of the church through
+this period, and the great archbishop whose figure we have drawn in
+outline is only one of many fine and vigorous souls among his
+contemporaries.
+
+[Illustration: Dunluce Castle.]
+
+The civil life of the nation, too, shows signs of singular promise at
+the same time, a promise embodied in the person of the king of Connacht,
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar, some of whose deeds we have recorded. There was a
+clearer sense of national feeling and national unity than ever before, a
+recognition of the method of conciliation and mutual understanding,
+rather than the old appeal to armed force, as under the genius of tribal
+strife. We see Ruaidri convoking the kings, chieftains and warriors to a
+solemn assembly, presided over by the king and the archbishops of the
+realm, and "passing good resolutions" for the settlement of religious
+and civil matters, and the better ordering of territories and tribes.
+That assembly was convened a half-century before the famous meeting
+between King John and his barons, at Runnymead among the Windsor
+meadows; and the seed then sown might have brought forth fruit as full
+of promise and potency for the future as the Great Charter itself. The
+contrast between these two historic assemblies is instructive. In the
+one case, we have a provincial king from the rich and beautiful country
+beyond the Shannon, gradually gaining such influence over the kings of
+the provinces and the chieftains of the tribes that he had come to be
+regarded as in a sense the overlord of the whole land, not through
+inherent sovreignty or divine right, but first as the chosen chief of
+his own tribe, and then as the elect of the whole body of chieftains,
+first among his peers. In this character we see Ruaidri settling
+disputes between two sections of the great Northern clan, and fixing a
+boundary between them; giving presents to the chieftains of the south
+for their support in this difficult decision, and exercising a
+beneficent influence over the whole people, a moral sway rather than a
+sovereign and despotic authority. It is pleasant to find the same king
+establishing a college foundation for the instruction of the youth of
+Ireland and Scotland in literature.
+
+This is what we have on the one hand. On the other, we have the Norman
+king surrounded by his barons, over whom he claimed, but could not
+exercise, despotic authority; and the Norman barons taking advantage of
+his necessity to extort promises and privileges for their own order
+rather than for the whole people. For we must remember that the Angles
+and Saxons had been reduced by conquest to a servile condition, from
+which they never wholly recovered. The ruling classes of Britain at the
+present day are at least nominal descendants of those same Norman
+barons; and between them and the mass of the people--the sons of the
+Saxons and Angles--there is still a great gulf fixed. It is quite
+impossible for one of the tillers of the soil to stand on a footing of
+equality with the old baronial class, and the gulf has widened, rather
+than closed, since the battle of Hastings and the final overthrow of the
+Saxon power.
+
+We see here the full contrast between the ideal of kingship in Ireland
+and that which grew up among the Norman conquerors of the Saxons. The
+Irish king was always in theory and often in fact a real representative,
+duly elected by the free suffrage of his tribesmen; he was not owner of
+the tribal land, as the duke of the Normans was; he was rather the
+leader of the tribe, chosen to guard their common possessions. The
+communal system of Ireland stands here face to face with the feudal
+system of the Normans.
+
+It would be a study of great interest to consider what form of national
+life might have resulted in Ireland from the free growth of this
+principle of communal chieftainship. There are many analogies in other
+lands, all of which point to the likelihood of a slow emergence of the
+hereditary principle; a single family finally overtopping the whole
+nation. Had this free development taken place, we might have had a
+strong and vigorous national evolution, an abundant flowering of all our
+energies and powers through the Middle Ages, a rich and vigorous
+production of art and literature, equal to the wonderful blossoming of
+genius in the Val d'Arno and Venice and Rome; but we should have missed
+something much greater than all these; something towards which events
+and destiny have been leading us, through the whole of the Middle Ages
+and modern times.
+
+From this point forward we shall have to trace the working of that
+destiny, not manifested in a free blossoming and harvesting of our
+national life, but rather in the suppression and involution of our
+powers; in a development arrested by pressure from without and kept thus
+suspended until the field was ready for its real work. Had our fate been
+otherwise, we might now be looking back to a great mediaeval past, as
+Spain and Austria look back; it is fated that we shall look not back but
+forwards, brought as we are by destiny into the midst of the modern
+world, a people with energy unimpaired, full of vigorous vital force,
+uncorrupted by the weakening influence of wealth, taught by our own
+history the measureless evil of oppression, and therefore cured once for
+all of the desire to dominate others. Finally, the intense inner life
+towards which we have been led by the checking of our outward energies
+has opened to us secrets of the invisible world which are of untold
+value, of measureless promise for all future time.
+
+We have, therefore, to trace the gradual involution of our national
+life; the checking and restraining of that free development which would
+assuredly have been ours, had our national life grown forward unimpeded
+and uninfluenced from without, from the days when the Norse power waned.
+The first great check to that free development came from the feudal
+system, the principle of which was brought over by Robert FitzStephen,
+Richard FitzGilbert, the De Courcys, the De Lacys, the De Berminghams
+and their peers, whose coming we have recorded. They added new elements
+to the old struggle of district against district, tribe against tribe,
+but they added something more enduring--an idea and principle destined
+almost wholly to supplant the old communal tenure which was the genius
+of the native polity. The outward and visible sign of that new principle
+was manifested in the rapid growth of feudal castles, with their strong
+keeps, at every point of vantage gained by the Norman lords. They were
+lords of the land, not leaders of the tribe, and their lordship was
+fitly symbolized in the great gloomy towers of stone that everywhere
+bear witness to their strength, almost untouched as they are by the
+hand of time.
+
+When the duke of the Normans overthrew the Saxon king at Hastings, he
+became real owner of the soil of England. His barons and lords held
+their estates from him, in return for services to be rendered to him
+direct. To reward them for supporting him, first in that decisive
+battle, and then in whatever contests he might engage in, they were
+granted the right to tax certain tracts of country, baronies, earldoms,
+or counties, according to the title they bore. This tax was exacted
+first in service, then in produce, and finally in coin. It was the
+penalty of conquest, the tribute of the subject Saxons and Angles.
+There was no pretence of a free contract; no pretence that the baron
+returned to the farmer or laborer an equal value for the tax thus
+exacted. It was tribute pure and simple, with no claim to be anything
+else. That system of tribute has been consecrated in the land tenure of
+England, and the class enriched by that tribute, and still bearing the
+territorial titles which are its hall-mark, has always been, as it is
+to-day, the dominant class alike in political and social life. In other
+words, the Norman subjugation of Saxon and Angle is thoroughly effective
+at this moment.
+
+This principle of private taxation, as a right granted by the sovereign,
+came over to Ireland with the De Courcys and De Lacys and their like.
+But it by no means overspread Ireland in a single tide, as in England,
+after Hastings was lost and won. Its progress was slow; so slow, indeed,
+that the old communal system lingers here and there at the present day.
+The communal chiefs lived their lives side by side with the Norman
+barons, fighting now with the barons, now with each other; and the same
+generous rivalry, as we have seen, led to abundant fighting among the
+barons also. The principle of feudal ownership was working its way,
+however. We shall see later how great was its ultimate influence,--not
+so much by direct action, as in the quite modern reaction which its
+abuse provoked--a reaction from which have been evolved certain
+principles of value to the whole world.
+
+Leaving this force to work its way through the centuries, we may turn
+now to the life of the times as it appeared to the men and women who
+lived in them, and as they themselves have recorded it. We shall find
+fewer great personalities; nor should we expect this to be otherwise, if
+we are right in thinking that the age of struggle, with its
+efflorescence of great persons, had done its work, and was already
+giving way before the modern spirit, with its genius for the universal
+rather than the personal. We shall have contests to chronicle during the
+following centuries, whether engendered within or forced upon us from
+without; but they are no longer the substance of our history. They are
+only the last clouds of a departing storm; the mists before the dawn of
+the modern world.
+
+The most noteworthy of these contests in the early Norman age was the
+invasion under Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king, who brought a
+great fleet and army to Larne, then as now the Irish port nearest to the
+northern kingdom. The first sufferers by this invasion were the Normans
+of Heath, and we presently find these same Normans allied with Feidlimid
+son of Aed Ua Concobar and the Connachtmen, fighting side by side
+against the common foe. This was in 1315; two years later Robert Bruce
+joined his brother, and it was not till 1319 that Edward Bruce finally
+fell at Dundalk, "and no achievement had been performed in Ireland for a
+long time before," the Chronicler tells us, "from which greater benefit
+had accrued to the country than from this; for during the three and a
+half years that Edward had spent in it, a universal famine prevailed to
+such a degree that men were wont to devour one another."
+
+A ray of light is thus shed on the intellectual and moral life of the
+time: "1398: Garrett Earl of Desmond--or Deas-muma--a cheerful and
+courteous man, who excelled all the Normans and many of the Irish in the
+knowledge of the Irish language, poetry, history and other learning,
+died after the victory of peace." We see that the Normans are already
+fallen under the same influence of assimilation which had transformed
+the Danes two hundred years before.
+
+A half-century later, we get a vigorous and lurid picture of the
+survival of the old tribal strife: "1454: Donell O'Donell was installed
+in the lordship of Tyrconnell, in opposition to Rury O'Donell. Not long
+after this, Donell was treacherously taken captive and imprisoned in the
+castle of Inis--an island in Lough Swilly. As soon as Rury received
+tidings of this, he mustered an army thither, and proceeded to demolish
+the castle in which Donell was imprisoned with a few men to guard him.
+Rury and his army burned the great door of the castle, and set the
+stairs on fire; whereupon Donell, thinking that his life would be taken
+as soon as the army should reach the castle,--it being his dying
+request, as he thought--that he might be loosed from his fetters, as he
+deemed it a disgrace to be killed while imprisoned and fettered. His
+request was granted, and he was loosed from his fetters; after which he
+ascended to the battlements of the castle, to view the motions of the
+invading army. And he saw Rury beneath, with eyes flashing enmity, and
+waiting until the fire should subside, that he might enter and kill him.
+Donell then, finding a large stone by his side, hurled it directly down
+upon Rury, so that it fell on the crest of his helmet, on the top of his
+head, and crushed it, so that he instantly died. The invading forces
+were afterwards defeated, and by this throw Donell saved his own life
+and acquired the lordship of Tyrconnell."
+
+There is a whole historical romance in that single picture; the passage
+could not easily be surpassed for direct and forcible narrative. A few
+years later, we come on one of the most amusing things in the whole
+series of annals, a perfect contrast to the grim ferocity of the feud of
+the O'Donells. In 1472 "a wonderful animal was sent to Ireland by the
+king of England. She resembled a mare, and was of a yellow color, with
+the hoofs of a cow, a long neck, a very large head, a large tail, which
+was ugly and scant of hair. She had a saddle of her own. Wheat and salt
+were her usual food. She used to draw the largest sled-burden behind
+her. She used to kneel when passing under any doorway, however high, and
+also to let her rider mount." It is evident that the Gaelic language in
+the fifteenth century lacked a name for the camel. The same year, we are
+told, "the young earl of Desmond was set at liberty by the MacCarthys;
+he disabled Garrett, son of the earl of Kildare."
+
+Here is another passage which vies in vividness and force with the story
+of the death of Rury O'Donell: "1557: Two spies, Donough and Maurice by
+name, entered the camp of John O'Neill by Lough Swilly, and mingled with
+the troop without being noticed; for in consequence of the number and
+variety of the troops who were there, it was not easy for them to
+discriminate between one another, even if it were day, except by
+recognizing their chieftains alone. The two persons aforesaid proceeded
+from one fire to another, until they came to the great central fire,
+which was at the entrance of the son of O'Neill's tent; and a huge
+torch, thicker than a man's body, was continually flaming at a short
+distance from the fire, and sixty grim and redoubtable warriors with
+sharp, keen axes, terrible and ready for action, and sixty stern and
+terrific Scots, with massive, broad and heavy striking swords in their
+hands, ready to strike and parry, were guarding the son of O'Neill. When
+the time came for the troops to dine, and food was divided and
+distributed among them, the two spies whom we have mentioned stretched
+out their hands to the distributor like the rest, and that which fell to
+their share was a measure of meal, and a suitable complement of butter.
+With this testimony of their adventure they returned to their
+own people."
+
+Here again, what a picture of the camp-life of the age; the darkness of
+night, the great central fire with the sixty grim and redoubtable
+warriors armed with keen axes, terrible and ready for action, and the
+sixty stern and terrific Scots with their massive swords. The admirable
+manner of the narrative is as striking as the fierce vigor of the life
+portrayed. So we might go on, adding red pages of martial records, but
+in reality adding nothing to our understanding of the times. The life of
+the land was as full and abundant as of old, and one outcome of that
+life we may touch on rather more at length.
+
+We have said much of the old religious schools of Ireland, with their
+fine and vigorous intellectual life, which did so much to carry forward
+the torch of culture to our modern world. For nearly seven hundred years
+these great schools seem to have developed wholly along indigenous
+lines, once they had accepted the body of classical culture from the
+Roman Empire, then tottering to its fall. The full history of that
+remarkable chapter in the world's spiritual life has yet to be written;
+but this we can foretell, that when written, it will abound with rich
+material and ample evidence of a sound and generous culture, inspired
+throughout with the fervor of true faith.
+
+About the time when the Norman warriors began to mingle with the
+fighting chieftains of the old native tribes, a change came over the
+religious history of the country. After sending forth men of power and
+light to the awakening lands of modern Europe, Ireland began to receive
+a returning tide, to reap a harvest from these same lands, in the friars
+and abbots of the great Continental orders founded by men like Saint
+Bernard, Saint Dominick and Saint Francis of Assisi. A change in the
+church architecture of the period visibly records this spiritual change;
+continental forms appear, beginning with the rounded arches of the
+Normans, and passing gradually into the various forms of pointed arches
+which we know as Gothic. Very beautiful Abbeys belonging to this epoch
+remain everywhere throughout the island, making once more evident--what
+strikes us at every point of our study--that no country in the world is
+so rich in these lasting records of every step of our national life,
+whether in pagan or Christian times.
+
+We have said much of the archaic cromlechs. We have recorded the great
+Pyramids by the Boyne telling us of the genius of the De Danaans. The
+Milesian epoch is even now revealed to us in the great earthworks of
+Tara and Emain and Cruacan. We can, if we wish, climb the mound of
+heaped-up earth where was the fortress of Cuculain, or look over the
+green plains from the hill of Find.
+
+[Illustration: Mellifont Abbey, Co. Louth.]
+
+In like manner, there is an unbroken series of monuments through the
+early Christian epoch, beginning with the oratories of the sixth
+century, continuing through the early churches of Killiney, Moville,
+Dalkey, Glendalough and Monasterboice, from before the Norse inroads;
+followed by the epoch of Round Towers, or protected belfries, with their
+churches, nearly three score of these Round Towers remaining in fair
+preservation, while many are perfect from base to apex; and culminating
+in Cormac's chapel and the beautiful group of buildings on Cashel Rock.
+For the next period, the age of transition after the waning of the
+Norsemen and the coming of the first Normans, we have many monuments in
+the Norman style, like the door of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin,
+with its romance of Danish conversion and Norse religious fervor.
+
+Finally, we come to the age whose progress we have just recorded, which
+covers the whole of the Middle Ages. For this period, which was for
+Ireland an epoch of foreign influence much more than of foreign rule, we
+have many beautiful Abbeys, built for those foreign orders whose coming
+was in a sense a return tide, a backward flow of the old missionary
+spirit which went forth from Ireland over nascent modern Europe. The
+life of these abbeys was full of rich imaginative and religious power;
+it abounded in urbanity and ripe culture of a somewhat selfish and
+exclusive type. Yet we cannot but feel a limitless affection and
+sympathy for the abbots and friars of the days of old who have left us
+such a rich heritage of beauty and grace.
+
+All these abbeys seem to have been formed on a single plan: a cruciform
+church symbolized the source of all their inspiration, its choir
+extending towards the east, whence the Light had come; the nave, or main
+body of the church, was entered by the great western door, and the arms
+of the cross, the transepts, extended to the north and south. Here is a
+very beautiful symbol, a true embodiment of the whole spirit and
+inspiration of the monastic orders. From one of the transepts a side
+door generally led to the domestic buildings, the dormitory, the
+refectory, the chapter house, where the friars assembled in conclave
+under the presidency of the abbot. There were lesser buildings,
+store-rooms, granaries, work-rooms, but these were the kernel of the
+establishment. The church was the center of all things, and under its
+floor the friars were at last laid to rest, while brother friars carved
+tombs for them and epitaphs, adding a new richness of decoration to the
+already beautiful church.
+
+We may record a few of these old foundations, showing at the same time
+the present state of the old abbey buildings. At Newtown on the northern
+bank of the Boyne, about a mile below Trim, Simon Rochfort founded an
+abbey for the Augustinian Canons in 1206, dedicating it to Saint Peter
+and Saint Paul. The capitals of the pillars in the church, the vaulting
+of the roof and the shafts of the arches which supported the tower are
+full of singular grace and beauty, even now when the abbey is roofless
+and in part destroyed, while the corbels and mouldings round the
+lancet-shaped windows are full of luxuriant fancy and charm. We can
+divine from them the full and rich spiritual life which brought forth
+such exquisite flowers of beauty; we can imagine the fine aroma of
+fervor and saintly peace which brooded over these consecrated aisles.
+
+A few miles below Trim, and an equal distance from the old royal palace
+of Tara, Bective Abbey stands on the northern bank of the Boyne, with a
+square, battlemented tower overshadowing its cloistered quadrangle. The
+cinque-foil cloister arches, the fillets that bind the clustered shafts
+of the pillars, the leaf ornaments of the plinths at their base all
+speak of a luxuriant sense of beauty and grace, of a spirit of pure and
+admirable artistic work. This rich creative power thus breaking forth in
+lovely handiwork is only the outward sign of a full inner life, kindled
+by the fire of aspiration, and glowing with the warm ardor of devotion.
+Bective Abbey dates from about 1150. We are told that the king of Meath
+who founded it for the Cistercian order "endowed it with two hundred and
+forty-five acres of land, a fishing-weir and a mill." From this meager
+outline we can almost restore the picture of the life, altogether
+idyllic and full of quiet delight, that the old Friars lived among the
+meadows of the Boyne.
+
+Grey Abbey was founded a little later, in 1193, for the same Cistercian
+order, where the promontory of the Ards divides Strangford Lough from
+the eastern sea. Over the waters of the lough, the red sandstone hills
+of north Down make a frame for the green of the meadows, as the tide
+laps and murmurs close to the old monastic church. Grey Abbey owes its
+foundation to the piety of a princess of the Isle of Man, wedded to De
+Courcy, the Norman warrior whose victories and defeats we have recorded.
+The great beauty of its church is due to the soaring loftiness of the
+eastern window, and the graceful daring of the arches which in former
+days upheld the central tower.
+
+Other Cistercian foundations are commemorated in the names of
+Abbey-leix in Queen's county, and Abbey-dorney and Abbey-feale in Kerry;
+all three dating from after the reformation of the order by Saint
+Bernard the Younger, though the work of that ardent missionary did not
+apparently extend its influence to Ireland until a later date. This
+reformer of the Cistercians must not be confused with the elder Saint
+Bernard, whose hospice guards the pass of the Alps which bears his name.
+Saint Bernard of the Alps died in 1008, while Saint Bernard the reformer
+was born in 1093, dying sixty years later as abbot of Clara vallis or
+Clairvaux, on the bank of the Aube in northern France. It was at this
+Abbey of the Bright Vale, or Clara vallis, that Archbishop Maelmaedog
+resigned his spirit to heaven, five years before the death of the
+younger Saint Bernard, then abbot there. This is a link between the old
+indigenous church and the continental orders of the Friars.
+
+Killmallock Abbey, in Limerick, belonged to the order of the Dominicans,
+founded by the scion of the Guzmans, the ardent apostle of Old Castile,
+known to history as Saint Dominick. Here again we have a beautiful abbey
+church with a square central tower, upborne on soaring and graceful
+arches from the point where the nave joined the choir. There is only one
+transept--on the south--so that the church is not fully cruciform, a
+peculiarity shared by several other Dominican buildings. The eastern
+window and the window of this transept are full of delicate grace and
+beauty, each containing five lights, and marked by the singularly
+charming manner in which the mullions are interlaced above. Enough
+remains of the cloister and the domestic buildings for us to bring back
+to life the picture of the old monastic days, when the good Friars
+worked and prayed there, with the sunlight falling on them through the
+delicate network of the windows.
+
+Holycross Abbey, near Thurles in Tipperary, was another of the
+Cistercian foundations, its charter, dating from 1182, being still in
+existence. Its church is cruciform; the nave is separated from the north
+aisle by round arches, and from the south aisle by pointed arches, which
+gives it a singular and unusual beauty. The great western window of the
+nave, with its six lights, is also very wonderful. Two chapels are
+attached to the north transept, with a passage between them, its roof
+supported by a double row of pointed arches upheld by twisted pillars.
+The roof is delicately groined, as is the roof of the choir, and the
+whole abbey breathes a luxuriant richness of imagination, bearing
+everywhere the signs of high creative genius. The same lavish
+imagination is shown everywhere in the interlaced tracery, the black
+limestone giving the artist an admirable vehicle for his work. Though
+the charter dates from the twelfth century, some of the work is about
+two centuries later, showing finely the continuity of life and spiritual
+power in the old monastic days.
+
+[Illustration: Holy Cross Abbey, Co. Tipperary.]
+
+The Friars of Saint Augustine, who were in possession of the abbey at
+Newtown on the Boyne, had another foundation not far from West port in
+Mayo, in the Abbey of Ballintober, founded in 1216 by a son of the great
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar. Here also we have the cruciform church, with four
+splendid arches rising from the intersection of nave and choir, and once
+supporting the tower. The Norman windows over the altar, with their
+dog-tooth mouldings, are very perfect. In a chapel on the south of the
+choir are figures of the old abbots carved in stone.
+
+One of the Ui-Briain founded a Franciscan Abbey at Ennis in Clare about
+1240, which is more perfectly preserved than any of those we have
+described. The tower still stands, rising over the junction of nave and
+choir; the refectory, chapter house, and some other buildings still
+remain, while the figure of the patron, Saint Francis of Assisi, still
+stands beside the altar at the north pier of the nave.
+
+Clare Abbey, a mile from Ennis, was founded for the Augustine Friars in
+1195, and here also the tower still stands, dominating the surrounding
+plain. Three miles further south, on the shore of Killone Lake, was yet
+another abbey of the same period, while twenty miles to the north, at
+Corcomroe on the shore of Galway Bay, the Cistercians had yet
+another home.
+
+We might continue the list indefinitely. Some of the most beautiful of
+our abbeys still remain to be recorded, but we can do no more than give
+their names: Bonamargy was built for the Franciscans in Antrim in the
+fifteenth century; the Dominican priory at Roscommon dates from 1257;
+the Cistercian Abbey of Jerpoint in Kilkenny was begun in 1180; Molana
+Abbey, in Waterford, was built for the Augustinians on the site of a
+very old church; and finally Knockmoy Abbey in Galway, famous for its
+fourteenth century frescoes, was begun in 1189. We must remember that
+every one of these represents, and by its variations of style indicates,
+an unbroken life through several centuries. The death-knell of the old
+life of the abbeys and priories, in Ireland as in England, was struck in
+the year 1537 by the law which declared their lands forfeited to the
+crown; as the result of the religious controversies of the beginning of
+the sixteenth century.
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.
+
+A.D. 1603-1660.
+
+The confiscation of the abbey lands, as the result of religious
+controversy, closed an epoch of ecclesiastical life in Ireland, which we
+cannot look back on without great regret for the noble and beautiful
+qualities it brought forth in such abundance. There is a perennial charm
+and fascination in the quiet life of the old religious houses--in the
+world, yet not of the world--which appeals to aesthetic and moral
+elements in our minds in equal degree. From their lovely churches and
+chapter-houses the spirits of the old monks invite us to join them in an
+unworldly peace on earth, a renewal of the golden age, a life full of
+aspiration and self-forgetfulness, with all the burdens of egotism
+laid aside.
+
+Yet after all is said, we can hardly fail to see that out of the
+spoliation and scattering of the religious orders much good came. There
+was a danger that, like the older indigenous schools which they
+supplanted, these later foundations might divide the nation in two, all
+things within their consecrated walls being deemed holy, while all
+without was unregenerate, given up to wrath. A barrier of feelings and
+hopes thus springing up, tends to harden from year to year, till at last
+we have a religious caste grown proud and arrogant, and losing all trace
+of the spiritual fervor which is its sole reason for being.
+
+The evils which surround a wealthy church are great and easily to be
+understood, nor need we lay stress on them. There is, indeed, cause for
+wonder in the spectacle of the followers of him "who had not where to
+lay his head" become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest owners of land in
+Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses without number might
+and did often arise from this very fact. Ambition, the desire of wealth,
+the mere love of ease, led many to profess a religious life who had
+never passed through that transformation of will and understanding which
+is the essence of religion. The very purpose of religion was forgotten,
+or allowed to be hidden away under things excellent in themselves, yet
+not essential; and difference of view about these unessential things led
+to fierce and bitter controversy, and later to open strife and war.
+
+We take religion, in its human aspect, to mean the growth of a new and
+wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive consciousness of the
+individual; a superseding of the personal by the humane; a change from
+egotism to a more universal understanding; so that each shall act, not
+in order to gain an advantage over others, but rather to attain the
+greatest good for himself and others equally; that one shall not
+dominate another for his own profit, but shall rather seek to draw forth
+in that other whatever is best and truest, so that both may find their
+finest growth. Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one's
+neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul, the
+common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse from the
+beginning. Individual consciousness is in no way effaced; something new,
+wider and more humane, something universal, is added to it from above;
+something consciously common to all souls. And through the inspiration
+of that larger soul, the individual life for the first time comes to its
+true power--a power which is held by all pure souls in common.
+
+We can see that something like this was the original inspiration of the
+religious orders. Their very name of Friars or Brothers speaks of the
+ideal of a common life above egotism. They sought a new birth through
+the death of selfishness, through self-sacrifice and renunciation. All
+their life in common was a symbol of the single soul inspiring them, the
+very form of their churches bearing testimony to their devotion. More
+than that, the beauty and inspiration which still radiate from the old
+abbey buildings show how often and in how large a degree that ideal was
+actually attained.
+
+Nevertheless we can very well see how the possession of large wealth and
+costly offerings might be a hindrance to that spirit, fanning back to
+life the smouldering fires of desire. We can see even more clearly that
+the division between the secular and the religious life would tend to
+raise a moral barrier, hardening that very sense of separation which the
+humane and universal consciousness seeks to kill. Finally, we should see
+what the world has often seen: the disciples of the Nazarene dwelling in
+palaces, and vying with princes in the splendor of their retinues. This
+is hardly the way to make real the teaching of "the kingdom not of this
+world." This world, in the meaning of that saying, is the old world of
+egotism, of self-assertion, of selfish rivalry, of the sense of
+separation. The kingdom is that very realm of humane and universal
+consciousness added from above, the sense of the one soul common to all
+men and working through all men, whether they know it or not.
+
+We can, therefore, see that the confiscation of the monasteries, and
+even the persecution of the religious orders, might be the cause of
+lasting spiritual good; it was like the opening of granaries and the
+scattering of grain abroad over the fields. The religious force, instead
+of drawing men out of the world, thenceforth was compelled to work among
+all men, not creating beautiful abbeys but transforming common lives.
+Persecution was the safeguard of sincerity, the fire of purification,
+from which men's spirits came forth pure gold. Among all nations of the
+world, Ireland has long held the first place for pure morals, especially
+in the relations of sex; and this is increasingly true of those
+provinces where the old indigenous element is most firmly established.
+We may affirm that the spiritualizing of religious feeling through
+persecution has had its share in bringing this admirable result,
+working, as it did, on a race which has ever held a high ideal
+of purity.
+
+Thus out of evil comes good; out of oppression, rapacity and
+confiscation grow pure unselfishness, an unworldly ideal, a sense of the
+invisible realm. We shall presently see the same forces of rapacity and
+avarice sowing the seeds for a not less excellent harvest in the world
+of civil life.
+
+The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first Norman
+adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal recognition over
+the whole country until the seventeenth. The old communal tenure of the
+Brehon law was gradually superseded, so that, instead of innumerable
+tribal territories with elected chiefs, there grew up a system of
+estates, where the land was owned by one man and tilled by others. The
+germ of this tenure was the right of private taxation over certain
+districts, granted by the Norman duke to his barons and warriors as the
+reward for their help in battle. Feudal land tenure never was, and never
+pretended to be, a contract between cultivator and landowner for their
+mutual benefit. It was rather the right to prey on the farmer, assigned
+to the landowner by the king, and paid for in past or present services
+to the king. In other words, the head of the Norman army invited his
+officers to help themselves to a share of the cattle and crops over
+certain districts of England, and promised to aid them in securing their
+plunder, in case the Saxon cultivator was rash enough to resist. The
+baronial order presently ceased to render any real service to their
+duke, beyond upholding him that he might uphold them. But there was no
+such surcease for the Saxon cultivator. The share of his cattle and
+crops which he was compelled to give up to the Norman baron became more
+rigidly defined, more strictly exacted, with every succeeding century,
+and the whole civil state of England was built up on this principle.
+
+The baronial order assembled at Runnymead to force the hand of the king.
+From that time forward their power increased, while the king's power
+waned. But there was no Runnymead for the Saxon cultivator. He
+continued, as to this day he continues, to pay the share of his cattle
+and crops to the Norman baron or his successor, in return for
+services--no longer rendered--to the king. The whole civil state of
+England, therefore, depends on the principle of private taxation; the
+Norman barons and their successors receiving a share of the cattle and
+crops of the whole country, year after year, generation after
+generation, century after century, as payment for services long become
+purely imaginary, and even in the beginning rendered not to the
+cultivator who was taxed, but to the head of the armed invaders, who
+stood ready to enforce the payment. The Constitution of England embodies
+this very principle even now, in the twentieth century. Two of the three
+Estates,--King, Lords and Commons,--in whom the law-making power is
+vested, represent the Norman conquest, while even the third, still
+called the Lower House, boasts of being "an assembly of gentlemen," that
+is, of those who possess the right of private taxation of land, the
+right to claim a share of the cattle and crops of the whole country
+without giving anything at all in return.
+
+This is the system which English influence slowly introduced into
+Ireland, and with the reign of the first Stuarts the change was
+practically complete, guaranteed by law, and enforced by armed power.
+The tribesmen were now tenants of their former elected chief, in whom
+the ownership of the tribal land was invested; the right of privately
+taxing the tribesmen was guaranteed to the chief by law, and a share of
+all cattle and crops was his by legal right, not as head of the tribe,
+but as owner of the land, with power to dispossess the tribesmen if they
+failed to pay his tax.
+
+But very many districts had long before this come under the dominion of
+Norman adventurers, like the De Courcys, the De Lacys, and the rest, of
+whose coming we have told. They also enjoyed the right of private
+taxation over the districts under their dominion, and, naturally, had
+power to assign this right to others,--not only to their heirs, but to
+their creditors,--or even simply to sell the right of taxing a certain
+district to the highest bidder in open market.
+
+The tribal warfare of the Middle Ages had brought many of the old chiefs
+and Norman lords into open strife with the central power, with the
+result that the possessions of unsuccessful chiefs and lords were
+continually assigned by the law-courts to those who stood on the side of
+the central power, the right to tax certain districts thus changing
+hands indefinitely. The law-courts thus came into possession of a very
+potent weapon, whether for rewarding the friends or punishing the
+enemies of the central power, or simply for the payment of personal and
+partisan favors.
+
+During the reign of the first Stuarts the full significance of this
+weapon seems to have been grasped. We see an unlimited traffic in the
+right to tax; estates confiscated and assigned to time-serving
+officials, and endless abuses arising from the corruption of the courts,
+the judges being appointed by the very persons who were presently to
+invoke the law to their own profit. The tribal system was submerged,
+and the time of uncertainty was taken advantage of to introduce
+unlimited abuses, to assign to adventurers a fat share of other men's
+goods, to create a class legally owning the land, and entitled, in
+virtue of that ownership, to a share of the cattle and crops which they
+had done nothing to produce.
+
+The Stuarts were at this very time sowing the seeds of civil war in
+England by the introduction of like abuses, the story of which has been
+repeatedly told; and we are all familiar with the history of the great
+uprising which was thereby provoked, to the temporary eclipse of the
+power of the crown. The story of the like uprising at the same epoch,
+and from kindred causes, in Ireland, is much more obscure, but equally
+worth recording, and to this uprising we may now turn.
+
+Its moral causes we have already spoken of. There was, first, the
+confiscation of the abbey lands, and the transfer of church revenues and
+buildings to Anglican clergy--clergy, that is, who recognized the
+sovreign of England as the head of the church. This double confiscation
+touched the well-springs of intense animosity, the dispossessed abbots
+using all the influences of their order in foreign lands to bring about
+their re-installation, while the controversy as to the headship of the
+church aroused all the fierce and warring passions that had been raging
+on the Continent since the beginning of the sixteenth century.
+
+There were, besides, the griefs of the dispossessed chieftains, whose
+tribal lands had been given to others. Chief among these was the famous
+house of O'Neill, the descendants of Nial, the old pagan monarch whose
+wars are thought to have brought the captive of Slemish Mountain to
+Ireland. The O'Neills, like their neighbors the O'Donnells, descendants
+of Domnall, had been one of the great forces of tribal strife for eighty
+generations, and they now saw their lands confiscated and given over to
+strangers. But they were only representatives of a feeling which was
+universal; an indignant opposition to arbitrary and tyrannous
+expropriation.
+
+The head of the O'Neills had made his peace with the Tudors on the very
+day Queen Elizabeth died, and the tribal lands had been guaranteed to
+him in perpetuity. But within four years plots were set on foot by the
+central authorities, possibly acting in good faith, to dispossess him
+and the chief of the O'Donnells on a charge of treason; and in 1607
+both fled to the Continent. Their example was followed by numberless
+others, and the more restless and combative spirits among the tribesmen,
+who preferred fighting to the tilling of their fields, entered the
+continental armies in large numbers.
+
+When the chiefs of the north fled to the Continent, their lands were
+held to have reverted to the crown; and not only was the right to tax
+the produce of these lands assigned to adherents of the central power,
+but numbers of farmers from the Scottish lowlands, and in lesser degree
+from England, were brought over and settled on the old tribal territory.
+The tribesmen, with their cattle, were driven to less fertile districts,
+and the valleys were tilled by the transplanted farmers of Scotland.
+This was the Plantation of Ulster, of 1611,--four years after the flight
+of O'Neill and O'Donnell. The religious controversies of Scotland were
+thereby introduced into Ireland, so that there were three parties now in
+conflict--the old indigenous church, dispossessed of revenues and
+buildings, and even of civil rights; the Anglicans who had received
+these revenues and buildings, and, lastly, the Dissenters--Presbyterians
+and Puritans--equally opposed to both the former.
+
+The struggle between the king and Parliament of England now found an
+echo in Ireland, the Anglican party representing the king, while the
+Scottish and English newcomers sympathized with the Parliament. A
+cross-fire of interests and animosities was thus aroused, which greatly
+complicated the first elements of strife. The Parliament at Dublin was
+in the hands of the Puritan party, and was in no sense representative of
+the other elements of the country. There was a Puritan army of about ten
+thousand, as a garrison of defence for the Puritan newcomers in Ulster,
+and there were abundant materials of an opposing national army in the
+tribal warriors both at home and on the Continent.
+
+These national materials were presently drawn together by the head of
+the O'Neills, known to history as Owen Roe, an admirable leader and a
+most accomplished man, who wrote and spoke Latin, Spanish, French and
+English, as well as his mother-tongue. Owen Roe O'Neill had won renown
+on many continental battlefields, and was admirably fitted by genius and
+training to lead a national party, not only in council but in the field.
+The nucleus of his army he established in Tyrone, gaining numbers of
+recruits whom he rapidly turned into excellent soldiers.
+
+This took place at the end of 1641 and the beginning of 1642, and the
+other forces of the country were organized about the same time. The
+lines of difference between the Anglican and Catholic parties were at
+this time very lightly drawn, and the Norman lords found themselves able
+to co-operate with the Catholic bishops in forming a General Assembly at
+Kells, which straightway set itself to frame a Constitution for
+the country.
+
+The Norman lords had meanwhile assembled and organized their retainers,
+so that there were now three armies in Ireland: the garrison of the
+Scottish settlers under Monroe, strongly in sympathy with the Puritans;
+the tribal army under Owen Roe O'Neill; and the army of the Norman
+lords. The General Assembly outlined a system of parliamentary
+representation in which the Lords and Commons were to form a single
+House, the latter, two hundred and twenty-six in number, representing
+all the important cities and towns. A supreme Cabinet was to be formed,
+composed of six members for each of the four provinces, twenty-four in
+all, who might be lords spiritual or temporal, or commoners, according
+to the choice of the Parliament. This Cabinet, thus selected from the
+whole Parliament, was the responsible executive of the country; and
+under the Supreme Council a series of Provincial Councils and County
+Councils were to be formed along the same lines.
+
+[Illustration: Donegal Castle.]
+
+This plan was adopted at a general meeting of all the influential forces
+of the country, which assembled in May at Kilkenny, where many
+Parliaments had sat during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Writs
+were issued for elections under the new Constitution, and the date of
+the first assembly of the new Parliament was fixed for October. The new
+national body enjoyed abundant revenues, and no small state marked its
+deliberations in Kilkenny. We read of an endless series of
+illuminations, receptions, banquets and balls,--the whole of the Norman
+nobility of Leinster lavishing their great wealth in magnificent
+display. The Supreme Council journeyed in state from Kilkenny to
+Wexford, from Wexford to Waterford, from Waterford to Limerick and
+Galway, surrounded by hundreds of horsemen with drawn swords, and
+accompanied by an army of officials. We hear of "civil and military
+representations of comedies and stage plays, feasts and banquets, and
+palate-enticing dishes."
+
+The General Assembly, duly elected, finally met on October 23, 1642, at
+Kilkenny. On the same day was fought the battle of Edgehill, between
+the king of England and the forces of the English Parliament. This
+battle was the signal for division of counsels in the new Assembly. The
+Norman lords of Leinster, who stood on the ground of feudalism, and
+lived under the shadow of royal authority, were strongly drawn to take
+the side of the king against the English Parliament, and overtures of
+negotiation were made, which came near gaining a recognition and
+legalization of the General Assembly by the English Crown.
+
+While the leaders at Kilkenny were being drawn towards the royalists of
+England, Owen Roe O'Neill was successfully holding Ulster against the
+Puritan forces under Monroe and Leslie, with their headquarters at
+Carrickfergus. Thus matters went on till the autumn of 1643, when we
+find him inflicting a serious defeat on the English army under Monk and
+Moore at Portlester in Meath, in which Moore was killed and his forces
+driven back within the walls of Drogheda.
+
+The General Assembly continued to exercise sovreign authority at
+Kilkenny, collecting revenues, maintaining courts of justice in the
+provinces, and keeping several armies in the field, most effective of
+which was undoubtedly that of Owen Roe O'Neill. We find matters still in
+this condition three years later, in May, 1646, when Monroe and the
+Scottish forces prepared to inaugurate an offensive campaign from their
+base at Carrickfergus. General Robert Monroe had about seven thousand
+men at Carrickfergus; his brother George had five hundred at Coleraine;
+while there was a Scottish army at Derry, numbering about two thousand
+men. It was decided to converge these three forces on Clones, in
+Monaghan, and thence to proceed southwards against the government of the
+General Assembly, then centered at Limerick. Clones was sixty miles from
+Derry, and rather more from Coleraine and Carrickfergus, the two other
+points of departure.
+
+Owen Roe O'Neill was then at Cavan, fourteen miles south of Clones, with
+five thousand foot and five hundred horse, all "good, hopeful men," to
+use his own words. General Robert Monroe, starting from Carrickfergus,
+and marching by Lisburn and Armagh, expected to reach Glasslough, some
+sixteen miles from Clones, on June 5th. By a forced march from Cavan,
+Owen Roe O'Neill reached Glasslough a day earlier, and marching along
+the northern Blackwater, pitched his camp on the north bank of the
+river. Here he was directly in the line between the two Monroes, who
+could only join their forces after dislodging him; and Robert Monroe,
+who by that time had reached Armagh, saw that it would be necessary to
+give battle without delay if the much smaller forces from the north were
+not to be cut off.
+
+Robert Monroe began a movement northwards towards Owen Roe's position at
+dawn on June 5th, and presently reached the Blackwater, to find himself
+face to face with Owen Roe's army across the river. The two forces kept
+parallel with each other for some time, till Robert Monroe finally
+forded the Blackwater at Caledon, Owen Roe then retiring in the
+direction of the current, which here flows north. Owen Roe, in his
+movement of withdrawal, brought his army through a narrow pass, which he
+left in charge of one of his best infantry regiments, with orders to
+hold it only so long as the enemy could be safely harassed, meanwhile
+carrying his main body back to the hill of Knocknacloy, the position he
+had chosen from the first for the battle, and to gain which he had up to
+this time been manoeuvering.
+
+At Knocknacloy he had the center of his army protected by the hill, the
+right by a marsh, and the left by the river, so that, a flanking
+movement on Monroe's part being impossible, the Scottish general was
+forced to make a frontal attack. Under cover of the rearguard action at
+the pass, which caused both delay and confusion to Monroe's army, Owen
+Roe formed his men in order of battle. His first line was of four
+columns, with considerable spaces between them; his cavalry was on the
+right and left wings, behind this first line; while three columns more
+were drawn up some distance farther back, behind the openings in the
+front line, and forming the reserve. We should remember that not only
+was Owen Roe's army outnumbered by Monroe's, but also that Owen Roe had
+no artillery, while Monroe was well supplied with guns.
+
+Meanwhile Monroe's army came into touch with Owen Roe's force, and the
+Scottish general opened fire with guns and muskets, to which the muskets
+of Owen Roe as vigorously replied. The Scottish artillery was planted on
+a hillock a quarter-mile from Owen Roe's center, and under cover of its
+fire an infantry charge was attempted, which was brilliantly repulsed by
+the pikemen of Owen Roe's army. A second attack was made by the Scottish
+cavalry, who tried to ford the river, and thus turn the left flank of
+the Irish army, but they were met and routed by the Irish horse. This
+was about six in the evening, and the sun, hanging low in the sky, fell
+full in the faces of the Scottish troops. Owen Roe promptly followed up
+the rout of the Scottish horse by an advance, making a sweeping movement
+from right to left, and thereby forcing Monroe towards the junction of
+two streams, where he had no space to move. At this point Owen Roe's
+army received a notable accession of strength in the form of four
+squadrons of cavalry, sent earlier in the day to guard against the
+possible approach of George Monroe from Coleraine.
+
+At a signal from Owen Roe, his army advanced upon Monroe's force, to be
+met by a charge of the Scottish cavalry, instantly replied to by a
+charge of the Irish cavalry through the three open spaces in the front
+infantry line of Owen Roe's army. Monroe's first line was broken, and
+the Irish pikemen, the equivalent of a bayonet charge, steadily forced
+him backwards. It was a fierce struggle, hand to hand, eye to eye, and
+blade to blade. The order of Owen Roe's advance was admirably preserved,
+while the Scottish and English forces were in confusion, already broken
+and crowded into a narrow and constricted space between the two rivers.
+Finally the advancing Irish army reached and stormed the hillock where
+Monroe's artillery was placed, and victory was palpably won. The defeat
+of the Scottish and English army became an utter rout, and when the sun
+set more than three thousand of them lay dead on the field.
+
+It is almost incredible that the Irish losses were only seventy, yet
+such is the number recorded, while not only was the opposing army
+utterly defeated and dispersed, but Monroe's whole artillery, his tents
+and baggage, fifteen hundred horses, twenty stand of colors, two months'
+provisions and numbers of prisoners of war fell into the hands of Owen
+Roe; while, as a result of the battle, the two auxiliary forces were
+forced to retreat and take refuge in Coleraine and Derry, General Robert
+Monroe escaping meanwhile to Carrickfergus. It is only just to him to
+say that our best accounts of the battle come from officers in Monroe's
+army, Owen Roe contenting himself with the merest outline of the result
+gained, but saying nothing of the consummate generalship that gained it.
+
+For the next two years we see Owen Roe O'Neill holding the great central
+plain, the west and most of the north of Ireland against the armies of
+the English Parliamentarians and Royalists alike, and gaining victory
+after victory, generally against superior numbers, better armed and
+better equipped. We find him time after time almost betrayed by the
+Supreme Council, in which the Norman lords of Leinster, perpetually
+anxious for their own feudal estates, were ready to treat with whichever
+of the English parties was for the moment victorious, hoping that,
+whatever might be the outcome of the great English struggle, they
+themselves might be gainers. At this time they were in possession of
+many of the abbey lands, and there was perpetual friction between them
+and the ecclesiastics, their co-religionists, who had been driven from
+these same lands, so that the Norman landowners were the element of
+fatal weakness throughout this whole movement, willing to wound, and yet
+afraid to strike. While praying for the final defeat of the English
+parliamentary forces, they dreaded to see this defeat brought about by
+Owen Roe O'Neill, in whom they saw the representative of the old tribal
+ownership of Gaelic times, a return to which would mean their own
+extinction.
+
+Matters went so far that the Supreme Council, representing chiefly these
+Norman lords, had practically betrayed its trust to the Royalist party
+in England, and would have completed that betrayal had not the
+beheading of King Charles signalized the triumph of the
+Parliamentarians. Even then the Norman lords hoped for the Restoration,
+and strove in every way to undermine the authority of their own general,
+Owen Roe O'Neill, who was almost forced to enter into an alliance with
+the Puritans by the treachery of the Norman lords. It is of the greatest
+interest to find Monroe writing thus to Owen Roe in August, 1649: "By my
+own extraction, I have an interest in the Irish nation. I know how your
+lands have been taken, and your people made hewers of wood and drawers
+of water. If an Irishman can be a scourge to his own nation, the English
+will give him fair words but keep him from all trust, that they may
+destroy him when they have served themselves by him."
+
+On November 6, 1649, this great general died after a brief illness,
+having for seven years led his armies to constant victory, while the
+Norman lords, who were in name his allies, were secretly plotting
+against him for their own profit. Yet so strong and dominant was his
+genius that he overcame not only the forces of his foes but the
+treacheries of his friends, and his last days saw him at one with the
+Normans, while the forces of the Parliamentarians in Ireland were
+calling on him for help.
+
+We sea, therefore, that for full eight years, from the beginning of 1642
+to the close of 1649, Ireland had an independent national government,
+with a regularly elected Representative Assembly, and a central
+authority, the Supreme Council, appointed by that Assembly, with judges
+going circuit and holding their courts regularly, while the Supreme
+Council held a state of almost regal magnificence, and kept several
+armies continuously in the field. While Owen Roe O'Neill lived, that
+part of the army under his command was able not only to secure an
+unbroken series of victories for itself, but also to retrieve the
+defeats suffered by less competent commanders, so that at his death he
+was at the summit of power and fame. If regret were ever profitable, we
+might well regret that he did not follow the example of the great
+English commander, his contemporary, and declare himself Lord Protector
+of Ireland, with despotic power.
+
+After his death, the work he had done so well was all undone again, in
+part by treachery, in part by the victories of Oliver Cromwell. Yet ten
+years after the Lord Protector's arrival in Ireland, his own work was
+undone not less completely, and the Restoration saw once more enthroned
+every principle against which Cromwell had so stubbornly contended.
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+THE JACOBITE WARS.
+
+A.D. 1660-1750.
+
+The Restoration saw Cromwell's work completely undone; nor did the class
+which helped him to his victories again rise above the surface. The
+genius of the Stuarts was already sowing the seeds of new revolutions;
+but the struggle was presently to be fought out, not between the king
+and the people, but between the king and the more liberal or more
+ambitious elements of the baronial class, who saw in the despotic
+aspirations of the Stuarts a menace to their own power.
+
+These liberal elements in England selected as their champion Prince
+William of Nassau, before whose coming the English king found it
+expedient to fly to France, seeking and finding a friend in that apostle
+of absolutism, Louis XIV. We have already seen how the interests of the
+feudal lords of Ireland, with the old Norman families as their core,
+drew them towards the Stuarts. The divine right of the landowner
+depended, as we saw, on the divine right of kings; so that they
+naturally gravitated towards the Stuarts, and drew their tenants and
+retainers after them. Thus a considerable part of Ireland was enlisted
+on the side of James II, and shared the misfortunes which presently
+overtook him--or in truth did not overtake him, as the valiant gentleman
+outran them and escaped. Nothing is more firmly fixed in the memories of
+the whole Irish people than a good-natured contempt for this runaway
+English king, whose cause they were induced by the feudal lords to
+espouse. We shall follow the account of an officer in the Jacobite army
+in narrating the events of the campaigns that ensued.
+
+James, having gained courage and funds from his sojourn at the court of
+Louis XIV, presently made his appearance in Ireland, relying on the
+support of the feudal lords. He landed at Kinsale, in Cork, on March 12,
+1688, according to the Old Style, and reached Dublin twelve days later,
+warmly welcomed by Lord and Lady Tyrconnell. The only place in the
+country which strongly declared for William was the walled city of
+Derry, whence we have seen the Puritan forces issuing during the wars of
+the preceding generation. James, this officer says, went north to Derry,
+in spite of the bitterness of the season, "in order to preserve his
+Protestant subjects there from the ill-treatment which he apprehended
+they might receive from the Irish," and was mightily surprised when the
+gates were shut in his face and the citizens opened fire upon him from
+the walls.
+
+[Illustration: Tullymore Park, Co. Down.]
+
+James withdrew immediately to Dublin, assembled a Parliament there, and
+spent several months in vain discussions, not even finding courage to
+repeal the penal laws which Queen Elizabeth had passed against all who
+refused to recognize her as the head of the church. James was already
+embarked on a career of duplicity, professing great love for Ireland,
+yet fearing to carry out his professions lest he might arouse animosity
+in England, and so close the door against his hoped-for return.
+
+Enniskillen, on an island in Lough Erne, dominated by a strong castle,
+was, like Derry, a settlement of Scottish and English colonists brought
+over by the first of the Stuarts. These colonists were up in arms
+against the grandson of their first patron, and had successfully
+attacked his forces which were besieging Derry. James, therefore, sent a
+small body of troops against them; but the expedition ended in an
+ignominious rout rather than a battle, for the Jacobite army seems
+hardly to have struck a blow. The Irish leader, Lord Mountcashel, who
+manfully stood his ground in the general panic, was wounded and
+taken prisoner.
+
+The armies of James, meanwhile, made no headway against the courageous
+and determined defenders of Derry, where the siege was degenerating into
+a blockade, the scanty rations and sickness of the besieged being a far
+more formidable danger than the attacks of the besiegers. James even
+weakened the attacking forces by withdrawing a part of the troops to
+Dublin, being resolved at all risks to protect himself.
+
+So devoid of resolution and foresight was James that we only find him
+taking means to raise an army when Schomberg, the able lieutenant of
+William, was about to invade the north of Ireland. Schomberg landed at
+Bangor in Down in August, 1689, and marched south towards Drogheda, but
+finding that James was there before him, he withdrew and established a
+strongly fortified camp near Dundalk. James advanced to a point about
+seven miles from Schomberg, and there entrenched himself in turn, and so
+the two armies remained; as one of Schomberg's officers says, "our
+General would not risk anything, nor King James venture anything." The
+long delay was very fatal to Schomberg's army, his losses by sickness
+and disease being more than six thousand men.
+
+Early in November, as winter was already making itself felt, James
+decided to withdraw to Dublin; as our narrator says, "the young
+commanders were in some haste to return to the capital, where the ladies
+expected them with great impatience; so that King James, being once more
+persuaded to disband the new levies and raising his camp a little of the
+soonest, dispersed his men too early into winter quarters, having spent
+that campaign without any advantage, vainly expecting that his
+Protestant subjects of England who were in the camp of Schomberg would
+come over to him. And now the winter season, which should be employed in
+serious consultations, and making the necessary preparations for the
+ensuing campaign, was idly spent in revels, in gaming, and other
+debauches unfit for a Catholic court. But warlike Schomberg, who, after
+the retreat of James, had leisure to remove his sickly soldiers, to bury
+the dead, and put the few men that remained alive and were healthy into
+winter quarters of refreshment, took the field early in spring, before
+Tyrconnell was awake, and reduced the castle of Charlemont, the only
+place that held for James in Ulster, which was lost for want of
+provisions; and the concerns of the unfortunate James were ill-managed
+by those whom he entrusted with the administration of public affairs."
+
+We come thus to the spring of 1690. Derry was still holding out
+valiantly against the horrors of famine and sickness, the blockade being
+maintained, though nothing like a determined storm was attempted. A
+little of the courage shown by the apprentices of Derry, had he
+possessed it, might have revived the drooping fortunes of the fugitive
+English king. It seems, however, that even Schomberg's withdrawal to
+Carrickfergus failed to arouse him to more vigorous and valiant
+measures. It is clear that he was ready to abandon his Irish allies,
+hoping by their betrayal to gain favor with his "subjects in England,"
+whom he confidently expected to recall him, as they had recalled his
+brother Charles thirty years before. James found an able lieutenant in
+Tyrconnell, who thoroughly entered into his master's schemes of
+duplicity; and it is fairly clear that these two worthies, had occasion
+offered, would have betrayed each other with a perfectly good grace.
+
+Thus matters dragged on quite indecisively until June, 1690, when King
+William landed at Carrickfergus with a mixed force of English, Scottish,
+Dutch, Danish, Swedish and German troops, and joined his forces to the
+remnant of Schomberg's army. James, as we saw, had disbanded his army on
+breaking up his camp in the previous autumn, and had made no effective
+effort to get a new army together. Nor could he have used a strong army,
+had he possessed one. Nevertheless James marched north with such troops
+as were available, leaving Dublin on June 16th. He took up a strong
+position on the borders of Ulster and Leinster, thus blocking William's
+way south to the capital, only to abandon it again on the news of
+William's approach, when he retired to Drogheda and encamped there. He
+thus gave the whole advantage of initiative into the hands of his
+opponent, a brave man and a skillful general.
+
+James seems to have hoped that William's army would be mowed down by
+disease, as Schomberg's had been in the preceding campaign. And there is
+reason to believe that Tyrconnell, foreseeing the defeat of James,
+wished to avoid any serious fighting, which would be an obstacle in his
+way when he sought to patch up a peace with the victor and make terms
+for himself. But his opponent was inspired by a very different temper,
+and William's army advanced steadily southwards, to find James encamped
+on the southern bank of the Boyne.
+
+There were several fords by which William's army would have to cross on
+its way south. But James was such an incapable general that he did not
+even throw up trenches to defend the fords. William's army arrived and
+encamped on the north bank of the river, and the next day, June 30th,
+was employed in an artillery duel between the two armies, when
+considerable injury was inflicted on William's forces, although he was
+far stronger in artillery than his opponent. During that night, James,
+already certain of defeat, sent away most of his artillery to Dublin,
+leaving only six guns with his army on the Boyne.
+
+It seems tolerably certain that, when the battle began again next day,
+William's army numbered between forty-five and fifty thousand, with the
+usual proportion of cavalry,--probably a tenth of the whole. James, on
+the other hand, had from twenty to twenty-five thousand men, about a
+tenth of them, probably, being mounted; he had, by his own fault, only
+six guns against about fifty in William's batteries. William's line of
+battle was formed, as usual, with the infantry in the center and the
+cavalry on the wings. He gave the elder Schomberg command of the center,
+while Schomberg's son, with the cavalry of the right wing, was sent four
+or five miles up the river to Slane, to cross there and turn the left
+flank of the opposing army. William himself led the cavalry on the left
+wing, and later on in the battle, descending the river, crossed at a
+lower ford. He could thus attack the right flank of his opponent; the
+infantry composing the center of his army advancing, meanwhile, under
+cover of a heavy artillery fire, and forcing the fords of the Boyne.
+
+The river is shallow here, and in the middle of summer the water is
+nowhere too deep for wading, so that it was a very slight protection to
+the army of James. A better general would at least have chosen a
+stronger position, and one which would have given him some manifest
+advantage. Such positions were to be found all along the road by which
+William had advanced from Carrickfergus. The country on both sides of
+the Boyne is flat; rolling meadows with the shallow river dividing
+them--a country giving every opportunity to cavalry.
+
+William's right, under the younger Schomberg, made several unsuccessful
+attempts to cross the river at Slane, being repeatedly beaten back by
+Arthur O'Neill's horse. Finally, however, the way was cleared for him by
+a vigorous cannonade, to which O'Neill, having no cannon, was unable to
+reply, and William's right wing thus forced the passage of the Boyne.
+
+William's center now advanced, and began the passage of the river, under
+cover of a heavy artillery fire. Every foot of the advance was
+stubbornly contested, and such headway was made by the Irish troops that
+Schomberg's bodyguard was scattered or cut to pieces, and he himself was
+slain. The center of William's army was undoubtedly being beaten back,
+when, crossing lower down with eighteen squadrons of cavalry, he
+fiercely attacked the right flank of the Irish army and thus turned the
+possibility of defeat into certain victory. That the Irish troops,
+although outnumbered two to one and led by a coward, fought valiantly,
+is admitted on all sides. They charged and re-charged ten times in
+succession, and only gave way at last under pressure of greatly superior
+numbers. The retreat of the Irish army was orderly,--the more so,
+doubtless, because the former king of England was no longer among them,
+having most valiantly fled to Dublin, and thence to Kinsale, where he
+took ship for France, leaving behind him a reputation quite singular in
+the annals of Ireland.
+
+Within a week after the battle, the Irish army, which had preserved
+order and discipline even in the face of the flight of James, occupied
+Limerick, and made preparations to hold that strong position, with the
+untouched resources of the western province behind them, and the hope,
+unshaken by their rude experience, that the runaway king might reinforce
+them by sea. Through all the events that followed, presently to be
+narrated, it must be understood that Tyrconnell was steadily seeking to
+undermine the resolution of the Irish army, hoping the sooner to make
+his peace with King William, to secure his Irish estates, and, very
+possibly, be appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, under the new king.
+
+William meanwhile brought his army southwards, being welcomed to Dublin
+by the large English element there, and presently continued his march to
+Waterford, which was surrendered to him, as was alleged, by Tyrconnell's
+orders. He also reduced Kilkenny, to which Tyrconnell had failed to
+send reinforcements, though repeatedly appealed to by its commander.
+About this time, on July 28th or a day or two later, the brave garrison
+of Derry was relieved by some of William's ships, which broke the line
+of blockade across the river and brought abundant provisions to the
+emaciated defenders.
+
+A section of William's army under Douglas was sent to take Athlone, the
+strong fortress which guarded the ford, and later the bridge across the
+Shannon--the high road from Leinster to the western province of
+Connacht, beyond the river. Douglas, after a fierce attack lasting seven
+days, was compelled to retreat again to the main army encamped at
+Waterford. The French auxiliaries under Lauzun, who had not hitherto
+greatly distinguished themselves for valor, losing less than a score of
+men at the Boyne, now deserted Limerick and retreated to Galway, taking
+with them, if the fugitive king may be credited, a great quantity of
+ammunition from the fortress of Limerick.
+
+[Illustration: Thormond Bridge, Limerick.]
+
+Finally, on August 9th, William's army appeared before Limerick, and the
+famous siege began. Tyrconnell signalized himself by deserting the fords
+over the Shannon and departing to Galway, declaring that the town would
+certainly surrender within a week. The city, however, was of a
+different opinion. The garrison, under Sarsfield, made vigorous
+preparation for a defence, and a party under Sarsfield himself cut off
+one of William's convoys from Dublin, destroying the siege-train which
+was being brought for the attack on the city. William's cavalry, taking
+advantage of Tyrconnell's retreat, crossed the ford of the Shannon to
+complete the investment of the city on that side, but they presently
+returned, having done nothing effective.
+
+We hear of more attempts by Tyrconnell to undermine the resolution of
+the army, and of attacks by William's force, which gave him possession
+of the outworks, so that he was able presently to begin cannonading the
+walls, to make a breach for an assault. The officer in the Irish army
+whom we have already quoted, gives this account of the siege: "Never was
+a town better attacked and better defended than the city of Limerick.
+William left nothing unattempted that the art of war, the skill of a
+great captain and the valor of veteran soldiers could put in execution
+to gain the place; and the Irish omitted nothing that courage and
+constancy could practice to defend it. The continual assaults of the one
+and the frequent sallies of the other consumed a great many brave men
+both of the army and the garrison. On the nineteenth day, William, after
+fighting for every inch of ground he gained, having made a large breach
+in the wall, gave a general assault which lasted for three hours; and
+though his men mounted the breach, and some even entered the town, they
+were gallantly repulsed and forced to retire with considerable loss.
+William, resolving to renew the assault next day, could not persuade his
+men to advance, though he offered to lead them in person. Whereupon, all
+in a rage, he left the camp, and never stopped till he came to
+Waterford, where he took shipping for England; his army in the meantime
+retiring by night from Limerick."
+
+During this first siege of Limerick the garrison numbered some twenty
+thousand, by no means well armed. William's besieging army was about
+forty thousand, with forty cannon and mortars. His loss was between
+three and four thousand, while the loss of the defenders was about half
+that number.
+
+William, presently arriving in England, sent reinforcements to his
+generals in Ireland, under Lord Churchill, afterwards famous as the Duke
+of Marlborough. Tyrconnell had meantime followed his runaway king to
+France, as was involved in a maze of contradictory designs, the one
+clear principle of which was the future advantage of Tyrconnell. Louis
+XIV, who had reasons of his own for wishing to keep the armies of
+William locked up in Ireland, was altogether willing to advise and help
+a continuance of hostilities in that country. James seems to have
+recognized his incapacity too clearly to attempt anything definite, or,
+what is more probable, was too irresolute by nature even to determine to
+give up the fight. Tyrconnell himself sincerely wished to make his peace
+with William, so that he might once more enjoy the revenues of his
+estates. The Irish army was thoroughly determined to hold out to
+the end.
+
+With these conflicting desires and designs, no single-hearted and
+resolute action was possible. Matters seem to have drifted till about
+January, 1691, when Tyrconnell returned; "but he brought with him no
+soldiers, very few arms, little provision and no money." A month later a
+messenger came direct to Sarsfield, then with the army at Galway, from
+Louis XIV, promising reinforcements under the renowned soldier Saint
+Ruth. This letter to a great extent revealed the double part Tyrconnell
+had been playing at the French court, and did much to undermine his
+credit with the better elements in the Irish army.
+
+The French fleet finally arrived at Limerick in May, 1691, under Saint
+Ruth, bringing a considerable quantity of provisions for the Irish army;
+but it is doubtful whether this arrival added any real element of
+strength to the army. The Irish army, soon after this, was assembled at
+Athlone, to defend the passage of the Shannon. Much vigorous fighting
+took place, but Ginkell, William's general, finally captured that
+important fortress in June. The road to Galway was now open, and
+Ginkell's army prepared to march on that important city, the strongest
+place in Connacht. Saint Ruth prepared to resist their approach, fixing
+his camp at Aughrim, The Hill of the Horses, some eighteen miles from
+Athlone and thirty-five from Galway. We may once more tell the story in
+the words of an eye-witness:
+
+"Aughrim was then a ruined town, and the castle was not much better,
+situated in a bottom on the north side of the hill, where the Irish army
+encamped. The direct way from Ballinasloe was close by the castle, but
+there was another way about, on the south-east side of the hill. The
+rest of the ground fronting the camp was a marsh, passable only for
+foot. The army of Ginkell appeared in sight of Aughrim on July 12th. The
+Irish army, composed of about ten thousand foot, two thousand
+men-at-arms, and as many light horse, was soon drawn up by Saint Ruth in
+two lines; the cavalry on both wings flanking the foot; and having
+placed Chevalier de Tessé on the right wing of the horse, and Sarsfield
+on the left, and giving their several posts to the rest of the chief
+commanders, Saint Ruth obliged himself to no certain place, but rode
+constantly from one side to another to give the necessary orders where
+he saw occasion. Ginkell being now come up at so near a distance that
+his guns and other battering engines might do execution, he ordered them
+to be discharged, and as he had a vast number of them he made them play
+incessantly on the Irish army, hoping by that means to force them from
+the hill, which was of great advantage. But the Irish, encouraged by the
+presence and conduct of Saint Ruth, kept their ground and beat the
+English as often as they advanced towards them. The fight continued from
+noon till sunset, the Irish foot having still the better of the enemy;
+and Saint Ruth, observing the advantage of his side, and that the
+enemy's foot were much disordered, was resolved, by advancing with the
+cavalry, to make the victory complete, when an unlucky shot from one of
+the terrible new engines, hitting him in the head, made an end of his
+life, and took away the courage of his army. For Ginkell, observing the
+Irish to be in some disorder, gave a notable conjecture that the general
+was either killed or wounded, whereupon he commanded his army to
+advance. The Irish cavalry, discouraged by the death of Saint Ruth, and
+none of the general officers coming to head them in his place, gave
+back, and quitted the field. The foot who were engaged with the enemy,
+knowing nothing of the general's death or the retreat of the cavalry,
+continued fighting till they were surrounded by the whole English army;
+so that the most of them were cut off, and no quarter given but to a
+very few; the rest, by favor of the night then approaching, for Saint
+Ruth was killed about sunset, made their escape."
+
+To this we may add the testimony of the runaway monarch: "The Irish
+behaved with great spirit. They convinced the English they had to do
+with men no less resolute than themselves. Never assault was made with
+greater fury nor sustained with greater obstinacy. The Irish foot
+repulsed the enemy several times, particularly in the center. They even
+looked upon the victory as certain.... The Irish lost four thousand
+men. The loss of the English was not much inferior."
+
+The army of Ginkell, thus in possession of the key of Connacht, advanced
+upon its most important city, arriving before Galway a few days after
+the battle of Aughrim. Galway, however, was full of divided counsels,
+and speedily surrendered, so that Limerick alone remained. Limerick was
+greatly weakened, now that Galway, and with Galway the whole of Connacht
+to which alone Limerick could look for supplies, was in the hands of the
+enemy. Ginkell turned all his efforts in the direction of Limerick,
+appearing before the city and pitching his camp there on August 25,
+1691. Beginning with the next day, our narrator tells us, "he placed his
+cannon and other battering engines, which played furiously night and day
+without intermission, reducing that famous city almost to ashes. No
+memorable action, however, happened till the night between September 15
+and 16, when he made a bridge of boats over the Shannon, which being
+ready by break of day, he passed over with a considerable body of horse
+and foot on the Connacht side of the river, without any opposition. This
+so alarmed Sheldon, who commanded the cavalry at that time, that without
+staying for orders, he immediately retired to a mountain a good
+distance from Limerick, and marched with such precipitation and
+disorder, that if a hundred of the enemy's horse had charged him in the
+rear, they would in all likelihood have defeated his whole party, though
+he had near upon four thousand men-at-arms and light horse; for the man,
+if he was faithful, wanted either courage or conduct, and the party were
+altogether discouraged to be under his command. But Ginkell did not
+advance far, and after showing himself on that side of the bridge,
+returned back into his camp the same day. Yet Sheldon never rested till
+he came, about midnight, fifteen miles from the Shannon, and encamped in
+a fallow field where there was not a bit of grass to be had: as if he
+had designed to harass the horses by day and starve them by night....
+Ginkell, understanding that the Irish horse was removed to such a
+distance, passed the river on the twenty-third day with the greatest
+part of his cavalry, and a considerable body of foot, and encamped
+half-way between Limerick and the Irish horse camp, whereby he hindered
+all communication between them and the town. On the twenty-fourth, the
+captains within Limerick sent out a trumpet, desiring a parley," and as
+a result of this parley, a treaty was ultimately signed between the two
+parties, Limerick was evacuated, and the war came to an end. This was
+early in October, 1691.
+
+The war had, therefore, lasted nearly four years, a sufficient testimony
+to the military qualities of the Irish, seeing that throughout the whole
+period they had matched against them greatly superior numbers of the
+finest troops in Europe, veterans trained in continental wars, and at
+all points better armed and equipped than their adversaries.
+
+What moves our unbounded admiration, however, is to see the troops
+displaying these qualities of valor not only without good leadership,
+but in face of the cowardice of the English king, and of duplicity
+amounting to treachery on the part of his chief adherents. Foremost
+among these time-servers was Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, whose name
+shows him to have sprung from one of the Norman families, and we see
+here the recurrence of a principle which had worked much harm in the
+eight years' war of the preceding generation. The Duke of Ormond, sprung
+from the Norman Butlers, was then the chief representative of the policy
+of intrigue, and many of the reverses of both these wars are to be
+attributed to the same race.
+
+It is tragical to find the descendants of the old Norman barons, who at
+any rate were valiant fighters, descending thus to practices quite
+unworthy; yet we can easily understand how the fundamental injustice of
+the feudal principle on which they stood, not less than the boundless
+abuse of that already bad principle under the first Stuarts, could not
+fail to undermine their sense of honor and justice, preparing them at
+length for a policy of mere self-seeking, carried on by methods always
+doubtful, and often openly treacherous.
+
+The old tribal chieftains lived to fight, and went down fighting into
+the night of time. Owen Roe O'Neill, last great son of a heroic race,
+splendidly upheld their high tradition and ideal. No nobler figure, and
+few more gifted captains, can be found in the annals of those warlike
+centuries. The valor of Cuculain, the wisdom of Concobar, the chivalry
+of Fergus--all were his, and with them a gentle and tolerant spirit in
+all things concerning religion, very admirable in an age when so many
+men, in other things not lacking in elements of nobility, were full of
+bitter animosity, and zealous to persecute all those who differed from
+them concerning things shrouded in mystery.
+
+It may be said, indeed, that Owen Roe is in this only a type of all his
+countrymen, who, though they suffered centuries of persecution for a
+religious principle, never persecuted in return. Their conduct
+throughout the epoch of religious war and persecution was always
+tolerant and full of the sense of justice, contrasting in this, and
+contrasting to their honor, with the conduct of nearly every other
+nation in Christendom.
+
+The history of Ireland, for the half century which followed this war,
+offers few salient features for description. The Catholics during all
+this time were under the ban of penal laws. The old tribal chiefs were
+gone. The Norman lords were also gone. The life of the land hardly went
+beyond the tilling of the fields and the gathering of the harvests. And
+even here, men only labored for others to enter into their labor. The
+right of private taxation, confirmed by law, and now forfeited by the
+feudal lords, was given as a reward to the adherents of the dominant
+party in England, and their yearly exactions were enforced by an armed
+garrison. The more vigorous and restless elements of our race, unable to
+accept these conditions of life, sailed in great numbers to the
+continent, and entered the armies of many European powers. It is
+estimated that, during the half century after the Treaty of Limerick,
+fully half a million Irishmen fell in the service of France alone.
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+A.D. 1750-1901.
+
+The Treaty of Limerick, signed when the army of Sarsfield came to terms
+with the besiegers, guaranteed equal liberty to all Ireland, without
+regard to difference of religion. There is no doubt that William of
+Nassau, scion of a race which had done much for liberty, a house that
+had felt the bitterness of oppression, would willingly have carried this
+treaty out in a spirit of fidelity and honor. But he was, helpless. The
+dominant powers in England and Ireland were too strong for him, and
+within the next few years the treaty was violated in letter and spirit,
+and the indigenous population of Ireland was disarmed, deprived of civil
+rights, reduced to servitude.
+
+It is best, wherever possible, to secure the word of witnesses who
+cannot be suspected of prejudice or favor. We shall do this, therefore,
+in describing the condition of Ireland during the eighteenth century. We
+find the Lord Chancellor of England declaring, during the first half of
+that period, that "in the eye of the law no Catholic existed in
+Ireland." The Lord Chief Justice affirms the same doctrine: "It appears
+plain that the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish
+Roman Catholic." The law, therefore, as created by England for Ireland,
+deprived of all civil, religious, intellectual and moral rights
+four-fifths of the whole population, and gave them over as a lawful prey
+to the remaining fifth: a band of colonists and adventurers, who favored
+the policy of the party then dominant in England. This was the condition
+of the law. We shall see, presently, what was its result on the life of
+the nation. It should be a warning, for all time, of the dangers which
+arise when one nation undertakes to govern another. For it must be
+clearly understood that the Sovreign and Parliament of England believed
+that in this they stood for honor and righteousness, and had a true
+insight into the spirit and will of the Most High. It was, indeed, on
+this superior knowledge of the divine will that they based their whole
+policy; for what else is the meaning of legal discrimination against the
+holders of a certain form of faith?
+
+[Illustration: Salmon Fishery, Galway.]
+
+In the second half of the eighteenth century, in 1775, the Congress of
+the United States sent its sympathy in these words to the people of
+Ireland: "We know that you are not without your grievances; we
+sympathize with you in your distress, and we are pleased to find that
+the design of subjugating us has persuaded the administration to
+dispense to Ireland some vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. Even the
+tender mercies of the government have long been cruel to you. In the
+rich pastures of Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong
+to labor for her destruction."
+
+Three years later, in 1778, Benjamin Franklin wrote thus to the Irish
+people: "The misery and distress which your ill-fated country has been
+so frequently exposed to, and has so often experienced, by such a
+combination of rapine, treachery and violence as would have disgraced
+the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the world, has
+most sincerely affected your friends in America, and has engaged the
+most serious attention of Congress."
+
+It must be assumed that the men who drew up the Declaration of
+Independence knew the value of words, and that when they spoke of misery
+and cruelty, of rapine, treachery and distress, they meant what they
+said. Franklin's letter brings us to the eve of the Volunteer Movement,
+of which much has been said in a spirit of warm praise, but which seems
+to have wrought evil rather than good. This Movement, at first initiated
+wholly by the Scottish and English colonists and their adherents, was
+later widened so as to include a certain number of the indigenous
+population; and an armed force was thus formed, which was able to gain
+certain legislative favors from England, with the result that a
+Parliament sitting in Dublin from 1782 to 1799 passed laws with
+something more resembling justice than Ireland was accustomed to.
+
+But this Parliament was in no sense national or representative. It was
+wholly composed of the Scottish and English colonists and their friends,
+and the indigenous population had no voice in its deliberations. It is,
+therefore, the more honor to Henry Grattan that we find him addressing
+that Parliament thus: "I will never claim freedom for six hundred
+thousand of my countrymen while I leave two million or more of them in
+chains. Give the Catholics of Ireland their civil rights and their
+franchise; give them the power to return members to the Irish
+Parliament, and let the nation be represented." At this time, therefore,
+four-fifths of the nation had neither civil rights nor
+franchise,--because they differed from the dominant party in England as
+to the precedence of the disciples of Jesus.
+
+It may be supposed, however, that, even without civil or religious
+rights, the fate of the people of Ireland was tolerable; that a certain
+measure of happiness and well-being was theirs, if not by law, at least
+by grace. The answer to this we shall presently see. The Volunteer
+Movement, as we saw, included certain elements of the indigenous
+population. The dominant party in England professed to see in this a
+grave danger, and determined to ward off that danger by sending an army
+to Ireland, and quartering troops on the peasants of all suspected
+districts. We must remember that the peasants, on whom a hostile
+soldiery was thus quartered, had no civil rights as a safeguard; that
+the authorities were everywhere bitterly hostile, full of cowardly
+animosity towards them.
+
+The result we may best describe in the words of the English generals at
+the head of this army. We find Sir Ralph Abercrombie speaking thus: "The
+very disgraceful frequency of great crimes and cruelties, and the many
+complaints of the conduct of the troops in this kingdom--Ireland--has
+too unfortunately proved the army to be in a state of licentiousness
+that renders it formidable to everyone except the enemy." Sir Ralph
+Abercrombie declared himself so frightened and disgusted at the conduct
+of the soldiers that he threw up his commission, and refused the command
+of the army.
+
+General Lake, who was sent to take his place, speaks thus: "The state of
+the country, and its occupation previous to the insurrection, is not to
+be imagined, except by those who witnessed the atrocities of every
+description committed by the military,"--and he gives a list of
+hangings, burnings and murders.
+
+Finally, we have the testimony of another English soldier, Sir William
+Napier, speaking some years later: "What manner of soldiers were these
+fellows who were let loose upon the wretched districts, killing, burning
+and confiscating every man's property? ... We ourselves were young at
+the time; yet, being connected with the army, we were continually among
+the soldiers, listening with boyish eagerness to their experiences: and
+well remember, with horror, to this day, the tales of lust, of bloodshed
+and pillage, and the recital of their foul actions against the miserable
+peasantry, which they used to relate."
+
+The insurrection against this misery and violence, which began in May,
+1798, and its repression, we may pass over, coming to their political
+consequences. It is admitted on all hands that the morality and religion
+of England reached their lowest ebb at this very time; we are,
+therefore, ready to learn that the Act of Union between England and
+Ireland, which followed on the heels of this insurrection, was carried
+by unlimited bribery and corruption. The Parliament of Ireland, as we
+know, was solely composed of Protestants, the Catholics having neither
+the right to sit nor the right to vote; so that the ignominy of this
+universal corruption must be borne by the class of English and Scottish
+settlers alone.
+
+The curious may read lists of the various bribes paid to secure the
+passage of the Act of Union in 1800, the total being about six million
+dollars--a much more considerable sum then than now. And it must be
+remembered that this entire sum was drawn from the revenues of Ireland,
+besides the whole cost of an army numbering 125,000 men, which England
+maintained in Ireland at the time the Act was passed. What the amenities
+of the last three years of the eighteenth century cost Ireland we may
+judge from these figures: in 1797, while the hangings, burnings and
+torturings which brought about the insurrection of the following year
+were in an early stage, the national debt of Ireland was under
+$20,000,000; three years later that debt amounted to over $130,000,000.
+It is profitless to pursue the subject further. We may close it by
+saying that hardly can we find in history a story more discreditable to
+our common humanity than the conduct of England towards Ireland during
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
+
+The French Revolution wrought a salutary change of heart in the
+governing class in England, for it must in justice be added that the
+tyranny of this class was as keenly felt by the "lower orders" in
+England as in Ireland itself. It is fairly certain that only the Reform
+Bill and the change of sovreigns which shortly followed prevented an
+insurrection of the peasants and servile classes in England which would
+have outdone in horrors the French Revolution itself. The Reform Bill
+was the final surrender of the baronial class in England; a surrender
+rather apparent than real, however, since most of the political and all
+the social power in the land still remains in the hands of the
+same class.
+
+[Illustration: O'Connell's Statue, Dublin.]
+
+Through the salutary fear which was inspired by the horrors of the
+French Revolution, and perhaps through a certain moral awakening, the
+governing classes in England came to a less vicious mind in their
+dealings with Ireland. They were, therefore, the more ready to respond
+to the great national movement headed by Daniel O'Connell, with his
+demand that Irishmen might all equally enjoy civil and political rights,
+regardless of their form of faith. In 1829, as the result of this great
+movement, the Catholics were finally relieved of the burden of penal
+laws which, originally laid on them by the Tudors, were rendered even
+more irksome and more unjust by Cromwell and William of Nassau,--men in
+other things esteemed enlightened and lovers of liberty.
+
+Thus the burden of persecution was finally taken away. To those who
+imposed it, the system of Penal Laws will remain a deep dishonor. But to
+those who bore that burden it has proved a safeguard of spiritual purity
+and faith. The religion of the indigenous race in Ireland was saved from
+the degeneration and corruption which ever besets a wealthy and
+prosperous church, and which never fails to engender hypocrisy, avarice
+and ambition. In England, the followers of the Apostles exercise the
+right to levy a second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second
+burden imposed upon the conquered Saxons. As a result, the leaders of
+the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part of their
+congregation; have sunk into practical atheism. In France, the reaction
+against a like state of things brought the church to the verge of
+destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and materialism. The
+result to the moral life of the people is too well known to need remark.
+Not less evil consequences have flowed from the enriching of the church
+in other lands. That wealth has always carried with it the curse, so
+prophetically pronounced, against those who trust in riches. For the
+ministers of religion, in a supreme degree, the love of money has been
+the root of evil.
+
+We may, therefore, see in the spirituality and unworldliness of the
+native church in Ireland a result of all the evil and persecution the
+church suffered during almost three hundred years. From this
+purification by fire it comes that the people of Ireland are almost
+singular throughout Christendom in believing sincerely in the religion
+of gentleness and mercy--the kingdom which is not of this world.
+
+In 1829 the Catholics were at last freed from the galling burdens which
+had weighed on them since 1537, when they failed to recognize Henry VIII
+as the representative of God on earth. They were still, however, under
+the shadow of a grave injustice, which continued to rest on them for
+many years. When their church lands were confiscated and their faith
+proscribed by law under the Tudors, a new clergy was overlaid on the
+country, a clergy which consented to recognize the Tudors and their
+successors as their spiritual head. As a reward, these new ministers of
+religion were allowed to levy a second tax on land, exactly as in
+England; and this tax they continued to collect until their privilege
+was finally taken away by Gladstone and the English Liberals. Needless
+to say that through three centuries and more four-fifths of this tax was
+levied on the indigenous Catholics, in support of what was to them an
+alien, and for most of the time a persecuting church.
+
+One heavy disability still lay on the whole land. With its partial
+removal a principle has emerged of such world-wide importance in the
+present, and even more in the future, that we may well trace its history
+in detail.
+
+The Normans, as we saw, paid themselves for conquering the Saxons and
+Angles by assuming a perpetual right to tax their produce; a right still
+in full force, and forming the very foundation of the ruling class in
+England. The land tenure thus created was, under the Tudors and the
+first Stuarts, bodily transferred to Ireland. In Ireland the land had
+ever been owned by the people, each tribe, as representing a single
+family, holding a certain area by communal tenure, and electing a chief
+to protect its territory from aggression. For this elective
+chieftainship the English law-courts substituted something wholly
+different: a tenure modeled on the feudal servitude of England. This new
+principle made the land of the country the property not of the whole
+people but of a limited and privileged class: the favorites of the
+ruling power--"hungry parasites" as the Congress of 1775 called them.
+This "landed" class continued to hold absolute sway until quite
+recently, and it was this class which succumbed to bribery in 1800, and
+passed the Act of Legislative Union with England. The clergy of the
+Established church were little more than the private chaplains of the
+"landed" class, the two alien bodies supporting each other.
+
+Folly, however, was the child of injustice; for so shortsighted were
+these hungry parasites that they developed a system of land-laws so bad
+as to cause universal poverty, and bring a reaction which is steadily
+sweeping the "landed" class of Ireland to extinction and oblivion. The
+fundamental principle of these bad land-laws was this: the tenant was
+compelled to renew his lease from year to year; and whenever, during the
+year, he had in any way improved the land in his possession,--by
+draining marshes, by reclaiming waste areas, by adding farm-buildings,
+the "owner" of the land could demand an enhanced rent, as the condition
+of renewing the lease. The tenant had to submit to a continually
+ascending scale of extortion, sanctioned by law and exacted by armed
+force; or, as an alternative, he had to give up the fruit of his
+industry without compensation and without redress.
+
+Anything more certain to destroy energy, to cut at the roots of thrift,
+to undermine all the best qualities of manhood, it would be impossible
+to imagine. The slave on the plantation could in time purchase his
+freedom. The tiller of the soil in Ireland found, on the contrary, that
+the greater his industry, the greater was the sum he had to pay for the
+right to exercise it. We saw that there never was any pretence of free
+contract in the feudal land-tenure of England; that there never was any
+pretence of an honest bargain between farmer and landlord, for their
+mutual benefit. The tenant paid the landlord for services rendered, not
+to him, but to his Norman conqueror. So it was, in an even greater
+degree, in Ireland. There was no pretence at all that tenant and
+landlord entered into a free contract for their mutual benefit. Nor did
+either law, custom, religion or opinion require the landlord to make any
+return to his tenants for the share of the fruit of their toil he
+annually carried away.
+
+The tiller of the soil, therefore, labored from year to year, through
+droughts and rains, through heat and cold, facing bad seasons with good.
+At the end of the year, after hard toil had gathered in the fruit of the
+harvest, he saw the best part of that fruit legally confiscated by an
+alien, who would have been speechless with wonder, had it been suggested
+to him that anything was due from him in return. Nor was that all. This
+alien was empowered, and by the force of public opinion incited, to
+exact the greatest possible share of the tiller's produce, and, as we
+saw, he was entitled to the whole benefit of whatever improvements the
+tiller of the soil had made; and could--and constantly did--expel the
+cultivator who was unable or unwilling to pay a higher tax, as the
+penalty for improving the land.
+
+It may be said that bad as this all was, it was not without a remedy;
+that the cultivator had the choice of other occupations, and might let
+the land lie fallow, while its "owner" starved. But this only brings to
+mind the fact that during the eighteenth century England had legislated
+with the deliberate intention of destroying the manufactures and
+shipping of Ireland, and had legislated with success. It should be added
+that this one measure affected all residents in Ireland equally,
+whatever faith or race. There was practically no alternative before the
+cultivator. He had the choice between robbery and starvation.
+
+It would be more than miraculous if this condition of things had not
+borne its fruit. The result was this: it ceased to be the interest of
+the cultivator of the land to till it effectively, or to make any
+improvement whatever, whether by drainage, reclaiming waste land, or
+building, or by adopting better agricultural methods. In every case, his
+increase of labor, of foresight and energy, would have met with but one
+reward: when the time came to renew the lease, he would have been told
+that his land had doubled in value during the year, and that he must,
+therefore, pay twice as much for the privilege of tilling it. If he
+refused, he at once forfeited every claim to the fruit of his own work,
+the whole of his improvements becoming the property of the land owner.
+
+The cultivators, as an inevitable consequence, lost every incentive to
+labor, energy, foresight and the moral qualities which are fostered by
+honestly rewarded work. They worked as little as possible on their
+farms, and the standard of cultivation steadily declined, while the mode
+of living grew perpetually worse. If it were intended to reduce a whole
+population to hopeless poverty, no better or more certain way could
+be imagined.
+
+The steady lowering of the arts of cultivation, the restriction of
+crops, the tendency to keep as close as possible to the margin of
+sustenance, thus zealously fostered, opened the way for the disastrous
+famine of 1846 and 1847, which marks the beginning of a rapid decline in
+population,--a decrease which has never since been checked. The
+inhabitants of Ireland shortly before the famine numbered considerably
+over eight millions. Since that time, there has been a decrease of about
+four millions--a thing without parallel in Christendom.
+
+The amendment of the land-laws, which were directly responsible for
+these evil results, was by no means initiated in consequence of the
+famine. It was due wholly to a great national agitation, carried out
+under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, which led to the
+land-acts of 1881 and 1887. These new laws at last guaranteed to the
+cultivator the fruit of his toil, and guarded him against arbitrary
+increase of the tax levied on him by the "owner" of the land. But they
+did not stop here; they initiated a principle which will finally make
+the cultivator absolute owner of his land, and abolish the feudal class
+with their rights of private taxation. This cannot fail to react on
+England, so that the burdens of the Angles and Saxons will at last be
+lifted from their shoulders, as a result of the example set them by the
+Gaels, for generations working persistently, and persistently advancing
+towards their goal. Nor will the tide thus set in motion spread only to
+Saxon and Angle; its influence will be felt wherever those who work are
+deprived unjustly of the fruit of their toil, whether by law or without
+law. The evils suffered by Ireland will thus be not unavailing; they
+will rather bring the best of all rewards: a reward to others, of
+whatever race and in whatever land, who are victims of a like injustice.
+
+The story of Ireland, through many centuries, has thus been told. The
+rest belongs to the future. We have seen the strong life of the prime
+bringing forth the virtues of war and peace; we have seen valor and
+beauty and wisdom come to perfect ripeness in the old pagan world. We
+have seen that old pagan world transformed by the new teaching of
+gentleness and mercy, a consciousness, wider, more humane and universal,
+added from above to the old genius of individual life. With the new
+teaching came the culture of Rome, and something of the lore of Hellas
+and Palestine, of Egypt and Chaldea, warmly welcomed and ardently
+cherished in Ireland at a time when Europe was submerged under barbarian
+inroads and laid waste by heathen hordes. We have seen the faith and
+culture thus preserved among our western seas generously shared with the
+nascent nations who emerged from the pagan invasions; the seeds of
+intellectual and spiritual life, sown with faith and fervor as far as
+the Alps and the Danube, springing up with God-given increase, and
+ripening to an abundant harvest.
+
+To that bright epoch of our story succeeded centuries of growing
+darkness and gathering storm. The forces of our national life, which
+until then had found such rich expression and flowered in such abundant
+beauty, were now checked, driven backward and inward, through war,
+oppression and devastation, until a point was reached when the whole
+indigenous population had no vestige of religious or civil rights; when
+they ceased even to exist in the eyes of the law.
+
+The tide of life, thus forced inward, gained a firm possession of the
+invisible world, with the eternal realities indwelling there. Thus fixed
+and founded in the real, that tide turned once again, flowing outwards
+and sweeping before it all the barriers in its way. The population of
+Ireland is diminishing in numbers; but the race to which they belong
+increases steadily: a race of clean life, of unimpaired vital power,
+unspoiled by wealth or luxury, the most virile force in the New World.
+
+It happens very rarely, under those mysterious laws which rule the life
+of all humanity, the laws which work their majestic will through the
+ages, using as their ministers the ambitions and passions of men--it
+happens rarely that a race keeps its unbroken life through thirty
+centuries, transformed time after time by new spiritual forces, yet in
+genius remaining ever the same. It may be doubted whether even once
+before throughout all history a race thus long-lived has altogether
+escaped the taint of corruption and degeneration. Never before, we may
+confidently say, has a single people emerged from such varied
+vicissitudes, stronger at the end in genius, in spiritual and moral
+power, than at the beginning, richer in vital force, clearer in
+understanding, in every way more mature and humane.
+
+For this is the real fruit of so much evil valiantly endured: a deep
+love of freedom, a hatred of oppression, a knowledge that the wish to
+dominate is a fruitful source of wrong. The new age now dawning before
+us carries many promises of good for all humanity; not less, it has its
+dangers, grave and full of menace; threatening, if left to work
+unchecked, to bring lasting evil to our life. Never before, it is true,
+have there been so wide opportunities for material well-being; but, on
+the other hand, never before have there been such universal temptations
+toward a low and sensual ideal. Our very mastery over natural forces and
+material energies entices us away from our real goal, hides from our
+eyes the human and divine powers of the soul, with which we are
+enduringly concerned. Our skill in handling nature's lower powers may be
+a means of great good; not less may it bring forth unexampled evil. The
+opportunities of well-being are increased; the opportunities of
+exclusive luxury are increased in equal measure; exclusion may bring
+resentment; resentment may call forth oppression, armed with new
+weapons, guided by wider understanding, but prompted by the same corrupt
+spirit as of old.
+
+In the choice which our new age must make between these two ways, very
+much may be done for the enduring well-being of mankind by a race full
+of clean vigor, a race taught by stern experience the evil of tyranny
+and oppression, a race profoundly believing the religion of gentleness
+and mercy, a race full of the sense of the invisible world, the world of
+our immortality.
+
+We see in Ireland a land with a wonderful past, rich in tradition and
+varied lore; a land where the memorials of the ages, built in enduring
+stone, would in themselves enable us to trace the life and progress of
+human history; we see in Ireland a land full of a singular fascination
+and beauty, where even the hills and rivers speak not of themselves but
+of the spirit which builds the worlds; a beauty, whether in brightness
+or gloom, finding its exact likeness in no other land; we see all this,
+but we see much more: not a memory of the past, but a promise of the
+future; no offering of earthly wealth, but rather a gift to the soul of
+man; not for Ireland only, but for all mankind.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+Abbey-Dorney, 303
+Abbey-feale, 303
+Abbey-leix, 303
+Abbey of Ballintober, 305
+Abbey-quarter, 29
+Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, words of, 369, 370
+Achill Island, 30
+Act of Union, 371
+Aed Allan, 225, 231
+Aed Finnliat, 247
+Aed Roin, 225
+Aed, son of Colgan, 226
+Ailill, 130, 131, 132, 141, 142, 146, 147, 152
+Aiterni, 150
+Alfred, king of the Northumbrian Saxons, 232
+Alfred, king, ode of to the country he visited, 232, 233
+Alny, 120, 129
+Amargin, 150
+Ambigatos, 103
+Ancient seats of learning, 221
+Ancient seats of learning, studies therein, 221, 222
+Anglicans, 322
+Angus, the Young, 92, 95, 96, 173
+"Annals," history of the times as recorded in the, 235, 252
+"Annals," quotations from, 224, 244, 264, 277, 293
+Antrim, 5, 196
+Archaic Darkness, 11
+Archaic Dawn, 12
+Ardan, 120, 129
+Ard-Maca, 200
+Armagh, 200, 208, 232, 241
+At-Cliat, 242, 243, 275
+Athlone, 140, 350, 354
+Ath-uincé, 163
+Aughrim, 354, 355
+
+Ballinasloe, 354
+Ballysadare, 27, 87, 90
+Balor of the Evil Eye, 90, 91, 93
+Bangor, 221, 239, 240, 250, 342
+Bann, 146
+Bantry Bay, 104
+Barrow, valley of the, 42
+Battle of Kinvarra, 162
+Battle of the Headland of the Kings, 13
+Battle-verses, 248, 249
+Bay of Murbolg, 143
+Bay of Sligo, 29
+Bective Abbey, 301
+Bede, Venerable, 218
+Belgadan, 85
+Beltane, festival of, 47
+Beltaney, 47
+Black Lion Cromlech, 46
+Blackwater, 39, 82
+Bonamargy Abbey, 306
+Book of Kells, 209, 249
+Boyne, the, 5, 150, 242, 350
+Brandon Hill, 42
+Breagho, 34
+Breas, 83, 84, 99, 91, 105
+Breg, 149
+Brehon Laws, the, 206
+Brehon Laws, changes of, effected by St. Patrick, 207, 316
+Bruce, Edward, invasion by, 292
+Bruce, Edward, death of, 293
+Brugh, on the Boyne, 93, 95
+Bundoran, 29
+
+Cael, 163, 165, 194, 262
+Cael, poem of, 164, 165
+Caher, 161
+Caherconree, 32
+Cailté, 162, 166
+Cairbré, 89, 167, 168, 173, 241
+Cairpré Nia Fer, 146, 147, 132
+Callan River, 199
+Calpurn, 182
+Cantyre, 119, 123, 143
+Carlingford Lough, 241
+Carlingford Mountains, 44
+Carrickfergus, 331, 344, 345, 347
+Carrowmore, 27, 29
+Cataract of the Oaks, 87, 90, 91
+Catbad, 141, 142, 150
+Cavan, 46
+Cavancarragh, 35, 66
+Cealleac, 224
+Charlemont, castle of, 343
+Chevalier de Tessé, 355
+Chiefs of Tara, 82
+Chieftain of the Silver Arm, 91
+Chronicler's record of battles fought, 210, 211, 212, 217, 218
+Chronicles of Ulster, 218
+Church architecture, 298
+Ciar, 104
+Cistercian Abbey, 306
+Clare, 31, 62
+Clare Abbey, 306
+Clidna, 166
+Clocar, 161
+Clondalkin, 241
+Clonmacnoise, 208
+Cluain Bronaig, 226
+Coleraine, 331
+Colum Kill, 208, 212
+Colum Kill, death of, 215
+Colum Kill, verses written by, 213, 214
+Colum of the Churches, 223, 237
+Conall Cernac, 149, 151
+Concobar, 13, 113, 114, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 141,
+142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 177, 194, 246, 258,
+262, 360
+Conditions existing in early years, 219, 220, 221, 222
+Congus the Abbot, 225
+Connacht, 5, 88, 133, 140, 144, 350, 357
+Connemara, 85
+Conn, lord of Connacht, 162
+Conn of the Five-Score Battles, 88, 162
+Copyright decision, an early, 213
+Cork, 5
+Cormac, 167, 171, 172
+Cormac, precepts of, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171
+Coroticus, 195
+Corrib, 85
+Credé of the Yellow Hair, 163, 178, 194, 262
+Crimtan of the Yellow Hair, 162
+Cromlech-builders, the, 51, 68
+Cromlech of Howth, 43
+Cromlech of Lisbellaw. 47
+Cromlech of Lough Rea, 46
+Cromlechs, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52. 53,
+54, 55, 56, 57, 58
+Cromwell, 334, 339
+Croom, 161
+Cruacan, 131, 141, 146
+Cryptic Designs on cromlechs, 47
+Cuailgne, 132
+Cuigead Sreing, 88
+Culdaff, 47
+Cumal, 162
+Curlew hills, 37, 131
+Cuculain, 13, 14, 15, 16, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144,
+145, 152, 155, 181, 194, 246, 262, 360
+
+DAGDA Mor, 96, 148
+Dagda, the Mighty, 92, 95
+Dairé, 132, 133, 200, 262
+Danes, conversion of the, 275
+Danish Pyramid of Uby, 97
+Dark Ages, the, 260, 261, 262
+Day of Spirits, 140
+De Danaans, the, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96,
+97, 98, 99, 103, 105, 106, 112, 132, 148
+De Courcey, 277
+De Courceys, the, 319
+Deer-park, 29
+Deirdré, 13, 14, 15, 115, 123, 124, 129, 130, 178, 262
+Deirdré, the fate of, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122
+Deirdré, the Lament of, 125
+De Lacys, the, 319
+Deny, 331, 341, 342, 344, 350
+Devenish, 250
+Devenish Island, 221
+Diarmuid, 171, 172, 173
+Dicu, 240
+Dingle Bay, 104
+Dinn-Rig by the Barrow, 146
+Dissenters, 322
+Domnall, 211, 231
+Donaghpatrick, 208
+Doncad, 231, 232
+Donegal, 29, 47
+Donegal Highlands, 26
+Donegal ranges, 5
+Douglas, 350
+Douin Cain, 81
+Down, 5, 46
+Downpatrick, 198, 240
+Drogheda, 342, 345
+Druids, 140
+Druim Dean, 162
+Drumbo, 46
+Dublin, 5, 252, 340, 345
+Dublin Parliament, 368
+Duke of Ormond, 359
+Dundalathglas, 240
+Dundalk, 342
+Dundelga, 143
+Dundrum, 146
+Dundrum Bay, 44, 45
+Durrow, 221, 250
+
+Early churches, 208
+Early schools of learning, tongues first studied in, 208
+Eclipses of the sun and moon, record of, 218
+Edgehill, battle of, 326
+Elias, Bishop of Angoulême, France, testimony of, 250, 251
+Elizabeth, Queen, 321, 341
+Emain, Banquet-hall of, 111
+Emain of Maca, 13, 110, 112, 115, 122, 123, 129, 131, 140
+Engineering skill ten thousand years ago, 43
+Enniskillen, 34, 35, 341
+Eocaid, son of Erc, 81, 84, 86, 87
+Eocu, 146
+Erin, 141, 144
+Established Church, clergy of the, 376
+Etan, 89
+Evangel of Galilee, the, 16
+
+Factna, son of Cass, 113
+Fair Head, 143
+Feidlimid, 242
+Ferdiad, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140
+Fergus mac Roeg, 13, 15, 16, 113, 114, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130,
+131, 133
+Fergus the Eloquent, 166, 177, 262, 360
+Fermanagh, 33
+Feudal system, the, 289
+Feudal ownership, 291
+Find, ode to Spring of, 156
+Find, son of Cumal, 14, 16, 155, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 171, 172,
+173, 177, 194, 246, 262
+Find, son of Ros, 146, 147, 152
+Finian, school of learning and religion founded by, 212
+Finvoy, 46
+Firbolgs, 60, 61, 69. 70, 77, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 105, 106
+Flann, 248
+Fomorians, 69, 70, 77, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 106, 246
+Ford of Ferdiad, Ath-Fhirdia, 140
+Ford of Luan, 140
+Ford of Seannait, 226
+Ford of the Hurdles, 242, 243, 246
+Ford of the river, 14
+Franklin, Benjamin, letter of to Irish people, 367
+French Revolution, the, 372
+
+Gairec, 140
+Galian of Lagin, 144
+Galtee Mountains, 161
+Galway, 5, 62, 350, 357
+Galway Bay, 31, 162
+Galway Lakes, 31
+Gauls, the, 103
+Giant Stones, 30
+Ginkell, 354, 355, 357, 358
+Gladstone, 375
+Glanworth, 39
+Glendalough, 208, 221
+Glen Druid, 42
+Gold Mines River, 109
+Golden Vale, 161
+Goll Mac Norna, 162
+Grania, 15, 171, 172, 173, 178
+Grattan, Henry, address of, to Dublin Parliament, 368
+Gray Lake, 37
+Grey Abbey, 302
+
+Headland of the Kings, 148
+Hill of Barnec, 162
+Hill of Howth, 239, 252
+Hill of Luchra, 146
+Hill of Rudraige, 44
+Hill of Tara, 155
+Hill of the Willows, 200
+Hill of Ward, 140
+Holycross Abbey, 304
+House of Delga, 143
+House of Mead, 199
+Howth, 239
+Howth Head, 43
+Hyperboreans, 60, 61, 62, 64, 69
+
+Iarl Strangbow, 275
+Indec, son of De Domnand, 90, 91
+Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny, 21
+Inismurray, 237, 238, 239
+Iona, 215
+Ireland, art of working gold in, 108, 178
+Ireland, causes of uprising in, 320
+Ireland, condition of, in the eighteenth century, 365, 366, 367
+Ireland, English influence in, 318
+Ireland, life in, two thousand years ago, 177, 178, 179, 180
+Ireland, national debt of, 372
+Ireland, sympathy of U. S. Congress for people of, 366, 367
+Ireland, traditions of, 110
+Ireland, the Insurrection of, 370, 371, 372
+Ireland, visible and invisible, 3
+Irgalac, 149
+Iriel, 149
+Irish writing, earliest forms of, 177
+Islay, 143
+Islay Hills, 119
+
+James II., 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 353
+Jura, 119, 123, 143
+
+Kenmare, 39
+Kenmare Kiver, 39, 104
+Kerry, 5, 62
+Kildare, 210, 221, 232
+Kilkenny, 42, 325, 326, 349
+Killarney, 36, 39, 163
+Killee, 34
+Killmallock Abbey, 303
+Killteran Village, 43
+Kinsale, 340, 349
+King Gorm's Stone, 97
+King William, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 352, 365
+Knock-Mealdown Hills, 161
+Knockmoy Abbey, 306
+Knocknarea, 30
+
+Lake, General, statement of, 370
+Lake of Killarney, 161
+Lakes of Erne, 81
+Lambay, 236, 239, 241
+Land of the Cromlech-builders, 57
+Land of the Ever Young, 95, 96
+Land tenure, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380
+Laogaire, 199, 240
+Lame, 143
+Lauzun, 350
+Legamaddy, 45
+Leinster, 5, 162, 225, 226, 232, 345, 350
+Leitrim, 81
+Leitrim Hills, 26
+Lennan in Monaghan, 46
+Life of the Cromlech-builders, 68
+Liffey, the, 242
+Limerick, 349, 350, 351, 354, 357
+Leinstermen, 232, 238
+Loing Seac, 224
+Lough Erne, 341
+Loch Etive, 119, 121
+Lough Foyle, 247
+Lough Garra, 37
+Lough Gill, 29
+Lough Gur, 38, 39
+Lough Key, 37
+Lough Leane, 161, 163
+Lough Mask, 85
+Lough Neagh, 110, 200
+Lough Ree, 140
+Loughcrew Hills, 43
+Louis XIV, 337, 340, 353
+Lug, surnamed Lamfada, the Long-Armed, 92, 93
+Lusk, 241
+
+Maca, Queen, 110
+Maelbridge, 217
+Mag Breag, 223
+Mag Rein, 81
+Mag Tuiread, 85, 87, 246
+Mangerton, 162
+Marlborough, Duke of, 352
+Mask, 85
+Mayo, 5, 62
+Mayo Cliffs, 26
+Meave, Queen of Connacht, 13, 14, 15, 25, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134,
+136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 178, 262
+Meath, 155, 242
+Men of Oluemacht, 144
+Message of the New Way, 264
+Messenger of the Tidings, 182
+Mide, 149
+Miocene Age, the, 58
+Modern form of old Irish names, 234
+Monasterboice, 221
+Monk, 326
+Molana Abbey, 306
+Molaise, 237
+Monasteries and religious schools, 221
+Monroe, 324, 326, 327, 323, 329, 330, 331, 333
+Monument of Pillared Stones, 30
+Moore, 326
+Mount Venus Cromlech, 42
+Mountcashel, Lord, 342
+Mountains of Mourne, 44, 94, 146, 193, 231
+Mountains of Storms, 26, 87
+Moville, 221, 239, 262
+Moytura, 31, 85
+Munster, 5
+Munstermen of Great Muma, 144
+Murcad, 238
+
+Naisi, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 129, 130
+Napier, Sir William, testimony of, 370
+Nectain's Shield, 232
+Nemed's sons, 87
+Nessa, 15, 113
+Norsemen, waning of the, 284
+Northern Cromlech Region, 54
+Northmen, 234, 235, 236, 243, 251
+Nuada, the De Danaan king, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93
+
+O'Connell, Daniel, 373
+O'Donnell, 321, 322
+O'Neill, Owen Roe, 321, 322, 323, 324, 332, 333, 334, 338
+O'Neill, death of, 333
+O'Neill, defeat of English army by, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 360
+Ogma, of the Sunlike Face, 92, 95, 96
+Oscar, son of Ossin, 14
+Oscur, 155, 171
+Ossin, son of Find, 14, 15, 16, 155, 161, 162, 167, 171, 172, 177, 181,
+194, 246, 262
+Ox Mountains, 87
+
+Parliament at Dublin, 323
+Parliament of Ireland, 371
+Parnell, Charles Stewart, 380
+Patricius, 182
+Patricius, appeal of, to fellow-Christians of Coroticus, 195, 196
+Patricius, birthplace of, 182
+Patricius, letter of, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191,
+192, 193
+Patrick, 17
+Patrick, his first victory commemorated, 198
+Patrick, the dwelling of, 198
+Peat, age of, 34, 36
+Peat, rate of growth of, 33, 35, 66, 67
+Penal Laws, the system of, 373
+Plain of Nia, 85
+Plain of the Headland, 82
+Plain of the Pillars, 85
+Plain of Tirerril, 91
+Plantation of Ulster, 322
+Poem of Ossin, 156
+Potitus, 182
+Prince William of Nassau, 339, 340, 342
+Private taxation, 291
+Pyramids of stone, 93, 94
+
+Quoyle River, 198, 240
+
+Ragallac, 217
+Raid of the Northmen, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243
+Raids on islands of Irish coast, 257, 258, 259
+Raphoe, 47
+Rathcool, 162
+Rath-Laogaire, 199
+Rath of Badamar, 161
+Red Hills of Leinster, 162
+Reform Bill, the, 372
+Restoration, the, 339
+Roderick O'Conor, 61
+Ros Ruad, 152
+Ros, son of Rudraige, 112
+Rudraige, 44, 112
+Rudraige, hill of, 44, 231
+Runnymead, 317
+
+Saint Adamnan, 223, 224
+Saint Bernard, 298
+Saint Brigid, 210
+Saint Camin's "Commentary on the Psalms," 222
+"Saint Colum of the Churches," 212
+Saint Dominick, 298
+Saint Francis of Assisi, 298
+Saint Mansuy, 60
+Saint Patrick, body of laid at rest, 201
+Saint Patrick, delivery of message by, to King Laogaire, 199
+Saint Patrick, visit of to kings of Leinster and Munster, 200
+Saint Patrick, work of, 199, 205
+Saint Ruth, 354, 355
+Saint Ruth, death of, 356
+Saint Samtain, 226
+Saint Samtain, epitaph of the saintly virgin, 226, 227
+Sarsfield, 351, 353, 355
+Saul, 208, 221
+Schomberg, 342, 343, 344, 345, 347, 348
+Second Epoch, 13
+Senca, 144
+Shannon, the, 5, 32, 37, 130, 141, 146, 350, 354, 357
+Sheldon, 357, 358
+Slane, 347, 348
+Slieve Callan, 31, 39
+Slieve League, 26, 90
+Slieve Mish, 104, 132, 196
+Slievemore Mountain, 30
+Slieve na Calliagh, 95, 97
+Slieve-na-griddle, 45, 46
+Sligo, 25, 29, 90, 91
+Sligo Hills, 26
+Sons of Milid, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 112, 132
+Sound of Jura, 119, 123
+Southern Cromlech Province, 53
+Sreng, 82, 83, 84, 91, 93, 105
+Stone Circles, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 42, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52,
+53, 55, 72
+Stone Circles, clue to their building, 40
+Stone Circles, measure of their years, 40
+Strand of Tralee, 161
+Strangford, 45
+Strangford Lough, 198
+Stuarts, the, 339
+Sualtam, 13
+Succat, 182
+Suir, 161
+Sullane River, 39
+Summit of Prospects, 146
+
+Tailten, 106, 132
+Talbott, Earl of Tyrconnell, 359
+Tara, 81, 84, 106, 146, 147, 198
+Tara, Banquet-hall of, 112
+"The Church of the Oak-woods," 210
+The Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, 87
+Thenay Relics, the, 58
+Third Epoch, 14
+Three Waves of Erin, the, 146
+Tigearnac, 265
+Toppid Mountain, 35, 36
+Traig Eotaile, 87
+Tralee, 32
+Treaty of Limerick, 361, 365
+Tuata De Danaan, 79, 84
+Twelve Peaks of Connemara, 31
+Tyrconnell, Lady, 340
+Tyrconnell, Lord, 340, 343, 344, 345, 349, 351, 352, 353
+
+Uincé, 162
+Ui-Neill, the, 225, 232
+Ulad, 113, 130, 131, 133, 141, 151
+Ulaid, 113, 145, 150, 152
+Ulaid, Councils of the, 113
+Ulaid, men of the, 130
+Ulster, 5, 345
+Upper Erne, 32
+Usnae, 115
+
+Venice of Lough Rea, 37
+Volunteer Movement, the, 367, 369
+
+Waterford, 349, 350, 352
+Water of Luachan, 146
+Wave of Clidna, the, 146, 151
+Wave of Rudraige, the, 146, 151
+Wave of Tuag Inbir, the, 146, 151
+Waves of Erin, the three, 146, 151
+Weight of Cromlech-stones, 56
+Wexford Harbor, 42
+Wicklow, 5
+Wicklow Gold-mines, the, 108, 109
+
+Yellow Ford of Athboy, 140
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ireland, Historic and Picturesque
+by Charles Johnston
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12078 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12078 ***</div>
+
+<a name="000.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/000.jpg"><img src="images/000.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>PEEP HOLE, BLARNEY CASTLE.</b></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>IRELAND</h1>
+<h2>HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE</h2>
+<h4>BY</h4>
+<h3>CHARLES JOHNSTON</h3>
+<h4>ILLUSTRATED</h4>
+<h5>1902</h5>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+<center><a href="#I.">I. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.</a><br>
+<a href="#II.">II. THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.</a><br>
+<a href="#III.">III. THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.</a><br>
+<a href="#IV.">IV. THE DE DANAANS.</a><br>
+<a href="#V.">V. EMAIN OF MACA.</a><br>
+<a href="#VI.">VI. CUCULAIN THE HERO.</a><br>
+<a href="#VII.">VII. FIND AND OSSIN.</a><br>
+<a href="#VIII.">VIII. THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.</a><br>
+<a href="#IX.">IX. THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.</a><br>
+<a href="#X.">X. THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.</a><br>
+<a href="#XI.">XI. THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.</a><br>
+<a href="#XII.">XII. THE NORMANS.</a><br>
+<a href="#XIII.">XIII. THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.</a><br>
+<a href="#XIV.">XIV. THE JACOBITE WARS.</a><br>
+<a href="#XV.">XV. CONCLUSION.</a><br>
+<a href="#INDEX.">INDEX.</a></center>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.</h2>
+<center>Photogravures made by A.W. ELSON &amp; Co.<br>
+<br>
+<a href="#000.jpg">PEEP HOLE, BLARNEY CASTLE</a><br>
+<a href="#017.jpg">IN THE DARGLE, CO. WICKLOW</a><br>
+<a href="#037.jpg">MUCKROSS ABBEY, KILLARNEY</a><br>
+<a href="#053.jpg">BRANDY ISLAND, GLENGARRIFF</a><br>
+<a href="#063.jpg">SUGAR LOAF MOUNTAIN, GLENGARRIFF</a><br>
+<a href="#079.jpg">RIVER ERNE, BELLEEK</a><br>
+<a href="#097.jpg">WHITE ROCKS, PORTRUSH</a><br>
+<a href="#113.jpg">POWERSCOURT WATERFALL, CO. WICKLOW</a><br>
+<a href="#131.jpg">HONEYCOMB, GIANT'S CAUSEWAY</a><br>
+<a href="#145.jpg">GRAY MAN'S PATH, FAIR HEAD</a><br>
+<a href="#165.jpg">COLLEEN BAWN CAVES, KILLARNEY</a><br>
+<a href="#181.jpg">RUINS ON SCATTERY ISLAND</a><br>
+<a href="#209.jpg">VALLEY OF GLENDALOUGH AND RUINS OF THE SEVEN
+CHURCHES</a><br>
+<a href="#223.jpg">ANCIENT CROSS, GLENDALOUGH</a><br>
+<a href="#243.jpg">ROUND TOWER, ANTRIM</a><br>
+<a href="#259.jpg">GIANT'S HEAD AND DUNLUCE CASTLE, CO.
+ANTRIM</a><br>
+<a href="#267.jpg">ROCK CASHEL, RUINS OF OLD CATHEDRAL, KING
+CORMAC'S CHAPEL AND ROUND TOWER</a><br>
+<a href="#285.jpg">DUNLUCE CASTLE</a><br>
+<a href="#299.jpg">MELLIFONT ABBEY, CO. LOUTH</a><br>
+<a href="#305.jpg">HOLY CROSS ABBEY, CO. TIPPERARY</a><br>
+<a href="#325.jpg">DONEGAL CASTLE</a><br>
+<a href="#341.jpg">TULLYMORE PARK, CO. DOWN</a><br>
+<a href="#351.jpg">THOMOND BRIDGE, LIMERICK</a><br>
+<a href="#367.jpg">SALMON FISHERY, GALWAY</a><br>
+<a href="#373.jpg">O'CONNELL'S STATUE, DUBLIN</a><br>
+<a href="#394.jpg">MAP OF IRELAND</a></center>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page001" id="page001"></a>[pg
+001]</span>
+<h2>VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page002" id="page002"></a>[pg
+002]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page003" id="page003"></a>[pg
+003]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>IRELAND.</h2>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="I."></a>I.</h2>
+<h3>VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Here is an image by which you may call up and remember the
+natural form and appearance of Ireland:</p>
+<p>Think of the sea gradually rising around her coasts, until the
+waters, deepened everywhere by a hundred fathoms, close in upon the
+land. Of all Ireland there will now remain visible above the waves
+only two great armies of islands, facing each other obliquely
+across a channel of open sea. These two armies of islands will lie
+in ordered ranks, their lines stretching from northeast to
+southwest; they will be equal in size, each two hundred miles along
+the front, and seventy miles from front to rear. And the open sea
+between, which divides the two armies, will measure seventy miles
+across.</p>
+<p>Not an island of these two armies, as they lie thus obliquely
+facing each other, will rise as high as three <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page004" id="page004"></a>[pg 004]</span>
+thousand feet; only the captains among them will exceed a thousand;
+nor will there be great variety in their forms. All the islands,
+whether north or south, will have gently rounded backs, clothed in
+pastures nearly to the crest, with garments of purple heather lying
+under the sky upon their ridges. Yet for all this roundness of
+outline there will be, towards the Atlantic end of either army, a
+growing sternness of aspect, a more sombre ruggedness in the
+outline of the hills, with cliffs and steep ravines setting their
+brows frowning against the deep.</p>
+<p>Hold in mind the image of these two obliquely ranged
+archipelagoes, their length thrice their breadth, seaming the blue
+of the sea, and garmented in dark green and purple under the
+sunshine; and, thinking of them thus, picture to yourself a new
+rising of the land, a new withdrawal of the waters, the waves
+falling and ever falling, till all the hills come forth again, and
+the salt tides roll and ripple away from the valleys, leaving their
+faces for the winds to dry; let this go on till the land once more
+takes its familiar form, and you will easily call up the visible
+image of the whole.</p>
+<p>As you stand in the midst of the land, where first lay the
+channel of open sea, you will have, on your northern horizon, the
+beginning of a world of purple-outlined <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page005" id="page005"></a>[pg 005]</span> hills,
+outliers of the northern mountain region, which covers the upper
+third of the island. On all sides about you, from the eastern sea
+to the western ocean, you will have the great central plain,
+dappled with lakes and ribbed with silver rivers, another third of
+the island. Then once more, to the south, you will have a region of
+hills, the last third of Ireland, in size just equal to the
+northern mountains or the central plain.</p>
+<p>The lines of the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses
+of Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern
+Ulster and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear
+is held by the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness
+of the northern seas.</p>
+<p>The plain opens from the verge of these hills; the waters that
+gather on its pleasant pastures and fat fields, or among the green
+moss tracts of its lowlands, flow eastward by the Boyne or
+southwestward by the Shannon to the sea.</p>
+<p>Then with the granite mountains of Dublin and Wicklow begin the
+southern hills, stretching through south Leinster and Munster to
+the red sandstone ridges of Cork and Kerry, our last vantage-ground
+against the Atlantic.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page006" id="page006"></a>[pg
+006]</span>
+<p>Finally, encircling all, is the perpetual presence of the sea,
+with its foaming, thunderous life or its days of dreamy peace;
+around the silver sands or furrowed cliffs that gird the island our
+white waves rush forever, murmuring the music of eternity.</p>
+<p>Such is this land of Eir&eacute;, very old, yet full of
+perpetual youth; a thousand times darkened by sorrow, yet with a
+heart of living gladness; too often visited by evil and pale death,
+yet welling ever up in unconquerable life,--the youth and life and
+gladness that thrill through earth and air and sky, when the whole
+world grows beautiful in the front of Spring.</p>
+<p>For with us Spring is like the making of a new world in the dawn
+of time. Under the warm wind's caressing breath the grass comes
+forth upon the meadows and the hills, chasing dun Winter away.
+Every field is newly vestured in young corn or the olive greenness
+of wheat; the smell of the earth is full of sweetness. White
+daisies and yellow dandelions star all our pastures; and on the
+green ruggedness of every hillside, or along the shadowed banks of
+every river and every silver stream, amid velvet mosses and fringes
+of new-born ferns, in a million nooks and crannies throughout all
+the land, are strewn <span class="pagenum"><a name="page007" id=
+"page007"></a>[pg 007]</span> dark violets; and wreaths of yellow
+primroses with crimped green leaves pour forth a remote and divine
+fragrance; above them, the larches are dainty with new greenery and
+rosy tassels, and the young leaves of beech and oak quiver with
+fresh life.</p>
+<p>Still the benignance of Spring pours down upon us from the sky,
+till the darkening fields are hemmed in between barriers of white
+hawthorn, heavy with nectar, and twined with creamy honeysuckle,
+the finger-tips of every blossom coral-red. The living blue above
+throbs with the tremulous song of innumerable larks; the measured
+chant of cuckoos awakens the woods; and through the thickets a
+whole world's gladness sings itself forth from the throat of thrush
+and blackbird. Through the whole land between the four seas
+benediction is everywhere; blue-bells and the rosy fingers of heath
+deck the mountain-tops, where the grouse are crooning to each other
+among the whins; down the hillsides into every valley pour gladness
+and greenness and song; there are flowers everywhere, even to the
+very verge of the whispering sea. There, among the gray bent-spikes
+and brackens on the sandhills, primroses weave their yellow
+wreaths; and little pansies, golden and blue and purple, marshal
+their weird eyes against the spears <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page008" id="page008"></a>[pg 008]</span> of dark blue hyacinths,
+till the rich tribute of wild thyme makes peace between them.</p>
+<p>The blue sky overhead, with its flocks of sunlit clouds, softly
+bends over the gentle bosom of the earth. A living spirit throbs
+everywhere, palpable, audible, full of sweetness and sadness
+immeasurable--sadness that is only a more secret joy.</p>
+<br>
+<p>Then the day grows weary, making way for the magic of evening
+and the oncoming dark with its mystery. The tree-stems redden with
+the sunset; there is a chill sigh in the wind; the leaves turn
+before it, burnished against the purple sky. As the gloom rises up
+out of the earth, bands of dark red gather on the horizon, seaming
+the clear bronze of the sky, that passes upward into olive-color,
+merging in dark blue overhead. The sun swings down behind the
+hills, and purple darkness comes down out of the sky; the red fades
+from the tree-stems, the cloud-colors die away; the whole world
+glimmers with the fading whiteness of twilight. Silence gathers
+itself together out of the dark, deepened, not broken, by the
+hushing of the wind among the beech-leaves, or the startled cluck
+of a blackbird, or a wood-pigeon's soft murmur, as it dreams in the
+silver fir.</p>
+<p>Under the brown wings of the dark, the night <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page009" id="page009"></a>[pg 009]</span> throbs
+with mystic presences; the hills glimmer with an inward life;
+whispering voices hurry through the air. Another and magical land
+awakes in the dark, full of a living restlessness; sleepless as the
+ever-moving sea. Everywhere through the night-shrouded woods, the
+shadowy trees seem to interrupt their secret whispers till you are
+gone past. There is no sense of loneliness anywhere, but rather a
+host of teeming lives on every hand, palpable though hidden, remote
+from us though touching our lives, calling to us through the gloom
+with wordless voices, inviting us to enter and share with them the
+mystical life of this miraculous earth, great mother of us all, The
+dark is full of watching eyes.</p>
+<p>Summer with us is but a brighter Spring, as our Winter only
+prolongs the sadness of Autumn. So our year has but two moods, a
+gay one and a sad one. Yet each tinges the other--the mists of
+Autumn veiling the gleam of Spring--Spring smiling through the
+grief of Autumn. When the sad mood comes, stripping the trees of
+their leaves, and the fields of their greenness, white mists veil
+the hills and brood among the fading valleys. A shiver runs through
+the air, and the cold branches are starred with tears. A poignant
+grief is over the land, an almost desolation,--full <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page010" id="page010"></a>[pg 010]</span> of
+unspoken sorrow, tongue-tied with unuttered complaint. All the
+world is lost and forlorn, without hope or respite. Everything is
+given up to the dirges of the moaning seas, the white shrouds of
+weeping mist. Wander forth upon the uplands and among the lonely
+hills and rock-seamed sides of the mountains, and you will find the
+same sadness everywhere: a grieving world under a grieving sky.
+Quiet desolation hides among the hills, tears tremble on every
+brown grass-blade, white mists of melancholy shut out the lower
+world.</p>
+<p>Whoever has not felt the poignant sadness of the leafless days
+has never known the real Ireland; the sadness that is present,
+though veiled, in the green bravery of Spring, and under the songs
+of Summer. Nor have they ever known the real Ireland who have not
+divined beneath that poignant sadness a heart of joy, deep and
+perpetual, made only keener by that sad outward show.</p>
+<p>Here in our visible life is a whisper and hint of our life
+invisible; of the secret that runs through and interprets so much
+of our history. For very much of our nation's life has been like
+the sadness of those autumn days,--a tale of torn leaves, of broken
+branches, of tears everywhere. Tragedy upon <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page011" id="page011"></a>[pg 011]</span>
+tragedy has filled our land with woe and sorrow, and, as men count
+success, we have failed of it, and received only misery and
+deprivation. He has never known the true Ireland who does not feel
+that woe. Yet, more, he knows not the real Ireland who cannot feel
+within that woe the heart of power and joy,--the strong life
+outlasting darkest night,--the soul that throbs incessantly under
+all the calamities of the visible world, throughout the long
+tragedy of our history.</p>
+<p>This is our secret: the life that is in sorrow as in joy; the
+power that is not more in success than in failure--the one soul
+whose moods these are, who uses equally life and death.</p>
+<p>For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy. And we may outline
+now the manner in which that tale will be told. We shall have,
+first, a long, dim dawn,--mysterious peoples of the hidden past
+coming together to our land from the outlying darkness. A first
+period, which has left abundant and imperishable traces everywhere
+among our hills and valleys, writing a large history in massive
+stone, yet a history which, even now, is dim as the dawn it belongs
+to. What can be called forth from that Archaic Darkness, in the
+backward and abysm of Time, we shall <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page012" id="page012"></a>[pg 012]</span> try to evoke; drawing
+the outlines of a people who, with large energies in our visible
+world, toiled yet more for the world invisible; a people uniform
+through the whole land and beyond it, along many neighboring
+shores; a people everywhere building; looking back into a long
+past; looking forward through the mists of the future. A people
+commemorating the past in a form that should outlast the future. A
+people undertaking great enterprises for mysterious ends; whose
+works are everywhere among us, to this day, imperishable in giant
+stone; yet a people whose purposes are mysterious to us, whose very
+name and tongue are quite unknown. Their works still live all
+around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the four provinces, a
+world of the vanished past enduring among us into the present; and,
+so mightily did these old builders work, and with such large
+simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every
+handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows,
+bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race.</p>
+<p>After this Archaic Dawn we shall find a mingling of four races
+in Ireland, coming together from widely separated homes, unless one
+of the four be the descendant of the archaic race, as well it may
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page013" id="page013"></a>[pg
+013]</span> be. From the surging together of these four races we
+shall see, in almost pre-historic times, the growth of a well-knit
+polity; firm principalities founded, strong battles fought, a
+lasting foundation of law. In this Second Epoch, every thing that
+in the first was dim and vague grows firm in outline and defined.
+Names, places, persons,--we know them all as if they were of
+to-day. This is the age which flowered in the heroic days of Emain
+of Maca, Emain 'neath the beech-trees, the citadel of northeastern
+Ireland. Here we shall find the court of Fergus mac Roeg, a man too
+valiant, too passionate, too generous to rule altogether wisely;
+his star darkened by the gloomy genius of Concobar his stepson, the
+evil lover of ill-fated Deirdr&eacute;. Cuculain, too, the
+war-loving son of Sualtam, shall rise again,--in whom one part of
+our national genius finds its perfect flower. We shall hear the
+thunder of his chariot, at the Battle of the Headland of the Kings,
+when Meave the winsome and crafty queen of Connacht comes against
+him, holding in silken chains of her tresses the valiant spirit of
+Fergus. The whole life of that heroic epoch, still writ large upon
+the face of the land, shall come forth clear and definite; we shall
+stand by the threshold of Cuculain's dwelling, and move
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page014" id="page014"></a>[pg
+014]</span> among the banquet-halls of Emain of Maca. We shall look
+upon the hills and valleys that Meave and Deirdr&eacute; looked on,
+and hear the clash of spear and shield at the Ford of the
+river,--and this even though we must go back two thousand
+years.</p>
+<p>To this will follow a Third Epoch, where another side of
+Ireland's genius will write itself in epic all across the land,
+with songs for every hillside, and stories for every vale and
+grove. Here our more passionate and poetic force will break forth
+in the lives of Find, son of Cumal, the lord of warriors; in his
+son Ossin, most famous bard of the western lands, and Ossin's son
+Oscar, before whose might even the fiends and sprites cowered back
+dismayed. As the epoch of Cuculain shows us our valor finding its
+apotheosis, so shall we find in Find and Ossin and Oscar the
+perfect flower of our genius for story and song; for romantic life
+and fine insight into nature; for keen wit and gentler humor. The
+love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly the
+visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly,--a sense
+of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic
+life. We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and
+poetic side of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page015" id=
+"page015"></a>[pg 015]</span> Irish character as will leave little
+for coming ages to add. In these two early epochs we shall see the
+perfecting of the natural man; the moulding of rounded, gracious
+and harmonious lives, inspired with valor and the love of beauty
+and song.</p>
+<p>Did our human destiny stop there, with the perfect life of
+individual men and women, we might well say that these two epochs
+of Ireland contain it all; that our whole race could go no further.
+For no man lived more valiant than Cuculain, more generous than
+Fergus, more full of the fire of song than Ossin, son of Find. Nor
+amongst women were any sadder than Deirdr&eacute; and Grania;
+craftier than Meave, more winsome than Nessa the mother of
+Concobar. Perfected flowers of human life all of them,--if that be
+all of human life. So, were this all, we might well consent that
+with the death of Oscar our roll of history might close; there is
+nothing to add that the natural man could add.</p>
+<p>But where the perfecting of the natural man ends, our truer
+human life begins--the life of our ever-living soul. The natural
+man seeks victory; he seeks wealth and possessions and happiness;
+the love of women, and the loyalty of followers. But the natural
+man trembles in the face of defeat, of sorrow, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page016" id="page016"></a>[pg 016]</span> of
+subjection; the natural man cannot raise the black veil of
+death.</p>
+<p>Therefore for the whole world and for our land there was needed
+another epoch, a far more difficult lesson,--one so remote from
+what had been of old, that even now we only begin to understand it.
+To the Ireland that had seen the valor of Cuculain, that had
+watched the wars of Fergus,--to the Ireland that listened to the
+deeds of Find and the songs of Ossin,--came the Evangel of Galilee,
+the darkest yet brightest message ever brought to the children of
+earth. If we rightly read that Evangel, it brought the doom of the
+natural man, and his supersession by the man immortal; it brought
+the death of our personal perfecting and pride, and the rising from
+the dead of the common soul, whereby a man sees another self in his
+neighbor; sees all alike in the one Divine.</p>
+<p>Of this one Divine, wherein we all live and live forever, pain
+is no less the minister than pleasure; nay, pain is more its
+minister, since pleasure has already given its message to the
+natural man. Of that one Divine, sorrow and desolation are the
+messengers, alike with joy and gladness; even more than joy and
+gladness, for the natural man has tasted <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page017" id="page017"></a>[pg 017]</span> these.
+Of that one Divine, black and mysterious death is the servant, not
+less than bright life; and life we had learned of old in the
+sunshine.</p>
+<a name="017.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/017.jpg"><img src="images/017.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>IN THE DARGLE, CO. WICKLOW.</b></p>
+<p>There came, therefore, to Ireland, as to a land cherished for
+enduring purposes, first the gentler side, and then the sterner, of
+the Galilean message. First, the epoch almost idyllic which
+followed after the mission of Patrick; the epoch of learning and
+teaching the simpler phrases of the Word. Churches and schools rose
+everywhere, taking the place of fort and embattled camp. Chants
+went up at morning and at evening, with the incense of prayer, and
+heaven seemed descended upon earth. Our land, which had stood so
+high in the ranks of valor and romance, now rose not less eminent
+for piety and fervid zeal, sending forth messengers and ministers
+of the glad news to the heathen lands of northern and central
+Europe, and planting refuges of religion within their savage
+bounds. Beauty came forth in stone and missal, answering to the
+beauty of life it was inspired by; and here, if anywhere upon earth
+through a score of centuries, was realized the ideal of that prayer
+for the kingdom, as in heaven, so on earth. Here, again, we have
+most ample memorials scattered all abroad throughout the land; we
+can <span class="pagenum"><a name="page018" id="page018"></a>[pg
+018]</span> call up the whole epoch, and make it stand visible
+before us, visiting every shrine and sacred place of that saintly
+time, seeing, with inner eyes, the footsteps of those who followed
+that path, first traced out by the shores of Gennesaret.</p>
+<p>Once more, if the kingdom come upon earth were all of the
+message, we might halt here; for here forgiveness and gentle
+charity performed their perfect work, and learning was present with
+wise counsel to guide willing feet in the way. Yet this is not all;
+nor, if we rightly understand that darkest yet brightest message,
+are we or is mankind destined for such an earthly paradise; our
+kingdom is not of this world. Here was another happiness, another
+success; yet not in that happiness nor in that success was hid the
+secret; it lay far deeper. Therefore we find that morning with its
+sunshine rudely clouded over, its promise swept away in the black
+darkness of storms. Something more than holy living remained to be
+learned; there remained the mystery of failure and death--that
+death which is the doorway to our real life. Therefore upon our
+shores broke wave after wave of invasion, storm after storm of
+cruelest oppression and degradation. In the very dust was our race
+ground down, destitute, afflicted, tormented, according
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page019" id="page019"></a>[pg
+019]</span> to prophecy and promise. Nor was that the end. Every
+bitterness that the heart of man can conceive, that the heart of
+man can inflict, that the heart of man can endure, was poured into
+our cup, and we drained it to the dregs. Of that saddest yet most
+potent time we shall record enough to show not only what befell
+through our age of darkness, but also, so far as may be, what
+miraculous intent underlay it, what promise the darkness covered,
+of our future light; what golden rays of dawn were hidden in our
+gloom.</p>
+<p>Finally, from all our fiery trials we shall see the genius of
+our land emerge, tried indeed by fire, yet having gained fire's
+purity; we shall see that genius beginning, as yet with halting
+speech, to utter its most marvelous secret of the soul of man. We
+shall try at least to gain clear sight of our great destiny, and
+thereby of the like destiny of universal man.</p>
+<p>For we cannot doubt that what we have passed through, all men
+and all nations either have passed through already, or are to pass
+through in the time to come. There is but one divine law, one
+everlasting purpose and destiny for us all. And if we see other
+nations now entering that time of triumph which passed for us so
+long ago, that perfecting of the natural man, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page020" id="page020"></a>[pg 020]</span> with
+his valor and his song, we shall with fear and reverence remember
+that before them also lie the dark centuries of fiery trial; the
+long night of affliction, the vigils of humiliation and suffering.
+The one Divine has not yet laid aside the cup that holds the bitter
+draught,--the drinking of which comes ever before the final gift of
+the waters of life. What we passed through, they shall pass through
+also; what we suffered, they too shall suffer. Well will it be with
+them if, like us, they survive the fierce trial, and rise from the
+fire immortal, born again through sacrifice.</p>
+<p>Therefore I see in Ireland a miraculous and divine history, a
+life and destiny invisible, lying hid within her visible life. Like
+that throbbing presence of the night which whispers along the
+hills, this diviner whisper, this more miraculous and occult power,
+lurks in our apparent life. From the very gray of her morning, the
+children of Ireland were preoccupied with the invisible world; it
+was so in the darkest hours of our oppression and desolation;
+driven from this world, we took refuge in that; it was not the
+kingdom of heaven upon earth, but the children of earth seeking a
+refuge in heaven. So the same note rings and echoes through all our
+history; we <span class="pagenum"><a name="page021" id=
+"page021"></a>[pg 021]</span> live in the invisible world. If I
+rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To
+restore to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our
+immortality; as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean
+Evangel. We shall first learn, and then teach, that not with wealth
+can the soul of man be satisfied; that our enduring interest is not
+here but there, in the unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose
+purposes exist all the visible beauties of the world. If this be
+our mission and our purpose, well may our fair mysterious land
+deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page022" id="page022"></a>[pg
+022]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page023" id="page023"></a>[pg
+023]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page024" id="page024"></a>[pg
+024]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page025" id="page025"></a>[pg
+025]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="II."></a>II.</h2>
+<h3>THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Westward from Sligo--Town of the River of Shells--a tongue of
+land runs toward the sea between two long bays. Where the two bays
+join their waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray limestone
+rocks soaring sheer upwards, rugged and formidable. Within the
+shadow of the mountain is hidden a wonderful glen--a long tunnel
+between cliffs, densely arched over with trees and fringed with
+ferns; even at midday full of a green gloom. It is a fitting
+gateway to the beauty and mystery of the mountain.</p>
+<p>Slowly climbing by stony ways, the path reaches the summit, a
+rock table crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in
+olden days as a memorial of golden-haired Maeve. From the dead
+queen's pyramid a view of surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over
+sea and land, mingled valley and hill. The Atlantic stretches in
+illimitable blue, curved round the rim of the sky, a darker mirror
+of the blue above. It is full of throbbing silence and peace.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page026" id="page026"></a>[pg
+026]</span> Across blue fields of ocean, and facing the noonday
+brightness of the sun, rise the tremendous cliffs of Slieve League,
+gleaming with splendid colors through the shimmering air; broad
+bands of amber and orange barred with deeper red; the blue weaves
+beneath them and the green of the uplands above.</p>
+<p>The vast amber wall rises out of the ocean, and passes eastward
+in a golden band till it merges in the Donegal highlands with their
+immeasurable blue. Sweeping round a wide bay, the land drawls
+nearer again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to
+green and brown. The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and
+Sligo hills, a row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler
+and more translucent in the southern distance.</p>
+<p>Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across
+the plain, where brown and purple are blended with green in broad
+spaces of mingling color. To the west the ground rises again into
+hills crowded behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the
+Mountains of Storms. Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud-wreaths
+in the blue, are the hills that guard our western ocean. From their
+sunset-verges the land draws near again, in the long range of the
+Mayo cliffs,--fierce walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page027" id="page027"></a>[pg
+027]</span> from a wild world of storm-swept uplands. The cliffs
+gradually lessen, and their colors grow clearer, till they sink at
+last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare, divided from us only by
+a channel of shallow sea.</p>
+<p>The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain,
+is full of the silence of intense and mighty power. The ocean is
+tremulous with the breath of life. The mountains, in their stately
+beauty, rise like immortals in the clear azure. The signs of our
+present works are dwarfed to insignificance.</p>
+<p>Everywhere within that wide world of hill and plain, and hardly
+less ancient than the hills themselves, are strewn memorials of
+another world that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden
+past. A wordless history is written there, in giant circles of
+stone and cromlechs of piled blocks, so old that in a land of most
+venerable tradition their very legend has vanished away.</p>
+<p>Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs
+and stone circles, a very city of dead years. There is something
+awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered
+stones, the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts; that awe is
+deepened by the feeling of the tremendous power <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page028" id="page028"></a>[pg 028]</span>
+lavished in bringing them here, setting them up in their ordered
+groups, and piling the crowns of the cromlechs on other only less
+gigantic stones; awe gives place to overwhelming mystery when we
+can find no kinship to our own thoughts and aims in their stately
+grouping. We are in presence of archaic purposes recorded in a
+massive labyrinth, purposes darkly hidden from us in the
+unknown.</p>
+<p>There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances,
+firmly set upright in the earth. They loom vast, like beads of a
+giant necklace on the velvet grass. There are cromlechs set
+alone--a single huge boulder borne aloft in the air on three others
+of hardly less weight. There are cromlechs set in the midst of
+titanic circles of stone, with lesser boulders guarding the
+cromlechs closer at hand. There are circles beside circles rising
+in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting their
+aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their
+companion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmuring sea.</p>
+<p>Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages. When
+sunrise reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of
+darkness over the burnished grass. From morning to midday the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page029" id="page029"></a>[pg
+029]</span> shadows shrink, ever hiding from the sun; an army of
+wraiths, sprite-like able to grow gigantic or draw together into
+mere blots of darkness. When day declines, the shadows come forth
+again, joining ghostly hands from stone to stone, from circle to
+circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at last into the
+universal realm of night. Thus they weave their web, inexorable as
+tireless Time.</p>
+<p>There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore,
+under Knocknarea. Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials
+of dead years within our horizon. At Abbey-quarter, within the
+town-limits of Sligo itself, there is another great ring of
+boulders, the past and the present mingling together. On the
+northern coast, across the Bay of Sligo, where the headland of
+Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is another giant necklace
+of gray blocks ranged upon the moor. Farther along the shore, where
+Bundoran marks the boundary of Donegal, a cromlech and a stone
+circle rise among the sand-banks. All have the same rugged and
+enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery.</p>
+<p>Eastward from Sligo, Lough Gill lies like a mirror framed in
+hills, wreathed with dark green woods. On a hill-top north of the
+lake, in the Deer-park, is a <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page030" id="page030"></a>[pg 030]</span> monument of quite other
+character--a great oblong marked by pillared stones, like an open
+temple. At three points huge stones are laid across from pillar to
+pillar. The whole enclosure was doubtless so barred in days of old,
+a temple of open arches crowning the summit of the hill. The great
+ruin by the lake keeps its secret well.</p>
+<p>Another ring of giant stones rests on a hillside across the
+lake, under the Cairn hill, with its pyramid crown. All these are
+within easy view from our first vantage-point on Knocknarea, yet
+they are but the outposts of an army which spreads everywhere
+throughout the land. They are as common in wild and inaccessible
+places as on the open plain. Some rise in lonely islands off the
+coast; others on the summits of mountains; yet others in the midst
+of tilled fields. They bear no relation at all to the land as it is
+to-day. The very dispersion of these great stone monuments,
+scattered equally among places familiar or wild, speaks of a remote
+past--a past when all places were alike wild, or all alike
+familiar.</p>
+<p>Where the gale-swept moors of Achill Island rise up toward the
+slope of Slievemore Mountain, there are stone circles and cromlechs
+like the circles of Carrowmore. The wild storms of the Atlantic
+rush <span class="pagenum"><a name="page031" id="page031"></a>[pg
+031]</span> past them, and the breakers roar under their cliffs.
+The moorland round the towering mountain is stained with ochre and
+iron under a carpet of heather rough as the ocean winds.</p>
+<p>Away to the south from Slievemore the horizon is broken by an
+army of mountains, beginning with the Twelve Peaks of Connemara.
+Eastward of these hills are spread the great Galway lakes; eastward
+of these a wide expanse of plain. This is the famous Moytura of
+traditional history, whose story we shall presently tell. Ages ago
+a decisive battle was fought there; but ages before the battle, if
+we are not greatly misled, the stone circles of the plain were
+already there. Tradition says that these circles numbered seven in
+the beginning, but only two remain unbroken.</p>
+<p>Between Galway Bay and the wide estuary of the Shannon spread
+the moorlands of Clare, bleak under Atlantic gales, with never a
+tree for miles inward from the sea. Like a watch-tower above the
+moorlands stand. Slieve Callan, the crown of the mountain abruptly
+shorn. Under the shoulder of the great hill, with the rolling
+moorlands all about it, stands a solitary cromlech; formed of huge
+flat stones, it was at first a roomy chamber shut in on all four
+sides, and roofed by a single enormous block; the ends <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page032" id="page032"></a>[pg 032]</span> have
+fallen, so that it is now an open tunnel formed of three huge
+stones.</p>
+<p>The coast runs southward from the Shannon to the strand of
+Tralee, the frontier of the southern mountain world, where four
+ranges of red sandstone thrust themselves forth towards the ocean,
+with long fiords running inland between them. On a summit of the
+first of these red ranges, Caherconree above Tralee strand, there
+is a stone circle, massive, gigantic, dwelling in utter
+solitude.</p>
+<p>We have recorded a few only out of many of these great stone
+monuments strewn along our Atlantic coast, whether on moor or cliff
+or remote mountain-top.</p>
+<p>There are others as notable everywhere in the central plain, the
+limestone world of lakes and rivers. On a green hill-crest
+overlooking the network of inlets of Upper Erne there is a circle
+greater than any we have recorded. The stones are very massive,
+some of them twice the height of a tall man. To one who stands
+within the ring these huge blocks of stone shut out the world; they
+loom large against the sky, full of unspoken secrets like the
+Sphinx. Within this mighty ring the circle of Stonehenge might be
+set, leaving a broad road all round it on the grass.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page033" id="page033"></a>[pg
+033]</span>
+<p>From Fermanagh, where this huge circle is, we gain our best clue
+to the age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each
+other in their massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in
+their utter mystery. Round the lakes of Erne there are wide
+expanses of peat, dug as fuel for centuries, and in many places as
+much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of clay, the waste of old
+glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness, this whole mass
+of peat has grown since some of the great stone monuments were
+built; if we can tell the time thus taken for its growth we know at
+least the nearer limit of the time that divides us from their
+builders.</p>
+<p>Like a tree, the peat has its time of growth and its time of
+rest. Spring covers it with green, winter sees it brown and dead.
+Thus thin layers are spread over it, a layer for a year, and it
+steadily gains in thickness with the passing of the years. The
+deeper levels are buried and pressed down, slowly growing firm and
+rigid, but still keeping the marks of the layers that make them up.
+It is like a dry ocean gradually submerging the land. Gathering
+round the great stone circles as they stand on the clay, this black
+sea has risen slowly but surely, till at last it has covered them
+with its dark waves, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page034"
+id="page034"></a>[pg 034]</span> they rest in the quiet depths,
+with a green foam of spring freshness far above their heads.</p>
+<p>At Killee and Breagho, near Enniskillen, the peat has once more
+been cut away, restoring some of these great stones to the light.
+If we count the layers and measure the thickness of the peat, we
+can tell how many years are represented by its growth. We can,
+therefore, tell that the great stone circle, which the first growth
+of peat found already there, must be at least as old, and may be
+indefinitely older. By careful count it is found that one foot of
+black peat is made up of eight hundred layers; eight hundred
+summers and eight hundred winters went to the building of it. One
+foot of black peat, therefore, will measure the time from before
+the founding of Rome or the First Olympiad to the beginning of our
+era. Another foot will bring us to the crowning of Charlemagne. Yet
+another, to the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Since then,
+only a few inches have been added. Here is a chronometer worthy of
+our great cromlechs and stone circles.</p>
+<p>Some of these, as we saw, rest on the clay, with a sea of peat
+twelve feet deep around and above them. Every foot of the peat
+stands for eight centuries. Since the peat began to form, eight or
+ten <span class="pagenum"><a name="page035" id="page035"></a>[pg
+035]</span> thousand years have passed, and when that vast period
+began, the great monuments of stone were already there. How long
+they had stood in their silence before our chronometer began to run
+we cannot even guess.</p>
+<p>At Cavancarragh, on the shoulder of Toppid Mountain, some four
+miles from Enniskillen, there is one of these circles; a ring of
+huge stone boulders with equal spaces between stone and stone. A
+four-fold avenue of great blocks stretches away from it along the
+shoulder of the hill, ending quite abruptly at the edge of a
+ravine, the steep channel of a torrent. It looks as if the river,
+gradually undermining the hillside, had cut the avenue in halves,
+so that the ravine seems later in date than the stones. But that we
+cannot be quite sure of. This, however, we do certainly know: that
+since the avenue of boulders and the circle of huge red stones were
+ranged in order, a covering of peat in some parts twelve feet thick
+has grown around and above them, hiding them at last altogether
+from the day. In places the peat has been cut away again, leaving
+the stones once more open to the light, standing, as they always
+stood, on the surface of the clay.</p>
+<p>Here again we get the same measurement. At <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page036" id="page036"></a>[pg 036]</span> eight
+hundred annual layers to the foot, and with twelve feet of peat, we
+have nine thousand six hundred years,--not for the age of the stone
+circles, but for that part of their age which we are able to
+measure. For we know not how long they were there before the peat
+began to grow. It may have been a few years; it may have been a
+period as great or even greater than the ten thousand years we are
+able to measure.</p>
+<p>The peat gradually displaced an early forest of giant oaks.
+Their stems are still there, standing rooted in the older clay.
+Where they once stood no trees now grow. The whole face of the land
+has changed. Some great change of climate must lie behind this
+vanishing of vast forests, this gradual growth of peat-covered
+moors. A dry climate must have changed to one much damper; heat
+must have changed to cold, warm winds to chilly storms. In the
+southern promontories, among red sandstone hills, still linger
+survivors of that more genial clime--groves of arbutus that speak
+of Greece or Sicily; ferns, as at Killarney, found elsewhere only
+in the south, in Portugal, or the Canary Islands.</p>
+<a name="037.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/037.jpg"><img src="images/037.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>MUCKROSS ABBEY, KILLARNEY.</b></p>
+<p>On the southwestern horizon from Toppid Mountain, when the sky
+is clear after rain, you can trace <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page037" id="page037"></a>[pg 037]</span> the outline of the
+Curlew hills, our southern limit of view from Knocknarea. Up to the
+foot of the hills spreads a level country of pastures dappled with
+lakes, broken into a thousand fantastic inlets by the wasting of
+the limestone rock. The daisies are the stars in that green sky.
+Just beyond the young stream of the Shannon, where it links Lough
+Garra to Lough Key, there is a lonely cromlech, whose tremendous
+crown was once upheld by five massive pillars. There is a kindred
+wildness and mystery in the cromlech and the lonely hills.</p>
+<p>Southward again of this, where the town of Lough Rea takes its
+name from the Gray Lake, stands a high hill crowned by a cromlech,
+with an encircling earthwork. It marks a green ring of sacred
+ground alone upon the hill-top, shut off from all the world, and
+with the mysterious monument of piled stones in its centre; here,
+as always, one huge block upheld in the air by only lesser blocks.
+The Gray Lake itself, under this strange sentry on the hill, was in
+long-passed ages a little Venice; houses built on piles lined its
+shores, set far enough out into the lake for safety, ever ready to
+ward off attack from the land. This miniature Venice of Lough Rea
+is the type of a whole epoch of turbulent tribal war, when homes
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page038" id="page038"></a>[pg
+038]</span> were everywhere clustered within the defence of the
+waters, with stores laid up to last the rigors of a siege.</p>
+<p>The contrast between the insecurity and peril of the old lake
+dwellings and the present safety of the town, open on all sides,
+unguarded and free from fear, is very marked. But not less complete
+is the contrast between the ancient hamlet, thus hidden for
+security amid the waters, and the great cromlech, looming black
+against the sky on the hill's summit, exposed to the wildness of
+the winds, utterly unguarded, yet resting there in lonely
+serenity.</p>
+<p>A little farther south, Lough Gur lies like a white mirror among
+the rolling pasture-lands of Limerick, set amongst low hills. On
+the lake's shore is another metropolis of the dead, worthy to
+compare with Carrowmore on the Sligo headland. Some of the circles
+here are not formed of single stones set at some distance from each
+other, but of a continuous wall of great blocks crowded edge to
+edge. They are like round temples open to the sky, and within one
+of these unbroken rings is a lesser ring like an inner shrine. All
+round the lake there are like memorials--if we can call memorials
+these mighty groups of stone, which only remind us how much we have
+forgotten. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page039" id=
+"page039"></a>[pg 039]</span> There are huge circles of blocks
+either set close together or with an equal space dividing boulder
+from boulder; some of the giant circles are grouped together in
+twos and threes, others are isolated; one has its centre marked by
+a single enormous block, while another like block stands farther
+off in lonely vastness. Here also stands a chambered cromlech of
+four huge flat blocks roofed over like the cromlech under Slieve
+Callan across the Shannon mouth.</p>
+<p>The southern horizon from Lough Gur is broken by the hills of
+red sandstone rising around Glanworth. Beside the stream, a
+tributary of the Blackwater, a huge red cromlech rises over the
+greenness of the meadows like a belated mammoth in its uncouth
+might. To the southwest, under the red hills that guard Killarney
+on the south, the Sullane River flows towards the Lee. On its bank
+is another cromlech of red sandstone blocks, twin-brother to the
+Glanworth pile. Beyond it the road passes towards the sunset
+through mountain-shadowed glens, coming out at last where Kenmare
+River opens into a splendid fiord towards the Atlantic Ocean. At
+Kenmare, in a vale of perfect beauty green with groves of arbutus
+and fringed with thickets of fuchsia, stands a great stone circle,
+the last we shall <span class="pagenum"><a name="page040" id=
+"page040"></a>[pg 040]</span> record to the south. Like all the
+rest, it speaks of tremendous power, of unworldly and mysterious
+ends.</p>
+<p>The very antiquity of these huge stone circles suggests an
+affinity with the revolving years. And here, perhaps, we may find a
+clue to their building. They may have been destined to record great
+Time itself, great Time that circles forever through the circling
+years. There is first the year to be recorded, with its revolving
+days; white winter gleaming into spring; summer reddening and
+fading to autumn. Returning winter tells that the year has gone
+full circle; the sun among the stars gives the definite measure of
+the days. A ring of thirty-six great boulders, set ten paces apart,
+would give the measure of the year in days; and of circles like
+this there are more than one.</p>
+<p>In this endless ring of days the moon is the measurer, marking
+the hours and weeks upon the blue belt of night studded with golden
+stars. Moving stealthily among the stars, the moon presently
+changes her place by a distance equal to her own breadth; we call
+the time this takes an hour. From her rising to her setting, she
+gains her own breadth twelve times; therefore, the night and the
+day are divided <span class="pagenum"><a name="page041" id=
+"page041"></a>[pg 041]</span> each into twelve hours. Meanwhile she
+grows from crescent to full disk, to wane again to a sickle of
+light, and presently to lose herself in darkness at new moon. From
+full moon to full moon, or from one new moon to another, the
+nearest even measure is thirty days; a circle of thirty stones
+would record this, as the larger circle of thirty-six recorded the
+solar year. In three years there are thrice twelve full moons, with
+one added; a ring of thirty-seven stones representing this would
+show the simplest relation between sun and moon.</p>
+<p>The moon, as we saw, stealthily glides among the fixed stars,
+gaining her own width every hour. Passing thus along the mid belt
+of the sphere, she makes the complete circuit in twenty-seven days,
+returning to the same point among the stars, or, if it should so
+happen, to the same star, within that time. Because the earth has
+meanwhile moved forward, the moon needs three days more to overtake
+it and gain the same relative position towards earth and sun, thus
+growing full again, not after twenty-seven, but after thirty days.
+Circles of twenty-seven and thirty days would stand for these lunar
+epochs, and would, for those who understood them, further bear
+testimony to the earth's movement in its own great path
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page042" id="page042"></a>[pg
+042]</span> around the sun. Thus would rings of varying numbers
+mark the measures of time; and not these only, but the great sweep
+of orbs engendering them, the triumphal march of the spheres
+through pathless ether. The life of our own world would thus be
+shown bound up with the lives of others in ceaseless, ever-widening
+circles, that lead us to the Infinite, the Eternal.</p>
+<p>All the cromlechs and circles we have thus far recorded are in
+the western half of our land; there are as many, as worthy of note,
+in the eastern half. But as before we can only pick out a few. One
+of these crowns the volcanic peak of Brandon Hill, in Kilkenny,
+dividing the valleys of the Barrow and Nore. From the mountain-top
+you can trace the silver lines of the rivers coming together to the
+south, and flowing onward to the widening inlet of Wexford harbor,
+where they mingle with the waters of the River Suir. On the summit
+of Brandon Hill stands a great stone circle, a ring of huge basalt
+blocks dominating the rich valleys and the surrounding plain.</p>
+<p>In Glen Druid of the Dublin hills is a cromlech whose granite
+crown weighs seventy tons. Not far off is the Mount Venus cromlech,
+the covering block of which is even more titanic; it is a single
+stone <span class="pagenum"><a name="page043" id="page043"></a>[pg
+043]</span> eighty tons in weight. Near Killternan village, a short
+distance off, is yet another cromlech whose top-most boulder
+exceeds both of these, weighing not less than ninety tons. Yet vast
+as all these are, they are outstripped by the cromlech of Howth,
+whose upper block is twenty feet square and eight feet thick, a
+single enormous boulder one hundred tons in weight. This huge stone
+was borne in the air upon twelve massive pillars of quartz, seven
+feet above the ground, so that a man of average height standing on
+the ground and reaching upward could just touch the under surface
+of the block with his finger-tips. Even a tall man standing on the
+shoulders of another as tall would quite fail to touch the upper
+edge of the stone. If we give this marvelous monument the same age
+as the Fermanagh circles, as we well may, this raising of a single
+boulder of one hundred tons, and balancing it in the air on the
+crest of massive pillars may give us some insight into the
+engineering skill of the men of ten thousand years ago.</p>
+<p>Across the central plain from Howth Head the first break is the
+range of Loughcrew hills. Here are great stone circles in numbers,
+not standing alone like so many others, but encompassing still
+stranger monuments; chambered pyramids of boulders, to <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page044" id="page044"></a>[pg 044]</span> which
+we shall later return. They are lesser models of the three great
+pyramids of Brugh on the Boyne, where the river sweeps southward in
+a long curve, half-encircling a headland of holy ground.</p>
+<p>From near Howth to the Boyne and north of it, the coast is low
+and flat; sandhills matted with bent-grass and starred with red
+thyme and tiny pansies, yellow and purple and blue. Low tide
+carries the sea almost to the horizon, across a vast wilderness of
+dripping sand where the gulls chatter as they wade among the pools.
+Where the shore rises again towards the Carlingford Mountains,
+another cromlech stands under the shadow of granite hills.</p>
+<p>A long fiord with wooded walls divides the Carlingford range
+from the mountains of Mourne. The great dark range thrusts itself
+forth against the sea in somber beauty, overhanging the wide strand
+of Dundrum Bay. The lesser bay, across whose bar the sea moans
+under the storm-winds, is dominated by the hill of Rudraige, named
+in honor of a hero of old days; but under the shadow of the hill
+stands a more ancient monument, that was gray with age before the
+race of Rudraige was born. On five pillars of massive stone is
+upreared a sixth, of huge and formidable bulk, and carrying even to
+us in our day <span class="pagenum"><a name="page045" id=
+"page045"></a>[pg 045]</span> a sense of mystery and might. The
+potent atmosphere of a hidden past still breathes from it,
+whispering of vanished years, vanished races, vanished secrets of
+the prime.</p>
+<p>There are two circles of enormous stones on the tongue of land
+between Dundrum Bay and Strangford, both very perfect and marked
+each in its own way from among the rest. The first, at Legamaddy,
+has every huge boulder still in place. There is a lesser ring of
+stones within the first circle, with many outliers, of enormous
+size, dotted among the fields. It looks as if a herd of huge
+animals of the early world had come together in a circle for the
+night, the young being kept for safety within their ring, while
+others, grazing longer or wandering farther from the rest, were
+approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon them with dire
+magic turned them all to stone; and there they remain, sentient,
+yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies like
+this we may convey the feeling of mystery breathing from them.</p>
+<p>On the hill-top of Slieve-na-griddle is another circle of the
+same enormous boulders. A cromlech is piled in the midst of it, and
+an avenue of stones leads up to the circle. Its form is that of
+many circles <span class="pagenum"><a name="page046" id=
+"page046"></a>[pg 046]</span> with enclosed cromlechs at
+Carrowmore, though in these the avenue is missing. The thought that
+underlies them is the same, though they are separated by the whole
+width of the land; a single cult with a single ideal prompted the
+erection of both.</p>
+<p>At Drumbo, on the east bank of the Lagan before it reaches
+Belfast Lough, there is a massive cromlech surrounded by a wide
+ring of earth piled up high enough to cut off the sacred space
+within from all view of the outer world. Like the earthwork round
+the cromlech of Lough Rea, it marks the boundary of a great nature
+temple, open to the sky but shut off from mankind. Even now its
+very atmosphere breathes reverence.</p>
+<p>At Finvoy, in northern Antrim, among the meadows of the Bann,
+there is a cromlech within a great stone circle like that on
+Slieve-na-griddle in Down, and like many of the Carrowmore rings.
+The Black Lion cromlech in Cavan is encircled with a like ring of
+boulders, and another cromlech not far off rivals some of the
+largest in the immense size of its crowning block.</p>
+<p>Three cromlechs in the same limestone plain add something to the
+mystery that overhangs all the rest. The first, at Lennan in
+Monaghan, is marked with a <span class="pagenum"><a name="page047"
+id="page047"></a>[pg 047]</span> curious cryptic design, suggesting
+a clue, yet yielding none. There is a like script on the cromlech
+at Castlederg in Tyrone, if indeed the markings were ever the
+record of some thought to be remembered, and not mere ornament. The
+chambered cromlech of Lisbellaw in Fermanagh has like markings;
+they are too similar to be quite independent, yet almost too simple
+to contain a recorded thought.</p>
+<p>We come once more to Donegal. On the hill-top of Beltaney, near
+Raphoe, there is a very massive circle formed of sixty-seven huge
+blocks. Here again the Stonehenge ring might be set up within the
+Irish circle, leaving an avenue eight paces wide all round it. The
+sacred fire was formerly kindled here to mark the birth of Spring.
+The name of the old festival of Beltane still lingers on the hill.
+At Culdaff in north Donegal, at the end of the Inishowen peninsula,
+stands another great stone circle, with which we must close our
+survey of these titanic monuments.</p>
+<p>We have mentioned a few only among many; yet enough to show
+their presence everywhere throughout the land, in the valleys or on
+mountain summits, in the midst of pastures or on lonely and rugged
+isles. One group, as we have seen, cannot be younger than
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page048" id="page048"></a>[pg
+048]</span> ten thousand years, and may be far older. The others
+may be well coeval. Their magnitude, their ordered ranks, their
+universal presence, are a startling revelation of the material
+powers of the men of that remote age; they are a testimony, not
+less wonderful, of the moral force which dedicated so much power to
+ideal ends. Finally, they are a monument to remind us how little we
+yet know of the real history of our race.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page049" id="page049"></a>[pg
+049]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page050" id="page050"></a>[pg
+050]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page051" id="page051"></a>[pg
+051]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="III."></a>III.</h2>
+<h3>THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>In every district of Ireland, therefore, there remain these
+tremendous and solemn survivors of a mighty past. The cromlechs,
+with their enormous masses upheld in the air, rising among the
+fertile fields or daisy-dotted pastures; the great circles of
+standing stones, starred everywhere, in the valleys or upon the
+uplands, along the rough sides of heather-covered hills. They have
+everywhere the same aspect of august mystery, the same brooding
+presence, like sentinels of another world. It is impossible not to
+feel their overshadowing majesty. Everywhere they follow the same
+designs in large simplicity; inspired by the same purpose, and with
+the same tireless might overcoming the tremendous obstacles of
+their erection; they are devoted everywhere not to material and
+earthly ends, but to the ideal purposes of the invisible and
+everlasting, linked with the hidden life of those who pass away
+from us through the gates of death.</p>
+<p>Can we find any clue to the builders of these grand <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page052" id="page052"></a>[pg 052]</span> and
+enduring memorials, the conditions of their building, the age of
+our land to which they belong? If we wisely use the abundant
+knowledge of the past already in our possession, there is good
+reason to believe we can, establishing much with entire certainty
+and divining more.</p>
+<p>The standing stones and cromlechs, as we know, are everywhere
+spread over Ireland, so that it is probable that throughout the
+whole country one is never out of sight of one of these solemn
+monuments. Their uniform and universal presence shows, therefore, a
+uniform race dwelling everywhere within the four seas, a universal
+stability and order, allowing such great and enduring works to be
+undertaken and completed. We must believe, too, that the builders
+of these giant stone monuments were dominant throughout the land,
+possessing entire power over the labor of thousands everywhere; and
+even then the raising of these titanic masses is almost
+miraculous.</p>
+<p>But the history of the standing stones and cromlechs is not a
+page of Irish history only, nor can we limit to our own isle the
+presence of their builders, the conditions of dominion and order
+under which alone they could have been raised. We shall gain
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page053" id="page053"></a>[pg
+053]</span> our first trustworthy clue by tracing the limits of the
+larger territory, beyond our island, where these same gray
+memorials are found.</p>
+<a name="053.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/053.jpg"><img src="images/053.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>BRANDY ISLAND, GLENGARRIFF.</b></p>
+<p>The limits of the region in which alone we find these piles and
+circles of enormous stones are clearly and sharply defined, though
+this region itself is of immense and imposing extent. It is divided
+naturally into two provinces, both starting from a point somewhere
+in the neighborhood of Gibraltar or Mount Atlas, and spreading
+thence over a territory of hundreds of miles.</p>
+<p>The southern cromlech province, beginning at the Strait of
+Gibraltar, extends eastward along the African coast past Algiers to
+the headland of Tunis, where Carthage stood, at a date far later
+than the age of cromlechs. Were it not for the flaming southern
+sun, the scorched sands, the palms, the shimmering torrid air, we
+might believe these Algerian megaliths belonged to our own land, so
+perfect is the resemblance, so uniform the design, so identical the
+inspiration. The same huge boulders, oblong or egg-shaped,
+formidable, impressive, are raised aloft on massive supporting
+stones; there are the same circles of stones hardly less gigantic,
+with the same mysterious faces, the same silent solemnity.
+Following this line, we <span class="pagenum"><a name="page054" id=
+"page054"></a>[pg 054]</span> find them again in Minorca, Sardinia
+and Malta; everywhere under warm blue skies, in lands of olives and
+trailing vines, with the peacock-blue of the Mediterranean waves
+twinkling beneath them. Northward from Minorca, but still in our
+southern cromlech province, we find them in southeastern Spain, in
+the region of New Carthage, but far older than the oldest trace of
+that ancient city. In lesser numbers they follow the Spanish coast
+up towards the Ebro, through vinelands and lands of figs,
+everywhere under summer skies. This province, therefore, our
+southern cromlech province, covers most of the western
+Mediterranean; it does not cover, nor even approach, Italy or
+Greece or Egypt, the historic Mediterranean lands. We must look for
+its origin in the opposite direction--towards Gibraltar, the
+Pillars of Hercules.</p>
+<p>From the same point, the Pillars of Hercules, begins our second
+or northern cromlech region, even larger and more extensive than
+the first, though hardly richer in titanic memorials. From
+Gibraltar, the cromlech region passes northward, covering Portugal
+and western Spain; indeed, it probably merges in the other province
+to the eastward, the two including all Spain between them. From
+northern <span class="pagenum"><a name="page055" id=
+"page055"></a>[pg 055]</span> Spain, turning the flank of the giant
+Pyrenees at Fontarrabia, the cromlech region goes northward and
+ever northward, along the Atlantic coast of France, spreading
+eastward also through the central provinces, covering the mountains
+of the C&ocirc;te d'Or and the Cevennes, but nowhere entering north
+Italy or Germany, which limit France to the east. There is a
+tremendous culmination of the huge stone monuments on the capes and
+headlands of Brittany, where France thrusts herself forward against
+the Atlantic, centring in Carnac, the metropolis of a bygone world.
+Nowhere are there greater riches of titanic stone, in circles, in
+cromlechs, in ranged avenues like huge frozen armies or ordered
+hosts of sleeping elephants. From Brittany we pass to Ireland,
+whose wealth, inherited from dead ages, we have already
+inventoried, and Britain, where the same monuments reappear. More
+numerous to the south and west, they yet spread all over Britain,
+including remote northern Scotland and the Western Isles. Finally,
+there is a streamer stretching still northeastward, to Norway and
+some of the Baltic Islands.</p>
+<p>We are, therefore, confronted with the visible and enduring
+evidence of a mighty people, spreading in two main directions from
+the Pillars of Hercules--eastward <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page056" id="page056"></a>[pg 056]</span> through Gibraltar Strait
+to sunny Algeria, to southern Spain and the Mediterranean isles;
+and northward, along the stormy shores of the Atlantic, from within
+sight of Africa almost to the Arctic Circle, across Spain,
+Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain, and the lands of the Baltic and
+the North Sea. Throughout this vast territory there must have been
+a common people, a common purpose and inspiration, a common
+striving towards the hidden world; there must have been long ages
+of order, of power, of peace, during which men's hearts could
+conceive and their hands execute memorials so vast, so evidently
+meant to endure to a far distant future, so clearly destined to
+ideal ends. There must have been a great spiritual purpose, a
+living belief in the invisible world, and a large practical power
+over natural forces, before these huge monuments could be erected.
+Some of the stones upheld in the air in the Irish cromlechs weigh
+eighty or ninety or a hundred tons. If we estimate that a
+well-built man can lift two hundred pounds, it would demand the
+simultaneous work of a thousand men to erect them; and it is at
+least difficult to see how the effort of a thousand men could be
+applied.</p>
+<p>We are led, therefore, by evidence of the solidest <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page057" id="page057"></a>[pg 057]</span>
+material reality to see this great empire on the Atlantic and along
+the western Mediterranean; this Atlantean land of the
+cromlech-builders, as we may call it, for want of a better name. As
+the thought and purpose of its inhabitants are uniform throughout
+its whole vast extent, we are led to see in them a single
+homogeneous race, working without rivals, without obstacles,
+without contests, for they seem everywhere to have been free to
+choose what sites they would for their gigantic structures. And we
+are irresistibly led to believe that these conditions must have
+endured throughout a vast extent of time, for no nation which does
+not look back to a distant past will plan for a distant future. The
+spiritual sweep and view of the cromlech-builders are, therefore,
+as great as the extent of their territory. This mysterious people
+must have had a life as wonderful as that of Greece or Rome or
+Egypt, whose territories we find them everywhere approaching, but
+nowhere invading.</p>
+<p>What we now know of the past history of our race is so vast, so
+incredibly enormous, that we have ample space for such a territory,
+so widespread, so enduring, as we have seen demanded by the
+position of the cromlechs and standing stones; more than
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page058" id="page058"></a>[pg
+058]</span> that, so overwhelming are the distances in the dark
+backward and abysm of time, to which we must now carry the dawn of
+human history, that the time needed for the building of the
+cromlechs may seem quite recent and insignificant, in view of the
+mightier past, stretching back through geologic ages. The
+nineteenth century may well be called the age of resurrection, when
+long-forgotten epochs of man were born again into our knowledge. We
+can carry back that knowledge now to the early Miocene period, to
+which belong the human relics found by the Abb&eacute; Bourgeois on
+the uplands of Thenay, in central France; and no one believes that
+the early Miocene age can be as recent as a million years ago. A
+vast space separates the Thenay relics from the later traces of man
+found in Pliocene sands with the bones of the archaic meridional
+elephant,--at a date when the German ocean was a forest, full of
+southern trees and huge beasts now long since departed from the
+earth. A period hardly less vast must separate these from the close
+of the glacial age, when man roamed the plains of Europe, and
+sketched the herds of mammoths as they cropped the leaves. That
+huge beast, too, has long since departed into the abyss; but man
+the artist, who recorded the massive outline, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page059" id="page059"></a>[pg 059]</span> the
+huge bossed forehead, the formidable bulk of the shaggy arctic
+elephant, engraved in firm lines on a fragment of its tusk,--man
+still remains. Man was present when rhinoceros and elephant were as
+common in Britain as they are to-day in Southern India or Borneo;
+when the hippopotamus was as much at home in the waters of the
+Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like the grizzly
+of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked in Devon
+caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this epoch
+of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is a
+recent chapter of the great epic of man; there lies far more behind
+it, beyond the Age of Ice to the immensely distant Pliocene; beyond
+this as far as the early Miocene; beyond this, again, how much
+further we know not, towards the beginningless beginning, the
+infinite.</p>
+<p>We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost
+boundless ages, geologic epochs of human history succeeding each
+other in majestic procession, as the face of our island was now
+tropical, now arctic; as the seas swelled up and covered the hills,
+or the bottom of the deep drove back the ocean and became dry land,
+an unbroken continent. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="page060"
+id="page060"></a>[pg 060]</span> wild dreams of romance never
+approached the splendid outlines of this certain history.</p>
+<p>There are dim outlines of man throughout all these ages, but
+only at a comparatively recent date have we traditions and evidence
+pointing to still surviving races. At a period of only a few
+thousand years ago, we begin to catch glimpses of a northern race
+whom the old Greeks and Romans called Hyperboreans or
+Far-Northerners; a race wild and little skilled in the arts of
+life; a race of small stature, slight, dusky, with piercing eyes,
+low brows, and of forbidding face. This race was scattered over
+lands far north of the Mediterranean, dwelling in caves and dens of
+the earth, and lingering on unchanged from the days of mammoth and
+cave-bear. We have slight but definite knowledge of this very
+ancient race--enough to show us that its peculiar type lingers to
+this day in a few remote islands on the Galway and Kerry coast,
+mingled with many later races. This type we find described in old
+Gaelic records as the Firbolgs, a race weak and furtive, dusky and
+keen-eyed, subjected by later races of greater force. Yet from this
+race, as if to show the inherent and equal power of the soul, came
+holy saints and mighty warriors; to the old race of the Firbolgs
+belong Saint Mansuy, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page061" id=
+"page061"></a>[pg 061]</span> apostle of Belgium, and Roderick
+O'Conor, the last king of united Ireland. In gloomy mountain glens
+and lonely ocean islands still it lingers, unvanquished, tenacious,
+obscurely working out its secret destiny.</p>
+<p>This slight and low-browed race, of dark or sallow visage, and
+with black crisp hair, this Hyperborean people, is the oldest we
+can gain a clear view of in our island's history; but we know
+nothing of its extension or powers which would warrant us in
+believing that this was the race which built the cromlechs. Greek
+and Roman tradition, in this only corroborating the actual traces
+we ourselves possess of these old races, tells us of another people
+many thousand years ago overrunning and dominating the Firbolgs; a
+race of taller stature, of handsome features, though also dark, but
+with softer black hair, not crisp and tufted like the hair of the
+dwarfish earlier race. Of this second conquering race, tall and
+handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered from many lands where
+they dwelt; bodies preserved by art or nature, in caverns or
+sepulchres of stone; ornaments, pottery, works decorative and
+useful, and covering several thousand years in succession. But
+better than this, we have present, through nearly every land where
+we know of them in the past, a living remnant <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page062" id="page062"></a>[pg 062]</span> of
+this ancient race, like it in every particular of stature, form,
+complexion and visage, identical in character and temper, tendency
+and type of mind.</p>
+<p>In Ireland we find this tall, dark race over all the west of the
+island, but most numerous in Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo; in
+those regions where, we know, the older population was least
+disturbed. In remote villages among the mountains, reached by
+bridle-paths between heath-covered hills; in the settlements of
+fishermen, under some cliff or in the sheltered nook of one of our
+great western bays; or among the lonely, little visited Atlantic
+islands, this dark, handsome race, with its black hair, dark-brown
+eyes, sallow skin and high forehead, still holds its own, as a
+second layer above the remnant of the far more ancient Firbolg
+Hyperboreans. We find the same race also among the Donegal
+highlands, here and there in the central plain or in the south, and
+nowhere entirely missing among the varied races towards the eastern
+sea.</p>
+<a name="063.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/063.jpg"><img src="images/063.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>SUGAR LOAF MOUNTAIN, GLENGARRIFF.</b></p>
+<p>But it is by no means in Ireland only that this tall, dark,
+western race is found. It is numerously represented in the nearest
+extension of the continent, among the headlands and bays and isles
+of Brittany--a land so like our own western seaboard, with its
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page063" id="page063"></a>[pg
+063]</span> wild Atlantic storms. Following the ocean southward, we
+find the same race extending to the Loire, the Garonne, the
+Pyrenees; stretching somewhat inland also, but clinging everywhere
+to the Atlantic, as we also saw it cling in Ireland. In earlier
+centuries, long before our era opened, we find this same race
+spread far to the east,--as far, almost, as the German and Italian
+frontier,--so that at one time it held almost complete possession
+of France. South of the Pyrenees we find it once more; dominant in
+Portugal, less strongly represented in Spain, yet still supplying a
+considerable part of the population of the whole peninsula, as it
+does in Ireland at the present day. But it does not stop with
+Spain, or even Europe. We find the same race again in the Guanches
+of the Canary islands, off the African coast; and, stranger still,
+we find mummies of this race, of great antiquity, in the cave-tombs
+of Teneriffe. Further, we have ample evidence of its presence,
+until displaced by Moorish invaders, all along northern Africa as
+far as Tunis; and we come across it again amongst the living races
+in the Mediterranean isles, in Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy.
+Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central Sahara belong to the same type.
+Everywhere the same tall, dark race, handsome, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page064" id="page064"></a>[pg 064]</span>
+imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of eyes;
+a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and texture of
+hair.</p>
+<p>Thus far the southern extension of this, our second Irish race;
+we may look for a moment at its distribution in the north. Across
+the shallow sea which separates us from Britain we find the same
+race, clinging always to the Atlantic seaboard. It dominates south
+Wales, where its presence was remarked and commented on by the
+invading Romans. It is present elsewhere through the Welsh
+mountains, and much more sparsely over the east of England; but we
+have ample evidence that at one time this tall, dark race held the
+whole of England in undisputed possession, except, perhaps, for a
+remnant of the Hyperborean dwarfs. In the west of Scotland, and
+especially in the Western Isles, it is once more numerous; and we
+find offshoots of the same race in the dark-haired
+Norwegians,--still holding to the seaboard of the Atlantic.</p>
+<p>Such is the distribution of this once dominant but now dwindled
+race, which has gradually descended from the summit of power as
+ancient Rome descended, as Greece descended, or Assyria or Egypt.
+But we can look back with certainty to a time when this
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page065" id="page065"></a>[pg
+065]</span> race, and this race only, held complete possession of
+all the lands we have mentioned, in north or south, in Europe or
+northern Africa; holding everywhere to the Atlantic coast, or, as
+in the Mediterranean isles, evidently pressing inward from the
+Atlantic, past the Pillars of Hercules, through the Strait of
+Gibraltar.</p>
+<p>It is evident at once that the territory of this race
+corresponds exactly, throughout many countries, with the territory
+of the cromlechs and standing stones; where we find the one, as in
+Ireland, Brittany, Spain, we find the other; where the one is
+absent, as in Germany, or northern Italy or Greece, the other is
+likewise absent. The identity is complete. We are justified,
+therefore, in giving the same provisional name to both, and calling
+them Atlantean, from their evident origin not far from Atlas, and
+their everywhere clinging to the Atlantic coast. We can find traces
+of no other race which at all closely fulfills the necessary
+conditions of uniform and undisputed extension, through a long
+epoch, over the whole cromlech region--the only conditions under
+which we can conceive of the erection of these gigantic monuments,
+or of the long established and universally extended spiritual
+conditions which make possible such vast ideal enterprises.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page066" id="page066"></a>[pg
+066]</span>
+<p>In this race, therefore, which we have called Atlantean, we find
+the conditions fulfilled; of this race, and of no other, we still
+find a lingering remnant in each of the cromlech countries; and we
+hardly find a trace of this race, either now or in the past, in the
+lands which have no cromlechs or standing stones.</p>
+<p>We have already seen that the standing stones of Cavancarragh,
+four miles from Fermanagh, were, within the memory of men still
+living or of their fathers, buried under ten or twelve feet of
+peat, which had evidently formed there after their erection. We
+have here a natural chronometer; for we know the rate at which peat
+forms, and we can, therefore, assign a certain age to a given
+depth. We have given one mode of reckoning already; we find it
+corroborated by another. In the Somme valley, in northern France,
+we have a Nature's timepiece; in the peat, at different levels, are
+relics of the Roman age; of the Gaulish age which preceded it; and,
+far deeper, of pre-historic races, like our Atlanteans, who
+preceded the Gauls. The date of the Roman remains we know
+accurately; and from this standard we find that the peat grows
+regularly some three centimeters a century, or a foot in a thousand
+years.</p>
+<p>On the mountain side, as at Cavancarragh, the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page067" id="page067"></a>[pg 067]</span> growth
+is likely to be slower than in a river valley; yet we may take the
+same rate, a foot a thousand years, and we shall have, for this
+great stone circle, an antiquity of ten or twelve thousand years at
+least. This assumes that the peat began to form as soon as the
+monument was completed; but the contrary may be the case; centuries
+may have intervened.</p>
+<p>We may, however, take this as a provisional date, and say that
+our cromlech epoch, the epoch of the Atlantean builders, from
+Algeria to Ireland, from Ireland to the Baltic, is ten or twelve
+thousand years ago; extending, perhaps, much further back in the
+past, and in certain regions coming much further down towards the
+present, but having a period of twelve thousand years ago as its
+central date. It happens that we have traditions of a great
+dispersion from the very centre we have been led to fix, the
+neighborhood of Atlas or Gibraltar, and that to this dispersion
+tradition has given a date over eleven thousand years ago; but to
+this side of the subject we cannot more fully allude; it would take
+us too far afield.</p>
+<p>We have gone far enough to make it tolerably certain, first,
+that these great and wonderful monuments were built when uniform
+conditions of order, uniform religious beliefs and aspirations, and
+a uniform <span class="pagenum"><a name="page068" id=
+"page068"></a>[pg 068]</span> mastery over natural forces extended
+throughout a vast region spreading northward and eastward from
+Mount Atlas or Gibraltar; we have seen, next, that these conditions
+were furnished when a well-defined race, whom we have called
+Atlantean, was spread as the dominant element over this whole
+region; and, finally, we have seen reason to fix on a period some
+eleven or twelve thousand years ago as the central period of that
+domination, though it may have begun, and probably did begin, many
+centuries earlier. The distribution of the cromlechs is certain;
+the distribution of the race is certain; the age of one
+characteristic group of the monuments is certain. Further than this
+we need not go.</p>
+<p>When we try to form a clearer image of the life of this tall
+archaic race of cromlech-builders, we can divine very much to fill
+the picture. We note, to begin with, that not only do they always
+hold to the Atlantic ocean as something kindred and familiar, but
+that they are found everywhere in islands at such distances from
+the nearest coasts as would demand a certain seamanship for their
+arrival. This is true of their presence in Malta, Minorca,
+Sardinia; it is even more true of Ireland, the Western Isles of
+Scotland, the Norwegian Isles; all of which are surrounded by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page069" id="page069"></a>[pg
+069]</span> stormy and treacherous seas, where wrecks are very
+common even in our day. We must believe that our tail, dark
+invaders were a race of seamen, thoroughly skilled in the dangerous
+navigation of these dark seas; Caesar marveled at, and imitated,
+the ship-building of the natives of Brittany in his day; we equally
+admire the prowess of their sons, the Breton fishermen, in our own
+times. We find, too, that in the western districts and ocean
+islands of our own Ireland the tall, dark race often follows the
+sea, showing the same hereditary skill and daring; a skill which
+certainly marked the first invaders of that race, or they would
+never have reached our island at all. We are the more justified in
+seeing, in these dark cromlech-builders, the Fomorians of old
+Gaelic tradition, who came up out of the sea and subjugated the
+Firbolgs.</p>
+<p>Even to those familiar with the geological record of man it is
+sufficiently startling to find that the Firbolgs, the early
+dwarfish race of Hyperboreans, in all probability were ignorant of
+boats; that they almost certainly came to our island dry-shod, as
+they had come earlier to Britain, migrating over unbroken spaces of
+land to what afterwards became the isle of Erin; for this race we
+find everywhere associated <span class="pagenum"><a name="page070"
+id="page070"></a>[pg 070]</span> with the mammoth--on the
+continent, in Britain, in our own island--and the mammoths
+certainly never came over in ships. Needless to say, there is
+abundant geological evidence as well, to show our former union with
+continental Europe,--though of course at a time immensely more
+remote than ten or twelve thousand years ago.</p>
+<p>We are, therefore, led to identify our Atlantean race of hardy
+seamen with the Fomorians who came up out of the sea and found the
+furtive Firbolgs in possession of our island; and to this race, the
+Fomorians of the sea, we credit the building of cromlechs and
+standing stones, not only among ourselves, but in Norway, in
+Britain, in Brittany, in Spain, in Africa.</p>
+<p>We shall presently pick up the thread of tradition, as we find
+it in Ireland, and try to follow the doings and life of the
+Fomorian invaders; but in the meantime we may try to gain some
+insight into the most mysterious and enduring of their works. The
+cromlechs which have been excavated in many cases are found to
+contain the funereal urns of a people who burned their dead. It
+does not follow that their first and only use was as tombs; but if
+we think of them as tombs only, we must the more marvel at the
+faith <span class="pagenum"><a name="page071" id="page071"></a>[pg
+071]</span> of the builders, and their firm belief in the reality
+and overwhelming import of the other world which we enter at death.
+For of dwellings for the living, of fortresses or storehouses, of
+defences against the foes who later invaded them, we find few
+traces; nothing at all to compare with their massive mausoleums.
+The other world, for them, was a far weightier concern than this,
+and to the purposes of that world, as they conceived it, all their
+energies were directed. We can hardly doubt that, like other races
+who pay extreme reverence to the dead, their inner vision beheld
+these departed ones still around them and among them, forming with
+them a single race, a single family, a single life. This world was
+for them only the threshold of the other, the place of preparation.
+To that other their thoughts all turned, for that other they raised
+these titanic buildings. The solemn masses and simple grandeur of
+the cromlechs fitly symbolize the mood of reverence in which they
+drew near to the sublime world of the hidden; the awe with which
+their handiwork affirmed how greatly that world outweighs this. At
+these houses of the dead they were joined in spirit and communion
+with those who had passed away; once more united with their fathers
+and their fathers' <span class="pagenum"><a name="page072" id=
+"page072"></a>[pg 072]</span> fathers, from the dim beginning of
+their race. The air, for them, was full of spirits. Only the dead
+truly lived.</p>
+<p>The circles of standing stones are also devoted to ideal ends.
+Though the men who set them up could have built not less wonderful
+forts or dwellings of stone, we find none of these; nor has any
+worldly purpose ever been assigned to the stone circles. Yet there
+seems to be a very simple interpretation of their symbology; the
+circle, through all antiquity, stood for the circling year, which
+ever returns to its point of departure, spring repeating spring,
+summer answering to summer, winter with its icy winds only the
+return of former winters: the circling year and its landmarks,
+whether four seasons, or twelve months, or twenty-seven lunar
+mansions, through one of which the wandering moon passes in a day.
+We should thus have circles of twelve or twenty-seven stones, or
+four outlying stones at equal distances, for the four seasons, the
+regents of the year. By counting the stones in each circle we can
+tell to which division of the year they belonged, whether the solar
+months or the lunar mansions.</p>
+<p>But with all ancient nations the cycle of the year was only the
+symbol of the spiritual cycle of the <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page073" id="page073"></a>[pg 073]</span> soul, the path of birth
+and death. We must remember that even for ourselves the same
+symbolism holds: in the winter we celebrate the Incarnation; in
+spring, the Crucifixion; in summer, the birth of the beloved
+disciple; in autumn, the day of All Souls, the feast of the dead.
+Thus for us, too, the succeeding seasons only symbolize the stages
+of a spiritual life, the august procession of the soul.</p>
+<p>We cannot think it was otherwise with a people who lived and
+built so majestically for the hidden world; these great stone
+circles symbolized for them, we must believe, the circling life of
+the soul, the cycle of necessity, with the door of liberation to
+the home of the blest, who have reached perfect freedom and go no
+more out. We may picture in imagination their solemn celebrations;
+priests robed, perhaps, in the mingled green and purple of their
+hills, passing within the circle, chanting some archaic hymn of the
+Divine.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page074" id="page074"></a>[pg
+074]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page075" id="page075"></a>[pg
+075]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE DE DANAANS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page076" id="page076"></a>[pg
+076]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page077" id="page077"></a>[pg
+077]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="IV."></a>IV.</h2>
+<h3>THE DE DANAANS.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>In the dim days of Fomorian and Firbolg, and for ages after,
+Erin was a land of forests, full of wild cattle and deer and
+wolves. The central plain was altogether hidden under green clouds
+of oak-woods, full of long, mysterious alleys, dimpled with sunny
+glades, echoing in spring and summer to the songs of innumerable
+birds. Everywhere through the wide and gloomy forests were the blue
+mirrors of lakes, starred with shaggy islands, the hanging hills
+descending verdant to the water's edge. Silver rivers spread their
+network among the woods, and the lakes and the quiet reaches of the
+rivers teemed with trout and salmon. The hilly lands to the north
+and south showed purple under the sky from among their forests, oak
+mingling with pine; and the four seas beat around our island with
+their white fringe of hovering gulls. Over all, the arch of the
+blue, clearer and less clouded then than now. A pleasant land, full
+of gladness and mystery.</p>
+<p>We can but obscurely image to ourselves the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page078" id="page078"></a>[pg 078]</span>
+thoughts and deeds of the earliest dwellers in our island. We know
+that they were skilled in many arts of peace and inured to the
+shock of war. The sky spread above them as over us, and all around
+them was the green gloom of the forests, the whiteness of lakes and
+rivers, the rough purple of the heather. The great happenings of
+life, childhood and age and death, were for them what they are for
+us, yet their blood flowed warmer than ours. Browned by wind and
+sun, wet by the rain and the early dew of the morning, they
+delighted in the vigor of the prime. Their love for kindred, for
+their friends and lovers, was as ours; and when friends and kindred
+passed into the darkness, they still kept touch with their souls in
+the invisible Beyond.</p>
+<a name="079.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/079.jpg"><img src="images/079.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>RIVER ERNE, BELLEEK.</b></p>
+<p>The vision of our days is darkened by too much poring over
+earthly things; but the men of old, like many of our simpler races
+now, looked confidently and with intent faith across the threshold.
+For them the dead did not depart--hidden but from their eyes, while
+very near to their souls. Those in the beyond were still linked to
+those on earth; all together made one undivided life, neither in
+the visible world alone nor in the hidden world alone, but in both;
+each according to their destinies and duties. <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page079" id="page079"></a>[pg 079]</span> The
+men of old were immeasurably strong in this sense of immortality--a
+sense based not on faith but on knowledge; on a living touch with
+those who had gone before. They knew both over-world and
+under-world, because they held their souls open to the knowledge of
+both, and did not set their hearts on earthly things alone. A
+strong life close to the life of the natural world, a death that
+was no separation, the same human hearts as ours,--further we need
+not go in imagining that far-off time.</p>
+<p>A third people was presently added to these two, at an epoch
+fixed by tradition some four thousand years ago. A vivid picture of
+their coming has been handed down to us, and this picture we shall
+reproduce, as many circumstances and particulars of our knowledge
+drawn from other sources concur to show that our old legend is near
+to the truth, both in time and happenings.</p>
+<p>The name these newcomers bore was Tuata De Danaan, the De Danaan
+tribes; they were golden-haired and full of knowledge, and their
+coming was heavy with destiny for the dark races of Fomor and
+Firbolg. Even to-day, mysterious whispers of the De Danaans linger
+among the remote valleys and <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page080" id="page080"></a>[pg 080]</span> hillsides of our island,
+and truth is hidden in every legend of their deeds. They have borne
+a constant repute for magical knowledge, and the first tradition of
+their coming not only echoes that repute, but shows how first they
+came by it.</p>
+<p>The De Danaans came from the north; from what land, we shall
+presently inquire. They landed somewhere on the northeast coast of
+our island, says the tradition; the coast of Antrim was doubtless
+the place of their arrival, and we have our choice between Larne
+and the estuary of the Foyle. All between, lofty cliffs face a dark
+and angry sea, where no one not familiar with the coast would
+willingly approach; their later course in the island makes it very
+probable that they came to the Foyle.</p>
+<p>There, still within sight of the Caledonian isles and headlands
+hovering in blue shadows over the sea, they entered, where the sun
+rose over long silver sands and hills of chalk, with a grim
+headland on the west towering up into sombre mountains. Once within
+the strait, they had a wide expanse of quiet waters on all sides,
+running deep among the rugged hills, and receiving at its further
+end the river Foyle, tempting them further and further with their
+ships. Up the Foyle went the De Danaan fleet, among the oak-woods,
+the deer gazing wide-eyed at <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page081" id="page081"></a>[pg 081]</span> them from dark caverns
+of shadow, the wolves peering after them in the night. Then, when
+their ships would serve them no further, they landed, and, to set
+the seal on their coming, burned their boats, casting in their lot
+with the fate of their new home. Still following the streams of the
+Foyle, for rivers were the only pathways through the darkness of
+the woods, they came to the Lakes of Erne, then, as now, beautiful
+with innumerable islands, and draped with curtains of forest.
+Beyond Erne, they fixed their first settlement at Mag Rein, the
+Plain of the Headland, within the bounds of what afterwards was
+Leitrim; and at this camp their legend takes up the tale.</p>
+<p>It would seem that the Fomorians were then gathered further to
+the west, as well as in the northern isles. The Firbolgs had their
+central stronghold at Douin Cain, the Beautiful Eminence, which,
+tradition tells us, later bore the name of Tara. The chief among
+their chiefs was Eocaid, son of Ere, remembered as the last ruler
+of the Firbolgs. Every man of them was a hunter, used to spear and
+shield, and the skins of deer and the shaggy hides of wolves were
+their garments; their dwellings were built of well-fitted oak. To
+the chief, Eocaid, Erc's son, came rumor of the strangers near the
+Lakes of Erne; <span class="pagenum"><a name="page082" id=
+"page082"></a>[pg 082]</span> their ships, burned at their
+debarking, were not there to tell of the manner of their coming,
+and the De Danaans themselves bruited it abroad that they had come
+hither by magic, borne upon the wings of the wind. The chiefs of
+Tara gathered together, within their fort of earth crowned with a
+stockade, and took counsel how to meet this new adventure. After
+long consultation they chose one from among them, Sreng by name, a
+man of uncommon strength, a warrior tried and proven, who should go
+westward to find out more of the De Danaans.</p>
+<p>Doubtless taking certain chosen companions with him, Sreng, the
+man of valor from among the Firbolgs, set forth on his quest. As in
+all forest-covered countries, the only pathways lay along the
+river-banks, or, in times of drought, through the sand or pebbles
+of their beds. Where the woods pressed closest upon the streams,
+the path wound from one bank to the other, crossing by fords or
+stepping-stones, or by a bridge of tree-trunks. So went Sreng,
+careful and keen-eyed, up the stream of the Blackwater, and thence
+to the Erne, and so drew near to the Plain of the Headland, where
+was the De Danaan camp. They, too, had word of his coming from
+their scouts and hunters, and <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page083" id="page083"></a>[pg 083]</span> sent forth Breas, one
+among their bravest, to meet the envoy.</p>
+<p>They sighted each other and halted, each setting his shield in
+the earth, peering at his adversary above its rim. Then, reassured,
+they came together, and Breas first spoke to Sreng. After the first
+words they fell, warrior-like, to examining each other's weapons;
+Sreng saw that the two spears of Breas the De Danaan were thin,
+slender and long, and sharp-pointed, while his own were heavy,
+thick and point-less, but sharply rounded.</p>
+<p>Here we have a note of reality, for spears of these two types
+are well known to us; those of Sreng were chisel-shaped,
+round-edged, socketed celts; the De Danaan lances were long and
+slender, like our spears. There are two materials also--a beautiful
+golden bronze, shining and gleaming in the sunlight, and a darker,
+ruddier metal, dull and heavy; and these darker spears have sockets
+for greatly thicker hafts. Both also carried swords, made, very
+likely, the one of golden, the other of dull, copper-colored
+bronze.</p>
+<p>Then, putting these pleasant things aside, they turned to
+weightier matters, and Breas made a proposal for the De Danaan men.
+The island was large, the forests wide and full of game, the waters
+sweet <span class="pagenum"><a name="page084" id="page084"></a>[pg
+084]</span> and well-stocked with fish. Might they not share it
+between them, and join hands to keep out all future comers? Sreng
+could give no final answer; he could only put the matter before the
+Firbolg chiefs; so, exchanging spears in sign of friendship and for
+a token between them, they returned each to his own camp.</p>
+<p>Sreng of the Firbolgs retraced his path some four-score miles
+among the central forests, and came to the Beautiful Eminence,
+where the Firbolgs had their settlement. Eocaid, Erc's son, their
+chieftain, called the lesser chiefs around him, and Sreng made full
+report of what he had seen and heard. The Firbolgs, pressed on by
+their fate, decided to refuse all terms with the De Danaans, but to
+give them battle, and drive them from the island. So they made
+ready, each man seeing to the straps of his shield, the burnishing
+of his thick sword and heavy spear. Eyes gleamed out beneath
+lowering brows all about the dwellings of Tara, and hot words were
+muttered of the coming fight. The dark faces of the Firbolgs were
+full of wrath.</p>
+<p>Breas, returning to the camp of the Tuata De Danaan, gave such
+account of the fierceness and strength of Sreng, and the weight and
+sturdiness of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page085" id=
+"page085"></a>[pg 085]</span> his weapons, that the hearts of the
+golden-haired newcomers misgave them, and they drew away westward
+to the strip of land that lies between the lakes of Corrib and
+Mask. There, tradition tells us, they made an encampment upon the
+hill of Belgadan, near the stream that flows through caverns
+beneath the rocks from the northern to the southern lake. From
+their hill-top they had clear view of the plain stretching
+eastward, across which the Firbolg warriors must come; to the right
+hand and to the left were spread the great white waters of the
+lakes, stretching far away to the northern and southern verge of
+the sky. Islands dotted the lakes, and trees mirrored themselves in
+the waters. Behind them, to the westward, rose a square-topped
+mountain, crowned by a clear tarn; and, behind that, tier upon tier
+of hills, stretching dark and sombre along Lough Mask to the north,
+and spreading westward to the twelve crystal hills of
+Connemara.</p>
+<p>Across the plain to the east, then called the Plain of Nia, but
+thereafter Mag Tuiread or Moytura, the Plain of the Pillars, lay
+the forests, and thence issued forth the hosts of the Firbolgs,
+encamping on the eastern verge of the open space. Nuada, the De
+Danaan king, once more sought a peaceful issue to <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page086" id="page086"></a>[pg 086]</span> their
+meeting, but Erc's son Eocaid refused all terms, and it was plain
+to all that they must fight.</p>
+<p>It was midsummer. The air was warm about them, the lake-shores
+and the plain clothed in green of many gently blended shades. The
+sun shone down upon them, and the lakes mirrored the clear blue
+above. From their hill of encampment descended the De Danaans, with
+their long slender spears gleaming like bright gold, their swords
+of golden bronze firmly grasped, their left hands griping the thong
+of their shields. Golden-haired, with flowing tresses, they
+descended to the fight; what stately battle-song they chanted, what
+Powers they called on for a blessing, we cannot tell; nor in what
+terms the dark-browed Firbolgs answered them as they approached
+across the plain. All that day did the hosts surge together, spear
+launched against spear, and bronze sword clashing against shield;
+all that day and for three days more, and then the fate of the
+Firbolgs was decided. Great and dire was the slaughter of them, so
+that Erc's son Eocaid saw that all was lost. Withdrawing with a
+hundred of his own men about him, Eocaid was seeking water to
+quench his thirst, for the heat of the battle was upon him, when he
+was pursued by a greater band <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page087" id="page087"></a>[pg 087]</span> of the De Danaans, under
+the three sons of Nemed, one of their chieftains.</p>
+<p>Eocaid and his bodyguard fled before Nemed's sons, making their
+way northeastward along the Moy river, under the shadow of the
+Mountains of Storms, now wrongly named Ox Mountains. They came at
+last to the great strand called Traig Eotaile, but now Ballysadare,
+the Cataract of the Oaks,--where the descending river is cloven
+into white terraces by the rocks, and the sea, retreating at low
+tide, leaves a world of wet sand glinting under the moonlight. At
+the very sea's margin a great battle was fought between the last
+king of the Firbolgs with his men, and the De Danaans under Nemed's
+sons; so relentless was the fight along the tideways that few
+remained to tell of it, for Erc's son Eocaid fell, but Nemed's
+three sons fell likewise, The three De Danaan brothers were buried
+at the western end of the strand, and the place was called The
+Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, in their memory. The son of Erc
+was buried on the strand, where the waves lap along the shore, and
+his cairn of Traig Eotaile still stands by the water-side, last
+resting-place of the last ruler of the Firbolgs.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile the fighting had gone on at Mag Tuiread <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page088" id="page088"></a>[pg 088]</span> by the
+lakes, till but three hundred of the Firbolgs were left, with
+Sreng, the fierce fighter, at their head. Sreng had gained enduring
+fame by meeting Nuada, the De Danaan king, in combat, and smiting
+him so that he clove the shield-rim and cut down deep into Nuada's
+shoulder, disabling him utterly from the battle. Seeing themselves
+quite outnumbered, therefore, the survivors of the Firbolgs with
+Sreng demanded single combat with De Danaan champions, but the
+victors offered them worthy terms of peace. The Firbolgs were to
+hold in lordship and freedom whichever they might choose of the
+five provinces; the conquerors were to have the rest.</p>
+<p>Sreng looked around among his band of survivors,--a little band,
+though of great valor,--and he remembered the hosts of his people
+that had entered the battle three days before, but now lay strewn
+upon the plain; and thinking that they had done enough for valor he
+accepted the offered terms, choosing the Western Province for his
+men. In memory of him it was called Cuigead Sreing for generations,
+until Conn of the Five-Score Battles changed the name for his own,
+calling the province Connacht, as it is to this day.</p>
+<p>It fared less well with the victors, and with their <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page089" id="page089"></a>[pg 089]</span>
+victory were sown seeds of future discord. For Nuada, the king,
+being grievously wounded, was in no state to rule, so that the
+chief power was given to Breas, first envoy of the De Danaans. Now
+Breas was only half De Danaan, half Fomor, and would not recognize
+the De Danaan rites or laws of hospitality, but was a very
+tyrannous and overbearing ruler, so that much evil came of his
+government. Yet for seven years he was endured, even though meat
+nor ale was dispensed at his banquets, according to De Danaan
+law.</p>
+<br>
+<p>Mutterings against Breas were rife among the chiefs and their
+followers when the bard Cairbr&eacute;, whose mother Etan was also
+a maker of verses, came to the assembly of Breas. But the bard was
+shown little honor and given a mean lodging,--a room without fire
+or bed, with three dry loaves for his fare. The bard was full of
+resentment and set himself to make songs against Breas, so that all
+men repeated his verses, and the name of Breas fell into contempt.
+All men's minds were enkindled by the bard, and they drove Breas
+forth from the chieftainship. Breas fled to his Fomor kindred in
+the isles, with his heart full of anger and revenge against the De
+Danaans.</p>
+<p>He sought help of his kindred, and their design <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page090" id="page090"></a>[pg 090]</span> was
+told to the Fomorian chieftains--to Balor of the Evil Eye, and to
+Indec, son of De Domnand, chiefs of the Isles. These two leaders
+gathered ships from all the harbors and settlements of the
+Fomorians, from the Hebrides, the Shetlands, and far-distant
+Norway, so that their fleet was thick as gulls above a shoal of
+fish along the north shores of Erin.</p>
+<p>Coming down from the northern isles, they sighted the coast of
+Erin, the peaks of the northwestern mountains rising purple towards
+the clouds, with white seas foaming around them. Past towering
+headlands they sailed; then, drawing in towards the shore, they
+crept under the great cliffs of Slieve League, that rose like a
+many-colored wall from the sea to the sky--so high that the great
+eagles on their summits were but specks seen from beneath, so high
+that the ships below seemed like sea-shells to those who watched
+them from above. With the wall of the cliffs on their left hand,
+and the lesser headlands and hills of Sligo on their right, they
+came to that same strand of Ballysadare, the Cataract of the Oaks,
+where the last of the Firbolgs fell. Drawing their long ships up on
+the beach, with furled sail and oars drawn in, they debarked their
+army on the shore. It was a landing of ill-omen for the Fomorians,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page091" id="page091"></a>[pg
+091]</span> that landing beside the cairn of Eocaid; a landing of
+ill-omen for Indec, son of De Domnand, and for Balor of the Evil
+Eye.</p>
+<p>It was the fall of the leaf when they came; the winds ran crying
+through the forests, tearing the leaves and branches from the oaks,
+and mourning among the pines of the uplands. The sea was gray as a
+gull's back, with dark shadows under the cliffs and white tresses
+of foam along the headlands. At evening a cold wind brought the
+rain beating in from the ocean. Thus the Fomorians landed at the
+Cataract of the Oaks, and marched inland to the plain now called
+Tirerril in Sligo. The murky sky spread over the black and withered
+waste of the plain, hemmed in with gloomy hills, wild rocks and
+ravines, and with all the northern horizon broken by distant
+mountains. Here Indec and Balor, and Breas the cause of their
+coming, fixed their camp. They sent a message of defiance to the De
+Danaans, challenging them to fight or surrender. The De Danaans
+heard the challenge and made ready to fight.</p>
+<p>Nuada, now called the chieftain of the Silver Arm, because the
+mischief wrought by Sreng's blow on his shoulder had been hidden by
+a silver casing, was once more ruler since Breas had been driven
+out. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page092" id="page092"></a>[pg
+092]</span> Besides Nuada, these were De Danaan chieftains: Dagda,
+the Mighty; Lug, son of Cian, son of Diancect, surnamed Lamfada,
+the Long Armed; Ogma, of the Sunlike Face; and Angus, the Young.
+They summoned the workers in bronze and the armorers, and bid them
+prepare sword and spear for battle, charging the makers of
+spear-haft and shield to perfect their work. The heralds also were
+ready to proclaim the rank of the warriors, and those skilled in
+healing herbs stood prepared to succor the wounded. The bards were
+there also to arouse valor and ardor with their songs.</p>
+<p>Then marching westward to the plain of the battle among the
+hills, they set their camp and advanced upon the Fomorians. Each
+man had two spears bound with a thong to draw them back after the
+cast, with a shield to ward off blows, and a broad-bladed sword of
+bronze for close combat. With war-chants and invocations the two
+hosts met. The spears, well poised and leveled, clove the air,
+hissing between them, and under the weight of the spear-heads and
+their sharp points many in both hosts fell. There were cries of the
+wounded now, mingled with battle-songs, and hoarse shouting for
+vengeance among those whose sons and brothers and sworn friends
+fell. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page093" id="page093"></a>[pg
+093]</span> Another cast of the spears, seaming the air between as
+the hosts closed in, and they fell on each other with their swords,
+shields upraised and gold-bronze sword-points darting beneath like
+the tongues of serpents. They cut and thrust, each with his eyes
+fixed on the fierce eyes of his foe.</p>
+<p>They fought on the day of the Spirits, now the Eve of All
+Saints; the Fomorians were routed, and their chieftains slain. But
+of the De Danaans, Nuada, once wounded by Sreng of the Firbolgs,
+now fell by the hand of Balor; yet Balor also fell, slain by Lug,
+his own daughter's son.</p>
+<p>Thus was the might of the Fomorians broken, and the De Danaans
+ruled unopposed, their power and the works of their hands spreading
+throughout the length and breadth of the land.</p>
+<p>Many monuments are accredited to them by tradition, but greatest
+and most wonderful are the pyramids of stone at Brugh on the Boyne.
+Some nine miles from the sandy seashore, where the Boyne loses
+itself in the waves, there is a broad tongue of meadowland, shut in
+on three sides southward by the Boyne, and to the northeast cut off
+by a lesser stream that joins it. This remote and quiet headland,
+very famous in the annals, was in old days so surrounded
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page094" id="page094"></a>[pg
+094]</span> by woods that it was like a quiet glade in the forest
+rimmed by the clear waters of the Boyne. The Mourne Mountains to
+the north and the lesser summits on the southern sky-line were
+hidden by the trees. The forest wall encircled the green
+meadowland, and the river fringed with blue forget-me-nots.</p>
+<p>In this quiet spot was the sacred place of the De Danaans, and
+three great pyramids of stone, a mile apart along the river, mark
+their three chief sanctuaries. The central is the greatest; two
+hundred thousand tons of stone heaped up, within a circular wall of
+stone, itself surrounded by a great outer circle of standing
+stones, thirty in number, like gray sentinels guarding the shrine.
+In the very heart of the pyramid, hushed in perpetual stillness and
+peace, is the inmost sanctuary, a chamber formed like a cross,
+domed with a lofty roof, and adorned with mysterious tracings on
+the rocks. Shrines like this are found in many lands, whether
+within the heart of the pyramids of Egypt or in the recesses of
+India's hills; and in all lands they have the same purpose. They
+are secret and holy sanctuaries, guarded well from all outward
+influence, where, in the mystic solitude, the valiant and great
+among the living may commune with the spirits of the mighty dead.
+The dead, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page095" id=
+"page095"></a>[pg 095]</span> though hidden, are not passed away;
+their souls are in perpetual nearness to ours. If we enter deep
+within ourselves, to the remote shrine of the heart, as they
+entered that secluded shrine, we may find the mysterious threshold
+where their world and our world meet.</p>
+<p>In the gloom and silence of those pyramid-chambers, the De
+Danaans thus sought the souls of their mighty ones--the Dagda,
+surnamed the Mighty, and Lug the Long-Armed, and Ogma of the
+Sunlike Face, and Angus the Young. From these luminous guardians
+they sought the inbreathing of wisdom, drawing into themselves the
+might of these mightier ones, and rising toward the power of their
+immortal world. And to these sacred recesses they brought the ashes
+of their mighty dead, as a token that they, too, had passed through
+the secret gateway to the Land of the Ever Young.</p>
+<p>Some thirty miles to the west of Brugh, on the Boyne, a low
+range of hills rises from the central plain, now bearing the name
+of Slieve na Calliagh, the Witch's Hill. In the days of the great
+forest this was the first large open space to the west coming from
+Brugh, and, like it, a quiet and remote refuge among the woods. On
+the hillsides of Slieve na Calliagh are <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page096" id="page096"></a>[pg 096]</span> other
+pyramids of stone, in all things like those of Brugh, and with the
+same chambered sanctuaries, but of lesser size; belonging, perhaps,
+to a later age, when the De Danaans were no longer supreme in the
+land, but took their place beside newcome invaders. These lesser
+shrines were also sacred places, doorways to the hidden world,
+entrance-gates to the Land of the Ever Young. There also was beheld
+the vision of the radiant departed; there also were fonts of
+baptism, basins wrought of granite brought hither from the distant
+hills of Mourne or Wicklow. As in all lands, these fonts were used
+in the consecration of the new birth, from which man rises
+conscious of his immortality.</p>
+<p>In harmony with this faith of theirs, our present tradition sees
+in the De Danaans a still haunting impalpable presence, a race
+invisible yet real, dwelling even now among our hills and valleys.
+When the life of the visible world is hushed, they say, there is
+another life in the hidden, where the Dagda Mor and Ogma and Lug
+and Angus still guard the De Danaan hosts. The radiance of their
+nearness is all through the land, like the radiance of the sun
+hidden behind storm-clouds, glimmering through the veil.</p>
+<a name="097.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/097.jpg"><img src="images/097.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>WHITE ROCKS, PORTRUSH.</b></p>
+<p>In the chambers of those pyramid-shrines are still <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page097" id="page097"></a>[pg 097]</span> traces
+of the material presence of the De Danaans; not only their
+baptismal fonts, but more earthly things--ornaments, beads of glass
+and amber, and combs with which they combed their golden locks.
+These amber beads, like so many things in the De Danaan history,
+call us to far northern lands by the Baltic, whence in all
+likelihood the De Danaans came; for in those Baltic lands we find
+just such pyramid shrines as those at Brugh and on the hillsides of
+Slieve na Calliagh, and their ornaments are the same, and the
+fashion of their spear-heads and shields. The plan of the Danish
+pyramid of Uby is like the pyramids of Newgrange and Nowth and
+Dowth by the Boyne, and the carvings on King Gorm's stone by the
+Baltic are like the carvings of stones in our own island. On the
+Baltic shores, too, of most ancient date and belonging to forgotten
+times, are still found fragments and even perfect hulls of just
+such long ships as were needed for the Danaans' coming, like the
+ships they burnt along the reaches of the Foyle.</p>
+<p>By the Baltic, too, and nowhere else, were there races with hair
+yellow as their own amber, or, as our island bards say, "so bright
+that the new-molten gold was not brighter; yellow as the yellow
+flag-lilies along the verges of the rivers." Therefore, in
+character of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page098" id=
+"page098"></a>[pg 098]</span> race, in face and feature, in color
+and complexion, in the form and make of sword and spear and shield,
+in their knowledge of ships and the paths of the sea, as in their
+ornaments and decorative art, and in those majestic pyramids and
+shrines where they sought mystic wisdom, and whither they carried
+the ashes of their dead, as to a place of sacred rest--in all these
+the life of the De Danaans speaks of the Baltic shores and the
+ancient race of golden-haired heroes who dwelt there. The honoring
+of bards, the heraldic keeping of traditions and the names of
+ancestors, also speak of the same home; and with a college of
+heraldic bards, well-ordered and holding due rank and honor, we can
+well see how the stories of their past have come down even to our
+days, lingering among our hills and valleys, as the De Danaan
+themselves linger, hidden yet not departed.</p>
+<p>The traditional time of their coming, too, agrees well with all
+we know. Without bronze tools they could not have carved the
+beautifully adorned stones that are built into the pyramids by the
+Boyne; yet there is a certain early ruggedness about these stones
+that falls far short of the perfection of later times. Early in the
+bronze age, therefore, they must be placed; and the early bronze
+age, wherever its <span class="pagenum"><a name="page099" id=
+"page099"></a>[pg 099]</span> remoteness can be measured, as in the
+Swiss lakes or the peat-mosses of Denmark, cannot be less than four
+thousand years ago, thus well agreeing with our De Danaan
+tradition. We are, therefore, led to believe that the tale told by
+these traditions is in the main a true one; that the races recorded
+by them came in the recorded order; that their places of landing
+are faithfully remembered; that all traditions pointing to their
+earlier homes are worthy of belief, and in full accord with all our
+other knowledge.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page100" id="page100"></a>[pg
+100]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page101" id="page101"></a>[pg
+101]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>EMAIN OF MACA.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page102" id="page102"></a>[pg
+102]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page103" id="page103"></a>[pg
+103]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="V."></a>V.</h2>
+<h3>EMAIN OF MACA.</h3>
+<h3>B.C. 50--A.D. 50.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The battles of Southern and Northern Moytura gave the De Danaans
+sway over the island. After they had ruled for many centuries, they
+in their turn were subjected to invasion, as the Firbolg and
+Fomorian had been before them. The newcomers were the Sons of
+Milid, and their former home was either Gaul or Spain. But whether
+from Gaul or Spain, the sons of Milid were of undoubted Gaelic
+race, in every feature of character and complexion resembling the
+continental Gauls.</p>
+<p>We must remember that, in the centuries before the northward
+spread of Rome, the Gauls were the great central European power.
+Twenty-six hundred years ago their earlier tribal life was
+consolidated into a stable empire under Ambigatos; Galicia in
+Eastern Austria and Galicia in Western Spain mark their extreme
+borders towards the rising and setting sun.</p>
+<p>Several centuries before the days of Ambigatos, in the older
+period of tribal confederation, was the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page104" id="page104"></a>[pg 104]</span> coming
+of the Gaelic Sons of Milid to Ireland. Tradition places the date
+between three and four thousand years ago. Yet even after that long
+interval of isolation the resemblance between the Irish and
+continental Gaels is perfect; they are tall, solidly built, rather
+inclined to stoutness; they are fair-skinned, or even florid,
+easily browned by sun and wind. Their eyes are gray, greenish or
+hazel, not clear blue, like the eyes of the Baltic race; and though
+fair-haired, they are easily distinguished from the golden-haired
+Norsemen. Such are the descendants of the Sons of Milid. Coming
+from Gaul or Spain, the Sons of Milid landed in one of the great
+fiords that penetrate between the mountains of Kerry--long after so
+named from the descendants of Ciar. These same fiords between the
+hills have been the halting-place of continental invaders for ages;
+hardly a century has passed since the last landing there of
+continental soldiers; there was another invasion a century before
+that, and yet another a hundred years earlier. But the Sons of
+Milid showed the way. They may have come by Bantry Bay or the
+Kenmare River or Dingle Bay; more probably the last, for tradition
+still points to the battlefield where they were opposed, on the
+hills of Slieve Mish, above the Dingle fiord.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page105" id="page105"></a>[pg
+105]</span>
+<p>But wherever they debarked on that southwestern coast they found
+a land warm and winning as the south they had left behind--a land
+of ever-green woods, yew and arbutus mingling with beech and oak
+and fir; rich southern heaths carpeting the hillsides, and a soft
+drapery of ferns upon the rocks. There were red masses of
+overhanging mountain, but in the valleys, sheltered and sun-warmed,
+they found a refuge like the Isles of the Blest. The Atlantic,
+surging in great blue rollers, brought the warmth of tropical seas,
+and a rich and vivid growth through all the glens and vales
+responded to the sun's caress.</p>
+<p>The De Danaans must ere this have spread through all of the
+island, except the western province assigned to the Firbolgs; for
+we find them opposing,--but vainly opposing,--the Sons of Milid, at
+the very place of their landing. Here again we find the old
+tradition verified; for at the spot recorded of old by the bards
+and heralds, among the hills by the pass that leads from Dingle to
+Tralee Bay, numberless arrow-heads have been gathered, the
+gleanings after a great combat. The De Danaans fought with sword
+and spear, but, unless they had added to their weapons since the
+days of Breas and Sreng, they did not shoot with the bow; this was,
+perhaps, the cause of their defeat, for the De Danaans were
+defeated <span class="pagenum"><a name="page106" id=
+"page106"></a>[pg 106]</span> among the hills on that long
+headland.</p>
+<p>From their battlefield they could see the sea on either hand,
+stretching far inland northward and southward; across these arms of
+the sea rose other headlands, more distant, the armies of hills
+along them fading from green to purple, from purple to clear blue.
+But the De Danaans had burned their boats; they sought refuge
+rather by land, retreating northward till they came to the shelter
+of the great central woods. The Sons of Milid pursued them, and,
+overtaking them at Tailten on the Blackwater, some ten miles
+northwest of Tara, they fought another battle; after it, the
+supremacy of the De Danaans definitely passed away.</p>
+<p>Yet we have no reason to believe that, any more than the
+Fomorians or Firbolgs, the De Danaans ceased to fill their own
+place in the land. They seem, indeed, to have been preponderant in
+the north, and in all likelihood they hold their own there even
+now; for every addition to our knowledge shows us more and more how
+tenacious is the life of races, how firmly they cling to their
+earliest dwellings. And though we read of races perishing before
+invaders, this is the mere boasting of conquerors; <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page107" id="page107"></a>[pg 107]</span> more
+often the newcomers are absorbed among the earlier race, and
+nothing distinctive remains of them but a name. We have abundant
+evidence to show that at the present day, as throughout the last
+three thousand years, the four races we have described continue to
+make up the bulk of our population, and pure types of each still
+linger unblended in their most ancient seats; for, though races
+mingle, they do not thereby lose their own character. The law is
+rather that the type of one or other will come out clear in their
+descendants, all undefined forms tending to disappear.</p>
+<p>Nor did any subsequent invasion add new elements; for as all
+northern Europe is peopled by the same few types, every
+newcomer,--whether from Norway, Denmark, Britain or Continental
+Europe,--but reinforced one of these earlier races. Yet even where
+the ethnical elements are alike, there seems to be a difference of
+destiny and promise--as if the very land itself brooded over its
+children, transforming them and molding them to a larger purpose.
+The spiritual life of races goes far deeper than their ethnic
+history.</p>
+<p>It would seem that with the coming of the Sons of Milid the
+destiny of Ireland was rounded and <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page108" id="page108"></a>[pg 108]</span> completed; from that
+time onward, for more than two thousand years, was a period of
+uniform growth and settled life and ideals; a period whose history
+and achievements we are only beginning to understand. At the
+beginning of that long epoch of settled life the art of working
+gold was developed and perfected; and we have abundance of
+beautiful gold-work from remote times, of such fine design and
+execution that there is nothing in the world to equal it. The
+modern work of countries where gold is found in quantities is
+commonplace, vulgar and inartistic, when compared with the work of
+the old Irish period. Torques, or twisted ribbons of gold, of
+varying size and shape, were worn as diadems, collars, or even
+belts; crescent bands of finely embossed sheet-gold were worn above
+the forehead; brooches and pins of most delicate and imaginative
+workmanship were used to catch together the folds of richly colored
+cloaks, and rings and bracelets were of not less various and
+exquisite forms.</p>
+<p>We are at no loss to understand the abundance of our old
+goldsmiths' work when we know that even now, after being worked for
+centuries, the Wicklow gold-mines have an average yearly yield of
+some five hundred ounces, found, for the most part, in nuggets
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page109" id="page109"></a>[pg
+109]</span> in the beds of streams flowing into the two Avons. One
+mountain torrent bears the name of Gold Mines River at the present
+day, showing the unbroken presence of the yellow metal from the
+time of its first discovery, over three thousand years ago. It
+seems probable that a liberal alloy of gold gave the golden bronze
+its peculiar excellence and beauty; for so rich is the lustre, so
+fine the color of many of our bronze axes and spears, that they are
+hardly less splendid than weapons of pure gold. From the perfect
+design and workmanship of these things of gold and bronze, more
+than from any other source, we gain an insight into the high
+culture and skill in the arts which marked that most distinctively
+Irish period, lasting, as we have seen, more than two thousand
+years.</p>
+<p>Early in this same epoch we find traditions of the clearing of
+forests, the sowing of cornfields, the skill of dyers in seven
+colors, earliest of which were purple, blue and green. Wells were
+dug to insure an easily accessible supply of pure water, so that we
+begin to think of a settled population dwelling among fields of
+golden grain, pasturing their cattle in rich meadows, and depending
+less on the deer and wild oxen of the forest, the salmon of lake
+and river, and the abundant fish along the shores.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page110" id="page110"></a>[pg
+110]</span>
+<p>Tradition speaks persistently of bards, heralds, poets and
+poetesses; of music and song; of cordial and generous social life;
+and to the presence of these bards, like the skalds of the
+Northmen, we owe pictures, even now full of life and color and
+movement, of those days of long ago.</p>
+<p>At a period rather more than two thousand years ago, a
+warrior-queen, Maca by name, founded a great fort and citadel at
+Emain, some two miles west of Armagh, in the undulating country of
+green hills and meadows to the south of Lough Neagh. The ramparts
+and earthworks of that ancient fortress can still be traced, and we
+can follow and verify what the ancient bards told of the greatness
+of the stronghold of Maca. The plans of all forts of that time seem
+to have been much the same--a wide ring of earthwork, with a deep
+moat, guarded them, and a stockade of oak stakes rose above the
+earthwork, behind which the defenders stood, firing volleys of
+arrows at the attacking host. Within this outer circle of defence
+there was almost always a central stronghold, raised on a great
+mound of earth; and this was the dwelling of the chief, provincial
+ruler, or king. Lesser mounds upheld the houses of lesser chiefs,
+and all alike seem to have been built of oak, with plank
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page111" id="page111"></a>[pg
+111]</span> roofs. Safe storehouses of stone were often sunk
+underground, beneath the chief's dwelling. In the fort of Emain, as
+in the great fort of Tara in the Boyne Valley, there was a
+banqueting-hall for the warriors, and the bards thus describe one
+of these in the days of its glory: "The banquet-hall had twelve
+divisions in each wing, with tables and passages round them; there
+were sixteen attendants on each side, eight for the star-watchers,
+the historians and the scribes, in the rear of the hall, and two to
+each table at the door,--a hundred guests in all; two oxen, two
+sheep and two hogs were divided equally on each side at each meal.
+Beautiful was the appearance of the king in that assembly--flowing,
+slightly curling golden hair upon him; a red buckler with stars and
+beasts wrought of gold and fastenings of silver upon him; a crimson
+cloak in wide descending folds upon him, fastened at his breast by
+a golden brooch set with precious stones; a neck-torque of gold
+around his neck; a white shirt with a full collar, and intertwined
+with threads of gold, upon him; a girdle of gold inlaid with
+precious stones around him; two wonderful shoes of gold with
+runings of gold upon him; two spears with golden sockets in his
+hand."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page112" id="page112"></a>[pg
+112]</span>
+<p>We are the more disposed to trust the fidelity of the picture,
+since the foundations of the Tara banquet-hall are to be clearly
+traced to this day--an oblong earthwork over seven hundred feet
+long by ninety wide, with the twelve doors still distinctly marked;
+as for the brooches and torques of gold, some we have surpass in
+magnificence anything here described, and their artistic beauty is
+eloquent of the refinement of spirit that conceived and the skill
+that fashioned them. Spear-heads, too, are of beautiful
+bronze-gold, with tracings round the socket of great excellence and
+charm.</p>
+<a name="113.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/113.jpg"><img src="images/113.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>POWERSCOURT WATERFALL, CO. WICKLOW.</b></p>
+<p>For a picture of the life of that age, we cannot do better than
+return to Emain of Maca, telling the story of one famous generation
+of warriors and fair women who loved and fought there two thousand
+years ago. The ideal of beauty was still the golden hair and blue
+eyes of the De Danaans, and we cannot doubt that their race
+persisted side by side with the Sons of Milid, retaining a certain
+predominance in the north and northeast of the island, the first
+landing-place of the De Danaan invaders. Of this mingled race was
+the great Rudraige, from whom the most famous rulers of Emain
+descended. Ros was the son of Rudraige, and from Roeg and Cass,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page113" id="page113"></a>[pg
+113]</span> the sons of Ros, came the princes Fergus and Factna.
+Factna, son of Cass, wedded the beautiful Nessa, and from their
+union sprang Concobar, the great hero and ruler of Ulster--in those
+days named Ulad, and the dwellers there the Ulaid. Factna died
+while Concobar was yet a boy; and Nessa, left desolate, was yet so
+beautiful in her sadness that Fergus became her slave, and sued for
+her favor, though himself a king whose favors others sued. Nessa's
+heart was wholly with her son, her life wrapt up in his. She
+answered, therefore, that she would renounce her mourning and give
+her widowed hand to Fergus the king, if the king, on his part,
+would promise that Nessa's son Concobar should succeed him, rather
+than the children of Fergus. Full of longing, and held in thrall by
+her beauty, Fergus promised; and this promise was the beginning of
+many calamities, for Nessa, the queen, feeling her sway over
+Fergus, and full of ambition for her child, won a promise from
+Fergus that the youth should sit beside him on the throne, hearing
+all pleadings and disputes, and learning the art of ruling. But the
+spirit of Concobar was subtle and strong and masterful, and he
+quickly took the greater place in the councils of the Ulaid, until
+Nessa, still confident in her charm, took a <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page114" id="page114"></a>[pg 114]</span>
+promise from Fergus that Concobar should reign for one year.</p>
+<p>Fergus, great-hearted warrior, but tender and gentle and fond of
+feasts and merrymaking, was very willing to lift the cares of rule
+from his shoulders to the younger shoulders of Nessa's son, and the
+one year thus granted became many years, so that Fergus never again
+mounted his throne. Yet for the love he bore to Nessa, Fergus
+willingly admitted his stepson's rule, and remained faithfully
+upholding him, ever merry at the banquets, and leading the martial
+sports and exercises of the youths, the sons of chieftains, at the
+court. Thus Concobar, son of Nessa, came to be ruler over the great
+fort of Emain, with its citadel, its earthworks and outer forts,
+its strong stockade and moat; ruler of these, and of the chiefs of
+the Ulaid, and chief commander of all the fighting-men that
+followed them. To him came the tribute of cattle and horses, of
+scarlet cloaks and dyed fabrics, purple and blue and green, and the
+beryls and emeralds from the mountains of Mourne where the sea
+thunders in the caves, near the great fort of Rudraige. Fergus was
+lord only of the banqueting-hall and of the merrymakings of the
+young chiefs; but in all else the will of Concobar was supreme and
+his word was law.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page115" id="page115"></a>[pg
+115]</span>
+<p>It happened that before this a child had been born, a girl
+golden-haired and with blue eyes, of whom the Druids had foretold
+many dark and terrible things. That the evil might not be wrought
+through this child of sad destiny, the king had from her earliest
+childhood kept her securely hidden in a lonely fort, and there
+Deirdr&eacute; grew in solitude, daily increasing in beauty and
+winsomeness. She so won the love of those set in guard over her
+that they relaxed something of the strictness of their watch,
+letting her wander a little in the meadows and the verges of the
+woods, gathering flowers, and watching the life of birds and wild
+things there.</p>
+<p>Among the chieftains of the court of Emain was one Usnac, of
+whom were three sons, with Naisi strongest and handsomest of the
+three. Naisi was dark, with black locks hanging upon his shoulders
+and dark, gleaming eyes; and so strongly is unlike drawn to unlike
+that golden-haired Deirdr&eacute;, seeing him in one of her
+wanderings, felt her heart go forth to him utterly. Falling into
+talk with him, they exchanged promises of enduring love. Thus the
+heart of Naisi went to Deirdr&eacute;, as hers had gone to him, so
+that all things were changed for them, growing radiant with
+tremulous hope and wistful with longing. <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page116" id="page116"></a>[pg 116]</span> Yet
+the fate that lay upon Deirdr&eacute; was heavy, and all men
+dreaded it but Naisi; so that even his brothers, the sons of Usnac,
+feared greatly and would have dissuaded him from giving his life to
+the ill-fated one. But Naisi would not be dissuaded; so they met
+secretly many times, in the twilight at the verge of the wood,
+Deirdr&eacute;'s golden hair catching the last gleam of sunlight
+and holding it long into the darkness, while the black locks of
+Naisi, even ere sunset, foreshadowed the coming night. In their
+hearts it was not otherwise; for Deirdr&eacute;, full of wonder at
+the change that had come over her, at the song of the birds that
+echoed ever around her even in her dreams, at the radiance of the
+flowers and trees, the sunshine on the waters of the river, the
+vivid gladness over all,-- Deirdr&eacute; knew nothing of the dread
+doom that was upon her, and was all joy and wonderment at the
+meetings with her lover, full of fancies and tender words and shy
+caresses; but Naisi, who knew well the fate that overshadowed them
+like a black cloud above a cliff of the sea, strove to be glad and
+show a bold face to his mistress, though his heart many a time grew
+cold within him, thinking on what had befallen and what might
+befall.</p>
+<p>For the old foretelling of the star-watchers was not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page117" id="page117"></a>[pg
+117]</span> the only doom laid upon Deirdr&eacute;. Concobar the
+king, stern and masterful, crafty and secret in counsel though
+swift as an eagle to slay,--Concobar the king had watched
+Deirdr&eacute; in her captivity, ever unseen of her, and his heart
+had been moved by the fair softness of her skin, the glow of her
+cheek, the brightness of her eyes and hair; so that the king had
+steadfastly determined in his mind that Deirdr&eacute; should be
+his, in scorn of all prophecies and warnings; that her beauty
+should be for him alone. This the king had determined; and it was
+known to Naisi the son of Usnac. It was known to him also that what
+Concobar the king determined, he steadfastly carried out; for the
+will of Concobar was strong and masterful over all around him.</p>
+<p>Therefore at their meetings two clouds lay upon the heart of
+Naisi: the presentment of the king's power and anger, and his
+relentless hand pursuing through the night, and the darker dread of
+the sightless doom pronounced of old at the birth of
+Deirdr&eacute;, of which the will of Concobar was but the tool.
+There was gloom in his eyes and silence on his lips and a secret
+dread in his heart. Deirdr&eacute; wondered at it, her own heart
+being so full of gladness, her eyes sparkling, and endearing words
+ever ready on her <span class="pagenum"><a name="page118" id=
+"page118"></a>[pg 118]</span> lips. Deirdr&eacute; wondered, yet
+found a new delight and wonderment in the silence of Naisi, and the
+gloomy lightning in his eyes, as being the more contrasted with
+herself, and therefore the more to be beloved.</p>
+<p>Yet the time came when Naisi determined to tell her all and risk
+the worst that fate could do against them, finding death with her
+greatly better than life without her. Yet death with her was not to
+be granted to him. Deirdr&eacute; heard, wondering and trembling,
+and Naisi must tell her the tale many times before she
+understood,--so utter had been her solitude and so perfect was yet
+her ignorance of all things beyond the fort where she was captive,
+and of all the doings of men. Concobar was not even a name to her,
+and she knew nothing of his power or the stronghold of Emain, the
+armies of the Ulaid, or the tributes of gold and cattle and horses.
+Spears and swords and those who wielded them were not even dreams
+to her until the coming of Naisi, when his gloom blended with her
+sunshine.</p>
+<p>Talking long through the twilight, until the red gold of the
+west was dulled to bronze over the hills, and the bronze tarnished
+and darkened with the coming of the eastern stars, they planned
+together what <span class="pagenum"><a name="page119" id=
+"page119"></a>[pg 119]</span> they should do; and, the heart of
+Deirdr&eacute; at last growing resolute, they made their way
+through the night to where the brothers of Naisi were, and all fled
+together towards the northern sea. Amongst the fishermen of the
+north they found those who were willing to carry them beyond the
+reach of Concobar's anger, and with a southerly breeze set sail for
+the distant headlands of Scotland, that they had seen from the
+cliff-top lying like blue clouds along the horizon. They set forth
+early in the morning, as the sun came up out of the east over blue
+Alban capes, and when the sun went down it reddened the dark rocks
+of Islay; so that, making for the shore, they camped that night
+under the Islay Hills. On their setting forth again, the sea was
+like a wild grey lake between Jura on the left and the long
+headland of Cantyre on their right; and thus they sped forward
+between long ranks of gloomy hills, growing ever nearer them on
+both sides, till they passed through the Sound of Jura and rounded
+into Loch Etive.</p>
+<p>There they made the land, drawing up under the shadow of dark
+hills, and there they dwelt for many a day. Very familiar to
+Deirdr&eacute;, though at first strange and wild and terrible
+beyond words, grew <span class="pagenum"><a name="page120" id=
+"page120"></a>[pg 120]</span> that vast amphitheatre of hills in
+their eternal grayness, with the long Loch stretching down like a
+horn through their midst. Very familiar to inland-bred
+Deirdr&eacute;, though at first strange and fearful, grew the gray
+surges of the incoming tides, the white foam of the waves seething
+along boulders of granite, and the long arms of seaweed waving as
+she peered downward into the clear green water. Very familiar to
+Deirdr&eacute;, though at first strange and confusing, grew the
+arms of Naisi around her in the darkness and his warm lips on her
+cheek. Happy were those wild days in the great glen of Etive, and
+dear did the sons of Usnac grow to her heart, loved as brothers by
+her who never knew a brother, or the gentleness of a mother's
+watching, or the solace of dear kindred.</p>
+<p>The sons of Usnac sped forth before dawn among the hills from
+their green dwelling roofed with pine branches and reeds and moss;
+early they went forth to track the deer, pursuing them with their
+arrows, till the red flank of the buck was laced with brighter red.
+One of the three ever stayed behind with Deirdr&eacute;, whether it
+was Naisi himself, or Alny, or Ardan, and the two thus remaining
+were like children playing together, whether gathering sticks and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page121" id="page121"></a>[pg
+121]</span> dry rushes and long spears of withered grass for their
+fire, or wandering by the white curling waves, or sending flat
+pebbles skipping over the wavelets; and the sound of their laughter
+many a time echoed along the Loch's green waters and up the hills,
+till the does peered and wondered from among the heather, and the
+heron, startled at his fishing, flew upwards croaking, with
+flapping wings. Happy were those days for Deirdr&eacute;, and with
+utter sadness she looked back to them afterwards, when the doom
+foretold had fallen upon her. Happy sped the days, till once in the
+gray of the dawn, while Deirdr&eacute; was resting in their green
+refuge with Naisi, she cried out in her sleep and waked, telling
+him, weeping, that she had heard the voice of the bird of doom in
+her dreams.</p>
+<p>The voice she heard was indeed the voice of their doom; yet it
+was a cheerful voice, full of friendly gladness; the voice of
+Fergus, son of Roeg, former King of Emain, and now come to Loch
+Etive as messenger of Concobar, Fergus came up from the sea-beach
+towards the answering shout of the sons of Usnac, and glad
+greetings passed among them at the door of their refuge. Fergus
+looked long in admiration at the blue eyes and golden locks, the
+clear skin <span class="pagenum"><a name="page122" id=
+"page122"></a>[pg 122]</span> and gentle breast of Deirdr&eacute;,
+nor wondered, as he looked, that Naisi had dared fate to possess
+her. Then Fergus told the story of his coming; how they had
+discovered the flight of the sons of Usnac from Emain, and how
+terrible was the black anger of Concobar; what passionate fire had
+gleamed in his eyes as he tossed the golden locks back from his
+shoulders and grasped the haft of his spear, and pledged himself to
+be avenged on Naisi and all his kin, swearing that he would have
+Deirdr&eacute; back again.</p>
+<p>Thus Fergus told the tale, laughingly, as at a danger that was
+past, a storm-cloud that had lost its arrows of white hail and was
+no longer fearful. For, he said, Concobar had forgotten his anger,
+had promised a truce to the sons of Usnac, and most of all to
+Naisi, and had bidden them return as his guests to Emain of Maca,
+where Deirdr&eacute; should dwell happy with her beloved. The
+comrades of Fergus by this time had tied their boat and come up
+from the shore, and the sons of Usnac were ready to depart. Yet
+Deirdr&eacute;'s heart misgave her as she thought of the days among
+those purple hills and granite rocks, by the long green water of
+the Loch, and her clear-seeing soul spoke words of doom for
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page123" id="page123"></a>[pg
+123]</span> them all: words soon to be fulfilled. Amongst the
+comrades of Fergus were certain of the adherents of Concobar,
+treacherous as he; for he had no thought of pardoning the sons of
+Usnac, nor any intent but to draw Deirdr&eacute; back within his
+reach; the image of her bright eyes and the redness of her lips,
+and her soft breast and shining hair was ever before him, and his
+heart gnawed within him for longing and the bitterness of
+desire.</p>
+<p>Therefore he had designed this embassy; and Fergus, believing
+all things and trusting all things, had gladly undertaken to be the
+messenger of forgiveness; fated, instead, to be the instrument of
+betrayal. So they turned their faces homewards towards Emain,
+Deirdr&eacute; full of desponding, as one whose day of grace is
+past. They set sail again through the long Sound of Jura, with the
+islands now on their right hand and the gray hills of Cantyre on
+their left. So they passed Jura, and later Islay, and came at last
+under the cliffs of Rathlin and the white Antrim headlands.
+Deirdr&eacute;'s heart never lightened, nor did laughter play about
+her lips or in her eyes through all the time of her journey, but
+sadness lay ever upon her, like the heavy darkness of a winter's
+night, when a storm is gathering <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page124" id="page124"></a>[pg 124]</span> out of the West. But
+Fergus made merry, rejoicing at the reconciling; bidden to a
+treacherous banquet by the partisans of Concobar, his heart never
+misgave him, but giving the charge of Deirdr&eacute; and the sons
+of Usnac to his sons, he went to the banquet, delaying long in
+carousing and singing, while Deirdr&eacute; and the three brothers
+were carried southwards to Emain. There the treachery plotted
+against them was carried out, as they sat in the banquet-hall; for
+Concobar's men brought against them the power of cowardly flames,
+setting fire to the hall, and slaying the sons of Usnac as they
+hurried forth from under the burning roof.</p>
+<p>One of the sons of Fergus shamefully betrayed them, bought by
+the gold and promises of Concobar, but the other bravely fell,
+fighting back to back with one of the sons of Usnac, when they fell
+overpowered by the warriors of Concobar. Thus was the doom of
+Deirdr&eacute; consummated, her lover treacherously done to death,
+and she herself condemned to bear the hated caress of Concobar,
+thinking ever of those other lips, in the days of her joy among the
+northern hills. This is the lament of Deirdr&eacute; for Usnac's
+sons:</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page125" id="page125"></a>[pg
+125]</span>
+<blockquote>The lions of the hill are gone,<br>
+And I am left alone, alone;<br>
+Dig the grave both wide and deep,<br>
+For I am sick and fain would sleep!<br>
+<br>
+The falcons of the wood are flown,<br>
+And I am left alone, alone;<br>
+Dig the grave both deep and wide,<br>
+And let us slumber side by side.<br>
+<br>
+Lay their spears and bucklers bright<br>
+By the warriors' sides aright;<br>
+Many a day the three before me<br>
+On their linked bucklers bore me.<br>
+<br>
+Dig the grave both wide and deep,<br>
+Sick I am and fain would sleep.<br>
+Dig the grave both deep and wide,<br>
+And let us slumber side by side.</blockquote>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page126" id="page126"></a>[pg
+126]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page127" id="page127"></a>[pg
+127]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CUCULAIN THE HERO.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page128" id="page128"></a>[pg
+128]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page129" id="page129"></a>[pg
+129]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VI."></a>VI.</h2>
+<h3>CUCULAIN THE HERO.</h3>
+<h3>B.C. 50--A.D. 50.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The treacherous death of Naisi and his brothers Ardan and Alny,
+and her own bereavement and misery, were not the end of the doom
+pronounced at her birth for Deirdr&eacute;, but rather the
+beginning. Yet the burden of the evils that followed fell on
+Concobar and his lands and his warriors.</p>
+<p>For Fergus, son of Roeg, former king over Emain, who had stayed
+behind his charges feasting and banqueting, came presently to
+Emain, fearing nothing and thinking no evil, but still warm with
+the reconciliation that he had accomplished; and, coming to Emain
+of Maca, found the sons of Usnac dead, with the sods still soft on
+their graves, and his own son also dead, Deirdr&eacute; in the
+hands of Concobar, and the plighted word of Fergus and his generous
+pledge of safety most traitorously and basely broken; broken by
+Concobar, whom he himself had guarded and set upon the throne.</p>
+<p>Fergus changed from gladness to fierce wrath, and <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page130" id="page130"></a>[pg 130]</span> his
+countenance was altered with anger, as he uttered his bitter
+indignation against Concobar to the warriors and heroes of Emain
+and the men of Ulad. The warriors were parted in two by his words,
+swaying to the right and to the left, as tall wheat sways before
+one who passes through it. For some of them sided with Fergus,
+saying that he had done great wrong to put Concobar on the throne,
+and that even now he should cast him down again, for the baseness
+and treachery of his deed; but others took Concobar's part, saying
+that the first betraying was Naisi's, who stole away
+Deirdr&eacute;,--the hostage, as it were, of evil doom, so that he
+drew the doom upon himself. They further said that Concobar was
+chief and ruler among them, the strong and masterful leader, able
+to uphold their cause amongst men. So indeed it befell, for the
+sedition of Fergus and his fight to avenge his wrong upon Concobar
+failed, so that he fled defeated to Meave, Queen of Connacht, at
+her stronghold amid the lakes whence issues forth the Shannon.</p>
+<a name="131.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/131.jpg"><img src="images/131.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>HONEYCOMB, GIANT'S CAUSEWAY.</b></p>
+<p>Meave, whose power and genius overtopped her lord Ailill,
+received the exiled king gladly, and put many honors upon him,
+holding him as the pillar of her army, with the two thousand men of
+the Ulaid <span class="pagenum"><a name="page131" id=
+"page131"></a>[pg 131]</span> who came with him;--those who had
+fought for him against the party of Concobar. At Cruacan, on the
+hillside, with the lakes of the Great River all around them, with
+the sun setting red behind the Curlew hills, with green meadows and
+beech-woods to gladden them, Meave and Ailill kept their court, and
+thence they sent many forays against Emain of Maca and Concobar,
+with Fergus the fallen king ever raging in the van, and, for the
+wrong that was done him, working measureless wrong on his own
+kingdom and the kingdom of his fathers.</p>
+<p>After many a foray had gone forth against Ulad, crossing the
+level plains, it befell that Meave and Ailill her lord disputed
+between them as to which had the greatest wealth; nor would either
+yield until their most precious possessions had been brought and
+matched the one against the other. Their jewels of gold,
+wonderfully wrought, and set with emeralds and beryls and red
+carbuncles, were brought forth, their crescents for the brow, with
+hammered tracery upon them, their necklets and torques, like
+twisted ribbons of gold, their bracelets and arm-rings set with
+gold, their gems of silver and all their adornments, cloaks of
+scarlet and blue and purple, were all brought, and no advantage in
+the one was <span class="pagenum"><a name="page132" id=
+"page132"></a>[pg 132]</span> found over the other. Their
+battle-steeds also were brought, their horses for chariots; and
+likewise their herds of lowing wealth, their sheep with soft
+fleeces. When the cattle were driven up before them, it was found
+that among the herds of Ailill was one bull, matchless, with white
+horns shining and polished; and equal to this bull was none among
+the herds of the queen. She would not admit her lord's advantage,
+but sent forthwith to seek where another bull like the bull of
+Ailill might be found, and tidings were brought to her of the brown
+bull of Cuailgne,--of Cuailgne named after a chief of the Sons of
+Milid, fallen ages ago in the pursuit of the De Danaans, when the
+De Danaans retreated before the Sons of Milid from the southern
+headland of Slieve Mish to the ford at green Tailten by the Boyne,
+and thence further northwards to where Cuailgne of the Sons of
+Milid was killed. At that same place had grown up a dwelling with a
+fortress, and there was the brown bull that Meave heard the report
+of. She sent, therefore, and her embassy bore orders to
+Dair&eacute;, the owner of the bull, asking that the bull might be
+sent to her for a year, and offering fifty heifers in payment.
+Dair&eacute; received her messengers well, and willingly consented
+to her request; but the messengers <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page133" id="page133"></a>[pg 133]</span> of Meave from feasting
+fell to drinking, from drinking to boasting; one of them declaring
+that it was a small thing that Dair&eacute; had granted the
+request, since they themselves would have compelled him, even
+unwillingly, and would have driven off the brown bull by force. The
+taunt stung Dair&eacute;, after his hospitality, and in wrath he
+sent them forth empty-handed, and so they came slighted to
+Meave.</p>
+<p>The queen, conceiving her honor impeached, would by no means
+suffer the matter so to rest, but stirred up wrath and dissension,
+till the armies of Connacht with their allies set forth to sack and
+burn in Ulad, and at all hazards to bring the brown bull. Fergus
+and the men who fought by his side went with them, and marching
+thus eastwards they came, after three days march through fair lands
+and fertile, to the river Dee--the frontier of Ulad, and the scene
+of many well-fought fights.</p>
+<p>The army of Ulad was not yet ready to meet them, but one
+champion with his band confronted them at the ford. That champion
+was Cuculain, whose true name was Setanta, son of Sualtam, chief at
+Dundelga, and of Dectira the sister of Concobar. Cuculain was
+accounted the greatest and most skillful warrior of his time, and
+bards for ages after told <span class="pagenum"><a name="page134"
+id="page134"></a>[pg 134]</span> how he kept the ford. For by the
+laws of honor, amongst them, the host from Connacht could not pass
+the ford so long as Cuculain held the ford and offered single
+combat to the champions. They must take up his challenge one by
+one; and while he stood there challenging, the host could not
+pass.</p>
+<p>Many of their champions fell there by the ford, so that queen
+Meave's heart chafed within her, and her army was hot to do battle,
+but still Cuculain kept the ford. Last of the western champions
+came forth Ferdiad, taught in the famous northern school of arms, a
+dear friend and companion of Cuculain, who now must meet him to
+slay or be slain. This is the story of their combat, as the
+traditions tell it:</p>
+<p>When they ceased fighting on the first day, they cast their
+weapons away from them into the hands of their charioteers. Each of
+them approached the other forthwith, and each put his hand round
+the other's neck, and gave him three kisses. Their horses were in
+the same paddock that night, and their charioteers at the same
+fire; and their charioteers spread beds of green rushes for them,
+with wounded men's pillows to them. The men of healing came to heal
+and solace them, applying herbs that should assuage to every cut or
+gash upon their <span class="pagenum"><a name="page135" id=
+"page135"></a>[pg 135]</span> bodies, and to all their wounds. Of
+every healing herb that was laid on the hurts of Cuculain, he sent
+an equal share to Ferdiad, sending it westward over the ford, so
+that men might not say that through the healing virtue of the herbs
+he was able to overcome him. And of all food and invigorating drink
+that was set before Ferdiad, he sent an equal portion northwards
+over the ford to Cuculain, for those that prepared food for him
+were more than those who made ready food for Cuculain. Thus that
+night they rested.</p>
+<p>They fought with spears on the next day, and so great was the
+strength of each, so dire their skill in combat, that both were
+grievously wounded, for all the protection of their shields. The
+men of healing art could do little for them beyond the staunching
+of their blood, that it might not flow from their wounds, laying
+herbs upon their red wounds.</p>
+<p>On the third day they arose early in the morning and came
+forward to the place of combat. Cuculain saw that the face of
+Ferdiad was dark as a black cloud, and thus addressed him: "Thy
+face is darkened, Ferdiad, and thine eye has lost its fire, nor are
+the form and features thine!" And Ferdiad answered, "O, Cuculain,
+it is not from fear or dread <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page136" id="page136"></a>[pg 136]</span> that my face is changed,
+for I am ready to meet all champions in the fight." Cuculain
+reproached him, wondering that, for the persuasions of Meave,
+Ferdiad was willing thus to fight against his friend, coming to
+spoil his land. But Ferdiad replied that fate compelled him, since
+every man is constrained to come unto the sod where shall be his
+last resting-place. That day the heroes fought with swords, but
+such was the skill of both that neither could break down the
+other's guard.</p>
+<p>In the dusk they cast away their weapons, ceasing from the
+fight; and though the meeting of the two had been full of vigor and
+friendship in the morning, yet was their parting at night mournful
+and full of sorrow. That night their horses were not in the same
+enclosure, nor did their charioteers rest at the same fire.</p>
+<p>Then Ferdiad arose early in the morning and went forth to the
+place of contest, knowing well that that day would decide whether
+he should fall or Cuculain; knowing that the sun would set on one
+of them dead that night. Cuculain, seeing him come forth, spoke
+thus to his charioteer: "I see the might and skill of Ferdiad,
+coming forth to the combat. If it be I that shall begin to yield
+to-day, do thou <span class="pagenum"><a name="page137" id=
+"page137"></a>[pg 137]</span> stir my valor, uttering reproaches
+and words of condemnation against me, so that my wrath shall grow
+upon me, enkindling me again for the battle." And the charioteer
+assented and promised.</p>
+<p>Great was the deed that was performed that day at the ford by
+the two heroes, the two warriors, the two champions of western
+lands, the two gift-bestowing hands of the northwest of the world,
+the two beloved pillars of the valor of the Gael, the two keys of
+the bravery of the Gael, brought to fight from afar through the
+schemes of Meave the queen.</p>
+<p>They began to shoot with their missiles from the dawn of the
+day, from early morning till noon. And when midday came the ire of
+the men waxed more furious, and they drew nearer together. Then
+Cuculain sprang from the river-bank against the boss of the shield
+of Ferdiad, son of Daman, to strike at his head over the rim of the
+shield from above. But Ferdiad gave the shield so strong a turn
+with his left arm that he cast Cuculain from him like a bird.
+Cuculain sprang again upon him, to strike him from above. But the
+son of Daman so struck the shield with his left knee that he cast
+Cuculain from him like a child.</p>
+<p>Then the charioteer of Cuculain spoke to chide <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page138" id="page138"></a>[pg 138]</span> him:
+"Woe for thee, whom the warrior thus casts aside as an evil mother
+casts away her offspring. He throws thee as foam is thrown by the
+river. He grinds thee as a mill would grind fresh grain. He pierces
+thee as the ax of the woodman cleaves the oak. He binds thee as the
+woodbine binds the tree. He darts on thee as the hawk darts on
+finches, so that henceforth thou hast no claim or name or fame for
+valor, until thy life's end, thou phantom sprite!"</p>
+<p>Then Cuculain sprang up fleet as the wind and swift as the
+swallow, fierce as a dragon, strong as a lion, advancing against
+Ferdiad through clouds of dust, and forcing himself upon his
+shield, to strike at him from above. Yet even then Ferdiad shook
+him off, driving him backwards into the ford.</p>
+<p>Then Cuculain's countenance was changed, and his heart swelled
+and grew great within him till he towered demoniac and gigantic,
+rising like one of the Fomor upon Ferdiad. So fierce was the fight
+they now fought that their heads met above and their feet below and
+their arms in the midst, past the rims of the shields. So fierce
+was the fight they fought that they cleft the shields to their
+centers. So fierce was the fight they fought that their spears were
+shivered from socket to haft. So fierce was <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page139" id="page139"></a>[pg 139]</span> the
+fight they fought that the demons of the air screamed along the
+rims of the shields, and from the hilts of their swords and from
+the hafts of their spears. So fierce was the fight they fought that
+they cast the river out of its bed, so that not a drop of water lay
+there unless from the fierceness of the champion heroes hewing each
+other in the midst of the ford. So fierce was the fight they fought
+that the horses of the Gael fled away in fright, breaking their
+chains and their yokes, and the women and youths and camp-followers
+broke from the camp, flying forth southwards and westwards.</p>
+<p>They were fighting with the edges of their swords, and Ferdiad,
+finding a break in the guard of Cuculain, gave him a stroke of the
+straight-edged sword, burying it in his body until the blood fell
+into his girdle, until the ford was red with the blood of the
+hero's body. Then Cuculain thrust an unerring spear over the rim of
+the shield, and through the breast of Ferdiad's armor, so that the
+point of the spear pierced his heart and showed through his
+body.</p>
+<p>"That is enough, now," said Ferdiad: "I fall for that!" Then
+Cuculain ran towards him, and clasped his two arms about him, and
+bore him with his arms and armor across the ford northwards.
+Cuculain <span class="pagenum"><a name="page140" id=
+"page140"></a>[pg 140]</span> laid Ferdiad down there, bowing over
+his body in faintness and weakness. But the charioteer cried to
+him, "Rise up, Cuculain, for the host is coming upon us, and it is
+not single combat they will give thee, since Ferdiad, son of Daman,
+son of Dair&eacute;, has fallen before thee!"</p>
+<p>"Friend," Cuculain made answer, "what avails it for me to rise
+after him that has fallen by me?"</p>
+<p>Thus did Cuculain keep the ford, still known as the ford of
+Ferdiad, Ath-Fhirdia on the Dee, in the midst of the green plain of
+Louth. And while he fought at the ford of Ferdiad the army of Ulad
+assembled, and coming southwards over the hills before Emain,
+turned back the host of Meave the queen and pursued them. The army
+of Meave fled westwards and southwards towards Connacht, passing
+the Yellow Ford of Athboy and the Hill of Ward, the place of
+sacrifice, where the fires on the Day of Spirits summoned the
+priests and Druids to the offering. Fleeing still westwards from
+the Yellow Ford, they passed between the lakes of Owel and Ennel,
+with the men of Ulad still hot in their rear. Thus came pursued and
+pursuers to Gairec, close by Athlone--the Ford of Luan--and the
+wooded shore of the great Lough Ree. There was <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page141" id="page141"></a>[pg 141]</span> fought
+a battle hardly less fatal to victors than to vanquished, for
+though the hosts of Meave were routed, yet Concobar's men could not
+continue the pursuit. Thus Meave escaped and Fergus with her, and
+came to their great fort on the green hillside of Cruacan amid the
+headwaters of the Shannon.</p>
+<p>The victory of Concobar's men was like a defeat. There was not
+food that pleased him, nor did sleep come to him by flight, so that
+the Ulad wondered, and Catbad the right-wonderful Druid, himself a
+warrior who had taught Concobar and reared him, went to Concobar to
+learn the secret of his trouble. Therefore Catbad asked of Concobar
+what wound had wounded him, what obstinate sickness had come upon
+him, making him faint and pale, day after day.</p>
+<p>"Great reason have I for it," answered Concobar, "for the four
+great provinces of Erin have come against me, bringing with them
+their bards and singers, that their ravages and devastations might
+be recorded, and they have burned our fortresses and dwellings, and
+Ailill and Meave have gained a battle against me. Therefore I would
+be avenged upon Meave the queen."</p>
+<p>"Thou hast already avenged it sternly, O Red-handed <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page142" id="page142"></a>[pg 142]</span>
+Concobar," Catbad made answer, "by winning the battle over the four
+provinces of Erin."</p>
+<p>"That is no battle," Concobar answered, "where a strong king
+falls not by hard fighting and by fury. That an army should escape
+from a goodly battle! Unless Ailill should fall, and Meave, by me
+in this encounter with valorous hosts, I tell you that my heart
+will break, O Catbad!"</p>
+<p>"This is my counsel for thee," replied Catbad, "to stay for the
+present. For the winds are rough, and the roads are foul, and the
+streams and the rivers are in flood, and the hands of the warriors
+are busy making forts and strongholds among strangers. So wait till
+the summer days come upon us, till every grassy sod is a pillow,
+till our horses are full of spirit and our colts are strong, till
+our men are whole of their wounds and hurts, till the nights are
+short to watch and to ward and to guard in the land of enemies and
+in the territories of strangers. Spring is not the time for an
+invasion. But meanwhile let tidings be sent to thy friends in
+absence, in the islands and throughout the northern seas."</p>
+<p>Therefore messengers were sent with the tidings, and the friends
+in absence of Concobar were summoned. They set forth with ships
+from the islands <span class="pagenum"><a name="page143" id=
+"page143"></a>[pg 143]</span> of the northern seas, and came
+forward with the tide to the Cantyre headland. The green surges of
+the tremendous sea rose about them, and a mighty storm rose against
+them. Such was the strength of the storm that the fleet was parted
+in three. A third of them, with the son of Amargin, came under the
+cliffs of Fair Head, to the Bay of Murbolg, where huge columns
+tower upward on the face of the cliff, high as the nests of the
+eagles; cliffs ruddy and mighty, frowning tremendous across the
+channel to Cantyre and Islay and far-away Jura. A third of the
+ships came to the safer harbor of Larne, where bands of white seam
+the cliff's redness, where the great headland is thrust forth
+northwards, sheltering the bay from the eastern waves. A third of
+the fleet came to the strand beside Dundelga, hard by the great
+hill of earth where was reared the stronghold of Cuculain.</p>
+<p>At that same time came Concobar with a thousand men to the fort
+of Cuculain, and feasting was prepared for him at the House of
+Delga. Nor was Concobar long there till he saw the bent spars of
+sails and the full-crewed ships, and the scarlet pavilions, and the
+many-colored banners, and the blue bright lances, and the weapons
+of war. Then Concobar <span class="pagenum"><a name="page144" id=
+"page144"></a>[pg 144]</span> called on the chiefs that were about
+him, for the territory and land he had bestowed upon them, and for
+the jewels he had given them, to stand firm and faithful. For he
+knew not whether the ships were ships of his foes, of the Galian of
+Lagin, now called Leinster, or the Munstermen of great Muma, or the
+men of Olnemact, called afterwards Connacht; for the estuary of the
+river and the strand were full of men.</p>
+<p>Then Senca son of Ailill answered for the chieftains: "I give my
+word, indeed, that Erin holds not a soldier who lays his hand in
+the hand of a chieftain that is not known to me. If they be the men
+of Erin thy foes that are there, I shall ask a truce of battle from
+them; but if they be thy friends and allies, thou shalt the more
+rejoice."</p>
+<p>Then Senca son of Ailill went forward to the place where the
+ships were, and learned that they were the friends in absence of
+Concobar, come to be his allies against the four provinces of Erin.
+Then Concobar spoke to Cuculain:</p>
+<p>"Well, O Cuculain, let the horses of the plain of Murtemni be
+caught by thee; let four-wheeled chariots be harnessed for them;
+bring with them hither my friends from the ships in chariots and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page145" id="page145"></a>[pg
+145]</span> four-wheeled cars, that feasting and enjoyment may be
+prepared for them."</p>
+<a name="145.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/145.jpg"><img src="images/145.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>GRAY MAN'S PATH, FAIR HEAD.</b></p>
+<p>They were brought in chariots to the feast, and carvers carved
+for them, and serving-men carried the cups of mead. Songs were sung
+to them, and they tarried there till sunrise on the morrow. Then
+Concobar spoke again to Cuculain:</p>
+<p>"It is well, Cuculain. Let messengers now be sent through the
+lands of the Ulaid to the warriors of the Ulaid, that the foreign
+friends may be ministered to by them also, while I make my camp
+here by the river. And bid the thrice fifty veteran champions come
+hither to me, that I may have their aid and counsel in battle."</p>
+<p>But Cuculain would not. Therefore Concobar went himself to
+summon the veterans. When they asked the cause of his coming,
+Concobar answered, "Have you not heard how the four provinces of
+Erin came against us, bringing with them their bards and singers,
+that their ravages and devastations might the better be recorded,
+and burning and plundering our fortresses and dwellings? Therefore
+I would make an expedition of hostility against them, and with your
+guidance and counsel would I make the expedition."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page146" id="page146"></a>[pg
+146]</span>
+<p>"Let our old steeds be caught by thee," they answered, "and let
+our old chariots be yoked by thee, so that we may go on this
+journey and expedition with thee." Then their old chargers were
+caught, and their old chariots yoked, so that they too came to the
+camp at the Water of Luachan.</p>
+<p>This was told to the four provinces. The Three Waves of Erin
+thundered in the night; the Wave of Clidna at Glandore in the
+South; the Wave of Rudraige along the bent-carpeted sandhills of
+Dundrum, under the Mountains of Mourne; and the Wave of Tuag Inbir,
+at the bar of northern Bann. For these are the Three Waves of Fate
+in Erin. Then the four provinces hosted their men. The son of
+Lucta, the north Munster king, assembled his tribes at the Hill of
+Luchra, between the Shannon mouth and the Summit of Prospects.
+Ailill and Meave hosted the men of the west at Cruacan. Find, son
+of Ros, king over the Galian of Leinster, gathered his army at
+Dinn-Rig by the Barrow. Cairpr&eacute; Nia Fer assembled his host
+about him at Tara, in the valley of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>This was the proposal of Eocu, son of Lucta, king of north
+Munster by the Shannon: That everything should have its payment,
+and that reparation should <span class="pagenum"><a name="page147"
+id="page147"></a>[pg 147]</span> be made to Concobar for the
+invasion; that a fort should be paid for every fort, for every
+house a house, for every cow a cow, for every bull a bull; that the
+great brown bull should be sent back, that the breadth of the face
+of the bull in red gold should be given to Concobar, and that there
+should be no more hostility among the men of Erin.</p>
+<p>This was reported to Meave, but the queen answered, "A false
+hand was his who gave this counsel. For so long as there shall be
+among us one who can hold a sword, who can wear the shield-strap
+about his neck, that proposal shall not go to him."</p>
+<p>"Thy counsel is not mine," replied Ailill, "for not greater
+shall be our part of that payment than the part of all the four
+provinces who went on that raid for the bull." Therefore Meave
+consented, and messengers were sent, and came to Tara by the Boyne,
+where were Find, son of Ros, king of Leinster, and his brother
+Cairpr&eacute; Nia Fer, king of Tara. Thence they sent messengers
+to treat with Concobar, but Concobar rejected the terms. "I give my
+word, indeed," answered Concobar, "that I will not take terms from
+you till my tent has been pitched in every province of Erin."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page148" id="page148"></a>[pg
+148]</span>
+<p>"Good, O Concobar," they replied; "where wilt thou now make thy
+encampment to-night?"</p>
+<p>"In the Headland of the Kings, by the clear bright Boyne,"
+answered Concobar, for Concobar concealed not ever from his enemy
+the place in which he would take station or camp, that they might
+not say that it was fear or dread that caused him not to say it.
+Concobar, therefore, marched toward the Headland of the Kings,
+across the Boyne to the southward, and facing the northern bank
+where are the pyramids of the Dagda Mor and the De Danaans. But the
+southern armies were there already, so Concobar halted before the
+river. Then were their positions fixed and their pavilions pitched,
+their huts and their tents were made. Their fires were kindled,
+cooking and food and drink were prepared; baths of clean bathing
+were made by them, and their hair was smooth-combed; their bodies
+were minutely cleansed, supper and food were eaten by them; and
+tunes and merry songs and eulogies were sung by them.</p>
+<p>Then Concobar sent men to reconnoitre the southern and western
+armies. Two went and returned not, falling indeed into the hands of
+the foe. It seemed long to Concobar that the two were gone.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page149" id="page149"></a>[pg
+149]</span> He spoke, therefore, to his kinsman: "Good indeed,
+Irgalac, son of Macclac, son of Congal, son of Rudraige, sayest
+thou who is proper to go to estimate and to reconnoitre the
+army?"</p>
+<p>"Who should go there," answered Irgalac, "but Iriel good at
+arms, great-kneed son of Conall Cernac. He is a Conall for havoc, a
+Cuculain for dexterity of feats. He is a Catbad, a right-wonderful
+Druid, for intelligence and counsel, he is a Senca son of Ailill
+for peace and for good speech, he is a Celtcair son of Utecar for
+valor, he is a Concobar son of Factna Fatac for kingliness and
+wide-eyed-ness, for giving of treasures and of wealth and of
+riches. Who but Iriel should go?"</p>
+<p>Therefore Iriel went forward: standing on the pyramid of the
+Dagda, he began measuring and reconnoitering the army. His spirit,
+or his mind, or his thoughts did not fret over them at all. He
+brought their description with him to the place in which Concobar
+was.</p>
+<p>"How, my life, Iriel?" said Concobar. "I give my word truly,"
+said Iriel; "it seems to me that there is not ford on river, or
+stone on hill, nor highway nor road in the territory of Breg or
+Mide, that is not full of their horse-teams and of their servants.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page150" id="page150"></a>[pg
+150]</span> It seems to me that their apparel and their gear and
+their garments are the blaze of a royal house from the plain."</p>
+<p>"Good, O Ulaid," said Concobar, "what is your advice to us for
+the battle?" "Our advice is," said the Ulaid, "to wait till our
+strong men and our leaders and our commanders and our supporters of
+battle come." Not long was their waiting, and not great was their
+stay, till they saw three chariot-warriors approaching them, and a
+band of twelve hundred along with each rider of them. It is these
+that were there--three of the goodly men of science of the Ulaid,
+to wit, Catbad the right-wonderful Druid, and Aiterni the
+Importunate, and Amargin the man of science and art. After them
+came other valiant leaders with troops. Then Concobar arose and
+took his gear of battle and of conflict and of combat about him,
+saying, "Why should we not give battle?"</p>
+<p>A third of the army of the Ulaid rose with him, too. And they
+went over the river Boyne. And the other armies arose against them
+as they were crossing the river. And each of them took to hacking
+and to cutting down the other, destroying and wounding till there
+was no similitude of the Ulaid at that <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page151" id="page151"></a>[pg 151]</span> point
+of time, unless it were a huge sturdy oakwood in the middle of the
+plain, and a great army were to go close to it, and the slender and
+the small of the wood were cut off, but its huge sturdy oaks were
+left behind. Thus their young were cut off, and none but their
+champions and their battle-warriors and their good heroes of valor
+were left.</p>
+<p>The shield of Concobar was struck so that it moaned, and the
+three Waves of Erin, the Wave of Clidna, the Wave of Rudraige, and
+the Wave of Tuag Inbir echoed that moan, and all the shields of the
+Ulaid resounded, every one of them that was on their shoulders and
+in their chariots. As the Ulaid were retreating, fresh troops came
+up for them under Conall Cernac. A tree of shelter and a wreath of
+laurel and a hand above them was Conall to them. So their flight
+was stayed. Then Conall drew the sharp long sword out of its sheath
+of war and played the music of his sword on the armies. The ring of
+Conall's sword was heard through the battalions on both sides. And
+when they heard the music of Conall's sword their hearts quaked and
+their eyes fluttered and their faces whitened, and each of them
+withdrew back into his place of battle and of combat. But so fierce
+was the onset of the southern armies <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page152" id="page152"></a>[pg 152]</span> that the fight of the
+Ulaid against them was as a breast against a great flood, or an
+arrow against the rock, or the striking of a head against cliffs.
+Yet through the great might of Cuculain the Ulaid prevailed, and
+Cairpr&eacute; the King of Tara was slain. After the battle,
+Concobar spoke thus: "There were three sons of Ros Ruad the
+king--Find in Alend, Ailill in Cruac, Cairpr&eacute; in Tara;
+together they performed their deeds of valor, the three brothers in
+every strife; together they used to give their battle. They were
+three pillars of gold about their hills, abiding in strength; great
+is their loss since the third son has fallen."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page153" id="page153"></a>[pg
+153]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>FIND AND OSSIN.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page154" id="page154"></a>[pg
+154]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page155" id="page155"></a>[pg
+155]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VII."></a>VII.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>FIND AND OSSIN.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 200--290.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Seventeen centuries ago, two hundred summers after the death of
+Cuculain the hero, came the great and wonderful time of Find the
+son of Cumal, Ossin the son of Find, and Find's grandson Oscur. It
+was a period of growth and efflorescence; the spirit and
+imaginative powers of the people burst forth with the freshness of
+the prime. The life of the land was more united, coming to a
+national consciousness.</p>
+<p>The five kingdoms were now clearly defined, with Meath, in the
+central plain, predominant over the others, and in a certain sense
+ruling all Ireland from the Hill of Tara. The code of honor was
+fixed; justice had taken well-defined forms; social life had
+ripened to genial urbanity. The warriors were gathered together
+into something like a regular army, a power rivaling the kings. Of
+this army, Find, son of Cumal, was the most renowned leader--a
+warrior and a poet, who embodied in himself the very genius of the
+time, its fresh naturalness, its ripeness, its <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page156" id="page156"></a>[pg 156]</span>
+imagination. No better symbol of the spirit of his age could be
+found than Find's own "Ode to Spring":</p>
+<p>"May-day! delightful time! How beautiful the color! The
+blackbirds sing their full lay. Would that Laigay were here! The
+cuckoos call in constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble
+brightness of the season. On the margin of the leafy pools the
+summer swallows skim the stream. Swift horses seek the pools. The
+heath spreads out its long hair. The white, gentle cotton-grass
+grows. The sea is lulled to rest. Flowers cover the earth."</p>
+<p>Find's large and imaginative personality is well drawn in one of
+the poems of his golden-tongued son Ossin, though much of the
+beauty of Ossin's form is lost in the change of tongue:</p>
+<blockquote>"Six thousand gallant men of war<br>
+We sought the rath o'er Badamar;<br>
+To the king's palace home we bent<br>
+Our way. His bidden guests we went.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;'Twas Clocar Fair,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And Find was there,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Fians from the hills around<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Had gathered to the race-course ground.<br>
+From valley deep and wooded glen<br>
+Fair Munster sent its mighty men;<br>
+And Fiaca, Owen's son, the king,<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page157" id="page157"></a>[pg
+157]</span> Was there the contest witnessing.<br>
+'Twas gallant sport! With what delight<br>
+Leaped thousand pulses at the sight.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;How all hearts bound<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As to the ground<br>
+First are brought forth the Fian steeds,<br>
+Then those from Luimnea's sunny meads.<br>
+Three heats on Mac Mareda's green<br>
+They run; and foremost still is seen<br>
+Dill Mac Decreca's coal-black steed.<br>
+At Crag-Lochgur he takes the lead.<br>
+<br>
+"His is the day--and, lo! the king<br>
+The coal-black steed soliciting<br>
+From Dill the Druid!--'Take for it<br>
+A hundred beeves; for it is fit<br>
+The black horse should be mine to pay<br>
+Find for his deeds of many a day.'<br>
+<br>
+"Then spoke the Druid, answering<br>
+His grandson, Fiaca the king:<br>
+'Take my blessing; take the steed,<br>
+For the hero's fitting meed:<br>
+Give it for thy honor's sake.'<br>
+And to Find the King thus spake<br>
+<br>
+"'Hero, take the swift black steed,<br>
+Of thy valor fitting meed;<br>
+And my car, in battle-raid<br>
+Gazed on by the foe with fear;<br>
+And a seemly steed for thy charioteer.<br>
+Chieftain, be this good sword thine,<br>
+Purchased with a hundred kine,<br>
+In thine hand be it our aid.<br>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page158" id="page158"></a>[pg
+158]</span> Take this spear, whose point the breath<br>
+Of venomed words has armed with death,<br>
+And the silver-orb&egrave;d shield,<br>
+Sunbeam of the battlefield!<br>
+And take with thee<br>
+My grayhounds three,<br>
+Slender and tall,<br>
+Bright-spotted all,<br>
+Take them with thee, chieftain bold,<br>
+With their chainlets light<br>
+Of the silver white,<br>
+And their neck-rings of the tawny gold.<br>
+Slight not thou our offering,<br>
+Son of Cumal, mighty king!"<br>
+<br>
+"Uprose Find our chieftain bold,<br>
+Stood before the Fian ranks,<br>
+To the king spoke gracious thanks,<br>
+Took the gifts the monarch gave;<br>
+Then each to each these champions brave<br>
+Glorious sight to see and tell,<br>
+Spoke their soldier-like farewell!<br>
+<br>
+"The way before us Find led then;<br>
+We followed him, six thousand men,<br>
+From out the Fair, six thousand brave,<br>
+To Caicer's house of Cloon-na-Dave.<br>
+<br>
+"Three nights, three days, did all of us<br>
+Keep joyous feast in Caicer's house;<br>
+Fifty rings of the yellow gold<br>
+To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain told;<br>
+As many cows and horses gave<br>
+To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain brave.<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page159" id="page159"></a>[pg
+159]</span> Well did Find of Innisfail<br>
+Pay the price of his food and ale.<br>
+<br>
+"Find rode o'er the Luacra, joyous man,<br>
+Till he reached the strand at Barriman;<br>
+At the lake where the foam on the billow's top<br>
+Leaps white, did Find and the Fians stop.<br>
+<br>
+"'Twas then that our chieftain rode and ran<br>
+Along the strand of Barriman;<br>
+Trying the speed<br>
+Of his swift black steed,--<br>
+Who now but Find was a happy man?<br>
+<br>
+"Myself and Cailt&eacute; at each side,<br>
+In wantonness of youthful pride,<br>
+Would ride with him where he might ride.<br>
+Fast and furious rode he,<br>
+Urging his steed to far Tralee.<br>
+On from Tralee by Lerg duv-glass,<br>
+And o'er Fraegmoy, o'er Finnass,<br>
+O'er Moydeo, o'er Monaken,<br>
+On to Shan-iber, o'er Shan-glen,<br>
+Till the clear stream of Flesk we win,<br>
+And reach the pillar of Crofinn;<br>
+O'er Sru-Muny, o'er Moneket,<br>
+And where the fisher spreads his net<br>
+To snare the salmon of Lemain,<br>
+And thence to where our coursers' feet<br>
+Wake the glad echoes of Loch Leane;<br>
+And thus fled he,<br>
+Nor slow were we;<br>
+Through rough and smooth our course we strain.<br>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page160" id="page160"></a>[pg
+160]</span> "Long and swift our stride,--more fleet<br>
+Than the deer of the mountain our coursers' feet!<br>
+Away to Flesk by Carnwood dun;<br>
+And past Mac Scalv&eacute;'s Mangerton,<br>
+Till Find reached Barnec Hill at last;<br>
+There rested he, and then we passed<br>
+Up the high hill before him, and:<br>
+'Is there no hunting hut at hand?'<br>
+He thus addressed us; 'The daylight<br>
+Is gone, and shelter for the night<br>
+We lack.' He scarce had ended, when<br>
+Gazing adown the rocky glen,<br>
+On the left hand, just opposite,<br>
+He saw a house with its fire lit;<br>
+'That house till now I've never seen,<br>
+Though many a time and oft I've been<br>
+In this wild glen. Come, look at it!'<br>
+<br>
+"Yes, there are things that our poor wit<br>
+Knows little of,' said Cailt&eacute;; 'thus<br>
+This may be some miraculous<br>
+Hostel we see, whose generous blaze<br>
+Thy hospitality repays,<br>
+Large-handed son of Cumal!'--So<br>
+On to the house all three we go...."</blockquote>
+<p>Of their entry to the mysterious house, of the ogre and the
+witch they found there, of the horrors that gathered on all sides,
+when</p>
+<blockquote>"From iron benches on the right<br>
+Nine headless bodies rose to sight,<br>
+And on the left, from grim repose,<br>
+Nine heads that had no bodies rose,..."</blockquote>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page161" id="page161"></a>[pg
+161]</span>
+<p>Ossin likewise tells, and how, overcome, they fell at last into
+a deathlike trance and stupor, till the sunlight woke them lying on
+the heathery hillside, the house utterly vanished away.</p>
+<p>The scenes of all the happenings in the story are well known:
+the rath of Badamar is near Caher on the Suir, in the midst of the
+Golden Vale, a plain of wonderful richness and beauty, walled in by
+the red precipices of the Galtee Mountains, and the Knock-Mealdown
+Hills. From the rath of Badamar Find could watch the western
+mountains reddening and glowing in front of the dawn, as the
+sun-rays shot level over the burnished plain. Clocar is thirty
+miles westward over the Golden Vale, near where Croom now stands;
+and here were run the races; here Find gained the gift of the
+coal-black steed. It is some forty miles still westwards to the
+Strand of Tralee; the last half of the way among hills carpeted
+with heather; and the Strand itself, with the tide out, leaves a
+splendid level of white sand as far as the eye can reach, tempting
+Find to try his famous courser. The race carried them southwards
+some fifteen miles to the beautiful waters of Lough Leane, with its
+overhanging wooded hills, the Lake of Killarney, southward of which
+rises the huge red mass <span class="pagenum"><a name="page162" id=
+"page162"></a>[pg 162]</span> of Mangerton, in the midst of a
+country everywhere rich in beauty. The Hill of Barnec is close by,
+but the site of the magic dwelling, who can tell? Perhaps Find; or
+Cailt&eacute;, or golden-tongued Ossin himself.</p>
+<p>There was abundant fighting in those days, for well within
+memory was the time of Conn of the Five-score Fights, against whom
+Cumal had warred because Conn lord of Connacht had raised Crimtan
+of the Yellow Hair to the kingship of Leinster. Cumal fought at the
+Rath that bears his name, now softened to Rathcool, twelve miles
+inward from the sea at Dublin, with the hills rising up from the
+plain to the south of the Rath. Cumal fought and fell, slain by
+Goll Mac Morna, and enmity long endured between Find and Goll who
+slew his sire. But like valiant men they were reconciled, and when
+Goll in his turn died, Find made a stirring poem on Goll's mighty
+deeds.</p>
+<p>Another fateful fight for Find was the battle of Kinvarra, among
+the southern rocks of Galway Bay; for though he broke through the
+host of his foeman Uinc&eacute;, that chieftain himself escaped,
+and, riding swiftly with a score of men, came to Find's own
+dwelling at Druim Dean on the Red Hills of Leinster, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page163" id="page163"></a>[pg 163]</span> and
+burned the dwelling, leaving it a smoldering ruin. Find pursuing,
+overtook them, slaying them at the ford called to this day
+Ath-uinc&eacute;, the ford of Uinc&eacute;. Returning homewards,
+Find found his house desolate, and the song he sang still holds the
+memory of his sorrow.</p>
+<p>Two poems he made, on the Plain of Swans and on Roirend in
+Offaly, full of vivid pictures and legends; and one of romantic
+tragedy, telling how the two daughters of King Tuatal Tectmar were
+treacherously slain, through the malice of the Leinster king. But
+of romances and songs of fair women in the days of Find, the best
+is the Poem of Gael, who composed it to win a princess for his
+bride.</p>
+<p>Of fair Cred&eacute; of the Yellow Hair it was said that there
+was scarce a gem in all Erin that she had not got as a love-token,
+but that she would give her heart to none. Cred&eacute; had vowed
+that she would marry the man who made the best verses on her home,
+a richly-adorned dwelling in the south, under the twin cones of the
+Paps, and within sight of Lough Leane and Killarney. Cael took up
+the challenge, and invoking the Genius that dwelt in the sacred
+pyramid of Brugh on the Boyne he made these verses, and came to
+recite them to yellow-haired Cred&eacute;:</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page164" id="page164"></a>[pg
+164]</span>
+<blockquote>"It would be happy for me to be in her home,<br>
+Among her soft and downy couches,<br>
+Should Cred&eacute; deign to hear me;<br>
+Happy for me would be my journey.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A bowl she has, whence berry-juice
+flows,<br>
+With which she colors her eyebrows black;<br>
+She has clear vessels of fermenting ale;<br>
+Cups she has, and beautiful goblets.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The color of her house is white like
+lime;<br>
+Within it are couches and green rushes;<br>
+Within it are silks and blue mantles;<br>
+Within it are red gold and crystal cups.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of its sunny chamber the corner stones<br>
+Are all of silver and yellow gold,<br>
+Its roof in stripes of faultless order<br>
+Of wings of brown and crimson red.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Two doorposts of green I see,<br>
+Nor is the door devoid of beauty;<br>
+Of carved silver,--long has it been renowned,--<br>
+Is the lintel that is over the door.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Cred&eacute;'s chair is on your right
+hand,<br>
+The pleasantest of the pleasant it is;<br>
+All over a blaze of Alpine gold,<br>
+At the foot of her beautiful couch...<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The household which is in her house<br>
+To the happiest fate has been destined;<br>
+Grey and glossy are their garments;<br>
+Twisted and fair is their flowing hair.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Wounded men would sink in sleep,<br>
+Though ever so heavily teeming with blood,<br>
+With the warbling of the fairy birds<br>
+From the eaves of her sunny summer-room.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;If I am blessed with the lady's grace,<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page165" id="page165"></a>[pg
+165]</span> Fair Cred&eacute; for whom the cuckoo sings,<br>
+In songs of praise shall ever live,<br>
+If she but repay me for my gift....<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;There is a vat of royal bronze,<br>
+Whence flows the pleasant; nice of malt;<br>
+An apple-tree stands over the vat,<br>
+With abundance of weighty fruit.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;When Cred&eacute;'s goblet is filled<br>
+With the ale of the noble vat,<br>
+There drop down into the cup forthwith<br>
+Four apples at the same time.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The four attendants that have been
+named,<br>
+Arise and go to the distributing,<br>
+They present to four of the guests around<br>
+A drink to each man and an apple.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;She who possesses all these things,<br>
+With the strand and the stream that flow by them,<br>
+Cred&eacute; of the three-pointed hill,<br>
+Is a spear-cast beyond the women of Erin.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Here is a poem for her,--no mean gift.<br>
+It is not a hasty, rash composition;<br>
+To Cred&eacute; now it is here presented:<br>
+May my journey be brightness to her!"</blockquote>
+<a name="165.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/165.jpg"><img src="images/165.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>COLLEEN BAWN CAVES, KILLARNEY.</b></p>
+<p>Tradition says that the heart of the yellow-haired beauty was
+utterly softened and won, so that she delayed not to make Cael
+master of the dwelling he so well celebrated; master, perhaps, of
+all the jewels of Erin that her suitors had given her. Yet their
+young love was not destined to meet the storms and frosts of the
+years; for Cael the gallant fell in battle, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page166" id="page166"></a>[pg 166]</span> his
+melodious lips for ever stilled. Thus have these two become
+immortal in song.</p>
+<p>We have seen Cailt&eacute; with Ossin following Find in his wild
+ride through the mountains of Killarney, and to Cailt&eacute; is
+attributed the saying that echoes down the ages: "There are things
+that our poor wit knows nothing off!" Cailt&eacute; was a great
+lover of the supernatural, yet there was in him also a vein of
+sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of Clidna--"Clidna the
+fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was tragically drowned at
+Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith still moans upon
+the bar, in hours of fate for the people of Erin.</p>
+<p>In a gayer vein is the poem of Fergus the Eloquent, who sang the
+legend of Tipra Seangarmna, the Fountain of the Feale River, which
+flows westward to the sea from the mountains north of Killarney.
+The river rises among precipices, gloomy caverns and ravines, and
+passes through vales full of mysterious echoes amid mist-shrouded
+hills. There, as Fergus sings, were Ossin and his following
+hunting, when certain ominous fair women lured them to a
+cave,--women who were but insubstantial wraiths,--to hold them
+captive till the seasons ran full circle, summer giving place again
+to winter and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page167" id=
+"page167"></a>[pg 167]</span> spring. But Ossin, being himself of
+more than human wisdom, found a way to trick the spirits; for daily
+he cut chips from his spear and sent them floating down the spring,
+till Find at last saw them, and knew the tokens as Ossin's, and,
+coming, delivered his son from durance among ghosts.</p>
+<p>The great romantic theme of the time binds the name of Find, son
+of Cumal, with that of Cormac, son of Art, and grandson of Conn of
+the Five-score Battles. This Cormac was himself a notable man of
+wisdom, and here are some of the Precepts he taught to
+Cairbr&eacute;, his son:</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbr&eacute; asked him, "what
+is good for a king?"</p>
+<p>"This is plain," answered Cormac. "It is good for him to have
+patience and not to dispute, self-government without anger,
+affability without haughtiness, diligent attention to history,
+strict observance of covenants and agreements, justice tempered by
+mercy in the execution of the laws. It is good for him to make
+fertile land, to invite ships, to import jewels of price from
+across the sea, to purchase and distribute raiment, to keep
+vigorous swordsmen who may protect his territory, to make war
+beyond his territory, to attend to the sick, to discipline his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page168" id="page168"></a>[pg
+168]</span> soldiers. Let him enforce fear, let him perfect peace,
+let him give mead and wine, let him pronounce just judgments of
+light, let him speak all truth, for it is through the truth of a
+king that God gives favorable seasons."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbr&eacute; again asked him,
+"what is good for the welfare of a country?"</p>
+<p>"This is plain," answered Cormac. "Frequent assemblies of wise
+and good men to investigate its affairs, to abolish every evil and
+retain every wholesome institution, to attend to the precepts of
+the seniors; let every assembly be convened according to the law,
+let the law be in the hands of the noblest, let the chieftains be
+upright and unwilling to oppress the poor."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," again asked Cairbr&eacute;,
+"what are duties of a prince in the banqueting-house?"</p>
+<p>"A prince on the Day of Spirits should light his lamps and
+welcome his guests with clapping of hands, offering comfortable
+seats; the cup-bearers should be active in distributing meat and
+drink. Let there be moderation of music, short stories, a welcoming
+countenance, a greeting for the learned, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page169" id="page169"></a>[pg 169]</span>
+pleasant conversation. These are the duties of a prince and the
+arrangement of a banqueting-house."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, for what qualifications is a king
+elected over countries and tribes of people?"</p>
+<p>"From the goodness of his shape and family, from his experience
+and wisdom, from his prudence and magnanimity, from his eloquence
+and bravery in battle, and from the number of his friends."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what was thy deportment when a
+youth?"</p>
+<p>"I was cheerful at the banquet of the House of Mead, I was
+fierce in battle, but vigilant and careful. I was kind to friends,
+a physician to the sick, merciful to the weak, stern toward the
+headstrong. Though possessed of knowledge, I loved silence. Though
+strong, I was not overbearing. Though young, I mocked not the old.
+Though valiant, I was not vain. When I spoke of one absent I
+praised and blamed him not, for by conduct like this are we known
+to be courteous and refined."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what is good for me?"</p>
+<p>"If thou attend to my command, thou wilt not scorn the old
+though thou art young, nor the poor <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page170" id="page170"></a>[pg 170]</span> though thou art well
+clad, nor the lame though thou art swift, nor the blind though thou
+seest, nor the weak though thou art strong, nor the ignorant though
+thou art wise. Be not slothful, be not passionate, be not greedy,
+be not idle, be not jealous; for he who is so is hateful to God and
+man."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, I would know how to hold myself
+with the wise and the foolish, with friends and strangers, with old
+and young."</p>
+<p>"Be not too knowing or simple, too proud or inactive, too humble
+or haughty, talkative or too silent, timid or too severe. For if
+thou art too knowing, thou wilt be mocked at and abused; if too
+simple, thou wilt be deceived; if proud, thou wilt be shunned; if
+too humble, thou wilt suffer; if talkative, thou wilt be thought
+foolish; if too severe, men will speak ill of thee; if timid, thy
+rights will suffer."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, how shall I discern the
+characters of women?"</p>
+<p>"I know them, but I cannot describe them. Their counsel is
+foolish, they are forgetful of love, most headstrong in their
+desires, fond of folly, prone to enter rashly into engagements,
+given to swearing, proud to be asked in marriage, tenacious of
+enmity, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page171" id=
+"page171"></a>[pg 171]</span> cheerless at the banquet, rejectors
+of reconciliation, prone to strife, of much garrulity. Until evil
+be good, until hell be heaven, until the sun hide his light, until
+the stars of heaven fall, women will remain as we have declared.
+Woe to him, my son, who desires or serves a bad woman, woe to him
+who has a bad wife."</p>
+<p>Was there some thought of his daughter Grania in Cormac's mind,
+behind these keen-edged; words?--of Grania, beloved of Diarmuid?
+When the winters of the years were already white on Find, son of
+Cumal, when Ossin his son had a son of his own, Oscur the valiant,
+the two old men, Cormac the king and Find leader of the warriors,
+bethought them to make a match between Find and Grania, one of the
+famous beauties of the olden time. A banquet was set in the great
+House of Mead, and Find and his men were there, Diarmuid son of
+Duibn&eacute; being also there, best beloved among Find's warriors.
+There was a custom, much in honor among the chieftains, that a
+princess should send her goblet to the guests, offering it to each
+with gentle courtesy. This grace fell to the lady Grania, whose
+whole heart rose up against her grey-bearded lover, and was indeed
+set on Diarmuid the son of Duibn&eacute;. Grania compounded
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page172" id="page172"></a>[pg
+172]</span> a dreamy draught to mix with the mead, so that all the
+chieftains and warriors, with Cormac and Find himself, even while
+praising the drink, fell straightway a-nodding, and were soon in
+silent sleep, all except Ossin and Diarmuid, whom Grania had bidden
+not to drink.</p>
+<p>Then Grania, her voice all tremulous with tears, told to Ossin
+the fate that awaited her, looking at him, but speaking for
+Diarmuid; bewailing bitterly the misery of fair youth in the arms
+of withered eld, and at last turning and openly begging Diarmuid to
+save her from her fate. To carry away a king's daughter, betrothed
+to the leader of the warriors, was a perilous thing, and Diarmuid's
+heart stood still at the thought of it; yet Grania's tears
+prevailed, and they two fled forth that night to the hills and
+forests. Dire and ruinous was the wrath of Cormac and of Find when
+they awoke and found that these two were fled; and whatever might
+was in the king's hand, whatever power in the hosts of Find, was
+straightway turned against them in pursuit. Yet the two fled as the
+deer might fly, visiting with their loves every wood and valley in
+Erin, till the memory of them lingers throughout all the hills.
+Finally, after a year's joyful and fearsome fleeing, the Fian
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page173" id="page173"></a>[pg
+173]</span> warriors everywhere aiding them for love of Diarmuid,
+swift death came upon Diarmuid, and Grania was left desolate.</p>
+<p>But Angus the Ever-Young, guardian Genius of the pyramid-shrine
+of Brugh by the Boyne, De Danaan dweller in the secret house, Angus
+of the Immortals received the spirit of Diarmuid, opening for him
+the ways of the hidden world.</p>
+<p>But enmity grew between Find with his warriors and Cormac the
+king, till at last a battle was fought where Find's men fell, and
+Cairbr&eacute;, the well-instructed son of Cormac also fell. Thus
+passed away the ruling spirits of that age, the flowering time of
+the genius of Erin.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page174" id="page174"></a>[pg
+174]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page175" id="page175"></a>[pg
+175]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page176" id="page176"></a>[pg
+176]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page177" id="page177"></a>[pg
+177]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VIII."></a>VIII.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 410-493.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The valor of Fergus and Cuculain, the rich imaginative life of
+Find and Ossin, were the flower of heroic centuries. Strong men had
+fought for generations before Concobar reigned at Emain of Maca.
+Poets had sung their deeds of valor, and the loves of fair women,
+and the magical beauty of the world, through hardly changing ages.
+The heroes of fame were but the best fruit in the garden of the
+nation's life. So ripe was that life, more than two thousand years
+ago, that it is hard to say what they did not know, of the things
+which make for amenity and comity. The colors of the picture are
+everywhere rich, yet perfectly harmonized.</p>
+<p>The earliest forms of Irish writing seem to have come from the
+Baltic runes, and these, in their turn, from an old Greek script of
+twenty-five hundred years ago. The runes spread as far as the
+Orkneys, and there they were well within the horizon of Ireland's
+knowledge. Nothing would be more natural <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page178" id="page178"></a>[pg 178]</span> than
+the keeping of written records in Erin for three or four hundred
+years before Cuculain's birth, nineteen hundred years ago.</p>
+<p>The arts of life were very perfect; the gold-work of that time
+is unsurpassed--has never been surpassed. At a far earlier time
+there were beautifully moulded and decorated gold-bronze spears,
+that show what richness of feeling and imagination, what just taste
+and fine skill were there. All our knowledge goes to show that the
+suitor of Cred&eacute; has drawn a true picture of her house and
+the generous social life belonging to it. We know, too, that the
+great dining-hall of Tara has been faithfully celebrated by the
+bards; the picture of the king in his scarlet cloak is
+representative of the whole epoch.</p>
+<p>The story of Cred&eacute; also shows the freedom and honor
+accorded to women, as does the queenship of Meave, with the record
+of her separate riches. The tragedies of Deirdr&eacute; and Grania
+would never have been remembered, had not the freedom and high
+regard of women been universal. Such decorative skill as is shown
+in the metal-work and pottery that have come down to us must have
+borne fruit in every realm of social life, in embroideries,
+tapestries, well-designed and beautifully adorned homes. Music
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page179" id="page179"></a>[pg
+179]</span> is everywhere spoken of in the old traditions, and the
+skill of the poets we can judge for ourselves.</p>
+<p>In all that concerns the natural man, therefore, a very high
+perfection had been reached. A frame of life had grown habitual,
+which brought out the finest vigor and strength and beauty.
+Romantic love added its riches to valor, and dignity was given by
+the ever-present memory of the heroic past, merging on the horizon
+with the divine dawn of the world. Manhood and womanhood had come
+to perfect flower. The crown rested on the brow of the nation's
+life.</p>
+<p>When the life of the natural man is perfected, the time comes to
+strike the note of the immortal, to open the door of our real and
+enduring destiny. Sensual success, the ideal of unregenerate man,
+was perfectly realized in Concobar and ten thousand like him. The
+destiny of triumphant individual life, the strong man victorious
+over nature and other men, was fulfilled. Individual prowess,
+individual accomplishment, could go no further.</p>
+<p>Nor should we overlook the dark shadows of the picture. Glory is
+to the victor, but woe to the vanquished. The continual warfare
+between tribe and tribe, between chief and chief, which made every
+valley a home of warriors dominated by a rath-fortress,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page180" id="page180"></a>[pg
+180]</span> bore abundant fruits of evil. Death in battle need not
+be reckoned, or may be counted as pure gain; but the fate of the
+wounded, maimed and miserable, the destitution of women and
+children left behind, the worse fate of the captives, sold as they
+were into exile and slavery,--all these must be included in the
+total.</p>
+<p>Nor are these material losses the worst. The great evil of the
+epoch of tribal war is its reaction on the human spirit. The
+continual struggle of ambition draws forth egotism, the desire to
+dominate for mere domination, the sense of separation and
+antagonism between man and man, tribe and tribe, province and
+province.</p>
+<p>But our real human life begins only when these evil tendencies
+are abated; when we learn to watch the life of others as if it were
+our own,--as being indeed a part of our own life,--and in every act
+and motion of our minds do only that which shall be to the best
+advantage of both ourselves and our neighbor. For only thus, only
+by the incessant practice of this in imagination and act, can the
+door of our wider and more humane consciousness be opened.</p>
+<a name="181.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/181.jpg"><img src="images/181.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>RUINS ON SCATTERY ISLAND.</b></p>
+<p>Nor is this all. There are in us vast unexplored tracts of power
+and wisdom; tracts not properly belonging <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page181" id="page181"></a>[pg 181]</span> to our
+personal and material selves, but rather to the impersonal and
+universal consciousness which touches us from within, and which we
+call divine. Our personal fate is closed by death; but we have a
+larger destiny which death does not touch; a destiny enduring and
+immortal. The door to this larger destiny can only be opened after
+we have laid down the weapons of egotism; after we have become
+veritably humane. There must be a death to militant self-assertion,
+a new birth to wide and universal purposes, before this larger life
+can be understood and known.</p>
+<p>With all the valor and rich life of the days of Cuculain and
+Ossin, the destructive instinct of antagonism was very deeply
+rooted in all hearts; it did endless harm to the larger interests
+of the land, and laid Ireland open to attack from without. Because
+the genius of the race was strong and highly developed, the harm
+went all the deeper; even now, after centuries, it is not wholly
+gone.</p>
+<p>The message of the humane and the divine, taught among the
+Galilean hills and on the shores of Gennesaret, was after four
+centuries brought to Ireland--a word of new life to the warriors
+and chieftains, enkindling and transforming their heroic world.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page182" id="page182"></a>[pg
+182]</span> Britain had received the message before, for Britain
+was a part of the dominion of Rome, which already had its imperial
+converts. Roman life and culture and knowledge of the Latin tongue
+had spread throughout the island up to the northern barrier between
+the Forth and Clyde. Beyond this was a wilderness of warring
+tribes.</p>
+<p>Where the Clyde comes forth from the plain to the long estuary
+of the sea, the Messenger of the Tidings was born. His father,
+Calpurn, was a Roman patrician; from this his son, whose personal
+name was Succat, was surnamed Patricius, a title raised by his
+greatness into a personal name. His letters give us a vivid picture
+of his captivity, and the stress of life which gradually aroused in
+him the inspiration of the humane and divine ripened later into a
+full knowledge of his apostolate.</p>
+<p>"I Patricius, a sinner," he writes, "and most unlearned of
+believers, looked down upon by many, had for my father the deacon
+Calpurn, son of the elder Potitus, of a place called Bannova in
+Tabernia, near to which was his country home. There I was taken
+captive, when not quite sixteen. I knew not the Eternal. Being led
+into captivity with thousands of others, I was brought to
+Ireland,--a fate well <span class="pagenum"><a name="page183" id=
+"page183"></a>[pg 183]</span> deserved. For we had turned from the
+Eternal, nor kept the laws of the Eternal. Nor had we heeded the
+teachers who urged us to seek safety. Therefore the Eternal, justly
+wroth, scattered us among unbelievers, to the uttermost parts of
+the earth; here, where my poor worth is now seen among strangers,
+where the Eternal liberated the power hid in my unenkindled heart,
+that even though late I should recognize my error, and turn with
+all my heart to the Eternal....</p>
+<p>"I have long had it in mind to write, but until now have
+hesitated; for I feared blame, because I had not studied law and
+the sacred writings,--as have others who have never changed their
+language, but gone on to perfection in it; but my speech is
+translated into another language, and the roughness of my writing
+shows how little I have been taught. As the Sage says, 'Show by thy
+speech thy wisdom and knowledge and learning.' But what profits
+this excuse? since all can see how in my old age I struggle after
+what I should have learned as a boy. For then my sinfulness
+hindered me. I was but a beardless boy when I was taken captive,
+not knowing what to do and what to avoid; therefore I am ashamed to
+show my ignorance now? because I never learned to <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page184" id="page184"></a>[pg 184]</span>
+express great matters succinctly and well;--great matters like the
+moving of the soul and mind by the Divine Breath.... Nor, indeed,
+was I worthy that the Master should so greatly favor me, after all
+my hard labor and heavy toil, and the years of captivity amongst
+this people,--that the Master should show me such graciousness as I
+never knew nor hoped for till I came to Ireland.</p>
+<p>"But daily herding cattle here, and aspiring many times a day,
+the fear of the Eternal grew daily in me. A divine dread and
+aspiration grew in me, so that I often prayed a hundred times a
+day, and as many times in the night. I often remained in the woods
+and on the hills, rising to pray while it was yet dark, in snow or
+frost or rain; yet I took no harm. The Breath of the Divine burned
+within me, so that nothing remained in me unenkindled.</p>
+<p>"One night, while I was sleeping, I heard a voice saying to me,
+'You have fasted well, and soon you shall see your home and your
+native land.' Soon after, I heard the voice again, saying, 'The
+ship is ready for you.' But the ship was not near, but two hundred
+miles off, in a district I had never visited, and where I knew no
+one. Therefore I fled, leaving <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page185" id="page185"></a>[pg 185]</span> the master I had served
+for six years, and found the ship by divine guidance, going without
+fear....</p>
+<p>"We reached the land after three days' sail; then for
+twenty-eight days we wandered through a wilderness.... Once more,
+after years of exile, I was at home again with my kindred, among
+the Britons. All welcomed me like a son, earnestly begging me that,
+after the great dangers I had passed through, I would never again
+leave my home.</p>
+<p>"While I was at home, in a vision of the night I saw one who
+seemed to come from Ireland, bringing innumerable letters. He gave
+me one of the letters, in which I read, 'The voices of the Irish
+...;' and while I read, it seemed to me that I heard the cry of the
+dwellers by the forest of Foclut, by the Western Ocean, calling
+with one voice to me, 'Come and dwell with us!' My heart was so
+moved that I awoke, and I give thanks to my God who after many
+years has given to them according to their petition.</p>
+<p>"On another night, whether within me or without me I know not,
+God knows, One prayed with very wonderful words that I could not
+comprehend, till at last He said, 'It is He who gave His soul for
+you, that speaks!' I awoke for joy. And once in a vision I saw Him
+praying within me, as it were; I <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page186" id="page186"></a>[pg 186]</span> saw myself, as it were,
+within myself; and I heard Him praying urgently and strongly over
+the inner man; I being meanwhile astonished, and wondering who thus
+prayed within me, till at the end He declared that I should be an
+overseer for Him....</p>
+<p>"I had not believed in the living Divine from childhood, but had
+remained in the realm of death until hunger and nakedness and daily
+slavery in Ireland--for I came there as a captive--had so afflicted
+me that I almost broke down. Yet these things brought good, for
+through that daily suffering I was so changed that I work and toil
+now for the well-being of others, I who formerly took no care even
+for myself....</p>
+<p>"Therefore I thank Him who kept me faithful in the day of trial,
+that I live to offer myself daily as a living offering to Him who
+saves and guards me. Well may I say, 'Master, what am I, what is my
+calling, that such grace and divine help are given to me--that I am
+every day raised to greater power among these unbelievers, while I
+everywhere praise thy name? Whatever comes to me, whether happiness
+or misery, whether good or evil fortune, I hold it all the same;
+giving Thee equal thanks for it, because Thou hast unveiled for me
+the One, sure and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page187" id=
+"page187"></a>[pg 187]</span> unchanging, in whom I may for ever
+believe. So that in these latter days, even though I am ignorant, I
+may dare to undertake so righteous a work, and so wonderful, that
+makes me like those who, according to His promise, should carry His
+message to all people before the end of the world.</p>
+<p>"It were long in whole or even in part to tell of my labours, or
+how the all-powerful One many times set me free from bondage, and
+from twelve perils wherein my life was in danger, and from nameless
+pitfalls. It were ill to try the reader too far, when I have within
+me the Author himself, who knows all things even before they
+happen, as He knows me, His poor disciple. The voice that so often
+guides me is divine; and thence it is that wisdom has come to me,
+who had no wisdom, knowing not Him, nor the number of my days:
+thence comes my knowledge and heart's joy in His great and healing
+gift, for the sake of which I willingly left my home and kindred,
+though they offered me many gifts with tears and sorrow.</p>
+<p>"Many of the older people also disapproved, but through divine
+help I would not give way. It was no grace of mine, but the divine
+power in me that stood out against all, so that I came to bear the
+Message <span class="pagenum"><a name="page188" id=
+"page188"></a>[pg 188]</span> here among the people of Ireland,
+suffering the scorn of those who believed not, and bearing derision
+and many persecutions, and even chains. Nay, I even lost my
+patrician rank for the good of others. But if I be worthy to do
+something for the Divine, I am ready with all my heart to yield
+service, even to the death, since it has been permitted that
+through me many might be reborn to the divine, and that others
+might be appointed to teach them....</p>
+<p>"The people of Ireland, who formerly had only their idols and
+pagan ritual, not knowing the Master, have now become His children.
+The sons of the Scoti and their kings' daughters are now become
+sons of the Master and handmaidens of the Anointed. And one nobly
+born lady among them, a beautiful woman whom I baptized myself,
+came soon after to tell me that she was divinely admonished to live
+in maidenhood, drawing nearer to Him. Six days later she entered
+the grade that all the handmaidens of the Anointed desire, though
+their fathers and mothers would hinder them, reproaching and
+afflicting them; nevertheless, they grow in number, so that I know
+not how many they are, besides widows and continent women, who
+suffer most from those who hold them in bondage. Yet they stand
+firm, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page189" id="page189"></a>[pg
+189]</span> and God grants grace to many of them worthily to follow
+Him.</p>
+<p>"Therefore I might even leave them, to go among the
+Britons,--for willingly would I see my own kindred and my native
+land again, or even go as far as Gaul to visit my brothers, and see
+the faces of my Master's holy men. But I am bound in the Spirit,
+and would be unfaithful if I went. Nor would I willingly risk the
+fruit of all my work. Yet it is not I who decide, but the Master,
+who bid me come hither, to spend my whole life in serving, as
+indeed I think I shall....</p>
+<p>"Therefore I should ever thank Him who was so tolerant of my
+ignorance and sluggishness, so many times; treating me not in anger
+but as a fellow-worker, though I was slow to learn the work set for
+me by the Spirit. He pitied me amongst many thousands, for he saw
+that I was very willing, but did net know how to offer my
+testimony. For they all opposed my mission, and talked behind my
+back, saying, 'He wishes to risk his life among enemies who know
+nothing of the Master'; not speaking maliciously, but opposing me
+because I was so ignorant. Nor did I myself at once perceive the
+power that was in me....</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page190" id="page190"></a>[pg
+190]</span>
+<p>"Thus simply, brothers and fellow-workers for the Master, who
+with me have believed, I have told you how it happened that I
+preached and still preach, to strengthen and confirm you in
+aspiration, hoping that we may all rise yet higher. Let that be my
+reward, as 'the wise son is the glory of his father.' You know, and
+the Master knows, how from my youth I have lived among you, in
+aspiration and truth and with single heart; that I have declared
+the faith to those among whom I dwell, and still declare it. The
+Master knows that I have deceived no man in anything, nor ever
+shall, for His sake and His people's. Nor shall I ever arouse
+uncharity in them or in any, lest His name should be spoken evil
+of....</p>
+<p>"I have striven in my poor way to help my brothers and the
+handmaidens of the Anointed, and the holy women who often
+volunteered to give me presents and to lay their jewels on my
+altar; but these I always gave back to them, even though they were
+hurt by it; and I have so lived my life, for the hope of the life
+eternal, that none may find the least cause of offence in my
+ministry; that my least act might not tarnish my good name, so that
+unbelievers might speak evil of me....</p>
+<p>"If I have asked of any as much as the value of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page191" id="page191"></a>[pg 191]</span> a
+shoe, tell me. I will repay it and more. I rather spent my own
+wealth on you and among you, wherever I went, for your sakes,
+through many dangers, to regions where no believer had ever come to
+baptize, to ordain teachers or to confirm the flock. With the
+divine help I very willingly and lovingly paid all. Sometimes I
+gave presents to the kings,--in giving presents to their sons who
+convoyed us, to guard us against being taken captive. Once they
+sought to kill me, but my time was not yet come. But they took away
+all we possessed, and kept me bound, till the Master liberated me
+on the fourteenth day, and all our goods were given back, because
+of the Master and of those who convoyed us. You yourselves know
+what gifts I gave to those who administer the law through the
+districts I visited oftenest. I think I spent not less than the
+fine of fifteen men among them, in order that I might come among
+you. Nor do I regret it, nor count it enough, for I still spend,
+and shall ever spend, happy if the Master allows me to spend my
+soul for you....For I know certainly that poverty and plain living
+are better for me than riches and luxury. The Anointed our Master
+was poor for us. I am poorer still, for I could not have wealth if
+I wished it. Nor do I now judge <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page192" id="page192"></a>[pg 192]</span> myself, for I look
+forward daily to a violent death, or to be taken captive and sold
+into slavery, or some like end. But I fear none of these ...but let
+me not lose the flock I feed for Him, here in the uttermost parts
+of the earth....</p>
+<p>"I am willing for His sake to shed my blood, to go without
+burial, even though my body be torn by dogs and wild beasts and the
+fowls of the air; for I know that thus I should through my body
+enrich my soul. And I know that in that day we shall arise in the
+brightness of the sun, in the glory of the Anointed Master, as sons
+of the divine and co-heirs with Him, made in His likeness. For the
+sun we see rises daily by divine ordinance; but it is not ordained
+to rise for ever, nor shall its light last for ever. The sun of
+this world shall fade, with those that worship it; but we bow to
+the spiritual Sun, the Anointed, that shall never perish, nor they
+who do His will, but shall endure for ever like the Anointed
+himself, who reigns with the Father and the Divine Spirit now and
+ever....</p>
+<p>"This I beg, that no believer or servant of the Master, who
+reads or receives this writing, which I, Patricius, a sinner and
+very unlearned, wrote in Ireland,--I beg that none may say that
+whatever is good <span class="pagenum"><a name="page193" id=
+"page193"></a>[pg 193]</span> in it was dictated by my ignorance,
+but rather that it came from Him. This is my Confession, before I
+die."</p>
+<p>That is the story of the most vital event in the life of
+Ireland, in the words of the man who was chiefly instrumental in
+bringing it about. Though an unskilled writer, as he says himself
+he has nevertheless succeeded in breathing into every part of his
+epistle the power and greatness of his soul, the sense and vivid
+reality of the divine breath which stirred in him and transformed
+him, the spiritual power, humane and universal, which enkindled him
+from within; these are the words of a man who had first-hand
+knowledge of the things of our deeper life; not a mere servant of
+tradition, living on the words and convictions of other men. He has
+drawn in large and universal outline the death to egotism--reached
+in his case through hunger, nakedness and slavery--and the new
+birth from above, the divine Soul enkindling the inner man, and
+wakening him to new powers and a knowledge of his genius and
+immortal destiny.</p>
+<p>Not less vivid is the sense he conveyed, of the world in which
+he moved; the feeling of his dignity as a Roman Patrician, having a
+share of the greatness <span class="pagenum"><a name="page194" id=
+"page194"></a>[pg 194]</span> of empire; the sense of a
+dividing-line between the Christian realms of Rome and the outer
+barbarians yet in darkness. Yet the picture he gives of these outer
+realms is as certainly true. There are the rival chieftains, each
+with his own tribe and his own fort, and bearing the title of king.
+They are perpetually striving among themselves, so that from the
+province of one he must move to the province of another with an
+escort, led by the king's son, who receives gifts in return for
+this protection. This is the world of Concobar and Cuculain; of
+Find and Ossin, as they themselves have painted it.</p>
+<p>The world of Find and Ossin, of Cael and Cred&eacute;, was
+marked by a certain urbanity and freedom, a large-mindedness and
+imaginative power. We are therefore prepared to expect that the
+Messenger of the new life would be received with openness of mind,
+and allowed to deliver his message without any very violent
+opposition. It was the meeting of unarmed moral power and armed
+valor; and the victory of the apostle was a victory of spiritual
+force, of character, of large-heartedness; the man himself was the
+embodiment of his message, and through his forceful genius his
+message was effective. He visibly represented the New Way; the way
+of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page195" id="page195"></a>[pg
+195]</span> humane and the divine, transforming the destructive
+instinct of self-assertion. He visibly represented the divine and
+the immortal in us, the new birth from above.</p>
+<p>Yet there were tragedies in his apostolate. In another letter a
+very vivid and pathetic account is given of one of these.
+Coroticus, a chieftain of Britain, and therefore nominally a
+Christian and a citizen of Rome, had sent marauding bands to
+Ireland to capture slaves. Some of the new converts were taken
+captive by these slave-hunters, an outrage which drew forth an
+indignant protest from the great Messenger:</p>
+<p>"My neophytes in their white robes, the baptismal chrism still
+wet and glistening on their foreheads, were taken captive with the
+sword by these murderers. The next day I sent letters begging them
+to liberate the baptized captives, but they answered my prayer with
+mocking laughter. I know not which I should mourn for more,--those
+who were slain, those who were taken prisoner, or those who in this
+were Satan's instruments, since these must suffer everlasting
+punishment in perdition."</p>
+<p>He appeals indignantly to the fellow-Christians of Coroticus in
+Britain: "I pray you, all that are <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page196" id="page196"></a>[pg 196]</span> righteous and humble, to
+hold no converse with those who do these things. Eat not, drink not
+with them, accept no gifts from them, until they have repented and
+made atonement, setting free these newly-baptized handmaidens of
+Christ, for whom He died.... They seem to think we are not children
+of one Father!"</p>
+<p>The work and mission of this great man grow daily better known.
+The scenes of each marked event are certainly identified. His early
+slavery, his time of probation, was spent in Antrim, on the
+hillside of Slieve Mish, and in the woods that then covered its
+flanks and valleys. Wandering there with his flocks to the
+hill-top, he looked down over the green darkness of the woods, with
+the fertile open country stretching park-like beyond, to the coast
+eight miles away. From his lonely summit he could gaze over the
+silvery grayness of the sea, and trace on the distant horizon the
+headlands of his dear native land. The exile's heart must have
+ached to look at them, as he thought of his hunger and nakedness
+and toil. There in deep pity came home to him the fate of the weak
+ones of the earth, the vanquished, the afflicted, the losers in the
+race. Compassion showed him the better way, the way of sympathy
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page197" id="page197"></a>[pg
+197]</span> and union, instead of contest and dominion. A firm and
+fixed purpose grew up within him to make the appeal of gentleness
+to the chiefs and rulers, in the name of Him who was all sympathy
+for the weak. Thus the inspiration of the Message awakened his soul
+to its immortal powers.</p>
+<p>Later, returning with the clear purpose of his message formed,
+he began his great work not far from his first place of captivity.
+His strong personality led him always to the presence of the chiefs
+and warriors, and he talked to them freely as an equal, gradually
+giving them an insight into his own vision of life, of the kinship
+between soul and soul, of our immortal power and inheritance. He
+appealed always to his own inner knowledge of things divine, to the
+light and power unveiled within himself; and the commanding genius
+in his words lit a like fire in the hearts of those who heard,
+awakening an enthusiasm for the New Way. He had a constant sense of
+his divine mission:</p>
+<p>"Was it without divine promise, or in the body only, that I came
+to Ireland? Who led me? Who took captive my soul, that I should no
+more see friends and kindred? Whence came my inspiration of pity
+for the race that had enslaved me?"</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page198" id="page198"></a>[pg
+198]</span>
+<p>The memory of his first victories is perpetuated in the name,
+Downpatrick,--that is: the Dwelling of Patrick.--where Dicu son of
+Tricem, chief of the district, gave him a tract of land to build a
+place of meeting and prayer for his disciples; while the church was
+being built, the chief offered his barn as a meeting-place, an
+incident commemorated in the name of Saul, on a hill above the
+town,--a name softened from Sabal, "a barn." This first victory was
+won among the rounded hills south of the Quoyle River, where it
+widens toward Strangford Lough; from the hill-top of Saul there is
+a wide prospect over the reed-covered flats with the river winding
+among them, the hills with their oak-woods in the bends of the
+river, and the widening lough with its innumerable islands, its
+sand-flats lit up with red under the dawn. The sun sets among the
+mountains of Mourne, flushing from behind the purple profile of the
+hills, and sending golden arrows over the rich fertility of the
+plain. The year 432 is the probable date of this first
+conversion.</p>
+<p>The strong genius of the Messenger carried him after a few
+months to the center of power in the land, to Tara with its
+fortresses, its earthworks, its great banquet-halls and granaries
+and well-adorned <span class="pagenum"><a name="page199" id=
+"page199"></a>[pg 199]</span> dwellings of chief and king. A huge
+oval earthwork defended the king's house; northward of this was the
+splendid House of Mead,--the banquet-hall, with lesser fortresses
+beyond it. Southward of the central dwelling and its defence was
+the new ringed fort of Laogaire the king, son of the more famous
+king Nial of the Hostages. At this circular fort, Rath-Laogaire, on
+Easter day, Saint Patrick met the king face to face, and delivered
+to him the message of the New Way, telling him of the unveiling of
+the Divine within himself, of the voice that had bidden him come,
+of the large soul of immortal pity that breathed in the teachings
+among the hills of Galilee, of the new life there begun for the
+world. Tradition says that the coming of the Messenger had been
+foretold by the Druids, and the great work he should accomplish;
+the wise men of the West catching the inner brightness of the
+Light, as the Eastern Magians had caught it more than four
+centuries before. The fruits of that day's teaching in the plain of
+Tara, in the assembly of Laogaire the king, were to be gathered
+through long centuries to come.</p>
+<p>In the year 444, the work of the teacher had so thriven that he
+was able to build a larger church on a hill above the Callan River,
+in the undulating <span class="pagenum"><a name="page200" id=
+"page200"></a>[pg 200]</span> country south of Lough Neagh. This
+hill, called in the old days the Hill of the Willows, was only two
+miles from the famous fortress of Emain of Maca. It was a gift from
+the ruler Dair&eacute;, who, like so many other chiefs, had felt
+and acknowledged the Messenger's power. Later, the hill came to be
+called Ard-Maca, the Height of Maca; a name now softened into
+Armagh, ever since esteemed the central stronghold of the first
+Messenger's followers.</p>
+<p>The Messenger passed on from chief to chief, from province to
+province, meeting with success everywhere, yet facing grave perils.
+Later histories take him to the kings of Leinster and Munster, and
+he himself tells us that the prayer of the children of Foclut was
+answered by his coming, so that he must have reached the western
+ocean. It was a tremendous victory of moral force, of the divine
+and immortal working through him, that the Messenger was able to
+move unarmed among the warriors of many tribes that were often at
+war with each other; everywhere meeting the chiefs and kings, and
+meeting them as an equal: the unarmed bringer of good tidings
+confronting the king in the midst of his warriors, and winning him
+to his better vision.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page201" id="page201"></a>[pg
+201]</span>
+<p>For sixty years the Messenger worked, sowing seed and gathering
+the fruit of his labor; and at last his body was laid at rest close
+to his first church at Saul. Thus one of the great men of the world
+accomplished his task.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page202" id="page202"></a>[pg
+202]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page203" id="page203"></a>[pg
+203]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page204" id="page204"></a>[pg
+204]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page205" id="page205"></a>[pg
+205]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="IX."></a>IX.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 493-750.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>It would be hard to find in the whole history of early
+Christianity a record of greater and more enduring success than the
+work of St. Patrick. None of the Messengers of the New Way, as they
+were called first by St. Luke, unless the phrase is St. Paul's,
+accomplished single-handed so wonderful a work, conquering so large
+a territory, and leaving such enduring monuments of his victory.
+Amongst the world's masters, the son of Calpurn the Decurion
+deserves a place with the greatest.</p>
+<p>Not less noteworthy than the wide range of his work was the way
+in which he gained success. He addressed himself always to the
+chiefs, the kings, the men of personal weight and power. And his
+address was almost invariably successful,--a thing that would have
+been impossible had he not been himself a personality of singular
+force and fire, able to meet the great ones of the land as an
+equal. His manner was that of an ambassador, full of tact,
+knowledge <span class="pagenum"><a name="page206" id=
+"page206"></a>[pg 206]</span> of men and of the world. Nor can we
+find in him--or, indeed, in the whole history of the churches
+founded by him--anything of that bitter zeal and fanaticism which,
+nearly two centuries nearer to apostolic times, marred the work of
+the Councils under Constantius; the fierce animosity between
+Christian and Christian which marked the Arian controversy. The
+Apostle of Ireland showed far more urbanity, far more humane and
+liberal wisdom, far more gentleness, humor and good feeling, in his
+treatment of the pre-Christian institutions and ideals of Ireland
+than warring Christian sects have generally been willing to show to
+each other.</p>
+<p>It was doubtless due to this urbane wisdom that the history of
+the conversion of Ireland is without one story of martyrdom. The
+change was carried out in open-hearted frankness and good-will, the
+old order giving place to the new as gently as spring changes to
+summer. The most marvelous example of St. Patrick's wisdom, and at
+the same time the most wonderful testimony to his personal force,
+is his action towards the existing civil and religious law of the
+country, commonly known as the Brehon Law. Principles had by long
+usage been wrought into the fabric of the Brehon Laws which were in
+flat <span class="pagenum"><a name="page207" id="page207"></a>[pg
+207]</span> contradiction to St. Patrick's teaching of the New Way.
+Instead of fiercely denouncing the whole system, he talked with the
+chief jurists and heralds,--custodians of the old system,--and
+convinced them that changes in their laws would give effect to more
+humane and liberal principles. They admitted the justice of his
+view, and agreed to a meeting between three great chieftains or
+kings, three Brehons or jurists, and three of St. Patrick's
+converts, to revise the whole system of law, substituting the more
+humane principles, which they had already accepted as just and
+right. These changes were made and universally applied; so that,
+without any violent revolution, without strife or bloodshed, the
+better way became the accepted law. It would be hard to find in all
+history a finer example of wisdom and moderation, of the great and
+worthy way of accomplishing right ends.</p>
+<p>We have seen the great Messenger himself founding monasteries,
+houses of religious study, and churches for his converts, on land
+given to him by chieftains who were moved by his character and
+ideals. We can judge of the immediate spread of his teaching if we
+remember that these churches were generally sixty feet long, thus
+giving room for many <span class="pagenum"><a name="page208" id=
+"page208"></a>[pg 208]</span> worshippers. They seem to have been
+built of stone--almost the first use of that material in Ireland
+since the archaic days. Among the first churches of this type were
+those at Saul, at Donaghpatrick on the Blackwater, and at Armagh,
+with others further from the central region of St. Patrick's work.
+The schools of learning which grew up beside them were universally
+esteemed and protected, and from them came successive generations
+of men and women who worthily carried on the work so wisely begun.
+The tongues first studied were Latin and Irish. We have works of
+very early periods in both, as, for instance, the Latin epistles of
+St. Patrick himself, and the Irish poems of the hardly less eminent
+Colum Kill. But other languages were presently added.</p>
+<a name="209.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/209.jpg"><img src="images/209.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>VALLEY OF GLENDALOUGH AND RUINS OF THE SEVEN CHURCHES.</b></p>
+<p>These schools and churches gradually made their way throughout
+the whole country; some of the oldest of them are still to be seen,
+as at Donaghpatrick, Clonmacnoise and Glendalough. Roofed with
+stone, they are well fitted to resist the waste of time. An intense
+spiritual and moral life inspired the students, a life rich also in
+purely intellectual and artistic force. The ancient churches speak
+for themselves; the artistic spirit of the time is splendidly
+embodied <span class="pagenum"><a name="page209" id=
+"page209"></a>[pg 209]</span> in the famous Latin manuscript of the
+Gospels, called the Book of Kells, the most beautiful specimen of
+illumination in the world. The wonderful colored initial letters
+reproduce and develop the designs of the old gold work, the motives
+of which came, it would seem, from the Baltic, with the De Danaan
+tribes. We can judge of the quiet and security of the early
+disciples at Kells, the comfort and amenity of their daily life,
+the spirit of comity and good-will, the purity of inspiration of
+that early time, by the artistic truth and beauty of these
+illuminated pages and the perfection with which the work was done.
+Refined and difficult arts are the evidence of refined feeling,
+abundant moral and spiritual force, and a certain material security
+and ease surrounding the artist. When these arts are freely offered
+in the service of religion, they are further evidence of widespread
+fervor and aspiration, a high and worthy ideal of life.</p>
+<p>Yet we shall be quite wrong if we imagine an era of peace and
+security following the epoch of the first great Messenger. Nothing
+is further from the truth. The old tribal strife continued for long
+centuries; the instincts which inspired it are, even now, not quite
+outworn. Chief continued to war against chief, province
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page210" id="page210"></a>[pg
+210]</span> against province, tribe against tribe, even among the
+fervent converts of the first teachers.</p>
+<p>Saint Brigid is one of the great figures in the epoch
+immediately succeeding the first coming of the Word. She was the
+foundress of a school of religious teaching for women at Kildare,
+or Killdara, "The Church of the Oak-woods," whose name still
+records her work. Her work, her genius, her power, the immense
+spiritual influence for good which flowed from her, entitle her to
+be remembered with the women of apostolic times, who devoted their
+whole lives to the service of the divine. We have seen the esteem
+in which women were always held in Ireland. St. Brigid and those
+who followed in her steps gave effect to that high estimation, and
+turned it to a more spiritual quality, so that now, as in all past
+centuries, the ideal of womanly purity is higher in Ireland than in
+any country in the world.</p>
+<p>This great soul departed from earthly life in the year 525, a
+generation after the death of the first Messenger. To show how the
+old order continued with the new, we may record the words of the
+Chronicler for the following year: "526: The battle of Eiblinne, by
+Muirceartac son of Erc; the battle of Mag-Ailbe; the battle of
+Almain; the battle of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page211" id=
+"page211"></a>[pg 211]</span> Ceann-eic; the plundering of the
+Cliacs; and the battle of Eidne against the men of Connacht." Three
+of these battles were fought at no great distance from St. Brigid's
+Convent.</p>
+<p>The mediaeval Chronicler quotes the old Annalist for the
+following year: "The king, the son of Erc, returned to the side of
+the descendants of Nial. Blood reached the girdle in each plain.
+The exterior territories were enriched. Seventeen times nine
+chariots he brought, and long shall it be remembered. He bore away
+the hostages of the Ui-Neill with the hostages of the plain of
+Munster."</p>
+<p>Ten years later we find the two sons of this same king,
+Muirceartac son of Erc, by name Fergus and Domnall, fighting under
+the shadow of Knocknarea mountain against Eogan Bel the king of
+Connacht; the ancient Annalist, doubtless contemporary with the
+events recorded, thus commemorated the battle in verse:</p>
+<p>"The battle of the Ui-Fiacrac was fought with the fury of edged
+weapons against Bel;</p>
+<p>"The kine of the enemy roared with the javelins, the battle was
+spread out at Crinder;</p>
+<p>"The River of Shells bore to the great sea the blood of men with
+their flesh;</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page212" id="page212"></a>[pg
+212]</span>
+<p>"They carried many trophies across Eaba, together with the head
+of Eogan Bel."</p>
+<p>During this stormy time, which only carried forward the long
+progress of fighting since the days of the prime, a famous school
+of learning and religion had been founded at Moville by Finian,
+"the tutor of the saints of Ireland." The home of his church and
+school is a very beautiful one, with sombre mountains behind rising
+from oak-woods into shaggy masses of heather, the blue waters of
+Lough Foyle in front, and across the mouth of the lough the silver
+sands and furrowed chalk hills of Antrim, blending into green
+plains. Here the Psalms and the Gospels were taught in Latin to
+pupils who had in no wise given up their love for the old poetry
+and traditions of their motherland. Here Colum studied, afterwards
+called Colum Kill, "Saint Colum of the Churches," and here arose a
+memorable dispute concerning a Latin manuscript of the Psalms. The
+manuscript belonged to Finian, founder of the school, and was
+esteemed one of the treasures of his college. Colum, then a young
+student, ardently longed for a copy, and, remaining in the church
+after service, he daily copied a part of the sacred text. When his
+work was completed, Finian discovered it, and at once <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page213" id="page213"></a>[pg 213]</span>
+claimed the copy of his book as also his. The matter was submitted
+to an umpire, who gave the famous decision: "Unto every cow her
+calf; unto every book its copy"--the copy belonged to the owner of
+the book. This early decision of copyright was by no means
+acceptable to the student Colum. He disputed its justice, and the
+quarrel spread till it resulted in a battle. The discredit
+attaching to the whole episode resulted in the banishment of Colum,
+who sailed away northward and eastward towards the isles and fiords
+of that land which, from the Irish Scoti who civilized it, now
+bears the name of Scotland. Let us recall a few verses written by
+Colum on his departure, in a version which echoes something of the
+original melody and form:</p>
+<blockquote>"We are rounding Moy-n-Olurg, we sweep by its head
+and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;We plunge through the Foyle,<br>
+Whose swans could enchant with their music the dead and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Make pleasure of toil....<br>
+Oh, Erin, were wealth my desire, what a wealth were<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To gain far from thee,<br>
+In the land of the stranger, but there even health were<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A sickness to me!<br>
+Alas for the voyage, oh high King of Heaven,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Enjoined upon me,<br>
+For that I on the red plain of bloody Cooldrevin<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Was present to see.<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page214" id="page214"></a>[pg
+214]</span> How happy the son is of Dima; no sorrow<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For him is designed,<br>
+He is having this hour, round his own Kill in Durrow,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The wish of his mind.<br>
+The sound of the wind in the elms, like the strings of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A harp being played,<br>
+The note of the blackbird that claps with the wings of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Delight in the glade.<br>
+With him in Ros-grenca the cattle are lowing<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;At earliest dawn,<br>
+On the brink of the summer the pigeons are cooing<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And doves on the lawn...."</blockquote>
+<p>In another measure, he again mourns his exile: "Happy to be on
+Ben Edar, before going over the sea; white, white the dashing of
+the wave against its face; the bareness of its shore and its
+border....</p>
+<blockquote>"How swiftly we travel; there is a grey eye<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Looks back upon Erin, but it no more<br>
+Shall see while the stars shall endure in the sky,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Her women, her men, or her stainless
+shore...."</blockquote>
+<p>This great-hearted and impetuous exile did not waste his life in
+useless regrets. Calling forth the fire of his genius, and facing
+the reality of life, he set himself to work, spreading the teaching
+of the New Way among the Picts of the north--the same Picts who, in
+years gone by, had raged against the barrier of Hadrian between
+Forth and Clyde. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="page215" id=
+"page215"></a>[pg 215]</span> year of his setting out was 563; the
+great center of his work was in the sacred isle of Iona, off the
+Ross of Mull. Iona stands in the rush of Atlantic surges and fierce
+western storms, yet it is an island of rare beauty amid the tinted
+mists of summer dawns. Under the year 592, a century after Saint
+Patrick's death, we find this entry in the Chronicle: "Colum Kill,
+son of Feidlimid, Apostle of Scotland, head of the piety of the
+most part of Ireland and Scotland after Patrick, died in his own
+church in Iona in Scotland, after the thirty-fifth year of his
+pilgrimage, on Sunday night, the ninth of June. Seventy-seven years
+was his whole age when he resigned his spirit to heaven." The
+corrected date is 596.</p>
+<p>We can see in Colum of the Churches the very spirit of
+turbulence and adventure, the fierce impetuosity and readiness for
+dispute, which led to the contests between the chieftains of
+Ireland, the wars between province and province, often between
+valley and valley. It is the same spiritual energy, working itself
+out in another way, transmuted by the sacred fire into a divine
+mission. In the same way the strong will of Meave, the romantic
+power of Deirdr&eacute; and Grania, transmuted to ideal purposes,
+was the inspiration of Saint Brigid and so many like her,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page216" id="page216"></a>[pg
+216]</span> who devoted their powers to the religious teaching of
+women.</p>
+<p>We should doubtless fail utterly to understand the riddle of
+history, were we to regret the wild warring of these early times as
+a mere lamentable loss of life, a useless and cruel bloodshed. We
+are too much given to measuring other times and other moods of the
+soul by our own, and many false judgments issue from this error.
+Peaceful material production is our main purpose, and we learn many
+lessons of the Will embodied in the material world when we follow
+this purpose honestly. But before our age could begin, it was
+necessary for the races to come to personal consciousness. This end
+seems everywhere to have been reached by a long epoch of strife,
+the contending of man against man, of tribe against tribe. Thus
+were brought to full consciousness the instinct of personal valor,
+personal honor and personal readiness to face death.</p>
+<p>Only after this high personal consciousness is kindled can a
+race enter the wider path of national life, where vivid and intense
+individuals unite their forces to a common end, reaching a common
+consciousness, and holding their power in common for the purposes
+of all. After the lessons of fighting come the lessons <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page217" id="page217"></a>[pg 217]</span> of
+work. For these lessons of work, for the direct touch with the
+everlasting Will gained in all honest work, our own age is to be
+valued, far more than for the visible and material fruits which
+that work produces.</p>
+<p>In like manner the old epoch of war is to be esteemed for the
+lessons it taught of high valor, sacrifice, heroic daring. And to
+what admirable ends these same qualities may tend we can see in a
+life like that of Colum Kill, "head of the piety of the most part
+of Ireland and Scotland after Patrick."</p>
+<p>Yet the days of old were grim enough to live in. Let this record
+of some half-century later testify. It is but one year culled from
+a long red rank of years. We give the Chronicler's own words: "645:
+The sixth year of Conall and Ceallac. Mac Laisre, abbot of Bangor,
+died on May 16. Ragallac son of Uatac, King of Connacht, was killed
+by Maelbrigde son of Motlacan, of which was said:</p>
+<blockquote>"Ragallac son of Uatac was pierced on the back of a
+white<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; steed;<br>
+<br>
+Muiream has well lamented him; Catal has well avenged him.<br>
+<br>
+Catal is this day in battle, though bound to peace in the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; presence of kings;<br>
+<br>
+Though Catal is without a father, his father is not without<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; vengeance.<br>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page218" id="page218"></a>[pg
+218]</span> Estimate his terrible revenge from the account of it
+related:<br>
+<br>
+He slew six men and fifty; he made sixteen devastations;<br>
+<br>
+I had my share like another in the revenge of Ragallac,--<br>
+<br>
+I have the gray beard in my hand, of Maelbrigde son of
+Motlacan."</blockquote>
+<p>These are evidently the very words of one who fought in the
+battle. Nor need this in any way surprise us, for we have far older
+Chronicles set down year by year in unbroken record. The matter is
+easy to prove. The Chronicles of Ulster record eclipses of the sun
+and moon as early as 495,--two years after Saint Patrick's death.
+It was, of course, the habit of astronomers to reckon eclipses
+backwards, and of annalists to avail themselves of these
+reckonings. The Venerable Bede, for example, has thus inserted
+eclipses in his history. The result is that the Venerable Bede has
+the dates several days wrong, while the Chronicles of Ulster, where
+direct observation took the place of faulty reckoning, has them
+right, to the day and hour. It is only in quite modern times that
+we have reached sufficiently accurate knowledge of the moon's
+movements to vindicate the old Ulster Annalists, who began their
+work not less than a hundred and fifty years before the battle we
+have just recorded.</p>
+<p>Nor should we exaggerate the condition of the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page219" id="page219"></a>[pg 219]</span> time,
+thinking of it as altogether given over to ravaging and
+devastation. Even though there were two or three expeditions and
+battles every year, these would only affect a small part of the
+whole country. Over all the rest, the tending of cattle in the
+glades of the forest, the sowing and reaping of wheat and oats, the
+gathering of fruit and nuts, continued in quiet contentment and
+peace. The young men practiced the arts of war and exercised
+themselves in warlike games. The poets sang to them, the heralds
+recounted the great doings of old, how Cuculain kept the ford, how
+Concobar thirsted in his heart for Deirdr&eacute;, how the son of
+Cumal went to war, how golden-tongued Ossin was ensnared by the
+spirits. The gentle life of tillage and the keeping of cattle could
+never engage the whole mental force of so vigorous a race. What
+wonder, then, that, when a chieftain had some real or imagined
+wrong to avenge, or some adventure to propose,--what wonder that
+bold spirits were ever ready to accompany him, leaving the women to
+their distaffs and the tending of children and the grinding of
+corn? Mounting their horses, they rode forth through the woods,
+under the huge arms of the oak-trees; along the banks of
+swift-gliding rivers, through <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page220" id="page220"></a>[pg 220]</span> passes of the lowering
+hills. While still in familiar territory, the time of the march was
+passed in song and story. Then came increased precaution, and
+gradually heightened pulses marked the stages of the way. The rival
+chieftain, warned by his scouts and outlying tribesmen, got word of
+their approach, and hastily replenishing his granaries and driving
+the cattle into the great circle of his embankments, prepared to
+meet the coming foe. Swords, spears, bows, arrows were the arms of
+both sides. Though leather tunics were common, coats of mail came
+only at a later date. The attackers under cover of the night sped
+across the open ground before the fort, and tried to storm the
+fortress, the defenders meanwhile showering down keen-pointed
+arrows on them from above. Both parties, under the chieftains'
+guidance, fought fiercely, in a fever of excitement, giving no heed
+to wounds, seeing nothing but the foe and the battlements to be
+scaled. Then either a successful sortie broke the ranks of the
+assailants and sent them back to their forest camp in wild
+disorder, or, the stockade giving way, the stormers swept in like a
+wave of the sea, and all was chaos and wild struggle hand to hand.
+Whatever the outcome, both sides thought of the wild surge of will
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page221" id="page221"></a>[pg
+221]</span> and valor in that hour as the crowning event of their
+lives.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, within the quiet enclosures of the monasteries and
+religious schools, the spirit of the time was working with not less
+fervor, to invisible and ideal ends. At Bangor, on the neck of the
+northern Ards; at Moville, where Lough Foyle spreads its inland
+sea; at Saul, where the first Messenger won his first convert; at
+Devenish Island amid the waters of Lough Erne; at Monasterboice in
+the plain of Louth; at Grlendalough, among the solemn hills of
+Wicklow; at Kildare, beneath the oak-woods; at Durrow, amid the
+central marshes, and many another ancient seat of learning, the way
+of wisdom and holiness was trod with gladness. Latin had been
+taught since the early days of the Message; the native tongue of
+Ireland, consecrated in the hymns of St. Patrick and the poems of
+St. Colum of the Churches, was the language in which all pupils
+were taught, the modern ministrant to the classical speech of Rome.
+Nor were the Scriptures alone studied. Terence, Virgil, Ovid, the
+Augustans and the men of the silver age, were familiar in the Irish
+schools; and to these Latin writers were soon added the Greeks,
+more especially--as was natural--the <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page222" id="page222"></a>[pg 222]</span> Greek Fathers, the
+religious philosophers, and those who embodied the thought and
+controversies of the early Christian centuries. To Greek, Hebrew
+was added, so that both Old and New Testaments were known in their
+proper tongues. About the time when "Ragallac son of Uatac was
+pierced on the back of a white steed," Saint Camin in his island
+school at Inis Caltra, where red mountains hem in Lough Derg of the
+Shannon, was writing his Commentary on the Psalms, recording the
+Hebrew readings on the margin of the page. A few years before that
+battle, in 634, Saint Cummian of Durrow, some thirty miles to the
+east of Camin's Holy Island, wrote to his brother, the Abbot of
+Iona in the northern seas, quoting Latin writers sacred and
+secular, as well as Origen, Cyril and Pachomius among the Greeks.
+The learned man discusses the astronomical systems of the
+Mediterranean world, giving the names of months and cycles in
+Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, and telling of his researches into the
+true time of Easter, while on a journey to Italy and Rome. This
+letter, which has come down to our days, is first-hand testimony to
+the learning of the early Irish schools.</p>
+<a name="223.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/223.jpg"><img src="images/223.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>ANCIENT CROSS, GLENDALOUGH.</b></p>
+<p>Fifty years later, in 683, we hear of the Saxons <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page223" id="page223"></a>[pg 223]</span> for
+the first and almost the last time in the history of Ireland. It is
+recorded that the North Saxons raided Mag Breag in the East of
+Meath, attacking both churches and chieftains. They carried away
+many hostages and much spoil, but the captives were soon after set
+at liberty and sent home again, on the intercession of a remarkable
+man, Adamnan, the biographer of Colum of the Churches, whose
+success in his mission was held to be miraculous.</p>
+<p>For more than a century after this single Saxon raid Ireland was
+wholly undisturbed by foreign invasion, and the work of building
+churches, founding schools, studying Hebrew and Greek and Latin,
+went on with increasing vigor and success. An army of missionaries
+went forth to other lands, following in the footsteps of Colum of
+the Churches, and of these we shall presently speak. The life of
+the church was so rich and fruitful that we are led to think of
+this as a period of childlike and idyllic peace.</p>
+<p>Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The raids,
+devastations and wars between province and province, tribe and
+tribe, went on without a year's interruption. This was the normal
+course of the nation's life, the natural outlet of the nation's
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page224" id="page224"></a>[pg
+224]</span> energy: not less a visible sign of invisible inward
+power than the faith and fervor of the schools. We shall get the
+truest flavor of the times by quoting again from the old Annals.
+That they were recorded year by year, we have already seen; the
+records of frosts, great snow-storms, years of rich harvests and
+the like, interspersed among the fates of kings, show how
+faithfully the annals were kept,--as, for example, the winter of
+great cold, "when all the rivers and lakes of Ireland were frozen
+over," in the year after the Saxon raid.</p>
+<p>Here again, under the year 701, is the word of a man then
+living: "After Loing Seac son of Angus son of Domnall had been
+eight years in the sovreignty of Ireland, he was slain in the
+battle of Ceann by Cealleac of Lough Cime, the son of Ragallac, as
+Cealleac himself testifies:</p>
+<blockquote>"'For his deeds of ambition he was slain in the morning
+at<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Glas Cuilg;<br>
+<br>
+I wounded Loing Seac with a sword, the monarch of Ireland<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; round.'"</blockquote>
+<p>Two years later Saint Adamnan died, after governing the Abbey of
+Iona for six and twenty years. It was said of him that "He made a
+slave of himself to his virtues," and his great life-work, the
+Latin <span class="pagenum"><a name="page225" id="page225"></a>[pg
+225]</span> history of Saint Colum of the Churches, founder of the
+Iona Abbey, to this day testifies to his high learning and
+wisdom.</p>
+<p>Fourteen years later "Leinster was five times devastated by the
+Ui-Neill," the descendants of Nial, and a battle was fought between
+the men of Connacht and Munster. Thus the lives of saints and
+warriors were interwoven. On very rare occasions the two lives of
+the race came into collision. Thus, a quarrel arose between Congus
+the Abbot and Aed Roin king of Ulad. Congus summoned to his aid the
+chief of the Ui-Neill, Aed Allan by name, in these verses:</p>
+<blockquote>"Say to the cold Aed Allan that I have been oppressed
+by<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a feeble enemy:<br>
+<br>
+Aed Roin insulted me last night at Cill Cunna of the sweet<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;music."</blockquote>
+<p>Aed Allan made these verses on his way to battle to avenge the
+insult:</p>
+<blockquote>"For Cill Cunna the church of my spiritual father,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I take this day a journey on the road.<br>
+Aed Roin shall leave his head with me,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Or I shall leave my head with
+him."</blockquote>
+<p>The further history of that same year, 733, is best told in the
+words of the Annals: "Aed Allan, king <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page226" id="page226"></a>[pg 226]</span> of
+Ireland, assembled his forces to proceed into Leinster, and he
+arrived at the Ford of Seannait (in Kildare). The Leinstermen
+collected the greatest number they were able, to defend their
+rights against him. The king Aed Allan himself went into the
+battle, and the chieftains of the north along with him. The
+chieftains of Leinster came with their kings into the battle, and
+bloodily and heroically was the battle fought between them. Heroes
+were slaughtered and bodies were hacked. Aed Allan and Aed, son of
+Colgan, king of Leinster, met each other, and Aed son of Colgan was
+slain by Aed Allan. The Leinstermen were killed, slaughtered, cut
+off, and dreadfully exterminated in this battle, so that there
+escaped of them but a small remnant and a few fugitives."</p>
+<p>To round out the picture, to contrast the two streams of the
+nation's life, let us give this, from the following year: "734:
+Fifth year of Aed Allan. Saint Samtain, virgin, of Cluain Bronaig
+(Longford), died on December 19. It was of her that Aed Allan gave
+this testimony:</p>
+<blockquote>"Samtain for enlightening various sinners,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A servant who observed stern chastity,<br>
+In the wide plain of fertile Meath<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Great suffering did Samtain endure;<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page227" id="page227"></a>[pg
+227]</span> She undertook a thing not easy,--<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Fasting for the kingdom above.<br>
+She lived on scanty food;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Hard were her girdles;<br>
+She struggled in venomous conflicts;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Pure was her heart amid the wicked.<br>
+To the bosom of the Lord, with a pure death,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Samtain passed from her
+trials."</blockquote>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page228" id="page228"></a>[pg
+228]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page229" id="page229"></a>[pg
+229]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page230" id="page230"></a>[pg
+230]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page231" id="page231"></a>[pg
+231]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="X."></a>X.</h2>
+<h3>THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 750-1050.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Aed Allan, the king who so feelingly wrote the epitaph of the
+saintly virgin Samtain, needed an epitaph himself four years later,
+for he fell in battle with Domnall son of Murcad son of Diarmaid,
+who succeeded him on the throne. It is recorded that, in the
+following year, the sea cast ashore a whale under the mountains of
+Mourne, to the great wonder of those who dwelt by the hill of
+Rudraige. Thus do the Chronicles establish their good faith, by
+putting on record things trifling or grave, with equal
+impartiality.</p>
+<p>They were presently to have something more memorable to record
+than the loss of a battle or the stranding of a whale. But before
+we come to this new chapter in the life of Ireland, let us show the
+continuity of the forces we have already depicted. The old tribal
+turmoil went on unabated. In 771, the first year of Doncad son of
+Domnall in the sovereignty over Ireland, that ruler made a full
+muster <span class="pagenum"><a name="page232" id="page232"></a>[pg
+232]</span> of the Ui-Neill and marched into Leinster. The
+Leinstermen moved before the monarch and his forces, until they
+arrived at the fort called Nectain's Shield in Kildare. Domcad with
+his forces was entrenched at Aillin, whence his people continued to
+fire, burn, plunder and devastate the province for the space of a
+week, when the Leinstermen at last submitted to his will. Seventeen
+years later it is recorded that the church and abbey of Ardmaca,
+or, as we may now begin to call it, Armagh, were struck by
+lightning, and the night was terrible with thunder, lightning and
+wind.</p>
+<p>We see, therefore, that the double life of the people, the life
+of valor and the life of wisdom, were following their steady course
+in camp and school. We may call up a very interesting witness to
+the whole condition of Ireland during this epoch: Alfred king of
+the Northumbrian Saxons, who spent several years traveling through
+the land and studying in the schools. On his departure, he wrote an
+ode of acknowledgment to the country he was leaving, in the verse
+of the native Irish tongue. From this ode we may quote a few
+picturesque lines, taking them from a version which preserves
+something of the original rhythm:</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page233" id="page233"></a>[pg
+233]</span>
+<blockquote>"I traveled its fruitful provinces round,<br>
+And in every one of the five I found,<br>
+Alike in church and in palace hall,<br>
+Abundant apparel and food for all.<br>
+Gold and silver I found, and money,<br>
+Plenty of wheat and plenty of honey;<br>
+I found God's people rich in pity;<br>
+Found many a feast and many a city....<br>
+I found in each great church moreo'er,<br>
+Whether on island or on shore,<br>
+Piety, learning, fond affection,<br>
+Holy welcome and kind protection....<br>
+I found in Munster unfettered of any<br>
+Kings and queens and poets a many,<br>
+Poets well skilled in music and measure;<br>
+Prosperous doings, mirth and pleasure.<br>
+I found in Connacht the just, redundance<br>
+Of riches, milk in lavish abundance;<br>
+Hospitality, vigor, fame,<br>
+In Crimean's land of heroic name....<br>
+I found in Ulster, from hill to glen,<br>
+Hardy warriors, resolute men.<br>
+Beauty that bloomed when youth was gone,<br>
+And strength transmitted from sire to son....<br>
+I found in Leinster the smooth and sleek,<br>
+From Dublin to Slewmargy's peak,<br>
+Flourishing pastures, valor, health,<br>
+Song-loving worthies, commerce, wealth....<br>
+I found in Meath's fair principality<br>
+Virtue, vigor, and hospitality;<br>
+Candor, joyfulness, bravery, purity--<br>
+Ireland's bulwark and security.<br>
+I found strict morals in age and youth,<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page234" id="page234"></a>[pg
+234]</span> I found historians recording truth.<br>
+The things I sing of in verse unsmooth<br>
+I found them all; I have written sooth."</blockquote>
+<p>The modern form of the names used by the translator gives this
+version a slightly misleading tone. Ulster, Munster, Leinster were
+still known by their old names: Ulad, Mumain and Lagin. The Danish
+termination by which we know them had not been added. In like
+manner, Dublin in those days and far later was still called
+At-Cliat, the Ford of the Hurdles. Yet the tribute which the Saxon
+king paid to Ireland has a true ring. It thoroughly supports what
+we have said: that incessant tribal warfare rather expressed than
+detracted from the vigor of the nation's life. It had this grave
+defect, however: it so kindled and cherished the instinct of
+separateness that union in face of a common foe was almost
+impossible. Long years of adverse fate were needed to merge the
+keen individual instinct of old into the common consciousness of
+to-day.</p>
+<p>Modern historians generally write as if the onslaught of the
+Northmen had had this unifying effect; as if it had been a great
+calamity, overwhelming the country for several centuries, and
+submerging its original life under a tide of conquest. Here again
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page235" id="page235"></a>[pg
+235]</span> the history of the time, as recorded year by year in
+the Annals, leads us to a wholly different conclusion. We find
+inroads of the Northmen, it is true; but they are only interludes
+in the old national life of storm and struggle. That enduring
+tribal conflict, of which we have already seen so much, did not
+cease even for a year. Nor can it have greatly mattered to the
+dwellers in some remote valley whether they were sacked, their
+cattle driven off, and their children taken captive by strangers or
+by men of their own land.</p>
+<p>There was one chief difference: the foreigners, being still
+heathens, did not spare the churches and the schools. The golden or
+silver reliquaries, the jeweled manuscript-cases, the offerings of
+precious stones and rich ornaments laid on the altars: these things
+proved an irresistible temptation to the roving sea-kings. They
+often burned or cast away the manuscripts, eager only to take the
+jeweled coverings, and in this way many monuments of the olden time
+have been lost, and many gaps in the history of the nation made
+irreparable. Yet it would seem that even the loss of manuscripts
+has been exaggerated, since such lavish abundance remains to us
+from the times before the first northern raiders came. Many
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page236" id="page236"></a>[pg
+236]</span> a remote shrine was never even approached by the
+northern wanderers; and, in the long times of peace between raid
+and raid, one school had time to gain from another copies of the
+books which were lost. We may hope that the somewhat rigid views of
+copyright expressed in the matter of St. Finian's Psalter were not
+invariably adhered to. We have Chronicles kept with unbroken
+regularity year by year through the whole of the epoch of Northern
+raids, and they by no means indicate a period of national
+depression, nor justify us in thinking of these raids as much more
+than episodes in the general fighting of the nation,--the martial
+state through which every modern country has passed before emerging
+to homogeneous life.</p>
+<p>To come to the events themselves, as they appeared to the men
+who witnessed them. We find the first record of the Northern
+raiders under the year 795: "The burning of Lambay by the Gentiles.
+The shrines were broken and plundered." This Lambay is an island of
+considerable extent, off the Dublin coast, some six or seven miles
+north of Howth. It rises gradually from the south extremity into a
+purple cliff of porphyry facing the northern sea, and on the
+sheltered slope under the sun a little church <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page237" id="page237"></a>[pg 237]</span> colony
+with schools and dwelling-houses had been built. Against this
+peaceful solitude the raiders came, burning and plundering, and
+when they rowed away again in their long ships towards the north, a
+smoldering black ruin bore testimony that they were indeed
+Gentiles, unblessed by Christian baptism.</p>
+<p>Three years later the little island of St. Patrick, six miles
+north of Lambay, met with a like fate. It was "burned by the
+Gentiles," as the Chronicles say. And from that time forth we hear
+of their long ships again and again, hovering hawk-like around the
+coasts of Ireland and Scotland. In 802, and again in 806, the
+Scottish Iona of Colum of the Churches was raided, and the next
+year we find the pirates making a descent upon Inismurray, off the
+Sligo coast, between the summit of Knocknarea and the cliffs of
+Slieve League. This last settlement of saints and scholars was
+founded by Molaise,--he who had pronounced sentence of exile on
+Colum of the Churches, the banishment that was the beginning of
+grace for the northern Picts. His oratory still remains on the
+island, beside the Church of the Men, the Church of the Women and
+the circular stone fort, which was very likely built to guard
+against new attacks, after this first raid. There are holy wells
+and altars there <span class="pagenum"><a name="page238" id=
+"page238"></a>[pg 238]</span> also, and Inismurray, better than any
+other place, gives us a picture of the old scholastic life of that
+remote and wonderful time.</p>
+<p>Five years later, the Northern raiders made their way further
+round the coast, under the shadow of the western mountains and the
+great cliffs of Achill; we read of "a slaughter of the people of
+Connemara by the Gentiles" in that year, and the year following,
+other battles with Gentiles are recorded in the same part of
+Ireland.</p>
+<p>In 818, if we are to believe the Annalist, a singular thing
+happened: "An army was led by Murcad, having the Ui-Neill of the
+North with him. Concobar king of Ireland with the Ui-Neill of the
+South and the Leinstermen came from the South on the other hand.
+When they came to one place, it happened, through a miracle of God,
+that they separated from each other for that time without slaughter
+or one of them spilling a drop of the other's blood." That entry
+better than any other shows the restless spirit of the times. It
+shows, too, that the first shock of Norse invasion had not in any
+sense warned the people and chieftains of Ireland of coming danger,
+nor had it in any degree checked the steady course of the nation's
+growth through storm and strife to <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page239" id="page239"></a>[pg 239]</span> personal consciousness,
+as the stepping-stone to the wider common consciousness of the
+modern world.</p>
+<p>The year following we read of "a plundering of Howth by the
+Gentiles, who carried off a great prey of women." These captives
+were doubtless the first to bring the Message of the New Way to the
+wild granite lands of the north, where the mountains in their
+grandeur frown upon the long inlets of the fiords. They taught to
+their children in those wild lands of exile the lessons of grace
+and holiness, so rudely interrupted when the long ships of the
+Norsemen were sighted from the Hill of Howth.</p>
+<p>A year later, in 820, the raiders had found their way to the
+southernmost extremity of the island; to Cape Clear, off the coast
+of Cork. This once again brings to our notice the position of so
+many of the early religious settlements,--on rocky islands off the
+coasts, well out of the turmoil of tribal strife which raged
+uninterrupted on the mainland. St. Patrick's Island and Lambay on
+the east, Clear Island on the south, and Inismurray on the
+northwest, so well protected by the sea from disturbance at home,
+were, by that very isolation, terribly exposed to these foreign
+raiders from the sea. Howth, Moville and Bangor, all on peninsulas,
+all by the seashore, enjoyed a like <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page240" id="page240"></a>[pg 240]</span> immunity and were open
+to a like danger. Therefore we are not surprised to find that, two
+years later, Bangor was "plundered by the Gentiles."</p>
+<p>It will be remembered that St. Patrick's first church was built
+on land given him by Dicu, chieftain of the district round
+Downpatrick, a name which commemorates the presence of the
+Messenger. Two sons of this same Dicu had been held as hostages by
+Laogaire the king, and their marvelous escape from durance was
+recorded in the name, Dun-da-lath-glas, the Dwelling of the Two
+Broken Fetters, given to Downpatrick. The place was of old renown.
+Known to Ptolemy as Dunum, it was, during Concobar's sway at Emain
+of Maca, the fortress of the strong chief, Celtcar, whose huge
+embattled hill of earth still rises formidable over the Quoyle
+River. In the year 823, we read, Dundalathglas was plundered by the
+Gentiles; but the story does not stop here, for we are further told
+that these same Gentiles were beaten by the Ulad armies not far
+from the great fort of Celtcar. This is the first entry of this
+tenor. Hitherto, the Northmen seem to have fallen only on outlying
+religious communities, in remote islands or on the seashore; but
+this last raid brought them to one of the very few church-schools
+which had been built <span class="pagenum"><a name="page241" id=
+"page241"></a>[pg 241]</span> close to a strong fortress, with the
+result that the Northmen were beaten and driven back into their
+ships.</p>
+<p>Three years later the Gentiles plundered Lusk on the mainland
+opposite Lambay, but in that same year they were twice defeated in
+battle, once by Cairbr&eacute; son of Catal, and once by the king
+of Ulad. The raids of the Norse warriors grow more frequent and
+determined from this time; in itself a testimony to the wealth and
+prosperity of the country, the abundance of gold and of accumulated
+riches, whether cattle or corn, ornaments or richly dyed stuffs,
+red and purple and blue. Word seems to have been carried to the
+wild hills and fiords of frozen Scandinavia that here was booty in
+abundance, and the pirate hordes came down in swarms.</p>
+<p>Thus we read that Armagh, the center of St. Patrick's work, and
+the chief home of learning, was thrice plundered in 830, the
+raiders sailing up Carlingford Lough and then making a dash of some
+fifteen miles across the undulating country separating them from
+the city of churches. This is the first time they ventured out of
+sight of their boats. Two years later they plundered Clondalkin,
+nine miles inland from the Dublin coast, where the Round Tower
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page242" id="page242"></a>[pg
+242]</span> still marks the site of the old church and school. To
+the growing frequency of these raids, it would seem, the building
+of Round Towers is to be attributed; they were at once belfries and
+places of refuge. We find, therefore, that the door is almost
+always many feet above the ground, being reached by a ladder
+afterwards drawn up by those inside. The number of these Round
+Towers all over the country, and the perfect preservation of many
+of them, show how universal this precaution was, and how effective
+were the refugees thus provided. It is instructive to read under
+this same year, 832, that "a great number of the family of
+Clonmacnoise were slain by Feidlimid king of Cashel, all their land
+being burned by him up to the door of the church." Thus the
+progress of tribal struggle was uninterrupted by the Gentile
+raids.</p>
+<p>Four years later, a fleet of sixty Norse fighting galleys sailed
+up the Boyne. Sixty long ships entered the Liffey in the same year,
+and a year later they captured the fortress of the Ford of the
+Hurdles, At-Cliat,--the old name of Dublin. Three years later we
+find the king of Munster plundering Meath and West Meath, showing
+that no sense of common danger disturbed the native kings. This
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page243" id="page243"></a>[pg
+243]</span> strengthens the view we have already taken: that the
+attacks of the Norse sea-kings were only an interlude in the
+incessant contests between the tribes of province and province;
+contests perfectly natural and normal to the development of the
+land, and through which every country has at some period
+passed.</p>
+<a name="243.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/243.jpg"><img src="images/243.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>ROUND TOWER, ANTRIM.</b></p>
+<p>It would seem that the Northmen who captured the Ford of the
+Hurdles departed from their former usage. Fortifying themselves, or
+strengthening the existent fortress, they determined to pass the
+winter in Ireland, instead of returning, as they had always done up
+to this time, before the autumn storms made dangerous the
+navigation of the wild northern seas. Their presence in this fort
+gave the native powers a center upon which to concentrate their
+attack, and as a result the year 846 was marked by a signal victory
+over the Northmen, twelve hundred of those at At-Cliat being slain.
+Four other successful contests with the raiders are recorded for
+the same year, and we can thoroughly trust the Annalists who, up to
+this time, have so faithfully recorded the disasters of their own
+race.</p>
+<p>About the same time the Northmen gained a second point of
+vantage by seizing and fortifying a strong <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page244" id="page244"></a>[pg 244]</span>
+position where the town of Cork now stands. Indeed their instinct
+of seamanship, their knowledge of good harbors and the conditions
+which make them, led them to fix their first entrenchments at
+Dublin, Cork and Limerick,--which remained for centuries after the
+great ports of the country on the east, south and west; and the
+Norse flavor still lingers in the names of Carlingford, Wexford and
+Waterford, the Fiords of Cairlinn, Weis and Vadre. A wonderful
+side-light on the whole epoch is shed by this entry for 847: "In
+this year sevenscore ships of the Gentiles from abroad fought
+against the Gentiles in Ireland." It would seem that the earlier
+comers, who had drawn up their long ships on the beach, and thrown
+up earthworks round their camp, instantly resented the attempt of
+later arrivals to poach on their preserves, and that a fierce fight
+was the result. During the whole of the following century we find
+signs of like rivalry between different bands of raiders, and it
+becomes evident that they were as much divided amongst themselves
+as were the native tribes they fought against.</p>
+<p>Two years later a further light is shed on this mutual strife
+when we are told that "Dark Gentiles came to At-Cliat and
+slaughtered the Fair Gentiles, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page245" id="page245"></a>[pg 245]</span> plundering their fort
+and carrying away both people and property." The next year saw a
+new struggle between the Dark Gentiles and the Fair Gentiles, with
+much mutual slaughter. This leads us to realize that these raiders,
+vaguely grouped by modern writers under the single name of Danes,
+really belonged to several different races, and doubtless came from
+many parts of the Baltic coasts, as well as from the fiords of the
+great Scandinavian peninsula. The Dark Foreigners are without doubt
+some of that same race of southern origin which we saw, ages
+earlier, migrating northwards along the Atlantic seaboard,--a race
+full of the spirit of the sea, and never happier than when the
+waves were curling and breaking under their prows. They found their
+way, we saw, as far northwards as the coast of Scotland, the
+Western Isles, and distant Norway over the foam, where the long
+fiords and rugged precipices gave them a congenial home. We find
+them hovering over the shores of Ireland at the very dawn of her
+history; and, in later but still remote ages, their power waned
+before the De Danaan tribes. This same dark race returning now from
+Norway, swooped hawk-like upon the rich shrines of the Irish island
+sanctuaries, only to come into hostile contact once <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page246" id="page246"></a>[pg 246]</span> more
+with sons of that golden-haired race which scattered the dark
+Fomorians at Mag Tuiread of the North. For the Fair Gentiles of our
+mediaeval Chronicle are no other than the golden-haired
+Scandinavians; the yellow-locked Baltic race that gave conquerors
+and a new ideal of beauty to the whole modern world. And this
+Baltic race, as we saw in an earlier epoch, was the source and
+mother of the old De Danaans, whose hair was like new-smelted gold
+or the yellow flag-lilies of our lakes and rivers. Thus after long
+ages the struggle of Fomor and De Danaan was renewed at the Ford of
+the Hurdles between the Dark and Fair Strangers, rivals for the
+plunder of the Irish religious schools.</p>
+<p>Though the personalities of this age do not stand forth with the
+high relief of Cuculain and Concobar, though we can hardly quote
+poems to equal the songs of Find son of Cumal and Ossin of the
+golden tongue, yet genuine inspiration never failed in the hearts
+of the warriors and on the lips of the bards. Thus in 860 did a
+poet lament the death of a king:</p>
+<blockquote>"Mournfully is spread her veil of grief over Erin<br>
+Since Maelseaclain, chieftain of our race has perished,--<br>
+Maelseaclain of the flowing Shannon.<br>
+Many a moan resounds in every place;<br>
+It is mournful news among the Gael.<br>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page247" id="page247"></a>[pg
+247]</span> Red wine has been spilled into the valley:<br>
+Erin's monarch has died.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Though he was wont to ride a white charger.<br>
+Though he had many steeds,<br>
+His car this day is drawn by a yoke of oxen.<br>
+The king of Erin is dead."</blockquote>
+<p>Four years afterwards the contest between the raiders and the
+chieftains grew keener, more centered, more like organized war. "A
+complete muster of the North was made by Aed Finnliat, so that he
+plundered the fortresses of the foreigners, wherever they were in
+the north; and he carried off their cattle and accoutrements, their
+goods and chattels. The foreigners of the province came together at
+Lough Foyle. After Aed king of Ireland had heard that this
+gathering of strangers was on the borders of his country, he was
+not negligent in attending to them. For he marched towards them
+with all his forces, and a battle was fought fiercely and
+spiritedly between them. The victory was gained over the
+foreigners, and a slaughter was made of them. Their heads were
+collected to one place, in the presence of the king, and
+twelve-score heads were reckoned before him, which was the number
+slain in that battle, besides the numbers of those who were wounded
+and carried off by him in the agonies of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page248" id="page248"></a>[pg 248]</span> death,
+and who died of their wounds some time afterwards."</p>
+<p>A renewal of tribal warfare in the second year after this, when
+this same Aed the king was attacked by Flann the lord of Breag in
+Meath, called forth certain battle-verses full of the fire and
+fervor of the time.</p>
+<p>A poet sang:</p>
+<blockquote>"At Kiladerry this day the ravens shall taste sips of
+blood:<br>
+A victory shall be gained over the magic host of the Gentiles<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; and over Flann."</blockquote>
+<p>The mother of Flann sang:</p>
+<blockquote>"Happiness! Woe! Good news! Bad news! The gaining of a
+great<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;triumphant battle.<br>
+<br>
+Happy the king whom it makes victorious; unhappy the king who<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;was defeated.<br>
+<br>
+Unhappy the host of Leat Cuin, to have fallen by the sprites<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;of Slain;<br>
+<br>
+Happy the reign of great Aed, and unhappy the loss of
+Flann."</blockquote>
+<p>Aed the victorious king sang:</p>
+<blockquote>"The troops of Leinster are with him, with the added
+men of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;swift Boyne;<br>
+<br>
+This shows the treachery of Flann: the concord of Gentiles<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;at his side."</blockquote>
+<p>After ten years, a bard thus sings the dirge of Aed:</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page249" id="page249"></a>[pg
+249]</span>
+<blockquote>"Long is the wintry night, with rough gusts of
+wind;<br>
+Under pressing grief we meet it, since the red-speared king<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; of the noble house lives not.<br>
+It is fearful to watch how the waves heave from the bottom;<br>
+To them may be compared all those who with us lament him.<br>
+A generous, wise, staid man, of whose renown the populous<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Tara was full.<br>
+A shielded oak that sheltered the palace of Milid's sons.<br>
+Master of the games of the fair hilled Taillten,<br>
+King of Tara of a hundred conflicts;<br>
+Chief of Fodla the noble, Aed of Oileac who died too soon.<br>
+Popular, not forgotten, he departed from this world,<br>
+A yew without any blemish upon him was he of the long-flowing<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; hair."</blockquote>
+<p>Nor must it be thought that these repeated raids which we have
+recorded in any way checked the full spiritual life of the nation.
+It is true that there was not that quiet serenity from which came
+the perfect beauty and art of the old Book of Kells, but a keenness
+and fire kindled the breasts of those who learned the New Way and
+the Ancient Learning. The schools sent forth a host of eminent men
+who over all western Europe laid the intellectual basis of the
+modern world. This view of Ireland's history might well be expanded
+almost without limit or possibility of exaggeration. Receiving, as
+we saw, the learning and traditions of Rome while Rome was yet
+mighty and a name of old imperial renown, Ireland <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page250" id="page250"></a>[pg 250]</span> kept
+and cherished the classical wisdom and learning, not less than the
+lore of Palestine. Then the northern garrisons of Rome were beaten
+back, and Britain and Gaul alike were devastated by hordes from
+beyond the Rhine. The first wild deluge of these fierce invaders
+was now over, and during the lull of the storm teachers went forth
+from Ireland to Scotland, as we have seen; they went also to
+Britain; to Belgium; to northern, central and southern Gaul; and to
+countries beyond the Rhine and in the south; to Switzerland and
+Austria, where one Irishman gave his name to the Canton of St.
+Gall, while another founded the famous see of Salzburg, a
+rallying-point through all the Middle Ages. It was not only for
+pure spiritual zeal and high inspiration that these teachers were
+famed. They had not less renown for all refined learning and
+culture. The famous universities of Oxford, Paris and Pavia count
+among the great spirits at their inception men who were worthy
+pupils of the schools of Devenish and Durrow, of Bangor and
+Moville.</p>
+<p>We have recorded the tribute paid by Alfred the Saxon king to
+the Ireland of his day. Let us add to it the testimony of a great
+divine of France. Elias, Bishop of Angoul&ecirc;me, who died in
+875, wrote thus: <span class="pagenum"><a name="page251" id=
+"page251"></a>[pg 251]</span> "What need to speak of Ireland;
+setting at nought, as it does, the difficulties of the sea, and
+coming almost in a body to our shores, with its crowd of
+philosophers, the most intelligent of whom are subjecting
+themselves to a voluntary exile."</p>
+<p>We have traced the raids of the Northmen for nearly a century.
+They continued for a century and a quarter longer. Through all this
+time the course of the nation's life was as we have described it: a
+raid from the sea, or from one of their seaboard fortresses by the
+Dark Gentiles or the Fair; an assembling of the hosts of the native
+chieftains against them; a fierce and spirited battle against the
+pirates in their mail-coats and armed with great battle-axes.
+Sometimes the chosen people prevailed, and sometimes the Gentiles;
+but in either case the heads of the slain were heaped up at the
+feet of the victor, many cattle were driven away as spoil, and
+young men and maidens were taken into captivity. It would seem that
+at no time was there any union between the foreigners of one and
+another seaboard fortress, any more than there was unity among the
+tribes whom they raided and who defeated them in their turn. It was
+a strife of warring units, without fusion; small groups round
+chosen leaders, and these <span class="pagenum"><a name="page252"
+id="page252"></a>[pg 252]</span> merging for awhile in greater
+groups. Thus the life of the times, in its warlike aspect. Its
+spiritual vigor we have sufficiently shown, not less in the
+inspirations of the saints than in the fiery songs of the bards,
+called forth by battles and the death of kings. Everywhere there
+was fierce force and seething energy, bringing forth fruit of piety
+or prowess.</p>
+<p>The raiders slowly lost their grasp of the fortresses they had
+seized. Newcomers ceased to fill their thinning ranks. Their force
+was finally shattered at the battle of Clontarf, which the Annalist
+thus records: "1013: The Foreigners of the west of Europe assembled
+against Brian and Maelseaclain, and they took with them a thousand
+men with coats of mail. A spirited, fierce, violent, vengeful and
+furious battle was fought between them, the likeness of which was
+not to be found in that time, at Cluain-tarb, the Lawn of the
+Bulls. In this battle was slain Brian son of Ceinneidig, monarch of
+Ireland, who was the Augustus of all the west of Europe, in the
+eighty-eighth year of his age."</p>
+<p>The scene of this famous conflict is on the coast, between
+Dublin and the Hill of Howth. A wide strand of boulders is laid
+bare by the receding tide, with green sea-grass carpeting the
+stones. At the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page253" id=
+"page253"></a>[pg 253]</span> very verge of the farthest tide are
+two huge sand-banks, where the waves roar and rumble with a sound
+like the bellowing of bulls, and this tumultuous roaring is
+preserved in the name of the place unto this day.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page254" id="page254"></a>[pg
+254]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page255" id="page255"></a>[pg
+255]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page256" id="page256"></a>[pg
+256]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page257" id="page257"></a>[pg
+257]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XI."></a>XI.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1013-1250.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>There was, as we have seen, no "Danish Conquest" of Ireland, nor
+anything approaching a conquest. What really happened during the
+ninth and tenth centuries was this: Raiders from the shores of the
+Northern seas, from the Scandinavian peninsula and the Western
+Isles of Scotland, sailed in their long ships among the islands of
+the Irish coast, looking for opportunities to plunder the
+treasuries of the religious schools, and carrying off the gold and
+silver reliquaries and manuscript cases, far more valuable to these
+heathen seamen than the Latin or Gaelic manuscripts they
+contained.</p>
+<p>These raids had little connection with each other; they were the
+outcome of individual daring, mere boat's-crews from one or another
+of the Northern fiords. A few of the more persistent gradually grew
+reluctant to retreat with their booty to the frozen north, and
+tried to gain a footing on the shores of the fertile and wealthy
+island they had discovered. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page258"
+id="page258"></a>[pg 258]</span> They made temporary camps on the
+beach, always beside the best harbors, and threw up earthworks
+round them, or perhaps more lasting forts of stone. Thus they
+established a secondary base for raids inland, and a place of
+refuge whither they might carry the cattle, corn and captives which
+these raids brought them from the territories of the native clans.
+These camps on the shore were the germ of a chain of sea-ports at
+Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.</p>
+<p>From these points raiding went on, and battles were fought in
+which the raiders were as often vanquished as victorious. There was
+little union between the various Norse forts, and indeed we
+sometimes find them fighting valiantly among themselves. Meanwhile,
+the old tribal contest went on everywhere throughout the island.
+The south invaded the north and was presently invaded in return.
+The east and the west sent expeditions against each other. Clan
+went forth against clan, chief against chief, and cattle and
+captives many times changed hands. These captives, it would seem,
+became the agricultural class in each clan, being made to work as
+the penalty for unsuccessful fighting. The old tribal life went on
+unbroken during the whole of this period; nor did it <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page259" id="page259"></a>[pg 259]</span>
+subsequently yield to pressure from without, but rather passed
+away, during succeeding centuries, as the result of inward growth.
+Meanwhile the religious schools continued their work, studying
+Latin and Greek as well as the old Gaelic, and copying manuscripts
+as before; and one fruit of their work we see in the gradual
+conversion of the heathen Norsemen, who were baptized and admitted
+to the native church. The old bardic schools likewise continued, so
+that we have a wealth of native manuscripts belonging to this time,
+embodying the finest tradition and literature of the earlier pagan
+ages.</p>
+<a name="259.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/259.jpg"><img src="images/259.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>GIANT'S HEAD AND DUNLUCE CASTLE, CO. ANTRIM.</b></p>
+<p>If the Danes and Northern raiders never conquered Ireland, on
+the other hand they never were expelled. Through the cessation of
+the original impulse of unrest which brought them, they gradually
+ceased to receive accessions from the North, and at the same time
+the forces of amalgamation were slowly merging them into the
+national and tribal life of their new home. Their separate
+influence grew less and less, but their race continued, and
+continues to this day in the sea-ports we have named.</p>
+<p>We shall presently have to record another series of Norse
+inroads, this time not directly from the North, but mediately,
+through France and Britain, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page260"
+id="page260"></a>[pg 260]</span> and we shall find that much of our
+subsequent history was influenced by the new elements and
+principles then added. We shall do well, therefore, to linger for a
+moment before this new transition, to gain a clear view of the
+tendencies of the epoch then closed, the wider significance of that
+chapter of our nation's life.</p>
+<p>The culture of Ireland, during the period before the Northern
+raids, bridged over the abyss between the classical and the
+mediaeval world. During the whole of that period the rest of Europe
+was hidden under the clouds of the Dark Ages. Ireland stood alone
+as the one cultured nation. Receiving the classical learning from
+Roman Gaul and Britain and Italy, while the old world was still
+alive, Ireland carried that culture onward when Rome and the Roman
+Empire fell, crushed under the hordes of Northern barbarians: the
+Franks in Gaul; the Lombards, Goths and Vandals in Spain and Italy;
+the Angles, Saxons and Danes in Britain; and the Picts and Northmen
+in the Scottish lowlands. Austria was meanwhile overrun by Asian
+nomads, the Huns and Magyars; Russia and Germany, with the
+Scandinavian lands, were still pagan.</p>
+<p>Thus all Europe was submerged under a deluge of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page261" id="page261"></a>[pg 261]</span>
+heathenism, and the old Latin culture was swept away. The tradition
+of ancient Greece still lingered at Constantinople behind the wall
+of the Balkans, but it had no influence at all on the northern
+nations beyond the wall. Ireland was thus the one exception, the
+ark of safety for the old wisdom and beauty of classical days. And
+from Ireland, when the tide of heathen invasion slackened, the
+light of classical times and the spirit of the New Way went forth
+to all the nascent nations, the great pagan tribes that were to
+form the modern world. Thus Ireland was the bridge over the Dark
+Ages, the first of modern nations, keeping the old and blending it
+with the new.</p>
+<p>Yet another view of Ireland's significance must not be
+forgotten. Of the original life of the great pagan world which
+swept over the Roman Empire we know almost nothing. How much do we
+realize of the thought and genius of Aleman, Frank and Vandal, of
+Angle and Lombard and Burgundian?</p>
+<p>Nothing at all. The darkness that shrouds them is complete. But
+what a contrast when we come to Ireland! If we leave out the basin
+of the Mediterranean, with its Asian and African traditions,
+Ireland is the one European nation which has clear records
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page262" id="page262"></a>[pg
+262]</span> of its pagan history. And how excellent that history
+was, how full of humanity and the rich wine of life, the stories of
+Fergus and Concobar and Cuculain, of Find and Ossin and Gael, of
+Meave and Deirdr&eacute; and Cred&eacute; bear sufficient witness.
+The tide of Irish life to which they belong, and which brought them
+forth, flowed on without break to a time so recent that their whole
+tradition has come down to us, practically at first hand, from the
+heralds and bards themselves. Ireland is, therefore, our one
+doorway to the history of northern Europe through the long era of
+pagan times.</p>
+<p>That history was everywhere a fierce tale of tribal warfare. Its
+heroes are valiant fighters, keen leaders of forays, champion
+swordsmen and defenders of forts. The air throbs to the
+battle-drum, rings to the call of the war-trumpet. Every tribe,
+every clan, is in turn victor and vanquished, raider and victim of
+raids. Everywhere are struggle and unrest, tales of captivity and
+slaughter.</p>
+<p>We fall into vain lamenting over this red rapine and wrath,
+until we divine the genius and secret purpose of that wonderful
+epoch, so wholly different in inspiration from our own. The life of
+races, like the life of men, has its ordered stages, and none can
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page263" id="page263"></a>[pg
+263]</span> ripen out of season. That was the epoch of dawning
+individual consciousness, when men were coming to a keen and vivid
+realization of themselves and their powers. Keen consciousness and
+strong personal will could be developed only through
+struggle--through long ages of individual and independent fighting,
+where the best man led, and often fought for his right to lead with
+the best of his followers. Innumerable centers of initiative and
+force were needed, and these the old tribal life abundantly gave.
+The territory of a chief hardly stretched farther than he could
+ride in a day, so that every part of it had a real place in his
+heart. Nor was he the owner of that territory. He was simply the
+chosen leader of the men who lived there, perhaps the strongest
+among many brothers who shared it equally between them. If another
+thought himself the better man, the matter was forthwith decided by
+fighting.</p>
+<p>The purpose of all this was not the "survival of the fittest" in
+the material sense, but a harvest purely spiritual: the ripening of
+keen personal consciousness and will in all the combatants, to the
+full measure of their powers. The chiefs were the strongest men who
+set the standard and served as models for the rest, but that
+standard held the minds <span class="pagenum"><a name="page264" id=
+"page264"></a>[pg 264]</span> of all, the model of perfect valor
+was in the hearts of all. Thus was personal consciousness gained
+and perfected.</p>
+<p>If we keep this in mind as the keynote of the whole pagan epoch,
+we shall be better able to comprehend the new forces which were
+added to that epoch, and which gradually transformed it. The
+greatest was the Message of the New Way. Deeds are stronger than
+words, and in the deeds of the first Messengers we can see the new
+spirit bearing fruit. The slave of Slemish mountain returned
+breathing not vengeance for his captivity but pity and generous
+kindness towards his captors. Colum the exile did not seek to
+enlist the Picts against his native land, but sought rather to give
+the message of that land to the wild Pictish warriors, and to
+spread humane and generous feeling among them. Thus was laid the
+foundation of a wide and universal consciousness; a bridge was
+built between soul and soul.</p>
+<p>From the waning of the Norsemen to the first coming of the
+Normans is a period of about a hundred and fifty years. We shall
+best gain an insight into the national and religious life of that
+time by gleaning from the Annals the vivid and living pictures they
+never fail to give,--pictures which are the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page265" id="page265"></a>[pg 265]</span>
+records of eye-witnesses. The strictly contemporary character of
+the records is vouched for by the correct entry of eclipses: for
+instance, "on the day before the calends of September, in the year
+1030, there was a darkening of the sun."</p>
+<p>We see the genius of the Norsemen suffering a like eclipse the
+year before: "1029: Olaf son of Sitric, lord of the Foreigners, was
+taken prisoner by Matgamain Ua Riagain lord of Breag, who exacted
+twelve hundred cows as his ransom, together with seven score
+British horses, three score ounces of gold, the sword of Carlus,
+the Irish hostages, sixty ounces of white silver as the ransom of
+his fetters, eighty cows for word and supplication, and four
+hostages to Ua Riagain as a security of peace."</p>
+<p>Two generations later we read: "1088: Tigearnac Ua Briain, chief
+successor of Ciaran and Coman, died. He was a paragon of learning
+and history." The work of the paragon Tigearnac, a history of
+Ireland, is extant and writ in choice Latin, a monument at once of
+the classical learning of our schools and of the historical spirit
+carried down from the days of the pagan heralds and bards.
+Tigearnac quotes abundantly from Greek and Latin authors,
+fortifying his conclusions with passages from Eusebius,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page266" id="page266"></a>[pg
+266]</span> Orosius, Julius Africanus, Josephus, Jerome and
+Bede.</p>
+<p>A half-century later we get a quaint and vivid glimpse into the
+religious life of the time: "1145: A lime-kiln which was sixty feet
+every way was erected opposite Emain Maca by Gilla Mac Liag, the
+successor of Patrick, and Patrick's clergy in general." Here is the
+glow of that devotion through work which gave us the great
+mediaeval cathedrals, the fervor and artistic power, which in
+former times adorned the Gospels of the Book of Kells, now working
+out its way in lasting stone. The date of this lime-kiln lies
+indeed just half-way between the consecration of Cormac's Chapel at
+Cashel in 1134 and the foundation of the beautiful cathedral beside
+it by the lord of Tuaid-Muma or Thomond in 1152. Cormac's Chapel is
+a very pure example of native style, untouched by foreign or
+continental influence.</p>
+<a name="267.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/267.jpg"><img src="images/267.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>ROCK CASHEL, RUINS OF OLD CATHEDRAL, KING CORMAC'S CHAPEL AND
+ROUND TOWER.</b></p>
+<p>We can divine the figure of one of the great men of the
+religious world in the records for the year 1148: "A synod was
+convened at Saint Patrick's Isle by Maelmaedog, called also
+Malachias, successor of Patrick, at which were present fifteen
+bishops and two hundred priests, to establish rules and morals for
+all. Maelmaedog by the advice of the synod went <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page267" id="page267"></a>[pg 267]</span> a
+second time to Rome, to confer with the successor of Peter." A few
+months later we read this record of his death: "Malachias, that is,
+Maelmaedog Ua Morgair, Archbishop of the chair of Patrick, chief
+head of the piety of the West of Europe, legate of the successor of
+Peter, the only head whom the Irish and the Foreigners obeyed,
+chief paragon of wisdom and piety, a brilliant lamp which illumined
+territories and churches by preaching and good works, faithful
+shepherd of the church in general,--after having ordained bishops
+and priests and persons of every degree; after having consecrated
+many churches and cemeteries; after having performed every
+ecclesiastical work throughout Ireland; after having bestowed
+jewels and food upon the mighty and the needy; after having founded
+churches and monasteries, for by him was repaired in Ireland every
+church which had been consigned to decay and neglect, and they had
+been neglected from times remote; --after leaving every rule and
+every good moral in the churches of Ireland in general; after
+having been the second time in the legateship; after having been
+fourteen years in the primacy; and after the fifty-fourth year of
+his age, resigned his spirit to heaven on the second day of
+November, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page268" id=
+"page268"></a>[pg 268]</span> was buried in the monastery of Saint
+Bernard at Claravallis in France."</p>
+<p>This is the same worthy under whose influence was built the
+great lime-kiln over against the fort of Emain, where Concobar once
+ruled. Even from the scant notices which we have quoted he stands
+forth clear and strong, full of spiritual and moral vigor, a great
+man in every sense, and one in whom we divine a lovable and
+admirable spirit. At that time there were four archbishoprics in
+Ireland, at Armagh, Cashel, Dublin and Tuam; the primacy belonging
+to the first, as the seat of the Damliag Mor or Great Stone Church,
+built by Saint Patrick himself. A sentence in the Annals shows how
+the revenues were raised: "A horse from every chieftain, a sheep
+from every hearth." A few passages like these are enough to light
+up whole epochs of that mediaeval time, and to show us how
+sympathetic, strong and pure that life was, in so many ways.</p>
+<p>We find, meanwhile, that the tribal struggle continued as of
+old: "1154: Toirdealbac Ua Concobar brought a fleet round Ireland
+northwards, and plundered Tir-Conaill and Inis Eogain. The Cinel
+Eogain sent to hire the fleets of the Hebrides, Arran, Cantyre and
+Man, and the borders of Alba in general, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page269" id="page269"></a>[pg 269]</span> and
+they fell in with the other fleet and a naval battle was fiercely
+and spiritedly fought between them. They continued the conflict
+from, the beginning of the day till evening, but the foreign fleet
+was defeated." This records perhaps the only lesson learned from
+the Norsemen, the art of naval warfare. We may regret that the new
+knowledge was not turned to a more national end.</p>
+<p>Four years later, "a wicker bridge was made by Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar at Athlone, for the purpose of making incursions into
+Meath. There was a pacific meeting between Ruaidri Ua Concobar and
+Tigearnan, and they made peace, and took mutual oaths before
+sureties and relics." This is our first meeting with a king as
+remarkable in his way as the great archbishop his contemporary.
+Ruaidri descendant of Concobar was king of Connacht, holding the
+land from the western ocean up to the great frontier of the river
+Shannon. Eager to plunder his neighbors and bring back "a countless
+number of cows," he undertook this wonderful work, a pile bridge
+across the river, seemingly the first of its kind to be built
+there, and in structure very like the famous bridge which Caesar
+built across the Rhine,--or like many of the wooden bridges across
+the upper streams <span class="pagenum"><a name="page270" id=
+"page270"></a>[pg 270]</span> of the Danube at the present day. We
+shall record a few more of this enterprising and large-minded
+prince's undertakings, following the course of the years.</p>
+<p>In parenthesis, we find a clue to the standard of value of the
+time in this record: "1161: The visitation of Osraige was made by
+Flaitbeartac, successor of Colum Kill; the tribute due to him was
+seven score oxen, but he selected, as a substitute for these, four
+hundred and twenty ounces of pure silver." The price of an ox was,
+therefore, three ounces of silver. The old-time barter, an echo of
+which still lingers in the word "pecuniary" from the Latin name for
+"cattle," was evidently yielding to the more convenient form of
+exchange through the medium of the metals, which are easily carried
+and divided, and suffer no detriment from the passage of time. With
+the wicker bridge and the lime-kiln, this change from a tribute in
+cattle to a payment in silver may remind us that we are on the
+threshold of the modern world.</p>
+<p>In 1162 we find the king of Connacht in a new adventure: "An
+army was led by Muirceartac Ua Lochlain, accompanied by the people
+of the north of Ireland, the men of Meath, and a battalion of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page271" id="page271"></a>[pg
+271]</span> Connacht men, to At-Cliat, to lay siege to the
+Foreigners and the Irish; but Ua Lochlain retired without battle or
+hostages after having plundered the Fair Strangers. A peace was
+afterwards concluded between the Foreigners and the Gaels; and six
+score ounces of gold were given by the Foreigners to Ua Lochlain,
+and five score ounces of gold were paid by Diarmaid Ua Maelseaclain
+to Ruaidri Ua Concobar for West Meath." Here again we see the
+"countless cows" giving place to counted gold in the levying of
+tribute. We note also, in the following year, that "a lime-kiln
+measuring seventy feet every way was made by the successor of Colum
+Kill and the clergy of Colum Kill in twenty days," in evident
+emulation of the work of the Armagh see.</p>
+<p>The synod already recorded as having been held in the little
+island of Saint Patrick off the Dublin coast, gives us a general
+view of the church at that time, the number of sees and parishes,
+and the spirit animating them. We gain a like view of the civil
+state in the record of a great assembly convened in 1167 by the
+energetic and enterprising Connacht king: "A great meeting was
+called together by Ruaidri Ua Concobar and the chiefs of Leat Cuin,
+both lay and ecclesiastic, and the chiefs of At-boy,--the Yellow
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page272" id="page272"></a>[pg
+272]</span> Ford across one of the streams of the Boyne in Meath.
+To it came the successor of Patrick, the archbishop of Connacht,
+the archbishop of Leinster, the lord of Breifne, the lord of
+Oirgialla, the king of Ulster, the king of Tara, and Ragnall son of
+Ragnall, lord of the Foreigners. The whole of their gathering and
+assemblage was 19,000 horsemen, of which 6000 were Connachtmen,
+4000 with the lord of Breifne, 2000 with the king of Tara, 4000
+with the lord of Oirgialla and the king of Ulster, 2000 with the
+chief of Ui-Failge, and 1000 with the Foreigners of At-Cliat. They
+passed many good resolutions at this meeting, respecting veneration
+for churches and clerics, and control of tribes and territories, so
+that women used to traverse Ireland alone; and a restoration of his
+prey was made by the chief of the Ui-Failge at the hands of the
+kings aforesaid. They afterwards separated in peace and amity,
+without battle or controversy, or without anyone complaining of
+another at that meeting, in consequence of the prosperousness of
+the king, who had assembled these chiefs with their forces at one
+place."</p>
+<p>Here is a foreshadowing of the representative assemblies of our
+modern times, and the same wise spirit is shown in another event of
+the same year, thus <span class="pagenum"><a name="page273" id=
+"page273"></a>[pg 273]</span> recorded: "A hosting and a mustering
+of the men of Ireland, with their chieftains, by Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar; thither came the lord of Deas-muma, the lord of
+Tuaid-muma, the king of Meath, the lord of Oirgialla and all the
+chieftains of Leinster. They arrived in Tir-Eogain, and allotted
+the part of it north of Slieve Gullion,--now the eastern part of
+Derry,--to Nial Ua Lochlain for two hostages, and allotted the part
+of the country of the clan to the south of the mountain to Aed Ua
+Neill for two other hostages. Then the men of Ireland returned back
+southwards over Slieve Fuaid, through Tir-Eogain and Tir-Connaill,
+and over Assaroe--the Cataract of the Erne--and Ruaidri Ua Concobar
+escorted the lord of Deas-muma with his forces southwards through
+Tuaid-muma as far as Cnoc-Ain&eacute;--in Limerick--and the lord of
+Deas-muma departed with gifts of many jewels and riches."</p>
+<p>While the Norse foreigners were a power at Dublin, Waterford,
+Cork and Limerick, there were not wanting occasions when one of the
+native tribes called on them for aid against another tribe, sharing
+with them the joys of victory or the sorrow of defeat, and, where
+fortune favored, dividing with them the "countless cows" taken in a
+raid. In like manner <span class="pagenum"><a name="page274" id=
+"page274"></a>[pg 274]</span> the Cinel Eogain, as we saw, hired
+the fleet of the Norsemen of the Western Isles of Scotland to help
+them to resist a raid of the Connachtmen. The example thus set was
+followed repeatedly in the coming years, and we find mention of
+Flemings, Welshmen and Saxons brought over to take one side or
+other in the tribal wars.</p>
+<p>In the same year that saw the two assemblings of the chieftains
+under Ruaidri Ua Concobar, another chieftain, Diarmaid son of
+Murcad brought in from "the land of the Saxons," as it was called,
+one of these bands of foreign mercenaries, for the most part Welsh
+descendants of the old Gaelic Britons, to aid him in his contest
+for "the kingdom of the sons of Ceinnsealaig." Two years later,
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar "granted ten cows every year from himself and
+from every king that should follow him for ever, to the Lector of
+Ard Maca, in honor of Patrick, to instruct the youths of Ireland
+and Alba in Literature."</p>
+<p>For the next year, 1170, we find this record: "Robert Mac Stepni
+and Ricard Mac Gillebert--Iarl Strangbow--came from Saxonland into
+Erin with a numerous force, and many knights and archers, in the
+army of the son of Murcad, to contest Leinster <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page275" id="page275"></a>[pg 275]</span> for
+him, and to disturb the Gaels of Erin in general; and the son of
+Murcad gave his daughter to Iarl Strangbow for coming into his
+army. They took Loch Garman--Wexford--and Port
+Lairge--Waterford--by force; and they took Gillemaire the officer
+of the fortress and Ua Faelain lord of the Deisi and his son, and
+they killed seven hundred persons there. Domnall Breagac with
+numbers of the men of Breag fell by the Leinstermen on that
+occasion. An army was led by Ruaidri Ua Concobar with the lord of
+Breifne and the lord of Oirgialla against Leinster and the
+Foreigners aforesaid, and there was a challenge of battle between
+them for the space of three days." This contest was indecisive. The
+most noteworthy event of the battle was the plundering and
+slaughter of the Danes of At-Cliat by the newcomers under Iarl
+Strangbow. The Danes had long before this given up their old pagan
+faith, converted by their captives and their Gaelic neighbors.
+Christ Church Cathedral in At-Cliat or Dublin was founded early in
+the preceding century by Sitric son of Olaf, king of the Danes of
+Dublin, and Donatus the first Danish bishop; but the oldest part of
+the present structure belongs to the time we are now speaking of:
+the close of the twelfth century. The transepts with <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page276" id="page276"></a>[pg 276]</span> their
+chevron mouldings and the principal doorway are of that period, and
+we may regard them as an offering in expiation of the early heathen
+raids on Lambay, Saint Patrick's Isle, and the early schools of the
+church.</p>
+<p>The ambitious Diarmaid Mac Murcad died shortly after the last
+battle we have recorded, "perishing without sacrament, of a
+loathsome disease;" a manifest judgment, in the eyes of the
+Chronicler, for the crime of bringing the Normans to Ireland. In
+the year that saw his death, "Henry the Second, king of the Saxons
+and duke of the Normans, came to Ireland with two hundred and forty
+ships." He established a footing in the land, as one of many
+contesting powers, but the immediate results of his coming were
+slight. This we can judge from the record of three years later: "A
+brave battle was fought by the Foreigners under Iarl Strangbow and
+the Gaels under Ruaidri Ua Concobar at Thurles, in which the
+Foreigners were finally defeated by dint of fighting. Seventeen
+hundred of the Foreigners were slain in the battle, and only a few
+of them survived with the Iarl, who proceeded in sorrow to his home
+at Port Lairge--Waterford." Iarl Strangbow died two years later at
+Dublin.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page277" id="page277"></a>[pg
+277]</span>
+<p>Norman warriors continue to appear during the succeeding years,
+fighting against the native chieftains and against each other,
+while the native chieftains continue their own quarrels, just as in
+the days of the first Norse raids. Thus in the year of Iarl
+Strangbow's death, Kells was laid waste by the Foreigners in
+alliance with the native Ui-Briain, while later in the same year
+the Foreigners were driven from Limerick by Domnall Ua-Briain, who
+laid siege to them and forced them to surrender.</p>
+<p>Two years later, four hundred and fifty of the followers of De
+Courcy, another great Norman warrior, were defeated at Maghera
+Conall in Louth, some being drowned in the river, while others were
+slain on the battlefield. In the same year De Courcy was again
+defeated with great slaughter in Down, and escaped severely wounded
+to Dublin. For At-Cliat, from being a fortress of the Danes and
+Norsemen, was gradually becoming a Norman town. The doorway of
+Christ Church Cathedral, which dates from about this time, is of
+pure Norman style.</p>
+<p>In 1186 we find a son of the great Ruaidri Ua Concobar paying a
+band of these same Foreigners three thousand cows as "wages," for
+joining him in some plundering expedition against his neighbors.
+The <span class="pagenum"><a name="page278" id="page278"></a>[pg
+278]</span> genius of strife reigned supreme, and the newcomers
+were as completely under its sway as the old clansmen. Just as we
+saw the Dark Norsemen of the ninth century coming in their long
+ships to plunder the Fair Norsemen of At-Cliat, and the Fair
+Norsemen not less vigorously retaliating, so now we find wars
+breaking out among the Normans who followed in the steps of the
+Norsemen. In 1205 the Norman chieftain who held a part of Meath
+under his armed sway, and who had already built a strong castle at
+Kells, was at war with the De Bermingham family, who at that time
+held the old Danish stronghold of Limerick. Two years later another
+contest broke out between the De Berminghams and William Marescal,
+and yet another struggle between Hugo de Lacy and De Bermingham,
+very disastrous to the retainers of the latter, for the Chronicler
+tells us that "nearly all his people were ruined."</p>
+<p>Thus the old life of tribal struggle went on. The country was
+wealthy, full of cattle and herds, silver and gold, stored corn and
+fruit, rich dyed stuffs and ornaments. The chieftains and
+provincial kings lived in state within their forts, with their
+loyal warriors around them, feasting and making merry, and the
+bards and heralds recited for their delight the great <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page279" id="page279"></a>[pg 279]</span> deeds
+of the men of old, their forefathers; the harpers charmed or
+saddened them with the world-old melodies that Deirdr&eacute; had
+played for Naisi, that Meave had listened to, that Cred&eacute;
+sang for her poet lover.</p>
+<p>The life of the church was not less vigorous and vital. There
+are many churches and cathedrals of that period of transition, as
+of the epoch before the first Norman came, which show the same
+fervor and devotion, the same faith made manifest by works of
+beauty. In truth no country in the world has so full and rich a
+record in lasting stone, beginning with the dwellings of the early
+saints who had seen the first Messenger face to face, and passing
+down through age after age, showing the life and growth of the
+faith from generation to generation.</p>
+<p>The schools, as we saw, carried on the old classical tradition,
+bringing forth monuments like the Annals of Tigearnac; and there
+was the same vigor and vital force in every part of the nation's
+life. The coming of the Normans changed this in no essential
+regard. There was something added in architecture, the Norman
+modifying the old native style; the castle and keep gradually
+taking the place of the earthwork and stone fort. And in the tenure
+of land <span class="pagenum"><a name="page280" id=
+"page280"></a>[pg 280]</span> certain new principles were
+introduced. But the sum of national life went on unbroken, less
+modified, probably, than it had been by the old Norse raids.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page281" id="page281"></a>[pg
+281]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE NORMANS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page282" id="page282"></a>[pg
+282]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page283" id="page283"></a>[pg
+283]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XII."></a>XII.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE NORMANS.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1250-1603.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>When summing up each epoch of Irish history, we may find both
+interest and profit in considering what the future of the land and
+the people might have been had certain new elements not been added.
+Thus we may try to picture to ourselves what would have been our
+history had our life moved forward from the times of Cuculain and
+Concobar, of Find and Cormac son of Art, without that transforming
+power which the fifth century brought. We may imagine the tribal
+strife and stress growing keener and fiercer, till the whole life
+and strength of the people was fruitlessly consumed in plundering
+and destroying.</p>
+<p>Or we may imagine an unbroken continuance of the epoch of
+saintly aspiration, the building of churches, the illumination of
+holy books, so dividing the religious from the secular community as
+almost to make two nations in one, a nation altogether absorbed in
+the present life, with another nation living <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page284" id="page284"></a>[pg 284]</span> in its
+midst, but dwelling wholly in the thought of the other world.
+Religion would have grown to superstition, ecstasy would have ruled
+in the hearts of the religious devotees, weakening their hold on
+the real, and wafting them away into misty regions of paradise. We
+should have had every exaggeration of ascetic practice, hermitages
+multiplying among the rocks and islands of the sea, men and women
+torturing their bodies for the saving of their souls.</p>
+<p>The raids of the Norsemen turned the strong aspirations of the
+religious schools into better channels, bringing them to a sense of
+their identity with the rest of the people, compelling them to bear
+their part of the burden of calamity and strife. The two nations
+which might have wandered farther and farther apart were thus
+welded into one, so that the spirit of religion became what it has
+ever since remained, something essential and inherent in the life
+of the whole people.</p>
+<p>After the waning of the Norsemen, a period opened full of great
+national promise in many ways. We see the church strengthened and
+confirmed, putting forth its power in admirable works of art,
+churches and cathedrals full of the fire and fervor of devotion,
+and conceived in a style truly national, with a sense <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page285" id="page285"></a>[pg 285]</span> of
+beauty altogether its own. Good morals and generous feeling mark
+the whole life of the church through this period, and the great
+archbishop whose figure we have drawn in outline is only one of
+many fine and vigorous souls among his contemporaries.</p>
+<a name="285.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/285.jpg"><img src="images/285.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>DUNLUCE CASTLE.</b></p>
+<p>The civil life of the nation, too, shows signs of singular
+promise at the same time, a promise embodied in the person of the
+king of Connacht, Ruaidri Ua Concobar, some of whose deeds we have
+recorded. There was a clearer sense of national feeling and
+national unity than ever before, a recognition of the method of
+conciliation and mutual understanding, rather than the old appeal
+to armed force, as under the genius of tribal strife. We see
+Ruaidri convoking the kings, chieftains and warriors to a solemn
+assembly, presided over by the king and the archbishops of the
+realm, and "passing good resolutions" for the settlement of
+religious and civil matters, and the better ordering of territories
+and tribes. That assembly was convened a half-century before the
+famous meeting between King John and his barons, at Runnymead among
+the Windsor meadows; and the seed then sown might have brought
+forth fruit as full of promise and potency for the future as the
+Great Charter itself. The contrast between these <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page286" id="page286"></a>[pg 286]</span> two
+historic assemblies is instructive. In the one case, we have a
+provincial king from the rich and beautiful country beyond the
+Shannon, gradually gaining such influence over the kings of the
+provinces and the chieftains of the tribes that he had come to be
+regarded as in a sense the overlord of the whole land, not through
+inherent sovreignty or divine right, but first as the chosen chief
+of his own tribe, and then as the elect of the whole body of
+chieftains, first among his peers. In this character we see Ruaidri
+settling disputes between two sections of the great Northern clan,
+and fixing a boundary between them; giving presents to the
+chieftains of the south for their support in this difficult
+decision, and exercising a beneficent influence over the whole
+people, a moral sway rather than a sovereign and despotic
+authority. It is pleasant to find the same king establishing a
+college foundation for the instruction of the youth of Ireland and
+Scotland in literature.</p>
+<p>This is what we have on the one hand. On the other, we have the
+Norman king surrounded by his barons, over whom he claimed, but
+could not exercise, despotic authority; and the Norman barons
+taking advantage of his necessity to extort promises <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page287" id="page287"></a>[pg 287]</span> and
+privileges for their own order rather than for the whole people.
+For we must remember that the Angles and Saxons had been reduced by
+conquest to a servile condition, from which they never wholly
+recovered. The ruling classes of Britain at the present day are at
+least nominal descendants of those same Norman barons; and between
+them and the mass of the people--the sons of the Saxons and
+Angles--there is still a great gulf fixed. It is quite impossible
+for one of the tillers of the soil to stand on a footing of
+equality with the old baronial class, and the gulf has widened,
+rather than closed, since the battle of Hastings and the final
+overthrow of the Saxon power.</p>
+<p>We see here the full contrast between the ideal of kingship in
+Ireland and that which grew up among the Norman conquerors of the
+Saxons. The Irish king was always in theory and often in fact a
+real representative, duly elected by the free suffrage of his
+tribesmen; he was not owner of the tribal land, as the duke of the
+Normans was; he was rather the leader of the tribe, chosen to guard
+their common possessions. The communal system of Ireland stands
+here face to face with the feudal system of the Normans.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page288" id="page288"></a>[pg
+288]</span>
+<p>It would be a study of great interest to consider what form of
+national life might have resulted in Ireland from the free growth
+of this principle of communal chieftainship. There are many
+analogies in other lands, all of which point to the likelihood of a
+slow emergence of the hereditary principle; a single family finally
+overtopping the whole nation. Had this free development taken
+place, we might have had a strong and vigorous national evolution,
+an abundant flowering of all our energies and powers through the
+Middle Ages, a rich and vigorous production of art and literature,
+equal to the wonderful blossoming of genius in the Val d'Arno and
+Venice and Rome; but we should have missed something much greater
+than all these; something towards which events and destiny have
+been leading us, through the whole of the Middle Ages and modern
+times.</p>
+<p>From this point forward we shall have to trace the working of
+that destiny, not manifested in a free blossoming and harvesting of
+our national life, but rather in the suppression and involution of
+our powers; in a development arrested by pressure from without and
+kept thus suspended until the field was ready for its real work.
+Had our fate been otherwise, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page289" id="page289"></a>[pg 289]</span> we might now be looking
+back to a great mediaeval past, as Spain and Austria look back; it
+is fated that we shall look not back but forwards, brought as we
+are by destiny into the midst of the modern world, a people with
+energy unimpaired, full of vigorous vital force, uncorrupted by the
+weakening influence of wealth, taught by our own history the
+measureless evil of oppression, and therefore cured once for all of
+the desire to dominate others. Finally, the intense inner life
+towards which we have been led by the checking of our outward
+energies has opened to us secrets of the invisible world which are
+of untold value, of measureless promise for all future time.</p>
+<p>We have, therefore, to trace the gradual involution of our
+national life; the checking and restraining of that free
+development which would assuredly have been ours, had our national
+life grown forward unimpeded and uninfluenced from without, from
+the days when the Norse power waned. The first great check to that
+free development came from the feudal system, the principle of
+which was brought over by Robert FitzStephen, Richard FitzGilbert,
+the De Courcys, the De Lacys, the De Berminghams and their peers,
+whose coming we have recorded. They <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page290" id="page290"></a>[pg 290]</span> added new elements to
+the old struggle of district against district, tribe against tribe,
+but they added something more enduring--an idea and principle
+destined almost wholly to supplant the old communal tenure which
+was the genius of the native polity. The outward and visible sign
+of that new principle was manifested in the rapid growth of feudal
+castles, with their strong keeps, at every point of vantage gained
+by the Norman lords. They were lords of the land, not leaders of
+the tribe, and their lordship was fitly symbolized in the great
+gloomy towers of stone that everywhere bear witness to their
+strength, almost untouched as they are by the hand of time.</p>
+<p>When the duke of the Normans overthrew the Saxon king at
+Hastings, he became real owner of the soil of England. His barons
+and lords held their estates from him, in return for services to be
+rendered to him direct. To reward them for supporting him, first in
+that decisive battle, and then in whatever contests he might engage
+in, they were granted the right to tax certain tracts of country,
+baronies, earldoms, or counties, according to the title they bore.
+This tax was exacted first in service, then in produce, and finally
+in coin. It was the penalty of conquest, the tribute of the subject
+Saxons and Angles. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page291" id=
+"page291"></a>[pg 291]</span> There was no pretence of a free
+contract; no pretence that the baron returned to the farmer or
+laborer an equal value for the tax thus exacted. It was tribute
+pure and simple, with no claim to be anything else. That system of
+tribute has been consecrated in the land tenure of England, and the
+class enriched by that tribute, and still bearing the territorial
+titles which are its hall-mark, has always been, as it is to-day,
+the dominant class alike in political and social life. In other
+words, the Norman subjugation of Saxon and Angle is thoroughly
+effective at this moment.</p>
+<p>This principle of private taxation, as a right granted by the
+sovereign, came over to Ireland with the De Courcys and De Lacys
+and their like. But it by no means overspread Ireland in a single
+tide, as in England, after Hastings was lost and won. Its progress
+was slow; so slow, indeed, that the old communal system lingers
+here and there at the present day. The communal chiefs lived their
+lives side by side with the Norman barons, fighting now with the
+barons, now with each other; and the same generous rivalry, as we
+have seen, led to abundant fighting among the barons also. The
+principle of feudal ownership was working its way, however. We
+shall see later how great was its ultimate influence,--not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page292" id="page292"></a>[pg
+292]</span> so much by direct action, as in the quite modern
+reaction which its abuse provoked--a reaction from which have been
+evolved certain principles of value to the whole world.</p>
+<p>Leaving this force to work its way through the centuries, we may
+turn now to the life of the times as it appeared to the men and
+women who lived in them, and as they themselves have recorded it.
+We shall find fewer great personalities; nor should we expect this
+to be otherwise, if we are right in thinking that the age of
+struggle, with its efflorescence of great persons, had done its
+work, and was already giving way before the modern spirit, with its
+genius for the universal rather than the personal. We shall have
+contests to chronicle during the following centuries, whether
+engendered within or forced upon us from without; but they are no
+longer the substance of our history. They are only the last clouds
+of a departing storm; the mists before the dawn of the modern
+world.</p>
+<p>The most noteworthy of these contests in the early Norman age
+was the invasion under Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king,
+who brought a great fleet and army to Larne, then as now the Irish
+port nearest to the northern kingdom. The first sufferers
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page293" id="page293"></a>[pg
+293]</span> by this invasion were the Normans of Heath, and we
+presently find these same Normans allied with Feidlimid son of Aed
+Ua Concobar and the Connachtmen, fighting side by side against the
+common foe. This was in 1315; two years later Robert Bruce joined
+his brother, and it was not till 1319 that Edward Bruce finally
+fell at Dundalk, "and no achievement had been performed in Ireland
+for a long time before," the Chronicler tells us, "from which
+greater benefit had accrued to the country than from this; for
+during the three and a half years that Edward had spent in it, a
+universal famine prevailed to such a degree that men were wont to
+devour one another."</p>
+<p>A ray of light is thus shed on the intellectual and moral life
+of the time: "1398: Garrett Earl of Desmond--or Deas-muma--a
+cheerful and courteous man, who excelled all the Normans and many
+of the Irish in the knowledge of the Irish language, poetry,
+history and other learning, died after the victory of peace." We
+see that the Normans are already fallen under the same influence of
+assimilation which had transformed the Danes two hundred years
+before.</p>
+<p>A half-century later, we get a vigorous and lurid picture of the
+survival of the old tribal strife: "1454: Donell O'Donell was
+installed in the lordship of <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page294" id="page294"></a>[pg 294]</span> Tyrconnell, in
+opposition to Rury O'Donell. Not long after this, Donell was
+treacherously taken captive and imprisoned in the castle of
+Inis--an island in Lough Swilly. As soon as Rury received tidings
+of this, he mustered an army thither, and proceeded to demolish the
+castle in which Donell was imprisoned with a few men to guard him.
+Rury and his army burned the great door of the castle, and set the
+stairs on fire; whereupon Donell, thinking that his life would be
+taken as soon as the army should reach the castle,--it being his
+dying request, as he thought-- that he might be loosed from his
+fetters, as he deemed it a disgrace to be killed while imprisoned
+and fettered. His request was granted, and he was loosed from his
+fetters; after which he ascended to the battlements of the castle,
+to view the motions of the invading army. And he saw Rury beneath,
+with eyes flashing enmity, and waiting until the fire should
+subside, that he might enter and kill him. Donell then, finding a
+large stone by his side, hurled it directly down upon Rury, so that
+it fell on the crest of his helmet, on the top of his head, and
+crushed it, so that he instantly died. The invading forces were
+afterwards defeated, and by this throw Donell saved his own life
+and acquired the lordship of Tyrconnell."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page295" id="page295"></a>[pg
+295]</span>
+<p>There is a whole historical romance in that single picture; the
+passage could not easily be surpassed for direct and forcible
+narrative. A few years later, we come on one of the most amusing
+things in the whole series of annals, a perfect contrast to the
+grim ferocity of the feud of the O'Donells. In 1472 "a wonderful
+animal was sent to Ireland by the king of England. She resembled a
+mare, and was of a yellow color, with the hoofs of a cow, a long
+neck, a very large head, a large tail, which was ugly and scant of
+hair. She had a saddle of her own. Wheat and salt were her usual
+food. She used to draw the largest sled-burden behind her. She used
+to kneel when passing under any doorway, however high, and also to
+let her rider mount." It is evident that the Gaelic language in the
+fifteenth century lacked a name for the camel. The same year, we
+are told, "the young earl of Desmond was set at liberty by the
+MacCarthys; he disabled Garrett, son of the earl of Kildare."</p>
+<p>Here is another passage which vies in vividness and force with
+the story of the death of Rury O'Donell: "1557: Two spies, Donough
+and Maurice by name, entered the camp of John O'Neill by Lough
+Swilly, and mingled with the troop without being noticed; for in
+consequence of the number and <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page296" id="page296"></a>[pg 296]</span> variety of the troops
+who were there, it was not easy for them to discriminate between
+one another, even if it were day, except by recognizing their
+chieftains alone. The two persons aforesaid proceeded from one fire
+to another, until they came to the great central fire, which was at
+the entrance of the son of O'Neill's tent; and a huge torch,
+thicker than a man's body, was continually flaming at a short
+distance from the fire, and sixty grim and redoubtable warriors
+with sharp, keen axes, terrible and ready for action, and sixty
+stern and terrific Scots, with massive, broad and heavy striking
+swords in their hands, ready to strike and parry, were guarding the
+son of O'Neill. When the time came for the troops to dine, and food
+was divided and distributed among them, the two spies whom we have
+mentioned stretched out their hands to the distributor like the
+rest, and that which fell to their share was a measure of meal, and
+a suitable complement of butter. With this testimony of their
+adventure they returned to their own people."</p>
+<p>Here again, what a picture of the camp-life of the age; the
+darkness of night, the great central fire with the sixty grim and
+redoubtable warriors armed with keen axes, terrible and ready for
+action, and the sixty stern and terrific Scots with their massive
+swords. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page297" id=
+"page297"></a>[pg 297]</span> The admirable manner of the narrative
+is as striking as the fierce vigor of the life portrayed. So we
+might go on, adding red pages of martial records, but in reality
+adding nothing to our understanding of the times. The life of the
+land was as full and abundant as of old, and one outcome of that
+life we may touch on rather more at length.</p>
+<p>We have said much of the old religious schools of Ireland, with
+their fine and vigorous intellectual life, which did so much to
+carry forward the torch of culture to our modern world. For nearly
+seven hundred years these great schools seem to have developed
+wholly along indigenous lines, once they had accepted the body of
+classical culture from the Roman Empire, then tottering to its
+fall. The full history of that remarkable chapter in the world's
+spiritual life has yet to be written; but this we can foretell,
+that when written, it will abound with rich material and ample
+evidence of a sound and generous culture, inspired throughout with
+the fervor of true faith.</p>
+<p>About the time when the Norman warriors began to mingle with the
+fighting chieftains of the old native tribes, a change came over
+the religious history of the country. After sending forth men of
+power and light to the awakening lands of modern Europe, Ireland
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page298" id="page298"></a>[pg
+298]</span> began to receive a returning tide, to reap a harvest
+from these same lands, in the friars and abbots of the great
+Continental orders founded by men like Saint Bernard, Saint
+Dominick and Saint Francis of Assisi. A change in the church
+architecture of the period visibly records this spiritual change;
+continental forms appear, beginning with the rounded arches of the
+Normans, and passing gradually into the various forms of pointed
+arches which we know as Gothic. Very beautiful Abbeys belonging to
+this epoch remain everywhere throughout the island, making once
+more evident--what strikes us at every point of our study--that no
+country in the world is so rich in these lasting records of every
+step of our national life, whether in pagan or Christian times.</p>
+<p>We have said much of the archaic cromlechs. We have recorded the
+great Pyramids by the Boyne telling us of the genius of the De
+Danaans. The Milesian epoch is even now revealed to us in the great
+earthworks of Tara and Emain and Cruacan. We can, if we wish, climb
+the mound of heaped-up earth where was the fortress of Cuculain, or
+look over the green plains from the hill of Find.</p>
+<a name="299.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/299.jpg"><img src="images/299.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>MELLIFONT ABBEY, CO. LOUTH.</b></p>
+<p>In like manner, there is an unbroken series of monuments through
+the early Christian epoch, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page299"
+id="page299"></a>[pg 299]</span> beginning with the oratories of
+the sixth century, continuing through the early churches of
+Killiney, Moville, Dalkey, Glendalough and Monasterboice, from
+before the Norse inroads; followed by the epoch of Round Towers, or
+protected belfries, with their churches, nearly three score of
+these Round Towers remaining in fair preservation, while many are
+perfect from base to apex; and culminating in Cormac's chapel and
+the beautiful group of buildings on Cashel Rock. For the next
+period, the age of transition after the waning of the Norsemen and
+the coming of the first Normans, we have many monuments in the
+Norman style, like the door of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin,
+with its romance of Danish conversion and Norse religious
+fervor.</p>
+<p>Finally, we come to the age whose progress we have just
+recorded, which covers the whole of the Middle Ages. For this
+period, which was for Ireland an epoch of foreign influence much
+more than of foreign rule, we have many beautiful Abbeys, built for
+those foreign orders whose coming was in a sense a return tide, a
+backward flow of the old missionary spirit which went forth from
+Ireland over nascent modern Europe. The life of these abbeys was
+full of rich imaginative and religious power; it <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page300" id="page300"></a>[pg 300]</span>
+abounded in urbanity and ripe culture of a somewhat selfish and
+exclusive type. Yet we cannot but feel a limitless affection and
+sympathy for the abbots and friars of the days of old who have left
+us such a rich heritage of beauty and grace.</p>
+<p>All these abbeys seem to have been formed on a single plan: a
+cruciform church symbolized the source of all their inspiration,
+its choir extending towards the east, whence the Light had come;
+the nave, or main body of the church, was entered by the great
+western door, and the arms of the cross, the transepts, extended to
+the north and south. Here is a very beautiful symbol, a true
+embodiment of the whole spirit and inspiration of the monastic
+orders. From one of the transepts a side door generally led to the
+domestic buildings, the dormitory, the refectory, the chapter
+house, where the friars assembled in conclave under the presidency
+of the abbot. There were lesser buildings, store-rooms, granaries,
+work-rooms, but these were the kernel of the establishment. The
+church was the center of all things, and under its floor the friars
+were at last laid to rest, while brother friars carved tombs for
+them and epitaphs, adding a new richness of decoration to the
+already beautiful church.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page301" id="page301"></a>[pg
+301]</span>
+<p>We may record a few of these old foundations, showing at the
+same time the present state of the old abbey buildings. At Newtown
+on the northern bank of the Boyne, about a mile below Trim, Simon
+Rochfort founded an abbey for the Augustinian Canons in 1206,
+dedicating it to Saint Peter and Saint Paul. The capitals of the
+pillars in the church, the vaulting of the roof and the shafts of
+the arches which supported the tower are full of singular grace and
+beauty, even now when the abbey is roofless and in part destroyed,
+while the corbels and mouldings round the lancet-shaped windows are
+full of luxuriant fancy and charm. We can divine from them the full
+and rich spiritual life which brought forth such exquisite flowers
+of beauty; we can imagine the fine aroma of fervor and saintly
+peace which brooded over these consecrated aisles.</p>
+<p>A few miles below Trim, and an equal distance from the old royal
+palace of Tara, Bective Abbey stands on the northern bank of the
+Boyne, with a square, battlemented tower overshadowing its
+cloistered quadrangle. The cinque-foil cloister arches, the fillets
+that bind the clustered shafts of the pillars, the leaf ornaments
+of the plinths at their base all speak of a luxuriant sense of
+beauty and grace, of a <span class="pagenum"><a name="page302" id=
+"page302"></a>[pg 302]</span> spirit of pure and admirable artistic
+work. This rich creative power thus breaking forth in lovely
+handiwork is only the outward sign of a full inner life, kindled by
+the fire of aspiration, and glowing with the warm ardor of
+devotion. Bective Abbey dates from about 1150. We are told that the
+king of Meath who founded it for the Cistercian order "endowed it
+with two hundred and forty-five acres of land, a fishing-weir and a
+mill." From this meager outline we can almost restore the picture
+of the life, altogether idyllic and full of quiet delight, that the
+old Friars lived among the meadows of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>Grey Abbey was founded a little later, in 1193, for the same
+Cistercian order, where the promontory of the Ards divides
+Strangford Lough from the eastern sea. Over the waters of the
+lough, the red sandstone hills of north Down make a frame for the
+green of the meadows, as the tide laps and murmurs close to the old
+monastic church. Grey Abbey owes its foundation to the piety of a
+princess of the Isle of Man, wedded to De Courcy, the Norman
+warrior whose victories and defeats we have recorded. The great
+beauty of its church is due to the soaring loftiness of the eastern
+window, and the graceful daring of the arches which in former days
+upheld the central tower.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page303" id="page303"></a>[pg
+303]</span>
+<p>Other Cistercian foundations are commemorated in the names of
+Abbey-leix in Queen's county, and Abbey-dorney and Abbey-feale in
+Kerry; all three dating from after the reformation of the order by
+Saint Bernard the Younger, though the work of that ardent
+missionary did not apparently extend its influence to Ireland until
+a later date. This reformer of the Cistercians must not be confused
+with the elder Saint Bernard, whose hospice guards the pass of the
+Alps which bears his name. Saint Bernard of the Alps died in 1008,
+while Saint Bernard the reformer was born in 1093, dying sixty
+years later as abbot of Clara vallis or Clairvaux, on the bank of
+the Aube in northern France. It was at this Abbey of the Bright
+Vale, or Clara vallis, that Archbishop Maelmaedog resigned his
+spirit to heaven, five years before the death of the younger Saint
+Bernard, then abbot there. This is a link between the old
+indigenous church and the continental orders of the Friars.</p>
+<p>Killmallock Abbey, in Limerick, belonged to the order of the
+Dominicans, founded by the scion of the Guzmans, the ardent apostle
+of Old Castile, known to history as Saint Dominick. Here again we
+have a beautiful abbey church with a square central tower,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page304" id="page304"></a>[pg
+304]</span> upborne on soaring and graceful arches from the point
+where the nave joined the choir. There is only one transept--on the
+south--so that the church is not fully cruciform, a peculiarity
+shared by several other Dominican buildings. The eastern window and
+the window of this transept are full of delicate grace and beauty,
+each containing five lights, and marked by the singularly charming
+manner in which the mullions are interlaced above. Enough remains
+of the cloister and the domestic buildings for us to bring back to
+life the picture of the old monastic days, when the good Friars
+worked and prayed there, with the sunlight falling on them through
+the delicate network of the windows.</p>
+<p>Holycross Abbey, near Thurles in Tipperary, was another of the
+Cistercian foundations, its charter, dating from 1182, being still
+in existence. Its church is cruciform; the nave is separated from
+the north aisle by round arches, and from the south aisle by
+pointed arches, which gives it a singular and unusual beauty. The
+great western window of the nave, with its six lights, is also very
+wonderful. Two chapels are attached to the north transept, with a
+passage between them, its roof supported by a double row of pointed
+arches upheld by twisted pillars. The <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page305" id="page305"></a>[pg 305]</span> roof
+is delicately groined, as is the roof of the choir, and the whole
+abbey breathes a luxuriant richness of imagination, bearing
+everywhere the signs of high creative genius. The same lavish
+imagination is shown everywhere in the interlaced tracery, the
+black limestone giving the artist an admirable vehicle for his
+work. Though the charter dates from the twelfth century, some of
+the work is about two centuries later, showing finely the
+continuity of life and spiritual power in the old monastic
+days.</p>
+<a name="305.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/305.jpg"><img src="images/305.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>HOLY CROSS ABBEY, CO. TIPPERARY.</b></p>
+<p>The Friars of Saint Augustine, who were in possession of the
+abbey at Newtown on the Boyne, had another foundation not far from
+West port in Mayo, in the Abbey of Ballintober, founded in 1216 by
+a son of the great Ruaidri Ua Concobar. Here also we have the
+cruciform church, with four splendid arches rising from the
+intersection of nave and choir, and once supporting the tower. The
+Norman windows over the altar, with their dog-tooth mouldings, are
+very perfect. In a chapel on the south of the choir are figures of
+the old abbots carved in stone.</p>
+<p>One of the Ui-Briain founded a Franciscan Abbey at Ennis in
+Clare about 1240, which is more perfectly preserved than any of
+those we have described. The tower still stands, rising over the
+junction <span class="pagenum"><a name="page306" id=
+"page306"></a>[pg 306]</span> of nave and choir; the refectory,
+chapter house, and some other buildings still remain, while the
+figure of the patron, Saint Francis of Assisi, still stands beside
+the altar at the north pier of the nave.</p>
+<p>Clare Abbey, a mile from Ennis, was founded for the Augustine
+Friars in 1195, and here also the tower still stands, dominating
+the surrounding plain. Three miles further south, on the shore of
+Killone Lake, was yet another abbey of the same period, while
+twenty miles to the north, at Corcomroe on the shore of Galway Bay,
+the Cistercians had yet another home.</p>
+<p>We might continue the list indefinitely. Some of the most
+beautiful of our abbeys still remain to be recorded, but we can do
+no more than give their names: Bonamargy was built for the
+Franciscans in Antrim in the fifteenth century; the Dominican
+priory at Roscommon dates from 1257; the Cistercian Abbey of
+Jerpoint in Kilkenny was begun in 1180; Molana Abbey, in Waterford,
+was built for the Augustinians on the site of a very old church;
+and finally Knockmoy Abbey in Galway, famous for its fourteenth
+century frescoes, was begun in 1189. We must remember that every
+one of these represents, and by its variations of style indicates,
+an unbroken <span class="pagenum"><a name="page307" id=
+"page307"></a>[pg 307]</span> life through several centuries. The
+death-knell of the old life of the abbeys and priories, in Ireland
+as in England, was struck in the year 1537 by the law which
+declared their lands forfeited to the crown; as the result of the
+religious controversies of the beginning of the sixteenth
+century.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page308" id="page308"></a>[pg
+308]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page309" id="page309"></a>[pg
+309]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page310" id="page310"></a>[pg
+310]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page311" id="page311"></a>[pg
+311]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIII."></a>XIII.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1603-1660.</h3>
+<p>The confiscation of the abbey lands, as the result of religious
+controversy, closed an epoch of ecclesiastical life in Ireland,
+which we cannot look back on without great regret for the noble and
+beautiful qualities it brought forth in such abundance. There is a
+perennial charm and fascination in the quiet life of the old
+religious houses--in the world, yet not of the world--which appeals
+to aesthetic and moral elements in our minds in equal degree. From
+their lovely churches and chapter-houses the spirits of the old
+monks invite us to join them in an unworldly peace on earth, a
+renewal of the golden age, a life full of aspiration and
+self-forgetfulness, with all the burdens of egotism laid aside.</p>
+<p>Yet after all is said, we can hardly fail to see that out of the
+spoliation and scattering of the religious orders much good came.
+There was a danger that, like the older indigenous schools which
+they supplanted, these later foundations might divide the nation
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page312" id="page312"></a>[pg
+312]</span> in two, all things within their consecrated walls being
+deemed holy, while all without was unregenerate, given up to wrath.
+A barrier of feelings and hopes thus springing up, tends to harden
+from year to year, till at last we have a religious caste grown
+proud and arrogant, and losing all trace of the spiritual fervor
+which is its sole reason for being.</p>
+<p>The evils which surround a wealthy church are great and easily
+to be understood, nor need we lay stress on them. There is, indeed,
+cause for wonder in the spectacle of the followers of him "who had
+not where to lay his head" become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest
+owners of land in Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses
+without number might and did often arise from this very fact.
+Ambition, the desire of wealth, the mere love of ease, led many to
+profess a religious life who had never passed through that
+transformation of will and understanding which is the essence of
+religion. The very purpose of religion was forgotten, or allowed to
+be hidden away under things excellent in themselves, yet not
+essential; and difference of view about these unessential things
+led to fierce and bitter controversy, and later to open strife and
+war.</p>
+<p>We take religion, in its human aspect, to mean the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page313" id="page313"></a>[pg 313]</span> growth
+of a new and wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive
+consciousness of the individual; a superseding of the personal by
+the humane; a change from egotism to a more universal
+understanding; so that each shall act, not in order to gain an
+advantage over others, but rather to attain the greatest good for
+himself and others equally; that one shall not dominate another for
+his own profit, but shall rather seek to draw forth in that other
+whatever is best and truest, so that both may find their finest
+growth. Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one's
+neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul,
+the common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse
+from the beginning. Individual consciousness is in no way effaced;
+something new, wider and more humane, something universal, is added
+to it from above; something consciously common to all souls. And
+through the inspiration of that larger soul, the individual life
+for the first time comes to its true power--a power which is held
+by all pure souls in common.</p>
+<p>We can see that something like this was the original inspiration
+of the religious orders. Their very name of Friars or Brothers
+speaks of the ideal of a common life above egotism. They sought a
+new <span class="pagenum"><a name="page314" id="page314"></a>[pg
+314]</span> birth through the death of selfishness, through
+self-sacrifice and renunciation. All their life in common was a
+symbol of the single soul inspiring them, the very form of their
+churches bearing testimony to their devotion. More than that, the
+beauty and inspiration which still radiate from the old abbey
+buildings show how often and in how large a degree that ideal was
+actually attained.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless we can very well see how the possession of large
+wealth and costly offerings might be a hindrance to that spirit,
+fanning back to life the smouldering fires of desire. We can see
+even more clearly that the division between the secular and the
+religious life would tend to raise a moral barrier, hardening that
+very sense of separation which the humane and universal
+consciousness seeks to kill. Finally, we should see what the world
+has often seen: the disciples of the Nazarene dwelling in palaces,
+and vying with princes in the splendor of their retinues. This is
+hardly the way to make real the teaching of "the kingdom not of
+this world." This world, in the meaning of that saying, is the old
+world of egotism, of self-assertion, of selfish rivalry, of the
+sense of separation. The kingdom is that very realm of humane and
+universal consciousness <span class="pagenum"><a name="page315" id=
+"page315"></a>[pg 315]</span> added from above, the sense of the
+one soul common to all men and working through all men, whether
+they know it or not.</p>
+<p>We can, therefore, see that the confiscation of the monasteries,
+and even the persecution of the religious orders, might be the
+cause of lasting spiritual good; it was like the opening of
+granaries and the scattering of grain abroad over the fields. The
+religious force, instead of drawing men out of the world,
+thenceforth was compelled to work among all men, not creating
+beautiful abbeys but transforming common lives. Persecution was the
+safeguard of sincerity, the fire of purification, from which men's
+spirits came forth pure gold. Among all nations of the world,
+Ireland has long held the first place for pure morals, especially
+in the relations of sex; and this is increasingly true of those
+provinces where the old indigenous element is most firmly
+established. We may affirm that the spiritualizing of religious
+feeling through persecution has had its share in bringing this
+admirable result, working, as it did, on a race which has ever held
+a high ideal of purity.</p>
+<p>Thus out of evil comes good; out of oppression, rapacity and
+confiscation grow pure unselfishness, an unworldly ideal, a sense
+of the invisible realm. We <span class="pagenum"><a name="page316"
+id="page316"></a>[pg 316]</span> shall presently see the same
+forces of rapacity and avarice sowing the seeds for a not less
+excellent harvest in the world of civil life.</p>
+<p>The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first
+Norman adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal
+recognition over the whole country until the seventeenth. The old
+communal tenure of the Brehon law was gradually superseded, so
+that, instead of innumerable tribal territories with elected
+chiefs, there grew up a system of estates, where the land was owned
+by one man and tilled by others. The germ of this tenure was the
+right of private taxation over certain districts, granted by the
+Norman duke to his barons and warriors as the reward for their help
+in battle. Feudal land tenure never was, and never pretended to be,
+a contract between cultivator and landowner for their mutual
+benefit. It was rather the right to prey on the farmer, assigned to
+the landowner by the king, and paid for in past or present services
+to the king. In other words, the head of the Norman army invited
+his officers to help themselves to a share of the cattle and crops
+over certain districts of England, and promised to aid them in
+securing their plunder, in case the Saxon cultivator was rash
+enough to resist. The baronial <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page317" id="page317"></a>[pg 317]</span> order presently ceased
+to render any real service to their duke, beyond upholding him that
+he might uphold them. But there was no such surcease for the Saxon
+cultivator. The share of his cattle and crops which he was
+compelled to give up to the Norman baron became more rigidly
+defined, more strictly exacted, with every succeeding century, and
+the whole civil state of England was built up on this
+principle.</p>
+<p>The baronial order assembled at Runnymead to force the hand of
+the king. From that time forward their power increased, while the
+king's power waned. But there was no Runnymead for the Saxon
+cultivator. He continued, as to this day he continues, to pay the
+share of his cattle and crops to the Norman baron or his successor,
+in return for services--no longer rendered--to the king. The whole
+civil state of England, therefore, depends on the principle of
+private taxation; the Norman barons and their successors receiving
+a share of the cattle and crops of the whole country, year after
+year, generation after generation, century after century, as
+payment for services long become purely imaginary, and even in the
+beginning rendered not to the cultivator who was taxed, but to the
+head of the armed invaders, who <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page318" id="page318"></a>[pg 318]</span> stood ready to enforce
+the payment. The Constitution of England embodies this very
+principle even now, in the twentieth century. Two of the three
+Estates,--King, Lords and Commons,--in whom the law-making power is
+vested, represent the Norman conquest, while even the third, still
+called the Lower House, boasts of being "an assembly of gentlemen,"
+that is, of those who possess the right of private taxation of
+land, the right to claim a share of the cattle and crops of the
+whole country without giving anything at all in return.</p>
+<p>This is the system which English influence slowly introduced
+into Ireland, and with the reign of the first Stuarts the change
+was practically complete, guaranteed by law, and enforced by armed
+power. The tribesmen were now tenants of their former elected
+chief, in whom the ownership of the tribal land was invested; the
+right of privately taxing the tribesmen was guaranteed to the chief
+by law, and a share of all cattle and crops was his by legal right,
+not as head of the tribe, but as owner of the land, with power to
+dispossess the tribesmen if they failed to pay his tax.</p>
+<p>But very many districts had long before this come under the
+dominion of Norman adventurers, like the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page319" id="page319"></a>[pg 319]</span> De
+Courcys, the De Lacys, and the rest, of whose coming we have told.
+They also enjoyed the right of private taxation over the districts
+under their dominion, and, naturally, had power to assign this
+right to others,--not only to their heirs, but to their
+creditors,--or even simply to sell the right of taxing a certain
+district to the highest bidder in open market.</p>
+<p>The tribal warfare of the Middle Ages had brought many of the
+old chiefs and Norman lords into open strife with the central
+power, with the result that the possessions of unsuccessful chiefs
+and lords were continually assigned by the law-courts to those who
+stood on the side of the central power, the right to tax certain
+districts thus changing hands indefinitely. The law-courts thus
+came into possession of a very potent weapon, whether for rewarding
+the friends or punishing the enemies of the central power, or
+simply for the payment of personal and partisan favors.</p>
+<p>During the reign of the first Stuarts the full significance of
+this weapon seems to have been grasped. We see an unlimited traffic
+in the right to tax; estates confiscated and assigned to
+time-serving officials, and endless abuses arising from the
+corruption of the courts, the judges being appointed by the very
+persons who were presently to invoke the law <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page320" id="page320"></a>[pg 320]</span> to
+their own profit. The tribal system was submerged, and the time of
+uncertainty was taken advantage of to introduce unlimited abuses,
+to assign to adventurers a fat share of other men's goods, to
+create a class legally owning the land, and entitled, in virtue of
+that ownership, to a share of the cattle and crops which they had
+done nothing to produce.</p>
+<p>The Stuarts were at this very time sowing the seeds of civil war
+in England by the introduction of like abuses, the story of which
+has been repeatedly told; and we are all familiar with the history
+of the great uprising which was thereby provoked, to the temporary
+eclipse of the power of the crown. The story of the like uprising
+at the same epoch, and from kindred causes, in Ireland, is much
+more obscure, but equally worth recording, and to this uprising we
+may now turn.</p>
+<p>Its moral causes we have already spoken of. There was, first,
+the confiscation of the abbey lands, and the transfer of church
+revenues and buildings to Anglican clergy--clergy, that is, who
+recognized the sovreign of England as the head of the church. This
+double confiscation touched the well-springs of intense animosity,
+the dispossessed abbots using all the influences of their order in
+foreign lands to bring <span class="pagenum"><a name="page321" id=
+"page321"></a>[pg 321]</span> about their re-installation, while
+the controversy as to the headship of the church aroused all the
+fierce and warring passions that had been raging on the Continent
+since the beginning of the sixteenth century.</p>
+<p>There were, besides, the griefs of the dispossessed chieftains,
+whose tribal lands had been given to others. Chief among these was
+the famous house of O'Neill, the descendants of Nial, the old pagan
+monarch whose wars are thought to have brought the captive of
+Slemish Mountain to Ireland. The O'Neills, like their neighbors the
+O'Donnells, descendants of Domnall, had been one of the great
+forces of tribal strife for eighty generations, and they now saw
+their lands confiscated and given over to strangers. But they were
+only representatives of a feeling which was universal; an indignant
+opposition to arbitrary and tyrannous expropriation.</p>
+<p>The head of the O'Neills had made his peace with the Tudors on
+the very day Queen Elizabeth died, and the tribal lands had been
+guaranteed to him in perpetuity. But within four years plots were
+set on foot by the central authorities, possibly acting in good
+faith, to dispossess him and the chief of the O'Donnells on a
+charge of treason; and in 1607 both <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page322" id="page322"></a>[pg 322]</span> fled to the Continent.
+Their example was followed by numberless others, and the more
+restless and combative spirits among the tribesmen, who preferred
+fighting to the tilling of their fields, entered the continental
+armies in large numbers.</p>
+<p>When the chiefs of the north fled to the Continent, their lands
+were held to have reverted to the crown; and not only was the right
+to tax the produce of these lands assigned to adherents of the
+central power, but numbers of farmers from the Scottish lowlands,
+and in lesser degree from England, were brought over and settled on
+the old tribal territory. The tribesmen, with their cattle, were
+driven to less fertile districts, and the valleys were tilled by
+the transplanted farmers of Scotland. This was the Plantation of
+Ulster, of 1611,--four years after the flight of O'Neill and
+O'Donnell. The religious controversies of Scotland were thereby
+introduced into Ireland, so that there were three parties now in
+conflict--the old indigenous church, dispossessed of revenues and
+buildings, and even of civil rights; the Anglicans who had received
+these revenues and buildings, and, lastly, the
+Dissenters--Presbyterians and Puritans--equally opposed to both the
+former.</p>
+<p>The struggle between the king and Parliament of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page323" id="page323"></a>[pg 323]</span>
+England now found an echo in Ireland, the Anglican party
+representing the king, while the Scottish and English newcomers
+sympathized with the Parliament. A cross-fire of interests and
+animosities was thus aroused, which greatly complicated the first
+elements of strife. The Parliament at Dublin was in the hands of
+the Puritan party, and was in no sense representative of the other
+elements of the country. There was a Puritan army of about ten
+thousand, as a garrison of defence for the Puritan newcomers in
+Ulster, and there were abundant materials of an opposing national
+army in the tribal warriors both at home and on the Continent.</p>
+<p>These national materials were presently drawn together by the
+head of the O'Neills, known to history as Owen Roe, an admirable
+leader and a most accomplished man, who wrote and spoke Latin,
+Spanish, French and English, as well as his mother-tongue. Owen Roe
+O'Neill had won renown on many continental battlefields, and was
+admirably fitted by genius and training to lead a national party,
+not only in council but in the field. The nucleus of his army he
+established in Tyrone, gaining numbers of recruits whom he rapidly
+turned into excellent soldiers.</p>
+<p>This took place at the end of 1641 and the beginning
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page324" id="page324"></a>[pg
+324]</span> of 1642, and the other forces of the country were
+organized about the same time. The lines of difference between the
+Anglican and Catholic parties were at this time very lightly drawn,
+and the Norman lords found themselves able to co-operate with the
+Catholic bishops in forming a General Assembly at Kells, which
+straightway set itself to frame a Constitution for the country.</p>
+<p>The Norman lords had meanwhile assembled and organized their
+retainers, so that there were now three armies in Ireland: the
+garrison of the Scottish settlers under Monroe, strongly in
+sympathy with the Puritans; the tribal army under Owen Roe O'Neill;
+and the army of the Norman lords. The General Assembly outlined a
+system of parliamentary representation in which the Lords and
+Commons were to form a single House, the latter, two hundred and
+twenty-six in number, representing all the important cities and
+towns. A supreme Cabinet was to be formed, composed of six members
+for each of the four provinces, twenty-four in all, who might be
+lords spiritual or temporal, or commoners, according to the choice
+of the Parliament. This Cabinet, thus selected from the whole
+Parliament, was the responsible executive of the country; and under
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page325" id="page325"></a>[pg
+325]</span> Supreme Council a series of Provincial Councils and
+County Councils were to be formed along the same lines.</p>
+<a name="325.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/325.jpg"><img src="images/325.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>DONEGAL CASTLE.</b></p>
+<p>This plan was adopted at a general meeting of all the
+influential forces of the country, which assembled in May at
+Kilkenny, where many Parliaments had sat during the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries. Writs were issued for elections under the new
+Constitution, and the date of the first assembly of the new
+Parliament was fixed for October. The new national body enjoyed
+abundant revenues, and no small state marked its deliberations in
+Kilkenny. We read of an endless series of illuminations,
+receptions, banquets and balls,--the whole of the Norman nobility
+of Leinster lavishing their great wealth in magnificent display.
+The Supreme Council journeyed in state from Kilkenny to Wexford,
+from Wexford to Waterford, from Waterford to Limerick and Galway,
+surrounded by hundreds of horsemen with drawn swords, and
+accompanied by an army of officials. We hear of "civil and military
+representations of comedies and stage plays, feasts and banquets,
+and palate-enticing dishes."</p>
+<p>The General Assembly, duly elected, finally met on October 23,
+1642, at Kilkenny. On the same <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page326" id="page326"></a>[pg 326]</span> day was fought the
+battle of Edgehill, between the king of England and the forces of
+the English Parliament. This battle was the signal for division of
+counsels in the new Assembly. The Norman lords of Leinster, who
+stood on the ground of feudalism, and lived under the shadow of
+royal authority, were strongly drawn to take the side of the king
+against the English Parliament, and overtures of negotiation were
+made, which came near gaining a recognition and legalization of the
+General Assembly by the English Crown.</p>
+<p>While the leaders at Kilkenny were being drawn towards the
+royalists of England, Owen Roe O'Neill was successfully holding
+Ulster against the Puritan forces under Monroe and Leslie, with
+their headquarters at Carrickfergus. Thus matters went on till the
+autumn of 1643, when we find him inflicting a serious defeat on the
+English army under Monk and Moore at Portlester in Meath, in which
+Moore was killed and his forces driven back within the walls of
+Drogheda.</p>
+<p>The General Assembly continued to exercise sovreign authority at
+Kilkenny, collecting revenues, maintaining courts of justice in the
+provinces, and keeping several armies in the field, most effective
+of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page327" id="page327"></a>[pg
+327]</span> which was undoubtedly that of Owen Roe O'Neill. We find
+matters still in this condition three years later, in May, 1646,
+when Monroe and the Scottish forces prepared to inaugurate an
+offensive campaign from their base at Carrickfergus. General Robert
+Monroe had about seven thousand men at Carrickfergus; his brother
+George had five hundred at Coleraine; while there was a Scottish
+army at Derry, numbering about two thousand men. It was decided to
+converge these three forces on Clones, in Monaghan, and thence to
+proceed southwards against the government of the General Assembly,
+then centered at Limerick. Clones was sixty miles from Derry, and
+rather more from Coleraine and Carrickfergus, the two other points
+of departure.</p>
+<p>Owen Roe O'Neill was then at Cavan, fourteen miles south of
+Clones, with five thousand foot and five hundred horse, all "good,
+hopeful men," to use his own words. General Robert Monroe, starting
+from Carrickfergus, and marching by Lisburn and Armagh, expected to
+reach Glasslough, some sixteen miles from Clones, on June 5th. By a
+forced march from Cavan, Owen Roe O'Neill reached Glasslough a day
+earlier, and marching along the northern Blackwater, pitched his
+camp on the north bank of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page328"
+id="page328"></a>[pg 328]</span> the river. Here he was directly in
+the line between the two Monroes, who could only join their forces
+after dislodging him; and Robert Monroe, who by that time had
+reached Armagh, saw that it would be necessary to give battle
+without delay if the much smaller forces from the north were not to
+be cut off.</p>
+<p>Robert Monroe began a movement northwards towards Owen Roe's
+position at dawn on June 5th, and presently reached the Blackwater,
+to find himself face to face with Owen Roe's army across the river.
+The two forces kept parallel with each other for some time, till
+Robert Monroe finally forded the Blackwater at Caledon, Owen Roe
+then retiring in the direction of the current, which here flows
+north. Owen Roe, in his movement of withdrawal, brought his army
+through a narrow pass, which he left in charge of one of his best
+infantry regiments, with orders to hold it only so long as the
+enemy could be safely harassed, meanwhile carrying his main body
+back to the hill of Knocknacloy, the position he had chosen from
+the first for the battle, and to gain which he had up to this time
+been manoeuvering.</p>
+<p>At Knocknacloy he had the center of his army protected by the
+hill, the right by a marsh, and the <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page329" id="page329"></a>[pg 329]</span> left by the river, so
+that, a flanking movement on Monroe's part being impossible, the
+Scottish general was forced to make a frontal attack. Under cover
+of the rearguard action at the pass, which caused both delay and
+confusion to Monroe's army, Owen Roe formed his men in order of
+battle. His first line was of four columns, with considerable
+spaces between them; his cavalry was on the right and left wings,
+behind this first line; while three columns more were drawn up some
+distance farther back, behind the openings in the front line, and
+forming the reserve. We should remember that not only was Owen
+Roe's army outnumbered by Monroe's, but also that Owen Roe had no
+artillery, while Monroe was well supplied with guns.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile Monroe's army came into touch with Owen Roe's force,
+and the Scottish general opened fire with guns and muskets, to
+which the muskets of Owen Roe as vigorously replied. The Scottish
+artillery was planted on a hillock a quarter-mile from Owen Roe's
+center, and under cover of its fire an infantry charge was
+attempted, which was brilliantly repulsed by the pikemen of Owen
+Roe's army. A second attack was made by the Scottish cavalry, who
+tried to ford the river, and thus turn the left flank <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page330" id="page330"></a>[pg 330]</span> of the
+Irish army, but they were met and routed by the Irish horse. This
+was about six in the evening, and the sun, hanging low in the sky,
+fell full in the faces of the Scottish troops. Owen Roe promptly
+followed up the rout of the Scottish horse by an advance, making a
+sweeping movement from right to left, and thereby forcing Monroe
+towards the junction of two streams, where he had no space to move.
+At this point Owen Roe's army received a notable accession of
+strength in the form of four squadrons of cavalry, sent earlier in
+the day to guard against the possible approach of George Monroe
+from Coleraine.</p>
+<p>At a signal from Owen Roe, his army advanced upon Monroe's
+force, to be met by a charge of the Scottish cavalry, instantly
+replied to by a charge of the Irish cavalry through the three open
+spaces in the front infantry line of Owen Roe's army. Monroe's
+first line was broken, and the Irish pikemen, the equivalent of a
+bayonet charge, steadily forced him backwards. It was a fierce
+struggle, hand to hand, eye to eye, and blade to blade. The order
+of Owen Roe's advance was admirably preserved, while the Scottish
+and English forces were in confusion, already broken and crowded
+into a narrow and constricted space between the two rivers. Finally
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page331" id="page331"></a>[pg
+331]</span> advancing Irish army reached and stormed the hillock
+where Monroe's artillery was placed, and victory was palpably won.
+The defeat of the Scottish and English army became an utter rout,
+and when the sun set more than three thousand of them lay dead on
+the field.</p>
+<p>It is almost incredible that the Irish losses were only seventy,
+yet such is the number recorded, while not only was the opposing
+army utterly defeated and dispersed, but Monroe's whole artillery,
+his tents and baggage, fifteen hundred horses, twenty stand of
+colors, two months' provisions and numbers of prisoners of war fell
+into the hands of Owen Roe; while, as a result of the battle, the
+two auxiliary forces were forced to retreat and take refuge in
+Coleraine and Derry, General Robert Monroe escaping meanwhile to
+Carrickfergus. It is only just to him to say that our best accounts
+of the battle come from officers in Monroe's army, Owen Roe
+contenting himself with the merest outline of the result gained,
+but saying nothing of the consummate generalship that gained
+it.</p>
+<p>For the next two years we see Owen Roe O'Neill holding the great
+central plain, the west and most of the north of Ireland against
+the armies of the English <span class="pagenum"><a name="page332"
+id="page332"></a>[pg 332]</span> Parliamentarians and Royalists
+alike, and gaining victory after victory, generally against
+superior numbers, better armed and better equipped. We find him
+time after time almost betrayed by the Supreme Council, in which
+the Norman lords of Leinster, perpetually anxious for their own
+feudal estates, were ready to treat with whichever of the English
+parties was for the moment victorious, hoping that, whatever might
+be the outcome of the great English struggle, they themselves might
+be gainers. At this time they were in possession of many of the
+abbey lands, and there was perpetual friction between them and the
+ecclesiastics, their co-religionists, who had been driven from
+these same lands, so that the Norman landowners were the element of
+fatal weakness throughout this whole movement, willing to wound,
+and yet afraid to strike. While praying for the final defeat of the
+English parliamentary forces, they dreaded to see this defeat
+brought about by Owen Roe O'Neill, in whom they saw the
+representative of the old tribal ownership of Gaelic times, a
+return to which would mean their own extinction.</p>
+<p>Matters went so far that the Supreme Council, representing
+chiefly these Norman lords, had practically betrayed its trust to
+the Royalist party in <span class="pagenum"><a name="page333" id=
+"page333"></a>[pg 333]</span> England, and would have completed
+that betrayal had not the beheading of King Charles signalized the
+triumph of the Parliamentarians. Even then the Norman lords hoped
+for the Restoration, and strove in every way to undermine the
+authority of their own general, Owen Roe O'Neill, who was almost
+forced to enter into an alliance with the Puritans by the treachery
+of the Norman lords. It is of the greatest interest to find Monroe
+writing thus to Owen Roe in August, 1649: "By my own extraction, I
+have an interest in the Irish nation. I know how your lands have
+been taken, and your people made hewers of wood and drawers of
+water. If an Irishman can be a scourge to his own nation, the
+English will give him fair words but keep him from all trust, that
+they may destroy him when they have served themselves by him."</p>
+<p>On November 6, 1649, this great general died after a brief
+illness, having for seven years led his armies to constant victory,
+while the Norman lords, who were in name his allies, were secretly
+plotting against him for their own profit. Yet so strong and
+dominant was his genius that he overcame not only the forces of his
+foes but the treacheries of his friends, and his last days saw him
+at one with the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page334" id=
+"page334"></a>[pg 334]</span> Normans, while the forces of the
+Parliamentarians in Ireland were calling on him for help.</p>
+<p>We sea, therefore, that for full eight years, from the beginning
+of 1642 to the close of 1649, Ireland had an independent national
+government, with a regularly elected Representative Assembly, and a
+central authority, the Supreme Council, appointed by that Assembly,
+with judges going circuit and holding their courts regularly, while
+the Supreme Council held a state of almost regal magnificence, and
+kept several armies continuously in the field. While Owen Roe
+O'Neill lived, that part of the army under his command was able not
+only to secure an unbroken series of victories for itself, but also
+to retrieve the defeats suffered by less competent commanders, so
+that at his death he was at the summit of power and fame. If regret
+were ever profitable, we might well regret that he did not follow
+the example of the great English commander, his contemporary, and
+declare himself Lord Protector of Ireland, with despotic power.</p>
+<p>After his death, the work he had done so well was all undone
+again, in part by treachery, in part by the victories of Oliver
+Cromwell. Yet ten years after the Lord Protector's arrival in
+Ireland, his <span class="pagenum"><a name="page335" id=
+"page335"></a>[pg 335]</span> own work was undone not less
+completely, and the Restoration saw once more enthroned every
+principle against which Cromwell had so stubbornly contended.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page336" id="page336"></a>[pg
+336]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page337" id="page337"></a>[pg
+337]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE JACOBITE WARS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page338" id="page338"></a>[pg
+338]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page339" id="page339"></a>[pg
+339]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIV."></a>XIV.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE JACOBITE WARS.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1660-1750.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The Restoration saw Cromwell's work completely undone; nor did
+the class which helped him to his victories again rise above the
+surface. The genius of the Stuarts was already sowing the seeds of
+new revolutions; but the struggle was presently to be fought out,
+not between the king and the people, but between the king and the
+more liberal or more ambitious elements of the baronial class, who
+saw in the despotic aspirations of the Stuarts a menace to their
+own power.</p>
+<p>These liberal elements in England selected as their champion
+Prince William of Nassau, before whose coming the English king
+found it expedient to fly to France, seeking and finding a friend
+in that apostle of absolutism, Louis XIV. We have already seen how
+the interests of the feudal lords of Ireland, with the old Norman
+families as their core, drew them towards the Stuarts. The divine
+right of the landowner depended, as we saw, on the divine right of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page340" id="page340"></a>[pg
+340]</span> kings; so that they naturally gravitated towards the
+Stuarts, and drew their tenants and retainers after them. Thus a
+considerable part of Ireland was enlisted on the side of James II,
+and shared the misfortunes which presently overtook him--or in
+truth did not overtake him, as the valiant gentleman outran them
+and escaped. Nothing is more firmly fixed in the memories of the
+whole Irish people than a good-natured contempt for this runaway
+English king, whose cause they were induced by the feudal lords to
+espouse. We shall follow the account of an officer in the Jacobite
+army in narrating the events of the campaigns that ensued.</p>
+<p>James, having gained courage and funds from his sojourn at the
+court of Louis XIV, presently made his appearance in Ireland,
+relying on the support of the feudal lords. He landed at Kinsale,
+in Cork, on March 12, 1688, according to the Old Style, and reached
+Dublin twelve days later, warmly welcomed by Lord and Lady
+Tyrconnell. The only place in the country which strongly declared
+for William was the walled city of Derry, whence we have seen the
+Puritan forces issuing during the wars of the preceding generation.
+James, this officer says, went north to Derry, in spite of the
+bitterness of the season, "in <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page341" id="page341"></a>[pg 341]</span> order to preserve his
+Protestant subjects there from the ill-treatment which he
+apprehended they might receive from the Irish," and was mightily
+surprised when the gates were shut in his face and the citizens
+opened fire upon him from the walls.</p>
+<a name="341.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/341.jpg"><img src="images/341.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>TULLYMORE PARK, CO. DOWN.</b></p>
+<p>James withdrew immediately to Dublin, assembled a Parliament
+there, and spent several months in vain discussions, not even
+finding courage to repeal the penal laws which Queen Elizabeth had
+passed against all who refused to recognize her as the head of the
+church. James was already embarked on a career of duplicity,
+professing great love for Ireland, yet fearing to carry out his
+professions lest he might arouse animosity in England, and so close
+the door against his hoped-for return.</p>
+<p>Enniskillen, on an island in Lough Erne, dominated by a strong
+castle, was, like Derry, a settlement of Scottish and English
+colonists brought over by the first of the Stuarts. These colonists
+were up in arms against the grandson of their first patron, and had
+successfully attacked his forces which were besieging Derry. James,
+therefore, sent a small body of troops against them; but the
+expedition ended in an ignominious rout rather than a battle, for
+the Jacobite army seems hardly to have struck a blow. The Irish
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page342" id="page342"></a>[pg
+342]</span> leader, Lord Mountcashel, who manfully stood his ground
+in the general panic, was wounded and taken prisoner.</p>
+<p>The armies of James, meanwhile, made no headway against the
+courageous and determined defenders of Derry, where the siege was
+degenerating into a blockade, the scanty rations and sickness of
+the besieged being a far more formidable danger than the attacks of
+the besiegers. James even weakened the attacking forces by
+withdrawing a part of the troops to Dublin, being resolved at all
+risks to protect himself.</p>
+<p>So devoid of resolution and foresight was James that we only
+find him taking means to raise an army when Schomberg, the able
+lieutenant of William, was about to invade the north of Ireland.
+Schomberg landed at Bangor in Down in August, 1689, and marched
+south towards Drogheda, but finding that James was there before
+him, he withdrew and established a strongly fortified camp near
+Dundalk. James advanced to a point about seven miles from
+Schomberg, and there entrenched himself in turn, and so the two
+armies remained; as one of Schomberg's officers says, "our General
+would not risk anything, nor King James venture anything." The long
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page343" id="page343"></a>[pg
+343]</span> delay was very fatal to Schomberg's army, his losses by
+sickness and disease being more than six thousand men.</p>
+<p>Early in November, as winter was already making itself felt,
+James decided to withdraw to Dublin; as our narrator says, "the
+young commanders were in some haste to return to the capital, where
+the ladies expected them with great impatience; so that King James,
+being once more persuaded to disband the new levies and raising his
+camp a little of the soonest, dispersed his men too early into
+winter quarters, having spent that campaign without any advantage,
+vainly expecting that his Protestant subjects of England who were
+in the camp of Schomberg would come over to him. And now the winter
+season, which should be employed in serious consultations, and
+making the necessary preparations for the ensuing campaign, was
+idly spent in revels, in gaming, and other debauches unfit for a
+Catholic court. But warlike Schomberg, who, after the retreat of
+James, had leisure to remove his sickly soldiers, to bury the dead,
+and put the few men that remained alive and were healthy into
+winter quarters of refreshment, took the field early in spring,
+before Tyrconnell was awake, and reduced the castle of Charlemont,
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page344" id="page344"></a>[pg
+344]</span> only place that held for James in Ulster, which was
+lost for want of provisions; and the concerns of the unfortunate
+James were ill-managed by those whom he entrusted with the
+administration of public affairs."</p>
+<p>We come thus to the spring of 1690. Derry was still holding out
+valiantly against the horrors of famine and sickness, the blockade
+being maintained, though nothing like a determined storm was
+attempted. A little of the courage shown by the apprentices of
+Derry, had he possessed it, might have revived the drooping
+fortunes of the fugitive English king. It seems, however, that even
+Schomberg's withdrawal to Carrickfergus failed to arouse him to
+more vigorous and valiant measures. It is clear that he was ready
+to abandon his Irish allies, hoping by their betrayal to gain favor
+with his "subjects in England," whom he confidently expected to
+recall him, as they had recalled his brother Charles thirty years
+before. James found an able lieutenant in Tyrconnell, who
+thoroughly entered into his master's schemes of duplicity; and it
+is fairly clear that these two worthies, had occasion offered,
+would have betrayed each other with a perfectly good grace.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page345" id="page345"></a>[pg
+345]</span>
+<p>Thus matters dragged on quite indecisively until June, 1690,
+when King William landed at Carrickfergus with a mixed force of
+English, Scottish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and German troops, and
+joined his forces to the remnant of Schomberg's army. James, as we
+saw, had disbanded his army on breaking up his camp in the previous
+autumn, and had made no effective effort to get a new army
+together. Nor could he have used a strong army, had he possessed
+one. Nevertheless James marched north with such troops as were
+available, leaving Dublin on June 16th. He took up a strong
+position on the borders of Ulster and Leinster, thus blocking
+William's way south to the capital, only to abandon it again on the
+news of William's approach, when he retired to Drogheda and
+encamped there. He thus gave the whole advantage of initiative into
+the hands of his opponent, a brave man and a skillful general.</p>
+<p>James seems to have hoped that William's army would be mowed
+down by disease, as Schomberg's had been in the preceding campaign.
+And there is reason to believe that Tyrconnell, foreseeing the
+defeat of James, wished to avoid any serious fighting, which would
+be an obstacle in his way when he <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page346" id="page346"></a>[pg 346]</span> sought to patch up a
+peace with the victor and make terms for himself. But his opponent
+was inspired by a very different temper, and William's army
+advanced steadily southwards, to find James encamped on the
+southern bank of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>There were several fords by which William's army would have to
+cross on its way south. But James was such an incapable general
+that he did not even throw up trenches to defend the fords.
+William's army arrived and encamped on the north bank of the river,
+and the next day, June 30th, was employed in an artillery duel
+between the two armies, when considerable injury was inflicted on
+William's forces, although he was far stronger in artillery than
+his opponent. During that night, James, already certain of defeat,
+sent away most of his artillery to Dublin, leaving only six guns
+with his army on the Boyne.</p>
+<p>It seems tolerably certain that, when the battle began again
+next day, William's army numbered between forty-five and fifty
+thousand, with the usual proportion of cavalry,--probably a tenth
+of the whole. James, on the other hand, had from twenty to
+twenty-five thousand men, about a tenth of them, probably, being
+mounted; he had, by his own fault, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page347" id="page347"></a>[pg 347]</span> only six guns against
+about fifty in William's batteries. William's line of battle was
+formed, as usual, with the infantry in the center and the cavalry
+on the wings. He gave the elder Schomberg command of the center,
+while Schomberg's son, with the cavalry of the right wing, was sent
+four or five miles up the river to Slane, to cross there and turn
+the left flank of the opposing army. William himself led the
+cavalry on the left wing, and later on in the battle, descending
+the river, crossed at a lower ford. He could thus attack the right
+flank of his opponent; the infantry composing the center of his
+army advancing, meanwhile, under cover of a heavy artillery fire,
+and forcing the fords of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>The river is shallow here, and in the middle of summer the water
+is nowhere too deep for wading, so that it was a very slight
+protection to the army of James. A better general would at least
+have chosen a stronger position, and one which would have given him
+some manifest advantage. Such positions were to be found all along
+the road by which William had advanced from Carrickfergus. The
+country on both sides of the Boyne is flat; rolling meadows with
+the shallow river dividing them--a country giving every opportunity
+to cavalry.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page348" id="page348"></a>[pg
+348]</span>
+<p>William's right, under the younger Schomberg, made several
+unsuccessful attempts to cross the river at Slane, being repeatedly
+beaten back by Arthur O'Neill's horse. Finally, however, the way
+was cleared for him by a vigorous cannonade, to which O'Neill,
+having no cannon, was unable to reply, and William's right wing
+thus forced the passage of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>William's center now advanced, and began the passage of the
+river, under cover of a heavy artillery fire. Every foot of the
+advance was stubbornly contested, and such headway was made by the
+Irish troops that Schomberg's bodyguard was scattered or cut to
+pieces, and he himself was slain. The center of William's army was
+undoubtedly being beaten back, when, crossing lower down with
+eighteen squadrons of cavalry, he fiercely attacked the right flank
+of the Irish army and thus turned the possibility of defeat into
+certain victory. That the Irish troops, although outnumbered two to
+one and led by a coward, fought valiantly, is admitted on all
+sides. They charged and re-charged ten times in succession, and
+only gave way at last under pressure of greatly superior numbers.
+The retreat of the Irish army was orderly,--the more so, doubtless,
+because <span class="pagenum"><a name="page349" id=
+"page349"></a>[pg 349]</span> the former king of England was no
+longer among them, having most valiantly fled to Dublin, and thence
+to Kinsale, where he took ship for France, leaving behind him a
+reputation quite singular in the annals of Ireland.</p>
+<p>Within a week after the battle, the Irish army, which had
+preserved order and discipline even in the face of the flight of
+James, occupied Limerick, and made preparations to hold that strong
+position, with the untouched resources of the western province
+behind them, and the hope, unshaken by their rude experience, that
+the runaway king might reinforce them by sea. Through all the
+events that followed, presently to be narrated, it must be
+understood that Tyrconnell was steadily seeking to undermine the
+resolution of the Irish army, hoping the sooner to make his peace
+with King William, to secure his Irish estates, and, very possibly,
+be appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, under the new king.</p>
+<p>William meanwhile brought his army southwards, being welcomed to
+Dublin by the large English element there, and presently continued
+his march to Waterford, which was surrendered to him, as was
+alleged, by Tyrconnell's orders. He also reduced Kilkenny, to which
+Tyrconnell had failed to send <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page350" id="page350"></a>[pg 350]</span> reinforcements, though
+repeatedly appealed to by its commander. About this time, on July
+28th or a day or two later, the brave garrison of Derry was
+relieved by some of William's ships, which broke the line of
+blockade across the river and brought abundant provisions to the
+emaciated defenders.</p>
+<p>A section of William's army under Douglas was sent to take
+Athlone, the strong fortress which guarded the ford, and later the
+bridge across the Shannon--the high road from Leinster to the
+western province of Connacht, beyond the river. Douglas, after a
+fierce attack lasting seven days, was compelled to retreat again to
+the main army encamped at Waterford. The French auxiliaries under
+Lauzun, who had not hitherto greatly distinguished themselves for
+valor, losing less than a score of men at the Boyne, now deserted
+Limerick and retreated to Galway, taking with them, if the fugitive
+king may be credited, a great quantity of ammunition from the
+fortress of Limerick.</p>
+<a name="351.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/351.jpg"><img src="images/351.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>THOMOND BRIDGE, LIMERICK.</b></p>
+<p>Finally, on August 9th, William's army appeared before Limerick,
+and the famous siege began. Tyrconnell signalized himself by
+deserting the fords over the Shannon and departing to Galway,
+declaring that the town would certainly surrender within a week.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page351" id="page351"></a>[pg
+351]</span> The city, however, was of a different opinion. The
+garrison, under Sarsfield, made vigorous preparation for a defence,
+and a party under Sarsfield himself cut off one of William's
+convoys from Dublin, destroying the siege-train which was being
+brought for the attack on the city. William's cavalry, taking
+advantage of Tyrconnell's retreat, crossed the ford of the Shannon
+to complete the investment of the city on that side, but they
+presently returned, having done nothing effective.</p>
+<p>We hear of more attempts by Tyrconnell to undermine the
+resolution of the army, and of attacks by William's force, which
+gave him possession of the outworks, so that he was able presently
+to begin cannonading the walls, to make a breach for an assault.
+The officer in the Irish army whom we have already quoted, gives
+this account of the siege: "Never was a town better attacked and
+better defended than the city of Limerick. William left nothing
+unattempted that the art of war, the skill of a great captain and
+the valor of veteran soldiers could put in execution to gain the
+place; and the Irish omitted nothing that courage and constancy
+could practice to defend it. The continual assaults of the one and
+the frequent sallies of the other consumed a <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page352" id="page352"></a>[pg 352]</span> great
+many brave men both of the army and the garrison. On the nineteenth
+day, William, after fighting for every inch of ground he gained,
+having made a large breach in the wall, gave a general assault
+which lasted for three hours; and though his men mounted the
+breach, and some even entered the town, they were gallantly
+repulsed and forced to retire with considerable loss. William,
+resolving to renew the assault next day, could not persuade his men
+to advance, though he offered to lead them in person. Whereupon,
+all in a rage, he left the camp, and never stopped till he came to
+Waterford, where he took shipping for England; his army in the
+meantime retiring by night from Limerick."</p>
+<p>During this first siege of Limerick the garrison numbered some
+twenty thousand, by no means well armed. William's besieging army
+was about forty thousand, with forty cannon and mortars. His loss
+was between three and four thousand, while the loss of the
+defenders was about half that number.</p>
+<p>William, presently arriving in England, sent reinforcements to
+his generals in Ireland, under Lord Churchill, afterwards famous as
+the Duke of Marlborough. Tyrconnell had meantime followed his
+runaway king to France, as was involved in a maze of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page353" id="page353"></a>[pg 353]</span>
+contradictory designs, the one clear principle of which was the
+future advantage of Tyrconnell. Louis XIV, who had reasons of his
+own for wishing to keep the armies of William locked up in Ireland,
+was altogether willing to advise and help a continuance of
+hostilities in that country. James seems to have recognized his
+incapacity too clearly to attempt anything definite, or, what is
+more probable, was too irresolute by nature even to determine to
+give up the fight. Tyrconnell himself sincerely wished to make his
+peace with William, so that he might once more enjoy the revenues
+of his estates. The Irish army was thoroughly determined to hold
+out to the end.</p>
+<p>With these conflicting desires and designs, no single-hearted
+and resolute action was possible. Matters seem to have drifted till
+about January, 1691, when Tyrconnell returned; "but he brought with
+him no soldiers, very few arms, little provision and no money." A
+month later a messenger came direct to Sarsfield, then with the
+army at Galway, from Louis XIV, promising reinforcements under the
+renowned soldier Saint Ruth. This letter to a great extent revealed
+the double part Tyrconnell had been playing at the French court,
+and did much to <span class="pagenum"><a name="page354" id=
+"page354"></a>[pg 354]</span> undermine his credit with the better
+elements in the Irish army.</p>
+<p>The French fleet finally arrived at Limerick in May, 1691, under
+Saint Ruth, bringing a considerable quantity of provisions for the
+Irish army; but it is doubtful whether this arrival added any real
+element of strength to the army. The Irish army, soon after this,
+was assembled at Athlone, to defend the passage of the Shannon.
+Much vigorous fighting took place, but Ginkell, William's general,
+finally captured that important fortress in June. The road to
+Galway was now open, and Ginkell's army prepared to march on that
+important city, the strongest place in Connacht. Saint Ruth
+prepared to resist their approach, fixing his camp at Aughrim, The
+Hill of the Horses, some eighteen miles from Athlone and
+thirty-five from Galway. We may once more tell the story in the
+words of an eye-witness:</p>
+<p>"Aughrim was then a ruined town, and the castle was not much
+better, situated in a bottom on the north side of the hill, where
+the Irish army encamped. The direct way from Ballinasloe was close
+by the castle, but there was another way about, on the south-east
+side of the hill. The rest of the ground fronting the camp was a
+marsh, passable only for <span class="pagenum"><a name="page355"
+id="page355"></a>[pg 355]</span> foot. The army of Ginkell appeared
+in sight of Aughrim on July 12th. The Irish army, composed of about
+ten thousand foot, two thousand men-at-arms, and as many light
+horse, was soon drawn up by Saint Ruth in two lines; the cavalry on
+both wings flanking the foot; and having placed Chevalier de
+Tess&eacute; on the right wing of the horse, and Sarsfield on the
+left, and giving their several posts to the rest of the chief
+commanders, Saint Ruth obliged himself to no certain place, but
+rode constantly from one side to another to give the necessary
+orders where he saw occasion. Ginkell being now come up at so near
+a distance that his guns and other battering engines might do
+execution, he ordered them to be discharged, and as he had a vast
+number of them he made them play incessantly on the Irish army,
+hoping by that means to force them from the hill, which was of
+great advantage. But the Irish, encouraged by the presence and
+conduct of Saint Ruth, kept their ground and beat the English as
+often as they advanced towards them. The fight continued from noon
+till sunset, the Irish foot having still the better of the enemy;
+and Saint Ruth, observing the advantage of his side, and that the
+enemy's foot were much disordered, was resolved, by advancing with
+the cavalry, to make the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page356"
+id="page356"></a>[pg 356]</span> victory complete, when an unlucky
+shot from one of the terrible new engines, hitting him in the head,
+made an end of his life, and took away the courage of his army. For
+Ginkell, observing the Irish to be in some disorder, gave a notable
+conjecture that the general was either killed or wounded, whereupon
+he commanded his army to advance. The Irish cavalry, discouraged by
+the death of Saint Ruth, and none of the general officers coming to
+head them in his place, gave back, and quitted the field. The foot
+who were engaged with the enemy, knowing nothing of the general's
+death or the retreat of the cavalry, continued fighting till they
+were surrounded by the whole English army; so that the most of them
+were cut off, and no quarter given but to a very few; the rest, by
+favor of the night then approaching, for Saint Ruth was killed
+about sunset, made their escape."</p>
+<p>To this we may add the testimony of the runaway monarch: "The
+Irish behaved with great spirit. They convinced the English they
+had to do with men no less resolute than themselves. Never assault
+was made with greater fury nor sustained with greater obstinacy.
+The Irish foot repulsed the enemy several times, particularly in
+the center. They even looked upon the victory as certain.... The
+Irish lost <span class="pagenum"><a name="page357" id=
+"page357"></a>[pg 357]</span> four thousand men. The loss of the
+English was not much inferior."</p>
+<p>The army of Ginkell, thus in possession of the key of Connacht,
+advanced upon its most important city, arriving before Galway a few
+days after the battle of Aughrim. Galway, however, was full of
+divided counsels, and speedily surrendered, so that Limerick alone
+remained. Limerick was greatly weakened, now that Galway, and with
+Galway the whole of Connacht to which alone Limerick could look for
+supplies, was in the hands of the enemy. Ginkell turned all his
+efforts in the direction of Limerick, appearing before the city and
+pitching his camp there on August 25, 1691. Beginning with the next
+day, our narrator tells us, "he placed his cannon and other
+battering engines, which played furiously night and day without
+intermission, reducing that famous city almost to ashes. No
+memorable action, however, happened till the night between
+September 15 and 16, when he made a bridge of boats over the
+Shannon, which being ready by break of day, he passed over with a
+considerable body of horse and foot on the Connacht side of the
+river, without any opposition. This so alarmed Sheldon, who
+commanded the cavalry at that time, that without staying for
+orders, he immediately <span class="pagenum"><a name="page358" id=
+"page358"></a>[pg 358]</span> retired to a mountain a good distance
+from Limerick, and marched with such precipitation and disorder,
+that if a hundred of the enemy's horse had charged him in the rear,
+they would in all likelihood have defeated his whole party, though
+he had near upon four thousand men-at-arms and light horse; for the
+man, if he was faithful, wanted either courage or conduct, and the
+party were altogether discouraged to be under his command. But
+Ginkell did not advance far, and after showing himself on that side
+of the bridge, returned back into his camp the same day. Yet
+Sheldon never rested till he came, about midnight, fifteen miles
+from the Shannon, and encamped in a fallow field where there was
+not a bit of grass to be had: as if he had designed to harass the
+horses by day and starve them by night.... Ginkell, understanding
+that the Irish horse was removed to such a distance, passed the
+river on the twenty-third day with the greatest part of his
+cavalry, and a considerable body of foot, and encamped half-way
+between Limerick and the Irish horse camp, whereby he hindered all
+communication between them and the town. On the twenty-fourth, the
+captains within Limerick sent out a trumpet, desiring a parley,"
+and as a result of this parley, a treaty was ultimately signed
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page359" id="page359"></a>[pg
+359]</span> between the two parties, Limerick was evacuated, and
+the war came to an end. This was early in October, 1691.</p>
+<p>The war had, therefore, lasted nearly four years, a sufficient
+testimony to the military qualities of the Irish, seeing that
+throughout the whole period they had matched against them greatly
+superior numbers of the finest troops in Europe, veterans trained
+in continental wars, and at all points better armed and equipped
+than their adversaries.</p>
+<p>What moves our unbounded admiration, however, is to see the
+troops displaying these qualities of valor not only without good
+leadership, but in face of the cowardice of the English king, and
+of duplicity amounting to treachery on the part of his chief
+adherents. Foremost among these time-servers was Talbot, Earl of
+Tyrconnell, whose name shows him to have sprung from one of the
+Norman families, and we see here the recurrence of a principle
+which had worked much harm in the eight years' war of the preceding
+generation. The Duke of Ormond, sprung from the Norman Butlers, was
+then the chief representative of the policy of intrigue, and many
+of the reverses of both these wars are to be attributed to the same
+race.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page360" id="page360"></a>[pg
+360]</span>
+<p>It is tragical to find the descendants of the old Norman barons,
+who at any rate were valiant fighters, descending thus to practices
+quite unworthy; yet we can easily understand how the fundamental
+injustice of the feudal principle on which they stood, not less
+than the boundless abuse of that already bad principle under the
+first Stuarts, could not fail to undermine their sense of honor and
+justice, preparing them at length for a policy of mere
+self-seeking, carried on by methods always doubtful, and often
+openly treacherous.</p>
+<p>The old tribal chieftains lived to fight, and went down fighting
+into the night of time. Owen Roe O'Neill, last great son of a
+heroic race, splendidly upheld their high tradition and ideal. No
+nobler figure, and few more gifted captains, can be found in the
+annals of those warlike centuries. The valor of Cuculain, the
+wisdom of Concobar, the chivalry of Fergus--all were his, and with
+them a gentle and tolerant spirit in all things concerning
+religion, very admirable in an age when so many men, in other
+things not lacking in elements of nobility, were full of bitter
+animosity, and zealous to persecute all those who differed from
+them concerning things shrouded in mystery.</p>
+<p>It may be said, indeed, that Owen Roe is in this only a type of
+all his countrymen, who, though they suffered <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page361" id="page361"></a>[pg 361]</span>
+centuries of persecution for a religious principle, never
+persecuted in return. Their conduct throughout the epoch of
+religious war and persecution was always tolerant and full of the
+sense of justice, contrasting in this, and contrasting to their
+honor, with the conduct of nearly every other nation in
+Christendom.</p>
+<p>The history of Ireland, for the half century which followed this
+war, offers few salient features for description. The Catholics
+during all this time were under the ban of penal laws. The old
+tribal chiefs were gone. The Norman lords were also gone. The life
+of the land hardly went beyond the tilling of the fields and the
+gathering of the harvests. And even here, men only labored for
+others to enter into their labor. The right of private taxation,
+confirmed by law, and now forfeited by the feudal lords, was given
+as a reward to the adherents of the dominant party in England, and
+their yearly exactions were enforced by an armed garrison. The more
+vigorous and restless elements of our race, unable to accept these
+conditions of life, sailed in great numbers to the continent, and
+entered the armies of many European powers. It is estimated that,
+during the half century after the Treaty of Limerick, fully half a
+million Irishmen fell in the service of France alone.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page362" id="page362"></a>[pg
+362]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page363" id="page363"></a>[pg
+363]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CONCLUSION.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page364" id="page364"></a>[pg
+364]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page365" id="page365"></a>[pg
+365]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XV."></a>XV.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>CONCLUSION.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1750-1901.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The Treaty of Limerick, signed when the army of Sarsfield came
+to terms with the besiegers, guaranteed equal liberty to all
+Ireland, without regard to difference of religion. There is no
+doubt that William of Nassau, scion of a race which had done much
+for liberty, a house that had felt the bitterness of oppression,
+would willingly have carried this treaty out in a spirit of
+fidelity and honor. But he was, helpless. The dominant powers in
+England and Ireland were too strong for him, and within the next
+few years the treaty was violated in letter and spirit, and the
+indigenous population of Ireland was disarmed, deprived of civil
+rights, reduced to servitude.</p>
+<p>It is best, wherever possible, to secure the word of witnesses
+who cannot be suspected of prejudice or favor. We shall do this,
+therefore, in describing the condition of Ireland during the
+eighteenth century. We find the Lord Chancellor of England
+declaring, during the first half of that period, that "in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page366" id="page366"></a>[pg
+366]</span> the eye of the law no Catholic existed in Ireland." The
+Lord Chief Justice affirms the same doctrine: "It appears plain
+that the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish
+Roman Catholic." The law, therefore, as created by England for
+Ireland, deprived of all civil, religious, intellectual and moral
+rights four-fifths of the whole population, and gave them over as a
+lawful prey to the remaining fifth: a band of colonists and
+adventurers, who favored the policy of the party then dominant in
+England. This was the condition of the law. We shall see,
+presently, what was its result on the life of the nation. It should
+be a warning, for all time, of the dangers which arise when one
+nation undertakes to govern another. For it must be clearly
+understood that the Sovreign and Parliament of England believed
+that in this they stood for honor and righteousness, and had a true
+insight into the spirit and will of the Most High. It was, indeed,
+on this superior knowledge of the divine will that they based their
+whole policy; for what else is the meaning of legal discrimination
+against the holders of a certain form of faith?</p>
+<a name="367.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/367.jpg"><img src="images/367.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>SALMON FISHERY, GALWAY.</b></p>
+<p>In the second half of the eighteenth century, in 1775, the
+Congress of the United States sent its <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page367" id="page367"></a>[pg 367]</span>
+sympathy in these words to the people of Ireland: "We know that you
+are not without your grievances; we sympathize with you in your
+distress, and we are pleased to find that the design of subjugating
+us has persuaded the administration to dispense to Ireland some
+vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. Even the tender mercies of
+the government have long been cruel to you. In the rich pastures of
+Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong to labor for
+her destruction."</p>
+<p>Three years later, in 1778, Benjamin Franklin wrote thus to the
+Irish people: "The misery and distress which your ill-fated country
+has been so frequently exposed to, and has so often experienced, by
+such a combination of rapine, treachery and violence as would have
+disgraced the name of government in the most arbitrary country in
+the world, has most sincerely affected your friends in America, and
+has engaged the most serious attention of Congress."</p>
+<p>It must be assumed that the men who drew up the Declaration of
+Independence knew the value of words, and that when they spoke of
+misery and cruelty, of rapine, treachery and distress, they meant
+what they said. Franklin's letter brings us to the eve of the
+Volunteer Movement, of which much has <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page368" id="page368"></a>[pg 368]</span> been
+said in a spirit of warm praise, but which seems to have wrought
+evil rather than good. This Movement, at first initiated wholly by
+the Scottish and English colonists and their adherents, was later
+widened so as to include a certain number of the indigenous
+population; and an armed force was thus formed, which was able to
+gain certain legislative favors from England, with the result that
+a Parliament sitting in Dublin from 1782 to 1799 passed laws with
+something more resembling justice than Ireland was accustomed
+to.</p>
+<p>But this Parliament was in no sense national or representative.
+It was wholly composed of the Scottish and English colonists and
+their friends, and the indigenous population had no voice in its
+deliberations. It is, therefore, the more honor to Henry Grattan
+that we find him addressing that Parliament thus: "I will never
+claim freedom for six hundred thousand of my countrymen while I
+leave two million or more of them in chains. Give the Catholics of
+Ireland their civil rights and their franchise; give them the power
+to return members to the Irish Parliament, and let the nation be
+represented." At this time, therefore, four-fifths of the nation
+had neither civil rights nor franchise,--because they differed
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page369" id="page369"></a>[pg
+369]</span> from the dominant party in England as to the precedence
+of the disciples of Jesus.</p>
+<p>It may be supposed, however, that, even without civil or
+religious rights, the fate of the people of Ireland was tolerable;
+that a certain measure of happiness and well-being was theirs, if
+not by law, at least by grace. The answer to this we shall
+presently see. The Volunteer Movement, as we saw, included certain
+elements of the indigenous population. The dominant party in
+England professed to see in this a grave danger, and determined to
+ward off that danger by sending an army to Ireland, and quartering
+troops on the peasants of all suspected districts. We must remember
+that the peasants, on whom a hostile soldiery was thus quartered,
+had no civil rights as a safeguard; that the authorities were
+everywhere bitterly hostile, full of cowardly animosity towards
+them.</p>
+<p>The result we may best describe in the words of the English
+generals at the head of this army. We find Sir Ralph Abercrombie
+speaking thus: "The very disgraceful frequency of great crimes and
+cruelties, and the many complaints of the conduct of the troops in
+this kingdom--Ireland--has too unfortunately proved the army to be
+in a state of licentiousness <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page370" id="page370"></a>[pg 370]</span> that renders it
+formidable to everyone except the enemy." Sir Ralph Abercrombie
+declared himself so frightened and disgusted at the conduct of the
+soldiers that he threw up his commission, and refused the command
+of the army.</p>
+<p>General Lake, who was sent to take his place, speaks thus: "The
+state of the country, and its occupation previous to the
+insurrection, is not to be imagined, except by those who witnessed
+the atrocities of every description committed by the
+military,"--and he gives a list of hangings, burnings and
+murders.</p>
+<p>Finally, we have the testimony of another English soldier, Sir
+William Napier, speaking some years later: "What manner of soldiers
+were these fellows who were let loose upon the wretched districts,
+killing, burning and confiscating every man's property? ... We
+ourselves were young at the time; yet, being connected with the
+army, we were continually among the soldiers, listening with boyish
+eagerness to their experiences: and well remember, with horror, to
+this day, the tales of lust, of bloodshed and pillage, and the
+recital of their foul actions against the miserable peasantry,
+which they used to relate."</p>
+<p>The insurrection against this misery and violence, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page371" id="page371"></a>[pg 371]</span> which
+began in May, 1798, and its repression, we may pass over, coming to
+their political consequences. It is admitted on all hands that the
+morality and religion of England reached their lowest ebb at this
+very time; we are, therefore, ready to learn that the Act of Union
+between England and Ireland, which followed on the heels of this
+insurrection, was carried by unlimited bribery and corruption. The
+Parliament of Ireland, as we know, was solely composed of
+Protestants, the Catholics having neither the right to sit nor the
+right to vote; so that the ignominy of this universal corruption
+must be borne by the class of English and Scottish settlers
+alone.</p>
+<p>The curious may read lists of the various bribes paid to secure
+the passage of the Act of Union in 1800, the total being about six
+million dollars--a much more considerable sum then than now. And it
+must be remembered that this entire sum was drawn from the revenues
+of Ireland, besides the whole cost of an army numbering 125,000
+men, which England maintained in Ireland at the time the Act was
+passed. What the amenities of the last three years of the
+eighteenth century cost Ireland we may judge from these figures: in
+1797, while the hangings, burnings and torturings which brought
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page372" id="page372"></a>[pg
+372]</span> about the insurrection of the following year were in an
+early stage, the national debt of Ireland was under $20,000,000;
+three years later that debt amounted to over $130,000,000. It is
+profitless to pursue the subject further. We may close it by saying
+that hardly can we find in history a story more discreditable to
+our common humanity than the conduct of England towards Ireland
+during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.</p>
+<p>The French Revolution wrought a salutary change of heart in the
+governing class in England, for it must in justice be added that
+the tyranny of this class was as keenly felt by the "lower orders"
+in England as in Ireland itself. It is fairly certain that only the
+Reform Bill and the change of sovreigns which shortly followed
+prevented an insurrection of the peasants and servile classes in
+England which would have outdone in horrors the French Revolution
+itself. The Reform Bill was the final surrender of the baronial
+class in England; a surrender rather apparent than real, however,
+since most of the political and all the social power in the land
+still remains in the hands of the same class.</p>
+<a name="373.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/373.jpg"><img src="images/373.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>O'CONNELL'S STATUE, DUBLIN.</b></p>
+<p>Through the salutary fear which was inspired by the horrors of
+the French Revolution, and perhaps <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page373" id="page373"></a>[pg 373]</span> through a certain moral
+awakening, the governing classes in England came to a less vicious
+mind in their dealings with Ireland. They were, therefore, the more
+ready to respond to the great national movement headed by Daniel
+O'Connell, with his demand that Irishmen might all equally enjoy
+civil and political rights, regardless of their form of faith. In
+1829, as the result of this great movement, the Catholics were
+finally relieved of the burden of penal laws which, originally laid
+on them by the Tudors, were rendered even more irksome and more
+unjust by Cromwell and William of Nassau,--men in other things
+esteemed enlightened and lovers of liberty.</p>
+<p>Thus the burden of persecution was finally taken away. To those
+who imposed it, the system of Penal Laws will remain a deep
+dishonor. But to those who bore that burden it has proved a
+safeguard of spiritual purity and faith. The religion of the
+indigenous race in Ireland was saved from the degeneration and
+corruption which ever besets a wealthy and prosperous church, and
+which never fails to engender hypocrisy, avarice and ambition. In
+England, the followers of the Apostles exercise the right to levy a
+second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second burden
+imposed upon the conquered Saxons. <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page374" id="page374"></a>[pg 374]</span> As a result, the leaders
+of the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part
+of their congregation; have sunk into practical atheism. In France,
+the reaction against a like state of things brought the church to
+the verge of destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and
+materialism. The result to the moral life of the people is too well
+known to need remark. Not less evil consequences have flowed from
+the enriching of the church in other lands. That wealth has always
+carried with it the curse, so prophetically pronounced, against
+those who trust in riches. For the ministers of religion, in a
+supreme degree, the love of money has been the root of evil.</p>
+<p>We may, therefore, see in the spirituality and unworldliness of
+the native church in Ireland a result of all the evil and
+persecution the church suffered during almost three hundred years.
+From this purification by fire it comes that the people of Ireland
+are almost singular throughout Christendom in believing sincerely
+in the religion of gentleness and mercy--the kingdom which is not
+of this world.</p>
+<p>In 1829 the Catholics were at last freed from the galling
+burdens which had weighed on them since 1537, when they failed to
+recognize Henry VIII as the representative of God on earth. They
+were still, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page375" id=
+"page375"></a>[pg 375]</span> however, under the shadow of a grave
+injustice, which continued to rest on them for many years. When
+their church lands were confiscated and their faith proscribed by
+law under the Tudors, a new clergy was overlaid on the country, a
+clergy which consented to recognize the Tudors and their successors
+as their spiritual head. As a reward, these new ministers of
+religion were allowed to levy a second tax on land, exactly as in
+England; and this tax they continued to collect until their
+privilege was finally taken away by Gladstone and the English
+Liberals. Needless to say that through three centuries and more
+four-fifths of this tax was levied on the indigenous Catholics, in
+support of what was to them an alien, and for most of the time a
+persecuting church.</p>
+<p>One heavy disability still lay on the whole land. With its
+partial removal a principle has emerged of such world-wide
+importance in the present, and even more in the future, that we may
+well trace its history in detail.</p>
+<p>The Normans, as we saw, paid themselves for conquering the
+Saxons and Angles by assuming a perpetual right to tax their
+produce; a right still in full force, and forming the very
+foundation of the ruling class in England. The land tenure thus
+created was, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page376" id=
+"page376"></a>[pg 376]</span> under the Tudors and the first
+Stuarts, bodily transferred to Ireland. In Ireland the land had
+ever been owned by the people, each tribe, as representing a single
+family, holding a certain area by communal tenure, and electing a
+chief to protect its territory from aggression. For this elective
+chieftainship the English law-courts substituted something wholly
+different: a tenure modeled on the feudal servitude of England.
+This new principle made the land of the country the property not of
+the whole people but of a limited and privileged class: the
+favorites of the ruling power--"hungry parasites" as the Congress
+of 1775 called them. This "landed" class continued to hold absolute
+sway until quite recently, and it was this class which succumbed to
+bribery in 1800, and passed the Act of Legislative Union with
+England. The clergy of the Established church were little more than
+the private chaplains of the "landed" class, the two alien bodies
+supporting each other.</p>
+<p>Folly, however, was the child of injustice; for so shortsighted
+were these hungry parasites that they developed a system of
+land-laws so bad as to cause universal poverty, and bring a
+reaction which is steadily sweeping the "landed" class of Ireland
+to extinction and oblivion. The fundamental principle <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page377" id="page377"></a>[pg 377]</span> of
+these bad land-laws was this: the tenant was compelled to renew his
+lease from year to year; and whenever, during the year, he had in
+any way improved the land in his possession,--by draining marshes,
+by reclaiming waste areas, by adding farm-buildings, the "owner" of
+the land could demand an enhanced rent, as the condition of
+renewing the lease. The tenant had to submit to a continually
+ascending scale of extortion, sanctioned by law and exacted by
+armed force; or, as an alternative, he had to give up the fruit of
+his industry without compensation and without redress.</p>
+<p>Anything more certain to destroy energy, to cut at the roots of
+thrift, to undermine all the best qualities of manhood, it would be
+impossible to imagine. The slave on the plantation could in time
+purchase his freedom. The tiller of the soil in Ireland found, on
+the contrary, that the greater his industry, the greater was the
+sum he had to pay for the right to exercise it. We saw that there
+never was any pretence of free contract in the feudal land-tenure
+of England; that there never was any pretence of an honest bargain
+between farmer and landlord, for their mutual benefit. The tenant
+paid the landlord for services rendered, not to him, but to his
+Norman conqueror. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page378" id=
+"page378"></a>[pg 378]</span> So it was, in an even greater degree,
+in Ireland. There was no pretence at all that tenant and landlord
+entered into a free contract for their mutual benefit. Nor did
+either law, custom, religion or opinion require the landlord to
+make any return to his tenants for the share of the fruit of their
+toil he annually carried away.</p>
+<p>The tiller of the soil, therefore, labored from year to year,
+through droughts and rains, through heat and cold, facing bad
+seasons with good. At the end of the year, after hard toil had
+gathered in the fruit of the harvest, he saw the best part of that
+fruit legally confiscated by an alien, who would have been
+speechless with wonder, had it been suggested to him that anything
+was due from him in return. Nor was that all. This alien was
+empowered, and by the force of public opinion incited, to exact the
+greatest possible share of the tiller's produce, and, as we saw, he
+was entitled to the whole benefit of whatever improvements the
+tiller of the soil had made; and could--and constantly did--expel
+the cultivator who was unable or unwilling to pay a higher tax, as
+the penalty for improving the land.</p>
+<p>It may be said that bad as this all was, it was not without a
+remedy; that the cultivator had the choice <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page379" id="page379"></a>[pg 379]</span> of
+other occupations, and might let the land lie fallow, while its
+"owner" starved. But this only brings to mind the fact that during
+the eighteenth century England had legislated with the deliberate
+intention of destroying the manufactures and shipping of Ireland,
+and had legislated with success. It should be added that this one
+measure affected all residents in Ireland equally, whatever faith
+or race. There was practically no alternative before the
+cultivator. He had the choice between robbery and starvation.</p>
+<p>It would be more than miraculous if this condition of things had
+not borne its fruit. The result was this: it ceased to be the
+interest of the cultivator of the land to till it effectively, or
+to make any improvement whatever, whether by drainage, reclaiming
+waste land, or building, or by adopting better agricultural
+methods. In every case, his increase of labor, of foresight and
+energy, would have met with but one reward: when the time came to
+renew the lease, he would have been told that his land had doubled
+in value during the year, and that he must, therefore, pay twice as
+much for the privilege of tilling it. If he refused, he at once
+forfeited every claim to the fruit of his own work, the whole of
+his improvements becoming the property of the land owner.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page380" id="page380"></a>[pg
+380]</span>
+<p>The cultivators, as an inevitable consequence, lost every
+incentive to labor, energy, foresight and the moral qualities which
+are fostered by honestly rewarded work. They worked as little as
+possible on their farms, and the standard of cultivation steadily
+declined, while the mode of living grew perpetually worse. If it
+were intended to reduce a whole population to hopeless poverty, no
+better or more certain way could be imagined.</p>
+<p>The steady lowering of the arts of cultivation, the restriction
+of crops, the tendency to keep as close as possible to the margin
+of sustenance, thus zealously fostered, opened the way for the
+disastrous famine of 1846 and 1847, which marks the beginning of a
+rapid decline in population,--a decrease which has never since been
+checked. The inhabitants of Ireland shortly before the famine
+numbered considerably over eight millions. Since that time, there
+has been a decrease of about four millions--a thing without
+parallel in Christendom.</p>
+<p>The amendment of the land-laws, which were directly responsible
+for these evil results, was by no means initiated in consequence of
+the famine. It was due wholly to a great national agitation,
+carried out under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page381" id="page381"></a>[pg
+381]</span> which led to the land-acts of 1881 and 1887. These new
+laws at last guaranteed to the cultivator the fruit of his toil,
+and guarded him against arbitrary increase of the tax levied on him
+by the "owner" of the land. But they did not stop here; they
+initiated a principle which will finally make the cultivator
+absolute owner of his land, and abolish the feudal class with their
+rights of private taxation. This cannot fail to react on England,
+so that the burdens of the Angles and Saxons will at last be lifted
+from their shoulders, as a result of the example set them by the
+Gaels, for generations working persistently, and persistently
+advancing towards their goal. Nor will the tide thus set in motion
+spread only to Saxon and Angle; its influence will be felt wherever
+those who work are deprived unjustly of the fruit of their toil,
+whether by law or without law. The evils suffered by Ireland will
+thus be not unavailing; they will rather bring the best of all
+rewards: a reward to others, of whatever race and in whatever land,
+who are victims of a like injustice.</p>
+<p>The story of Ireland, through many centuries, has thus been
+told. The rest belongs to the future. We have seen the strong life
+of the prime bringing forth the virtues of war and peace; we have
+seen valor <span class="pagenum"><a name="page382" id=
+"page382"></a>[pg 382]</span> and beauty and wisdom come to perfect
+ripeness in the old pagan world. We have seen that old pagan world
+transformed by the new teaching of gentleness and mercy, a
+consciousness, wider, more humane and universal, added from above
+to the old genius of individual life. With the new teaching came
+the culture of Rome, and something of the lore of Hellas and
+Palestine, of Egypt and Chaldea, warmly welcomed and ardently
+cherished in Ireland at a time when Europe was submerged under
+barbarian inroads and laid waste by heathen hordes. We have seen
+the faith and culture thus preserved among our western seas
+generously shared with the nascent nations who emerged from the
+pagan invasions; the seeds of intellectual and spiritual life, sown
+with faith and fervor as far as the Alps and the Danube, springing
+up with God-given increase, and ripening to an abundant
+harvest.</p>
+<p>To that bright epoch of our story succeeded centuries of growing
+darkness and gathering storm. The forces of our national life,
+which until then had found such rich expression and flowered in
+such abundant beauty, were now checked, driven backward and inward,
+through war, oppression and devastation, until a point was reached
+when the whole indigenous <span class="pagenum"><a name="page383"
+id="page383"></a>[pg 383]</span> population had no vestige of
+religious or civil rights; when they ceased even to exist in the
+eyes of the law.</p>
+<p>The tide of life, thus forced inward, gained a firm possession
+of the invisible world, with the eternal realities indwelling
+there. Thus fixed and founded in the real, that tide turned once
+again, flowing outwards and sweeping before it all the barriers in
+its way. The population of Ireland is diminishing in numbers; but
+the race to which they belong increases steadily: a race of clean
+life, of unimpaired vital power, unspoiled by wealth or luxury, the
+most virile force in the New World.</p>
+<p>It happens very rarely, under those mysterious laws which rule
+the life of all humanity, the laws which work their majestic will
+through the ages, using as their ministers the ambitions and
+passions of men--it happens rarely that a race keeps its unbroken
+life through thirty centuries, transformed time after time by new
+spiritual forces, yet in genius remaining ever the same. It may be
+doubted whether even once before throughout all history a race thus
+long-lived has altogether escaped the taint of corruption and
+degeneration. Never before, we may confidently say, has a single
+people emerged <span class="pagenum"><a name="page384" id=
+"page384"></a>[pg 384]</span> from such varied vicissitudes,
+stronger at the end in genius, in spiritual and moral power, than
+at the beginning, richer in vital force, clearer in understanding,
+in every way more mature and humane.</p>
+<p>For this is the real fruit of so much evil valiantly endured: a
+deep love of freedom, a hatred of oppression, a knowledge that the
+wish to dominate is a fruitful source of wrong. The new age now
+dawning before us carries many promises of good for all humanity;
+not less, it has its dangers, grave and full of menace;
+threatening, if left to work unchecked, to bring lasting evil to
+our life. Never before, it is true, have there been so wide
+opportunities for material well-being; but, on the other hand,
+never before have there been such universal temptations toward a
+low and sensual ideal. Our very mastery over natural forces and
+material energies entices us away from our real goal, hides from
+our eyes the human and divine powers of the soul, with which we are
+enduringly concerned. Our skill in handling nature's lower powers
+may be a means of great good; not less may it bring forth
+unexampled evil. The opportunities of well-being are increased; the
+opportunities of exclusive luxury are increased in equal measure;
+exclusion may bring resentment; resentment <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page385" id="page385"></a>[pg 385]</span> may
+call forth oppression, armed with new weapons, guided by wider
+understanding, but prompted by the same corrupt spirit as of
+old.</p>
+<p>In the choice which our new age must make between these two
+ways, very much may be done for the enduring well-being of mankind
+by a race full of clean vigor, a race taught by stern experience
+the evil of tyranny and oppression, a race profoundly believing the
+religion of gentleness and mercy, a race full of the sense of the
+invisible world, the world of our immortality.</p>
+<p>We see in Ireland a land with a wonderful past, rich in
+tradition and varied lore; a land where the memorials of the ages,
+built in enduring stone, would in themselves enable us to trace the
+life and progress of human history; we see in Ireland a land full
+of a singular fascination and beauty, where even the hills and
+rivers speak not of themselves but of the spirit which builds the
+worlds; a beauty, whether in brightness or gloom, finding its exact
+likeness in no other land; we see all this, but we see much more:
+not a memory of the past, but a promise of the future; no offering
+of earthly wealth, but rather a gift to the soul of man; not for
+Ireland only, but for all mankind.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page386" id="page386"></a>[pg
+386]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="INDEX."></a>INDEX.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Abbey-Dorney, <a href="#page303">303</a><br>
+Abbey-feale, <a href="#page303">303</a><br>
+Abbey-leix, <a href="#page303">303</a><br>
+Abbey of Ballintober, <a href="#page305">305</a><br>
+Abbey-quarter, <a href="#page029">29</a><br>
+Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, words of, <a href="#page369">369</a>,
+<a href="#page370">370</a><br>
+Achill Island, <a href="#page030">30</a><br>
+Act of Union, <a href="#page371">371</a><br>
+Aed Allan, <a href="#page225">225</a>, <a href=
+"#page231">231</a><br>
+Aed Finnliat, <a href="#page247">247</a><br>
+Aed Roin, <a href="#page225">225</a><br>
+Aed, son of Colgan, <a href="#page226">226</a><br>
+Ailill, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href="#page131">131</a>,
+<a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href=
+"#page142">142</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page152">152</a><br>
+Aiterni, <a href="#page150">150</a><br>
+Alfred, king of the Northumbrian Saxons, <a href=
+"#page232">232</a><br>
+Alfred, king, ode of to the country he visited, <a href=
+"#page232">232</a>, <a href="#page233">233</a><br>
+Alny, <a href="#page120">120</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a><br>
+Amargin, <a href="#page150">150</a><br>
+Ambigatos, <a href="#page103">103</a><br>
+Ancient seats of learning, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Ancient seats of learning, studies therein, <a href=
+"#page221">221</a>, <a href="#page222">222</a><br>
+Anglicans, <a href="#page322">322</a><br>
+Angus, the Young, <a href="#page092">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a>, <a href="#page096">96</a>, <a href=
+"#page173">173</a><br>
+"Annals," history of the times as recorded in the, <a href=
+"#page235">235</a>, <a href="#page252">252</a><br>
+"Annals," quotations from, <a href="#page224">224</a>, <a href=
+"#page244">244</a>, <a href="#page264">264</a>, <a href=
+"#page277">277</a>, <a href="#page293">293</a><br>
+Antrim, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page196">196</a><br>
+Archaic Darkness, <a href="#page011">11</a><br>
+Archaic Dawn, <a href="#page012">12</a><br>
+Ardan, <a href="#page120">120</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a><br>
+Ard-Maca, <a href="#page200">200</a><br>
+Armagh, <a href="#page200">200</a>, <a href="#page208">208</a>,
+<a href="#page232">232</a>, <a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+At-Cliat, <a href="#page242">242</a>, <a href="#page243">243</a>,
+<a href="#page275">275</a><br>
+Athlone, <a href="#page140">140</a>, <a href="#page350">350</a>,
+<a href="#page354">354</a><br>
+Ath-uinc&eacute;, <a href="#page163">163</a><br>
+Aughrim, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href="#page355">355</a></p>
+<p>Ballinasloe, <a href="#page354">354</a><br>
+Ballysadare, <a href="#page027">27</a>, <a href="#page087">87</a>,
+<a href="#page090">90</a><br>
+Balor of the Evil Eye, <a href="#page090">90</a>, <a href=
+"#page091">91</a>, <a href="#page093">93</a><br>
+Bangor, <a href="#page221">221</a>, <a href="#page239">239</a>,
+<a href="#page240">240</a>, <a href="#page250">250</a>, <a href=
+"#page342">342</a><br>
+Bann, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Bantry Bay, <a href="#page104">104</a><br>
+Barrow, valley of the, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Battle of Kinvarra, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Battle of the Headland of the Kings, <a href="#page013">13</a><br>
+Battle-verses, <a href="#page248">248</a>, <a href=
+"#page249">249</a><br>
+Bay of Murbolg, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Bay of Sligo, <a href="#page029">29</a><br>
+Bective Abbey, <a href="#page301">301</a><br>
+Bede, Venerable, <a href="#page218">218</a><br>
+Belgadan, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Beltane, festival of, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Beltaney, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Black Lion Cromlech, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Blackwater, <a href="#page039">39</a>, <a href=
+"#page082">82</a><br>
+Bonamargy Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Book of Kells, <a href="#page209">209</a>, <a href=
+"#page249">249</a><br>
+Boyne, the, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page150">150</a>,
+<a href="#page242">242</a>, <a href="#page350">350</a><br>
+Brandon Hill, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Breagho, <a href="#page034">34</a><br>
+Breas, <a href="#page083">83</a>, <a href="#page084">84</a>,
+<a href="#page099">99</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page105">105</a><br>
+Breg, <a href="#page149">149</a><br>
+Brehon Laws, the, <a href="#page206">206</a><br>
+Brehon Laws, changes of, effected by St. Patrick, <a href=
+"#page207">207</a>, <a href="#page316">316</a><br>
+Bruce, Edward, invasion by, <a href="#page292">292</a><br>
+Bruce, Edward, death of, <a href="#page293">293</a><br>
+Brugh, on the Boyne, <a href="#page093">93</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a><br>
+Bundoran, <a href="#page029">29</a></p>
+<p>Cael, <a href="#page163">163</a>, <a href="#page165">165</a>,
+<a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a><br>
+Cael, poem of, <a href="#page164">164</a>, <a href=
+"#page165">165</a><br>
+Caher, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Caherconree, <a href="#page032">32</a><br>
+Cailt&eacute;, <a href="#page162">162</a>, <a href=
+"#page166">166</a><br>
+Cairbr&eacute;, <a href="#page089">89</a>, <a href=
+"#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page168">168</a>, <a href=
+"#page173">173</a>, <a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+Cairpr&eacute; Nia Fer, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a><br>
+Callan River, <a href="#page199">199</a><br>
+Calpurn, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Cantyre, <a href="#page119">119</a>, <a href="#page123">123</a>,
+<a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Carlingford Lough, <a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+Carlingford Mountains, <a href="#page044">44</a><br>
+Carrickfergus, <a href="#page331">331</a>, <a href=
+"#page344">344</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a>, <a href=
+"#page347">347</a><br>
+Carrowmore, <a href="#page027">27</a>, <a href=
+"#page029">29</a><br>
+Cataract of the Oaks, <a href="#page087">87</a>, <a href=
+"#page090">90</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a><br>
+Catbad, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href="#page142">142</a>,
+<a href="#page150">150</a><br>
+Cavan, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Cavancarragh, <a href="#page035">35</a>, <a href=
+"#page066">66</a><br>
+Cealleac, <a href="#page224">224</a><br>
+Charlemont, castle of, <a href="#page343">343</a><br>
+Chevalier de Tess&eacute;, <a href="#page355">355</a><br>
+Chiefs of Tara, <a href="#page082">82</a><br>
+Chieftain of the Silver Arm, <a href="#page091">91</a><br>
+Chronicler's record of battles fought, <a href="#page210">210</a>,
+<a href="#page211">211</a>, <a href="#page212">212</a>, <a href=
+"#page217">217</a>, <a href="#page">218</a><br>
+Chronicles of Ulster, <a href="#page218">218</a><br>
+Church architecture, <a href="#page298">298</a><br>
+Ciar, <a href="#page104">104</a><br>
+Cistercian Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Clare,031 <a href="#page">31</a>, <a href="#page062">62</a><br>
+Clare Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Clidna, <a href="#page166">166</a><br>
+Clocar, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Clondalkin, <a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+Clonmacnoise, <a href="#page208">208</a><br>
+Cluain Bronaig, <a href="#page226">226</a><br>
+Coleraine, <a href="#page331">331</a><br>
+Colum Kill, <a href="#page208">208</a>, <a href=
+"#page212">212</a><br>
+Colum Kill, death of, <a href="#page215">215</a><br>
+Colum Kill, verses written by, <a href="#page213">213</a>, <a href=
+"#page214">214</a><br>
+Colum of the Churches, <a href="#page223">223</a>, <a href=
+"#page237">237</a><br>
+Conall Cernac, <a href="#page149">149</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Concobar, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href="#page113">113</a>,
+<a href="#page114">114</a>, <a href="#page117">117</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a>, <a href=
+"#page123">123</a>, <a href="#page124">124</a>, <a href=
+"#page129">129</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href=
+"#page142">142</a>, <a href="#page143">143</a>, <a href=
+"#page144">144</a>, <a href="#page145">145</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page148">148</a>, <a href=
+"#page149">149</a>, <a href="#page150">150</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a>, <a href="#page152">152</a>, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href=
+"#page246">246</a>, <a href="#page258">258</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a>, <a href="#page360">360</a><br>
+Conditions existing in early years, <a href="#page219">219</a>,
+<a href="#page220">220</a>, <a href="#page221">221</a>, <a href=
+"#page222">222</a><br>
+Congus the Abbot, <a href="#page225">225</a><br>
+Connacht, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page088">88</a>,
+<a href="#page133">133</a>, <a href="#page140">140</a>, <a href=
+"#page144">144</a>, <a href="#page350">350</a>, <a href=
+"#page357">357</a><br>
+Connemara, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Conn, lord of Connacht, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Conn of the Five-Score Battles, <a href="#page088">88</a>, <a href=
+"#page162">162</a><br>
+Copyright decision, an early, <a href="#page213">213</a><br>
+Cork, <a href="#page005">5</a><br>
+Cormac, <a href="#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page">171</a>,
+<a href="#page172">172</a><br>
+Cormac, precepts of, <a href="#page167">167</a>, <a href=
+"#page168">168</a>, <a href="#page169">169</a>, <a href=
+"#page170">170</a>, <a href="#page171">171</a><br>
+Coroticus, <a href="#page195">195</a><br>
+Corrib, <a href="#page">85</a><br>
+Cred&eacute; of the Yellow Hair, <a href="#page163">163</a>,
+<a href="#page178">178</a>, <a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Crimtan of the Yellow Hair, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Cromlech-builders, the, <a href="#page051">51</a>, <a href=
+"#page068">68</a><br>
+Cromlech of Howth, <a href="#page043">43</a><br>
+Cromlech of Lisbellaw. <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Cromlech of Lough Rea, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Cromlechs, <a href="#page027">27</a>, <a href="#page028">28</a>,
+<a href="#page029">29</a>, <a href="#page030">30</a>, <a href=
+"#page031">31</a>, <a href="#page037">37</a>, <a href=
+"#page039">39</a>, <a href="#page042">42</a>, <a href=
+"#page043">43</a>, <a href="#page045">45</a>, <a href=
+"#page046">46</a>, <a href="#page047">47</a>, <a href=
+"#page051">51</a>, <a href="#page052">52</a>. <a href=
+"#page053">53</a>, <a href="#page054">54</a>, <a href=
+"#page055">55</a>, <a href="#page056">56</a>, <a href=
+"#page057">57</a>, <a href="#page058">58</a><br>
+Cromwell, <a href="#page334">334</a>, <a href=
+"#page339">339</a><br>
+Croom, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Cruacan, <a href="#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page141">141</a>,
+<a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Cryptic Designs on cromlechs, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Cuailgne, <a href="#page132">132</a><br>
+Cuigead Sreing, <a href="#page088">88</a><br>
+Culdaff, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Cumal, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Curlew hills, <a href="#page037">37</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a><br>
+Cuculain, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href="#page014">14</a>,
+<a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page016">16</a>, <a href=
+"#page133">133</a>, <a href="#page134">134</a>, <a href=
+"#page135">135</a>, <a href="#page136">136</a>, <a href=
+"#page137">137</a>, <a href="#page138">138</a>, <a href=
+"#page139">139</a>, <a href="#page143">143</a>, <a href=
+"#page144">144</a>, <a href="#page145">145</a>, <a href=
+"#page152">152</a>, <a href="#page155">155</a>, <a href=
+"#page181">181</a>, <a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href=
+"#page246">246</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a>, <a href=
+"#page360">360</a></p>
+<p>DAGDA Mor, <a href="#page096">96</a>, <a href=
+"#page148">148</a><br>
+Dagda, the Mighty, <a href="#page092">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a><br>
+Dair&eacute;, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page133">133</a>, <a href="#page200">200</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Danes, conversion of the, <a href="#page275">275</a><br>
+Danish Pyramid of Uby, <a href="#page097">97</a><br>
+Dark Ages, the, <a href="#page260">260</a>, <a href=
+"#page261">261</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a><br>
+Day of Spirits, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+De Danaans, the, <a href="#page077">77</a>, <a href=
+"#page079">79</a>, <a href="#page080">80</a>, <a href=
+"#page082">82</a>, <a href="#page084">84</a>, <a href=
+"#page086">86</a>, <a href="#page087">87</a>, <a href=
+"#page089">89</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page093">93</a>, <a href="#page094">94</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a>, <a href="#page096">96</a>, <a href=
+"#page097">97</a>, <a href="#page098">98</a>, <a href=
+"#page099">99</a>, <a href="#page103">103</a>, <a href=
+"#page105">105</a>, <a href="#page106">106</a>, <a href=
+"#page112">112</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page148">148</a><br>
+De Courcey, <a href="#page277">277</a><br>
+De Courceys, the, <a href="#page319">319</a><br>
+Deer-park, <a href="#page029">29</a><br>
+Deirdr&eacute;, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href=
+"#page014">14</a>, <a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href=
+"#page115">115</a>, <a href="#page123">123</a>, <a href=
+"#page124">124</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a>, <a href=
+"#page130">130</a>, <a href="#page178">178</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Deirdr&eacute;, the fate of, <a href="#page116">116</a>, <a href=
+"#page117">117</a>, <a href="#page118">118</a>, <a href=
+"#page119">119</a>, <a href="#page120">120</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a><br>
+Deirdr&eacute;, the Lament of, <a href="#page125">125</a><br>
+De Lacys, the, <a href="#page319">319</a><br>
+Deny, <a href="#page331">331</a>, <a href="#page341">341</a>,
+<a href="#page342">342</a>, <a href="#page344">344</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a><br>
+Devenish, <a href="#page250">250</a><br>
+Devenish Island, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Diarmuid, <a href="#page171">171</a>, <a href="#page172">172</a>,
+<a href="#page173">173</a><br>
+Dicu, <a href="#page240">240</a><br>
+Dingle Bay, <a href="#page104">104</a><br>
+Dinn-Rig by the Barrow, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Dissenters, <a href="#page322">322</a><br>
+Domna, <a href="#page011">11</a>, <a href="#page211">211</a>,
+<a href="#page231">231</a><br>
+Donaghpatrick, <a href="#page208">208</a><br>
+Doncad, <a href="#page231">231</a>, <a href="#page232">232</a><br>
+Donegal, <a href="#page029">29</a>, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Donegal Highlands, <a href="#page026">26</a><br>
+Donegal ranges, <a href="#page005">5</a><br>
+Douglas, <a href="#page350">350</a><br>
+Douin Cain, <a href="#page081">81</a><br>
+Down, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Downpatrick, <a href="#page198">198</a>, <a href=
+"#page240">240</a><br>
+Drogheda, <a href="#page342">342</a>, <a href=
+"#page345">345</a><br>
+Druids, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Druim Dean, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Drumbo, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Dublin, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page252">252</a>,
+<a href="#page340">340</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a><br>
+Dublin Parliament, <a href="#page368">368</a><br>
+Duke of Ormond, <a href="#page359">359</a><br>
+Dundalathglas, <a href="#page240">240</a><br>
+Dundalk, <a href="#page342">342</a><br>
+Dundelga, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Dundrum, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Dundrum Bay, <a href="#page044">44</a>, <a href=
+"#page045">45</a><br>
+Durrow, <a href="#page221">221</a>, <a href="#page250">250</a></p>
+<p>Early churches, <a href="#page208">208</a><br>
+Early schools of learning, tongues first studied in, <a href=
+"#page208">208</a><br>
+Eclipses of the sun and moon, record of, <a href=
+"#page218">218</a><br>
+Edgehill, battle of, <a href="#page326">326</a><br>
+Elias, Bishop of Angoul&ecirc;me, France, testimony of, <a href=
+"#page">250</a>, <a href="#page">251</a><br>
+Elizabeth, Queen, <a href="#page">321</a>, <a href=
+"#page">341</a><br>
+Emain, Banquet-hall of, <a href="#page111">111</a><br>
+Emain of Maca, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href=
+"#page110">110</a>, <a href="#page112">112</a>, <a href=
+"#page115">115</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a>, <a href=
+"#page123">123</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Engineering skill ten thousand years ago, <a href=
+"#page043">43</a><br>
+Enniskillen, <a href="#page034">34</a>, <a href="#page035">35</a>,
+<a href="#page341">341</a><br>
+Eocaid, son of Erc, <a href="#page081">81</a>, <a href=
+"#page084">84</a>, <a href="#page086">86</a>, <a href=
+"#page087">87</a><br>
+Eocu, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Erin, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Established Church, clergy of the, <a href="#page376">376</a><br>
+Etan, <a href="#page089">89</a><br>
+Evangel of Galilee, the, <a href="#page016">16</a></p>
+<p>Factna, son of Cass, <a href="#page113">113</a><br>
+Fair Head, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Feidlimid, <a href="#page242">242</a><br>
+Ferdiad, <a href="#page134">134</a>, <a href="#page135">135</a>,
+<a href="#page136">136</a>, <a href="#page138">138</a>, <a href=
+"#page139">139</a>, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Fergus mac Roeg, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href=
+"#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page016">16</a>, <a href=
+"#page113">113</a>, <a href="#page114">114</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a>, <a href=
+"#page123">123</a>, <a href="#page124">124</a>, <a href=
+"#page129">129</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page133">133</a><br>
+Fergus the Eloquent, <a href="#page166">166</a>, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a>, <a href=
+"#page360">360</a><br>
+Fermanagh, <a href="#page033">33</a><br>
+Feudal system, the, <a href="#page289">289</a><br>
+Feudal ownership, <a href="#page291">291</a><br>
+Find, ode to Spring of, <a href="#page156">156</a><br>
+Find, son of Cumal, <a href="#page014">14</a>, <a href=
+"#page016">16</a>, <a href="#page155">155</a>, <a href=
+"#page161">161</a>, <a href="#page162">162</a>, <a href=
+"#page163">163</a>, <a href="#page166">166</a>, <a href=
+"#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page171">171</a>, <a href=
+"#page172">172</a>, <a href="#page173">173</a>, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href=
+"#page246">246</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a><br>
+Find, son of Ros, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page152">152</a><br>
+Finian, school of learning and religion founded by, <a href=
+"#page212">212</a><br>
+Finvoy, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Firbolgs, <a href="#page060">60</a>, <a href="#page061">61</a>,
+<a href="#page069">69</a>. <a href="#page070">70</a>, <a href=
+"#page077">77</a>, <a href="#page081">81</a>, <a href=
+"#page082">82</a>, <a href="#page084">84</a>, <a href=
+"#page085">85</a>, <a href="#page086">86</a>, <a href=
+"#page087">87</a>, <a href="#page088">88</a>, <a href=
+"#page090">90</a>, <a href="#page105">105</a>, <a href=
+"#page106">106</a><br>
+Flann, <a href="#page248">248</a><br>
+Fomorians, <a href="#page069">69</a>, <a href="#page070">70</a>,
+<a href="#page077">77</a>, <a href="#page081">81</a>, <a href=
+"#page090">90</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page092">92</a>, <a href="#page093">93</a>, <a href=
+"#page106">106</a>, <a href="#page246">246</a><br>
+Ford of Ferdiad, Ath-Fhirdia, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Ford of Luan, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Ford of Seannait, <a href="#page226">226</a><br>
+Ford of the Hurdles, <a href="#page242">242</a>, <a href=
+"#page243">243</a>, <a href="#page246">246</a><br>
+Ford of the river, <a href="#page014">14</a><br>
+Franklin, Benjamin, letter of to Irish people, <a href=
+"#page367">367</a><br>
+French Revolution, the, <a href="#page372">372</a></p>
+<p>Gairec, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Galian of Lagin, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Galtee Mountains, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Galway, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page062">62</a>,
+<a href="#page">350</a>, <a href="#page357">357</a><br>
+Galway Bay, <a href="#page031">31</a>, <a href=
+"#page162">162</a><br>
+Galway Lakes, <a href="#page031">31</a><br>
+Gauls, the, <a href="#page103">103</a><br>
+Giant Stones, <a href="#page030">30</a><br>
+Ginkell, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href="#page355">355</a>,
+<a href="#page357">357</a>, <a href="#page358">358</a><br>
+Gladstone, <a href="#page375">375</a><br>
+Glanworth, <a href="#page039">39</a><br>
+Glendalough, <a href="#page208">208</a>, <a href=
+"#page221">221</a><br>
+Glen Druid, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Gold Mines River, <a href="#page109">109</a><br>
+Golden Vale, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Goll Mac Norna, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Grania, <a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page171">171</a>,
+<a href="#page172">172</a>, <a href="#page173">173</a>, <a href=
+"#page178">178</a><br>
+Grattan, Henry, address of, to Dublin Parliament, <a href=
+"#page368">368</a><br>
+Gray Lake, <a href="#page037">37</a><br>
+Grey Abbey, <a href="#page302">302</a></p>
+<p>Headland of the Kings, <a href="#page148">148</a><br>
+Hill of Barnec, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Hill of Howth, <a href="#page239">239</a>, <a href=
+"#page252">252</a><br>
+Hill of Luchra, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Hill of Rudraige, <a href="#page044">44</a><br>
+Hill of Tara, <a href="#page155">155</a><br>
+Hill of the Willows, <a href="#page200">200</a><br>
+Hill of Ward, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Holycross Abbey, <a href="#page304">304</a><br>
+House of Delga, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+House of Mead, <a href="#page199">199</a><br>
+Howth, <a href="#page239">239</a><br>
+Howth Head, <a href="#page043">43</a><br>
+Hyperboreans, <a href="#page060">60</a>, <a href="#page061">61</a>,
+<a href="#page062">62</a>, <a href="#page064">64</a>, <a href=
+"#page069">69</a></p>
+<p>Iarl Strangbow, <a href="#page275">275</a><br>
+Indec, son of De Domnand, <a href="#page090">90</a>, <a href=
+"#page091">91</a><br>
+Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny, <a href="#page021">21</a><br>
+Inismurray, <a href="#page237">237</a>, <a href="#page238">238</a>,
+<a href="#page239">239</a><br>
+Iona, <a href="#page215">215</a><br>
+Ireland, art of working gold in, <a href="#page108">108</a>,
+<a href="#page178">178</a><br>
+Ireland, causes of uprising in, <a href="#page320">320</a><br>
+Ireland, condition of, in the eighteenth century, <a href=
+"#page365">365</a>, <a href="#page366">366</a>, <a href=
+"#page367">367</a><br>
+Ireland, English influence in, <a href="#page318">318</a><br>
+Ireland, life in, two thousand years ago, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page178">178</a>, <a href=
+"#page179">179</a>, <a href="#page180">180</a><br>
+Ireland, national debt of, <a href="#page372">372</a><br>
+Ireland, sympathy of U. S. Congress for people of, <a href=
+"#page366">366</a>, <a href="#page367">367</a><br>
+Ireland, traditions of, <a href="#page110">110</a><br>
+Ireland, the Insurrection of, <a href="#page370">370</a>, <a href=
+"#page371">371</a>, <a href="#page372">372</a><br>
+Ireland, visible and invisible, <a href="#page003">3</a><br>
+Irgalac, <a href="#page149">149</a><br>
+Iriel, <a href="#page149">149</a><br>
+Irish writing, earliest forms of, <a href="#page177">177</a><br>
+Islay, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Islay Hills, <a href="#page119">119</a></p>
+<p>James II., <a href="#page340">340</a>, <a href=
+"#page341">341</a>, <a href="#page342">342</a>, <a href=
+"#page343">343</a>, <a href="#page344">344</a>, <a href=
+"#page345">345</a>, <a href="#page346">346</a>, <a href=
+"#page347">347</a>, <a href="#page353">353</a><br>
+Jura, <a href="#page119">119</a>, <a href="#page123">123</a>,
+<a href="#page143">143</a></p>
+<p>Kenmare, <a href="#page039">39</a><br>
+Kenmare Kiver, <a href="#page039">39</a>, <a href=
+"#page104">104</a><br>
+Kerry, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page062">62</a><br>
+Kildare, <a href="#page210">210</a>, <a href="#page221">221</a>,
+<a href="#page232">232</a><br>
+Kilkenny, <a href="#page042">42</a>, <a href="#page325">325</a>,
+<a href="#page326">326</a>, <a href="#page349">349</a><br>
+Killarney, <a href="#page036">36</a>, <a href="#page039">39</a>,
+<a href="#page163">163</a><br>
+Killee, <a href="#page034">34</a><br>
+Killmallock Abbey, <a href="#page303">303</a><br>
+Killteran Village, <a href="#page043">43</a><br>
+Kinsale, <a href="#page340">340</a>, <a href="#page349">349</a><br>
+King Gorm's Stone, <a href="#page097">97</a><br>
+King William, <a href="#page345">345</a>, <a href=
+"#page346">346</a>, <a href="#page347">347</a>, <a href=
+"#page348">348</a>, <a href="#page349">349</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a>, <a href="#page352">352</a>, <a href=
+"#page365">365</a><br>
+Knock-Mealdown Hills, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Knockmoy Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Knocknarea, <a href="#page030">30</a></p>
+<p>Lake, General, statement of, <a href="#page370">370</a><br>
+Lake of Killarney, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Lakes of Erne, <a href="#page081">81</a><br>
+Lambay, <a href="#page236">236</a>, <a href="#page239">239</a>,
+<a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+Land of the Cromlech-builders, <a href="#page057">57</a><br>
+Land of the Ever Young, <a href="#page095">95</a>, <a href=
+"#page096">96</a><br>
+Land tenure, <a href="#page375">375</a>, <a href=
+"#page376">376</a>, <a href="#page377">377</a>, <a href=
+"#page378">378</a>, <a href="#page389">379</a>, <a href=
+"#page380">380</a><br>
+Laogaire, <a href="#page199">199</a>, <a href=
+"#page240">240</a><br>
+Lame, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Lauzun, <a href="#page350">350</a><br>
+Legamaddy, <a href="#page045">45</a><br>
+Leinster, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page162">162</a>,
+<a href="#page225">225</a>, <a href="#page226">226</a>, <a href=
+"#page232">232</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a><br>
+Leitrim, <a href="#page081">81</a><br>
+Leitrim Hills, <a href="#page026">26</a><br>
+Lennan in Monaghan, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Life of the Cromlech-builders, <a href="#page068">68</a><br>
+Liffey, the, <a href="#page242">242</a><br>
+Limerick, <a href="#page349">349</a>, <a href="#page350">350</a>,
+<a href="#page351">351</a>, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href=
+"#page357">357</a><br>
+Leinstermen, <a href="#page232">232</a>, <a href=
+"#page238">238</a><br>
+Loing Seac, <a href="#page224">224</a><br>
+Lough Erne, <a href="#page341">341</a><br>
+Loch Etive, <a href="#page119">119</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a><br>
+Lough Foyle, <a href="#page247">247</a><br>
+Lough Garra, <a href="#page037">37</a><br>
+Lough Gill, <a href="#page029">29</a><br>
+Lough Gur, <a href="#page038">38</a>, <a href="#page039">39</a><br>
+Lough Key, <a href="#page037">37</a><br>
+Lough Leane, <a href="#page161">161</a>, <a href=
+"#page163">163</a><br>
+Lough Mask, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Lough Neagh, <a href="#page110">110</a>, <a href=
+"#page200">200</a><br>
+Lough Ree, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Loughcrew Hills, <a href="#page043">43</a><br>
+Louis XIV, <a href="#page337">337</a>, <a href="#page340">340</a>,
+<a href="#page353">353</a><br>
+Lug, surnamed Lamfada, the Long-Armed, <a href="#page092">92</a>,
+<a href="#page093">93</a><br>
+Lusk, <a href="#page241">241</a></p>
+<p>Maca, Queen, <a href="#page110">110</a><br>
+Maelbridge, <a href="#page217">217</a><br>
+Mag Breag, <a href="#page223">223</a><br>
+Mag Rein, <a href="#page081">81</a><br>
+Mag Tuiread, <a href="#page085">85</a>, <a href="#page087">87</a>,
+<a href="#page246">246</a><br>
+Mangerton, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Marlborough, Duke of, <a href="#page352">352</a><br>
+Mask, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Mayo, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page062">62</a><br>
+Mayo Cliffs, <a href="#page026">26</a><br>
+Meave, Queen of Connacht, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href=
+"#page014">14</a>, <a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href=
+"#page025">25</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page133">133</a>, <a href="#page134">134</a>, <a href=
+"#page136">136</a>, <a href="#page137">137</a>, <a href=
+"#page140">140</a>, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href=
+"#page142">142</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page178">178</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Meath, <a href="#page155">155</a>, <a href="#page242">242</a><br>
+Men of Oluemacht, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Message of the New Way, <a href="#page264">264</a><br>
+Messenger of the Tidings, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Mide, <a href="#page149">149</a><br>
+Miocene Age, the, <a href="#page058">58</a><br>
+Modern form of old Irish names, <a href="#page234">234</a><br>
+Monasterboice, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Monk, <a href="#page326">326</a><br>
+Molana Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Molaise, <a href="#page237">237</a><br>
+Monasteries and religious schools, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Monroe, <a href="#page324">324</a>, <a href="#page326">326</a>,
+<a href="#page327">327</a>, <a href="#page328">328</a>, <a href=
+"#page329">329</a>, <a href="#page330">330</a>, <a href=
+"#page331">331</a>, <a href="#page333">333</a><br>
+Monument of Pillared Stones, <a href="#page030">30</a><br>
+Moore, <a href="#page326">326</a><br>
+Mount Venus Cromlech, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Mountcashel, Lord, <a href="#page342">342</a><br>
+Mountains of Mourne, <a href="#page044">44</a>, <a href=
+"#page094">94</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page193">193</a>, <a href="#page231">231</a><br>
+Mountains of Storms, <a href="#page026">26</a>, <a href=
+"#page087">87</a><br>
+Moville, <a href="#page221">221</a>, <a href="#page239">239</a>,
+<a href="#page262">262</a><br>
+Moytura, <a href="#page031">31</a>, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Munster, <a href="#page005">5</a><br>
+Munstermen of Great Muma, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Murcad, <a href="#page238">238</a></p>
+<p>Naisi, <a href="#page115">115</a>, <a href="#page116">116</a>,
+<a href="#page117">117</a>, <a href="#page118">118</a>, <a href=
+"#page120">120</a>, <a href="#page121">121</a>, <a href=
+"#page122">122</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a>, <a href=
+"#page130">130</a><br>
+Napier, Sir William, testimony of, <a href="#page370">370</a><br>
+Nectain's Shield, <a href="#page232">232</a><br>
+Nemed's sons, <a href="#page087">87</a><br>
+Nessa, <a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page113">113</a><br>
+Norsemen, waning of the, <a href="#page284">284</a><br>
+Northern Cromlech Region, <a href="#page054">54</a><br>
+Northmen, <a href="#page234">234</a>, <a href="#page235">235</a>,
+<a href="#page236">236</a>, <a href="#page243">243</a>, <a href=
+"#page251">251</a><br>
+Nuada, the De Danaan king, <a href="#page085">85</a>, <a href=
+"#page088">88</a>, <a href="#page089">89</a>, <a href=
+"#page091">91</a>, <a href="#page092">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page093">93</a></p>
+<p>O'Connell, Daniel, <a href="#page373">373</a><br>
+O'Donnell, <a href="#page321">321</a>, <a href=
+"#page322">322</a><br>
+O'Neill, Owen Roe, <a href="#page321">321</a>, <a href=
+"#page322">322</a>, <a href="#page323">323</a>, <a href=
+"#page324">324</a>, <a href="#page332">332</a>, <a href=
+"#page333">333</a>, <a href="#page334">334</a>, <a href=
+"#page338">338</a><br>
+O'Neill, death of, <a href="#page333">333</a><br>
+O'Neill, defeat of English army by, <a href="#page326">326</a>,
+<a href="#page327">327</a>, <a href="#page328">328</a>, <a href=
+"#page329">329</a>, <a href="#page330">330</a>, <a href=
+"#page331">331</a>, <a href="#page360">360</a><br>
+Ogma, of the Sunlike Face, <a href="#page092">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a>, <a href="#page096">96</a><br>
+Oscar, son of Ossin, <a href="#page014">14</a><br>
+Oscur, <a href="#page55">155</a>, <a href="#page171">171</a><br>
+Ossin, son of Find, <a href="#page014">14</a>, <a href=
+"#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page016">16</a>, <a href=
+"#page155">155</a>, <a href="#page161">161</a>, <a href=
+"#page162">162</a>, <a href="#page167">167</a>, <a href=
+"#page171">171</a>, <a href="#page172">172</a>, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page181">181</a>, <a href=
+"#page194">194</a>, <a href="#page246">246</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Ox Mountains, <a href="#page087">87</a></p>
+<p>Parliament at Dublin, <a href="#page323">323</a><br>
+Parliament of Ireland, <a href="#page371">371</a><br>
+Parnell, Charles Stewart, <a href="#page380">380</a><br>
+Patricius, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Patricius, appeal of, to fellow-Christians of Coroticus, <a href=
+"#page195">195</a>, <a href="#page196">196</a><br>
+Patricius, birthplace of, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Patricius, letter of, <a href="#page182">182</a>, <a href=
+"#page183">183</a>, <a href="#page184">184</a>, <a href=
+"#page185">185</a>, <a href="#page186">186</a>, <a href=
+"#page187">187</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>, <a href=
+"#page189">189</a>, <a href="#page190">190</a>, <a href=
+"#page191">191</a>, <a href="#page192">192</a>, <a href=
+"#page193">193</a><br>
+Patrick, <a href="#page017">17</a><br>
+Patrick, his first victory commemorated, <a href=
+"#page198">198</a><br>
+Patrick, the dwelling of, <a href="#page198">198</a><br>
+Peat, age of, <a href="#page034">34</a>, <a href=
+"#page036">36</a><br>
+Peat, rate of growth of, <a href="#page033">33</a>, <a href=
+"#page035">35</a>, <a href="#page066">66</a>, <a href=
+"#page067">67</a><br>
+Penal Laws, the system of, <a href="#page373">373</a><br>
+Plain of Nia, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Plain of the Headland, <a href="#page082">82</a><br>
+Plain of the Pillars, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Plain of Tirerril, <a href="#page091">91</a><br>
+Plantation of Ulster, <a href="#page322">322</a><br>
+Poem of Ossin, <a href="#page156">156</a><br>
+Potitus, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Prince William of Nassau, <a href="#page339">339</a>, <a href=
+"#page340">340</a>, <a href="#page342">342</a><br>
+Private taxation, <a href="#page291">291</a><br>
+Pyramids of stone, <a href="#page093">93</a>, <a href=
+"#page094198">94</a></p>
+<p>Quoyle River, <a href="#page198">198</a>, <a href=
+"#page240">240</a></p>
+<p>Ragallac, <a href="#page217">217</a><br>
+Raid of the Northmen, <a href="#page234">234</a>, <a href=
+"#page235">235</a>, <a href="#page236">236</a>, <a href=
+"#page237">237</a>, <a href="#page238">238</a>, <a href=
+"#page239">239</a>, <a href="#page240">240</a>, <a href=
+"#page241">241</a>, <a href="#page242">242</a>, <a href=
+"#page243">243</a><br>
+Raids on islands of Irish coast, <a href="#page257">257</a>,
+<a href="#page258">258</a>, <a href="#page259">259</a><br>
+Raphoe, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Rathcool, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Rath-Laogaire, <a href="#page199">199</a><br>
+Rath of Badamar, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Red Hills of Leinster, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Reform Bill, the, <a href="#page372">372</a><br>
+Restoration, the, <a href="#page339">339</a><br>
+Roderick O'Conor, <a href="#page061">61</a><br>
+Ros Ruad, <a href="#page152">152</a><br>
+Ros, son of Rudraige, <a href="#page112">112</a><br>
+Rudraige, <a href="#page044">44</a>, <a href="#page112">112</a><br>
+Rudraige, hill of, <a href="#page044">44</a>, <a href=
+"#page231">231</a><br>
+Runnymead, <a href="#page317">317</a></p>
+<p>Saint Adamnan, <a href="#page223">223</a>, <a href=
+"#page224">224</a><br>
+Saint Bernard, <a href="#page298">298</a><br>
+Saint Brigid, <a href="#page210">210</a><br>
+Saint Camin's "Commentary on the Psalms," <a href=
+"#page222">222</a><br>
+"Saint Colum of the Churches," <a href="#page212">212</a><br>
+Saint Dominick, <a href="#page298">298</a><br>
+Saint Francis of Assisi, <a href="#page298">298</a><br>
+Saint Mansuy, <a href="#page060">60</a><br>
+Saint Patrick, body of laid at rest, <a href="#page201">201</a><br>
+Saint Patrick, delivery of message by, to King Laogaire, <a href=
+"#page199">199</a><br>
+Saint Patrick, visit of to kings of Leinster and Munster, <a href=
+"#page200">200</a><br>
+Saint Patrick, work of, <a href="#page199">199</a>, <a href=
+"#page205">205</a><br>
+Saint Ruth, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href=
+"#page355">355</a><br>
+Saint Ruth, death of, <a href="#page356">356</a><br>
+Saint Samtain, <a href="#page226">226</a><br>
+Saint Samtain, epitaph of the saintly virgin, <a href=
+"#page226">226</a>, <a href="#page227">227</a><br>
+Sarsfield, <a href="#page351">351</a>, <a href="#page353">353</a>,
+<a href="#page355">355</a><br>
+Saul, <a href="#page208">208</a>, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Schomberg, <a href="#page342">342</a>, <a href="#page343">343</a>,
+<a href="#page344">344</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a>, <a href=
+"#page347">347</a>, <a href="#page348">348</a><br>
+Second Epoch, <a href="#page013">13</a><br>
+Senca, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Shannon, the, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page032">32</a>,
+<a href="#page037">37</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href=
+"#page141">141</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a>, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href=
+"#page357">357</a><br>
+Sheldon, <a href="#page357">357</a>, <a href="#page358">358</a><br>
+Slane, <a href="#page347">347</a>, <a href="#page348">348</a><br>
+Slieve Callan, <a href="#page031">31</a>, <a href=
+"#page039">39</a><br>
+Slieve League, <a href="#page026">26</a>, <a href=
+"#page090">90</a><br>
+Slieve Mish, <a href="#page104">104</a>, <a href=
+"#page132">132</a>, <a href="#page196">196</a><br>
+Slievemore Mountain, <a href="#page030">30</a><br>
+Slieve na Calliagh, <a href="#page095">95</a>, <a href=
+"#page097">97</a><br>
+Slieve-na-griddle, <a href="#page045">45</a>, <a href=
+"#page046">46</a><br>
+Sligo, <a href="#page025">25</a>, <a href="#page029">29</a>,
+<a href="#page090">90</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a><br>
+Sligo Hills, <a href="#page026">26</a><br>
+Sons of Milid, <a href="#page103">103</a>, <a href=
+"#page104">104</a>, <a href="#page105">105</a>, <a href=
+"#page106">106</a>, <a href="#page107">107</a>, <a href=
+"#page112">112</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a><br>
+Sound of Jura, <a href="#page119">119</a>, <a href=
+"#page123">123</a><br>
+Southern Cromlech Province, <a href="#page053">53</a><br>
+Sreng, <a href="#page082">82</a>, <a href="#page083">83</a>,
+<a href="#page084">84</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page093">93</a>, <a href="#page105">105</a><br>
+Stone Circles, <a href="#page027">27</a>, <a href=
+"#page028">28</a>, <a href="#page029">29</a>, <a href=
+"#page030">30</a>, <a href="#page032">32</a>, <a href=
+"#page033">33</a>, <a href="#page034">34</a>, <a href=
+"#page035">35</a>, <a href="#page038">38</a>, <a href=
+"#page042">42</a>, <a href="#page045">45</a>, <a href=
+"#page046">46</a>, <a href="#page047">47</a>, <a href=
+"#page051">51</a>, <a href="#page052">52</a>, <a href=
+"#page053">53</a>, <a href="#page055">55</a>, <a href=
+"#page072">72</a><br>
+Stone Circles, clue to their building, <a href=
+"#page040">40</a><br>
+Stone Circles, measure of their years, <a href=
+"#page040">40</a><br>
+Strand of Tralee, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Strangford, <a href="#page045">45</a><br>
+Strangford Lough, <a href="#page198">198</a><br>
+Stuarts, the, <a href="#page339">339</a><br>
+Sualtam, <a href="#page013">13</a><br>
+Succat, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Suir, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Sullane River, <a href="#page039">39</a><br>
+Summit of Prospects, <a href="#page046">146</a></p>
+<p>Tailten, <a href="#page106">106</a>, <a href=
+"#page132">132</a><br>
+Talbott, Earl of Tyrconnell, <a href="#page359">359</a><br>
+Tara, <a href="#page081">81</a>, <a href="#page084">84</a>,
+<a href="#page106">106</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page198">198</a><br>
+Tara, Banquet-hall of, <a href="#page112">112</a><br>
+"The Church of the Oak-woods," <a href="#page210">210</a><br>
+The Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, <a href="#page087">87</a><br>
+Thenay Relics, the, <a href="#page058">58</a><br>
+Third Epoch, <a href="#page014">14</a><br>
+Three Waves of Erin, the, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Tigearnac, <a href="#page265">265</a><br>
+Toppid Mountain, <a href="#page035">35</a>, <a href=
+"#page036">36</a><br>
+Traig Eotaile, <a href="#page087">87</a><br>
+Tralee, <a href="#page032">32</a><br>
+Treaty of Limerick, <a href="#page361">361</a>, <a href=
+"#page365">365</a><br>
+Tuata De Danaan, <a href="#page079">79</a>, <a href=
+"#page084">84</a><br>
+Twelve Peaks of Connemara, <a href="#page031">31</a><br>
+Tyrconnell, Lady, <a href="#page340">340</a><br>
+Tyrconnell, Lord, <a href="#page340">340</a>, <a href=
+"#page343">343</a>, <a href="#page344">344</a>, <a href=
+"#page345">345</a>, <a href="#page349">349</a>, <a href=
+"#page351">351</a>, <a href="#page352">352</a>, <a href=
+"#page353">353</a></p>
+<p>Uinc&eacute;, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Ui-Neill, the, <a href="#page225">225</a>, <a href=
+"#page232">232</a><br>
+Ulad, <a href="#page113">113</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>,
+<a href="#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page133">133</a>, <a href=
+"#page141">141</a>, <a href="#page151">151</a><br>
+Ulaid, <a href="#page113">113</a>, <a href="#page145">145</a>,
+<a href="#page150">150</a>, <a href="#page152">152</a><br>
+Ulaid, Councils of the, <a href="#page113">113</a><br>
+Ulaid, men of the, <a href="#page130">130</a><br>
+Ulster, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a><br>
+Upper Erne, <a href="#page032">32</a><br>
+Usnae, <a href="#page115">115</a></p>
+<p>Venice of Lough Rea, <a href="#page037">37</a><br>
+Volunteer Movement, the, <a href="#page367">367</a>, <a href=
+"#page369">369</a></p>
+<p>Waterford, <a href="#page349">349</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a>, <a href="#page352">352</a><br>
+Water of Luachan, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Wave of Clidna, the, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Wave of Rudraige, the, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Wave of Tuag Inbir, the, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Waves of Erin, the three, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Weight of Cromlech-stones, <a href="#page056">56</a><br>
+Wexford Harbor, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Wicklow, <a href="#page005">5</a><br>
+Wicklow Gold-mines, the, <a href="#page108">108</a>, <a href=
+"#page109">109</a></p>
+<p>Yellow Ford of Athboy, <a href="#page140">140</a></p>
+<br>
+<a name="394.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/394.jpg"><img src="images/394.jpg"
+width="100%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>MAP OF IRELAND.</b></p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12078 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #12078 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12078)
diff --git a/old/12078-8.txt b/old/12078-8.txt
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+Project Gutenberg's Ireland, Historic and Picturesque, by Charles Johnston
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ireland, Historic and Picturesque
+
+Author: Charles Johnston
+
+Release Date: April 19, 2004 [EBook #12078]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRELAND, HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charlie Kirschner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+IRELAND
+
+HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE
+
+BY
+
+CHARLES JOHNSTON
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+1902
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+I. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.
+
+II. THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.
+
+III. THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.
+
+IV. THE DE DANAANS.
+
+V. EMAIN OF MACA.
+
+VI. CUCULAIN THE HERO.
+
+VII. FIND AND OSSIN.
+
+VIII. THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.
+
+IX. THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.
+
+X. THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.
+
+XI. THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.
+
+XII. THE NORMANS.
+
+XIII. THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.
+
+XIV. THE JACOBITE WARS.
+
+XV. CONCLUSION.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+Photogravures made by A.W. ELSON & Co.
+
+
+PEEP HOLE, BLARNEY CASTLE
+IN THE DARGLE, CO. WICKLOW
+MUCKROSS ABBEY, KILLARNEY
+BRANDY ISLAND, GLENGARRIFF
+SUGAR LOAF MOUNTAIN, GLENGARRIFF
+RIVER ERNE, BELLEEK
+WHITE ROCKS, PORTRUSH
+POWERSCOURT WATERFALL, CO. WICKLOW
+HONEYCOMB, GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
+GRAY MAN'S PATH, FAIR HEAD
+COLLEEN BAWN CAVES, KILLARNEY
+RUINS ON SCATTERY ISLAND
+VALLEY OF GLENDALOUGH AND RUINS OF THE SEVEN
+  CHURCHES
+ANCIENT CROSS, GLENDALOUGH
+ROUND TOWER, ANTRIM
+GIANT'S HEAD AND DUNLUCE CASTLE, CO. ANTRIM
+ROCK CASHEL, RUINS OF OLD CATHEDRAL, KING CORMAC'S
+  CHAPEL AND ROUND TOWER
+DUNLUCE CASTLE
+MELLIFONT ABBEY, CO. LOUTH
+HOLY CROSS ABBEY, CO. TIPPERARY
+DONEGAL CASTLE
+TULLYMORE PARK, CO. DOWN
+THOMOND BRIDGE, LIMERICK
+SALMON FISHERY, GALWAY
+O'CONNELL'S STATUE, DUBLIN
+
+
+
+
+IRELAND.
+
+I.
+
+VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.
+
+Here is an image by which you may call up and remember the natural form
+and appearance of Ireland:
+
+Think of the sea gradually rising around her coasts, until the waters,
+deepened everywhere by a hundred fathoms, close in upon the land. Of all
+Ireland there will now remain visible above the waves only two great
+armies of islands, facing each other obliquely across a channel of open
+sea. These two armies of islands will lie in ordered ranks, their lines
+stretching from northeast to southwest; they will be equal in size, each
+two hundred miles along the front, and seventy miles from front to rear.
+And the open sea between, which divides the two armies, will measure
+seventy miles across.
+
+Not an island of these two armies, as they lie thus obliquely facing
+each other, will rise as high as three thousand feet; only the captains
+among them will exceed a thousand; nor will there be great variety in
+their forms. All the islands, whether north or south, will have gently
+rounded backs, clothed in pastures nearly to the crest, with garments of
+purple heather lying under the sky upon their ridges. Yet for all this
+roundness of outline there will be, towards the Atlantic end of either
+army, a growing sternness of aspect, a more sombre ruggedness in the
+outline of the hills, with cliffs and steep ravines setting their brows
+frowning against the deep.
+
+Hold in mind the image of these two obliquely ranged archipelagoes,
+their length thrice their breadth, seaming the blue of the sea, and
+garmented in dark green and purple under the sunshine; and, thinking of
+them thus, picture to yourself a new rising of the land, a new
+withdrawal of the waters, the waves falling and ever falling, till all
+the hills come forth again, and the salt tides roll and ripple away from
+the valleys, leaving their faces for the winds to dry; let this go on
+till the land once more takes its familiar form, and you will easily
+call up the visible image of the whole.
+
+As you stand in the midst of the land, where first lay the channel of
+open sea, you will have, on your northern horizon, the beginning of a
+world of purple-outlined hills, outliers of the northern mountain
+region, which covers the upper third of the island. On all sides about
+you, from the eastern sea to the western ocean, you will have the great
+central plain, dappled with lakes and ribbed with silver rivers, another
+third of the island. Then once more, to the south, you will have a
+region of hills, the last third of Ireland, in size just equal to the
+northern mountains or the central plain.
+
+The lines of the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses of
+Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern Ulster
+and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear is held by
+the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness of the
+northern seas.
+
+The plain opens from the verge of these hills; the waters that gather on
+its pleasant pastures and fat fields, or among the green moss tracts of
+its lowlands, flow eastward by the Boyne or southwestward by the Shannon
+to the sea.
+
+Then with the granite mountains of Dublin and Wicklow begin the southern
+hills, stretching through south Leinster and Munster to the red
+sandstone ridges of Cork and Kerry, our last vantage-ground against
+the Atlantic.
+
+Finally, encircling all, is the perpetual presence of the sea, with its
+foaming, thunderous life or its days of dreamy peace; around the silver
+sands or furrowed cliffs that gird the island our white waves rush
+forever, murmuring the music of eternity.
+
+Such is this land of Eir�, very old, yet full of perpetual youth; a
+thousand times darkened by sorrow, yet with a heart of living gladness;
+too often visited by evil and pale death, yet welling ever up in
+unconquerable life,--the youth and life and gladness that thrill through
+earth and air and sky, when the whole world grows beautiful in the front
+of Spring.
+
+For with us Spring is like the making of a new world in the dawn of
+time. Under the warm wind's caressing breath the grass comes forth upon
+the meadows and the hills, chasing dun Winter away. Every field is newly
+vestured in young corn or the olive greenness of wheat; the smell of the
+earth is full of sweetness. White daisies and yellow dandelions star all
+our pastures; and on the green ruggedness of every hillside, or along
+the shadowed banks of every river and every silver stream, amid velvet
+mosses and fringes of new-born ferns, in a million nooks and crannies
+throughout all the land, are strewn dark violets; and wreaths of yellow
+primroses with crimped green leaves pour forth a remote and divine
+fragrance; above them, the larches are dainty with new greenery and rosy
+tassels, and the young leaves of beech and oak quiver with fresh life.
+
+Still the benignance of Spring pours down upon us from the sky, till the
+darkening fields are hemmed in between barriers of white hawthorn, heavy
+with nectar, and twined with creamy honeysuckle, the finger-tips of
+every blossom coral-red. The living blue above throbs with the tremulous
+song of innumerable larks; the measured chant of cuckoos awakens the
+woods; and through the thickets a whole world's gladness sings itself
+forth from the throat of thrush and blackbird. Through the whole land
+between the four seas benediction is everywhere; blue-bells and the rosy
+fingers of heath deck the mountain-tops, where the grouse are crooning
+to each other among the whins; down the hillsides into every valley pour
+gladness and greenness and song; there are flowers everywhere, even to
+the very verge of the whispering sea. There, among the gray bent-spikes
+and brackens on the sandhills, primroses weave their yellow wreaths; and
+little pansies, golden and blue and purple, marshal their weird eyes
+against the spears of dark blue hyacinths, till the rich tribute of
+wild thyme makes peace between them.
+
+The blue sky overhead, with its flocks of sunlit clouds, softly bends
+over the gentle bosom of the earth. A living spirit throbs everywhere,
+palpable, audible, full of sweetness and sadness immeasurable--sadness
+that is only a more secret joy.
+
+Then the day grows weary, making way for the magic of evening and the
+oncoming dark with its mystery. The tree-stems redden with the sunset;
+there is a chill sigh in the wind; the leaves turn before it, burnished
+against the purple sky. As the gloom rises up out of the earth, bands of
+dark red gather on the horizon, seaming the clear bronze of the sky,
+that passes upward into olive-color, merging in dark blue overhead. The
+sun swings down behind the hills, and purple darkness comes down out of
+the sky; the red fades from the tree-stems, the cloud-colors die away;
+the whole world glimmers with the fading whiteness of twilight. Silence
+gathers itself together out of the dark, deepened, not broken, by the
+hushing of the wind among the beech-leaves, or the startled cluck of a
+blackbird, or a wood-pigeon's soft murmur, as it dreams in the
+silver fir.
+
+Under the brown wings of the dark, the night throbs with mystic
+presences; the hills glimmer with an inward life; whispering voices
+hurry through the air. Another and magical land awakes in the dark, full
+of a living restlessness; sleepless as the ever-moving sea. Everywhere
+through the night-shrouded woods, the shadowy trees seem to interrupt
+their secret whispers till you are gone past. There is no sense of
+loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand,
+palpable though hidden, remote from us though touching our lives,
+calling to us through the gloom with wordless voices, inviting us to
+enter and share with them the mystical life of this miraculous earth,
+great mother of us all, The dark is full of watching eyes.
+
+Summer with us is but a brighter Spring, as our Winter only prolongs the
+sadness of Autumn. So our year has but two moods, a gay one and a sad
+one. Yet each tinges the other--the mists of Autumn veiling the gleam of
+Spring--Spring smiling through the grief of Autumn. When the sad mood
+comes, stripping the trees of their leaves, and the fields of their
+greenness, white mists veil the hills and brood among the fading
+valleys. A shiver runs through the air, and the cold branches are
+starred with tears. A poignant grief is over the land, an almost
+desolation,--full of unspoken sorrow, tongue-tied with unuttered
+complaint. All the world is lost and forlorn, without hope or respite.
+Everything is given up to the dirges of the moaning seas, the white
+shrouds of weeping mist. Wander forth upon the uplands and among the
+lonely hills and rock-seamed sides of the mountains, and you will find
+the same sadness everywhere: a grieving world under a grieving sky.
+Quiet desolation hides among the hills, tears tremble on every brown
+grass-blade, white mists of melancholy shut out the lower world.
+
+Whoever has not felt the poignant sadness of the leafless days has never
+known the real Ireland; the sadness that is present, though veiled, in
+the green bravery of Spring, and under the songs of Summer. Nor have
+they ever known the real Ireland who have not divined beneath that
+poignant sadness a heart of joy, deep and perpetual, made only keener by
+that sad outward show.
+
+Here in our visible life is a whisper and hint of our life invisible; of
+the secret that runs through and interprets so much of our history. For
+very much of our nation's life has been like the sadness of those autumn
+days,--a tale of torn leaves, of broken branches, of tears everywhere.
+Tragedy upon tragedy has filled our land with woe and sorrow, and, as
+men count success, we have failed of it, and received only misery and
+deprivation. He has never known the true Ireland who does not feel that
+woe. Yet, more, he knows not the real Ireland who cannot feel within
+that woe the heart of power and joy,--the strong life outlasting darkest
+night,--the soul that throbs incessantly under all the calamities of the
+visible world, throughout the long tragedy of our history.
+
+This is our secret: the life that is in sorrow as in joy; the power that
+is not more in success than in failure--the one soul whose moods these
+are, who uses equally life and death.
+
+For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy. And we may outline now the
+manner in which that tale will be told. We shall have, first, a long,
+dim dawn,--mysterious peoples of the hidden past coming together to our
+land from the outlying darkness. A first period, which has left abundant
+and imperishable traces everywhere among our hills and valleys, writing
+a large history in massive stone, yet a history which, even now, is dim
+as the dawn it belongs to. What can be called forth from that Archaic
+Darkness, in the backward and abysm of Time, we shall try to evoke;
+drawing the outlines of a people who, with large energies in our visible
+world, toiled yet more for the world invisible; a people uniform through
+the whole land and beyond it, along many neighboring shores; a people
+everywhere building; looking back into a long past; looking forward
+through the mists of the future. A people commemorating the past in a
+form that should outlast the future. A people undertaking great
+enterprises for mysterious ends; whose works are everywhere among us, to
+this day, imperishable in giant stone; yet a people whose purposes are
+mysterious to us, whose very name and tongue are quite unknown. Their
+works still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the
+four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the
+present; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such
+large simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every
+handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows,
+bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race.
+
+After this Archaic Dawn we shall find a mingling of four races in
+Ireland, coming together from widely separated homes, unless one of the
+four be the descendant of the archaic race, as well it may be. From the
+surging together of these four races we shall see, in almost
+pre-historic times, the growth of a well-knit polity; firm
+principalities founded, strong battles fought, a lasting foundation of
+law. In this Second Epoch, every thing that in the first was dim and
+vague grows firm in outline and defined. Names, places, persons,--we
+know them all as if they were of to-day. This is the age which flowered
+in the heroic days of Emain of Maca, Emain 'neath the beech-trees, the
+citadel of northeastern Ireland. Here we shall find the court of Fergus
+mac Roeg, a man too valiant, too passionate, too generous to rule
+altogether wisely; his star darkened by the gloomy genius of Concobar
+his stepson, the evil lover of ill-fated Deirdr�. Cuculain, too, the
+war-loving son of Sualtam, shall rise again,--in whom one part of our
+national genius finds its perfect flower. We shall hear the thunder of
+his chariot, at the Battle of the Headland of the Kings, when Meave the
+winsome and crafty queen of Connacht comes against him, holding in
+silken chains of her tresses the valiant spirit of Fergus. The whole
+life of that heroic epoch, still writ large upon the face of the land,
+shall come forth clear and definite; we shall stand by the threshold of
+Cuculain's dwelling, and move among the banquet-halls of Emain of Maca.
+We shall look upon the hills and valleys that Meave and Deirdr� looked
+on, and hear the clash of spear and shield at the Ford of the
+river,--and this even though we must go back two thousand years.
+
+To this will follow a Third Epoch, where another side of Ireland's
+genius will write itself in epic all across the land, with songs for
+every hillside, and stories for every vale and grove. Here our more
+passionate and poetic force will break forth in the lives of Find, son
+of Cumal, the lord of warriors; in his son Ossin, most famous bard of
+the western lands, and Ossin's son Oscar, before whose might even the
+fiends and sprites cowered back dismayed. As the epoch of Cuculain shows
+us our valor finding its apotheosis, so shall we find in Find and Ossin
+and Oscar the perfect flower of our genius for story and song; for
+romantic life and fine insight into nature; for keen wit and gentler
+humor. The love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly
+the visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly,--a sense
+of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic
+life. We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and poetic
+side of Irish character as will leave little for coming ages to add. In
+these two early epochs we shall see the perfecting of the natural man;
+the moulding of rounded, gracious and harmonious lives, inspired with
+valor and the love of beauty and song.
+
+Did our human destiny stop there, with the perfect life of individual
+men and women, we might well say that these two epochs of Ireland
+contain it all; that our whole race could go no further. For no man
+lived more valiant than Cuculain, more generous than Fergus, more full
+of the fire of song than Ossin, son of Find. Nor amongst women were any
+sadder than Deirdr� and Grania; craftier than Meave, more winsome than
+Nessa the mother of Concobar. Perfected flowers of human life all of
+them,--if that be all of human life. So, were this all, we might well
+consent that with the death of Oscar our roll of history might close;
+there is nothing to add that the natural man could add.
+
+But where the perfecting of the natural man ends, our truer human life
+begins--the life of our ever-living soul. The natural man seeks victory;
+he seeks wealth and possessions and happiness; the love of women, and
+the loyalty of followers. But the natural man trembles in the face of
+defeat, of sorrow, of subjection; the natural man cannot raise the
+black veil of death.
+
+Therefore for the whole world and for our land there was needed another
+epoch, a far more difficult lesson,--one so remote from what had been of
+old, that even now we only begin to understand it. To the Ireland that
+had seen the valor of Cuculain, that had watched the wars of Fergus,--to
+the Ireland that listened to the deeds of Find and the songs of
+Ossin,--came the Evangel of Galilee, the darkest yet brightest message
+ever brought to the children of earth. If we rightly read that Evangel,
+it brought the doom of the natural man, and his supersession by the man
+immortal; it brought the death of our personal perfecting and pride, and
+the rising from the dead of the common soul, whereby a man sees another
+self in his neighbor; sees all alike in the one Divine.
+
+Of this one Divine, wherein we all live and live forever, pain is no
+less the minister than pleasure; nay, pain is more its minister, since
+pleasure has already given its message to the natural man. Of that one
+Divine, sorrow and desolation are the messengers, alike with joy and
+gladness; even more than joy and gladness, for the natural man has
+tasted these. Of that one Divine, black and mysterious death is the
+servant, not less than bright life; and life we had learned of old in
+the sunshine.
+
+[Illustration: In the Dargle, Co. Wicklow]
+
+There came, therefore, to Ireland, as to a land cherished for enduring
+purposes, first the gentler side, and then the sterner, of the Galilean
+message. First, the epoch almost idyllic which followed after the
+mission of Patrick; the epoch of learning and teaching the simpler
+phrases of the Word. Churches and schools rose everywhere, taking the
+place of fort and embattled camp. Chants went up at morning and at
+evening, with the incense of prayer, and heaven seemed descended upon
+earth. Our land, which had stood so high in the ranks of valor and
+romance, now rose not less eminent for piety and fervid zeal, sending
+forth messengers and ministers of the glad news to the heathen lands of
+northern and central Europe, and planting refuges of religion within
+their savage bounds. Beauty came forth in stone and missal, answering to
+the beauty of life it was inspired by; and here, if anywhere upon earth
+through a score of centuries, was realized the ideal of that prayer for
+the kingdom, as in heaven, so on earth. Here, again, we have most ample
+memorials scattered all abroad throughout the land; we can call up the
+whole epoch, and make it stand visible before us, visiting every shrine
+and sacred place of that saintly time, seeing, with inner eyes, the
+footsteps of those who followed that path, first traced out by the
+shores of Gennesaret.
+
+Once more, if the kingdom come upon earth were all of the message, we
+might halt here; for here forgiveness and gentle charity performed their
+perfect work, and learning was present with wise counsel to guide
+willing feet in the way. Yet this is not all; nor, if we rightly
+understand that darkest yet brightest message, are we or is mankind
+destined for such an earthly paradise; our kingdom is not of this world.
+Here was another happiness, another success; yet not in that happiness
+nor in that success was hid the secret; it lay far deeper. Therefore we
+find that morning with its sunshine rudely clouded over, its promise
+swept away in the black darkness of storms. Something more than holy
+living remained to be learned; there remained the mystery of failure and
+death--that death which is the doorway to our real life. Therefore upon
+our shores broke wave after wave of invasion, storm after storm of
+cruelest oppression and degradation. In the very dust was our race
+ground down, destitute, afflicted, tormented, according to prophecy and
+promise. Nor was that the end. Every bitterness that the heart of man
+can conceive, that the heart of man can inflict, that the heart of man
+can endure, was poured into our cup, and we drained it to the dregs. Of
+that saddest yet most potent time we shall record enough to show not
+only what befell through our age of darkness, but also, so far as may
+be, what miraculous intent underlay it, what promise the darkness
+covered, of our future light; what golden rays of dawn were hidden in
+our gloom.
+
+Finally, from all our fiery trials we shall see the genius of our land
+emerge, tried indeed by fire, yet having gained fire's purity; we shall
+see that genius beginning, as yet with halting speech, to utter its most
+marvelous secret of the soul of man. We shall try at least to gain clear
+sight of our great destiny, and thereby of the like destiny of
+universal man.
+
+For we cannot doubt that what we have passed through, all men and all
+nations either have passed through already, or are to pass through in
+the time to come. There is but one divine law, one everlasting purpose
+and destiny for us all. And if we see other nations now entering that
+time of triumph which passed for us so long ago, that perfecting of the
+natural man, with his valor and his song, we shall with fear and
+reverence remember that before them also lie the dark centuries of fiery
+trial; the long night of affliction, the vigils of humiliation and
+suffering. The one Divine has not yet laid aside the cup that holds the
+bitter draught,--the drinking of which comes ever before the final gift
+of the waters of life. What we passed through, they shall pass through
+also; what we suffered, they too shall suffer. Well will it be with them
+if, like us, they survive the fierce trial, and rise from the fire
+immortal, born again through sacrifice.
+
+Therefore I see in Ireland a miraculous and divine history, a life and
+destiny invisible, lying hid within her visible life. Like that
+throbbing presence of the night which whispers along the hills, this
+diviner whisper, this more miraculous and occult power, lurks in our
+apparent life. From the very gray of her morning, the children of
+Ireland were preoccupied with the invisible world; it was so in the
+darkest hours of our oppression and desolation; driven from this world,
+we took refuge in that; it was not the kingdom of heaven upon earth, but
+the children of earth seeking a refuge in heaven. So the same note rings
+and echoes through all our history; we live in the invisible world. If
+I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To restore
+to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our immortality;
+as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall
+first learn, and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be
+satisfied; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the
+unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the
+visible beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose,
+well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle
+of Destiny.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.
+
+Westward from Sligo--Town of the River of Shells--a tongue of land runs
+toward the sea between two long bays. Where the two bays join their
+waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray limestone rocks soaring
+sheer upwards, rugged and formidable. Within the shadow of the mountain
+is hidden a wonderful glen--a long tunnel between cliffs, densely arched
+over with trees and fringed with ferns; even at midday full of a green
+gloom. It is a fitting gateway to the beauty and mystery of
+the mountain.
+
+Slowly climbing by stony ways, the path reaches the summit, a rock table
+crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in olden days as a
+memorial of golden-haired Maeve. From the dead queen's pyramid a view of
+surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over sea and land, mingled valley
+and hill. The Atlantic stretches in illimitable blue, curved round the
+rim of the sky, a darker mirror of the blue above. It is full of
+throbbing silence and peace. Across blue fields of ocean, and facing
+the noonday brightness of the sun, rise the tremendous cliffs of Slieve
+League, gleaming with splendid colors through the shimmering air; broad
+bands of amber and orange barred with deeper red; the blue weaves
+beneath them and the green of the uplands above.
+
+The vast amber wall rises out of the ocean, and passes eastward in a
+golden band till it merges in the Donegal highlands with their
+immeasurable blue. Sweeping round a wide bay, the land drawls nearer
+again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to green and
+brown. The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and Sligo hills, a
+row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler and more
+translucent in the southern distance.
+
+Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across the plain,
+where brown and purple are blended with green in broad spaces of
+mingling color. To the west the ground rises again into hills crowded
+behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the Mountains of
+Storms. Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud-wreaths in the blue, are
+the hills that guard our western ocean. From their sunset-verges the
+land draws near again, in the long range of the Mayo cliffs,--fierce
+walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean from a wild world of
+storm-swept uplands. The cliffs gradually lessen, and their colors grow
+clearer, till they sink at last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare,
+divided from us only by a channel of shallow sea.
+
+The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain, is full
+of the silence of intense and mighty power. The ocean is tremulous with
+the breath of life. The mountains, in their stately beauty, rise like
+immortals in the clear azure. The signs of our present works are dwarfed
+to insignificance.
+
+Everywhere within that wide world of hill and plain, and hardly less
+ancient than the hills themselves, are strewn memorials of another world
+that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden past. A wordless
+history is written there, in giant circles of stone and cromlechs of
+piled blocks, so old that in a land of most venerable tradition their
+very legend has vanished away.
+
+Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs and
+stone circles, a very city of dead years. There is something
+awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered stones,
+the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts; that awe is deepened by
+the feeling of the tremendous power lavished in bringing them here,
+setting them up in their ordered groups, and piling the crowns of the
+cromlechs on other only less gigantic stones; awe gives place to
+overwhelming mystery when we can find no kinship to our own thoughts and
+aims in their stately grouping. We are in presence of archaic purposes
+recorded in a massive labyrinth, purposes darkly hidden from us in
+the unknown.
+
+There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances, firmly set
+upright in the earth. They loom vast, like beads of a giant necklace on
+the velvet grass. There are cromlechs set alone--a single huge boulder
+borne aloft in the air on three others of hardly less weight. There are
+cromlechs set in the midst of titanic circles of stone, with lesser
+boulders guarding the cromlechs closer at hand. There are circles beside
+circles rising in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting
+their aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their
+companion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmuring sea.
+
+Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages. When sunrise
+reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over
+the burnished grass. From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever
+hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow
+gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness. When day
+declines, the shadows come forth again, joining ghostly hands from stone
+to stone, from circle to circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at
+last into the universal realm of night. Thus they weave their web,
+inexorable as tireless Time.
+
+There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore, under
+Knocknarea. Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials of dead
+years within our horizon. At Abbey-quarter, within the town-limits of
+Sligo itself, there is another great ring of boulders, the past and the
+present mingling together. On the northern coast, across the Bay of
+Sligo, where the headland of Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is
+another giant necklace of gray blocks ranged upon the moor. Farther
+along the shore, where Bundoran marks the boundary of Donegal, a
+cromlech and a stone circle rise among the sand-banks. All have the same
+rugged and enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery.
+
+Eastward from Sligo, Lough Gill lies like a mirror framed in hills,
+wreathed with dark green woods. On a hill-top north of the lake, in the
+Deer-park, is a monument of quite other character--a great oblong
+marked by pillared stones, like an open temple. At three points huge
+stones are laid across from pillar to pillar. The whole enclosure was
+doubtless so barred in days of old, a temple of open arches crowning the
+summit of the hill. The great ruin by the lake keeps its secret well.
+
+Another ring of giant stones rests on a hillside across the lake, under
+the Cairn hill, with its pyramid crown. All these are within easy view
+from our first vantage-point on Knocknarea, yet they are but the
+outposts of an army which spreads everywhere throughout the land. They
+are as common in wild and inaccessible places as on the open plain. Some
+rise in lonely islands off the coast; others on the summits of
+mountains; yet others in the midst of tilled fields. They bear no
+relation at all to the land as it is to-day. The very dispersion of
+these great stone monuments, scattered equally among places familiar or
+wild, speaks of a remote past--a past when all places were alike wild,
+or all alike familiar.
+
+Where the gale-swept moors of Achill Island rise up toward the slope of
+Slievemore Mountain, there are stone circles and cromlechs like the
+circles of Carrowmore. The wild storms of the Atlantic rush past them,
+and the breakers roar under their cliffs. The moorland round the
+towering mountain is stained with ochre and iron under a carpet of
+heather rough as the ocean winds.
+
+Away to the south from Slievemore the horizon is broken by an army of
+mountains, beginning with the Twelve Peaks of Connemara. Eastward of
+these hills are spread the great Galway lakes; eastward of these a wide
+expanse of plain. This is the famous Moytura of traditional history,
+whose story we shall presently tell. Ages ago a decisive battle was
+fought there; but ages before the battle, if we are not greatly misled,
+the stone circles of the plain were already there. Tradition says that
+these circles numbered seven in the beginning, but only two
+remain unbroken.
+
+Between Galway Bay and the wide estuary of the Shannon spread the
+moorlands of Clare, bleak under Atlantic gales, with never a tree for
+miles inward from the sea. Like a watch-tower above the moorlands stand.
+Slieve Callan, the crown of the mountain abruptly shorn. Under the
+shoulder of the great hill, with the rolling moorlands all about it,
+stands a solitary cromlech; formed of huge flat stones, it was at first
+a roomy chamber shut in on all four sides, and roofed by a single
+enormous block; the ends have fallen, so that it is now an open tunnel
+formed of three huge stones.
+
+The coast runs southward from the Shannon to the strand of Tralee, the
+frontier of the southern mountain world, where four ranges of red
+sandstone thrust themselves forth towards the ocean, with long fiords
+running inland between them. On a summit of the first of these red
+ranges, Caherconree above Tralee strand, there is a stone circle,
+massive, gigantic, dwelling in utter solitude.
+
+We have recorded a few only out of many of these great stone monuments
+strewn along our Atlantic coast, whether on moor or cliff or remote
+mountain-top.
+
+There are others as notable everywhere in the central plain, the
+limestone world of lakes and rivers. On a green hill-crest overlooking
+the network of inlets of Upper Erne there is a circle greater than any
+we have recorded. The stones are very massive, some of them twice the
+height of a tall man. To one who stands within the ring these huge
+blocks of stone shut out the world; they loom large against the sky,
+full of unspoken secrets like the Sphinx. Within this mighty ring the
+circle of Stonehenge might be set, leaving a broad road all round it on
+the grass.
+
+From Fermanagh, where this huge circle is, we gain our best clue to the
+age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each other in their
+massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in their utter mystery.
+Round the lakes of Erne there are wide expanses of peat, dug as fuel for
+centuries, and in many places as much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of
+clay, the waste of old glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness,
+this whole mass of peat has grown since some of the great stone
+monuments were built; if we can tell the time thus taken for its growth
+we know at least the nearer limit of the time that divides us from
+their builders.
+
+Like a tree, the peat has its time of growth and its time of rest.
+Spring covers it with green, winter sees it brown and dead. Thus thin
+layers are spread over it, a layer for a year, and it steadily gains in
+thickness with the passing of the years. The deeper levels are buried
+and pressed down, slowly growing firm and rigid, but still keeping the
+marks of the layers that make them up. It is like a dry ocean gradually
+submerging the land. Gathering round the great stone circles as they
+stand on the clay, this black sea has risen slowly but surely, till at
+last it has covered them with its dark waves, and they rest in the
+quiet depths, with a green foam of spring freshness far above
+their heads.
+
+At Killee and Breagho, near Enniskillen, the peat has once more been cut
+away, restoring some of these great stones to the light. If we count the
+layers and measure the thickness of the peat, we can tell how many years
+are represented by its growth. We can, therefore, tell that the great
+stone circle, which the first growth of peat found already there, must
+be at least as old, and may be indefinitely older. By careful count it
+is found that one foot of black peat is made up of eight hundred layers;
+eight hundred summers and eight hundred winters went to the building of
+it. One foot of black peat, therefore, will measure the time from before
+the founding of Rome or the First Olympiad to the beginning of our era.
+Another foot will bring us to the crowning of Charlemagne. Yet another,
+to the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Since then, only a few inches
+have been added. Here is a chronometer worthy of our great cromlechs and
+stone circles.
+
+Some of these, as we saw, rest on the clay, with a sea of peat twelve
+feet deep around and above them. Every foot of the peat stands for eight
+centuries. Since the peat began to form, eight or ten thousand years
+have passed, and when that vast period began, the great monuments of
+stone were already there. How long they had stood in their silence
+before our chronometer began to run we cannot even guess.
+
+At Cavancarragh, on the shoulder of Toppid Mountain, some four miles
+from Enniskillen, there is one of these circles; a ring of huge stone
+boulders with equal spaces between stone and stone. A four-fold avenue
+of great blocks stretches away from it along the shoulder of the hill,
+ending quite abruptly at the edge of a ravine, the steep channel of a
+torrent. It looks as if the river, gradually undermining the hillside,
+had cut the avenue in halves, so that the ravine seems later in date
+than the stones. But that we cannot be quite sure of. This, however, we
+do certainly know: that since the avenue of boulders and the circle of
+huge red stones were ranged in order, a covering of peat in some parts
+twelve feet thick has grown around and above them, hiding them at last
+altogether from the day. In places the peat has been cut away again,
+leaving the stones once more open to the light, standing, as they always
+stood, on the surface of the clay.
+
+Here again we get the same measurement. At eight hundred annual layers
+to the foot, and with twelve feet of peat, we have nine thousand six
+hundred years,--not for the age of the stone circles, but for that part
+of their age which we are able to measure. For we know not how long they
+were there before the peat began to grow. It may have been a few years;
+it may have been a period as great or even greater than the ten thousand
+years we are able to measure.
+
+The peat gradually displaced an early forest of giant oaks. Their stems
+are still there, standing rooted in the older clay. Where they once
+stood no trees now grow. The whole face of the land has changed. Some
+great change of climate must lie behind this vanishing of vast forests,
+this gradual growth of peat-covered moors. A dry climate must have
+changed to one much damper; heat must have changed to cold, warm winds
+to chilly storms. In the southern promontories, among red sandstone
+hills, still linger survivors of that more genial clime--groves of
+arbutus that speak of Greece or Sicily; ferns, as at Killarney, found
+elsewhere only in the south, in Portugal, or the Canary Islands.
+
+[Illustration: Muckross Abbey, Killarney.]
+
+On the southwestern horizon from Toppid Mountain, when the sky is clear
+after rain, you can trace the outline of the Curlew hills, our
+southern limit of view from Knocknarea. Up to the foot of the hills
+spreads a level country of pastures dappled with lakes, broken into a
+thousand fantastic inlets by the wasting of the limestone rock. The
+daisies are the stars in that green sky. Just beyond the young stream of
+the Shannon, where it links Lough Garra to Lough Key, there is a lonely
+cromlech, whose tremendous crown was once upheld by five massive
+pillars. There is a kindred wildness and mystery in the cromlech and the
+lonely hills.
+
+Southward again of this, where the town of Lough Rea takes its name from
+the Gray Lake, stands a high hill crowned by a cromlech, with an
+encircling earthwork. It marks a green ring of sacred ground alone upon
+the hill-top, shut off from all the world, and with the mysterious
+monument of piled stones in its centre; here, as always, one huge block
+upheld in the air by only lesser blocks. The Gray Lake itself, under
+this strange sentry on the hill, was in long-passed ages a little
+Venice; houses built on piles lined its shores, set far enough out into
+the lake for safety, ever ready to ward off attack from the land. This
+miniature Venice of Lough Rea is the type of a whole epoch of turbulent
+tribal war, when homes were everywhere clustered within the defence of
+the waters, with stores laid up to last the rigors of a siege.
+
+The contrast between the insecurity and peril of the old lake dwellings
+and the present safety of the town, open on all sides, unguarded and
+free from fear, is very marked. But not less complete is the contrast
+between the ancient hamlet, thus hidden for security amid the waters,
+and the great cromlech, looming black against the sky on the hill's
+summit, exposed to the wildness of the winds, utterly unguarded, yet
+resting there in lonely serenity.
+
+A little farther south, Lough Gur lies like a white mirror among the
+rolling pasture-lands of Limerick, set amongst low hills. On the lake's
+shore is another metropolis of the dead, worthy to compare with
+Carrowmore on the Sligo headland. Some of the circles here are not
+formed of single stones set at some distance from each other, but of a
+continuous wall of great blocks crowded edge to edge. They are like
+round temples open to the sky, and within one of these unbroken rings is
+a lesser ring like an inner shrine. All round the lake there are like
+memorials--if we can call memorials these mighty groups of stone, which
+only remind us how much we have forgotten. There are huge circles of
+blocks either set close together or with an equal space dividing boulder
+from boulder; some of the giant circles are grouped together in twos and
+threes, others are isolated; one has its centre marked by a single
+enormous block, while another like block stands farther off in lonely
+vastness. Here also stands a chambered cromlech of four huge flat blocks
+roofed over like the cromlech under Slieve Callan across the
+Shannon mouth.
+
+The southern horizon from Lough Gur is broken by the hills of red
+sandstone rising around Glanworth. Beside the stream, a tributary of the
+Blackwater, a huge red cromlech rises over the greenness of the meadows
+like a belated mammoth in its uncouth might. To the southwest, under the
+red hills that guard Killarney on the south, the Sullane River flows
+towards the Lee. On its bank is another cromlech of red sandstone
+blocks, twin-brother to the Glanworth pile. Beyond it the road passes
+towards the sunset through mountain-shadowed glens, coming out at last
+where Kenmare River opens into a splendid fiord towards the Atlantic
+Ocean. At Kenmare, in a vale of perfect beauty green with groves of
+arbutus and fringed with thickets of fuchsia, stands a great stone
+circle, the last we shall record to the south. Like all the rest, it
+speaks of tremendous power, of unworldly and mysterious ends.
+
+The very antiquity of these huge stone circles suggests an affinity with
+the revolving years. And here, perhaps, we may find a clue to their
+building. They may have been destined to record great Time itself, great
+Time that circles forever through the circling years. There is first the
+year to be recorded, with its revolving days; white winter gleaming into
+spring; summer reddening and fading to autumn. Returning winter tells
+that the year has gone full circle; the sun among the stars gives the
+definite measure of the days. A ring of thirty-six great boulders, set
+ten paces apart, would give the measure of the year in days; and of
+circles like this there are more than one.
+
+In this endless ring of days the moon is the measurer, marking the hours
+and weeks upon the blue belt of night studded with golden stars. Moving
+stealthily among the stars, the moon presently changes her place by a
+distance equal to her own breadth; we call the time this takes an hour.
+From her rising to her setting, she gains her own breadth twelve times;
+therefore, the night and the day are divided each into twelve hours.
+Meanwhile she grows from crescent to full disk, to wane again to a
+sickle of light, and presently to lose herself in darkness at new moon.
+From full moon to full moon, or from one new moon to another, the
+nearest even measure is thirty days; a circle of thirty stones would
+record this, as the larger circle of thirty-six recorded the solar year.
+In three years there are thrice twelve full moons, with one added; a
+ring of thirty-seven stones representing this would show the simplest
+relation between sun and moon.
+
+The moon, as we saw, stealthily glides among the fixed stars, gaining
+her own width every hour. Passing thus along the mid belt of the sphere,
+she makes the complete circuit in twenty-seven days, returning to the
+same point among the stars, or, if it should so happen, to the same
+star, within that time. Because the earth has meanwhile moved forward,
+the moon needs three days more to overtake it and gain the same relative
+position towards earth and sun, thus growing full again, not after
+twenty-seven, but after thirty days. Circles of twenty-seven and thirty
+days would stand for these lunar epochs, and would, for those who
+understood them, further bear testimony to the earth's movement in its
+own great path around the sun. Thus would rings of varying numbers mark
+the measures of time; and not these only, but the great sweep of orbs
+engendering them, the triumphal march of the spheres through pathless
+ether. The life of our own world would thus be shown bound up with the
+lives of others in ceaseless, ever-widening circles, that lead us to the
+Infinite, the Eternal.
+
+All the cromlechs and circles we have thus far recorded are in the
+western half of our land; there are as many, as worthy of note, in the
+eastern half. But as before we can only pick out a few. One of these
+crowns the volcanic peak of Brandon Hill, in Kilkenny, dividing the
+valleys of the Barrow and Nore. From the mountain-top you can trace the
+silver lines of the rivers coming together to the south, and flowing
+onward to the widening inlet of Wexford harbor, where they mingle with
+the waters of the River Suir. On the summit of Brandon Hill stands a
+great stone circle, a ring of huge basalt blocks dominating the rich
+valleys and the surrounding plain.
+
+In Glen Druid of the Dublin hills is a cromlech whose granite crown
+weighs seventy tons. Not far off is the Mount Venus cromlech, the
+covering block of which is even more titanic; it is a single stone
+eighty tons in weight. Near Killternan village, a short distance off, is
+yet another cromlech whose top-most boulder exceeds both of these,
+weighing not less than ninety tons. Yet vast as all these are, they are
+outstripped by the cromlech of Howth, whose upper block is twenty feet
+square and eight feet thick, a single enormous boulder one hundred tons
+in weight. This huge stone was borne in the air upon twelve massive
+pillars of quartz, seven feet above the ground, so that a man of average
+height standing on the ground and reaching upward could just touch the
+under surface of the block with his finger-tips. Even a tall man
+standing on the shoulders of another as tall would quite fail to touch
+the upper edge of the stone. If we give this marvelous monument the same
+age as the Fermanagh circles, as we well may, this raising of a single
+boulder of one hundred tons, and balancing it in the air on the crest of
+massive pillars may give us some insight into the engineering skill of
+the men of ten thousand years ago.
+
+Across the central plain from Howth Head the first break is the range of
+Loughcrew hills. Here are great stone circles in numbers, not standing
+alone like so many others, but encompassing still stranger monuments;
+chambered pyramids of boulders, to which we shall later return. They
+are lesser models of the three great pyramids of Brugh on the Boyne,
+where the river sweeps southward in a long curve, half-encircling a
+headland of holy ground.
+
+From near Howth to the Boyne and north of it, the coast is low and flat;
+sandhills matted with bent-grass and starred with red thyme and tiny
+pansies, yellow and purple and blue. Low tide carries the sea almost to
+the horizon, across a vast wilderness of dripping sand where the gulls
+chatter as they wade among the pools. Where the shore rises again
+towards the Carlingford Mountains, another cromlech stands under the
+shadow of granite hills.
+
+A long fiord with wooded walls divides the Carlingford range from the
+mountains of Mourne. The great dark range thrusts itself forth against
+the sea in somber beauty, overhanging the wide strand of Dundrum Bay.
+The lesser bay, across whose bar the sea moans under the storm-winds, is
+dominated by the hill of Rudraige, named in honor of a hero of old days;
+but under the shadow of the hill stands a more ancient monument, that
+was gray with age before the race of Rudraige was born. On five pillars
+of massive stone is upreared a sixth, of huge and formidable bulk, and
+carrying even to us in our day a sense of mystery and might. The potent
+atmosphere of a hidden past still breathes from it, whispering of
+vanished years, vanished races, vanished secrets of the prime.
+
+There are two circles of enormous stones on the tongue of land between
+Dundrum Bay and Strangford, both very perfect and marked each in its own
+way from among the rest. The first, at Legamaddy, has every huge boulder
+still in place. There is a lesser ring of stones within the first
+circle, with many outliers, of enormous size, dotted among the fields.
+It looks as if a herd of huge animals of the early world had come
+together in a circle for the night, the young being kept for safety
+within their ring, while others, grazing longer or wandering farther
+from the rest, were approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon
+them with dire magic turned them all to stone; and there they remain,
+sentient, yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies
+like this we may convey the feeling of mystery breathing from them.
+
+On the hill-top of Slieve-na-griddle is another circle of the same
+enormous boulders. A cromlech is piled in the midst of it, and an avenue
+of stones leads up to the circle. Its form is that of many circles with
+enclosed cromlechs at Carrowmore, though in these the avenue is missing.
+The thought that underlies them is the same, though they are separated
+by the whole width of the land; a single cult with a single ideal
+prompted the erection of both.
+
+At Drumbo, on the east bank of the Lagan before it reaches Belfast
+Lough, there is a massive cromlech surrounded by a wide ring of earth
+piled up high enough to cut off the sacred space within from all view of
+the outer world. Like the earthwork round the cromlech of Lough Rea, it
+marks the boundary of a great nature temple, open to the sky but shut
+off from mankind. Even now its very atmosphere breathes reverence.
+
+At Finvoy, in northern Antrim, among the meadows of the Bann, there is a
+cromlech within a great stone circle like that on Slieve-na-griddle in
+Down, and like many of the Carrowmore rings. The Black Lion cromlech in
+Cavan is encircled with a like ring of boulders, and another cromlech
+not far off rivals some of the largest in the immense size of its
+crowning block.
+
+Three cromlechs in the same limestone plain add something to the mystery
+that overhangs all the rest. The first, at Lennan in Monaghan, is marked
+with a curious cryptic design, suggesting a clue, yet yielding none.
+There is a like script on the cromlech at Castlederg in Tyrone, if
+indeed the markings were ever the record of some thought to be
+remembered, and not mere ornament. The chambered cromlech of Lisbellaw
+in Fermanagh has like markings; they are too similar to be quite
+independent, yet almost too simple to contain a recorded thought.
+
+We come once more to Donegal. On the hill-top of Beltaney, near Raphoe,
+there is a very massive circle formed of sixty-seven huge blocks. Here
+again the Stonehenge ring might be set up within the Irish circle,
+leaving an avenue eight paces wide all round it. The sacred fire was
+formerly kindled here to mark the birth of Spring. The name of the old
+festival of Beltane still lingers on the hill. At Culdaff in north
+Donegal, at the end of the Inishowen peninsula, stands another great
+stone circle, with which we must close our survey of these titanic
+monuments.
+
+We have mentioned a few only among many; yet enough to show their
+presence everywhere throughout the land, in the valleys or on mountain
+summits, in the midst of pastures or on lonely and rugged isles. One
+group, as we have seen, cannot be younger than ten thousand years, and
+may be far older. The others may be well coeval. Their magnitude, their
+ordered ranks, their universal presence, are a startling revelation of
+the material powers of the men of that remote age; they are a testimony,
+not less wonderful, of the moral force which dedicated so much power to
+ideal ends. Finally, they are a monument to remind us how little we yet
+know of the real history of our race.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.
+
+In every district of Ireland, therefore, there remain these tremendous
+and solemn survivors of a mighty past. The cromlechs, with their
+enormous masses upheld in the air, rising among the fertile fields or
+daisy-dotted pastures; the great circles of standing stones, starred
+everywhere, in the valleys or upon the uplands, along the rough sides of
+heather-covered hills. They have everywhere the same aspect of august
+mystery, the same brooding presence, like sentinels of another world. It
+is impossible not to feel their overshadowing majesty. Everywhere they
+follow the same designs in large simplicity; inspired by the same
+purpose, and with the same tireless might overcoming the tremendous
+obstacles of their erection; they are devoted everywhere not to material
+and earthly ends, but to the ideal purposes of the invisible and
+everlasting, linked with the hidden life of those who pass away from us
+through the gates of death.
+
+Can we find any clue to the builders of these grand and enduring
+memorials, the conditions of their building, the age of our land to
+which they belong? If we wisely use the abundant knowledge of the past
+already in our possession, there is good reason to believe we can,
+establishing much with entire certainty and divining more.
+
+The standing stones and cromlechs, as we know, are everywhere spread
+over Ireland, so that it is probable that throughout the whole country
+one is never out of sight of one of these solemn monuments. Their
+uniform and universal presence shows, therefore, a uniform race dwelling
+everywhere within the four seas, a universal stability and order,
+allowing such great and enduring works to be undertaken and completed.
+We must believe, too, that the builders of these giant stone monuments
+were dominant throughout the land, possessing entire power over the
+labor of thousands everywhere; and even then the raising of these
+titanic masses is almost miraculous.
+
+But the history of the standing stones and cromlechs is not a page of
+Irish history only, nor can we limit to our own isle the presence of
+their builders, the conditions of dominion and order under which alone
+they could have been raised. We shall gain our first trustworthy clue
+by tracing the limits of the larger territory, beyond our island, where
+these same gray memorials are found.
+
+[Illustration: Brandy Island, Glengarriff.]
+
+The limits of the region in which alone we find these piles and circles
+of enormous stones are clearly and sharply defined, though this region
+itself is of immense and imposing extent. It is divided naturally into
+two provinces, both starting from a point somewhere in the neighborhood
+of Gibraltar or Mount Atlas, and spreading thence over a territory of
+hundreds of miles.
+
+The southern cromlech province, beginning at the Strait of Gibraltar,
+extends eastward along the African coast past Algiers to the headland of
+Tunis, where Carthage stood, at a date far later than the age of
+cromlechs. Were it not for the flaming southern sun, the scorched sands,
+the palms, the shimmering torrid air, we might believe these Algerian
+megaliths belonged to our own land, so perfect is the resemblance, so
+uniform the design, so identical the inspiration. The same huge
+boulders, oblong or egg-shaped, formidable, impressive, are raised aloft
+on massive supporting stones; there are the same circles of stones
+hardly less gigantic, with the same mysterious faces, the same silent
+solemnity. Following this line, we find them again in Minorca, Sardinia
+and Malta; everywhere under warm blue skies, in lands of olives and
+trailing vines, with the peacock-blue of the Mediterranean waves
+twinkling beneath them. Northward from Minorca, but still in our
+southern cromlech province, we find them in southeastern Spain, in the
+region of New Carthage, but far older than the oldest trace of that
+ancient city. In lesser numbers they follow the Spanish coast up towards
+the Ebro, through vinelands and lands of figs, everywhere under summer
+skies. This province, therefore, our southern cromlech province, covers
+most of the western Mediterranean; it does not cover, nor even approach,
+Italy or Greece or Egypt, the historic Mediterranean lands. We must look
+for its origin in the opposite direction--towards Gibraltar, the Pillars
+of Hercules.
+
+From the same point, the Pillars of Hercules, begins our second or
+northern cromlech region, even larger and more extensive than the first,
+though hardly richer in titanic memorials. From Gibraltar, the cromlech
+region passes northward, covering Portugal and western Spain; indeed, it
+probably merges in the other province to the eastward, the two including
+all Spain between them. From northern Spain, turning the flank of the
+giant Pyrenees at Fontarrabia, the cromlech region goes northward and
+ever northward, along the Atlantic coast of France, spreading eastward
+also through the central provinces, covering the mountains of the C�te
+d'Or and the Cevennes, but nowhere entering north Italy or Germany,
+which limit France to the east. There is a tremendous culmination of the
+huge stone monuments on the capes and headlands of Brittany, where
+France thrusts herself forward against the Atlantic, centring in Carnac,
+the metropolis of a bygone world. Nowhere are there greater riches of
+titanic stone, in circles, in cromlechs, in ranged avenues like huge
+frozen armies or ordered hosts of sleeping elephants. From Brittany we
+pass to Ireland, whose wealth, inherited from dead ages, we have already
+inventoried, and Britain, where the same monuments reappear. More
+numerous to the south and west, they yet spread all over Britain,
+including remote northern Scotland and the Western Isles. Finally, there
+is a streamer stretching still northeastward, to Norway and some of the
+Baltic Islands.
+
+We are, therefore, confronted with the visible and enduring evidence of
+a mighty people, spreading in two main directions from the Pillars of
+Hercules--eastward through Gibraltar Strait to sunny Algeria, to
+southern Spain and the Mediterranean isles; and northward, along the
+stormy shores of the Atlantic, from within sight of Africa almost to the
+Arctic Circle, across Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain, and the
+lands of the Baltic and the North Sea. Throughout this vast territory
+there must have been a common people, a common purpose and inspiration,
+a common striving towards the hidden world; there must have been long
+ages of order, of power, of peace, during which men's hearts could
+conceive and their hands execute memorials so vast, so evidently meant
+to endure to a far distant future, so clearly destined to ideal ends.
+There must have been a great spiritual purpose, a living belief in the
+invisible world, and a large practical power over natural forces, before
+these huge monuments could be erected. Some of the stones upheld in the
+air in the Irish cromlechs weigh eighty or ninety or a hundred tons. If
+we estimate that a well-built man can lift two hundred pounds, it would
+demand the simultaneous work of a thousand men to erect them; and it is
+at least difficult to see how the effort of a thousand men could
+be applied.
+
+We are led, therefore, by evidence of the solidest material reality to
+see this great empire on the Atlantic and along the western
+Mediterranean; this Atlantean land of the cromlech-builders, as we may
+call it, for want of a better name. As the thought and purpose of its
+inhabitants are uniform throughout its whole vast extent, we are led to
+see in them a single homogeneous race, working without rivals, without
+obstacles, without contests, for they seem everywhere to have been free
+to choose what sites they would for their gigantic structures. And we
+are irresistibly led to believe that these conditions must have endured
+throughout a vast extent of time, for no nation which does not look back
+to a distant past will plan for a distant future. The spiritual sweep
+and view of the cromlech-builders are, therefore, as great as the extent
+of their territory. This mysterious people must have had a life as
+wonderful as that of Greece or Rome or Egypt, whose territories we find
+them everywhere approaching, but nowhere invading.
+
+What we now know of the past history of our race is so vast, so
+incredibly enormous, that we have ample space for such a territory, so
+widespread, so enduring, as we have seen demanded by the position of the
+cromlechs and standing stones; more than that, so overwhelming are the
+distances in the dark backward and abysm of time, to which we must now
+carry the dawn of human history, that the time needed for the building
+of the cromlechs may seem quite recent and insignificant, in view of the
+mightier past, stretching back through geologic ages. The nineteenth
+century may well be called the age of resurrection, when long-forgotten
+epochs of man were born again into our knowledge. We can carry back that
+knowledge now to the early Miocene period, to which belong the human
+relics found by the Abb� Bourgeois on the uplands of Thenay, in central
+France; and no one believes that the early Miocene age can be as recent
+as a million years ago. A vast space separates the Thenay relics from
+the later traces of man found in Pliocene sands with the bones of the
+archaic meridional elephant,--at a date when the German ocean was a
+forest, full of southern trees and huge beasts now long since departed
+from the earth. A period hardly less vast must separate these from the
+close of the glacial age, when man roamed the plains of Europe, and
+sketched the herds of mammoths as they cropped the leaves. That huge
+beast, too, has long since departed into the abyss; but man the artist,
+who recorded the massive outline, the huge bossed forehead, the
+formidable bulk of the shaggy arctic elephant, engraved in firm lines on
+a fragment of its tusk,--man still remains. Man was present when
+rhinoceros and elephant were as common in Britain as they are to-day in
+Southern India or Borneo; when the hippopotamus was as much at home in
+the waters of the Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like
+the grizzly of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked
+in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this
+epoch of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is
+a recent chapter of the great epic of man; there lies far more behind
+it, beyond the Age of Ice to the immensely distant Pliocene; beyond this
+as far as the early Miocene; beyond this, again, how much further we
+know not, towards the beginningless beginning, the infinite.
+
+We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost
+boundless ages, geologic epochs of human history succeeding each other
+in majestic procession, as the face of our island was now tropical, now
+arctic; as the seas swelled up and covered the hills, or the bottom of
+the deep drove back the ocean and became dry land, an unbroken
+continent. The wild dreams of romance never approached the splendid
+outlines of this certain history.
+
+There are dim outlines of man throughout all these ages, but only at a
+comparatively recent date have we traditions and evidence pointing to
+still surviving races. At a period of only a few thousand years ago, we
+begin to catch glimpses of a northern race whom the old Greeks and
+Romans called Hyperboreans or Far-Northerners; a race wild and little
+skilled in the arts of life; a race of small stature, slight, dusky,
+with piercing eyes, low brows, and of forbidding face. This race was
+scattered over lands far north of the Mediterranean, dwelling in caves
+and dens of the earth, and lingering on unchanged from the days of
+mammoth and cave-bear. We have slight but definite knowledge of this
+very ancient race--enough to show us that its peculiar type lingers to
+this day in a few remote islands on the Galway and Kerry coast, mingled
+with many later races. This type we find described in old Gaelic records
+as the Firbolgs, a race weak and furtive, dusky and keen-eyed, subjected
+by later races of greater force. Yet from this race, as if to show the
+inherent and equal power of the soul, came holy saints and mighty
+warriors; to the old race of the Firbolgs belong Saint Mansuy, apostle
+of Belgium, and Roderick O'Conor, the last king of united Ireland. In
+gloomy mountain glens and lonely ocean islands still it lingers,
+unvanquished, tenacious, obscurely working out its secret destiny.
+
+This slight and low-browed race, of dark or sallow visage, and with
+black crisp hair, this Hyperborean people, is the oldest we can gain a
+clear view of in our island's history; but we know nothing of its
+extension or powers which would warrant us in believing that this was
+the race which built the cromlechs. Greek and Roman tradition, in this
+only corroborating the actual traces we ourselves possess of these old
+races, tells us of another people many thousand years ago overrunning
+and dominating the Firbolgs; a race of taller stature, of handsome
+features, though also dark, but with softer black hair, not crisp and
+tufted like the hair of the dwarfish earlier race. Of this second
+conquering race, tall and handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered
+from many lands where they dwelt; bodies preserved by art or nature, in
+caverns or sepulchres of stone; ornaments, pottery, works decorative and
+useful, and covering several thousand years in succession. But better
+than this, we have present, through nearly every land where we know of
+them in the past, a living remnant of this ancient race, like it in
+every particular of stature, form, complexion and visage, identical in
+character and temper, tendency and type of mind.
+
+In Ireland we find this tall, dark race over all the west of the island,
+but most numerous in Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo; in those regions
+where, we know, the older population was least disturbed. In remote
+villages among the mountains, reached by bridle-paths between
+heath-covered hills; in the settlements of fishermen, under some cliff
+or in the sheltered nook of one of our great western bays; or among the
+lonely, little visited Atlantic islands, this dark, handsome race, with
+its black hair, dark-brown eyes, sallow skin and high forehead, still
+holds its own, as a second layer above the remnant of the far more
+ancient Firbolg Hyperboreans. We find the same race also among the
+Donegal highlands, here and there in the central plain or in the south,
+and nowhere entirely missing among the varied races towards the
+eastern sea.
+
+[Illustration: Sugar Loaf Mountain, Glengarriff.]
+
+But it is by no means in Ireland only that this tall, dark, western race
+is found. It is numerously represented in the nearest extension of the
+continent, among the headlands and bays and isles of Brittany--a land so
+like our own western seaboard, with its wild Atlantic storms.
+Following the ocean southward, we find the same race extending to the
+Loire, the Garonne, the Pyrenees; stretching somewhat inland also, but
+clinging everywhere to the Atlantic, as we also saw it cling in Ireland.
+In earlier centuries, long before our era opened, we find this same race
+spread far to the east,--as far, almost, as the German and Italian
+frontier,--so that at one time it held almost complete possession of
+France. South of the Pyrenees we find it once more; dominant in
+Portugal, less strongly represented in Spain, yet still supplying a
+considerable part of the population of the whole peninsula, as it does
+in Ireland at the present day. But it does not stop with Spain, or even
+Europe. We find the same race again in the Guanches of the Canary
+islands, off the African coast; and, stranger still, we find mummies of
+this race, of great antiquity, in the cave-tombs of Teneriffe. Further,
+we have ample evidence of its presence, until displaced by Moorish
+invaders, all along northern Africa as far as Tunis; and we come across
+it again amongst the living races in the Mediterranean isles, in
+Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy. Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central
+Sahara belong to the same type. Everywhere the same tall, dark race,
+handsome, imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of
+eyes; a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and texture
+of hair.
+
+Thus far the southern extension of this, our second Irish race; we may
+look for a moment at its distribution in the north. Across the shallow
+sea which separates us from Britain we find the same race, clinging
+always to the Atlantic seaboard. It dominates south Wales, where its
+presence was remarked and commented on by the invading Romans. It is
+present elsewhere through the Welsh mountains, and much more sparsely
+over the east of England; but we have ample evidence that at one time
+this tall, dark race held the whole of England in undisputed possession,
+except, perhaps, for a remnant of the Hyperborean dwarfs. In the west of
+Scotland, and especially in the Western Isles, it is once more numerous;
+and we find offshoots of the same race in the dark-haired
+Norwegians,--still holding to the seaboard of the Atlantic.
+
+Such is the distribution of this once dominant but now dwindled race,
+which has gradually descended from the summit of power as ancient Rome
+descended, as Greece descended, or Assyria or Egypt. But we can look
+back with certainty to a time when this race, and this race only, held
+complete possession of all the lands we have mentioned, in north or
+south, in Europe or northern Africa; holding everywhere to the Atlantic
+coast, or, as in the Mediterranean isles, evidently pressing inward from
+the Atlantic, past the Pillars of Hercules, through the Strait of
+Gibraltar.
+
+It is evident at once that the territory of this race corresponds
+exactly, throughout many countries, with the territory of the cromlechs
+and standing stones; where we find the one, as in Ireland, Brittany,
+Spain, we find the other; where the one is absent, as in Germany, or
+northern Italy or Greece, the other is likewise absent. The identity is
+complete. We are justified, therefore, in giving the same provisional
+name to both, and calling them Atlantean, from their evident origin not
+far from Atlas, and their everywhere clinging to the Atlantic coast. We
+can find traces of no other race which at all closely fulfills the
+necessary conditions of uniform and undisputed extension, through a long
+epoch, over the whole cromlech region--the only conditions under which
+we can conceive of the erection of these gigantic monuments, or of the
+long established and universally extended spiritual conditions which
+make possible such vast ideal enterprises.
+
+In this race, therefore, which we have called Atlantean, we find the
+conditions fulfilled; of this race, and of no other, we still find a
+lingering remnant in each of the cromlech countries; and we hardly find
+a trace of this race, either now or in the past, in the lands which have
+no cromlechs or standing stones.
+
+We have already seen that the standing stones of Cavancarragh, four
+miles from Fermanagh, were, within the memory of men still living or of
+their fathers, buried under ten or twelve feet of peat, which had
+evidently formed there after their erection. We have here a natural
+chronometer; for we know the rate at which peat forms, and we can,
+therefore, assign a certain age to a given depth. We have given one mode
+of reckoning already; we find it corroborated by another. In the Somme
+valley, in northern France, we have a Nature's timepiece; in the peat,
+at different levels, are relics of the Roman age; of the Gaulish age
+which preceded it; and, far deeper, of pre-historic races, like our
+Atlanteans, who preceded the Gauls. The date of the Roman remains we
+know accurately; and from this standard we find that the peat grows
+regularly some three centimeters a century, or a foot in a
+thousand years.
+
+On the mountain side, as at Cavancarragh, the growth is likely to be
+slower than in a river valley; yet we may take the same rate, a foot a
+thousand years, and we shall have, for this great stone circle, an
+antiquity of ten or twelve thousand years at least. This assumes that
+the peat began to form as soon as the monument was completed; but the
+contrary may be the case; centuries may have intervened.
+
+We may, however, take this as a provisional date, and say that our
+cromlech epoch, the epoch of the Atlantean builders, from Algeria to
+Ireland, from Ireland to the Baltic, is ten or twelve thousand years
+ago; extending, perhaps, much further back in the past, and in certain
+regions coming much further down towards the present, but having a
+period of twelve thousand years ago as its central date. It happens that
+we have traditions of a great dispersion from the very centre we have
+been led to fix, the neighborhood of Atlas or Gibraltar, and that to
+this dispersion tradition has given a date over eleven thousand years
+ago; but to this side of the subject we cannot more fully allude; it
+would take us too far afield.
+
+We have gone far enough to make it tolerably certain, first, that these
+great and wonderful monuments were built when uniform conditions of
+order, uniform religious beliefs and aspirations, and a uniform mastery
+over natural forces extended throughout a vast region spreading
+northward and eastward from Mount Atlas or Gibraltar; we have seen,
+next, that these conditions were furnished when a well-defined race,
+whom we have called Atlantean, was spread as the dominant element over
+this whole region; and, finally, we have seen reason to fix on a period
+some eleven or twelve thousand years ago as the central period of that
+domination, though it may have begun, and probably did begin, many
+centuries earlier. The distribution of the cromlechs is certain; the
+distribution of the race is certain; the age of one characteristic group
+of the monuments is certain. Further than this we need not go.
+
+When we try to form a clearer image of the life of this tall archaic
+race of cromlech-builders, we can divine very much to fill the picture.
+We note, to begin with, that not only do they always hold to the
+Atlantic ocean as something kindred and familiar, but that they are
+found everywhere in islands at such distances from the nearest coasts as
+would demand a certain seamanship for their arrival. This is true of
+their presence in Malta, Minorca, Sardinia; it is even more true of
+Ireland, the Western Isles of Scotland, the Norwegian Isles; all of
+which are surrounded by stormy and treacherous seas, where wrecks are
+very common even in our day. We must believe that our tail, dark
+invaders were a race of seamen, thoroughly skilled in the dangerous
+navigation of these dark seas; Caesar marveled at, and imitated, the
+ship-building of the natives of Brittany in his day; we equally admire
+the prowess of their sons, the Breton fishermen, in our own times. We
+find, too, that in the western districts and ocean islands of our own
+Ireland the tall, dark race often follows the sea, showing the same
+hereditary skill and daring; a skill which certainly marked the first
+invaders of that race, or they would never have reached our island at
+all. We are the more justified in seeing, in these dark
+cromlech-builders, the Fomorians of old Gaelic tradition, who came up
+out of the sea and subjugated the Firbolgs.
+
+Even to those familiar with the geological record of man it is
+sufficiently startling to find that the Firbolgs, the early dwarfish
+race of Hyperboreans, in all probability were ignorant of boats; that
+they almost certainly came to our island dry-shod, as they had come
+earlier to Britain, migrating over unbroken spaces of land to what
+afterwards became the isle of Erin; for this race we find everywhere
+associated with the mammoth--on the continent, in Britain, in our own
+island--and the mammoths certainly never came over in ships. Needless to
+say, there is abundant geological evidence as well, to show our former
+union with continental Europe,--though of course at a time immensely
+more remote than ten or twelve thousand years ago.
+
+We are, therefore, led to identify our Atlantean race of hardy seamen
+with the Fomorians who came up out of the sea and found the furtive
+Firbolgs in possession of our island; and to this race, the Fomorians of
+the sea, we credit the building of cromlechs and standing stones, not
+only among ourselves, but in Norway, in Britain, in Brittany, in Spain,
+in Africa.
+
+We shall presently pick up the thread of tradition, as we find it in
+Ireland, and try to follow the doings and life of the Fomorian invaders;
+but in the meantime we may try to gain some insight into the most
+mysterious and enduring of their works. The cromlechs which have been
+excavated in many cases are found to contain the funereal urns of a
+people who burned their dead. It does not follow that their first and
+only use was as tombs; but if we think of them as tombs only, we must
+the more marvel at the faith of the builders, and their firm belief in
+the reality and overwhelming import of the other world which we enter at
+death. For of dwellings for the living, of fortresses or storehouses, of
+defences against the foes who later invaded them, we find few traces;
+nothing at all to compare with their massive mausoleums. The other
+world, for them, was a far weightier concern than this, and to the
+purposes of that world, as they conceived it, all their energies were
+directed. We can hardly doubt that, like other races who pay extreme
+reverence to the dead, their inner vision beheld these departed ones
+still around them and among them, forming with them a single race, a
+single family, a single life. This world was for them only the threshold
+of the other, the place of preparation. To that other their thoughts all
+turned, for that other they raised these titanic buildings. The solemn
+masses and simple grandeur of the cromlechs fitly symbolize the mood of
+reverence in which they drew near to the sublime world of the hidden;
+the awe with which their handiwork affirmed how greatly that world
+outweighs this. At these houses of the dead they were joined in spirit
+and communion with those who had passed away; once more united with
+their fathers and their fathers' fathers, from the dim beginning of
+their race. The air, for them, was full of spirits. Only the dead
+truly lived.
+
+The circles of standing stones are also devoted to ideal ends. Though
+the men who set them up could have built not less wonderful forts or
+dwellings of stone, we find none of these; nor has any worldly purpose
+ever been assigned to the stone circles. Yet there seems to be a very
+simple interpretation of their symbology; the circle, through all
+antiquity, stood for the circling year, which ever returns to its point
+of departure, spring repeating spring, summer answering to summer,
+winter with its icy winds only the return of former winters: the
+circling year and its landmarks, whether four seasons, or twelve months,
+or twenty-seven lunar mansions, through one of which the wandering moon
+passes in a day. We should thus have circles of twelve or twenty-seven
+stones, or four outlying stones at equal distances, for the four
+seasons, the regents of the year. By counting the stones in each circle
+we can tell to which division of the year they belonged, whether the
+solar months or the lunar mansions.
+
+But with all ancient nations the cycle of the year was only the symbol
+of the spiritual cycle of the soul, the path of birth and death. We
+must remember that even for ourselves the same symbolism holds: in the
+winter we celebrate the Incarnation; in spring, the Crucifixion; in
+summer, the birth of the beloved disciple; in autumn, the day of All
+Souls, the feast of the dead. Thus for us, too, the succeeding seasons
+only symbolize the stages of a spiritual life, the august procession
+of the soul.
+
+We cannot think it was otherwise with a people who lived and built so
+majestically for the hidden world; these great stone circles symbolized
+for them, we must believe, the circling life of the soul, the cycle of
+necessity, with the door of liberation to the home of the blest, who
+have reached perfect freedom and go no more out. We may picture in
+imagination their solemn celebrations; priests robed, perhaps, in the
+mingled green and purple of their hills, passing within the circle,
+chanting some archaic hymn of the Divine.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THE DE DANAANS.
+
+In the dim days of Fomorian and Firbolg, and for ages after, Erin was a
+land of forests, full of wild cattle and deer and wolves. The central
+plain was altogether hidden under green clouds of oak-woods, full of
+long, mysterious alleys, dimpled with sunny glades, echoing in spring
+and summer to the songs of innumerable birds. Everywhere through the
+wide and gloomy forests were the blue mirrors of lakes, starred with
+shaggy islands, the hanging hills descending verdant to the water's
+edge. Silver rivers spread their network among the woods, and the lakes
+and the quiet reaches of the rivers teemed with trout and salmon. The
+hilly lands to the north and south showed purple under the sky from
+among their forests, oak mingling with pine; and the four seas beat
+around our island with their white fringe of hovering gulls. Over all,
+the arch of the blue, clearer and less clouded then than now. A pleasant
+land, full of gladness and mystery.
+
+We can but obscurely image to ourselves the thoughts and deeds of the
+earliest dwellers in our island. We know that they were skilled in many
+arts of peace and inured to the shock of war. The sky spread above them
+as over us, and all around them was the green gloom of the forests, the
+whiteness of lakes and rivers, the rough purple of the heather. The
+great happenings of life, childhood and age and death, were for them
+what they are for us, yet their blood flowed warmer than ours. Browned
+by wind and sun, wet by the rain and the early dew of the morning, they
+delighted in the vigor of the prime. Their love for kindred, for their
+friends and lovers, was as ours; and when friends and kindred passed
+into the darkness, they still kept touch with their souls in the
+invisible Beyond.
+
+[Illustration: River Erne, Belleek.]
+
+The vision of our days is darkened by too much poring over earthly
+things; but the men of old, like many of our simpler races now, looked
+confidently and with intent faith across the threshold. For them the
+dead did not depart--hidden but from their eyes, while very near to
+their souls. Those in the beyond were still linked to those on earth;
+all together made one undivided life, neither in the visible world alone
+nor in the hidden world alone, but in both; each according to their
+destinies and duties. The men of old were immeasurably strong in this
+sense of immortality--a sense based not on faith but on knowledge; on a
+living touch with those who had gone before. They knew both over-world
+and under-world, because they held their souls open to the knowledge of
+both, and did not set their hearts on earthly things alone. A strong
+life close to the life of the natural world, a death that was no
+separation, the same human hearts as ours,--further we need not go in
+imagining that far-off time.
+
+A third people was presently added to these two, at an epoch fixed by
+tradition some four thousand years ago. A vivid picture of their coming
+has been handed down to us, and this picture we shall reproduce, as many
+circumstances and particulars of our knowledge drawn from other sources
+concur to show that our old legend is near to the truth, both in time
+and happenings.
+
+The name these newcomers bore was Tuata De Danaan, the De Danaan tribes;
+they were golden-haired and full of knowledge, and their coming was
+heavy with destiny for the dark races of Fomor and Firbolg. Even to-day,
+mysterious whispers of the De Danaans linger among the remote valleys
+and hillsides of our island, and truth is hidden in every legend of
+their deeds. They have borne a constant repute for magical knowledge,
+and the first tradition of their coming not only echoes that repute, but
+shows how first they came by it.
+
+The De Danaans came from the north; from what land, we shall presently
+inquire. They landed somewhere on the northeast coast of our island,
+says the tradition; the coast of Antrim was doubtless the place of their
+arrival, and we have our choice between Larne and the estuary of the
+Foyle. All between, lofty cliffs face a dark and angry sea, where no one
+not familiar with the coast would willingly approach; their later course
+in the island makes it very probable that they came to the Foyle.
+
+There, still within sight of the Caledonian isles and headlands hovering
+in blue shadows over the sea, they entered, where the sun rose over long
+silver sands and hills of chalk, with a grim headland on the west
+towering up into sombre mountains. Once within the strait, they had a
+wide expanse of quiet waters on all sides, running deep among the rugged
+hills, and receiving at its further end the river Foyle, tempting them
+further and further with their ships. Up the Foyle went the De Danaan
+fleet, among the oak-woods, the deer gazing wide-eyed at them from dark
+caverns of shadow, the wolves peering after them in the night. Then,
+when their ships would serve them no further, they landed, and, to set
+the seal on their coming, burned their boats, casting in their lot with
+the fate of their new home. Still following the streams of the Foyle,
+for rivers were the only pathways through the darkness of the woods,
+they came to the Lakes of Erne, then, as now, beautiful with innumerable
+islands, and draped with curtains of forest. Beyond Erne, they fixed
+their first settlement at Mag Rein, the Plain of the Headland, within
+the bounds of what afterwards was Leitrim; and at this camp their legend
+takes up the tale.
+
+It would seem that the Fomorians were then gathered further to the west,
+as well as in the northern isles. The Firbolgs had their central
+stronghold at Douin Cain, the Beautiful Eminence, which, tradition tells
+us, later bore the name of Tara. The chief among their chiefs was
+Eocaid, son of Ere, remembered as the last ruler of the Firbolgs. Every
+man of them was a hunter, used to spear and shield, and the skins of
+deer and the shaggy hides of wolves were their garments; their dwellings
+were built of well-fitted oak. To the chief, Eocaid, Erc's son, came
+rumor of the strangers near the Lakes of Erne; their ships, burned at
+their debarking, were not there to tell of the manner of their coming,
+and the De Danaans themselves bruited it abroad that they had come
+hither by magic, borne upon the wings of the wind. The chiefs of Tara
+gathered together, within their fort of earth crowned with a stockade,
+and took counsel how to meet this new adventure. After long consultation
+they chose one from among them, Sreng by name, a man of uncommon
+strength, a warrior tried and proven, who should go westward to find out
+more of the De Danaans.
+
+Doubtless taking certain chosen companions with him, Sreng, the man of
+valor from among the Firbolgs, set forth on his quest. As in all
+forest-covered countries, the only pathways lay along the river-banks,
+or, in times of drought, through the sand or pebbles of their beds.
+Where the woods pressed closest upon the streams, the path wound from
+one bank to the other, crossing by fords or stepping-stones, or by a
+bridge of tree-trunks. So went Sreng, careful and keen-eyed, up the
+stream of the Blackwater, and thence to the Erne, and so drew near to
+the Plain of the Headland, where was the De Danaan camp. They, too, had
+word of his coming from their scouts and hunters, and sent forth Breas,
+one among their bravest, to meet the envoy.
+
+They sighted each other and halted, each setting his shield in the
+earth, peering at his adversary above its rim. Then, reassured, they
+came together, and Breas first spoke to Sreng. After the first words
+they fell, warrior-like, to examining each other's weapons; Sreng saw
+that the two spears of Breas the De Danaan were thin, slender and long,
+and sharp-pointed, while his own were heavy, thick and point-less, but
+sharply rounded.
+
+Here we have a note of reality, for spears of these two types are well
+known to us; those of Sreng were chisel-shaped, round-edged, socketed
+celts; the De Danaan lances were long and slender, like our spears.
+There are two materials also--a beautiful golden bronze, shining and
+gleaming in the sunlight, and a darker, ruddier metal, dull and heavy;
+and these darker spears have sockets for greatly thicker hafts. Both
+also carried swords, made, very likely, the one of golden, the other of
+dull, copper-colored bronze.
+
+Then, putting these pleasant things aside, they turned to weightier
+matters, and Breas made a proposal for the De Danaan men. The island was
+large, the forests wide and full of game, the waters sweet and
+well-stocked with fish. Might they not share it between them, and join
+hands to keep out all future comers? Sreng could give no final answer;
+he could only put the matter before the Firbolg chiefs; so, exchanging
+spears in sign of friendship and for a token between them, they returned
+each to his own camp.
+
+Sreng of the Firbolgs retraced his path some four-score miles among the
+central forests, and came to the Beautiful Eminence, where the Firbolgs
+had their settlement. Eocaid, Erc's son, their chieftain, called the
+lesser chiefs around him, and Sreng made full report of what he had seen
+and heard. The Firbolgs, pressed on by their fate, decided to refuse all
+terms with the De Danaans, but to give them battle, and drive them from
+the island. So they made ready, each man seeing to the straps of his
+shield, the burnishing of his thick sword and heavy spear. Eyes gleamed
+out beneath lowering brows all about the dwellings of Tara, and hot
+words were muttered of the coming fight. The dark faces of the Firbolgs
+were full of wrath.
+
+Breas, returning to the camp of the Tuata De Danaan, gave such account
+of the fierceness and strength of Sreng, and the weight and sturdiness
+of his weapons, that the hearts of the golden-haired newcomers misgave
+them, and they drew away westward to the strip of land that lies between
+the lakes of Corrib and Mask. There, tradition tells us, they made an
+encampment upon the hill of Belgadan, near the stream that flows through
+caverns beneath the rocks from the northern to the southern lake. From
+their hill-top they had clear view of the plain stretching eastward,
+across which the Firbolg warriors must come; to the right hand and to
+the left were spread the great white waters of the lakes, stretching far
+away to the northern and southern verge of the sky. Islands dotted the
+lakes, and trees mirrored themselves in the waters. Behind them, to the
+westward, rose a square-topped mountain, crowned by a clear tarn; and,
+behind that, tier upon tier of hills, stretching dark and sombre along
+Lough Mask to the north, and spreading westward to the twelve crystal
+hills of Connemara.
+
+Across the plain to the east, then called the Plain of Nia, but
+thereafter Mag Tuiread or Moytura, the Plain of the Pillars, lay the
+forests, and thence issued forth the hosts of the Firbolgs, encamping on
+the eastern verge of the open space. Nuada, the De Danaan king, once
+more sought a peaceful issue to their meeting, but Erc's son Eocaid
+refused all terms, and it was plain to all that they must fight.
+
+It was midsummer. The air was warm about them, the lake-shores and the
+plain clothed in green of many gently blended shades. The sun shone down
+upon them, and the lakes mirrored the clear blue above. From their hill
+of encampment descended the De Danaans, with their long slender spears
+gleaming like bright gold, their swords of golden bronze firmly grasped,
+their left hands griping the thong of their shields. Golden-haired, with
+flowing tresses, they descended to the fight; what stately battle-song
+they chanted, what Powers they called on for a blessing, we cannot tell;
+nor in what terms the dark-browed Firbolgs answered them as they
+approached across the plain. All that day did the hosts surge together,
+spear launched against spear, and bronze sword clashing against shield;
+all that day and for three days more, and then the fate of the Firbolgs
+was decided. Great and dire was the slaughter of them, so that Erc's son
+Eocaid saw that all was lost. Withdrawing with a hundred of his own men
+about him, Eocaid was seeking water to quench his thirst, for the heat
+of the battle was upon him, when he was pursued by a greater band of
+the De Danaans, under the three sons of Nemed, one of their chieftains.
+
+Eocaid and his bodyguard fled before Nemed's sons, making their way
+northeastward along the Moy river, under the shadow of the Mountains of
+Storms, now wrongly named Ox Mountains. They came at last to the great
+strand called Traig Eotaile, but now Ballysadare, the Cataract of the
+Oaks,--where the descending river is cloven into white terraces by the
+rocks, and the sea, retreating at low tide, leaves a world of wet sand
+glinting under the moonlight. At the very sea's margin a great battle
+was fought between the last king of the Firbolgs with his men, and the
+De Danaans under Nemed's sons; so relentless was the fight along the
+tideways that few remained to tell of it, for Erc's son Eocaid fell, but
+Nemed's three sons fell likewise, The three De Danaan brothers were
+buried at the western end of the strand, and the place was called The
+Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, in their memory. The son of Erc was
+buried on the strand, where the waves lap along the shore, and his cairn
+of Traig Eotaile still stands by the water-side, last resting-place of
+the last ruler of the Firbolgs.
+
+Meanwhile the fighting had gone on at Mag Tuiread by the lakes, till
+but three hundred of the Firbolgs were left, with Sreng, the fierce
+fighter, at their head. Sreng had gained enduring fame by meeting Nuada,
+the De Danaan king, in combat, and smiting him so that he clove the
+shield-rim and cut down deep into Nuada's shoulder, disabling him
+utterly from the battle. Seeing themselves quite outnumbered, therefore,
+the survivors of the Firbolgs with Sreng demanded single combat with De
+Danaan champions, but the victors offered them worthy terms of peace.
+The Firbolgs were to hold in lordship and freedom whichever they might
+choose of the five provinces; the conquerors were to have the rest.
+
+Sreng looked around among his band of survivors,--a little band, though
+of great valor,--and he remembered the hosts of his people that had
+entered the battle three days before, but now lay strewn upon the plain;
+and thinking that they had done enough for valor he accepted the offered
+terms, choosing the Western Province for his men. In memory of him it
+was called Cuigead Sreing for generations, until Conn of the Five-Score
+Battles changed the name for his own, calling the province Connacht, as
+it is to this day.
+
+It fared less well with the victors, and with their victory were sown
+seeds of future discord. For Nuada, the king, being grievously wounded,
+was in no state to rule, so that the chief power was given to Breas,
+first envoy of the De Danaans. Now Breas was only half De Danaan, half
+Fomor, and would not recognize the De Danaan rites or laws of
+hospitality, but was a very tyrannous and overbearing ruler, so that
+much evil came of his government. Yet for seven years he was endured,
+even though meat nor ale was dispensed at his banquets, according to De
+Danaan law.
+
+Mutterings against Breas were rife among the chiefs and their followers
+when the bard Cairbr�, whose mother Etan was also a maker of verses,
+came to the assembly of Breas. But the bard was shown little honor and
+given a mean lodging,--a room without fire or bed, with three dry loaves
+for his fare. The bard was full of resentment and set himself to make
+songs against Breas, so that all men repeated his verses, and the name
+of Breas fell into contempt. All men's minds were enkindled by the bard,
+and they drove Breas forth from the chieftainship. Breas fled to his
+Fomor kindred in the isles, with his heart full of anger and revenge
+against the De Danaans.
+
+He sought help of his kindred, and their design was told to the
+Fomorian chieftains--to Balor of the Evil Eye, and to Indec, son of De
+Domnand, chiefs of the Isles. These two leaders gathered ships from all
+the harbors and settlements of the Fomorians, from the Hebrides, the
+Shetlands, and far-distant Norway, so that their fleet was thick as
+gulls above a shoal of fish along the north shores of Erin.
+
+Coming down from the northern isles, they sighted the coast of Erin, the
+peaks of the northwestern mountains rising purple towards the clouds,
+with white seas foaming around them. Past towering headlands they
+sailed; then, drawing in towards the shore, they crept under the great
+cliffs of Slieve League, that rose like a many-colored wall from the sea
+to the sky--so high that the great eagles on their summits were but
+specks seen from beneath, so high that the ships below seemed like
+sea-shells to those who watched them from above. With the wall of the
+cliffs on their left hand, and the lesser headlands and hills of Sligo
+on their right, they came to that same strand of Ballysadare, the
+Cataract of the Oaks, where the last of the Firbolgs fell. Drawing their
+long ships up on the beach, with furled sail and oars drawn in, they
+debarked their army on the shore. It was a landing of ill-omen for the
+Fomorians, that landing beside the cairn of Eocaid; a landing of
+ill-omen for Indec, son of De Domnand, and for Balor of the Evil Eye.
+
+It was the fall of the leaf when they came; the winds ran crying through
+the forests, tearing the leaves and branches from the oaks, and mourning
+among the pines of the uplands. The sea was gray as a gull's back, with
+dark shadows under the cliffs and white tresses of foam along the
+headlands. At evening a cold wind brought the rain beating in from the
+ocean. Thus the Fomorians landed at the Cataract of the Oaks, and
+marched inland to the plain now called Tirerril in Sligo. The murky sky
+spread over the black and withered waste of the plain, hemmed in with
+gloomy hills, wild rocks and ravines, and with all the northern horizon
+broken by distant mountains. Here Indec and Balor, and Breas the cause
+of their coming, fixed their camp. They sent a message of defiance to
+the De Danaans, challenging them to fight or surrender. The De Danaans
+heard the challenge and made ready to fight.
+
+Nuada, now called the chieftain of the Silver Arm, because the mischief
+wrought by Sreng's blow on his shoulder had been hidden by a silver
+casing, was once more ruler since Breas had been driven out. Besides
+Nuada, these were De Danaan chieftains: Dagda, the Mighty; Lug, son of
+Cian, son of Diancect, surnamed Lamfada, the Long Armed; Ogma, of the
+Sunlike Face; and Angus, the Young. They summoned the workers in bronze
+and the armorers, and bid them prepare sword and spear for battle,
+charging the makers of spear-haft and shield to perfect their work. The
+heralds also were ready to proclaim the rank of the warriors, and those
+skilled in healing herbs stood prepared to succor the wounded. The bards
+were there also to arouse valor and ardor with their songs.
+
+Then marching westward to the plain of the battle among the hills, they
+set their camp and advanced upon the Fomorians. Each man had two spears
+bound with a thong to draw them back after the cast, with a shield to
+ward off blows, and a broad-bladed sword of bronze for close combat.
+With war-chants and invocations the two hosts met. The spears, well
+poised and leveled, clove the air, hissing between them, and under the
+weight of the spear-heads and their sharp points many in both hosts
+fell. There were cries of the wounded now, mingled with battle-songs,
+and hoarse shouting for vengeance among those whose sons and brothers
+and sworn friends fell. Another cast of the spears, seaming the air
+between as the hosts closed in, and they fell on each other with their
+swords, shields upraised and gold-bronze sword-points darting beneath
+like the tongues of serpents. They cut and thrust, each with his eyes
+fixed on the fierce eyes of his foe.
+
+They fought on the day of the Spirits, now the Eve of All Saints; the
+Fomorians were routed, and their chieftains slain. But of the De
+Danaans, Nuada, once wounded by Sreng of the Firbolgs, now fell by the
+hand of Balor; yet Balor also fell, slain by Lug, his own
+daughter's son.
+
+Thus was the might of the Fomorians broken, and the De Danaans ruled
+unopposed, their power and the works of their hands spreading throughout
+the length and breadth of the land.
+
+Many monuments are accredited to them by tradition, but greatest and
+most wonderful are the pyramids of stone at Brugh on the Boyne. Some
+nine miles from the sandy seashore, where the Boyne loses itself in the
+waves, there is a broad tongue of meadowland, shut in on three sides
+southward by the Boyne, and to the northeast cut off by a lesser stream
+that joins it. This remote and quiet headland, very famous in the
+annals, was in old days so surrounded by woods that it was like a quiet
+glade in the forest rimmed by the clear waters of the Boyne. The Mourne
+Mountains to the north and the lesser summits on the southern sky-line
+were hidden by the trees. The forest wall encircled the green
+meadowland, and the river fringed with blue forget-me-nots.
+
+In this quiet spot was the sacred place of the De Danaans, and three
+great pyramids of stone, a mile apart along the river, mark their three
+chief sanctuaries. The central is the greatest; two hundred thousand
+tons of stone heaped up, within a circular wall of stone, itself
+surrounded by a great outer circle of standing stones, thirty in number,
+like gray sentinels guarding the shrine. In the very heart of the
+pyramid, hushed in perpetual stillness and peace, is the inmost
+sanctuary, a chamber formed like a cross, domed with a lofty roof, and
+adorned with mysterious tracings on the rocks. Shrines like this are
+found in many lands, whether within the heart of the pyramids of Egypt
+or in the recesses of India's hills; and in all lands they have the same
+purpose. They are secret and holy sanctuaries, guarded well from all
+outward influence, where, in the mystic solitude, the valiant and great
+among the living may commune with the spirits of the mighty dead. The
+dead, though hidden, are not passed away; their souls are in perpetual
+nearness to ours. If we enter deep within ourselves, to the remote
+shrine of the heart, as they entered that secluded shrine, we may find
+the mysterious threshold where their world and our world meet.
+
+In the gloom and silence of those pyramid-chambers, the De Danaans thus
+sought the souls of their mighty ones--the Dagda, surnamed the Mighty,
+and Lug the Long-Armed, and Ogma of the Sunlike Face, and Angus the
+Young. From these luminous guardians they sought the inbreathing of
+wisdom, drawing into themselves the might of these mightier ones, and
+rising toward the power of their immortal world. And to these sacred
+recesses they brought the ashes of their mighty dead, as a token that
+they, too, had passed through the secret gateway to the Land of the
+Ever Young.
+
+Some thirty miles to the west of Brugh, on the Boyne, a low range of
+hills rises from the central plain, now bearing the name of Slieve na
+Calliagh, the Witch's Hill. In the days of the great forest this was the
+first large open space to the west coming from Brugh, and, like it, a
+quiet and remote refuge among the woods. On the hillsides of Slieve na
+Calliagh are other pyramids of stone, in all things like those of
+Brugh, and with the same chambered sanctuaries, but of lesser size;
+belonging, perhaps, to a later age, when the De Danaans were no longer
+supreme in the land, but took their place beside newcome invaders. These
+lesser shrines were also sacred places, doorways to the hidden world,
+entrance-gates to the Land of the Ever Young. There also was beheld the
+vision of the radiant departed; there also were fonts of baptism, basins
+wrought of granite brought hither from the distant hills of Mourne or
+Wicklow. As in all lands, these fonts were used in the consecration of
+the new birth, from which man rises conscious of his immortality.
+
+In harmony with this faith of theirs, our present tradition sees in the
+De Danaans a still haunting impalpable presence, a race invisible yet
+real, dwelling even now among our hills and valleys. When the life of
+the visible world is hushed, they say, there is another life in the
+hidden, where the Dagda Mor and Ogma and Lug and Angus still guard the
+De Danaan hosts. The radiance of their nearness is all through the land,
+like the radiance of the sun hidden behind storm-clouds, glimmering
+through the veil.
+
+[Illustration: White Rocks, Portrush]
+
+In the chambers of those pyramid-shrines are still traces of the
+material presence of the De Danaans; not only their baptismal fonts, but
+more earthly things--ornaments, beads of glass and amber, and combs with
+which they combed their golden locks. These amber beads, like so many
+things in the De Danaan history, call us to far northern lands by the
+Baltic, whence in all likelihood the De Danaans came; for in those
+Baltic lands we find just such pyramid shrines as those at Brugh and on
+the hillsides of Slieve na Calliagh, and their ornaments are the same,
+and the fashion of their spear-heads and shields. The plan of the Danish
+pyramid of Uby is like the pyramids of Newgrange and Nowth and Dowth by
+the Boyne, and the carvings on King Gorm's stone by the Baltic are like
+the carvings of stones in our own island. On the Baltic shores, too, of
+most ancient date and belonging to forgotten times, are still found
+fragments and even perfect hulls of just such long ships as were needed
+for the Danaans' coming, like the ships they burnt along the reaches of
+the Foyle.
+
+By the Baltic, too, and nowhere else, were there races with hair yellow
+as their own amber, or, as our island bards say, "so bright that the
+new-molten gold was not brighter; yellow as the yellow flag-lilies along
+the verges of the rivers." Therefore, in character of race, in face and
+feature, in color and complexion, in the form and make of sword and
+spear and shield, in their knowledge of ships and the paths of the sea,
+as in their ornaments and decorative art, and in those majestic pyramids
+and shrines where they sought mystic wisdom, and whither they carried
+the ashes of their dead, as to a place of sacred rest--in all these the
+life of the De Danaans speaks of the Baltic shores and the ancient race
+of golden-haired heroes who dwelt there. The honoring of bards, the
+heraldic keeping of traditions and the names of ancestors, also speak of
+the same home; and with a college of heraldic bards, well-ordered and
+holding due rank and honor, we can well see how the stories of their
+past have come down even to our days, lingering among our hills and
+valleys, as the De Danaan themselves linger, hidden yet not departed.
+
+The traditional time of their coming, too, agrees well with all we know.
+Without bronze tools they could not have carved the beautifully adorned
+stones that are built into the pyramids by the Boyne; yet there is a
+certain early ruggedness about these stones that falls far short of the
+perfection of later times. Early in the bronze age, therefore, they must
+be placed; and the early bronze age, wherever its remoteness can be
+measured, as in the Swiss lakes or the peat-mosses of Denmark, cannot be
+less than four thousand years ago, thus well agreeing with our De Danaan
+tradition. We are, therefore, led to believe that the tale told by these
+traditions is in the main a true one; that the races recorded by them
+came in the recorded order; that their places of landing are faithfully
+remembered; that all traditions pointing to their earlier homes are
+worthy of belief, and in full accord with all our other knowledge.
+
+
+
+V.
+
+EMAIN OF MACA.
+
+B.C. 50--A.D. 50.
+
+The battles of Southern and Northern Moytura gave the De Danaans sway
+over the island. After they had ruled for many centuries, they in their
+turn were subjected to invasion, as the Firbolg and Fomorian had been
+before them. The newcomers were the Sons of Milid, and their former home
+was either Gaul or Spain. But whether from Gaul or Spain, the sons of
+Milid were of undoubted Gaelic race, in every feature of character and
+complexion resembling the continental Gauls.
+
+We must remember that, in the centuries before the northward spread of
+Rome, the Gauls were the great central European power. Twenty-six
+hundred years ago their earlier tribal life was consolidated into a
+stable empire under Ambigatos; Galicia in Eastern Austria and Galicia in
+Western Spain mark their extreme borders towards the rising and
+setting sun.
+
+Several centuries before the days of Ambigatos, in the older period of
+tribal confederation, was the coming of the Gaelic Sons of Milid to
+Ireland. Tradition places the date between three and four thousand years
+ago. Yet even after that long interval of isolation the resemblance
+between the Irish and continental Gaels is perfect; they are tall,
+solidly built, rather inclined to stoutness; they are fair-skinned, or
+even florid, easily browned by sun and wind. Their eyes are gray,
+greenish or hazel, not clear blue, like the eyes of the Baltic race; and
+though fair-haired, they are easily distinguished from the golden-haired
+Norsemen. Such are the descendants of the Sons of Milid. Coming from
+Gaul or Spain, the Sons of Milid landed in one of the great fiords that
+penetrate between the mountains of Kerry--long after so named from the
+descendants of Ciar. These same fiords between the hills have been the
+halting-place of continental invaders for ages; hardly a century has
+passed since the last landing there of continental soldiers; there was
+another invasion a century before that, and yet another a hundred years
+earlier. But the Sons of Milid showed the way. They may have come by
+Bantry Bay or the Kenmare River or Dingle Bay; more probably the last,
+for tradition still points to the battlefield where they were opposed,
+on the hills of Slieve Mish, above the Dingle fiord.
+
+But wherever they debarked on that southwestern coast they found a land
+warm and winning as the south they had left behind--a land of ever-green
+woods, yew and arbutus mingling with beech and oak and fir; rich
+southern heaths carpeting the hillsides, and a soft drapery of ferns
+upon the rocks. There were red masses of overhanging mountain, but in
+the valleys, sheltered and sun-warmed, they found a refuge like the
+Isles of the Blest. The Atlantic, surging in great blue rollers, brought
+the warmth of tropical seas, and a rich and vivid growth through all the
+glens and vales responded to the sun's caress.
+
+The De Danaans must ere this have spread through all of the island,
+except the western province assigned to the Firbolgs; for we find them
+opposing,--but vainly opposing,--the Sons of Milid, at the very place of
+their landing. Here again we find the old tradition verified; for at the
+spot recorded of old by the bards and heralds, among the hills by the
+pass that leads from Dingle to Tralee Bay, numberless arrow-heads have
+been gathered, the gleanings after a great combat. The De Danaans fought
+with sword and spear, but, unless they had added to their weapons since
+the days of Breas and Sreng, they did not shoot with the bow; this was,
+perhaps, the cause of their defeat, for the De Danaans were defeated
+among the hills on that long headland.
+
+From their battlefield they could see the sea on either hand, stretching
+far inland northward and southward; across these arms of the sea rose
+other headlands, more distant, the armies of hills along them fading
+from green to purple, from purple to clear blue. But the De Danaans had
+burned their boats; they sought refuge rather by land, retreating
+northward till they came to the shelter of the great central woods. The
+Sons of Milid pursued them, and, overtaking them at Tailten on the
+Blackwater, some ten miles northwest of Tara, they fought another
+battle; after it, the supremacy of the De Danaans definitely
+passed away.
+
+Yet we have no reason to believe that, any more than the Fomorians or
+Firbolgs, the De Danaans ceased to fill their own place in the land.
+They seem, indeed, to have been preponderant in the north, and in all
+likelihood they hold their own there even now; for every addition to our
+knowledge shows us more and more how tenacious is the life of races, how
+firmly they cling to their earliest dwellings. And though we read of
+races perishing before invaders, this is the mere boasting of
+conquerors; more often the newcomers are absorbed among the earlier
+race, and nothing distinctive remains of them but a name. We have
+abundant evidence to show that at the present day, as throughout the
+last three thousand years, the four races we have described continue to
+make up the bulk of our population, and pure types of each still linger
+unblended in their most ancient seats; for, though races mingle, they do
+not thereby lose their own character. The law is rather that the type of
+one or other will come out clear in their descendants, all undefined
+forms tending to disappear.
+
+Nor did any subsequent invasion add new elements; for as all northern
+Europe is peopled by the same few types, every newcomer,--whether from
+Norway, Denmark, Britain or Continental Europe,--but reinforced one of
+these earlier races. Yet even where the ethnical elements are alike,
+there seems to be a difference of destiny and promise--as if the very
+land itself brooded over its children, transforming them and molding
+them to a larger purpose. The spiritual life of races goes far deeper
+than their ethnic history.
+
+It would seem that with the coming of the Sons of Milid the destiny of
+Ireland was rounded and completed; from that time onward, for more than
+two thousand years, was a period of uniform growth and settled life and
+ideals; a period whose history and achievements we are only beginning to
+understand. At the beginning of that long epoch of settled life the art
+of working gold was developed and perfected; and we have abundance of
+beautiful gold-work from remote times, of such fine design and execution
+that there is nothing in the world to equal it. The modern work of
+countries where gold is found in quantities is commonplace, vulgar and
+inartistic, when compared with the work of the old Irish period.
+Torques, or twisted ribbons of gold, of varying size and shape, were
+worn as diadems, collars, or even belts; crescent bands of finely
+embossed sheet-gold were worn above the forehead; brooches and pins of
+most delicate and imaginative workmanship were used to catch together
+the folds of richly colored cloaks, and rings and bracelets were of not
+less various and exquisite forms.
+
+We are at no loss to understand the abundance of our old goldsmiths'
+work when we know that even now, after being worked for centuries, the
+Wicklow gold-mines have an average yearly yield of some five hundred
+ounces, found, for the most part, in nuggets in the beds of streams
+flowing into the two Avons. One mountain torrent bears the name of Gold
+Mines River at the present day, showing the unbroken presence of the
+yellow metal from the time of its first discovery, over three thousand
+years ago. It seems probable that a liberal alloy of gold gave the
+golden bronze its peculiar excellence and beauty; for so rich is the
+lustre, so fine the color of many of our bronze axes and spears, that
+they are hardly less splendid than weapons of pure gold. From the
+perfect design and workmanship of these things of gold and bronze, more
+than from any other source, we gain an insight into the high culture and
+skill in the arts which marked that most distinctively Irish period,
+lasting, as we have seen, more than two thousand years.
+
+Early in this same epoch we find traditions of the clearing of forests,
+the sowing of cornfields, the skill of dyers in seven colors, earliest
+of which were purple, blue and green. Wells were dug to insure an easily
+accessible supply of pure water, so that we begin to think of a settled
+population dwelling among fields of golden grain, pasturing their cattle
+in rich meadows, and depending less on the deer and wild oxen of the
+forest, the salmon of lake and river, and the abundant fish along
+the shores.
+
+Tradition speaks persistently of bards, heralds, poets and poetesses;
+of music and song; of cordial and generous social life; and to the
+presence of these bards, like the skalds of the Northmen, we owe
+pictures, even now full of life and color and movement, of those days
+of long ago.
+
+At a period rather more than two thousand years ago, a warrior-queen,
+Maca by name, founded a great fort and citadel at Emain, some two miles
+west of Armagh, in the undulating country of green hills and meadows to
+the south of Lough Neagh. The ramparts and earthworks of that ancient
+fortress can still be traced, and we can follow and verify what the
+ancient bards told of the greatness of the stronghold of Maca. The plans
+of all forts of that time seem to have been much the same--a wide ring
+of earthwork, with a deep moat, guarded them, and a stockade of oak
+stakes rose above the earthwork, behind which the defenders stood,
+firing volleys of arrows at the attacking host. Within this outer circle
+of defence there was almost always a central stronghold, raised on a
+great mound of earth; and this was the dwelling of the chief, provincial
+ruler, or king. Lesser mounds upheld the houses of lesser chiefs, and
+all alike seem to have been built of oak, with plank roofs. Safe
+storehouses of stone were often sunk underground, beneath the chief's
+dwelling. In the fort of Emain, as in the great fort of Tara in the
+Boyne Valley, there was a banqueting-hall for the warriors, and the
+bards thus describe one of these in the days of its glory: "The
+banquet-hall had twelve divisions in each wing, with tables and passages
+round them; there were sixteen attendants on each side, eight for the
+star-watchers, the historians and the scribes, in the rear of the hall,
+and two to each table at the door,--a hundred guests in all; two oxen,
+two sheep and two hogs were divided equally on each side at each meal.
+Beautiful was the appearance of the king in that assembly--flowing,
+slightly curling golden hair upon him; a red buckler with stars and
+beasts wrought of gold and fastenings of silver upon him; a crimson
+cloak in wide descending folds upon him, fastened at his breast by a
+golden brooch set with precious stones; a neck-torque of gold around his
+neck; a white shirt with a full collar, and intertwined with threads of
+gold, upon him; a girdle of gold inlaid with precious stones around him;
+two wonderful shoes of gold with runings of gold upon him; two spears
+with golden sockets in his hand."
+
+We are the more disposed to trust the fidelity of the picture, since
+the foundations of the Tara banquet-hall are to be clearly traced to
+this day--an oblong earthwork over seven hundred feet long by ninety
+wide, with the twelve doors still distinctly marked; as for the brooches
+and torques of gold, some we have surpass in magnificence anything here
+described, and their artistic beauty is eloquent of the refinement of
+spirit that conceived and the skill that fashioned them. Spear-heads,
+too, are of beautiful bronze-gold, with tracings round the socket of
+great excellence and charm.
+
+[Illustration: Powerscourt Waterfall, Co. Wicklow]
+
+For a picture of the life of that age, we cannot do better than return
+to Emain of Maca, telling the story of one famous generation of warriors
+and fair women who loved and fought there two thousand years ago. The
+ideal of beauty was still the golden hair and blue eyes of the De
+Danaans, and we cannot doubt that their race persisted side by side with
+the Sons of Milid, retaining a certain predominance in the north and
+northeast of the island, the first landing-place of the De Danaan
+invaders. Of this mingled race was the great Rudraige, from whom the
+most famous rulers of Emain descended. Ros was the son of Rudraige, and
+from Roeg and Cass, the sons of Ros, came the princes Fergus and
+Factna. Factna, son of Cass, wedded the beautiful Nessa, and from their
+union sprang Concobar, the great hero and ruler of Ulster--in those days
+named Ulad, and the dwellers there the Ulaid. Factna died while Concobar
+was yet a boy; and Nessa, left desolate, was yet so beautiful in her
+sadness that Fergus became her slave, and sued for her favor, though
+himself a king whose favors others sued. Nessa's heart was wholly with
+her son, her life wrapt up in his. She answered, therefore, that she
+would renounce her mourning and give her widowed hand to Fergus the
+king, if the king, on his part, would promise that Nessa's son Concobar
+should succeed him, rather than the children of Fergus. Full of longing,
+and held in thrall by her beauty, Fergus promised; and this promise was
+the beginning of many calamities, for Nessa, the queen, feeling her sway
+over Fergus, and full of ambition for her child, won a promise from
+Fergus that the youth should sit beside him on the throne, hearing all
+pleadings and disputes, and learning the art of ruling. But the spirit
+of Concobar was subtle and strong and masterful, and he quickly took the
+greater place in the councils of the Ulaid, until Nessa, still confident
+in her charm, took a promise from Fergus that Concobar should reign
+for one year.
+
+Fergus, great-hearted warrior, but tender and gentle and fond of feasts
+and merrymaking, was very willing to lift the cares of rule from his
+shoulders to the younger shoulders of Nessa's son, and the one year thus
+granted became many years, so that Fergus never again mounted his
+throne. Yet for the love he bore to Nessa, Fergus willingly admitted his
+stepson's rule, and remained faithfully upholding him, ever merry at the
+banquets, and leading the martial sports and exercises of the youths,
+the sons of chieftains, at the court. Thus Concobar, son of Nessa, came
+to be ruler over the great fort of Emain, with its citadel, its
+earthworks and outer forts, its strong stockade and moat; ruler of
+these, and of the chiefs of the Ulaid, and chief commander of all the
+fighting-men that followed them. To him came the tribute of cattle and
+horses, of scarlet cloaks and dyed fabrics, purple and blue and green,
+and the beryls and emeralds from the mountains of Mourne where the sea
+thunders in the caves, near the great fort of Rudraige. Fergus was lord
+only of the banqueting-hall and of the merrymakings of the young chiefs;
+but in all else the will of Concobar was supreme and his word was law.
+
+It happened that before this a child had been born, a girl
+golden-haired and with blue eyes, of whom the Druids had foretold many
+dark and terrible things. That the evil might not be wrought through
+this child of sad destiny, the king had from her earliest childhood kept
+her securely hidden in a lonely fort, and there Deirdr� grew in
+solitude, daily increasing in beauty and winsomeness. She so won the
+love of those set in guard over her that they relaxed something of the
+strictness of their watch, letting her wander a little in the meadows
+and the verges of the woods, gathering flowers, and watching the life of
+birds and wild things there.
+
+Among the chieftains of the court of Emain was one Usnac, of whom were
+three sons, with Naisi strongest and handsomest of the three. Naisi was
+dark, with black locks hanging upon his shoulders and dark, gleaming
+eyes; and so strongly is unlike drawn to unlike that golden-haired
+Deirdr�, seeing him in one of her wanderings, felt her heart go forth to
+him utterly. Falling into talk with him, they exchanged promises of
+enduring love. Thus the heart of Naisi went to Deirdr�, as hers had gone
+to him, so that all things were changed for them, growing radiant with
+tremulous hope and wistful with longing. Yet the fate that lay upon
+Deirdr� was heavy, and all men dreaded it but Naisi; so that even his
+brothers, the sons of Usnac, feared greatly and would have dissuaded him
+from giving his life to the ill-fated one. But Naisi would not be
+dissuaded; so they met secretly many times, in the twilight at the verge
+of the wood, Deirdr�'s golden hair catching the last gleam of sunlight
+and holding it long into the darkness, while the black locks of Naisi,
+even ere sunset, foreshadowed the coming night. In their hearts it was
+not otherwise; for Deirdr�, full of wonder at the change that had come
+over her, at the song of the birds that echoed ever around her even in
+her dreams, at the radiance of the flowers and trees, the sunshine on
+the waters of the river, the vivid gladness over all,--Deirdr� knew
+nothing of the dread doom that was upon her, and was all joy and
+wonderment at the meetings with her lover, full of fancies and tender
+words and shy caresses; but Naisi, who knew well the fate that
+overshadowed them like a black cloud above a cliff of the sea, strove to
+be glad and show a bold face to his mistress, though his heart many a
+time grew cold within him, thinking on what had befallen and what
+might befall.
+
+For the old foretelling of the star-watchers was not the only doom laid
+upon Deirdr�. Concobar the king, stern and masterful, crafty and secret
+in counsel though swift as an eagle to slay,--Concobar the king had
+watched Deirdr� in her captivity, ever unseen of her, and his heart had
+been moved by the fair softness of her skin, the glow of her cheek, the
+brightness of her eyes and hair; so that the king had steadfastly
+determined in his mind that Deirdr� should be his, in scorn of all
+prophecies and warnings; that her beauty should be for him alone. This
+the king had determined; and it was known to Naisi the son of Usnac. It
+was known to him also that what Concobar the king determined, he
+steadfastly carried out; for the will of Concobar was strong and
+masterful over all around him.
+
+Therefore at their meetings two clouds lay upon the heart of Naisi: the
+presentment of the king's power and anger, and his relentless hand
+pursuing through the night, and the darker dread of the sightless doom
+pronounced of old at the birth of Deirdr�, of which the will of Concobar
+was but the tool. There was gloom in his eyes and silence on his lips
+and a secret dread in his heart. Deirdr� wondered at it, her own heart
+being so full of gladness, her eyes sparkling, and endearing words ever
+ready on her lips. Deirdr� wondered, yet found a new delight and
+wonderment in the silence of Naisi, and the gloomy lightning in his
+eyes, as being the more contrasted with herself, and therefore the more
+to be beloved.
+
+Yet the time came when Naisi determined to tell her all and risk the
+worst that fate could do against them, finding death with her greatly
+better than life without her. Yet death with her was not to be granted
+to him. Deirdr� heard, wondering and trembling, and Naisi must tell her
+the tale many times before she understood,--so utter had been her
+solitude and so perfect was yet her ignorance of all things beyond the
+fort where she was captive, and of all the doings of men. Concobar was
+not even a name to her, and she knew nothing of his power or the
+stronghold of Emain, the armies of the Ulaid, or the tributes of gold
+and cattle and horses. Spears and swords and those who wielded them were
+not even dreams to her until the coming of Naisi, when his gloom blended
+with her sunshine.
+
+Talking long through the twilight, until the red gold of the west was
+dulled to bronze over the hills, and the bronze tarnished and darkened
+with the coming of the eastern stars, they planned together what they
+should do; and, the heart of Deirdr� at last growing resolute, they made
+their way through the night to where the brothers of Naisi were, and all
+fled together towards the northern sea. Amongst the fishermen of the
+north they found those who were willing to carry them beyond the reach
+of Concobar's anger, and with a southerly breeze set sail for the
+distant headlands of Scotland, that they had seen from the cliff-top
+lying like blue clouds along the horizon. They set forth early in the
+morning, as the sun came up out of the east over blue Alban capes, and
+when the sun went down it reddened the dark rocks of Islay; so that,
+making for the shore, they camped that night under the Islay Hills. On
+their setting forth again, the sea was like a wild grey lake between
+Jura on the left and the long headland of Cantyre on their right; and
+thus they sped forward between long ranks of gloomy hills, growing ever
+nearer them on both sides, till they passed through the Sound of Jura
+and rounded into Loch Etive.
+
+There they made the land, drawing up under the shadow of dark hills, and
+there they dwelt for many a day. Very familiar to Deirdr�, though at
+first strange and wild and terrible beyond words, grew that vast
+amphitheatre of hills in their eternal grayness, with the long Loch
+stretching down like a horn through their midst. Very familiar to
+inland-bred Deirdr�, though at first strange and fearful, grew the gray
+surges of the incoming tides, the white foam of the waves seething along
+boulders of granite, and the long arms of seaweed waving as she peered
+downward into the clear green water. Very familiar to Deirdr�, though at
+first strange and confusing, grew the arms of Naisi around her in the
+darkness and his warm lips on her cheek. Happy were those wild days in
+the great glen of Etive, and dear did the sons of Usnac grow to her
+heart, loved as brothers by her who never knew a brother, or the
+gentleness of a mother's watching, or the solace of dear kindred.
+
+The sons of Usnac sped forth before dawn among the hills from their
+green dwelling roofed with pine branches and reeds and moss; early they
+went forth to track the deer, pursuing them with their arrows, till the
+red flank of the buck was laced with brighter red. One of the three ever
+stayed behind with Deirdr�, whether it was Naisi himself, or Alny, or
+Ardan, and the two thus remaining were like children playing together,
+whether gathering sticks and dry rushes and long spears of withered
+grass for their fire, or wandering by the white curling waves, or
+sending flat pebbles skipping over the wavelets; and the sound of their
+laughter many a time echoed along the Loch's green waters and up the
+hills, till the does peered and wondered from among the heather, and the
+heron, startled at his fishing, flew upwards croaking, with flapping
+wings. Happy were those days for Deirdr�, and with utter sadness she
+looked back to them afterwards, when the doom foretold had fallen upon
+her. Happy sped the days, till once in the gray of the dawn, while
+Deirdr� was resting in their green refuge with Naisi, she cried out in
+her sleep and waked, telling him, weeping, that she had heard the voice
+of the bird of doom in her dreams.
+
+The voice she heard was indeed the voice of their doom; yet it was a
+cheerful voice, full of friendly gladness; the voice of Fergus, son of
+Roeg, former King of Emain, and now come to Loch Etive as messenger of
+Concobar, Fergus came up from the sea-beach towards the answering shout
+of the sons of Usnac, and glad greetings passed among them at the door
+of their refuge. Fergus looked long in admiration at the blue eyes and
+golden locks, the clear skin and gentle breast of Deirdr�, nor
+wondered, as he looked, that Naisi had dared fate to possess her. Then
+Fergus told the story of his coming; how they had discovered the flight
+of the sons of Usnac from Emain, and how terrible was the black anger of
+Concobar; what passionate fire had gleamed in his eyes as he tossed the
+golden locks back from his shoulders and grasped the haft of his spear,
+and pledged himself to be avenged on Naisi and all his kin, swearing
+that he would have Deirdr� back again.
+
+Thus Fergus told the tale, laughingly, as at a danger that was past, a
+storm-cloud that had lost its arrows of white hail and was no longer
+fearful. For, he said, Concobar had forgotten his anger, had promised a
+truce to the sons of Usnac, and most of all to Naisi, and had bidden
+them return as his guests to Emain of Maca, where Deirdr� should dwell
+happy with her beloved. The comrades of Fergus by this time had tied
+their boat and come up from the shore, and the sons of Usnac were ready
+to depart. Yet Deirdr�'s heart misgave her as she thought of the days
+among those purple hills and granite rocks, by the long green water of
+the Loch, and her clear-seeing soul spoke words of doom for them all:
+words soon to be fulfilled. Amongst the comrades of Fergus were certain
+of the adherents of Concobar, treacherous as he; for he had no thought
+of pardoning the sons of Usnac, nor any intent but to draw Deirdr� back
+within his reach; the image of her bright eyes and the redness of her
+lips, and her soft breast and shining hair was ever before him, and his
+heart gnawed within him for longing and the bitterness of desire.
+
+Therefore he had designed this embassy; and Fergus, believing all things
+and trusting all things, had gladly undertaken to be the messenger of
+forgiveness; fated, instead, to be the instrument of betrayal. So they
+turned their faces homewards towards Emain, Deirdr� full of desponding,
+as one whose day of grace is past. They set sail again through the long
+Sound of Jura, with the islands now on their right hand and the gray
+hills of Cantyre on their left. So they passed Jura, and later Islay,
+and came at last under the cliffs of Rathlin and the white Antrim
+headlands. Deirdr�'s heart never lightened, nor did laughter play about
+her lips or in her eyes through all the time of her journey, but sadness
+lay ever upon her, like the heavy darkness of a winter's night, when a
+storm is gathering out of the West. But Fergus made merry, rejoicing at
+the reconciling; bidden to a treacherous banquet by the partisans of
+Concobar, his heart never misgave him, but giving the charge of Deirdr�
+and the sons of Usnac to his sons, he went to the banquet, delaying long
+in carousing and singing, while Deirdr� and the three brothers were
+carried southwards to Emain. There the treachery plotted against them
+was carried out, as they sat in the banquet-hall; for Concobar's men
+brought against them the power of cowardly flames, setting fire to the
+hall, and slaying the sons of Usnac as they hurried forth from under the
+burning roof.
+
+One of the sons of Fergus shamefully betrayed them, bought by the gold
+and promises of Concobar, but the other bravely fell, fighting back to
+back with one of the sons of Usnac, when they fell overpowered by the
+warriors of Concobar. Thus was the doom of Deirdr� consummated, her
+lover treacherously done to death, and she herself condemned to bear the
+hated caress of Concobar, thinking ever of those other lips, in the days
+of her joy among the northern hills. This is the lament of Deirdr� for
+Usnac's sons:
+
+     The lions of the hill are gone,
+     And I am left alone, alone;
+     Dig the grave both wide and deep,
+     For I am sick and fain would sleep!
+
+     The falcons of the wood are flown,
+     And I am left alone, alone;
+     Dig the grave both deep and wide,
+     And let us slumber side by side.
+
+     Lay their spears and bucklers bright
+     By the warriors' sides aright;
+     Many a day the three before me
+     On their linked bucklers bore me.
+
+     Dig the grave both wide and deep,
+     Sick I am and fain would sleep.
+     Dig the grave both deep and wide,
+     And let us slumber side by side.
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+CUCULAIN THE HERO.
+
+B.C. 50--A.D. 50.
+
+The treacherous death of Naisi and his brothers Ardan and Alny, and her
+own bereavement and misery, were not the end of the doom pronounced at
+her birth for Deirdr�, but rather the beginning. Yet the burden of the
+evils that followed fell on Concobar and his lands and his warriors.
+
+For Fergus, son of Roeg, former king over Emain, who had stayed behind
+his charges feasting and banqueting, came presently to Emain, fearing
+nothing and thinking no evil, but still warm with the reconciliation
+that he had accomplished; and, coming to Emain of Maca, found the sons
+of Usnac dead, with the sods still soft on their graves, and his own son
+also dead, Deirdr� in the hands of Concobar, and the plighted word of
+Fergus and his generous pledge of safety most traitorously and basely
+broken; broken by Concobar, whom he himself had guarded and set upon
+the throne.
+
+Fergus changed from gladness to fierce wrath, and his countenance was
+altered with anger, as he uttered his bitter indignation against
+Concobar to the warriors and heroes of Emain and the men of Ulad. The
+warriors were parted in two by his words, swaying to the right and to
+the left, as tall wheat sways before one who passes through it. For some
+of them sided with Fergus, saying that he had done great wrong to put
+Concobar on the throne, and that even now he should cast him down again,
+for the baseness and treachery of his deed; but others took Concobar's
+part, saying that the first betraying was Naisi's, who stole away
+Deirdr�,--the hostage, as it were, of evil doom, so that he drew the
+doom upon himself. They further said that Concobar was chief and ruler
+among them, the strong and masterful leader, able to uphold their cause
+amongst men. So indeed it befell, for the sedition of Fergus and his
+fight to avenge his wrong upon Concobar failed, so that he fled defeated
+to Meave, Queen of Connacht, at her stronghold amid the lakes whence
+issues forth the Shannon.
+
+[Illustration: Honeycomb, Giant's Causeway.]
+
+Meave, whose power and genius overtopped her lord Ailill, received the
+exiled king gladly, and put many honors upon him, holding him as the
+pillar of her army, with the two thousand men of the Ulaid who came
+with him;--those who had fought for him against the party of Concobar.
+At Cruacan, on the hillside, with the lakes of the Great River all
+around them, with the sun setting red behind the Curlew hills, with
+green meadows and beech-woods to gladden them, Meave and Ailill kept
+their court, and thence they sent many forays against Emain of Maca and
+Concobar, with Fergus the fallen king ever raging in the van, and, for
+the wrong that was done him, working measureless wrong on his own
+kingdom and the kingdom of his fathers.
+
+After many a foray had gone forth against Ulad, crossing the level
+plains, it befell that Meave and Ailill her lord disputed between them
+as to which had the greatest wealth; nor would either yield until their
+most precious possessions had been brought and matched the one against
+the other. Their jewels of gold, wonderfully wrought, and set with
+emeralds and beryls and red carbuncles, were brought forth, their
+crescents for the brow, with hammered tracery upon them, their necklets
+and torques, like twisted ribbons of gold, their bracelets and arm-rings
+set with gold, their gems of silver and all their adornments, cloaks of
+scarlet and blue and purple, were all brought, and no advantage in the
+one was found over the other. Their battle-steeds also were brought,
+their horses for chariots; and likewise their herds of lowing wealth,
+their sheep with soft fleeces. When the cattle were driven up before
+them, it was found that among the herds of Ailill was one bull,
+matchless, with white horns shining and polished; and equal to this bull
+was none among the herds of the queen. She would not admit her lord's
+advantage, but sent forthwith to seek where another bull like the bull
+of Ailill might be found, and tidings were brought to her of the brown
+bull of Cuailgne,--of Cuailgne named after a chief of the Sons of Milid,
+fallen ages ago in the pursuit of the De Danaans, when the De Danaans
+retreated before the Sons of Milid from the southern headland of Slieve
+Mish to the ford at green Tailten by the Boyne, and thence further
+northwards to where Cuailgne of the Sons of Milid was killed. At that
+same place had grown up a dwelling with a fortress, and there was the
+brown bull that Meave heard the report of. She sent, therefore, and her
+embassy bore orders to Dair�, the owner of the bull, asking that the
+bull might be sent to her for a year, and offering fifty heifers in
+payment. Dair� received her messengers well, and willingly consented to
+her request; but the messengers of Meave from feasting fell to
+drinking, from drinking to boasting; one of them declaring that it was a
+small thing that Dair� had granted the request, since they themselves
+would have compelled him, even unwillingly, and would have driven off
+the brown bull by force. The taunt stung Dair�, after his hospitality,
+and in wrath he sent them forth empty-handed, and so they came
+slighted to Meave.
+
+The queen, conceiving her honor impeached, would by no means suffer the
+matter so to rest, but stirred up wrath and dissension, till the armies
+of Connacht with their allies set forth to sack and burn in Ulad, and at
+all hazards to bring the brown bull. Fergus and the men who fought by
+his side went with them, and marching thus eastwards they came, after
+three days march through fair lands and fertile, to the river Dee--the
+frontier of Ulad, and the scene of many well-fought fights.
+
+The army of Ulad was not yet ready to meet them, but one champion with
+his band confronted them at the ford. That champion was Cuculain, whose
+true name was Setanta, son of Sualtam, chief at Dundelga, and of Dectira
+the sister of Concobar. Cuculain was accounted the greatest and most
+skillful warrior of his time, and bards for ages after told how he kept
+the ford. For by the laws of honor, amongst them, the host from Connacht
+could not pass the ford so long as Cuculain held the ford and offered
+single combat to the champions. They must take up his challenge one by
+one; and while he stood there challenging, the host could not pass.
+
+Many of their champions fell there by the ford, so that queen Meave's
+heart chafed within her, and her army was hot to do battle, but still
+Cuculain kept the ford. Last of the western champions came forth
+Ferdiad, taught in the famous northern school of arms, a dear friend and
+companion of Cuculain, who now must meet him to slay or be slain. This
+is the story of their combat, as the traditions tell it:
+
+When they ceased fighting on the first day, they cast their weapons away
+from them into the hands of their charioteers. Each of them approached
+the other forthwith, and each put his hand round the other's neck, and
+gave him three kisses. Their horses were in the same paddock that night,
+and their charioteers at the same fire; and their charioteers spread
+beds of green rushes for them, with wounded men's pillows to them. The
+men of healing came to heal and solace them, applying herbs that should
+assuage to every cut or gash upon their bodies, and to all their
+wounds. Of every healing herb that was laid on the hurts of Cuculain, he
+sent an equal share to Ferdiad, sending it westward over the ford, so
+that men might not say that through the healing virtue of the herbs he
+was able to overcome him. And of all food and invigorating drink that
+was set before Ferdiad, he sent an equal portion northwards over the
+ford to Cuculain, for those that prepared food for him were more than
+those who made ready food for Cuculain. Thus that night they rested.
+
+They fought with spears on the next day, and so great was the strength
+of each, so dire their skill in combat, that both were grievously
+wounded, for all the protection of their shields. The men of healing art
+could do little for them beyond the staunching of their blood, that it
+might not flow from their wounds, laying herbs upon their red wounds.
+
+On the third day they arose early in the morning and came forward to the
+place of combat. Cuculain saw that the face of Ferdiad was dark as a
+black cloud, and thus addressed him: "Thy face is darkened, Ferdiad, and
+thine eye has lost its fire, nor are the form and features thine!" And
+Ferdiad answered, "O, Cuculain, it is not from fear or dread that my
+face is changed, for I am ready to meet all champions in the fight."
+Cuculain reproached him, wondering that, for the persuasions of Meave,
+Ferdiad was willing thus to fight against his friend, coming to spoil
+his land. But Ferdiad replied that fate compelled him, since every man
+is constrained to come unto the sod where shall be his last
+resting-place. That day the heroes fought with swords, but such was the
+skill of both that neither could break down the other's guard.
+
+In the dusk they cast away their weapons, ceasing from the fight; and
+though the meeting of the two had been full of vigor and friendship in
+the morning, yet was their parting at night mournful and full of sorrow.
+That night their horses were not in the same enclosure, nor did their
+charioteers rest at the same fire.
+
+Then Ferdiad arose early in the morning and went forth to the place of
+contest, knowing well that that day would decide whether he should fall
+or Cuculain; knowing that the sun would set on one of them dead that
+night. Cuculain, seeing him come forth, spoke thus to his charioteer: "I
+see the might and skill of Ferdiad, coming forth to the combat. If it be
+I that shall begin to yield to-day, do thou stir my valor, uttering
+reproaches and words of condemnation against me, so that my wrath shall
+grow upon me, enkindling me again for the battle." And the charioteer
+assented and promised.
+
+Great was the deed that was performed that day at the ford by the two
+heroes, the two warriors, the two champions of western lands, the two
+gift-bestowing hands of the northwest of the world, the two beloved
+pillars of the valor of the Gael, the two keys of the bravery of the
+Gael, brought to fight from afar through the schemes of Meave the queen.
+
+They began to shoot with their missiles from the dawn of the day, from
+early morning till noon. And when midday came the ire of the men waxed
+more furious, and they drew nearer together. Then Cuculain sprang from
+the river-bank against the boss of the shield of Ferdiad, son of Daman,
+to strike at his head over the rim of the shield from above. But Ferdiad
+gave the shield so strong a turn with his left arm that he cast Cuculain
+from him like a bird. Cuculain sprang again upon him, to strike him from
+above. But the son of Daman so struck the shield with his left knee that
+he cast Cuculain from him like a child.
+
+Then the charioteer of Cuculain spoke to chide him: "Woe for thee, whom
+the warrior thus casts aside as an evil mother casts away her offspring.
+He throws thee as foam is thrown by the river. He grinds thee as a mill
+would grind fresh grain. He pierces thee as the ax of the woodman
+cleaves the oak. He binds thee as the woodbine binds the tree. He darts
+on thee as the hawk darts on finches, so that henceforth thou hast no
+claim or name or fame for valor, until thy life's end, thou
+phantom sprite!"
+
+Then Cuculain sprang up fleet as the wind and swift as the swallow,
+fierce as a dragon, strong as a lion, advancing against Ferdiad through
+clouds of dust, and forcing himself upon his shield, to strike at him
+from above. Yet even then Ferdiad shook him off, driving him backwards
+into the ford.
+
+Then Cuculain's countenance was changed, and his heart swelled and grew
+great within him till he towered demoniac and gigantic, rising like one
+of the Fomor upon Ferdiad. So fierce was the fight they now fought that
+their heads met above and their feet below and their arms in the midst,
+past the rims of the shields. So fierce was the fight they fought that
+they cleft the shields to their centers. So fierce was the fight they
+fought that their spears were shivered from socket to haft. So fierce
+was the fight they fought that the demons of the air screamed along the
+rims of the shields, and from the hilts of their swords and from the
+hafts of their spears. So fierce was the fight they fought that they
+cast the river out of its bed, so that not a drop of water lay there
+unless from the fierceness of the champion heroes hewing each other in
+the midst of the ford. So fierce was the fight they fought that the
+horses of the Gael fled away in fright, breaking their chains and their
+yokes, and the women and youths and camp-followers broke from the camp,
+flying forth southwards and westwards.
+
+They were fighting with the edges of their swords, and Ferdiad, finding
+a break in the guard of Cuculain, gave him a stroke of the
+straight-edged sword, burying it in his body until the blood fell into
+his girdle, until the ford was red with the blood of the hero's body.
+Then Cuculain thrust an unerring spear over the rim of the shield, and
+through the breast of Ferdiad's armor, so that the point of the spear
+pierced his heart and showed through his body.
+
+"That is enough, now," said Ferdiad: "I fall for that!" Then Cuculain
+ran towards him, and clasped his two arms about him, and bore him with
+his arms and armor across the ford northwards. Cuculain laid Ferdiad
+down there, bowing over his body in faintness and weakness. But the
+charioteer cried to him, "Rise up, Cuculain, for the host is coming upon
+us, and it is not single combat they will give thee, since Ferdiad, son
+of Daman, son of Dair�, has fallen before thee!"
+
+"Friend," Cuculain made answer, "what avails it for me to rise after him
+that has fallen by me?"
+
+Thus did Cuculain keep the ford, still known as the ford of Ferdiad,
+Ath-Fhirdia on the Dee, in the midst of the green plain of Louth. And
+while he fought at the ford of Ferdiad the army of Ulad assembled, and
+coming southwards over the hills before Emain, turned back the host of
+Meave the queen and pursued them. The army of Meave fled westwards and
+southwards towards Connacht, passing the Yellow Ford of Athboy and the
+Hill of Ward, the place of sacrifice, where the fires on the Day of
+Spirits summoned the priests and Druids to the offering. Fleeing still
+westwards from the Yellow Ford, they passed between the lakes of Owel
+and Ennel, with the men of Ulad still hot in their rear. Thus came
+pursued and pursuers to Gairec, close by Athlone--the Ford of Luan--and
+the wooded shore of the great Lough Ree. There was fought a battle
+hardly less fatal to victors than to vanquished, for though the hosts of
+Meave were routed, yet Concobar's men could not continue the pursuit.
+Thus Meave escaped and Fergus with her, and came to their great fort on
+the green hillside of Cruacan amid the headwaters of the Shannon.
+
+The victory of Concobar's men was like a defeat. There was not food that
+pleased him, nor did sleep come to him by flight, so that the Ulad
+wondered, and Catbad the right-wonderful Druid, himself a warrior who
+had taught Concobar and reared him, went to Concobar to learn the secret
+of his trouble. Therefore Catbad asked of Concobar what wound had
+wounded him, what obstinate sickness had come upon him, making him faint
+and pale, day after day.
+
+"Great reason have I for it," answered Concobar, "for the four great
+provinces of Erin have come against me, bringing with them their bards
+and singers, that their ravages and devastations might be recorded, and
+they have burned our fortresses and dwellings, and Ailill and Meave have
+gained a battle against me. Therefore I would be avenged upon Meave
+the queen."
+
+"Thou hast already avenged it sternly, O Red-handed Concobar," Catbad
+made answer, "by winning the battle over the four provinces of Erin."
+
+"That is no battle," Concobar answered, "where a strong king falls not
+by hard fighting and by fury. That an army should escape from a goodly
+battle! Unless Ailill should fall, and Meave, by me in this encounter
+with valorous hosts, I tell you that my heart will break, O Catbad!"
+
+"This is my counsel for thee," replied Catbad, "to stay for the present.
+For the winds are rough, and the roads are foul, and the streams and the
+rivers are in flood, and the hands of the warriors are busy making forts
+and strongholds among strangers. So wait till the summer days come upon
+us, till every grassy sod is a pillow, till our horses are full of
+spirit and our colts are strong, till our men are whole of their wounds
+and hurts, till the nights are short to watch and to ward and to guard
+in the land of enemies and in the territories of strangers. Spring is
+not the time for an invasion. But meanwhile let tidings be sent to thy
+friends in absence, in the islands and throughout the northern seas."
+
+Therefore messengers were sent with the tidings, and the friends in
+absence of Concobar were summoned. They set forth with ships from the
+islands of the northern seas, and came forward with the tide to the
+Cantyre headland. The green surges of the tremendous sea rose about
+them, and a mighty storm rose against them. Such was the strength of the
+storm that the fleet was parted in three. A third of them, with the son
+of Amargin, came under the cliffs of Fair Head, to the Bay of Murbolg,
+where huge columns tower upward on the face of the cliff, high as the
+nests of the eagles; cliffs ruddy and mighty, frowning tremendous across
+the channel to Cantyre and Islay and far-away Jura. A third of the ships
+came to the safer harbor of Larne, where bands of white seam the cliff's
+redness, where the great headland is thrust forth northwards, sheltering
+the bay from the eastern waves. A third of the fleet came to the strand
+beside Dundelga, hard by the great hill of earth where was reared the
+stronghold of Cuculain.
+
+At that same time came Concobar with a thousand men to the fort of
+Cuculain, and feasting was prepared for him at the House of Delga. Nor
+was Concobar long there till he saw the bent spars of sails and the
+full-crewed ships, and the scarlet pavilions, and the many-colored
+banners, and the blue bright lances, and the weapons of war. Then
+Concobar called on the chiefs that were about him, for the territory
+and land he had bestowed upon them, and for the jewels he had given
+them, to stand firm and faithful. For he knew not whether the ships were
+ships of his foes, of the Galian of Lagin, now called Leinster, or the
+Munstermen of great Muma, or the men of Olnemact, called afterwards
+Connacht; for the estuary of the river and the strand were full of men.
+
+Then Senca son of Ailill answered for the chieftains: "I give my word,
+indeed, that Erin holds not a soldier who lays his hand in the hand of a
+chieftain that is not known to me. If they be the men of Erin thy foes
+that are there, I shall ask a truce of battle from them; but if they be
+thy friends and allies, thou shalt the more rejoice."
+
+Then Senca son of Ailill went forward to the place where the ships were,
+and learned that they were the friends in absence of Concobar, come to
+be his allies against the four provinces of Erin. Then Concobar spoke
+to Cuculain:
+
+"Well, O Cuculain, let the horses of the plain of Murtemni be caught by
+thee; let four-wheeled chariots be harnessed for them; bring with them
+hither my friends from the ships in chariots and four-wheeled cars,
+that feasting and enjoyment may be prepared for them."
+
+[Illustration: Gray Man's Path, Fair Head.]
+
+They were brought in chariots to the feast, and carvers carved for them,
+and serving-men carried the cups of mead. Songs were sung to them, and
+they tarried there till sunrise on the morrow. Then Concobar spoke again
+to Cuculain:
+
+"It is well, Cuculain. Let messengers now be sent through the lands of
+the Ulaid to the warriors of the Ulaid, that the foreign friends may be
+ministered to by them also, while I make my camp here by the river. And
+bid the thrice fifty veteran champions come hither to me, that I may
+have their aid and counsel in battle."
+
+But Cuculain would not. Therefore Concobar went himself to summon the
+veterans. When they asked the cause of his coming, Concobar answered,
+"Have you not heard how the four provinces of Erin came against us,
+bringing with them their bards and singers, that their ravages and
+devastations might the better be recorded, and burning and plundering
+our fortresses and dwellings? Therefore I would make an expedition of
+hostility against them, and with your guidance and counsel would I make
+the expedition."
+
+"Let our old steeds be caught by thee," they answered, "and let our old
+chariots be yoked by thee, so that we may go on this journey and
+expedition with thee." Then their old chargers were caught, and their
+old chariots yoked, so that they too came to the camp at the Water
+of Luachan.
+
+This was told to the four provinces. The Three Waves of Erin thundered
+in the night; the Wave of Clidna at Glandore in the South; the Wave of
+Rudraige along the bent-carpeted sandhills of Dundrum, under the
+Mountains of Mourne; and the Wave of Tuag Inbir, at the bar of northern
+Bann. For these are the Three Waves of Fate in Erin. Then the four
+provinces hosted their men. The son of Lucta, the north Munster king,
+assembled his tribes at the Hill of Luchra, between the Shannon mouth
+and the Summit of Prospects. Ailill and Meave hosted the men of the west
+at Cruacan. Find, son of Ros, king over the Galian of Leinster, gathered
+his army at Dinn-Rig by the Barrow. Cairpr� Nia Fer assembled his host
+about him at Tara, in the valley of the Boyne.
+
+This was the proposal of Eocu, son of Lucta, king of north Munster by
+the Shannon: That everything should have its payment, and that
+reparation should be made to Concobar for the invasion; that a fort
+should be paid for every fort, for every house a house, for every cow a
+cow, for every bull a bull; that the great brown bull should be sent
+back, that the breadth of the face of the bull in red gold should be
+given to Concobar, and that there should be no more hostility among the
+men of Erin.
+
+This was reported to Meave, but the queen answered, "A false hand was
+his who gave this counsel. For so long as there shall be among us one
+who can hold a sword, who can wear the shield-strap about his neck, that
+proposal shall not go to him."
+
+"Thy counsel is not mine," replied Ailill, "for not greater shall be our
+part of that payment than the part of all the four provinces who went on
+that raid for the bull." Therefore Meave consented, and messengers were
+sent, and came to Tara by the Boyne, where were Find, son of Ros, king
+of Leinster, and his brother Cairpr� Nia Fer, king of Tara. Thence they
+sent messengers to treat with Concobar, but Concobar rejected the terms.
+"I give my word, indeed," answered Concobar, "that I will not take terms
+from you till my tent has been pitched in every province of Erin."
+
+"Good, O Concobar," they replied; "where wilt thou now make thy
+encampment to-night?"
+
+"In the Headland of the Kings, by the clear bright Boyne," answered
+Concobar, for Concobar concealed not ever from his enemy the place in
+which he would take station or camp, that they might not say that it was
+fear or dread that caused him not to say it. Concobar, therefore,
+marched toward the Headland of the Kings, across the Boyne to the
+southward, and facing the northern bank where are the pyramids of the
+Dagda Mor and the De Danaans. But the southern armies were there
+already, so Concobar halted before the river. Then were their positions
+fixed and their pavilions pitched, their huts and their tents were made.
+Their fires were kindled, cooking and food and drink were prepared;
+baths of clean bathing were made by them, and their hair was
+smooth-combed; their bodies were minutely cleansed, supper and food were
+eaten by them; and tunes and merry songs and eulogies were sung by them.
+
+Then Concobar sent men to reconnoitre the southern and western armies.
+Two went and returned not, falling indeed into the hands of the foe. It
+seemed long to Concobar that the two were gone. He spoke, therefore, to
+his kinsman: "Good indeed, Irgalac, son of Macclac, son of Congal, son
+of Rudraige, sayest thou who is proper to go to estimate and to
+reconnoitre the army?"
+
+"Who should go there," answered Irgalac, "but Iriel good at arms,
+great-kneed son of Conall Cernac. He is a Conall for havoc, a Cuculain
+for dexterity of feats. He is a Catbad, a right-wonderful Druid, for
+intelligence and counsel, he is a Senca son of Ailill for peace and for
+good speech, he is a Celtcair son of Utecar for valor, he is a Concobar
+son of Factna Fatac for kingliness and wide-eyed-ness, for giving of
+treasures and of wealth and of riches. Who but Iriel should go?"
+
+Therefore Iriel went forward: standing on the pyramid of the Dagda, he
+began measuring and reconnoitering the army. His spirit, or his mind, or
+his thoughts did not fret over them at all. He brought their description
+with him to the place in which Concobar was.
+
+"How, my life, Iriel?" said Concobar. "I give my word truly," said
+Iriel; "it seems to me that there is not ford on river, or stone on
+hill, nor highway nor road in the territory of Breg or Mide, that is not
+full of their horse-teams and of their servants. It seems to me that
+their apparel and their gear and their garments are the blaze of a royal
+house from the plain."
+
+"Good, O Ulaid," said Concobar, "what is your advice to us for the
+battle?" "Our advice is," said the Ulaid, "to wait till our strong men
+and our leaders and our commanders and our supporters of battle come."
+Not long was their waiting, and not great was their stay, till they saw
+three chariot-warriors approaching them, and a band of twelve hundred
+along with each rider of them. It is these that were there--three of the
+goodly men of science of the Ulaid, to wit, Catbad the right-wonderful
+Druid, and Aiterni the Importunate, and Amargin the man of science and
+art. After them came other valiant leaders with troops. Then Concobar
+arose and took his gear of battle and of conflict and of combat about
+him, saying, "Why should we not give battle?"
+
+A third of the army of the Ulaid rose with him, too. And they went over
+the river Boyne. And the other armies arose against them as they were
+crossing the river. And each of them took to hacking and to cutting down
+the other, destroying and wounding till there was no similitude of the
+Ulaid at that point of time, unless it were a huge sturdy oakwood in
+the middle of the plain, and a great army were to go close to it, and
+the slender and the small of the wood were cut off, but its huge sturdy
+oaks were left behind. Thus their young were cut off, and none but their
+champions and their battle-warriors and their good heroes of valor
+were left.
+
+The shield of Concobar was struck so that it moaned, and the three Waves
+of Erin, the Wave of Clidna, the Wave of Rudraige, and the Wave of Tuag
+Inbir echoed that moan, and all the shields of the Ulaid resounded,
+every one of them that was on their shoulders and in their chariots. As
+the Ulaid were retreating, fresh troops came up for them under Conall
+Cernac. A tree of shelter and a wreath of laurel and a hand above them
+was Conall to them. So their flight was stayed. Then Conall drew the
+sharp long sword out of its sheath of war and played the music of his
+sword on the armies. The ring of Conall's sword was heard through the
+battalions on both sides. And when they heard the music of Conall's
+sword their hearts quaked and their eyes fluttered and their faces
+whitened, and each of them withdrew back into his place of battle and of
+combat. But so fierce was the onset of the southern armies that the
+fight of the Ulaid against them was as a breast against a great flood,
+or an arrow against the rock, or the striking of a head against cliffs.
+Yet through the great might of Cuculain the Ulaid prevailed, and Cairpr�
+the King of Tara was slain. After the battle, Concobar spoke thus:
+"There were three sons of Ros Ruad the king--Find in Alend, Ailill in
+Cruac, Cairpr� in Tara; together they performed their deeds of valor,
+the three brothers in every strife; together they used to give their
+battle. They were three pillars of gold about their hills, abiding in
+strength; great is their loss since the third son has fallen."
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+FIND AND OSSIN.
+
+A.D. 200--290.
+
+Seventeen centuries ago, two hundred summers after the death of Cuculain
+the hero, came the great and wonderful time of Find the son of Cumal,
+Ossin the son of Find, and Find's grandson Oscur. It was a period of
+growth and efflorescence; the spirit and imaginative powers of the
+people burst forth with the freshness of the prime. The life of the land
+was more united, coming to a national consciousness.
+
+The five kingdoms were now clearly defined, with Meath, in the central
+plain, predominant over the others, and in a certain sense ruling all
+Ireland from the Hill of Tara. The code of honor was fixed; justice had
+taken well-defined forms; social life had ripened to genial urbanity.
+The warriors were gathered together into something like a regular army,
+a power rivaling the kings. Of this army, Find, son of Cumal, was the
+most renowned leader--a warrior and a poet, who embodied in himself the
+very genius of the time, its fresh naturalness, its ripeness, its
+imagination. No better symbol of the spirit of his age could be found
+than Find's own "Ode to Spring":
+
+"May-day! delightful time! How beautiful the color! The blackbirds sing
+their full lay. Would that Laigay were here! The cuckoos call in
+constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble brightness of the
+season. On the margin of the leafy pools the summer swallows skim the
+stream. Swift horses seek the pools. The heath spreads out its long
+hair. The white, gentle cotton-grass grows. The sea is lulled to rest.
+Flowers cover the earth."
+
+Find's large and imaginative personality is well drawn in one of the
+poems of his golden-tongued son Ossin, though much of the beauty of
+Ossin's form is lost in the change of tongue:
+
+     "Six thousand gallant men of war
+     We sought the rath o'er Badamar;
+     To the king's palace home we bent
+     Our way. His bidden guests we went.
+         'Twas Clocar Fair,
+         And Find was there,
+         The Fians from the hills around
+         Had gathered to the race-course ground.
+     From valley deep and wooded glen
+     Fair Munster sent its mighty men;
+     And Fiaca, Owen's son, the king,
+     Was there the contest witnessing.
+     'Twas gallant sport! With what delight
+     Leaped thousand pulses at the sight.
+         How all hearts bound
+         As to the ground
+     First are brought forth the Fian steeds,
+     Then those from Luimnea's sunny meads.
+     Three heats on Mac Mareda's green
+     They run; and foremost still is seen
+     Dill Mac Decreca's coal-black steed.
+     At Crag-Lochgur he takes the lead.
+
+     "His is the day--and, lo! the king
+     The coal-black steed soliciting
+     From Dill the Druid!--'Take for it
+     A hundred beeves; for it is fit
+     The black horse should be mine to pay
+     Find for his deeds of many a day.'
+
+     "Then spoke the Druid, answering
+     His grandson, Fiaca the king:
+     'Take my blessing; take the steed,
+     For the hero's fitting meed:
+     Give it for thy honor's sake.'
+     And to Find the King thus spake
+
+     "'Hero, take the swift black steed,
+     Of thy valor fitting meed;
+     And my car, in battle-raid
+     Gazed on by the foe with fear;
+     And a seemly steed for thy charioteer.
+     Chieftain, be this good sword thine,
+     Purchased with a hundred kine,
+     In thine hand be it our aid.
+
+     Take this spear, whose point the breath
+     Of venomed words has armed with death,
+     And the silver-orb�d shield,
+     Sunbeam of the battlefield!
+     And take with thee
+     My grayhounds three,
+     Slender and tall,
+     Bright-spotted all,
+     Take them with thee, chieftain bold,
+     With their chainlets light
+     Of the silver white,
+     And their neck-rings of the tawny gold.
+     Slight not thou our offering,
+     Son of Cumal, mighty king!"
+
+     "Uprose Find our chieftain bold,
+     Stood before the Fian ranks,
+     To the king spoke gracious thanks,
+     Took the gifts the monarch gave;
+     Then each to each these champions brave
+     Glorious sight to see and tell,
+     Spoke their soldier-like farewell!
+
+     "The way before us Find led then;
+     We followed him, six thousand men,
+     From out the Fair, six thousand brave,
+     To Caicer's house of Cloon-na-Dave.
+
+     "Three nights, three days, did all of us
+     Keep joyous feast in Caicer's house;
+     Fifty rings of the yellow gold
+     To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain told;
+     As many cows and horses gave
+     To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain brave.
+     Well did Find of Innisfail
+     Pay the price of his food and ale.
+
+     "Find rode o'er the Luacra, joyous man,
+     Till he reached the strand at Barriman;
+     At the lake where the foam on the billow's top
+     Leaps white, did Find and the Fians stop.
+
+     "'Twas then that our chieftain rode and ran
+     Along the strand of Barriman;
+     Trying the speed
+     Of his swift black steed,--
+     Who now but Find was a happy man?
+
+     "Myself and Cailt� at each side,
+     In wantonness of youthful pride,
+     Would ride with him where he might ride.
+     Fast and furious rode he,
+     Urging his steed to far Tralee.
+     On from Tralee by Lerg duv-glass,
+     And o'er Fraegmoy, o'er Finnass,
+     O'er Moydeo, o'er Monaken,
+     On to Shan-iber, o'er Shan-glen,
+     Till the clear stream of Flesk we win,
+     And reach the pillar of Crofinn;
+     O'er Sru-Muny, o'er Moneket,
+     And where the fisher spreads his net
+     To snare the salmon of Lemain,
+     And thence to where our coursers' feet
+     Wake the glad echoes of Loch Leane;
+     And thus fled he,
+     Nor slow were we;
+     Through rough and smooth our course we strain.
+
+     "Long and swift our stride,--more fleet
+     Than the deer of the mountain our coursers' feet!
+     Away to Flesk by Carnwood dun;
+     And past Mac Scalv�'s Mangerton,
+     Till Find reached Barnec Hill at last;
+     There rested he, and then we passed
+     Up the high hill before him, and:
+     'Is there no hunting hut at hand?'
+     He thus addressed us; 'The daylight
+     Is gone, and shelter for the night
+     We lack.' He scarce had ended, when
+     Gazing adown the rocky glen,
+     On the left hand, just opposite,
+     He saw a house with its fire lit;
+     'That house till now I've never seen,
+     Though many a time and oft I've been
+     In this wild glen. Come, look at it!'
+
+     "Yes, there are things that our poor wit
+     Knows little of,' said Cailt�; 'thus
+     This may be some miraculous
+     Hostel we see, whose generous blaze
+     Thy hospitality repays,
+     Large-handed son of Cumal!'--So
+     On to the house all three we go...."
+
+Of their entry to the mysterious house, of the ogre and the witch they
+found there, of the horrors that gathered on all sides, when
+
+     "From iron benches on the right
+     Nine headless bodies rose to sight,
+     And on the left, from grim repose,
+     Nine heads that had no bodies rose,..."
+
+Ossin likewise tells, and how, overcome, they fell at last into a
+deathlike trance and stupor, till the sunlight woke them lying on the
+heathery hillside, the house utterly vanished away.
+
+The scenes of all the happenings in the story are well known: the rath
+of Badamar is near Caher on the Suir, in the midst of the Golden Vale, a
+plain of wonderful richness and beauty, walled in by the red precipices
+of the Galtee Mountains, and the Knock-Mealdown Hills. From the rath of
+Badamar Find could watch the western mountains reddening and glowing in
+front of the dawn, as the sun-rays shot level over the burnished plain.
+Clocar is thirty miles westward over the Golden Vale, near where Croom
+now stands; and here were run the races; here Find gained the gift of
+the coal-black steed. It is some forty miles still westwards to the
+Strand of Tralee; the last half of the way among hills carpeted with
+heather; and the Strand itself, with the tide out, leaves a splendid
+level of white sand as far as the eye can reach, tempting Find to try
+his famous courser. The race carried them southwards some fifteen miles
+to the beautiful waters of Lough Leane, with its overhanging wooded
+hills, the Lake of Killarney, southward of which rises the huge red
+mass of Mangerton, in the midst of a country everywhere rich in beauty.
+The Hill of Barnec is close by, but the site of the magic dwelling, who
+can tell? Perhaps Find; or Cailt�, or golden-tongued Ossin himself.
+
+There was abundant fighting in those days, for well within memory was
+the time of Conn of the Five-score Fights, against whom Cumal had warred
+because Conn lord of Connacht had raised Crimtan of the Yellow Hair to
+the kingship of Leinster. Cumal fought at the Rath that bears his name,
+now softened to Rathcool, twelve miles inward from the sea at Dublin,
+with the hills rising up from the plain to the south of the Rath. Cumal
+fought and fell, slain by Goll Mac Morna, and enmity long endured
+between Find and Goll who slew his sire. But like valiant men they were
+reconciled, and when Goll in his turn died, Find made a stirring poem on
+Goll's mighty deeds.
+
+Another fateful fight for Find was the battle of Kinvarra, among the
+southern rocks of Galway Bay; for though he broke through the host of
+his foeman Uinc�, that chieftain himself escaped, and, riding swiftly
+with a score of men, came to Find's own dwelling at Druim Dean on the
+Red Hills of Leinster, and burned the dwelling, leaving it a smoldering
+ruin. Find pursuing, overtook them, slaying them at the ford called to
+this day Ath-uinc�, the ford of Uinc�. Returning homewards, Find found
+his house desolate, and the song he sang still holds the memory of
+his sorrow.
+
+Two poems he made, on the Plain of Swans and on Roirend in Offaly, full
+of vivid pictures and legends; and one of romantic tragedy, telling how
+the two daughters of King Tuatal Tectmar were treacherously slain,
+through the malice of the Leinster king. But of romances and songs of
+fair women in the days of Find, the best is the Poem of Gael, who
+composed it to win a princess for his bride.
+
+Of fair Cred� of the Yellow Hair it was said that there was scarce a gem
+in all Erin that she had not got as a love-token, but that she would
+give her heart to none. Cred� had vowed that she would marry the man who
+made the best verses on her home, a richly-adorned dwelling in the
+south, under the twin cones of the Paps, and within sight of Lough Leane
+and Killarney. Cael took up the challenge, and invoking the Genius that
+dwelt in the sacred pyramid of Brugh on the Boyne he made these verses,
+and came to recite them to yellow-haired Cred�:
+
+     "It would be happy for me to be in her home,
+     Among her soft and downy couches,
+     Should Cred� deign to hear me;
+     Happy for me would be my journey.
+         A bowl she has, whence berry-juice flows,
+     With which she colors her eyebrows black;
+     She has clear vessels of fermenting ale;
+     Cups she has, and beautiful goblets.
+         The color of her house is white like lime;
+     Within it are couches and green rushes;
+     Within it are silks and blue mantles;
+     Within it are red gold and crystal cups.
+         Of its sunny chamber the corner stones
+     Are all of silver and yellow gold,
+     Its roof in stripes of faultless order
+     Of wings of brown and crimson red.
+         Two doorposts of green I see,
+     Nor is the door devoid of beauty;
+     Of carved silver,--long has it been renowned,--
+     Is the lintel that is over the door.
+         Cred�'s chair is on your right hand,
+     The pleasantest of the pleasant it is;
+     All over a blaze of Alpine gold,
+     At the foot of her beautiful couch...
+         The household which is in her house
+     To the happiest fate has been destined;
+     Grey and glossy are their garments;
+     Twisted and fair is their flowing hair.
+         Wounded men would sink in sleep,
+     Though ever so heavily teeming with blood,
+     With the warbling of the fairy birds
+     From the eaves of her sunny summer-room.
+         If I am blessed with the lady's grace,
+     Fair Cred� for whom the cuckoo sings,
+     In songs of praise shall ever live,
+     If she but repay me for my gift....
+         There is a vat of royal bronze,
+     Whence flows the pleasant; nice of malt;
+     An apple-tree stands over the vat,
+     With abundance of weighty fruit.
+         When Cred�'s goblet is filled
+     With the ale of the noble vat,
+     There drop down into the cup forthwith
+     Four apples at the same time.
+         The four attendants that have been named,
+     Arise and go to the distributing,
+     They present to four of the guests around
+     A drink to each man and an apple.
+         She who possesses all these things,
+     With the strand and the stream that flow by them,
+     Cred� of the three-pointed hill,
+     Is a spear-cast beyond the women of Erin.
+       Here is a poem for her,--no mean gift.
+     It is not a hasty, rash composition;
+     To Cred� now it is here presented:
+     May my journey be brightness to her!"
+
+[Illustration: Colleen Bawn Caves, Klllarney.]
+
+Tradition says that the heart of the yellow-haired beauty was utterly
+softened and won, so that she delayed not to make Cael master of the
+dwelling he so well celebrated; master, perhaps, of all the jewels of
+Erin that her suitors had given her. Yet their young love was not
+destined to meet the storms and frosts of the years; for Cael the
+gallant fell in battle, his melodious lips for ever stilled. Thus have
+these two become immortal in song.
+
+We have seen Cailt� with Ossin following Find in his wild ride through
+the mountains of Killarney, and to Cailt� is attributed the saying that
+echoes down the ages: "There are things that our poor wit knows nothing
+off!" Cailt� was a great lover of the supernatural, yet there was in him
+also a vein of sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of
+Clidna--"Clidna the fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was
+tragically drowned at Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith
+still moans upon the bar, in hours of fate for the people of Erin.
+
+In a gayer vein is the poem of Fergus the Eloquent, who sang the legend
+of Tipra Seangarmna, the Fountain of the Feale River, which flows
+westward to the sea from the mountains north of Killarney. The river
+rises among precipices, gloomy caverns and ravines, and passes through
+vales full of mysterious echoes amid mist-shrouded hills. There, as
+Fergus sings, were Ossin and his following hunting, when certain ominous
+fair women lured them to a cave,--women who were but insubstantial
+wraiths,--to hold them captive till the seasons ran full circle, summer
+giving place again to winter and spring. But Ossin, being himself of
+more than human wisdom, found a way to trick the spirits; for daily he
+cut chips from his spear and sent them floating down the spring, till
+Find at last saw them, and knew the tokens as Ossin's, and, coming,
+delivered his son from durance among ghosts.
+
+The great romantic theme of the time binds the name of Find, son of
+Cumal, with that of Cormac, son of Art, and grandson of Conn of the
+Five-score Battles. This Cormac was himself a notable man of wisdom, and
+here are some of the Precepts he taught to Cairbr�, his son:
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbr� asked him, "what is good for a
+king?"
+
+"This is plain," answered Cormac. "It is good for him to have patience
+and not to dispute, self-government without anger, affability without
+haughtiness, diligent attention to history, strict observance of
+covenants and agreements, justice tempered by mercy in the execution of
+the laws. It is good for him to make fertile land, to invite ships, to
+import jewels of price from across the sea, to purchase and distribute
+raiment, to keep vigorous swordsmen who may protect his territory, to
+make war beyond his territory, to attend to the sick, to discipline his
+soldiers. Let him enforce fear, let him perfect peace, let him give mead
+and wine, let him pronounce just judgments of light, let him speak all
+truth, for it is through the truth of a king that God gives
+favorable seasons."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbr� again asked him, "what is good
+for the welfare of a country?"
+
+"This is plain," answered Cormac. "Frequent assemblies of wise and good
+men to investigate its affairs, to abolish every evil and retain every
+wholesome institution, to attend to the precepts of the seniors; let
+every assembly be convened according to the law, let the law be in the
+hands of the noblest, let the chieftains be upright and unwilling to
+oppress the poor."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," again asked Cairbr�, "what are duties of
+a prince in the banqueting-house?"
+
+"A prince on the Day of Spirits should light his lamps and welcome his
+guests with clapping of hands, offering comfortable seats; the
+cup-bearers should be active in distributing meat and drink. Let there
+be moderation of music, short stories, a welcoming countenance, a
+greeting for the learned, pleasant conversation. These are the duties
+of a prince and the arrangement of a banqueting-house."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, for what qualifications is a king elected
+over countries and tribes of people?"
+
+"From the goodness of his shape and family, from his experience and
+wisdom, from his prudence and magnanimity, from his eloquence and
+bravery in battle, and from the number of his friends."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what was thy deportment when a youth?"
+
+"I was cheerful at the banquet of the House of Mead, I was fierce in
+battle, but vigilant and careful. I was kind to friends, a physician to
+the sick, merciful to the weak, stern toward the headstrong. Though
+possessed of knowledge, I loved silence. Though strong, I was not
+overbearing. Though young, I mocked not the old. Though valiant, I was
+not vain. When I spoke of one absent I praised and blamed him not, for
+by conduct like this are we known to be courteous and refined."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what is good for me?"
+
+"If thou attend to my command, thou wilt not scorn the old though thou
+art young, nor the poor though thou art well clad, nor the lame though
+thou art swift, nor the blind though thou seest, nor the weak though
+thou art strong, nor the ignorant though thou art wise. Be not slothful,
+be not passionate, be not greedy, be not idle, be not jealous; for he
+who is so is hateful to God and man."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, I would know how to hold myself with the
+wise and the foolish, with friends and strangers, with old and young."
+
+"Be not too knowing or simple, too proud or inactive, too humble or
+haughty, talkative or too silent, timid or too severe. For if thou art
+too knowing, thou wilt be mocked at and abused; if too simple, thou wilt
+be deceived; if proud, thou wilt be shunned; if too humble, thou wilt
+suffer; if talkative, thou wilt be thought foolish; if too severe, men
+will speak ill of thee; if timid, thy rights will suffer."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, how shall I discern the characters of
+women?"
+
+"I know them, but I cannot describe them. Their counsel is foolish, they
+are forgetful of love, most headstrong in their desires, fond of folly,
+prone to enter rashly into engagements, given to swearing, proud to be
+asked in marriage, tenacious of enmity, cheerless at the banquet,
+rejectors of reconciliation, prone to strife, of much garrulity. Until
+evil be good, until hell be heaven, until the sun hide his light, until
+the stars of heaven fall, women will remain as we have declared. Woe to
+him, my son, who desires or serves a bad woman, woe to him who has a
+bad wife."
+
+Was there some thought of his daughter Grania in Cormac's mind, behind
+these keen-edged; words?--of Grania, beloved of Diarmuid? When the
+winters of the years were already white on Find, son of Cumal, when
+Ossin his son had a son of his own, Oscur the valiant, the two old men,
+Cormac the king and Find leader of the warriors, bethought them to make
+a match between Find and Grania, one of the famous beauties of the olden
+time. A banquet was set in the great House of Mead, and Find and his men
+were there, Diarmuid son of Duibn� being also there, best beloved among
+Find's warriors. There was a custom, much in honor among the chieftains,
+that a princess should send her goblet to the guests, offering it to
+each with gentle courtesy. This grace fell to the lady Grania, whose
+whole heart rose up against her grey-bearded lover, and was indeed set
+on Diarmuid the son of Duibn�. Grania compounded a dreamy draught to
+mix with the mead, so that all the chieftains and warriors, with Cormac
+and Find himself, even while praising the drink, fell straightway
+a-nodding, and were soon in silent sleep, all except Ossin and Diarmuid,
+whom Grania had bidden not to drink.
+
+Then Grania, her voice all tremulous with tears, told to Ossin the fate
+that awaited her, looking at him, but speaking for Diarmuid; bewailing
+bitterly the misery of fair youth in the arms of withered eld, and at
+last turning and openly begging Diarmuid to save her from her fate. To
+carry away a king's daughter, betrothed to the leader of the warriors,
+was a perilous thing, and Diarmuid's heart stood still at the thought of
+it; yet Grania's tears prevailed, and they two fled forth that night to
+the hills and forests. Dire and ruinous was the wrath of Cormac and of
+Find when they awoke and found that these two were fled; and whatever
+might was in the king's hand, whatever power in the hosts of Find, was
+straightway turned against them in pursuit. Yet the two fled as the deer
+might fly, visiting with their loves every wood and valley in Erin, till
+the memory of them lingers throughout all the hills. Finally, after a
+year's joyful and fearsome fleeing, the Fian warriors everywhere aiding
+them for love of Diarmuid, swift death came upon Diarmuid, and Grania
+was left desolate.
+
+But Angus the Ever-Young, guardian Genius of the pyramid-shrine of Brugh
+by the Boyne, De Danaan dweller in the secret house, Angus of the
+Immortals received the spirit of Diarmuid, opening for him the ways of
+the hidden world.
+
+But enmity grew between Find with his warriors and Cormac the king, till
+at last a battle was fought where Find's men fell, and Cairbr�, the
+well-instructed son of Cormac also fell. Thus passed away the ruling
+spirits of that age, the flowering time of the genius of Erin.
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.
+
+A.D. 410-493.
+
+The valor of Fergus and Cuculain, the rich imaginative life of Find and
+Ossin, were the flower of heroic centuries. Strong men had fought for
+generations before Concobar reigned at Emain of Maca. Poets had sung
+their deeds of valor, and the loves of fair women, and the magical
+beauty of the world, through hardly changing ages. The heroes of fame
+were but the best fruit in the garden of the nation's life. So ripe was
+that life, more than two thousand years ago, that it is hard to say what
+they did not know, of the things which make for amenity and comity. The
+colors of the picture are everywhere rich, yet perfectly harmonized.
+
+The earliest forms of Irish writing seem to have come from the Baltic
+runes, and these, in their turn, from an old Greek script of twenty-five
+hundred years ago. The runes spread as far as the Orkneys, and there
+they were well within the horizon of Ireland's knowledge. Nothing would
+be more natural than the keeping of written records in Erin for three
+or four hundred years before Cuculain's birth, nineteen hundred
+years ago.
+
+The arts of life were very perfect; the gold-work of that time is
+unsurpassed--has never been surpassed. At a far earlier time there were
+beautifully moulded and decorated gold-bronze spears, that show what
+richness of feeling and imagination, what just taste and fine skill were
+there. All our knowledge goes to show that the suitor of Cred� has drawn
+a true picture of her house and the generous social life belonging to
+it. We know, too, that the great dining-hall of Tara has been faithfully
+celebrated by the bards; the picture of the king in his scarlet cloak is
+representative of the whole epoch.
+
+The story of Cred� also shows the freedom and honor accorded to women,
+as does the queenship of Meave, with the record of her separate riches.
+The tragedies of Deirdr� and Grania would never have been remembered,
+had not the freedom and high regard of women been universal. Such
+decorative skill as is shown in the metal-work and pottery that have
+come down to us must have borne fruit in every realm of social life, in
+embroideries, tapestries, well-designed and beautifully adorned homes.
+Music is everywhere spoken of in the old traditions, and the skill of
+the poets we can judge for ourselves.
+
+In all that concerns the natural man, therefore, a very high perfection
+had been reached. A frame of life had grown habitual, which brought out
+the finest vigor and strength and beauty. Romantic love added its riches
+to valor, and dignity was given by the ever-present memory of the heroic
+past, merging on the horizon with the divine dawn of the world. Manhood
+and womanhood had come to perfect flower. The crown rested on the brow
+of the nation's life.
+
+When the life of the natural man is perfected, the time comes to strike
+the note of the immortal, to open the door of our real and enduring
+destiny. Sensual success, the ideal of unregenerate man, was perfectly
+realized in Concobar and ten thousand like him. The destiny of
+triumphant individual life, the strong man victorious over nature and
+other men, was fulfilled. Individual prowess, individual accomplishment,
+could go no further.
+
+Nor should we overlook the dark shadows of the picture. Glory is to the
+victor, but woe to the vanquished. The continual warfare between tribe
+and tribe, between chief and chief, which made every valley a home of
+warriors dominated by a rath-fortress, bore abundant fruits of evil.
+Death in battle need not be reckoned, or may be counted as pure gain;
+but the fate of the wounded, maimed and miserable, the destitution of
+women and children left behind, the worse fate of the captives, sold as
+they were into exile and slavery,--all these must be included in
+the total.
+
+Nor are these material losses the worst. The great evil of the epoch of
+tribal war is its reaction on the human spirit. The continual struggle
+of ambition draws forth egotism, the desire to dominate for mere
+domination, the sense of separation and antagonism between man and man,
+tribe and tribe, province and province.
+
+But our real human life begins only when these evil tendencies are
+abated; when we learn to watch the life of others as if it were our
+own,--as being indeed a part of our own life,--and in every act and
+motion of our minds do only that which shall be to the best advantage of
+both ourselves and our neighbor. For only thus, only by the incessant
+practice of this in imagination and act, can the door of our wider and
+more humane consciousness be opened.
+
+[Illustration: Ruins on Scattery Island.]
+
+Nor is this all. There are in us vast unexplored tracts of power and
+wisdom; tracts not properly belonging to our personal and material
+selves, but rather to the impersonal and universal consciousness which
+touches us from within, and which we call divine. Our personal fate is
+closed by death; but we have a larger destiny which death does not
+touch; a destiny enduring and immortal. The door to this larger destiny
+can only be opened after we have laid down the weapons of egotism; after
+we have become veritably humane. There must be a death to militant
+self-assertion, a new birth to wide and universal purposes, before this
+larger life can be understood and known.
+
+With all the valor and rich life of the days of Cuculain and Ossin, the
+destructive instinct of antagonism was very deeply rooted in all hearts;
+it did endless harm to the larger interests of the land, and laid
+Ireland open to attack from without. Because the genius of the race was
+strong and highly developed, the harm went all the deeper; even now,
+after centuries, it is not wholly gone.
+
+The message of the humane and the divine, taught among the Galilean
+hills and on the shores of Gennesaret, was after four centuries brought
+to Ireland--a word of new life to the warriors and chieftains,
+enkindling and transforming their heroic world. Britain had received
+the message before, for Britain was a part of the dominion of Rome,
+which already had its imperial converts. Roman life and culture and
+knowledge of the Latin tongue had spread throughout the island up to the
+northern barrier between the Forth and Clyde. Beyond this was a
+wilderness of warring tribes.
+
+Where the Clyde comes forth from the plain to the long estuary of the
+sea, the Messenger of the Tidings was born. His father, Calpurn, was a
+Roman patrician; from this his son, whose personal name was Succat, was
+surnamed Patricius, a title raised by his greatness into a personal
+name. His letters give us a vivid picture of his captivity, and the
+stress of life which gradually aroused in him the inspiration of the
+humane and divine ripened later into a full knowledge of his apostolate.
+
+"I Patricius, a sinner," he writes, "and most unlearned of believers,
+looked down upon by many, had for my father the deacon Calpurn, son of
+the elder Potitus, of a place called Bannova in Tabernia, near to which
+was his country home. There I was taken captive, when not quite sixteen.
+I knew not the Eternal. Being led into captivity with thousands of
+others, I was brought to Ireland,--a fate well deserved. For we had
+turned from the Eternal, nor kept the laws of the Eternal. Nor had we
+heeded the teachers who urged us to seek safety. Therefore the Eternal,
+justly wroth, scattered us among unbelievers, to the uttermost parts of
+the earth; here, where my poor worth is now seen among strangers, where
+the Eternal liberated the power hid in my unenkindled heart, that even
+though late I should recognize my error, and turn with all my heart to
+the Eternal....
+
+"I have long had it in mind to write, but until now have hesitated; for
+I feared blame, because I had not studied law and the sacred
+writings,--as have others who have never changed their language, but
+gone on to perfection in it; but my speech is translated into another
+language, and the roughness of my writing shows how little I have been
+taught. As the Sage says, 'Show by thy speech thy wisdom and knowledge
+and learning.' But what profits this excuse? since all can see how in my
+old age I struggle after what I should have learned as a boy. For then
+my sinfulness hindered me. I was but a beardless boy when I was taken
+captive, not knowing what to do and what to avoid; therefore I am
+ashamed to show my ignorance now? because I never learned to express
+great matters succinctly and well;--great matters like the moving of the
+soul and mind by the Divine Breath.... Nor, indeed, was I worthy that
+the Master should so greatly favor me, after all my hard labor and heavy
+toil, and the years of captivity amongst this people,--that the Master
+should show me such graciousness as I never knew nor hoped for till I
+came to Ireland.
+
+"But daily herding cattle here, and aspiring many times a day, the fear
+of the Eternal grew daily in me. A divine dread and aspiration grew in
+me, so that I often prayed a hundred times a day, and as many times in
+the night. I often remained in the woods and on the hills, rising to
+pray while it was yet dark, in snow or frost or rain; yet I took no
+harm. The Breath of the Divine burned within me, so that nothing
+remained in me unenkindled.
+
+"One night, while I was sleeping, I heard a voice saying to me, 'You
+have fasted well, and soon you shall see your home and your native
+land.' Soon after, I heard the voice again, saying, 'The ship is ready
+for you.' But the ship was not near, but two hundred miles off, in a
+district I had never visited, and where I knew no one. Therefore I fled,
+leaving the master I had served for six years, and found the ship by
+divine guidance, going without fear....
+
+"We reached the land after three days' sail; then for twenty-eight days
+we wandered through a wilderness.... Once more, after years of exile, I
+was at home again with my kindred, among the Britons. All welcomed me
+like a son, earnestly begging me that, after the great dangers I had
+passed through, I would never again leave my home.
+
+"While I was at home, in a vision of the night I saw one who seemed to
+come from Ireland, bringing innumerable letters. He gave me one of the
+letters, in which I read, 'The voices of the Irish ...;' and while I
+read, it seemed to me that I heard the cry of the dwellers by the forest
+of Foclut, by the Western Ocean, calling with one voice to me, 'Come and
+dwell with us!' My heart was so moved that I awoke, and I give thanks to
+my God who after many years has given to them according to
+their petition.
+
+"On another night, whether within me or without me I know not, God
+knows, One prayed with very wonderful words that I could not comprehend,
+till at last He said, 'It is He who gave His soul for you, that speaks!'
+I awoke for joy. And once in a vision I saw Him praying within me, as it
+were; I saw myself, as it were, within myself; and I heard Him praying
+urgently and strongly over the inner man; I being meanwhile astonished,
+and wondering who thus prayed within me, till at the end He declared
+that I should be an overseer for Him....
+
+"I had not believed in the living Divine from childhood, but had
+remained in the realm of death until hunger and nakedness and daily
+slavery in Ireland--for I came there as a captive--had so afflicted me
+that I almost broke down. Yet these things brought good, for through
+that daily suffering I was so changed that I work and toil now for the
+well-being of others, I who formerly took no care even for myself....
+
+"Therefore I thank Him who kept me faithful in the day of trial, that I
+live to offer myself daily as a living offering to Him who saves and
+guards me. Well may I say, 'Master, what am I, what is my calling, that
+such grace and divine help are given to me--that I am every day raised
+to greater power among these unbelievers, while I everywhere praise thy
+name? Whatever comes to me, whether happiness or misery, whether good or
+evil fortune, I hold it all the same; giving Thee equal thanks for it,
+because Thou hast unveiled for me the One, sure and unchanging, in whom
+I may for ever believe. So that in these latter days, even though I am
+ignorant, I may dare to undertake so righteous a work, and so wonderful,
+that makes me like those who, according to His promise, should carry His
+message to all people before the end of the world.
+
+"It were long in whole or even in part to tell of my labours, or how the
+all-powerful One many times set me free from bondage, and from twelve
+perils wherein my life was in danger, and from nameless pitfalls. It
+were ill to try the reader too far, when I have within me the Author
+himself, who knows all things even before they happen, as He knows me,
+His poor disciple. The voice that so often guides me is divine; and
+thence it is that wisdom has come to me, who had no wisdom, knowing not
+Him, nor the number of my days: thence comes my knowledge and heart's
+joy in His great and healing gift, for the sake of which I willingly
+left my home and kindred, though they offered me many gifts with tears
+and sorrow.
+
+"Many of the older people also disapproved, but through divine help I
+would not give way. It was no grace of mine, but the divine power in me
+that stood out against all, so that I came to bear the Message here
+among the people of Ireland, suffering the scorn of those who believed
+not, and bearing derision and many persecutions, and even chains. Nay, I
+even lost my patrician rank for the good of others. But if I be worthy
+to do something for the Divine, I am ready with all my heart to yield
+service, even to the death, since it has been permitted that through me
+many might be reborn to the divine, and that others might be appointed
+to teach them....
+
+"The people of Ireland, who formerly had only their idols and pagan
+ritual, not knowing the Master, have now become His children. The sons
+of the Scoti and their kings' daughters are now become sons of the
+Master and handmaidens of the Anointed. And one nobly born lady among
+them, a beautiful woman whom I baptized myself, came soon after to tell
+me that she was divinely admonished to live in maidenhood, drawing
+nearer to Him. Six days later she entered the grade that all the
+handmaidens of the Anointed desire, though their fathers and mothers
+would hinder them, reproaching and afflicting them; nevertheless, they
+grow in number, so that I know not how many they are, besides widows and
+continent women, who suffer most from those who hold them in bondage.
+Yet they stand firm, and God grants grace to many of them worthily to
+follow Him.
+
+"Therefore I might even leave them, to go among the Britons,--for
+willingly would I see my own kindred and my native land again, or even
+go as far as Gaul to visit my brothers, and see the faces of my Master's
+holy men. But I am bound in the Spirit, and would be unfaithful if I
+went. Nor would I willingly risk the fruit of all my work. Yet it is not
+I who decide, but the Master, who bid me come hither, to spend my whole
+life in serving, as indeed I think I shall....
+
+"Therefore I should ever thank Him who was so tolerant of my ignorance
+and sluggishness, so many times; treating me not in anger but as a
+fellow-worker, though I was slow to learn the work set for me by the
+Spirit. He pitied me amongst many thousands, for he saw that I was very
+willing, but did net know how to offer my testimony. For they all
+opposed my mission, and talked behind my back, saying, 'He wishes to
+risk his life among enemies who know nothing of the Master'; not
+speaking maliciously, but opposing me because I was so ignorant. Nor did
+I myself at once perceive the power that was in me....
+
+"Thus simply, brothers and fellow-workers for the Master, who with me
+have believed, I have told you how it happened that I preached and still
+preach, to strengthen and confirm you in aspiration, hoping that we may
+all rise yet higher. Let that be my reward, as 'the wise son is the
+glory of his father.' You know, and the Master knows, how from my youth
+I have lived among you, in aspiration and truth and with single heart;
+that I have declared the faith to those among whom I dwell, and still
+declare it. The Master knows that I have deceived no man in anything,
+nor ever shall, for His sake and His people's. Nor shall I ever arouse
+uncharity in them or in any, lest His name should be spoken evil of....
+
+"I have striven in my poor way to help my brothers and the handmaidens
+of the Anointed, and the holy women who often volunteered to give me
+presents and to lay their jewels on my altar; but these I always gave
+back to them, even though they were hurt by it; and I have so lived my
+life, for the hope of the life eternal, that none may find the least
+cause of offence in my ministry; that my least act might not tarnish my
+good name, so that unbelievers might speak evil of me....
+
+"If I have asked of any as much as the value of a shoe, tell me. I will
+repay it and more. I rather spent my own wealth on you and among you,
+wherever I went, for your sakes, through many dangers, to regions where
+no believer had ever come to baptize, to ordain teachers or to confirm
+the flock. With the divine help I very willingly and lovingly paid all.
+Sometimes I gave presents to the kings,--in giving presents to their
+sons who convoyed us, to guard us against being taken captive. Once they
+sought to kill me, but my time was not yet come. But they took away all
+we possessed, and kept me bound, till the Master liberated me on the
+fourteenth day, and all our goods were given back, because of the Master
+and of those who convoyed us. You yourselves know what gifts I gave to
+those who administer the law through the districts I visited oftenest. I
+think I spent not less than the fine of fifteen men among them, in order
+that I might come among you. Nor do I regret it, nor count it enough,
+for I still spend, and shall ever spend, happy if the Master allows me
+to spend my soul for you....For I know certainly that poverty and plain
+living are better for me than riches and luxury. The Anointed our Master
+was poor for us. I am poorer still, for I could not have wealth if I
+wished it. Nor do I now judge myself, for I look forward daily to a
+violent death, or to be taken captive and sold into slavery, or some
+like end. But I fear none of these ...but let me not lose the flock I
+feed for Him, here in the uttermost parts of the earth....
+
+"I am willing for His sake to shed my blood, to go without burial, even
+though my body be torn by dogs and wild beasts and the fowls of the air;
+for I know that thus I should through my body enrich my soul. And I know
+that in that day we shall arise in the brightness of the sun, in the
+glory of the Anointed Master, as sons of the divine and co-heirs with
+Him, made in His likeness. For the sun we see rises daily by divine
+ordinance; but it is not ordained to rise for ever, nor shall its light
+last for ever. The sun of this world shall fade, with those that worship
+it; but we bow to the spiritual Sun, the Anointed, that shall never
+perish, nor they who do His will, but shall endure for ever like the
+Anointed himself, who reigns with the Father and the Divine Spirit now
+and ever....
+
+"This I beg, that no believer or servant of the Master, who reads or
+receives this writing, which I, Patricius, a sinner and very unlearned,
+wrote in Ireland,--I beg that none may say that whatever is good in it
+was dictated by my ignorance, but rather that it came from Him. This is
+my Confession, before I die."
+
+That is the story of the most vital event in the life of Ireland, in the
+words of the man who was chiefly instrumental in bringing it about.
+Though an unskilled writer, as he says himself he has nevertheless
+succeeded in breathing into every part of his epistle the power and
+greatness of his soul, the sense and vivid reality of the divine breath
+which stirred in him and transformed him, the spiritual power, humane
+and universal, which enkindled him from within; these are the words of a
+man who had first-hand knowledge of the things of our deeper life; not a
+mere servant of tradition, living on the words and convictions of other
+men. He has drawn in large and universal outline the death to
+egotism--reached in his case through hunger, nakedness and slavery--and
+the new birth from above, the divine Soul enkindling the inner man, and
+wakening him to new powers and a knowledge of his genius and
+immortal destiny.
+
+Not less vivid is the sense he conveyed, of the world in which he moved;
+the feeling of his dignity as a Roman Patrician, having a share of the
+greatness of empire; the sense of a dividing-line between the Christian
+realms of Rome and the outer barbarians yet in darkness. Yet the picture
+he gives of these outer realms is as certainly true. There are the rival
+chieftains, each with his own tribe and his own fort, and bearing the
+title of king. They are perpetually striving among themselves, so that
+from the province of one he must move to the province of another with an
+escort, led by the king's son, who receives gifts in return for this
+protection. This is the world of Concobar and Cuculain; of Find and
+Ossin, as they themselves have painted it.
+
+The world of Find and Ossin, of Cael and Cred�, was marked by a certain
+urbanity and freedom, a large-mindedness and imaginative power. We are
+therefore prepared to expect that the Messenger of the new life would be
+received with openness of mind, and allowed to deliver his message
+without any very violent opposition. It was the meeting of unarmed moral
+power and armed valor; and the victory of the apostle was a victory of
+spiritual force, of character, of large-heartedness; the man himself was
+the embodiment of his message, and through his forceful genius his
+message was effective. He visibly represented the New Way; the way of
+the humane and the divine, transforming the destructive instinct of
+self-assertion. He visibly represented the divine and the immortal in
+us, the new birth from above.
+
+Yet there were tragedies in his apostolate. In another letter a very
+vivid and pathetic account is given of one of these. Coroticus, a
+chieftain of Britain, and therefore nominally a Christian and a citizen
+of Rome, had sent marauding bands to Ireland to capture slaves. Some of
+the new converts were taken captive by these slave-hunters, an outrage
+which drew forth an indignant protest from the great Messenger:
+
+"My neophytes in their white robes, the baptismal chrism still wet and
+glistening on their foreheads, were taken captive with the sword by
+these murderers. The next day I sent letters begging them to liberate
+the baptized captives, but they answered my prayer with mocking
+laughter. I know not which I should mourn for more,--those who were
+slain, those who were taken prisoner, or those who in this were Satan's
+instruments, since these must suffer everlasting punishment in
+perdition."
+
+He appeals indignantly to the fellow-Christians of Coroticus in Britain:
+"I pray you, all that are righteous and humble, to hold no converse
+with those who do these things. Eat not, drink not with them, accept no
+gifts from them, until they have repented and made atonement, setting
+free these newly-baptized handmaidens of Christ, for whom He died....
+They seem to think we are not children of one Father!"
+
+The work and mission of this great man grow daily better known. The
+scenes of each marked event are certainly identified. His early slavery,
+his time of probation, was spent in Antrim, on the hillside of Slieve
+Mish, and in the woods that then covered its flanks and valleys.
+Wandering there with his flocks to the hill-top, he looked down over the
+green darkness of the woods, with the fertile open country stretching
+park-like beyond, to the coast eight miles away. From his lonely summit
+he could gaze over the silvery grayness of the sea, and trace on the
+distant horizon the headlands of his dear native land. The exile's heart
+must have ached to look at them, as he thought of his hunger and
+nakedness and toil. There in deep pity came home to him the fate of the
+weak ones of the earth, the vanquished, the afflicted, the losers in the
+race. Compassion showed him the better way, the way of sympathy and
+union, instead of contest and dominion. A firm and fixed purpose grew up
+within him to make the appeal of gentleness to the chiefs and rulers, in
+the name of Him who was all sympathy for the weak. Thus the inspiration
+of the Message awakened his soul to its immortal powers.
+
+Later, returning with the clear purpose of his message formed, he began
+his great work not far from his first place of captivity. His strong
+personality led him always to the presence of the chiefs and warriors,
+and he talked to them freely as an equal, gradually giving them an
+insight into his own vision of life, of the kinship between soul and
+soul, of our immortal power and inheritance. He appealed always to his
+own inner knowledge of things divine, to the light and power unveiled
+within himself; and the commanding genius in his words lit a like fire
+in the hearts of those who heard, awakening an enthusiasm for the New
+Way. He had a constant sense of his divine mission:
+
+"Was it without divine promise, or in the body only, that I came to
+Ireland? Who led me? Who took captive my soul, that I should no more see
+friends and kindred? Whence came my inspiration of pity for the race
+that had enslaved me?"
+
+The memory of his first victories is perpetuated in the name,
+Downpatrick,--that is: the Dwelling of Patrick.--where Dicu son of
+Tricem, chief of the district, gave him a tract of land to build a place
+of meeting and prayer for his disciples; while the church was being
+built, the chief offered his barn as a meeting-place, an incident
+commemorated in the name of Saul, on a hill above the town,--a name
+softened from Sabal, "a barn." This first victory was won among the
+rounded hills south of the Quoyle River, where it widens toward
+Strangford Lough; from the hill-top of Saul there is a wide prospect
+over the reed-covered flats with the river winding among them, the hills
+with their oak-woods in the bends of the river, and the widening lough
+with its innumerable islands, its sand-flats lit up with red under the
+dawn. The sun sets among the mountains of Mourne, flushing from behind
+the purple profile of the hills, and sending golden arrows over the rich
+fertility of the plain. The year 432 is the probable date of this first
+conversion.
+
+The strong genius of the Messenger carried him after a few months to the
+center of power in the land, to Tara with its fortresses, its
+earthworks, its great banquet-halls and granaries and well-adorned
+dwellings of chief and king. A huge oval earthwork defended the king's
+house; northward of this was the splendid House of Mead,--the
+banquet-hall, with lesser fortresses beyond it. Southward of the central
+dwelling and its defence was the new ringed fort of Laogaire the king,
+son of the more famous king Nial of the Hostages. At this circular fort,
+Rath-Laogaire, on Easter day, Saint Patrick met the king face to face,
+and delivered to him the message of the New Way, telling him of the
+unveiling of the Divine within himself, of the voice that had bidden him
+come, of the large soul of immortal pity that breathed in the teachings
+among the hills of Galilee, of the new life there begun for the world.
+Tradition says that the coming of the Messenger had been foretold by the
+Druids, and the great work he should accomplish; the wise men of the
+West catching the inner brightness of the Light, as the Eastern Magians
+had caught it more than four centuries before. The fruits of that day's
+teaching in the plain of Tara, in the assembly of Laogaire the king,
+were to be gathered through long centuries to come.
+
+In the year 444, the work of the teacher had so thriven that he was able
+to build a larger church on a hill above the Callan River, in the
+undulating country south of Lough Neagh. This hill, called in the old
+days the Hill of the Willows, was only two miles from the famous
+fortress of Emain of Maca. It was a gift from the ruler Dair�, who, like
+so many other chiefs, had felt and acknowledged the Messenger's power.
+Later, the hill came to be called Ard-Maca, the Height of Maca; a name
+now softened into Armagh, ever since esteemed the central stronghold of
+the first Messenger's followers.
+
+The Messenger passed on from chief to chief, from province to province,
+meeting with success everywhere, yet facing grave perils. Later
+histories take him to the kings of Leinster and Munster, and he himself
+tells us that the prayer of the children of Foclut was answered by his
+coming, so that he must have reached the western ocean. It was a
+tremendous victory of moral force, of the divine and immortal working
+through him, that the Messenger was able to move unarmed among the
+warriors of many tribes that were often at war with each other;
+everywhere meeting the chiefs and kings, and meeting them as an equal:
+the unarmed bringer of good tidings confronting the king in the midst of
+his warriors, and winning him to his better vision.
+
+For sixty years the Messenger worked, sowing seed and gathering the
+fruit of his labor; and at last his body was laid at rest close to his
+first church at Saul. Thus one of the great men of the world
+accomplished his task.
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.
+
+A.D. 493-750.
+
+It would be hard to find in the whole history of early Christianity a
+record of greater and more enduring success than the work of St.
+Patrick. None of the Messengers of the New Way, as they were called
+first by St. Luke, unless the phrase is St. Paul's, accomplished
+single-handed so wonderful a work, conquering so large a territory, and
+leaving such enduring monuments of his victory. Amongst the world's
+masters, the son of Calpurn the Decurion deserves a place with
+the greatest.
+
+Not less noteworthy than the wide range of his work was the way in which
+he gained success. He addressed himself always to the chiefs, the kings,
+the men of personal weight and power. And his address was almost
+invariably successful,--a thing that would have been impossible had he
+not been himself a personality of singular force and fire, able to meet
+the great ones of the land as an equal. His manner was that of an
+ambassador, full of tact, knowledge of men and of the world. Nor can we
+find in him--or, indeed, in the whole history of the churches founded by
+him--anything of that bitter zeal and fanaticism which, nearly two
+centuries nearer to apostolic times, marred the work of the Councils
+under Constantius; the fierce animosity between Christian and Christian
+which marked the Arian controversy. The Apostle of Ireland showed far
+more urbanity, far more humane and liberal wisdom, far more gentleness,
+humor and good feeling, in his treatment of the pre-Christian
+institutions and ideals of Ireland than warring Christian sects have
+generally been willing to show to each other.
+
+It was doubtless due to this urbane wisdom that the history of the
+conversion of Ireland is without one story of martyrdom. The change was
+carried out in open-hearted frankness and good-will, the old order
+giving place to the new as gently as spring changes to summer. The most
+marvelous example of St. Patrick's wisdom, and at the same time the most
+wonderful testimony to his personal force, is his action towards the
+existing civil and religious law of the country, commonly known as the
+Brehon Law. Principles had by long usage been wrought into the fabric of
+the Brehon Laws which were in flat contradiction to St. Patrick's
+teaching of the New Way. Instead of fiercely denouncing the whole
+system, he talked with the chief jurists and heralds,--custodians of the
+old system,--and convinced them that changes in their laws would give
+effect to more humane and liberal principles. They admitted the justice
+of his view, and agreed to a meeting between three great chieftains or
+kings, three Brehons or jurists, and three of St. Patrick's converts, to
+revise the whole system of law, substituting the more humane principles,
+which they had already accepted as just and right. These changes were
+made and universally applied; so that, without any violent revolution,
+without strife or bloodshed, the better way became the accepted law. It
+would be hard to find in all history a finer example of wisdom and
+moderation, of the great and worthy way of accomplishing right ends.
+
+We have seen the great Messenger himself founding monasteries, houses of
+religious study, and churches for his converts, on land given to him by
+chieftains who were moved by his character and ideals. We can judge of
+the immediate spread of his teaching if we remember that these churches
+were generally sixty feet long, thus giving room for many worshippers.
+They seem to have been built of stone--almost the first use of that
+material in Ireland since the archaic days. Among the first churches of
+this type were those at Saul, at Donaghpatrick on the Blackwater, and at
+Armagh, with others further from the central region of St. Patrick's
+work. The schools of learning which grew up beside them were universally
+esteemed and protected, and from them came successive generations of men
+and women who worthily carried on the work so wisely begun. The tongues
+first studied were Latin and Irish. We have works of very early periods
+in both, as, for instance, the Latin epistles of St. Patrick himself,
+and the Irish poems of the hardly less eminent Colum Kill. But other
+languages were presently added.
+
+[Illustration: Valley of Glendalough and Ruins of the Seven Churches.]
+
+These schools and churches gradually made their way throughout the whole
+country; some of the oldest of them are still to be seen, as at
+Donaghpatrick, Clonmacnoise and Glendalough. Roofed with stone, they are
+well fitted to resist the waste of time. An intense spiritual and moral
+life inspired the students, a life rich also in purely intellectual and
+artistic force. The ancient churches speak for themselves; the artistic
+spirit of the time is splendidly embodied in the famous Latin
+manuscript of the Gospels, called the Book of Kells, the most beautiful
+specimen of illumination in the world. The wonderful colored initial
+letters reproduce and develop the designs of the old gold work, the
+motives of which came, it would seem, from the Baltic, with the De
+Danaan tribes. We can judge of the quiet and security of the early
+disciples at Kells, the comfort and amenity of their daily life, the
+spirit of comity and good-will, the purity of inspiration of that early
+time, by the artistic truth and beauty of these illuminated pages and
+the perfection with which the work was done. Refined and difficult arts
+are the evidence of refined feeling, abundant moral and spiritual force,
+and a certain material security and ease surrounding the artist. When
+these arts are freely offered in the service of religion, they are
+further evidence of widespread fervor and aspiration, a high and worthy
+ideal of life.
+
+Yet we shall be quite wrong if we imagine an era of peace and security
+following the epoch of the first great Messenger. Nothing is further
+from the truth. The old tribal strife continued for long centuries; the
+instincts which inspired it are, even now, not quite outworn. Chief
+continued to war against chief, province against province, tribe
+against tribe, even among the fervent converts of the first teachers.
+
+Saint Brigid is one of the great figures in the epoch immediately
+succeeding the first coming of the Word. She was the foundress of a
+school of religious teaching for women at Kildare, or Killdara, "The
+Church of the Oak-woods," whose name still records her work. Her work,
+her genius, her power, the immense spiritual influence for good which
+flowed from her, entitle her to be remembered with the women of
+apostolic times, who devoted their whole lives to the service of the
+divine. We have seen the esteem in which women were always held in
+Ireland. St. Brigid and those who followed in her steps gave effect to
+that high estimation, and turned it to a more spiritual quality, so that
+now, as in all past centuries, the ideal of womanly purity is higher in
+Ireland than in any country in the world.
+
+This great soul departed from earthly life in the year 525, a generation
+after the death of the first Messenger. To show how the old order
+continued with the new, we may record the words of the Chronicler for
+the following year: "526: The battle of Eiblinne, by Muirceartac son of
+Erc; the battle of Mag-Ailbe; the battle of Almain; the battle of
+Ceann-eic; the plundering of the Cliacs; and the battle of Eidne against
+the men of Connacht." Three of these battles were fought at no great
+distance from St. Brigid's Convent.
+
+The mediaeval Chronicler quotes the old Annalist for the following year:
+"The king, the son of Erc, returned to the side of the descendants of
+Nial. Blood reached the girdle in each plain. The exterior territories
+were enriched. Seventeen times nine chariots he brought, and long shall
+it be remembered. He bore away the hostages of the Ui-Neill with the
+hostages of the plain of Munster."
+
+Ten years later we find the two sons of this same king, Muirceartac son
+of Erc, by name Fergus and Domnall, fighting under the shadow of
+Knocknarea mountain against Eogan Bel the king of Connacht; the ancient
+Annalist, doubtless contemporary with the events recorded, thus
+commemorated the battle in verse:
+
+"The battle of the Ui-Fiacrac was fought with the fury of edged weapons
+against Bel;
+
+"The kine of the enemy roared with the javelins, the battle was spread
+out at Crinder;
+
+"The River of Shells bore to the great sea the blood of men with their
+flesh;
+
+"They carried many trophies across Eaba, together with the head of
+Eogan Bel."
+
+During this stormy time, which only carried forward the long progress of
+fighting since the days of the prime, a famous school of learning and
+religion had been founded at Moville by Finian, "the tutor of the saints
+of Ireland." The home of his church and school is a very beautiful one,
+with sombre mountains behind rising from oak-woods into shaggy masses of
+heather, the blue waters of Lough Foyle in front, and across the mouth
+of the lough the silver sands and furrowed chalk hills of Antrim,
+blending into green plains. Here the Psalms and the Gospels were taught
+in Latin to pupils who had in no wise given up their love for the old
+poetry and traditions of their motherland. Here Colum studied,
+afterwards called Colum Kill, "Saint Colum of the Churches," and here
+arose a memorable dispute concerning a Latin manuscript of the Psalms.
+The manuscript belonged to Finian, founder of the school, and was
+esteemed one of the treasures of his college. Colum, then a young
+student, ardently longed for a copy, and, remaining in the church after
+service, he daily copied a part of the sacred text. When his work was
+completed, Finian discovered it, and at once claimed the copy of his
+book as also his. The matter was submitted to an umpire, who gave the
+famous decision: "Unto every cow her calf; unto every book its
+copy"--the copy belonged to the owner of the book. This early decision
+of copyright was by no means acceptable to the student Colum. He
+disputed its justice, and the quarrel spread till it resulted in a
+battle. The discredit attaching to the whole episode resulted in the
+banishment of Colum, who sailed away northward and eastward towards the
+isles and fiords of that land which, from the Irish Scoti who civilized
+it, now bears the name of Scotland. Let us recall a few verses written
+by Colum on his departure, in a version which echoes something of the
+original melody and form:
+
+     "We are rounding Moy-n-Olurg, we sweep by its head and
+         We plunge through the Foyle,
+     Whose swans could enchant with their music the dead and
+         Make pleasure of toil....
+     Oh, Erin, were wealth my desire, what a wealth were
+         To gain far from thee,
+     In the land of the stranger, but there even health were
+         A sickness to me!
+     Alas for the voyage, oh high King of Heaven,
+         Enjoined upon me,
+     For that I on the red plain of bloody Cooldrevin
+         Was present to see.
+     How happy the son is of Dima; no sorrow
+         For him is designed,
+     He is having this hour, round his own Kill in Durrow,
+         The wish of his mind.
+     The sound of the wind in the elms, like the strings of
+         A harp being played,
+     The note of the blackbird that claps with the wings of
+         Delight in the glade.
+     With him in Ros-grenca the cattle are lowing
+         At earliest dawn,
+     On the brink of the summer the pigeons are cooing
+         And doves on the lawn...."
+
+In another measure, he again mourns his exile: "Happy to be on Ben Edar,
+before going over the sea; white, white the dashing of the wave against
+its face; the bareness of its shore and its border....
+
+     "How swiftly we travel; there is a grey eye
+       Looks back upon Erin, but it no more
+     Shall see while the stars shall endure in the sky,
+       Her women, her men, or her stainless shore...."
+
+This great-hearted and impetuous exile did not waste his life in useless
+regrets. Calling forth the fire of his genius, and facing the reality of
+life, he set himself to work, spreading the teaching of the New Way
+among the Picts of the north--the same Picts who, in years gone by, had
+raged against the barrier of Hadrian between Forth and Clyde. The year
+of his setting out was 563; the great center of his work was in the
+sacred isle of Iona, off the Ross of Mull. Iona stands in the rush of
+Atlantic surges and fierce western storms, yet it is an island of rare
+beauty amid the tinted mists of summer dawns. Under the year 592, a
+century after Saint Patrick's death, we find this entry in the
+Chronicle: "Colum Kill, son of Feidlimid, Apostle of Scotland, head of
+the piety of the most part of Ireland and Scotland after Patrick, died
+in his own church in Iona in Scotland, after the thirty-fifth year of
+his pilgrimage, on Sunday night, the ninth of June. Seventy-seven years
+was his whole age when he resigned his spirit to heaven." The corrected
+date is 596.
+
+We can see in Colum of the Churches the very spirit of turbulence and
+adventure, the fierce impetuosity and readiness for dispute, which led
+to the contests between the chieftains of Ireland, the wars between
+province and province, often between valley and valley. It is the same
+spiritual energy, working itself out in another way, transmuted by the
+sacred fire into a divine mission. In the same way the strong will of
+Meave, the romantic power of Deirdr� and Grania, transmuted to ideal
+purposes, was the inspiration of Saint Brigid and so many like her, who
+devoted their powers to the religious teaching of women.
+
+We should doubtless fail utterly to understand the riddle of history,
+were we to regret the wild warring of these early times as a mere
+lamentable loss of life, a useless and cruel bloodshed. We are too much
+given to measuring other times and other moods of the soul by our own,
+and many false judgments issue from this error. Peaceful material
+production is our main purpose, and we learn many lessons of the Will
+embodied in the material world when we follow this purpose honestly. But
+before our age could begin, it was necessary for the races to come to
+personal consciousness. This end seems everywhere to have been reached
+by a long epoch of strife, the contending of man against man, of tribe
+against tribe. Thus were brought to full consciousness the instinct of
+personal valor, personal honor and personal readiness to face death.
+
+Only after this high personal consciousness is kindled can a race enter
+the wider path of national life, where vivid and intense individuals
+unite their forces to a common end, reaching a common consciousness, and
+holding their power in common for the purposes of all. After the lessons
+of fighting come the lessons of work. For these lessons of work, for
+the direct touch with the everlasting Will gained in all honest work,
+our own age is to be valued, far more than for the visible and material
+fruits which that work produces.
+
+In like manner the old epoch of war is to be esteemed for the lessons it
+taught of high valor, sacrifice, heroic daring. And to what admirable
+ends these same qualities may tend we can see in a life like that of
+Colum Kill, "head of the piety of the most part of Ireland and Scotland
+after Patrick."
+
+Yet the days of old were grim enough to live in. Let this record of some
+half-century later testify. It is but one year culled from a long red
+rank of years. We give the Chronicler's own words: "645: The sixth year
+of Conall and Ceallac. Mac Laisre, abbot of Bangor, died on May 16.
+Ragallac son of Uatac, King of Connacht, was killed by Maelbrigde son of
+Motlacan, of which was said:
+
+     "Ragallac son of Uatac was pierced on the back of a white
+        steed;
+
+     Muiream has well lamented him; Catal has well avenged him.
+
+     Catal is this day in battle, though bound to peace in the
+        presence of kings;
+
+     Though Catal is without a father, his father is not without
+        vengeance.
+
+     Estimate his terrible revenge from the account of it related:
+
+     He slew six men and fifty; he made sixteen devastations;
+
+     I had my share like another in the revenge of Ragallac,--
+
+     I have the gray beard in my hand, of Maelbrigde son of Motlacan."
+
+These are evidently the very words of one who fought in the battle. Nor
+need this in any way surprise us, for we have far older Chronicles set
+down year by year in unbroken record. The matter is easy to prove. The
+Chronicles of Ulster record eclipses of the sun and moon as early as
+495,--two years after Saint Patrick's death. It was, of course, the
+habit of astronomers to reckon eclipses backwards, and of annalists to
+avail themselves of these reckonings. The Venerable Bede, for example,
+has thus inserted eclipses in his history. The result is that the
+Venerable Bede has the dates several days wrong, while the Chronicles of
+Ulster, where direct observation took the place of faulty reckoning, has
+them right, to the day and hour. It is only in quite modern times that
+we have reached sufficiently accurate knowledge of the moon's movements
+to vindicate the old Ulster Annalists, who began their work not less
+than a hundred and fifty years before the battle we have just recorded.
+
+Nor should we exaggerate the condition of the time, thinking of it as
+altogether given over to ravaging and devastation. Even though there
+were two or three expeditions and battles every year, these would only
+affect a small part of the whole country. Over all the rest, the tending
+of cattle in the glades of the forest, the sowing and reaping of wheat
+and oats, the gathering of fruit and nuts, continued in quiet
+contentment and peace. The young men practiced the arts of war and
+exercised themselves in warlike games. The poets sang to them, the
+heralds recounted the great doings of old, how Cuculain kept the ford,
+how Concobar thirsted in his heart for Deirdr�, how the son of Cumal
+went to war, how golden-tongued Ossin was ensnared by the spirits. The
+gentle life of tillage and the keeping of cattle could never engage the
+whole mental force of so vigorous a race. What wonder, then, that, when
+a chieftain had some real or imagined wrong to avenge, or some adventure
+to propose,--what wonder that bold spirits were ever ready to accompany
+him, leaving the women to their distaffs and the tending of children and
+the grinding of corn? Mounting their horses, they rode forth through the
+woods, under the huge arms of the oak-trees; along the banks of
+swift-gliding rivers, through passes of the lowering hills. While still
+in familiar territory, the time of the march was passed in song and
+story. Then came increased precaution, and gradually heightened pulses
+marked the stages of the way. The rival chieftain, warned by his scouts
+and outlying tribesmen, got word of their approach, and hastily
+replenishing his granaries and driving the cattle into the great circle
+of his embankments, prepared to meet the coming foe. Swords, spears,
+bows, arrows were the arms of both sides. Though leather tunics were
+common, coats of mail came only at a later date. The attackers under
+cover of the night sped across the open ground before the fort, and
+tried to storm the fortress, the defenders meanwhile showering down
+keen-pointed arrows on them from above. Both parties, under the
+chieftains' guidance, fought fiercely, in a fever of excitement, giving
+no heed to wounds, seeing nothing but the foe and the battlements to be
+scaled. Then either a successful sortie broke the ranks of the
+assailants and sent them back to their forest camp in wild disorder, or,
+the stockade giving way, the stormers swept in like a wave of the sea,
+and all was chaos and wild struggle hand to hand. Whatever the outcome,
+both sides thought of the wild surge of will and valor in that hour as
+the crowning event of their lives.
+
+Meanwhile, within the quiet enclosures of the monasteries and religious
+schools, the spirit of the time was working with not less fervor, to
+invisible and ideal ends. At Bangor, on the neck of the northern Ards;
+at Moville, where Lough Foyle spreads its inland sea; at Saul, where the
+first Messenger won his first convert; at Devenish Island amid the
+waters of Lough Erne; at Monasterboice in the plain of Louth; at
+Grlendalough, among the solemn hills of Wicklow; at Kildare, beneath the
+oak-woods; at Durrow, amid the central marshes, and many another ancient
+seat of learning, the way of wisdom and holiness was trod with gladness.
+Latin had been taught since the early days of the Message; the native
+tongue of Ireland, consecrated in the hymns of St. Patrick and the poems
+of St. Colum of the Churches, was the language in which all pupils were
+taught, the modern ministrant to the classical speech of Rome. Nor were
+the Scriptures alone studied. Terence, Virgil, Ovid, the Augustans and
+the men of the silver age, were familiar in the Irish schools; and to
+these Latin writers were soon added the Greeks, more especially--as was
+natural--the Greek Fathers, the religious philosophers, and those who
+embodied the thought and controversies of the early Christian centuries.
+To Greek, Hebrew was added, so that both Old and New Testaments were
+known in their proper tongues. About the time when "Ragallac son of
+Uatac was pierced on the back of a white steed," Saint Camin in his
+island school at Inis Caltra, where red mountains hem in Lough Derg of
+the Shannon, was writing his Commentary on the Psalms, recording the
+Hebrew readings on the margin of the page. A few years before that
+battle, in 634, Saint Cummian of Durrow, some thirty miles to the east
+of Camin's Holy Island, wrote to his brother, the Abbot of Iona in the
+northern seas, quoting Latin writers sacred and secular, as well as
+Origen, Cyril and Pachomius among the Greeks. The learned man discusses
+the astronomical systems of the Mediterranean world, giving the names of
+months and cycles in Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, and telling of his
+researches into the true time of Easter, while on a journey to Italy and
+Rome. This letter, which has come down to our days, is first-hand
+testimony to the learning of the early Irish schools.
+
+[Illustration: Ancient Cross, Glendalough.]
+
+Fifty years later, in 683, we hear of the Saxons for the first and
+almost the last time in the history of Ireland. It is recorded that the
+North Saxons raided Mag Breag in the East of Meath, attacking both
+churches and chieftains. They carried away many hostages and much spoil,
+but the captives were soon after set at liberty and sent home again, on
+the intercession of a remarkable man, Adamnan, the biographer of Colum
+of the Churches, whose success in his mission was held to be miraculous.
+
+For more than a century after this single Saxon raid Ireland was wholly
+undisturbed by foreign invasion, and the work of building churches,
+founding schools, studying Hebrew and Greek and Latin, went on with
+increasing vigor and success. An army of missionaries went forth to
+other lands, following in the footsteps of Colum of the Churches, and of
+these we shall presently speak. The life of the church was so rich and
+fruitful that we are led to think of this as a period of childlike and
+idyllic peace.
+
+Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The raids,
+devastations and wars between province and province, tribe and tribe,
+went on without a year's interruption. This was the normal course of the
+nation's life, the natural outlet of the nation's energy: not less a
+visible sign of invisible inward power than the faith and fervor of the
+schools. We shall get the truest flavor of the times by quoting again
+from the old Annals. That they were recorded year by year, we have
+already seen; the records of frosts, great snow-storms, years of rich
+harvests and the like, interspersed among the fates of kings, show how
+faithfully the annals were kept,--as, for example, the winter of great
+cold, "when all the rivers and lakes of Ireland were frozen over," in
+the year after the Saxon raid.
+
+Here again, under the year 701, is the word of a man then living: "After
+Loing Seac son of Angus son of Domnall had been eight years in the
+sovreignty of Ireland, he was slain in the battle of Ceann by Cealleac
+of Lough Cime, the son of Ragallac, as Cealleac himself testifies:
+
+
+     "'For his deeds of ambition he was slain in the morning at
+          Glas Cuilg;
+
+     I wounded Loing Seac with a sword, the monarch of Ireland
+          round.'"
+
+Two years later Saint Adamnan died, after governing the Abbey of Iona
+for six and twenty years. It was said of him that "He made a slave of
+himself to his virtues," and his great life-work, the Latin history of
+Saint Colum of the Churches, founder of the Iona Abbey, to this day
+testifies to his high learning and wisdom.
+
+Fourteen years later "Leinster was five times devastated by the
+Ui-Neill," the descendants of Nial, and a battle was fought between the
+men of Connacht and Munster. Thus the lives of saints and warriors were
+interwoven. On very rare occasions the two lives of the race came into
+collision. Thus, a quarrel arose between Congus the Abbot and Aed Roin
+king of Ulad. Congus summoned to his aid the chief of the Ui-Neill, Aed
+Allan by name, in these verses:
+
+     "Say to the cold Aed Allan that I have been oppressed by
+         a feeble enemy:
+
+     Aed Roin insulted me last night at Cill Cunna of the sweet
+         music."
+
+Aed Allan made these verses on his way to battle to avenge the insult:
+
+     "For Cill Cunna the church of my spiritual father,
+         I take this day a journey on the road.
+     Aed Roin shall leave his head with me,
+         Or I shall leave my head with him."
+
+The further history of that same year, 733, is best told in the words of
+the Annals: "Aed Allan, king of Ireland, assembled his forces to
+proceed into Leinster, and he arrived at the Ford of Seannait (in
+Kildare). The Leinstermen collected the greatest number they were able,
+to defend their rights against him. The king Aed Allan himself went into
+the battle, and the chieftains of the north along with him. The
+chieftains of Leinster came with their kings into the battle, and
+bloodily and heroically was the battle fought between them. Heroes were
+slaughtered and bodies were hacked. Aed Allan and Aed, son of Colgan,
+king of Leinster, met each other, and Aed son of Colgan was slain by Aed
+Allan. The Leinstermen were killed, slaughtered, cut off, and dreadfully
+exterminated in this battle, so that there escaped of them but a small
+remnant and a few fugitives."
+
+To round out the picture, to contrast the two streams of the nation's
+life, let us give this, from the following year: "734: Fifth year of Aed
+Allan. Saint Samtain, virgin, of Cluain Bronaig (Longford), died on
+December 19. It was of her that Aed Allan gave this testimony:
+
+     "Samtain for enlightening various sinners,
+         A servant who observed stern chastity,
+     In the wide plain of fertile Meath
+         Great suffering did Samtain endure;
+     She undertook a thing not easy,--
+         Fasting for the kingdom above.
+     She lived on scanty food;
+         Hard were her girdles;
+     She struggled in venomous conflicts;
+         Pure was her heart amid the wicked.
+     To the bosom of the Lord, with a pure death,
+         Samtain passed from her trials."
+
+
+
+X.
+
+THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.
+
+A.D. 750-1050.
+
+Aed Allan, the king who so feelingly wrote the epitaph of the saintly
+virgin Samtain, needed an epitaph himself four years later, for he fell
+in battle with Domnall son of Murcad son of Diarmaid, who succeeded him
+on the throne. It is recorded that, in the following year, the sea cast
+ashore a whale under the mountains of Mourne, to the great wonder of
+those who dwelt by the hill of Rudraige. Thus do the Chronicles
+establish their good faith, by putting on record things trifling or
+grave, with equal impartiality.
+
+They were presently to have something more memorable to record than the
+loss of a battle or the stranding of a whale. But before we come to this
+new chapter in the life of Ireland, let us show the continuity of the
+forces we have already depicted. The old tribal turmoil went on
+unabated. In 771, the first year of Doncad son of Domnall in the
+sovereignty over Ireland, that ruler made a full muster of the Ui-Neill
+and marched into Leinster. The Leinstermen moved before the monarch and
+his forces, until they arrived at the fort called Nectain's Shield in
+Kildare. Domcad with his forces was entrenched at Aillin, whence his
+people continued to fire, burn, plunder and devastate the province for
+the space of a week, when the Leinstermen at last submitted to his will.
+Seventeen years later it is recorded that the church and abbey of
+Ardmaca, or, as we may now begin to call it, Armagh, were struck by
+lightning, and the night was terrible with thunder, lightning and wind.
+
+We see, therefore, that the double life of the people, the life of valor
+and the life of wisdom, were following their steady course in camp and
+school. We may call up a very interesting witness to the whole condition
+of Ireland during this epoch: Alfred king of the Northumbrian Saxons,
+who spent several years traveling through the land and studying in the
+schools. On his departure, he wrote an ode of acknowledgment to the
+country he was leaving, in the verse of the native Irish tongue. From
+this ode we may quote a few picturesque lines, taking them from a
+version which preserves something of the original rhythm:
+
+     "I traveled its fruitful provinces round,
+     And in every one of the five I found,
+     Alike in church and in palace hall,
+     Abundant apparel and food for all.
+     Gold and silver I found, and money,
+     Plenty of wheat and plenty of honey;
+     I found God's people rich in pity;
+     Found many a feast and many a city....
+     I found in each great church moreo'er,
+     Whether on island or on shore,
+     Piety, learning, fond affection,
+     Holy welcome and kind protection....
+     I found in Munster unfettered of any
+     Kings and queens and poets a many,
+     Poets well skilled in music and measure;
+     Prosperous doings, mirth and pleasure.
+     I found in Connacht the just, redundance
+     Of riches, milk in lavish abundance;
+     Hospitality, vigor, fame,
+     In Crimean's land of heroic name....
+     I found in Ulster, from hill to glen,
+     Hardy warriors, resolute men.
+     Beauty that bloomed when youth was gone,
+     And strength transmitted from sire to son....
+     I found in Leinster the smooth and sleek,
+     From Dublin to Slewmargy's peak,
+     Flourishing pastures, valor, health,
+     Song-loving worthies, commerce, wealth....
+     I found in Meath's fair principality
+     Virtue, vigor, and hospitality;
+     Candor, joyfulness, bravery, purity--
+     Ireland's bulwark and security.
+     I found strict morals in age and youth,
+     I found historians recording truth.
+     The things I sing of in verse unsmooth
+     I found them all; I have written sooth."
+
+The modern form of the names used by the translator gives this version a
+slightly misleading tone. Ulster, Munster, Leinster were still known by
+their old names: Ulad, Mumain and Lagin. The Danish termination by which
+we know them had not been added. In like manner, Dublin in those days
+and far later was still called At-Cliat, the Ford of the Hurdles. Yet
+the tribute which the Saxon king paid to Ireland has a true ring. It
+thoroughly supports what we have said: that incessant tribal warfare
+rather expressed than detracted from the vigor of the nation's life. It
+had this grave defect, however: it so kindled and cherished the instinct
+of separateness that union in face of a common foe was almost
+impossible. Long years of adverse fate were needed to merge the keen
+individual instinct of old into the common consciousness of to-day.
+
+Modern historians generally write as if the onslaught of the Northmen
+had had this unifying effect; as if it had been a great calamity,
+overwhelming the country for several centuries, and submerging its
+original life under a tide of conquest. Here again the history of the
+time, as recorded year by year in the Annals, leads us to a wholly
+different conclusion. We find inroads of the Northmen, it is true; but
+they are only interludes in the old national life of storm and struggle.
+That enduring tribal conflict, of which we have already seen so much,
+did not cease even for a year. Nor can it have greatly mattered to the
+dwellers in some remote valley whether they were sacked, their cattle
+driven off, and their children taken captive by strangers or by men of
+their own land.
+
+There was one chief difference: the foreigners, being still heathens,
+did not spare the churches and the schools. The golden or silver
+reliquaries, the jeweled manuscript-cases, the offerings of precious
+stones and rich ornaments laid on the altars: these things proved an
+irresistible temptation to the roving sea-kings. They often burned or
+cast away the manuscripts, eager only to take the jeweled coverings, and
+in this way many monuments of the olden time have been lost, and many
+gaps in the history of the nation made irreparable. Yet it would seem
+that even the loss of manuscripts has been exaggerated, since such
+lavish abundance remains to us from the times before the first northern
+raiders came. Many a remote shrine was never even approached by the
+northern wanderers; and, in the long times of peace between raid and
+raid, one school had time to gain from another copies of the books which
+were lost. We may hope that the somewhat rigid views of copyright
+expressed in the matter of St. Finian's Psalter were not invariably
+adhered to. We have Chronicles kept with unbroken regularity year by
+year through the whole of the epoch of Northern raids, and they by no
+means indicate a period of national depression, nor justify us in
+thinking of these raids as much more than episodes in the general
+fighting of the nation,--the martial state through which every modern
+country has passed before emerging to homogeneous life.
+
+To come to the events themselves, as they appeared to the men who
+witnessed them. We find the first record of the Northern raiders under
+the year 795: "The burning of Lambay by the Gentiles. The shrines were
+broken and plundered." This Lambay is an island of considerable extent,
+off the Dublin coast, some six or seven miles north of Howth. It rises
+gradually from the south extremity into a purple cliff of porphyry
+facing the northern sea, and on the sheltered slope under the sun a
+little church colony with schools and dwelling-houses had been built.
+Against this peaceful solitude the raiders came, burning and plundering,
+and when they rowed away again in their long ships towards the north, a
+smoldering black ruin bore testimony that they were indeed Gentiles,
+unblessed by Christian baptism.
+
+Three years later the little island of St. Patrick, six miles north of
+Lambay, met with a like fate. It was "burned by the Gentiles," as the
+Chronicles say. And from that time forth we hear of their long ships
+again and again, hovering hawk-like around the coasts of Ireland and
+Scotland. In 802, and again in 806, the Scottish Iona of Colum of the
+Churches was raided, and the next year we find the pirates making a
+descent upon Inismurray, off the Sligo coast, between the summit of
+Knocknarea and the cliffs of Slieve League. This last settlement of
+saints and scholars was founded by Molaise,--he who had pronounced
+sentence of exile on Colum of the Churches, the banishment that was the
+beginning of grace for the northern Picts. His oratory still remains on
+the island, beside the Church of the Men, the Church of the Women and
+the circular stone fort, which was very likely built to guard against
+new attacks, after this first raid. There are holy wells and altars
+there also, and Inismurray, better than any other place, gives us a
+picture of the old scholastic life of that remote and wonderful time.
+
+Five years later, the Northern raiders made their way further round the
+coast, under the shadow of the western mountains and the great cliffs of
+Achill; we read of "a slaughter of the people of Connemara by the
+Gentiles" in that year, and the year following, other battles with
+Gentiles are recorded in the same part of Ireland.
+
+In 818, if we are to believe the Annalist, a singular thing happened:
+"An army was led by Murcad, having the Ui-Neill of the North with him.
+Concobar king of Ireland with the Ui-Neill of the South and the
+Leinstermen came from the South on the other hand. When they came to one
+place, it happened, through a miracle of God, that they separated from
+each other for that time without slaughter or one of them spilling a
+drop of the other's blood." That entry better than any other shows the
+restless spirit of the times. It shows, too, that the first shock of
+Norse invasion had not in any sense warned the people and chieftains of
+Ireland of coming danger, nor had it in any degree checked the steady
+course of the nation's growth through storm and strife to personal
+consciousness, as the stepping-stone to the wider common consciousness
+of the modern world.
+
+The year following we read of "a plundering of Howth by the Gentiles,
+who carried off a great prey of women." These captives were doubtless
+the first to bring the Message of the New Way to the wild granite lands
+of the north, where the mountains in their grandeur frown upon the long
+inlets of the fiords. They taught to their children in those wild lands
+of exile the lessons of grace and holiness, so rudely interrupted when
+the long ships of the Norsemen were sighted from the Hill of Howth.
+
+A year later, in 820, the raiders had found their way to the
+southernmost extremity of the island; to Cape Clear, off the coast of
+Cork. This once again brings to our notice the position of so many of
+the early religious settlements,--on rocky islands off the coasts, well
+out of the turmoil of tribal strife which raged uninterrupted on the
+mainland. St. Patrick's Island and Lambay on the east, Clear Island on
+the south, and Inismurray on the northwest, so well protected by the sea
+from disturbance at home, were, by that very isolation, terribly exposed
+to these foreign raiders from the sea. Howth, Moville and Bangor, all on
+peninsulas, all by the seashore, enjoyed a like immunity and were open
+to a like danger. Therefore we are not surprised to find that, two years
+later, Bangor was "plundered by the Gentiles."
+
+It will be remembered that St. Patrick's first church was built on land
+given him by Dicu, chieftain of the district round Downpatrick, a name
+which commemorates the presence of the Messenger. Two sons of this same
+Dicu had been held as hostages by Laogaire the king, and their marvelous
+escape from durance was recorded in the name, Dun-da-lath-glas, the
+Dwelling of the Two Broken Fetters, given to Downpatrick. The place was
+of old renown. Known to Ptolemy as Dunum, it was, during Concobar's sway
+at Emain of Maca, the fortress of the strong chief, Celtcar, whose huge
+embattled hill of earth still rises formidable over the Quoyle River. In
+the year 823, we read, Dundalathglas was plundered by the Gentiles; but
+the story does not stop here, for we are further told that these same
+Gentiles were beaten by the Ulad armies not far from the great fort of
+Celtcar. This is the first entry of this tenor. Hitherto, the Northmen
+seem to have fallen only on outlying religious communities, in remote
+islands or on the seashore; but this last raid brought them to one of
+the very few church-schools which had been built close to a strong
+fortress, with the result that the Northmen were beaten and driven back
+into their ships.
+
+Three years later the Gentiles plundered Lusk on the mainland opposite
+Lambay, but in that same year they were twice defeated in battle, once
+by Cairbr� son of Catal, and once by the king of Ulad. The raids of the
+Norse warriors grow more frequent and determined from this time; in
+itself a testimony to the wealth and prosperity of the country, the
+abundance of gold and of accumulated riches, whether cattle or corn,
+ornaments or richly dyed stuffs, red and purple and blue. Word seems to
+have been carried to the wild hills and fiords of frozen Scandinavia
+that here was booty in abundance, and the pirate hordes came down
+in swarms.
+
+Thus we read that Armagh, the center of St. Patrick's work, and the
+chief home of learning, was thrice plundered in 830, the raiders sailing
+up Carlingford Lough and then making a dash of some fifteen miles across
+the undulating country separating them from the city of churches. This
+is the first time they ventured out of sight of their boats. Two years
+later they plundered Clondalkin, nine miles inland from the Dublin
+coast, where the Round Tower still marks the site of the old church and
+school. To the growing frequency of these raids, it would seem, the
+building of Round Towers is to be attributed; they were at once belfries
+and places of refuge. We find, therefore, that the door is almost always
+many feet above the ground, being reached by a ladder afterwards drawn
+up by those inside. The number of these Round Towers all over the
+country, and the perfect preservation of many of them, show how
+universal this precaution was, and how effective were the refugees thus
+provided. It is instructive to read under this same year, 832, that "a
+great number of the family of Clonmacnoise were slain by Feidlimid king
+of Cashel, all their land being burned by him up to the door of the
+church." Thus the progress of tribal struggle was uninterrupted by the
+Gentile raids.
+
+Four years later, a fleet of sixty Norse fighting galleys sailed up the
+Boyne. Sixty long ships entered the Liffey in the same year, and a year
+later they captured the fortress of the Ford of the Hurdles,
+At-Cliat,--the old name of Dublin. Three years later we find the king of
+Munster plundering Meath and West Meath, showing that no sense of common
+danger disturbed the native kings. This strengthens the view we have
+already taken: that the attacks of the Norse sea-kings were only an
+interlude in the incessant contests between the tribes of province and
+province; contests perfectly natural and normal to the development of
+the land, and through which every country has at some period passed.
+
+[Illustration: Round Tower, Antrim.]
+
+It would seem that the Northmen who captured the Ford of the Hurdles
+departed from their former usage. Fortifying themselves, or
+strengthening the existent fortress, they determined to pass the winter
+in Ireland, instead of returning, as they had always done up to this
+time, before the autumn storms made dangerous the navigation of the wild
+northern seas. Their presence in this fort gave the native powers a
+center upon which to concentrate their attack, and as a result the year
+846 was marked by a signal victory over the Northmen, twelve hundred of
+those at At-Cliat being slain. Four other successful contests with the
+raiders are recorded for the same year, and we can thoroughly trust the
+Annalists who, up to this time, have so faithfully recorded the
+disasters of their own race.
+
+About the same time the Northmen gained a second point of vantage by
+seizing and fortifying a strong position where the town of Cork now
+stands. Indeed their instinct of seamanship, their knowledge of good
+harbors and the conditions which make them, led them to fix their first
+entrenchments at Dublin, Cork and Limerick,--which remained for
+centuries after the great ports of the country on the east, south and
+west; and the Norse flavor still lingers in the names of Carlingford,
+Wexford and Waterford, the Fiords of Cairlinn, Weis and Vadre. A
+wonderful side-light on the whole epoch is shed by this entry for 847:
+"In this year sevenscore ships of the Gentiles from abroad fought
+against the Gentiles in Ireland." It would seem that the earlier comers,
+who had drawn up their long ships on the beach, and thrown up earthworks
+round their camp, instantly resented the attempt of later arrivals to
+poach on their preserves, and that a fierce fight was the result. During
+the whole of the following century we find signs of like rivalry between
+different bands of raiders, and it becomes evident that they were as
+much divided amongst themselves as were the native tribes they
+fought against.
+
+Two years later a further light is shed on this mutual strife when we
+are told that "Dark Gentiles came to At-Cliat and slaughtered the Fair
+Gentiles, plundering their fort and carrying away both people and
+property." The next year saw a new struggle between the Dark Gentiles
+and the Fair Gentiles, with much mutual slaughter. This leads us to
+realize that these raiders, vaguely grouped by modern writers under the
+single name of Danes, really belonged to several different races, and
+doubtless came from many parts of the Baltic coasts, as well as from the
+fiords of the great Scandinavian peninsula. The Dark Foreigners are
+without doubt some of that same race of southern origin which we saw,
+ages earlier, migrating northwards along the Atlantic seaboard,--a race
+full of the spirit of the sea, and never happier than when the waves
+were curling and breaking under their prows. They found their way, we
+saw, as far northwards as the coast of Scotland, the Western Isles, and
+distant Norway over the foam, where the long fiords and rugged
+precipices gave them a congenial home. We find them hovering over the
+shores of Ireland at the very dawn of her history; and, in later but
+still remote ages, their power waned before the De Danaan tribes. This
+same dark race returning now from Norway, swooped hawk-like upon the
+rich shrines of the Irish island sanctuaries, only to come into hostile
+contact once more with sons of that golden-haired race which scattered
+the dark Fomorians at Mag Tuiread of the North. For the Fair Gentiles of
+our mediaeval Chronicle are no other than the golden-haired
+Scandinavians; the yellow-locked Baltic race that gave conquerors and a
+new ideal of beauty to the whole modern world. And this Baltic race, as
+we saw in an earlier epoch, was the source and mother of the old De
+Danaans, whose hair was like new-smelted gold or the yellow flag-lilies
+of our lakes and rivers. Thus after long ages the struggle of Fomor and
+De Danaan was renewed at the Ford of the Hurdles between the Dark and
+Fair Strangers, rivals for the plunder of the Irish religious schools.
+
+Though the personalities of this age do not stand forth with the high
+relief of Cuculain and Concobar, though we can hardly quote poems to
+equal the songs of Find son of Cumal and Ossin of the golden tongue, yet
+genuine inspiration never failed in the hearts of the warriors and on
+the lips of the bards. Thus in 860 did a poet lament the death of
+a king:
+
+     "Mournfully is spread her veil of grief over Erin
+     Since Maelseaclain, chieftain of our race has perished,--
+     Maelseaclain of the flowing Shannon.
+     Many a moan resounds in every place;
+     It is mournful news among the Gael.
+
+     Red wine has been spilled into the valley:
+     Erin's monarch has died.
+       Though he was wont to ride a white charger.
+     Though he had many steeds,
+     His car this day is drawn by a yoke of oxen.
+     The king of Erin is dead."
+
+Four years afterwards the contest between the raiders and the chieftains
+grew keener, more centered, more like organized war. "A complete muster
+of the North was made by Aed Finnliat, so that he plundered the
+fortresses of the foreigners, wherever they were in the north; and he
+carried off their cattle and accoutrements, their goods and chattels.
+The foreigners of the province came together at Lough Foyle. After Aed
+king of Ireland had heard that this gathering of strangers was on the
+borders of his country, he was not negligent in attending to them. For
+he marched towards them with all his forces, and a battle was fought
+fiercely and spiritedly between them. The victory was gained over the
+foreigners, and a slaughter was made of them. Their heads were collected
+to one place, in the presence of the king, and twelve-score heads were
+reckoned before him, which was the number slain in that battle, besides
+the numbers of those who were wounded and carried off by him in the
+agonies of death, and who died of their wounds some time afterwards."
+
+A renewal of tribal warfare in the second year after this, when this
+same Aed the king was attacked by Flann the lord of Breag in Meath,
+called forth certain battle-verses full of the fire and fervor of
+the time.
+
+A poet sang:
+
+     "At Kiladerry this day the ravens shall taste sips of blood:
+     A victory shall be gained over the magic host of the Gentiles
+        and over Flann."
+
+The mother of Flann sang:
+
+     "Happiness! Woe! Good news! Bad news! The gaining of a great
+         triumphant battle.
+
+     Happy the king whom it makes victorious; unhappy the king who
+         was defeated.
+
+     Unhappy the host of Leat Cuin, to have fallen by the sprites
+         of Slain;
+
+     Happy the reign of great Aed, and unhappy the loss of Flann."
+
+Aed the victorious king sang:
+
+     "The troops of Leinster are with him, with the added men of
+         swift Boyne;
+
+     This shows the treachery of Flann: the concord of Gentiles
+         at his side."
+
+After ten years, a bard thus sings the dirge of Aed:
+
+     "Long is the wintry night, with rough gusts of wind;
+     Under pressing grief we meet it, since the red-speared king
+        of the noble house lives not.
+     It is fearful to watch how the waves heave from the bottom;
+     To them may be compared all those who with us lament him.
+     A generous, wise, staid man, of whose renown the populous
+        Tara was full.
+     A shielded oak that sheltered the palace of Milid's sons.
+     Master of the games of the fair hilled Taillten,
+     King of Tara of a hundred conflicts;
+     Chief of Fodla the noble, Aed of Oileac who died too soon.
+     Popular, not forgotten, he departed from this world,
+     A yew without any blemish upon him was he of the long-flowing
+        hair."
+
+Nor must it be thought that these repeated raids which we have recorded
+in any way checked the full spiritual life of the nation. It is true
+that there was not that quiet serenity from which came the perfect
+beauty and art of the old Book of Kells, but a keenness and fire kindled
+the breasts of those who learned the New Way and the Ancient Learning.
+The schools sent forth a host of eminent men who over all western Europe
+laid the intellectual basis of the modern world. This view of Ireland's
+history might well be expanded almost without limit or possibility of
+exaggeration. Receiving, as we saw, the learning and traditions of Rome
+while Rome was yet mighty and a name of old imperial renown, Ireland
+kept and cherished the classical wisdom and learning, not less than the
+lore of Palestine. Then the northern garrisons of Rome were beaten back,
+and Britain and Gaul alike were devastated by hordes from beyond the
+Rhine. The first wild deluge of these fierce invaders was now over, and
+during the lull of the storm teachers went forth from Ireland to
+Scotland, as we have seen; they went also to Britain; to Belgium; to
+northern, central and southern Gaul; and to countries beyond the Rhine
+and in the south; to Switzerland and Austria, where one Irishman gave
+his name to the Canton of St. Gall, while another founded the famous see
+of Salzburg, a rallying-point through all the Middle Ages. It was not
+only for pure spiritual zeal and high inspiration that these teachers
+were famed. They had not less renown for all refined learning and
+culture. The famous universities of Oxford, Paris and Pavia count among
+the great spirits at their inception men who were worthy pupils of the
+schools of Devenish and Durrow, of Bangor and Moville.
+
+We have recorded the tribute paid by Alfred the Saxon king to the
+Ireland of his day. Let us add to it the testimony of a great divine of
+France. Elias, Bishop of Angoul�me, who died in 875, wrote thus: "What
+need to speak of Ireland; setting at nought, as it does, the
+difficulties of the sea, and coming almost in a body to our shores, with
+its crowd of philosophers, the most intelligent of whom are subjecting
+themselves to a voluntary exile."
+
+We have traced the raids of the Northmen for nearly a century. They
+continued for a century and a quarter longer. Through all this time the
+course of the nation's life was as we have described it: a raid from the
+sea, or from one of their seaboard fortresses by the Dark Gentiles or
+the Fair; an assembling of the hosts of the native chieftains against
+them; a fierce and spirited battle against the pirates in their
+mail-coats and armed with great battle-axes. Sometimes the chosen people
+prevailed, and sometimes the Gentiles; but in either case the heads of
+the slain were heaped up at the feet of the victor, many cattle were
+driven away as spoil, and young men and maidens were taken into
+captivity. It would seem that at no time was there any union between the
+foreigners of one and another seaboard fortress, any more than there was
+unity among the tribes whom they raided and who defeated them in their
+turn. It was a strife of warring units, without fusion; small groups
+round chosen leaders, and these merging for awhile in greater groups.
+Thus the life of the times, in its warlike aspect. Its spiritual vigor
+we have sufficiently shown, not less in the inspirations of the saints
+than in the fiery songs of the bards, called forth by battles and the
+death of kings. Everywhere there was fierce force and seething energy,
+bringing forth fruit of piety or prowess.
+
+The raiders slowly lost their grasp of the fortresses they had seized.
+Newcomers ceased to fill their thinning ranks. Their force was finally
+shattered at the battle of Clontarf, which the Annalist thus records:
+"1013: The Foreigners of the west of Europe assembled against Brian and
+Maelseaclain, and they took with them a thousand men with coats of mail.
+A spirited, fierce, violent, vengeful and furious battle was fought
+between them, the likeness of which was not to be found in that time, at
+Cluain-tarb, the Lawn of the Bulls. In this battle was slain Brian son
+of Ceinneidig, monarch of Ireland, who was the Augustus of all the west
+of Europe, in the eighty-eighth year of his age."
+
+The scene of this famous conflict is on the coast, between Dublin and
+the Hill of Howth. A wide strand of boulders is laid bare by the
+receding tide, with green sea-grass carpeting the stones. At the very
+verge of the farthest tide are two huge sand-banks, where the waves roar
+and rumble with a sound like the bellowing of bulls, and this tumultuous
+roaring is preserved in the name of the place unto this day.
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.
+
+A.D. 1013-1250.
+
+There was, as we have seen, no "Danish Conquest" of Ireland, nor
+anything approaching a conquest. What really happened during the ninth
+and tenth centuries was this: Raiders from the shores of the Northern
+seas, from the Scandinavian peninsula and the Western Isles of Scotland,
+sailed in their long ships among the islands of the Irish coast, looking
+for opportunities to plunder the treasuries of the religious schools,
+and carrying off the gold and silver reliquaries and manuscript cases,
+far more valuable to these heathen seamen than the Latin or Gaelic
+manuscripts they contained.
+
+These raids had little connection with each other; they were the outcome
+of individual daring, mere boat's-crews from one or another of the
+Northern fiords. A few of the more persistent gradually grew reluctant
+to retreat with their booty to the frozen north, and tried to gain a
+footing on the shores of the fertile and wealthy island they had
+discovered. They made temporary camps on the beach, always beside the
+best harbors, and threw up earthworks round them, or perhaps more
+lasting forts of stone. Thus they established a secondary base for raids
+inland, and a place of refuge whither they might carry the cattle, corn
+and captives which these raids brought them from the territories of the
+native clans. These camps on the shore were the germ of a chain of
+sea-ports at Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.
+
+From these points raiding went on, and battles were fought in which the
+raiders were as often vanquished as victorious. There was little union
+between the various Norse forts, and indeed we sometimes find them
+fighting valiantly among themselves. Meanwhile, the old tribal contest
+went on everywhere throughout the island. The south invaded the north
+and was presently invaded in return. The east and the west sent
+expeditions against each other. Clan went forth against clan, chief
+against chief, and cattle and captives many times changed hands. These
+captives, it would seem, became the agricultural class in each clan,
+being made to work as the penalty for unsuccessful fighting. The old
+tribal life went on unbroken during the whole of this period; nor did
+it subsequently yield to pressure from without, but rather passed
+away, during succeeding centuries, as the result of inward growth.
+Meanwhile the religious schools continued their work, studying Latin and
+Greek as well as the old Gaelic, and copying manuscripts as before; and
+one fruit of their work we see in the gradual conversion of the heathen
+Norsemen, who were baptized and admitted to the native church. The old
+bardic schools likewise continued, so that we have a wealth of native
+manuscripts belonging to this time, embodying the finest tradition and
+literature of the earlier pagan ages.
+
+[Illustration: Giant Head and Dunluce Castle, Co. Antrim.]
+
+If the Danes and Northern raiders never conquered Ireland, on the other
+hand they never were expelled. Through the cessation of the original
+impulse of unrest which brought them, they gradually ceased to receive
+accessions from the North, and at the same time the forces of
+amalgamation were slowly merging them into the national and tribal life
+of their new home. Their separate influence grew less and less, but
+their race continued, and continues to this day in the sea-ports we
+have named.
+
+We shall presently have to record another series of Norse inroads, this
+time not directly from the North, but mediately, through France and
+Britain, and we shall find that much of our subsequent history was
+influenced by the new elements and principles then added. We shall do
+well, therefore, to linger for a moment before this new transition, to
+gain a clear view of the tendencies of the epoch then closed, the wider
+significance of that chapter of our nation's life.
+
+The culture of Ireland, during the period before the Northern raids,
+bridged over the abyss between the classical and the mediaeval world.
+During the whole of that period the rest of Europe was hidden under the
+clouds of the Dark Ages. Ireland stood alone as the one cultured nation.
+Receiving the classical learning from Roman Gaul and Britain and Italy,
+while the old world was still alive, Ireland carried that culture onward
+when Rome and the Roman Empire fell, crushed under the hordes of
+Northern barbarians: the Franks in Gaul; the Lombards, Goths and Vandals
+in Spain and Italy; the Angles, Saxons and Danes in Britain; and the
+Picts and Northmen in the Scottish lowlands. Austria was meanwhile
+overrun by Asian nomads, the Huns and Magyars; Russia and Germany, with
+the Scandinavian lands, were still pagan.
+
+Thus all Europe was submerged under a deluge of heathenism, and the old
+Latin culture was swept away. The tradition of ancient Greece still
+lingered at Constantinople behind the wall of the Balkans, but it had no
+influence at all on the northern nations beyond the wall. Ireland was
+thus the one exception, the ark of safety for the old wisdom and beauty
+of classical days. And from Ireland, when the tide of heathen invasion
+slackened, the light of classical times and the spirit of the New Way
+went forth to all the nascent nations, the great pagan tribes that were
+to form the modern world. Thus Ireland was the bridge over the Dark
+Ages, the first of modern nations, keeping the old and blending it
+with the new.
+
+Yet another view of Ireland's significance must not be forgotten. Of the
+original life of the great pagan world which swept over the Roman Empire
+we know almost nothing. How much do we realize of the thought and genius
+of Aleman, Frank and Vandal, of Angle and Lombard and Burgundian?
+
+Nothing at all. The darkness that shrouds them is complete. But what a
+contrast when we come to Ireland! If we leave out the basin of the
+Mediterranean, with its Asian and African traditions, Ireland is the one
+European nation which has clear records of its pagan history. And how
+excellent that history was, how full of humanity and the rich wine of
+life, the stories of Fergus and Concobar and Cuculain, of Find and Ossin
+and Gael, of Meave and Deirdr� and Cred� bear sufficient witness. The
+tide of Irish life to which they belong, and which brought them forth,
+flowed on without break to a time so recent that their whole tradition
+has come down to us, practically at first hand, from the heralds and
+bards themselves. Ireland is, therefore, our one doorway to the history
+of northern Europe through the long era of pagan times.
+
+That history was everywhere a fierce tale of tribal warfare. Its heroes
+are valiant fighters, keen leaders of forays, champion swordsmen and
+defenders of forts. The air throbs to the battle-drum, rings to the call
+of the war-trumpet. Every tribe, every clan, is in turn victor and
+vanquished, raider and victim of raids. Everywhere are struggle and
+unrest, tales of captivity and slaughter.
+
+We fall into vain lamenting over this red rapine and wrath, until we
+divine the genius and secret purpose of that wonderful epoch, so wholly
+different in inspiration from our own. The life of races, like the life
+of men, has its ordered stages, and none can ripen out of season. That
+was the epoch of dawning individual consciousness, when men were coming
+to a keen and vivid realization of themselves and their powers. Keen
+consciousness and strong personal will could be developed only through
+struggle--through long ages of individual and independent fighting,
+where the best man led, and often fought for his right to lead with the
+best of his followers. Innumerable centers of initiative and force were
+needed, and these the old tribal life abundantly gave. The territory of
+a chief hardly stretched farther than he could ride in a day, so that
+every part of it had a real place in his heart. Nor was he the owner of
+that territory. He was simply the chosen leader of the men who lived
+there, perhaps the strongest among many brothers who shared it equally
+between them. If another thought himself the better man, the matter was
+forthwith decided by fighting.
+
+The purpose of all this was not the "survival of the fittest" in the
+material sense, but a harvest purely spiritual: the ripening of keen
+personal consciousness and will in all the combatants, to the full
+measure of their powers. The chiefs were the strongest men who set the
+standard and served as models for the rest, but that standard held the
+minds of all, the model of perfect valor was in the hearts of all. Thus
+was personal consciousness gained and perfected.
+
+If we keep this in mind as the keynote of the whole pagan epoch, we
+shall be better able to comprehend the new forces which were added to
+that epoch, and which gradually transformed it. The greatest was the
+Message of the New Way. Deeds are stronger than words, and in the deeds
+of the first Messengers we can see the new spirit bearing fruit. The
+slave of Slemish mountain returned breathing not vengeance for his
+captivity but pity and generous kindness towards his captors. Colum the
+exile did not seek to enlist the Picts against his native land, but
+sought rather to give the message of that land to the wild Pictish
+warriors, and to spread humane and generous feeling among them. Thus was
+laid the foundation of a wide and universal consciousness; a bridge was
+built between soul and soul.
+
+From the waning of the Norsemen to the first coming of the Normans is a
+period of about a hundred and fifty years. We shall best gain an insight
+into the national and religious life of that time by gleaning from the
+Annals the vivid and living pictures they never fail to give,--pictures
+which are the records of eye-witnesses. The strictly contemporary
+character of the records is vouched for by the correct entry of
+eclipses: for instance, "on the day before the calends of September, in
+the year 1030, there was a darkening of the sun."
+
+We see the genius of the Norsemen suffering a like eclipse the year
+before: "1029: Olaf son of Sitric, lord of the Foreigners, was taken
+prisoner by Matgamain Ua Riagain lord of Breag, who exacted twelve
+hundred cows as his ransom, together with seven score British horses,
+three score ounces of gold, the sword of Carlus, the Irish hostages,
+sixty ounces of white silver as the ransom of his fetters, eighty cows
+for word and supplication, and four hostages to Ua Riagain as a security
+of peace."
+
+Two generations later we read: "1088: Tigearnac Ua Briain, chief
+successor of Ciaran and Coman, died. He was a paragon of learning and
+history." The work of the paragon Tigearnac, a history of Ireland, is
+extant and writ in choice Latin, a monument at once of the classical
+learning of our schools and of the historical spirit carried down from
+the days of the pagan heralds and bards. Tigearnac quotes abundantly
+from Greek and Latin authors, fortifying his conclusions with passages
+from Eusebius, Orosius, Julius Africanus, Josephus, Jerome and Bede.
+
+A half-century later we get a quaint and vivid glimpse into the
+religious life of the time: "1145: A lime-kiln which was sixty feet
+every way was erected opposite Emain Maca by Gilla Mac Liag, the
+successor of Patrick, and Patrick's clergy in general." Here is the glow
+of that devotion through work which gave us the great mediaeval
+cathedrals, the fervor and artistic power, which in former times adorned
+the Gospels of the Book of Kells, now working out its way in lasting
+stone. The date of this lime-kiln lies indeed just half-way between the
+consecration of Cormac's Chapel at Cashel in 1134 and the foundation of
+the beautiful cathedral beside it by the lord of Tuaid-Muma or Thomond
+in 1152. Cormac's Chapel is a very pure example of native style,
+untouched by foreign or continental influence.
+
+[Illustration: Rock of Cashel, Ruins of Old Cathedral, King Cormac's
+Chapel and Round Tower,]
+
+We can divine the figure of one of the great men of the religious world
+in the records for the year 1148: "A synod was convened at Saint
+Patrick's Isle by Maelmaedog, called also Malachias, successor of
+Patrick, at which were present fifteen bishops and two hundred priests,
+to establish rules and morals for all. Maelmaedog by the advice of the
+synod went a second time to Rome, to confer with the successor of
+Peter." A few months later we read this record of his death: "Malachias,
+that is, Maelmaedog Ua Morgair, Archbishop of the chair of Patrick,
+chief head of the piety of the West of Europe, legate of the successor
+of Peter, the only head whom the Irish and the Foreigners obeyed, chief
+paragon of wisdom and piety, a brilliant lamp which illumined
+territories and churches by preaching and good works, faithful shepherd
+of the church in general,--after having ordained bishops and priests and
+persons of every degree; after having consecrated many churches and
+cemeteries; after having performed every ecclesiastical work throughout
+Ireland; after having bestowed jewels and food upon the mighty and the
+needy; after having founded churches and monasteries, for by him was
+repaired in Ireland every church which had been consigned to decay and
+neglect, and they had been neglected from times remote;--after leaving
+every rule and every good moral in the churches of Ireland in general;
+after having been the second time in the legateship; after having been
+fourteen years in the primacy; and after the fifty-fourth year of his
+age, resigned his spirit to heaven on the second day of November, and
+was buried in the monastery of Saint Bernard at Claravallis in France."
+
+This is the same worthy under whose influence was built the great
+lime-kiln over against the fort of Emain, where Concobar once ruled.
+Even from the scant notices which we have quoted he stands forth clear
+and strong, full of spiritual and moral vigor, a great man in every
+sense, and one in whom we divine a lovable and admirable spirit. At that
+time there were four archbishoprics in Ireland, at Armagh, Cashel,
+Dublin and Tuam; the primacy belonging to the first, as the seat of the
+Damliag Mor or Great Stone Church, built by Saint Patrick himself. A
+sentence in the Annals shows how the revenues were raised: "A horse from
+every chieftain, a sheep from every hearth." A few passages like these
+are enough to light up whole epochs of that mediaeval time, and to show
+us how sympathetic, strong and pure that life was, in so many ways.
+
+We find, meanwhile, that the tribal struggle continued as of old: "1154:
+Toirdealbac Ua Concobar brought a fleet round Ireland northwards, and
+plundered Tir-Conaill and Inis Eogain. The Cinel Eogain sent to hire the
+fleets of the Hebrides, Arran, Cantyre and Man, and the borders of Alba
+in general, and they fell in with the other fleet and a naval battle
+was fiercely and spiritedly fought between them. They continued the
+conflict from, the beginning of the day till evening, but the foreign
+fleet was defeated." This records perhaps the only lesson learned from
+the Norsemen, the art of naval warfare. We may regret that the new
+knowledge was not turned to a more national end.
+
+Four years later, "a wicker bridge was made by Ruaidri Ua Concobar at
+Athlone, for the purpose of making incursions into Meath. There was a
+pacific meeting between Ruaidri Ua Concobar and Tigearnan, and they made
+peace, and took mutual oaths before sureties and relics." This is our
+first meeting with a king as remarkable in his way as the great
+archbishop his contemporary. Ruaidri descendant of Concobar was king of
+Connacht, holding the land from the western ocean up to the great
+frontier of the river Shannon. Eager to plunder his neighbors and bring
+back "a countless number of cows," he undertook this wonderful work, a
+pile bridge across the river, seemingly the first of its kind to be
+built there, and in structure very like the famous bridge which Caesar
+built across the Rhine,--or like many of the wooden bridges across the
+upper streams of the Danube at the present day. We shall record a few
+more of this enterprising and large-minded prince's undertakings,
+following the course of the years.
+
+In parenthesis, we find a clue to the standard of value of the time in
+this record: "1161: The visitation of Osraige was made by Flaitbeartac,
+successor of Colum Kill; the tribute due to him was seven score oxen,
+but he selected, as a substitute for these, four hundred and twenty
+ounces of pure silver." The price of an ox was, therefore, three ounces
+of silver. The old-time barter, an echo of which still lingers in the
+word "pecuniary" from the Latin name for "cattle," was evidently
+yielding to the more convenient form of exchange through the medium of
+the metals, which are easily carried and divided, and suffer no
+detriment from the passage of time. With the wicker bridge and the
+lime-kiln, this change from a tribute in cattle to a payment in silver
+may remind us that we are on the threshold of the modern world.
+
+In 1162 we find the king of Connacht in a new adventure: "An army was
+led by Muirceartac Ua Lochlain, accompanied by the people of the north
+of Ireland, the men of Meath, and a battalion of the Connacht men, to
+At-Cliat, to lay siege to the Foreigners and the Irish; but Ua Lochlain
+retired without battle or hostages after having plundered the Fair
+Strangers. A peace was afterwards concluded between the Foreigners and
+the Gaels; and six score ounces of gold were given by the Foreigners to
+Ua Lochlain, and five score ounces of gold were paid by Diarmaid Ua
+Maelseaclain to Ruaidri Ua Concobar for West Meath." Here again we see
+the "countless cows" giving place to counted gold in the levying of
+tribute. We note also, in the following year, that "a lime-kiln
+measuring seventy feet every way was made by the successor of Colum Kill
+and the clergy of Colum Kill in twenty days," in evident emulation of
+the work of the Armagh see.
+
+The synod already recorded as having been held in the little island of
+Saint Patrick off the Dublin coast, gives us a general view of the
+church at that time, the number of sees and parishes, and the spirit
+animating them. We gain a like view of the civil state in the record of
+a great assembly convened in 1167 by the energetic and enterprising
+Connacht king: "A great meeting was called together by Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar and the chiefs of Leat Cuin, both lay and ecclesiastic, and the
+chiefs of At-boy,--the Yellow Ford across one of the streams of the
+Boyne in Meath. To it came the successor of Patrick, the archbishop of
+Connacht, the archbishop of Leinster, the lord of Breifne, the lord of
+Oirgialla, the king of Ulster, the king of Tara, and Ragnall son of
+Ragnall, lord of the Foreigners. The whole of their gathering and
+assemblage was 19,000 horsemen, of which 6000 were Connachtmen, 4000
+with the lord of Breifne, 2000 with the king of Tara, 4000 with the lord
+of Oirgialla and the king of Ulster, 2000 with the chief of Ui-Failge,
+and 1000 with the Foreigners of At-Cliat. They passed many good
+resolutions at this meeting, respecting veneration for churches and
+clerics, and control of tribes and territories, so that women used to
+traverse Ireland alone; and a restoration of his prey was made by the
+chief of the Ui-Failge at the hands of the kings aforesaid. They
+afterwards separated in peace and amity, without battle or controversy,
+or without anyone complaining of another at that meeting, in consequence
+of the prosperousness of the king, who had assembled these chiefs with
+their forces at one place."
+
+Here is a foreshadowing of the representative assemblies of our modern
+times, and the same wise spirit is shown in another event of the same
+year, thus recorded: "A hosting and a mustering of the men of Ireland,
+with their chieftains, by Ruaidri Ua Concobar; thither came the lord of
+Deas-muma, the lord of Tuaid-muma, the king of Meath, the lord of
+Oirgialla and all the chieftains of Leinster. They arrived in
+Tir-Eogain, and allotted the part of it north of Slieve Gullion,--now
+the eastern part of Derry,--to Nial Ua Lochlain for two hostages, and
+allotted the part of the country of the clan to the south of the
+mountain to Aed Ua Neill for two other hostages. Then the men of Ireland
+returned back southwards over Slieve Fuaid, through Tir-Eogain and
+Tir-Connaill, and over Assaroe--the Cataract of the Erne--and Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar escorted the lord of Deas-muma with his forces southwards
+through Tuaid-muma as far as Cnoc-Ain�--in Limerick--and the lord of
+Deas-muma departed with gifts of many jewels and riches."
+
+While the Norse foreigners were a power at Dublin, Waterford, Cork and
+Limerick, there were not wanting occasions when one of the native tribes
+called on them for aid against another tribe, sharing with them the joys
+of victory or the sorrow of defeat, and, where fortune favored, dividing
+with them the "countless cows" taken in a raid. In like manner the
+Cinel Eogain, as we saw, hired the fleet of the Norsemen of the Western
+Isles of Scotland to help them to resist a raid of the Connachtmen. The
+example thus set was followed repeatedly in the coming years, and we
+find mention of Flemings, Welshmen and Saxons brought over to take one
+side or other in the tribal wars.
+
+In the same year that saw the two assemblings of the chieftains under
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar, another chieftain, Diarmaid son of Murcad brought
+in from "the land of the Saxons," as it was called, one of these bands
+of foreign mercenaries, for the most part Welsh descendants of the old
+Gaelic Britons, to aid him in his contest for "the kingdom of the sons
+of Ceinnsealaig." Two years later, Ruaidri Ua Concobar "granted ten cows
+every year from himself and from every king that should follow him for
+ever, to the Lector of Ard Maca, in honor of Patrick, to instruct the
+youths of Ireland and Alba in Literature."
+
+For the next year, 1170, we find this record: "Robert Mac Stepni and
+Ricard Mac Gillebert--Iarl Strangbow--came from Saxonland into Erin with
+a numerous force, and many knights and archers, in the army of the son
+of Murcad, to contest Leinster for him, and to disturb the Gaels of
+Erin in general; and the son of Murcad gave his daughter to Iarl
+Strangbow for coming into his army. They took Loch Garman--Wexford--and
+Port Lairge--Waterford--by force; and they took Gillemaire the officer
+of the fortress and Ua Faelain lord of the Deisi and his son, and they
+killed seven hundred persons there. Domnall Breagac with numbers of the
+men of Breag fell by the Leinstermen on that occasion. An army was led
+by Ruaidri Ua Concobar with the lord of Breifne and the lord of
+Oirgialla against Leinster and the Foreigners aforesaid, and there was a
+challenge of battle between them for the space of three days." This
+contest was indecisive. The most noteworthy event of the battle was the
+plundering and slaughter of the Danes of At-Cliat by the newcomers under
+Iarl Strangbow. The Danes had long before this given up their old pagan
+faith, converted by their captives and their Gaelic neighbors. Christ
+Church Cathedral in At-Cliat or Dublin was founded early in the
+preceding century by Sitric son of Olaf, king of the Danes of Dublin,
+and Donatus the first Danish bishop; but the oldest part of the present
+structure belongs to the time we are now speaking of: the close of the
+twelfth century. The transepts with their chevron mouldings and the
+principal doorway are of that period, and we may regard them as an
+offering in expiation of the early heathen raids on Lambay, Saint
+Patrick's Isle, and the early schools of the church.
+
+The ambitious Diarmaid Mac Murcad died shortly after the last battle we
+have recorded, "perishing without sacrament, of a loathsome disease;" a
+manifest judgment, in the eyes of the Chronicler, for the crime of
+bringing the Normans to Ireland. In the year that saw his death, "Henry
+the Second, king of the Saxons and duke of the Normans, came to Ireland
+with two hundred and forty ships." He established a footing in the land,
+as one of many contesting powers, but the immediate results of his
+coming were slight. This we can judge from the record of three years
+later: "A brave battle was fought by the Foreigners under Iarl Strangbow
+and the Gaels under Ruaidri Ua Concobar at Thurles, in which the
+Foreigners were finally defeated by dint of fighting. Seventeen hundred
+of the Foreigners were slain in the battle, and only a few of them
+survived with the Iarl, who proceeded in sorrow to his home at Port
+Lairge--Waterford." Iarl Strangbow died two years later at Dublin.
+
+Norman warriors continue to appear during the succeeding years,
+fighting against the native chieftains and against each other, while the
+native chieftains continue their own quarrels, just as in the days of
+the first Norse raids. Thus in the year of Iarl Strangbow's death, Kells
+was laid waste by the Foreigners in alliance with the native Ui-Briain,
+while later in the same year the Foreigners were driven from Limerick by
+Domnall Ua-Briain, who laid siege to them and forced them to surrender.
+
+Two years later, four hundred and fifty of the followers of De Courcy,
+another great Norman warrior, were defeated at Maghera Conall in Louth,
+some being drowned in the river, while others were slain on the
+battlefield. In the same year De Courcy was again defeated with great
+slaughter in Down, and escaped severely wounded to Dublin. For At-Cliat,
+from being a fortress of the Danes and Norsemen, was gradually becoming
+a Norman town. The doorway of Christ Church Cathedral, which dates from
+about this time, is of pure Norman style.
+
+In 1186 we find a son of the great Ruaidri Ua Concobar paying a band of
+these same Foreigners three thousand cows as "wages," for joining him in
+some plundering expedition against his neighbors. The genius of strife
+reigned supreme, and the newcomers were as completely under its sway as
+the old clansmen. Just as we saw the Dark Norsemen of the ninth century
+coming in their long ships to plunder the Fair Norsemen of At-Cliat, and
+the Fair Norsemen not less vigorously retaliating, so now we find wars
+breaking out among the Normans who followed in the steps of the
+Norsemen. In 1205 the Norman chieftain who held a part of Meath under
+his armed sway, and who had already built a strong castle at Kells, was
+at war with the De Bermingham family, who at that time held the old
+Danish stronghold of Limerick. Two years later another contest broke out
+between the De Berminghams and William Marescal, and yet another
+struggle between Hugo de Lacy and De Bermingham, very disastrous to the
+retainers of the latter, for the Chronicler tells us that "nearly all
+his people were ruined."
+
+Thus the old life of tribal struggle went on. The country was wealthy,
+full of cattle and herds, silver and gold, stored corn and fruit, rich
+dyed stuffs and ornaments. The chieftains and provincial kings lived in
+state within their forts, with their loyal warriors around them,
+feasting and making merry, and the bards and heralds recited for their
+delight the great deeds of the men of old, their forefathers; the
+harpers charmed or saddened them with the world-old melodies that
+Deirdr� had played for Naisi, that Meave had listened to, that Cred�
+sang for her poet lover.
+
+The life of the church was not less vigorous and vital. There are many
+churches and cathedrals of that period of transition, as of the epoch
+before the first Norman came, which show the same fervor and devotion,
+the same faith made manifest by works of beauty. In truth no country in
+the world has so full and rich a record in lasting stone, beginning with
+the dwellings of the early saints who had seen the first Messenger face
+to face, and passing down through age after age, showing the life and
+growth of the faith from generation to generation.
+
+The schools, as we saw, carried on the old classical tradition, bringing
+forth monuments like the Annals of Tigearnac; and there was the same
+vigor and vital force in every part of the nation's life. The coming of
+the Normans changed this in no essential regard. There was something
+added in architecture, the Norman modifying the old native style; the
+castle and keep gradually taking the place of the earthwork and stone
+fort. And in the tenure of land certain new principles were introduced.
+But the sum of national life went on unbroken, less modified, probably,
+than it had been by the old Norse raids.
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+THE NORMANS.
+
+A.D. 1250-1603.
+
+When summing up each epoch of Irish history, we may find both interest
+and profit in considering what the future of the land and the people
+might have been had certain new elements not been added. Thus we may try
+to picture to ourselves what would have been our history had our life
+moved forward from the times of Cuculain and Concobar, of Find and
+Cormac son of Art, without that transforming power which the fifth
+century brought. We may imagine the tribal strife and stress growing
+keener and fiercer, till the whole life and strength of the people was
+fruitlessly consumed in plundering and destroying.
+
+Or we may imagine an unbroken continuance of the epoch of saintly
+aspiration, the building of churches, the illumination of holy books, so
+dividing the religious from the secular community as almost to make two
+nations in one, a nation altogether absorbed in the present life, with
+another nation living in its midst, but dwelling wholly in the thought
+of the other world. Religion would have grown to superstition, ecstasy
+would have ruled in the hearts of the religious devotees, weakening
+their hold on the real, and wafting them away into misty regions of
+paradise. We should have had every exaggeration of ascetic practice,
+hermitages multiplying among the rocks and islands of the sea, men and
+women torturing their bodies for the saving of their souls.
+
+The raids of the Norsemen turned the strong aspirations of the religious
+schools into better channels, bringing them to a sense of their identity
+with the rest of the people, compelling them to bear their part of the
+burden of calamity and strife. The two nations which might have wandered
+farther and farther apart were thus welded into one, so that the spirit
+of religion became what it has ever since remained, something essential
+and inherent in the life of the whole people.
+
+After the waning of the Norsemen, a period opened full of great national
+promise in many ways. We see the church strengthened and confirmed,
+putting forth its power in admirable works of art, churches and
+cathedrals full of the fire and fervor of devotion, and conceived in a
+style truly national, with a sense of beauty altogether its own. Good
+morals and generous feeling mark the whole life of the church through
+this period, and the great archbishop whose figure we have drawn in
+outline is only one of many fine and vigorous souls among his
+contemporaries.
+
+[Illustration: Dunluce Castle.]
+
+The civil life of the nation, too, shows signs of singular promise at
+the same time, a promise embodied in the person of the king of Connacht,
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar, some of whose deeds we have recorded. There was a
+clearer sense of national feeling and national unity than ever before, a
+recognition of the method of conciliation and mutual understanding,
+rather than the old appeal to armed force, as under the genius of tribal
+strife. We see Ruaidri convoking the kings, chieftains and warriors to a
+solemn assembly, presided over by the king and the archbishops of the
+realm, and "passing good resolutions" for the settlement of religious
+and civil matters, and the better ordering of territories and tribes.
+That assembly was convened a half-century before the famous meeting
+between King John and his barons, at Runnymead among the Windsor
+meadows; and the seed then sown might have brought forth fruit as full
+of promise and potency for the future as the Great Charter itself. The
+contrast between these two historic assemblies is instructive. In the
+one case, we have a provincial king from the rich and beautiful country
+beyond the Shannon, gradually gaining such influence over the kings of
+the provinces and the chieftains of the tribes that he had come to be
+regarded as in a sense the overlord of the whole land, not through
+inherent sovreignty or divine right, but first as the chosen chief of
+his own tribe, and then as the elect of the whole body of chieftains,
+first among his peers. In this character we see Ruaidri settling
+disputes between two sections of the great Northern clan, and fixing a
+boundary between them; giving presents to the chieftains of the south
+for their support in this difficult decision, and exercising a
+beneficent influence over the whole people, a moral sway rather than a
+sovereign and despotic authority. It is pleasant to find the same king
+establishing a college foundation for the instruction of the youth of
+Ireland and Scotland in literature.
+
+This is what we have on the one hand. On the other, we have the Norman
+king surrounded by his barons, over whom he claimed, but could not
+exercise, despotic authority; and the Norman barons taking advantage of
+his necessity to extort promises and privileges for their own order
+rather than for the whole people. For we must remember that the Angles
+and Saxons had been reduced by conquest to a servile condition, from
+which they never wholly recovered. The ruling classes of Britain at the
+present day are at least nominal descendants of those same Norman
+barons; and between them and the mass of the people--the sons of the
+Saxons and Angles--there is still a great gulf fixed. It is quite
+impossible for one of the tillers of the soil to stand on a footing of
+equality with the old baronial class, and the gulf has widened, rather
+than closed, since the battle of Hastings and the final overthrow of the
+Saxon power.
+
+We see here the full contrast between the ideal of kingship in Ireland
+and that which grew up among the Norman conquerors of the Saxons. The
+Irish king was always in theory and often in fact a real representative,
+duly elected by the free suffrage of his tribesmen; he was not owner of
+the tribal land, as the duke of the Normans was; he was rather the
+leader of the tribe, chosen to guard their common possessions. The
+communal system of Ireland stands here face to face with the feudal
+system of the Normans.
+
+It would be a study of great interest to consider what form of national
+life might have resulted in Ireland from the free growth of this
+principle of communal chieftainship. There are many analogies in other
+lands, all of which point to the likelihood of a slow emergence of the
+hereditary principle; a single family finally overtopping the whole
+nation. Had this free development taken place, we might have had a
+strong and vigorous national evolution, an abundant flowering of all our
+energies and powers through the Middle Ages, a rich and vigorous
+production of art and literature, equal to the wonderful blossoming of
+genius in the Val d'Arno and Venice and Rome; but we should have missed
+something much greater than all these; something towards which events
+and destiny have been leading us, through the whole of the Middle Ages
+and modern times.
+
+From this point forward we shall have to trace the working of that
+destiny, not manifested in a free blossoming and harvesting of our
+national life, but rather in the suppression and involution of our
+powers; in a development arrested by pressure from without and kept thus
+suspended until the field was ready for its real work. Had our fate been
+otherwise, we might now be looking back to a great mediaeval past, as
+Spain and Austria look back; it is fated that we shall look not back but
+forwards, brought as we are by destiny into the midst of the modern
+world, a people with energy unimpaired, full of vigorous vital force,
+uncorrupted by the weakening influence of wealth, taught by our own
+history the measureless evil of oppression, and therefore cured once for
+all of the desire to dominate others. Finally, the intense inner life
+towards which we have been led by the checking of our outward energies
+has opened to us secrets of the invisible world which are of untold
+value, of measureless promise for all future time.
+
+We have, therefore, to trace the gradual involution of our national
+life; the checking and restraining of that free development which would
+assuredly have been ours, had our national life grown forward unimpeded
+and uninfluenced from without, from the days when the Norse power waned.
+The first great check to that free development came from the feudal
+system, the principle of which was brought over by Robert FitzStephen,
+Richard FitzGilbert, the De Courcys, the De Lacys, the De Berminghams
+and their peers, whose coming we have recorded. They added new elements
+to the old struggle of district against district, tribe against tribe,
+but they added something more enduring--an idea and principle destined
+almost wholly to supplant the old communal tenure which was the genius
+of the native polity. The outward and visible sign of that new principle
+was manifested in the rapid growth of feudal castles, with their strong
+keeps, at every point of vantage gained by the Norman lords. They were
+lords of the land, not leaders of the tribe, and their lordship was
+fitly symbolized in the great gloomy towers of stone that everywhere
+bear witness to their strength, almost untouched as they are by the
+hand of time.
+
+When the duke of the Normans overthrew the Saxon king at Hastings, he
+became real owner of the soil of England. His barons and lords held
+their estates from him, in return for services to be rendered to him
+direct. To reward them for supporting him, first in that decisive
+battle, and then in whatever contests he might engage in, they were
+granted the right to tax certain tracts of country, baronies, earldoms,
+or counties, according to the title they bore. This tax was exacted
+first in service, then in produce, and finally in coin. It was the
+penalty of conquest, the tribute of the subject Saxons and Angles.
+There was no pretence of a free contract; no pretence that the baron
+returned to the farmer or laborer an equal value for the tax thus
+exacted. It was tribute pure and simple, with no claim to be anything
+else. That system of tribute has been consecrated in the land tenure of
+England, and the class enriched by that tribute, and still bearing the
+territorial titles which are its hall-mark, has always been, as it is
+to-day, the dominant class alike in political and social life. In other
+words, the Norman subjugation of Saxon and Angle is thoroughly effective
+at this moment.
+
+This principle of private taxation, as a right granted by the sovereign,
+came over to Ireland with the De Courcys and De Lacys and their like.
+But it by no means overspread Ireland in a single tide, as in England,
+after Hastings was lost and won. Its progress was slow; so slow, indeed,
+that the old communal system lingers here and there at the present day.
+The communal chiefs lived their lives side by side with the Norman
+barons, fighting now with the barons, now with each other; and the same
+generous rivalry, as we have seen, led to abundant fighting among the
+barons also. The principle of feudal ownership was working its way,
+however. We shall see later how great was its ultimate influence,--not
+so much by direct action, as in the quite modern reaction which its
+abuse provoked--a reaction from which have been evolved certain
+principles of value to the whole world.
+
+Leaving this force to work its way through the centuries, we may turn
+now to the life of the times as it appeared to the men and women who
+lived in them, and as they themselves have recorded it. We shall find
+fewer great personalities; nor should we expect this to be otherwise, if
+we are right in thinking that the age of struggle, with its
+efflorescence of great persons, had done its work, and was already
+giving way before the modern spirit, with its genius for the universal
+rather than the personal. We shall have contests to chronicle during the
+following centuries, whether engendered within or forced upon us from
+without; but they are no longer the substance of our history. They are
+only the last clouds of a departing storm; the mists before the dawn of
+the modern world.
+
+The most noteworthy of these contests in the early Norman age was the
+invasion under Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king, who brought a
+great fleet and army to Larne, then as now the Irish port nearest to the
+northern kingdom. The first sufferers by this invasion were the Normans
+of Heath, and we presently find these same Normans allied with Feidlimid
+son of Aed Ua Concobar and the Connachtmen, fighting side by side
+against the common foe. This was in 1315; two years later Robert Bruce
+joined his brother, and it was not till 1319 that Edward Bruce finally
+fell at Dundalk, "and no achievement had been performed in Ireland for a
+long time before," the Chronicler tells us, "from which greater benefit
+had accrued to the country than from this; for during the three and a
+half years that Edward had spent in it, a universal famine prevailed to
+such a degree that men were wont to devour one another."
+
+A ray of light is thus shed on the intellectual and moral life of the
+time: "1398: Garrett Earl of Desmond--or Deas-muma--a cheerful and
+courteous man, who excelled all the Normans and many of the Irish in the
+knowledge of the Irish language, poetry, history and other learning,
+died after the victory of peace." We see that the Normans are already
+fallen under the same influence of assimilation which had transformed
+the Danes two hundred years before.
+
+A half-century later, we get a vigorous and lurid picture of the
+survival of the old tribal strife: "1454: Donell O'Donell was installed
+in the lordship of Tyrconnell, in opposition to Rury O'Donell. Not long
+after this, Donell was treacherously taken captive and imprisoned in the
+castle of Inis--an island in Lough Swilly. As soon as Rury received
+tidings of this, he mustered an army thither, and proceeded to demolish
+the castle in which Donell was imprisoned with a few men to guard him.
+Rury and his army burned the great door of the castle, and set the
+stairs on fire; whereupon Donell, thinking that his life would be taken
+as soon as the army should reach the castle,--it being his dying
+request, as he thought--that he might be loosed from his fetters, as he
+deemed it a disgrace to be killed while imprisoned and fettered. His
+request was granted, and he was loosed from his fetters; after which he
+ascended to the battlements of the castle, to view the motions of the
+invading army. And he saw Rury beneath, with eyes flashing enmity, and
+waiting until the fire should subside, that he might enter and kill him.
+Donell then, finding a large stone by his side, hurled it directly down
+upon Rury, so that it fell on the crest of his helmet, on the top of his
+head, and crushed it, so that he instantly died. The invading forces
+were afterwards defeated, and by this throw Donell saved his own life
+and acquired the lordship of Tyrconnell."
+
+There is a whole historical romance in that single picture; the passage
+could not easily be surpassed for direct and forcible narrative. A few
+years later, we come on one of the most amusing things in the whole
+series of annals, a perfect contrast to the grim ferocity of the feud of
+the O'Donells. In 1472 "a wonderful animal was sent to Ireland by the
+king of England. She resembled a mare, and was of a yellow color, with
+the hoofs of a cow, a long neck, a very large head, a large tail, which
+was ugly and scant of hair. She had a saddle of her own. Wheat and salt
+were her usual food. She used to draw the largest sled-burden behind
+her. She used to kneel when passing under any doorway, however high, and
+also to let her rider mount." It is evident that the Gaelic language in
+the fifteenth century lacked a name for the camel. The same year, we are
+told, "the young earl of Desmond was set at liberty by the MacCarthys;
+he disabled Garrett, son of the earl of Kildare."
+
+Here is another passage which vies in vividness and force with the story
+of the death of Rury O'Donell: "1557: Two spies, Donough and Maurice by
+name, entered the camp of John O'Neill by Lough Swilly, and mingled with
+the troop without being noticed; for in consequence of the number and
+variety of the troops who were there, it was not easy for them to
+discriminate between one another, even if it were day, except by
+recognizing their chieftains alone. The two persons aforesaid proceeded
+from one fire to another, until they came to the great central fire,
+which was at the entrance of the son of O'Neill's tent; and a huge
+torch, thicker than a man's body, was continually flaming at a short
+distance from the fire, and sixty grim and redoubtable warriors with
+sharp, keen axes, terrible and ready for action, and sixty stern and
+terrific Scots, with massive, broad and heavy striking swords in their
+hands, ready to strike and parry, were guarding the son of O'Neill. When
+the time came for the troops to dine, and food was divided and
+distributed among them, the two spies whom we have mentioned stretched
+out their hands to the distributor like the rest, and that which fell to
+their share was a measure of meal, and a suitable complement of butter.
+With this testimony of their adventure they returned to their
+own people."
+
+Here again, what a picture of the camp-life of the age; the darkness of
+night, the great central fire with the sixty grim and redoubtable
+warriors armed with keen axes, terrible and ready for action, and the
+sixty stern and terrific Scots with their massive swords. The admirable
+manner of the narrative is as striking as the fierce vigor of the life
+portrayed. So we might go on, adding red pages of martial records, but
+in reality adding nothing to our understanding of the times. The life of
+the land was as full and abundant as of old, and one outcome of that
+life we may touch on rather more at length.
+
+We have said much of the old religious schools of Ireland, with their
+fine and vigorous intellectual life, which did so much to carry forward
+the torch of culture to our modern world. For nearly seven hundred years
+these great schools seem to have developed wholly along indigenous
+lines, once they had accepted the body of classical culture from the
+Roman Empire, then tottering to its fall. The full history of that
+remarkable chapter in the world's spiritual life has yet to be written;
+but this we can foretell, that when written, it will abound with rich
+material and ample evidence of a sound and generous culture, inspired
+throughout with the fervor of true faith.
+
+About the time when the Norman warriors began to mingle with the
+fighting chieftains of the old native tribes, a change came over the
+religious history of the country. After sending forth men of power and
+light to the awakening lands of modern Europe, Ireland began to receive
+a returning tide, to reap a harvest from these same lands, in the friars
+and abbots of the great Continental orders founded by men like Saint
+Bernard, Saint Dominick and Saint Francis of Assisi. A change in the
+church architecture of the period visibly records this spiritual change;
+continental forms appear, beginning with the rounded arches of the
+Normans, and passing gradually into the various forms of pointed arches
+which we know as Gothic. Very beautiful Abbeys belonging to this epoch
+remain everywhere throughout the island, making once more evident--what
+strikes us at every point of our study--that no country in the world is
+so rich in these lasting records of every step of our national life,
+whether in pagan or Christian times.
+
+We have said much of the archaic cromlechs. We have recorded the great
+Pyramids by the Boyne telling us of the genius of the De Danaans. The
+Milesian epoch is even now revealed to us in the great earthworks of
+Tara and Emain and Cruacan. We can, if we wish, climb the mound of
+heaped-up earth where was the fortress of Cuculain, or look over the
+green plains from the hill of Find.
+
+[Illustration: Mellifont Abbey, Co. Louth.]
+
+In like manner, there is an unbroken series of monuments through the
+early Christian epoch, beginning with the oratories of the sixth
+century, continuing through the early churches of Killiney, Moville,
+Dalkey, Glendalough and Monasterboice, from before the Norse inroads;
+followed by the epoch of Round Towers, or protected belfries, with their
+churches, nearly three score of these Round Towers remaining in fair
+preservation, while many are perfect from base to apex; and culminating
+in Cormac's chapel and the beautiful group of buildings on Cashel Rock.
+For the next period, the age of transition after the waning of the
+Norsemen and the coming of the first Normans, we have many monuments in
+the Norman style, like the door of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin,
+with its romance of Danish conversion and Norse religious fervor.
+
+Finally, we come to the age whose progress we have just recorded, which
+covers the whole of the Middle Ages. For this period, which was for
+Ireland an epoch of foreign influence much more than of foreign rule, we
+have many beautiful Abbeys, built for those foreign orders whose coming
+was in a sense a return tide, a backward flow of the old missionary
+spirit which went forth from Ireland over nascent modern Europe. The
+life of these abbeys was full of rich imaginative and religious power;
+it abounded in urbanity and ripe culture of a somewhat selfish and
+exclusive type. Yet we cannot but feel a limitless affection and
+sympathy for the abbots and friars of the days of old who have left us
+such a rich heritage of beauty and grace.
+
+All these abbeys seem to have been formed on a single plan: a cruciform
+church symbolized the source of all their inspiration, its choir
+extending towards the east, whence the Light had come; the nave, or main
+body of the church, was entered by the great western door, and the arms
+of the cross, the transepts, extended to the north and south. Here is a
+very beautiful symbol, a true embodiment of the whole spirit and
+inspiration of the monastic orders. From one of the transepts a side
+door generally led to the domestic buildings, the dormitory, the
+refectory, the chapter house, where the friars assembled in conclave
+under the presidency of the abbot. There were lesser buildings,
+store-rooms, granaries, work-rooms, but these were the kernel of the
+establishment. The church was the center of all things, and under its
+floor the friars were at last laid to rest, while brother friars carved
+tombs for them and epitaphs, adding a new richness of decoration to the
+already beautiful church.
+
+We may record a few of these old foundations, showing at the same time
+the present state of the old abbey buildings. At Newtown on the northern
+bank of the Boyne, about a mile below Trim, Simon Rochfort founded an
+abbey for the Augustinian Canons in 1206, dedicating it to Saint Peter
+and Saint Paul. The capitals of the pillars in the church, the vaulting
+of the roof and the shafts of the arches which supported the tower are
+full of singular grace and beauty, even now when the abbey is roofless
+and in part destroyed, while the corbels and mouldings round the
+lancet-shaped windows are full of luxuriant fancy and charm. We can
+divine from them the full and rich spiritual life which brought forth
+such exquisite flowers of beauty; we can imagine the fine aroma of
+fervor and saintly peace which brooded over these consecrated aisles.
+
+A few miles below Trim, and an equal distance from the old royal palace
+of Tara, Bective Abbey stands on the northern bank of the Boyne, with a
+square, battlemented tower overshadowing its cloistered quadrangle. The
+cinque-foil cloister arches, the fillets that bind the clustered shafts
+of the pillars, the leaf ornaments of the plinths at their base all
+speak of a luxuriant sense of beauty and grace, of a spirit of pure and
+admirable artistic work. This rich creative power thus breaking forth in
+lovely handiwork is only the outward sign of a full inner life, kindled
+by the fire of aspiration, and glowing with the warm ardor of devotion.
+Bective Abbey dates from about 1150. We are told that the king of Meath
+who founded it for the Cistercian order "endowed it with two hundred and
+forty-five acres of land, a fishing-weir and a mill." From this meager
+outline we can almost restore the picture of the life, altogether
+idyllic and full of quiet delight, that the old Friars lived among the
+meadows of the Boyne.
+
+Grey Abbey was founded a little later, in 1193, for the same Cistercian
+order, where the promontory of the Ards divides Strangford Lough from
+the eastern sea. Over the waters of the lough, the red sandstone hills
+of north Down make a frame for the green of the meadows, as the tide
+laps and murmurs close to the old monastic church. Grey Abbey owes its
+foundation to the piety of a princess of the Isle of Man, wedded to De
+Courcy, the Norman warrior whose victories and defeats we have recorded.
+The great beauty of its church is due to the soaring loftiness of the
+eastern window, and the graceful daring of the arches which in former
+days upheld the central tower.
+
+Other Cistercian foundations are commemorated in the names of
+Abbey-leix in Queen's county, and Abbey-dorney and Abbey-feale in Kerry;
+all three dating from after the reformation of the order by Saint
+Bernard the Younger, though the work of that ardent missionary did not
+apparently extend its influence to Ireland until a later date. This
+reformer of the Cistercians must not be confused with the elder Saint
+Bernard, whose hospice guards the pass of the Alps which bears his name.
+Saint Bernard of the Alps died in 1008, while Saint Bernard the reformer
+was born in 1093, dying sixty years later as abbot of Clara vallis or
+Clairvaux, on the bank of the Aube in northern France. It was at this
+Abbey of the Bright Vale, or Clara vallis, that Archbishop Maelmaedog
+resigned his spirit to heaven, five years before the death of the
+younger Saint Bernard, then abbot there. This is a link between the old
+indigenous church and the continental orders of the Friars.
+
+Killmallock Abbey, in Limerick, belonged to the order of the Dominicans,
+founded by the scion of the Guzmans, the ardent apostle of Old Castile,
+known to history as Saint Dominick. Here again we have a beautiful abbey
+church with a square central tower, upborne on soaring and graceful
+arches from the point where the nave joined the choir. There is only one
+transept--on the south--so that the church is not fully cruciform, a
+peculiarity shared by several other Dominican buildings. The eastern
+window and the window of this transept are full of delicate grace and
+beauty, each containing five lights, and marked by the singularly
+charming manner in which the mullions are interlaced above. Enough
+remains of the cloister and the domestic buildings for us to bring back
+to life the picture of the old monastic days, when the good Friars
+worked and prayed there, with the sunlight falling on them through the
+delicate network of the windows.
+
+Holycross Abbey, near Thurles in Tipperary, was another of the
+Cistercian foundations, its charter, dating from 1182, being still in
+existence. Its church is cruciform; the nave is separated from the north
+aisle by round arches, and from the south aisle by pointed arches, which
+gives it a singular and unusual beauty. The great western window of the
+nave, with its six lights, is also very wonderful. Two chapels are
+attached to the north transept, with a passage between them, its roof
+supported by a double row of pointed arches upheld by twisted pillars.
+The roof is delicately groined, as is the roof of the choir, and the
+whole abbey breathes a luxuriant richness of imagination, bearing
+everywhere the signs of high creative genius. The same lavish
+imagination is shown everywhere in the interlaced tracery, the black
+limestone giving the artist an admirable vehicle for his work. Though
+the charter dates from the twelfth century, some of the work is about
+two centuries later, showing finely the continuity of life and spiritual
+power in the old monastic days.
+
+[Illustration: Holy Cross Abbey, Co. Tipperary.]
+
+The Friars of Saint Augustine, who were in possession of the abbey at
+Newtown on the Boyne, had another foundation not far from West port in
+Mayo, in the Abbey of Ballintober, founded in 1216 by a son of the great
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar. Here also we have the cruciform church, with four
+splendid arches rising from the intersection of nave and choir, and once
+supporting the tower. The Norman windows over the altar, with their
+dog-tooth mouldings, are very perfect. In a chapel on the south of the
+choir are figures of the old abbots carved in stone.
+
+One of the Ui-Briain founded a Franciscan Abbey at Ennis in Clare about
+1240, which is more perfectly preserved than any of those we have
+described. The tower still stands, rising over the junction of nave and
+choir; the refectory, chapter house, and some other buildings still
+remain, while the figure of the patron, Saint Francis of Assisi, still
+stands beside the altar at the north pier of the nave.
+
+Clare Abbey, a mile from Ennis, was founded for the Augustine Friars in
+1195, and here also the tower still stands, dominating the surrounding
+plain. Three miles further south, on the shore of Killone Lake, was yet
+another abbey of the same period, while twenty miles to the north, at
+Corcomroe on the shore of Galway Bay, the Cistercians had yet
+another home.
+
+We might continue the list indefinitely. Some of the most beautiful of
+our abbeys still remain to be recorded, but we can do no more than give
+their names: Bonamargy was built for the Franciscans in Antrim in the
+fifteenth century; the Dominican priory at Roscommon dates from 1257;
+the Cistercian Abbey of Jerpoint in Kilkenny was begun in 1180; Molana
+Abbey, in Waterford, was built for the Augustinians on the site of a
+very old church; and finally Knockmoy Abbey in Galway, famous for its
+fourteenth century frescoes, was begun in 1189. We must remember that
+every one of these represents, and by its variations of style indicates,
+an unbroken life through several centuries. The death-knell of the old
+life of the abbeys and priories, in Ireland as in England, was struck in
+the year 1537 by the law which declared their lands forfeited to the
+crown; as the result of the religious controversies of the beginning of
+the sixteenth century.
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.
+
+A.D. 1603-1660.
+
+The confiscation of the abbey lands, as the result of religious
+controversy, closed an epoch of ecclesiastical life in Ireland, which we
+cannot look back on without great regret for the noble and beautiful
+qualities it brought forth in such abundance. There is a perennial charm
+and fascination in the quiet life of the old religious houses--in the
+world, yet not of the world--which appeals to aesthetic and moral
+elements in our minds in equal degree. From their lovely churches and
+chapter-houses the spirits of the old monks invite us to join them in an
+unworldly peace on earth, a renewal of the golden age, a life full of
+aspiration and self-forgetfulness, with all the burdens of egotism
+laid aside.
+
+Yet after all is said, we can hardly fail to see that out of the
+spoliation and scattering of the religious orders much good came. There
+was a danger that, like the older indigenous schools which they
+supplanted, these later foundations might divide the nation in two, all
+things within their consecrated walls being deemed holy, while all
+without was unregenerate, given up to wrath. A barrier of feelings and
+hopes thus springing up, tends to harden from year to year, till at last
+we have a religious caste grown proud and arrogant, and losing all trace
+of the spiritual fervor which is its sole reason for being.
+
+The evils which surround a wealthy church are great and easily to be
+understood, nor need we lay stress on them. There is, indeed, cause for
+wonder in the spectacle of the followers of him "who had not where to
+lay his head" become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest owners of land in
+Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses without number might
+and did often arise from this very fact. Ambition, the desire of wealth,
+the mere love of ease, led many to profess a religious life who had
+never passed through that transformation of will and understanding which
+is the essence of religion. The very purpose of religion was forgotten,
+or allowed to be hidden away under things excellent in themselves, yet
+not essential; and difference of view about these unessential things led
+to fierce and bitter controversy, and later to open strife and war.
+
+We take religion, in its human aspect, to mean the growth of a new and
+wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive consciousness of the
+individual; a superseding of the personal by the humane; a change from
+egotism to a more universal understanding; so that each shall act, not
+in order to gain an advantage over others, but rather to attain the
+greatest good for himself and others equally; that one shall not
+dominate another for his own profit, but shall rather seek to draw forth
+in that other whatever is best and truest, so that both may find their
+finest growth. Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one's
+neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul, the
+common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse from the
+beginning. Individual consciousness is in no way effaced; something new,
+wider and more humane, something universal, is added to it from above;
+something consciously common to all souls. And through the inspiration
+of that larger soul, the individual life for the first time comes to its
+true power--a power which is held by all pure souls in common.
+
+We can see that something like this was the original inspiration of the
+religious orders. Their very name of Friars or Brothers speaks of the
+ideal of a common life above egotism. They sought a new birth through
+the death of selfishness, through self-sacrifice and renunciation. All
+their life in common was a symbol of the single soul inspiring them, the
+very form of their churches bearing testimony to their devotion. More
+than that, the beauty and inspiration which still radiate from the old
+abbey buildings show how often and in how large a degree that ideal was
+actually attained.
+
+Nevertheless we can very well see how the possession of large wealth and
+costly offerings might be a hindrance to that spirit, fanning back to
+life the smouldering fires of desire. We can see even more clearly that
+the division between the secular and the religious life would tend to
+raise a moral barrier, hardening that very sense of separation which the
+humane and universal consciousness seeks to kill. Finally, we should see
+what the world has often seen: the disciples of the Nazarene dwelling in
+palaces, and vying with princes in the splendor of their retinues. This
+is hardly the way to make real the teaching of "the kingdom not of this
+world." This world, in the meaning of that saying, is the old world of
+egotism, of self-assertion, of selfish rivalry, of the sense of
+separation. The kingdom is that very realm of humane and universal
+consciousness added from above, the sense of the one soul common to all
+men and working through all men, whether they know it or not.
+
+We can, therefore, see that the confiscation of the monasteries, and
+even the persecution of the religious orders, might be the cause of
+lasting spiritual good; it was like the opening of granaries and the
+scattering of grain abroad over the fields. The religious force, instead
+of drawing men out of the world, thenceforth was compelled to work among
+all men, not creating beautiful abbeys but transforming common lives.
+Persecution was the safeguard of sincerity, the fire of purification,
+from which men's spirits came forth pure gold. Among all nations of the
+world, Ireland has long held the first place for pure morals, especially
+in the relations of sex; and this is increasingly true of those
+provinces where the old indigenous element is most firmly established.
+We may affirm that the spiritualizing of religious feeling through
+persecution has had its share in bringing this admirable result,
+working, as it did, on a race which has ever held a high ideal
+of purity.
+
+Thus out of evil comes good; out of oppression, rapacity and
+confiscation grow pure unselfishness, an unworldly ideal, a sense of the
+invisible realm. We shall presently see the same forces of rapacity and
+avarice sowing the seeds for a not less excellent harvest in the world
+of civil life.
+
+The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first Norman
+adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal recognition over
+the whole country until the seventeenth. The old communal tenure of the
+Brehon law was gradually superseded, so that, instead of innumerable
+tribal territories with elected chiefs, there grew up a system of
+estates, where the land was owned by one man and tilled by others. The
+germ of this tenure was the right of private taxation over certain
+districts, granted by the Norman duke to his barons and warriors as the
+reward for their help in battle. Feudal land tenure never was, and never
+pretended to be, a contract between cultivator and landowner for their
+mutual benefit. It was rather the right to prey on the farmer, assigned
+to the landowner by the king, and paid for in past or present services
+to the king. In other words, the head of the Norman army invited his
+officers to help themselves to a share of the cattle and crops over
+certain districts of England, and promised to aid them in securing their
+plunder, in case the Saxon cultivator was rash enough to resist. The
+baronial order presently ceased to render any real service to their
+duke, beyond upholding him that he might uphold them. But there was no
+such surcease for the Saxon cultivator. The share of his cattle and
+crops which he was compelled to give up to the Norman baron became more
+rigidly defined, more strictly exacted, with every succeeding century,
+and the whole civil state of England was built up on this principle.
+
+The baronial order assembled at Runnymead to force the hand of the king.
+From that time forward their power increased, while the king's power
+waned. But there was no Runnymead for the Saxon cultivator. He
+continued, as to this day he continues, to pay the share of his cattle
+and crops to the Norman baron or his successor, in return for
+services--no longer rendered--to the king. The whole civil state of
+England, therefore, depends on the principle of private taxation; the
+Norman barons and their successors receiving a share of the cattle and
+crops of the whole country, year after year, generation after
+generation, century after century, as payment for services long become
+purely imaginary, and even in the beginning rendered not to the
+cultivator who was taxed, but to the head of the armed invaders, who
+stood ready to enforce the payment. The Constitution of England embodies
+this very principle even now, in the twentieth century. Two of the three
+Estates,--King, Lords and Commons,--in whom the law-making power is
+vested, represent the Norman conquest, while even the third, still
+called the Lower House, boasts of being "an assembly of gentlemen," that
+is, of those who possess the right of private taxation of land, the
+right to claim a share of the cattle and crops of the whole country
+without giving anything at all in return.
+
+This is the system which English influence slowly introduced into
+Ireland, and with the reign of the first Stuarts the change was
+practically complete, guaranteed by law, and enforced by armed power.
+The tribesmen were now tenants of their former elected chief, in whom
+the ownership of the tribal land was invested; the right of privately
+taxing the tribesmen was guaranteed to the chief by law, and a share of
+all cattle and crops was his by legal right, not as head of the tribe,
+but as owner of the land, with power to dispossess the tribesmen if they
+failed to pay his tax.
+
+But very many districts had long before this come under the dominion of
+Norman adventurers, like the De Courcys, the De Lacys, and the rest, of
+whose coming we have told. They also enjoyed the right of private
+taxation over the districts under their dominion, and, naturally, had
+power to assign this right to others,--not only to their heirs, but to
+their creditors,--or even simply to sell the right of taxing a certain
+district to the highest bidder in open market.
+
+The tribal warfare of the Middle Ages had brought many of the old chiefs
+and Norman lords into open strife with the central power, with the
+result that the possessions of unsuccessful chiefs and lords were
+continually assigned by the law-courts to those who stood on the side of
+the central power, the right to tax certain districts thus changing
+hands indefinitely. The law-courts thus came into possession of a very
+potent weapon, whether for rewarding the friends or punishing the
+enemies of the central power, or simply for the payment of personal and
+partisan favors.
+
+During the reign of the first Stuarts the full significance of this
+weapon seems to have been grasped. We see an unlimited traffic in the
+right to tax; estates confiscated and assigned to time-serving
+officials, and endless abuses arising from the corruption of the courts,
+the judges being appointed by the very persons who were presently to
+invoke the law to their own profit. The tribal system was submerged,
+and the time of uncertainty was taken advantage of to introduce
+unlimited abuses, to assign to adventurers a fat share of other men's
+goods, to create a class legally owning the land, and entitled, in
+virtue of that ownership, to a share of the cattle and crops which they
+had done nothing to produce.
+
+The Stuarts were at this very time sowing the seeds of civil war in
+England by the introduction of like abuses, the story of which has been
+repeatedly told; and we are all familiar with the history of the great
+uprising which was thereby provoked, to the temporary eclipse of the
+power of the crown. The story of the like uprising at the same epoch,
+and from kindred causes, in Ireland, is much more obscure, but equally
+worth recording, and to this uprising we may now turn.
+
+Its moral causes we have already spoken of. There was, first, the
+confiscation of the abbey lands, and the transfer of church revenues and
+buildings to Anglican clergy--clergy, that is, who recognized the
+sovreign of England as the head of the church. This double confiscation
+touched the well-springs of intense animosity, the dispossessed abbots
+using all the influences of their order in foreign lands to bring about
+their re-installation, while the controversy as to the headship of the
+church aroused all the fierce and warring passions that had been raging
+on the Continent since the beginning of the sixteenth century.
+
+There were, besides, the griefs of the dispossessed chieftains, whose
+tribal lands had been given to others. Chief among these was the famous
+house of O'Neill, the descendants of Nial, the old pagan monarch whose
+wars are thought to have brought the captive of Slemish Mountain to
+Ireland. The O'Neills, like their neighbors the O'Donnells, descendants
+of Domnall, had been one of the great forces of tribal strife for eighty
+generations, and they now saw their lands confiscated and given over to
+strangers. But they were only representatives of a feeling which was
+universal; an indignant opposition to arbitrary and tyrannous
+expropriation.
+
+The head of the O'Neills had made his peace with the Tudors on the very
+day Queen Elizabeth died, and the tribal lands had been guaranteed to
+him in perpetuity. But within four years plots were set on foot by the
+central authorities, possibly acting in good faith, to dispossess him
+and the chief of the O'Donnells on a charge of treason; and in 1607
+both fled to the Continent. Their example was followed by numberless
+others, and the more restless and combative spirits among the tribesmen,
+who preferred fighting to the tilling of their fields, entered the
+continental armies in large numbers.
+
+When the chiefs of the north fled to the Continent, their lands were
+held to have reverted to the crown; and not only was the right to tax
+the produce of these lands assigned to adherents of the central power,
+but numbers of farmers from the Scottish lowlands, and in lesser degree
+from England, were brought over and settled on the old tribal territory.
+The tribesmen, with their cattle, were driven to less fertile districts,
+and the valleys were tilled by the transplanted farmers of Scotland.
+This was the Plantation of Ulster, of 1611,--four years after the flight
+of O'Neill and O'Donnell. The religious controversies of Scotland were
+thereby introduced into Ireland, so that there were three parties now in
+conflict--the old indigenous church, dispossessed of revenues and
+buildings, and even of civil rights; the Anglicans who had received
+these revenues and buildings, and, lastly, the Dissenters--Presbyterians
+and Puritans--equally opposed to both the former.
+
+The struggle between the king and Parliament of England now found an
+echo in Ireland, the Anglican party representing the king, while the
+Scottish and English newcomers sympathized with the Parliament. A
+cross-fire of interests and animosities was thus aroused, which greatly
+complicated the first elements of strife. The Parliament at Dublin was
+in the hands of the Puritan party, and was in no sense representative of
+the other elements of the country. There was a Puritan army of about ten
+thousand, as a garrison of defence for the Puritan newcomers in Ulster,
+and there were abundant materials of an opposing national army in the
+tribal warriors both at home and on the Continent.
+
+These national materials were presently drawn together by the head of
+the O'Neills, known to history as Owen Roe, an admirable leader and a
+most accomplished man, who wrote and spoke Latin, Spanish, French and
+English, as well as his mother-tongue. Owen Roe O'Neill had won renown
+on many continental battlefields, and was admirably fitted by genius and
+training to lead a national party, not only in council but in the field.
+The nucleus of his army he established in Tyrone, gaining numbers of
+recruits whom he rapidly turned into excellent soldiers.
+
+This took place at the end of 1641 and the beginning of 1642, and the
+other forces of the country were organized about the same time. The
+lines of difference between the Anglican and Catholic parties were at
+this time very lightly drawn, and the Norman lords found themselves able
+to co-operate with the Catholic bishops in forming a General Assembly at
+Kells, which straightway set itself to frame a Constitution for
+the country.
+
+The Norman lords had meanwhile assembled and organized their retainers,
+so that there were now three armies in Ireland: the garrison of the
+Scottish settlers under Monroe, strongly in sympathy with the Puritans;
+the tribal army under Owen Roe O'Neill; and the army of the Norman
+lords. The General Assembly outlined a system of parliamentary
+representation in which the Lords and Commons were to form a single
+House, the latter, two hundred and twenty-six in number, representing
+all the important cities and towns. A supreme Cabinet was to be formed,
+composed of six members for each of the four provinces, twenty-four in
+all, who might be lords spiritual or temporal, or commoners, according
+to the choice of the Parliament. This Cabinet, thus selected from the
+whole Parliament, was the responsible executive of the country; and
+under the Supreme Council a series of Provincial Councils and County
+Councils were to be formed along the same lines.
+
+[Illustration: Donegal Castle.]
+
+This plan was adopted at a general meeting of all the influential forces
+of the country, which assembled in May at Kilkenny, where many
+Parliaments had sat during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Writs
+were issued for elections under the new Constitution, and the date of
+the first assembly of the new Parliament was fixed for October. The new
+national body enjoyed abundant revenues, and no small state marked its
+deliberations in Kilkenny. We read of an endless series of
+illuminations, receptions, banquets and balls,--the whole of the Norman
+nobility of Leinster lavishing their great wealth in magnificent
+display. The Supreme Council journeyed in state from Kilkenny to
+Wexford, from Wexford to Waterford, from Waterford to Limerick and
+Galway, surrounded by hundreds of horsemen with drawn swords, and
+accompanied by an army of officials. We hear of "civil and military
+representations of comedies and stage plays, feasts and banquets, and
+palate-enticing dishes."
+
+The General Assembly, duly elected, finally met on October 23, 1642, at
+Kilkenny. On the same day was fought the battle of Edgehill, between
+the king of England and the forces of the English Parliament. This
+battle was the signal for division of counsels in the new Assembly. The
+Norman lords of Leinster, who stood on the ground of feudalism, and
+lived under the shadow of royal authority, were strongly drawn to take
+the side of the king against the English Parliament, and overtures of
+negotiation were made, which came near gaining a recognition and
+legalization of the General Assembly by the English Crown.
+
+While the leaders at Kilkenny were being drawn towards the royalists of
+England, Owen Roe O'Neill was successfully holding Ulster against the
+Puritan forces under Monroe and Leslie, with their headquarters at
+Carrickfergus. Thus matters went on till the autumn of 1643, when we
+find him inflicting a serious defeat on the English army under Monk and
+Moore at Portlester in Meath, in which Moore was killed and his forces
+driven back within the walls of Drogheda.
+
+The General Assembly continued to exercise sovreign authority at
+Kilkenny, collecting revenues, maintaining courts of justice in the
+provinces, and keeping several armies in the field, most effective of
+which was undoubtedly that of Owen Roe O'Neill. We find matters still in
+this condition three years later, in May, 1646, when Monroe and the
+Scottish forces prepared to inaugurate an offensive campaign from their
+base at Carrickfergus. General Robert Monroe had about seven thousand
+men at Carrickfergus; his brother George had five hundred at Coleraine;
+while there was a Scottish army at Derry, numbering about two thousand
+men. It was decided to converge these three forces on Clones, in
+Monaghan, and thence to proceed southwards against the government of the
+General Assembly, then centered at Limerick. Clones was sixty miles from
+Derry, and rather more from Coleraine and Carrickfergus, the two other
+points of departure.
+
+Owen Roe O'Neill was then at Cavan, fourteen miles south of Clones, with
+five thousand foot and five hundred horse, all "good, hopeful men," to
+use his own words. General Robert Monroe, starting from Carrickfergus,
+and marching by Lisburn and Armagh, expected to reach Glasslough, some
+sixteen miles from Clones, on June 5th. By a forced march from Cavan,
+Owen Roe O'Neill reached Glasslough a day earlier, and marching along
+the northern Blackwater, pitched his camp on the north bank of the
+river. Here he was directly in the line between the two Monroes, who
+could only join their forces after dislodging him; and Robert Monroe,
+who by that time had reached Armagh, saw that it would be necessary to
+give battle without delay if the much smaller forces from the north were
+not to be cut off.
+
+Robert Monroe began a movement northwards towards Owen Roe's position at
+dawn on June 5th, and presently reached the Blackwater, to find himself
+face to face with Owen Roe's army across the river. The two forces kept
+parallel with each other for some time, till Robert Monroe finally
+forded the Blackwater at Caledon, Owen Roe then retiring in the
+direction of the current, which here flows north. Owen Roe, in his
+movement of withdrawal, brought his army through a narrow pass, which he
+left in charge of one of his best infantry regiments, with orders to
+hold it only so long as the enemy could be safely harassed, meanwhile
+carrying his main body back to the hill of Knocknacloy, the position he
+had chosen from the first for the battle, and to gain which he had up to
+this time been manoeuvering.
+
+At Knocknacloy he had the center of his army protected by the hill, the
+right by a marsh, and the left by the river, so that, a flanking
+movement on Monroe's part being impossible, the Scottish general was
+forced to make a frontal attack. Under cover of the rearguard action at
+the pass, which caused both delay and confusion to Monroe's army, Owen
+Roe formed his men in order of battle. His first line was of four
+columns, with considerable spaces between them; his cavalry was on the
+right and left wings, behind this first line; while three columns more
+were drawn up some distance farther back, behind the openings in the
+front line, and forming the reserve. We should remember that not only
+was Owen Roe's army outnumbered by Monroe's, but also that Owen Roe had
+no artillery, while Monroe was well supplied with guns.
+
+Meanwhile Monroe's army came into touch with Owen Roe's force, and the
+Scottish general opened fire with guns and muskets, to which the muskets
+of Owen Roe as vigorously replied. The Scottish artillery was planted on
+a hillock a quarter-mile from Owen Roe's center, and under cover of its
+fire an infantry charge was attempted, which was brilliantly repulsed by
+the pikemen of Owen Roe's army. A second attack was made by the Scottish
+cavalry, who tried to ford the river, and thus turn the left flank of
+the Irish army, but they were met and routed by the Irish horse. This
+was about six in the evening, and the sun, hanging low in the sky, fell
+full in the faces of the Scottish troops. Owen Roe promptly followed up
+the rout of the Scottish horse by an advance, making a sweeping movement
+from right to left, and thereby forcing Monroe towards the junction of
+two streams, where he had no space to move. At this point Owen Roe's
+army received a notable accession of strength in the form of four
+squadrons of cavalry, sent earlier in the day to guard against the
+possible approach of George Monroe from Coleraine.
+
+At a signal from Owen Roe, his army advanced upon Monroe's force, to be
+met by a charge of the Scottish cavalry, instantly replied to by a
+charge of the Irish cavalry through the three open spaces in the front
+infantry line of Owen Roe's army. Monroe's first line was broken, and
+the Irish pikemen, the equivalent of a bayonet charge, steadily forced
+him backwards. It was a fierce struggle, hand to hand, eye to eye, and
+blade to blade. The order of Owen Roe's advance was admirably preserved,
+while the Scottish and English forces were in confusion, already broken
+and crowded into a narrow and constricted space between the two rivers.
+Finally the advancing Irish army reached and stormed the hillock where
+Monroe's artillery was placed, and victory was palpably won. The defeat
+of the Scottish and English army became an utter rout, and when the sun
+set more than three thousand of them lay dead on the field.
+
+It is almost incredible that the Irish losses were only seventy, yet
+such is the number recorded, while not only was the opposing army
+utterly defeated and dispersed, but Monroe's whole artillery, his tents
+and baggage, fifteen hundred horses, twenty stand of colors, two months'
+provisions and numbers of prisoners of war fell into the hands of Owen
+Roe; while, as a result of the battle, the two auxiliary forces were
+forced to retreat and take refuge in Coleraine and Derry, General Robert
+Monroe escaping meanwhile to Carrickfergus. It is only just to him to
+say that our best accounts of the battle come from officers in Monroe's
+army, Owen Roe contenting himself with the merest outline of the result
+gained, but saying nothing of the consummate generalship that gained it.
+
+For the next two years we see Owen Roe O'Neill holding the great central
+plain, the west and most of the north of Ireland against the armies of
+the English Parliamentarians and Royalists alike, and gaining victory
+after victory, generally against superior numbers, better armed and
+better equipped. We find him time after time almost betrayed by the
+Supreme Council, in which the Norman lords of Leinster, perpetually
+anxious for their own feudal estates, were ready to treat with whichever
+of the English parties was for the moment victorious, hoping that,
+whatever might be the outcome of the great English struggle, they
+themselves might be gainers. At this time they were in possession of
+many of the abbey lands, and there was perpetual friction between them
+and the ecclesiastics, their co-religionists, who had been driven from
+these same lands, so that the Norman landowners were the element of
+fatal weakness throughout this whole movement, willing to wound, and yet
+afraid to strike. While praying for the final defeat of the English
+parliamentary forces, they dreaded to see this defeat brought about by
+Owen Roe O'Neill, in whom they saw the representative of the old tribal
+ownership of Gaelic times, a return to which would mean their own
+extinction.
+
+Matters went so far that the Supreme Council, representing chiefly these
+Norman lords, had practically betrayed its trust to the Royalist party
+in England, and would have completed that betrayal had not the
+beheading of King Charles signalized the triumph of the
+Parliamentarians. Even then the Norman lords hoped for the Restoration,
+and strove in every way to undermine the authority of their own general,
+Owen Roe O'Neill, who was almost forced to enter into an alliance with
+the Puritans by the treachery of the Norman lords. It is of the greatest
+interest to find Monroe writing thus to Owen Roe in August, 1649: "By my
+own extraction, I have an interest in the Irish nation. I know how your
+lands have been taken, and your people made hewers of wood and drawers
+of water. If an Irishman can be a scourge to his own nation, the English
+will give him fair words but keep him from all trust, that they may
+destroy him when they have served themselves by him."
+
+On November 6, 1649, this great general died after a brief illness,
+having for seven years led his armies to constant victory, while the
+Norman lords, who were in name his allies, were secretly plotting
+against him for their own profit. Yet so strong and dominant was his
+genius that he overcame not only the forces of his foes but the
+treacheries of his friends, and his last days saw him at one with the
+Normans, while the forces of the Parliamentarians in Ireland were
+calling on him for help.
+
+We sea, therefore, that for full eight years, from the beginning of 1642
+to the close of 1649, Ireland had an independent national government,
+with a regularly elected Representative Assembly, and a central
+authority, the Supreme Council, appointed by that Assembly, with judges
+going circuit and holding their courts regularly, while the Supreme
+Council held a state of almost regal magnificence, and kept several
+armies continuously in the field. While Owen Roe O'Neill lived, that
+part of the army under his command was able not only to secure an
+unbroken series of victories for itself, but also to retrieve the
+defeats suffered by less competent commanders, so that at his death he
+was at the summit of power and fame. If regret were ever profitable, we
+might well regret that he did not follow the example of the great
+English commander, his contemporary, and declare himself Lord Protector
+of Ireland, with despotic power.
+
+After his death, the work he had done so well was all undone again, in
+part by treachery, in part by the victories of Oliver Cromwell. Yet ten
+years after the Lord Protector's arrival in Ireland, his own work was
+undone not less completely, and the Restoration saw once more enthroned
+every principle against which Cromwell had so stubbornly contended.
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+THE JACOBITE WARS.
+
+A.D. 1660-1750.
+
+The Restoration saw Cromwell's work completely undone; nor did the class
+which helped him to his victories again rise above the surface. The
+genius of the Stuarts was already sowing the seeds of new revolutions;
+but the struggle was presently to be fought out, not between the king
+and the people, but between the king and the more liberal or more
+ambitious elements of the baronial class, who saw in the despotic
+aspirations of the Stuarts a menace to their own power.
+
+These liberal elements in England selected as their champion Prince
+William of Nassau, before whose coming the English king found it
+expedient to fly to France, seeking and finding a friend in that apostle
+of absolutism, Louis XIV. We have already seen how the interests of the
+feudal lords of Ireland, with the old Norman families as their core,
+drew them towards the Stuarts. The divine right of the landowner
+depended, as we saw, on the divine right of kings; so that they
+naturally gravitated towards the Stuarts, and drew their tenants and
+retainers after them. Thus a considerable part of Ireland was enlisted
+on the side of James II, and shared the misfortunes which presently
+overtook him--or in truth did not overtake him, as the valiant gentleman
+outran them and escaped. Nothing is more firmly fixed in the memories of
+the whole Irish people than a good-natured contempt for this runaway
+English king, whose cause they were induced by the feudal lords to
+espouse. We shall follow the account of an officer in the Jacobite army
+in narrating the events of the campaigns that ensued.
+
+James, having gained courage and funds from his sojourn at the court of
+Louis XIV, presently made his appearance in Ireland, relying on the
+support of the feudal lords. He landed at Kinsale, in Cork, on March 12,
+1688, according to the Old Style, and reached Dublin twelve days later,
+warmly welcomed by Lord and Lady Tyrconnell. The only place in the
+country which strongly declared for William was the walled city of
+Derry, whence we have seen the Puritan forces issuing during the wars of
+the preceding generation. James, this officer says, went north to Derry,
+in spite of the bitterness of the season, "in order to preserve his
+Protestant subjects there from the ill-treatment which he apprehended
+they might receive from the Irish," and was mightily surprised when the
+gates were shut in his face and the citizens opened fire upon him from
+the walls.
+
+[Illustration: Tullymore Park, Co. Down.]
+
+James withdrew immediately to Dublin, assembled a Parliament there, and
+spent several months in vain discussions, not even finding courage to
+repeal the penal laws which Queen Elizabeth had passed against all who
+refused to recognize her as the head of the church. James was already
+embarked on a career of duplicity, professing great love for Ireland,
+yet fearing to carry out his professions lest he might arouse animosity
+in England, and so close the door against his hoped-for return.
+
+Enniskillen, on an island in Lough Erne, dominated by a strong castle,
+was, like Derry, a settlement of Scottish and English colonists brought
+over by the first of the Stuarts. These colonists were up in arms
+against the grandson of their first patron, and had successfully
+attacked his forces which were besieging Derry. James, therefore, sent a
+small body of troops against them; but the expedition ended in an
+ignominious rout rather than a battle, for the Jacobite army seems
+hardly to have struck a blow. The Irish leader, Lord Mountcashel, who
+manfully stood his ground in the general panic, was wounded and
+taken prisoner.
+
+The armies of James, meanwhile, made no headway against the courageous
+and determined defenders of Derry, where the siege was degenerating into
+a blockade, the scanty rations and sickness of the besieged being a far
+more formidable danger than the attacks of the besiegers. James even
+weakened the attacking forces by withdrawing a part of the troops to
+Dublin, being resolved at all risks to protect himself.
+
+So devoid of resolution and foresight was James that we only find him
+taking means to raise an army when Schomberg, the able lieutenant of
+William, was about to invade the north of Ireland. Schomberg landed at
+Bangor in Down in August, 1689, and marched south towards Drogheda, but
+finding that James was there before him, he withdrew and established a
+strongly fortified camp near Dundalk. James advanced to a point about
+seven miles from Schomberg, and there entrenched himself in turn, and so
+the two armies remained; as one of Schomberg's officers says, "our
+General would not risk anything, nor King James venture anything." The
+long delay was very fatal to Schomberg's army, his losses by sickness
+and disease being more than six thousand men.
+
+Early in November, as winter was already making itself felt, James
+decided to withdraw to Dublin; as our narrator says, "the young
+commanders were in some haste to return to the capital, where the ladies
+expected them with great impatience; so that King James, being once more
+persuaded to disband the new levies and raising his camp a little of the
+soonest, dispersed his men too early into winter quarters, having spent
+that campaign without any advantage, vainly expecting that his
+Protestant subjects of England who were in the camp of Schomberg would
+come over to him. And now the winter season, which should be employed in
+serious consultations, and making the necessary preparations for the
+ensuing campaign, was idly spent in revels, in gaming, and other
+debauches unfit for a Catholic court. But warlike Schomberg, who, after
+the retreat of James, had leisure to remove his sickly soldiers, to bury
+the dead, and put the few men that remained alive and were healthy into
+winter quarters of refreshment, took the field early in spring, before
+Tyrconnell was awake, and reduced the castle of Charlemont, the only
+place that held for James in Ulster, which was lost for want of
+provisions; and the concerns of the unfortunate James were ill-managed
+by those whom he entrusted with the administration of public affairs."
+
+We come thus to the spring of 1690. Derry was still holding out
+valiantly against the horrors of famine and sickness, the blockade being
+maintained, though nothing like a determined storm was attempted. A
+little of the courage shown by the apprentices of Derry, had he
+possessed it, might have revived the drooping fortunes of the fugitive
+English king. It seems, however, that even Schomberg's withdrawal to
+Carrickfergus failed to arouse him to more vigorous and valiant
+measures. It is clear that he was ready to abandon his Irish allies,
+hoping by their betrayal to gain favor with his "subjects in England,"
+whom he confidently expected to recall him, as they had recalled his
+brother Charles thirty years before. James found an able lieutenant in
+Tyrconnell, who thoroughly entered into his master's schemes of
+duplicity; and it is fairly clear that these two worthies, had occasion
+offered, would have betrayed each other with a perfectly good grace.
+
+Thus matters dragged on quite indecisively until June, 1690, when King
+William landed at Carrickfergus with a mixed force of English, Scottish,
+Dutch, Danish, Swedish and German troops, and joined his forces to the
+remnant of Schomberg's army. James, as we saw, had disbanded his army on
+breaking up his camp in the previous autumn, and had made no effective
+effort to get a new army together. Nor could he have used a strong army,
+had he possessed one. Nevertheless James marched north with such troops
+as were available, leaving Dublin on June 16th. He took up a strong
+position on the borders of Ulster and Leinster, thus blocking William's
+way south to the capital, only to abandon it again on the news of
+William's approach, when he retired to Drogheda and encamped there. He
+thus gave the whole advantage of initiative into the hands of his
+opponent, a brave man and a skillful general.
+
+James seems to have hoped that William's army would be mowed down by
+disease, as Schomberg's had been in the preceding campaign. And there is
+reason to believe that Tyrconnell, foreseeing the defeat of James,
+wished to avoid any serious fighting, which would be an obstacle in his
+way when he sought to patch up a peace with the victor and make terms
+for himself. But his opponent was inspired by a very different temper,
+and William's army advanced steadily southwards, to find James encamped
+on the southern bank of the Boyne.
+
+There were several fords by which William's army would have to cross on
+its way south. But James was such an incapable general that he did not
+even throw up trenches to defend the fords. William's army arrived and
+encamped on the north bank of the river, and the next day, June 30th,
+was employed in an artillery duel between the two armies, when
+considerable injury was inflicted on William's forces, although he was
+far stronger in artillery than his opponent. During that night, James,
+already certain of defeat, sent away most of his artillery to Dublin,
+leaving only six guns with his army on the Boyne.
+
+It seems tolerably certain that, when the battle began again next day,
+William's army numbered between forty-five and fifty thousand, with the
+usual proportion of cavalry,--probably a tenth of the whole. James, on
+the other hand, had from twenty to twenty-five thousand men, about a
+tenth of them, probably, being mounted; he had, by his own fault, only
+six guns against about fifty in William's batteries. William's line of
+battle was formed, as usual, with the infantry in the center and the
+cavalry on the wings. He gave the elder Schomberg command of the center,
+while Schomberg's son, with the cavalry of the right wing, was sent four
+or five miles up the river to Slane, to cross there and turn the left
+flank of the opposing army. William himself led the cavalry on the left
+wing, and later on in the battle, descending the river, crossed at a
+lower ford. He could thus attack the right flank of his opponent; the
+infantry composing the center of his army advancing, meanwhile, under
+cover of a heavy artillery fire, and forcing the fords of the Boyne.
+
+The river is shallow here, and in the middle of summer the water is
+nowhere too deep for wading, so that it was a very slight protection to
+the army of James. A better general would at least have chosen a
+stronger position, and one which would have given him some manifest
+advantage. Such positions were to be found all along the road by which
+William had advanced from Carrickfergus. The country on both sides of
+the Boyne is flat; rolling meadows with the shallow river dividing
+them--a country giving every opportunity to cavalry.
+
+William's right, under the younger Schomberg, made several unsuccessful
+attempts to cross the river at Slane, being repeatedly beaten back by
+Arthur O'Neill's horse. Finally, however, the way was cleared for him by
+a vigorous cannonade, to which O'Neill, having no cannon, was unable to
+reply, and William's right wing thus forced the passage of the Boyne.
+
+William's center now advanced, and began the passage of the river, under
+cover of a heavy artillery fire. Every foot of the advance was
+stubbornly contested, and such headway was made by the Irish troops that
+Schomberg's bodyguard was scattered or cut to pieces, and he himself was
+slain. The center of William's army was undoubtedly being beaten back,
+when, crossing lower down with eighteen squadrons of cavalry, he
+fiercely attacked the right flank of the Irish army and thus turned the
+possibility of defeat into certain victory. That the Irish troops,
+although outnumbered two to one and led by a coward, fought valiantly,
+is admitted on all sides. They charged and re-charged ten times in
+succession, and only gave way at last under pressure of greatly superior
+numbers. The retreat of the Irish army was orderly,--the more so,
+doubtless, because the former king of England was no longer among them,
+having most valiantly fled to Dublin, and thence to Kinsale, where he
+took ship for France, leaving behind him a reputation quite singular in
+the annals of Ireland.
+
+Within a week after the battle, the Irish army, which had preserved
+order and discipline even in the face of the flight of James, occupied
+Limerick, and made preparations to hold that strong position, with the
+untouched resources of the western province behind them, and the hope,
+unshaken by their rude experience, that the runaway king might reinforce
+them by sea. Through all the events that followed, presently to be
+narrated, it must be understood that Tyrconnell was steadily seeking to
+undermine the resolution of the Irish army, hoping the sooner to make
+his peace with King William, to secure his Irish estates, and, very
+possibly, be appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, under the new king.
+
+William meanwhile brought his army southwards, being welcomed to Dublin
+by the large English element there, and presently continued his march to
+Waterford, which was surrendered to him, as was alleged, by Tyrconnell's
+orders. He also reduced Kilkenny, to which Tyrconnell had failed to
+send reinforcements, though repeatedly appealed to by its commander.
+About this time, on July 28th or a day or two later, the brave garrison
+of Derry was relieved by some of William's ships, which broke the line
+of blockade across the river and brought abundant provisions to the
+emaciated defenders.
+
+A section of William's army under Douglas was sent to take Athlone, the
+strong fortress which guarded the ford, and later the bridge across the
+Shannon--the high road from Leinster to the western province of
+Connacht, beyond the river. Douglas, after a fierce attack lasting seven
+days, was compelled to retreat again to the main army encamped at
+Waterford. The French auxiliaries under Lauzun, who had not hitherto
+greatly distinguished themselves for valor, losing less than a score of
+men at the Boyne, now deserted Limerick and retreated to Galway, taking
+with them, if the fugitive king may be credited, a great quantity of
+ammunition from the fortress of Limerick.
+
+[Illustration: Thormond Bridge, Limerick.]
+
+Finally, on August 9th, William's army appeared before Limerick, and the
+famous siege began. Tyrconnell signalized himself by deserting the fords
+over the Shannon and departing to Galway, declaring that the town would
+certainly surrender within a week. The city, however, was of a
+different opinion. The garrison, under Sarsfield, made vigorous
+preparation for a defence, and a party under Sarsfield himself cut off
+one of William's convoys from Dublin, destroying the siege-train which
+was being brought for the attack on the city. William's cavalry, taking
+advantage of Tyrconnell's retreat, crossed the ford of the Shannon to
+complete the investment of the city on that side, but they presently
+returned, having done nothing effective.
+
+We hear of more attempts by Tyrconnell to undermine the resolution of
+the army, and of attacks by William's force, which gave him possession
+of the outworks, so that he was able presently to begin cannonading the
+walls, to make a breach for an assault. The officer in the Irish army
+whom we have already quoted, gives this account of the siege: "Never was
+a town better attacked and better defended than the city of Limerick.
+William left nothing unattempted that the art of war, the skill of a
+great captain and the valor of veteran soldiers could put in execution
+to gain the place; and the Irish omitted nothing that courage and
+constancy could practice to defend it. The continual assaults of the one
+and the frequent sallies of the other consumed a great many brave men
+both of the army and the garrison. On the nineteenth day, William, after
+fighting for every inch of ground he gained, having made a large breach
+in the wall, gave a general assault which lasted for three hours; and
+though his men mounted the breach, and some even entered the town, they
+were gallantly repulsed and forced to retire with considerable loss.
+William, resolving to renew the assault next day, could not persuade his
+men to advance, though he offered to lead them in person. Whereupon, all
+in a rage, he left the camp, and never stopped till he came to
+Waterford, where he took shipping for England; his army in the meantime
+retiring by night from Limerick."
+
+During this first siege of Limerick the garrison numbered some twenty
+thousand, by no means well armed. William's besieging army was about
+forty thousand, with forty cannon and mortars. His loss was between
+three and four thousand, while the loss of the defenders was about half
+that number.
+
+William, presently arriving in England, sent reinforcements to his
+generals in Ireland, under Lord Churchill, afterwards famous as the Duke
+of Marlborough. Tyrconnell had meantime followed his runaway king to
+France, as was involved in a maze of contradictory designs, the one
+clear principle of which was the future advantage of Tyrconnell. Louis
+XIV, who had reasons of his own for wishing to keep the armies of
+William locked up in Ireland, was altogether willing to advise and help
+a continuance of hostilities in that country. James seems to have
+recognized his incapacity too clearly to attempt anything definite, or,
+what is more probable, was too irresolute by nature even to determine to
+give up the fight. Tyrconnell himself sincerely wished to make his peace
+with William, so that he might once more enjoy the revenues of his
+estates. The Irish army was thoroughly determined to hold out to
+the end.
+
+With these conflicting desires and designs, no single-hearted and
+resolute action was possible. Matters seem to have drifted till about
+January, 1691, when Tyrconnell returned; "but he brought with him no
+soldiers, very few arms, little provision and no money." A month later a
+messenger came direct to Sarsfield, then with the army at Galway, from
+Louis XIV, promising reinforcements under the renowned soldier Saint
+Ruth. This letter to a great extent revealed the double part Tyrconnell
+had been playing at the French court, and did much to undermine his
+credit with the better elements in the Irish army.
+
+The French fleet finally arrived at Limerick in May, 1691, under Saint
+Ruth, bringing a considerable quantity of provisions for the Irish army;
+but it is doubtful whether this arrival added any real element of
+strength to the army. The Irish army, soon after this, was assembled at
+Athlone, to defend the passage of the Shannon. Much vigorous fighting
+took place, but Ginkell, William's general, finally captured that
+important fortress in June. The road to Galway was now open, and
+Ginkell's army prepared to march on that important city, the strongest
+place in Connacht. Saint Ruth prepared to resist their approach, fixing
+his camp at Aughrim, The Hill of the Horses, some eighteen miles from
+Athlone and thirty-five from Galway. We may once more tell the story in
+the words of an eye-witness:
+
+"Aughrim was then a ruined town, and the castle was not much better,
+situated in a bottom on the north side of the hill, where the Irish army
+encamped. The direct way from Ballinasloe was close by the castle, but
+there was another way about, on the south-east side of the hill. The
+rest of the ground fronting the camp was a marsh, passable only for
+foot. The army of Ginkell appeared in sight of Aughrim on July 12th. The
+Irish army, composed of about ten thousand foot, two thousand
+men-at-arms, and as many light horse, was soon drawn up by Saint Ruth in
+two lines; the cavalry on both wings flanking the foot; and having
+placed Chevalier de Tess� on the right wing of the horse, and Sarsfield
+on the left, and giving their several posts to the rest of the chief
+commanders, Saint Ruth obliged himself to no certain place, but rode
+constantly from one side to another to give the necessary orders where
+he saw occasion. Ginkell being now come up at so near a distance that
+his guns and other battering engines might do execution, he ordered them
+to be discharged, and as he had a vast number of them he made them play
+incessantly on the Irish army, hoping by that means to force them from
+the hill, which was of great advantage. But the Irish, encouraged by the
+presence and conduct of Saint Ruth, kept their ground and beat the
+English as often as they advanced towards them. The fight continued from
+noon till sunset, the Irish foot having still the better of the enemy;
+and Saint Ruth, observing the advantage of his side, and that the
+enemy's foot were much disordered, was resolved, by advancing with the
+cavalry, to make the victory complete, when an unlucky shot from one of
+the terrible new engines, hitting him in the head, made an end of his
+life, and took away the courage of his army. For Ginkell, observing the
+Irish to be in some disorder, gave a notable conjecture that the general
+was either killed or wounded, whereupon he commanded his army to
+advance. The Irish cavalry, discouraged by the death of Saint Ruth, and
+none of the general officers coming to head them in his place, gave
+back, and quitted the field. The foot who were engaged with the enemy,
+knowing nothing of the general's death or the retreat of the cavalry,
+continued fighting till they were surrounded by the whole English army;
+so that the most of them were cut off, and no quarter given but to a
+very few; the rest, by favor of the night then approaching, for Saint
+Ruth was killed about sunset, made their escape."
+
+To this we may add the testimony of the runaway monarch: "The Irish
+behaved with great spirit. They convinced the English they had to do
+with men no less resolute than themselves. Never assault was made with
+greater fury nor sustained with greater obstinacy. The Irish foot
+repulsed the enemy several times, particularly in the center. They even
+looked upon the victory as certain.... The Irish lost four thousand
+men. The loss of the English was not much inferior."
+
+The army of Ginkell, thus in possession of the key of Connacht, advanced
+upon its most important city, arriving before Galway a few days after
+the battle of Aughrim. Galway, however, was full of divided counsels,
+and speedily surrendered, so that Limerick alone remained. Limerick was
+greatly weakened, now that Galway, and with Galway the whole of Connacht
+to which alone Limerick could look for supplies, was in the hands of the
+enemy. Ginkell turned all his efforts in the direction of Limerick,
+appearing before the city and pitching his camp there on August 25,
+1691. Beginning with the next day, our narrator tells us, "he placed his
+cannon and other battering engines, which played furiously night and day
+without intermission, reducing that famous city almost to ashes. No
+memorable action, however, happened till the night between September 15
+and 16, when he made a bridge of boats over the Shannon, which being
+ready by break of day, he passed over with a considerable body of horse
+and foot on the Connacht side of the river, without any opposition. This
+so alarmed Sheldon, who commanded the cavalry at that time, that without
+staying for orders, he immediately retired to a mountain a good
+distance from Limerick, and marched with such precipitation and
+disorder, that if a hundred of the enemy's horse had charged him in the
+rear, they would in all likelihood have defeated his whole party, though
+he had near upon four thousand men-at-arms and light horse; for the man,
+if he was faithful, wanted either courage or conduct, and the party were
+altogether discouraged to be under his command. But Ginkell did not
+advance far, and after showing himself on that side of the bridge,
+returned back into his camp the same day. Yet Sheldon never rested till
+he came, about midnight, fifteen miles from the Shannon, and encamped in
+a fallow field where there was not a bit of grass to be had: as if he
+had designed to harass the horses by day and starve them by night....
+Ginkell, understanding that the Irish horse was removed to such a
+distance, passed the river on the twenty-third day with the greatest
+part of his cavalry, and a considerable body of foot, and encamped
+half-way between Limerick and the Irish horse camp, whereby he hindered
+all communication between them and the town. On the twenty-fourth, the
+captains within Limerick sent out a trumpet, desiring a parley," and as
+a result of this parley, a treaty was ultimately signed between the two
+parties, Limerick was evacuated, and the war came to an end. This was
+early in October, 1691.
+
+The war had, therefore, lasted nearly four years, a sufficient testimony
+to the military qualities of the Irish, seeing that throughout the whole
+period they had matched against them greatly superior numbers of the
+finest troops in Europe, veterans trained in continental wars, and at
+all points better armed and equipped than their adversaries.
+
+What moves our unbounded admiration, however, is to see the troops
+displaying these qualities of valor not only without good leadership,
+but in face of the cowardice of the English king, and of duplicity
+amounting to treachery on the part of his chief adherents. Foremost
+among these time-servers was Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, whose name
+shows him to have sprung from one of the Norman families, and we see
+here the recurrence of a principle which had worked much harm in the
+eight years' war of the preceding generation. The Duke of Ormond, sprung
+from the Norman Butlers, was then the chief representative of the policy
+of intrigue, and many of the reverses of both these wars are to be
+attributed to the same race.
+
+It is tragical to find the descendants of the old Norman barons, who at
+any rate were valiant fighters, descending thus to practices quite
+unworthy; yet we can easily understand how the fundamental injustice of
+the feudal principle on which they stood, not less than the boundless
+abuse of that already bad principle under the first Stuarts, could not
+fail to undermine their sense of honor and justice, preparing them at
+length for a policy of mere self-seeking, carried on by methods always
+doubtful, and often openly treacherous.
+
+The old tribal chieftains lived to fight, and went down fighting into
+the night of time. Owen Roe O'Neill, last great son of a heroic race,
+splendidly upheld their high tradition and ideal. No nobler figure, and
+few more gifted captains, can be found in the annals of those warlike
+centuries. The valor of Cuculain, the wisdom of Concobar, the chivalry
+of Fergus--all were his, and with them a gentle and tolerant spirit in
+all things concerning religion, very admirable in an age when so many
+men, in other things not lacking in elements of nobility, were full of
+bitter animosity, and zealous to persecute all those who differed from
+them concerning things shrouded in mystery.
+
+It may be said, indeed, that Owen Roe is in this only a type of all his
+countrymen, who, though they suffered centuries of persecution for a
+religious principle, never persecuted in return. Their conduct
+throughout the epoch of religious war and persecution was always
+tolerant and full of the sense of justice, contrasting in this, and
+contrasting to their honor, with the conduct of nearly every other
+nation in Christendom.
+
+The history of Ireland, for the half century which followed this war,
+offers few salient features for description. The Catholics during all
+this time were under the ban of penal laws. The old tribal chiefs were
+gone. The Norman lords were also gone. The life of the land hardly went
+beyond the tilling of the fields and the gathering of the harvests. And
+even here, men only labored for others to enter into their labor. The
+right of private taxation, confirmed by law, and now forfeited by the
+feudal lords, was given as a reward to the adherents of the dominant
+party in England, and their yearly exactions were enforced by an armed
+garrison. The more vigorous and restless elements of our race, unable to
+accept these conditions of life, sailed in great numbers to the
+continent, and entered the armies of many European powers. It is
+estimated that, during the half century after the Treaty of Limerick,
+fully half a million Irishmen fell in the service of France alone.
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+A.D. 1750-1901.
+
+The Treaty of Limerick, signed when the army of Sarsfield came to terms
+with the besiegers, guaranteed equal liberty to all Ireland, without
+regard to difference of religion. There is no doubt that William of
+Nassau, scion of a race which had done much for liberty, a house that
+had felt the bitterness of oppression, would willingly have carried this
+treaty out in a spirit of fidelity and honor. But he was, helpless. The
+dominant powers in England and Ireland were too strong for him, and
+within the next few years the treaty was violated in letter and spirit,
+and the indigenous population of Ireland was disarmed, deprived of civil
+rights, reduced to servitude.
+
+It is best, wherever possible, to secure the word of witnesses who
+cannot be suspected of prejudice or favor. We shall do this, therefore,
+in describing the condition of Ireland during the eighteenth century. We
+find the Lord Chancellor of England declaring, during the first half of
+that period, that "in the eye of the law no Catholic existed in
+Ireland." The Lord Chief Justice affirms the same doctrine: "It appears
+plain that the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish
+Roman Catholic." The law, therefore, as created by England for Ireland,
+deprived of all civil, religious, intellectual and moral rights
+four-fifths of the whole population, and gave them over as a lawful prey
+to the remaining fifth: a band of colonists and adventurers, who favored
+the policy of the party then dominant in England. This was the condition
+of the law. We shall see, presently, what was its result on the life of
+the nation. It should be a warning, for all time, of the dangers which
+arise when one nation undertakes to govern another. For it must be
+clearly understood that the Sovreign and Parliament of England believed
+that in this they stood for honor and righteousness, and had a true
+insight into the spirit and will of the Most High. It was, indeed, on
+this superior knowledge of the divine will that they based their whole
+policy; for what else is the meaning of legal discrimination against the
+holders of a certain form of faith?
+
+[Illustration: Salmon Fishery, Galway.]
+
+In the second half of the eighteenth century, in 1775, the Congress of
+the United States sent its sympathy in these words to the people of
+Ireland: "We know that you are not without your grievances; we
+sympathize with you in your distress, and we are pleased to find that
+the design of subjugating us has persuaded the administration to
+dispense to Ireland some vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. Even the
+tender mercies of the government have long been cruel to you. In the
+rich pastures of Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong
+to labor for her destruction."
+
+Three years later, in 1778, Benjamin Franklin wrote thus to the Irish
+people: "The misery and distress which your ill-fated country has been
+so frequently exposed to, and has so often experienced, by such a
+combination of rapine, treachery and violence as would have disgraced
+the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the world, has
+most sincerely affected your friends in America, and has engaged the
+most serious attention of Congress."
+
+It must be assumed that the men who drew up the Declaration of
+Independence knew the value of words, and that when they spoke of misery
+and cruelty, of rapine, treachery and distress, they meant what they
+said. Franklin's letter brings us to the eve of the Volunteer Movement,
+of which much has been said in a spirit of warm praise, but which seems
+to have wrought evil rather than good. This Movement, at first initiated
+wholly by the Scottish and English colonists and their adherents, was
+later widened so as to include a certain number of the indigenous
+population; and an armed force was thus formed, which was able to gain
+certain legislative favors from England, with the result that a
+Parliament sitting in Dublin from 1782 to 1799 passed laws with
+something more resembling justice than Ireland was accustomed to.
+
+But this Parliament was in no sense national or representative. It was
+wholly composed of the Scottish and English colonists and their friends,
+and the indigenous population had no voice in its deliberations. It is,
+therefore, the more honor to Henry Grattan that we find him addressing
+that Parliament thus: "I will never claim freedom for six hundred
+thousand of my countrymen while I leave two million or more of them in
+chains. Give the Catholics of Ireland their civil rights and their
+franchise; give them the power to return members to the Irish
+Parliament, and let the nation be represented." At this time, therefore,
+four-fifths of the nation had neither civil rights nor
+franchise,--because they differed from the dominant party in England as
+to the precedence of the disciples of Jesus.
+
+It may be supposed, however, that, even without civil or religious
+rights, the fate of the people of Ireland was tolerable; that a certain
+measure of happiness and well-being was theirs, if not by law, at least
+by grace. The answer to this we shall presently see. The Volunteer
+Movement, as we saw, included certain elements of the indigenous
+population. The dominant party in England professed to see in this a
+grave danger, and determined to ward off that danger by sending an army
+to Ireland, and quartering troops on the peasants of all suspected
+districts. We must remember that the peasants, on whom a hostile
+soldiery was thus quartered, had no civil rights as a safeguard; that
+the authorities were everywhere bitterly hostile, full of cowardly
+animosity towards them.
+
+The result we may best describe in the words of the English generals at
+the head of this army. We find Sir Ralph Abercrombie speaking thus: "The
+very disgraceful frequency of great crimes and cruelties, and the many
+complaints of the conduct of the troops in this kingdom--Ireland--has
+too unfortunately proved the army to be in a state of licentiousness
+that renders it formidable to everyone except the enemy." Sir Ralph
+Abercrombie declared himself so frightened and disgusted at the conduct
+of the soldiers that he threw up his commission, and refused the command
+of the army.
+
+General Lake, who was sent to take his place, speaks thus: "The state of
+the country, and its occupation previous to the insurrection, is not to
+be imagined, except by those who witnessed the atrocities of every
+description committed by the military,"--and he gives a list of
+hangings, burnings and murders.
+
+Finally, we have the testimony of another English soldier, Sir William
+Napier, speaking some years later: "What manner of soldiers were these
+fellows who were let loose upon the wretched districts, killing, burning
+and confiscating every man's property? ... We ourselves were young at
+the time; yet, being connected with the army, we were continually among
+the soldiers, listening with boyish eagerness to their experiences: and
+well remember, with horror, to this day, the tales of lust, of bloodshed
+and pillage, and the recital of their foul actions against the miserable
+peasantry, which they used to relate."
+
+The insurrection against this misery and violence, which began in May,
+1798, and its repression, we may pass over, coming to their political
+consequences. It is admitted on all hands that the morality and religion
+of England reached their lowest ebb at this very time; we are,
+therefore, ready to learn that the Act of Union between England and
+Ireland, which followed on the heels of this insurrection, was carried
+by unlimited bribery and corruption. The Parliament of Ireland, as we
+know, was solely composed of Protestants, the Catholics having neither
+the right to sit nor the right to vote; so that the ignominy of this
+universal corruption must be borne by the class of English and Scottish
+settlers alone.
+
+The curious may read lists of the various bribes paid to secure the
+passage of the Act of Union in 1800, the total being about six million
+dollars--a much more considerable sum then than now. And it must be
+remembered that this entire sum was drawn from the revenues of Ireland,
+besides the whole cost of an army numbering 125,000 men, which England
+maintained in Ireland at the time the Act was passed. What the amenities
+of the last three years of the eighteenth century cost Ireland we may
+judge from these figures: in 1797, while the hangings, burnings and
+torturings which brought about the insurrection of the following year
+were in an early stage, the national debt of Ireland was under
+$20,000,000; three years later that debt amounted to over $130,000,000.
+It is profitless to pursue the subject further. We may close it by
+saying that hardly can we find in history a story more discreditable to
+our common humanity than the conduct of England towards Ireland during
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
+
+The French Revolution wrought a salutary change of heart in the
+governing class in England, for it must in justice be added that the
+tyranny of this class was as keenly felt by the "lower orders" in
+England as in Ireland itself. It is fairly certain that only the Reform
+Bill and the change of sovreigns which shortly followed prevented an
+insurrection of the peasants and servile classes in England which would
+have outdone in horrors the French Revolution itself. The Reform Bill
+was the final surrender of the baronial class in England; a surrender
+rather apparent than real, however, since most of the political and all
+the social power in the land still remains in the hands of the
+same class.
+
+[Illustration: O'Connell's Statue, Dublin.]
+
+Through the salutary fear which was inspired by the horrors of the
+French Revolution, and perhaps through a certain moral awakening, the
+governing classes in England came to a less vicious mind in their
+dealings with Ireland. They were, therefore, the more ready to respond
+to the great national movement headed by Daniel O'Connell, with his
+demand that Irishmen might all equally enjoy civil and political rights,
+regardless of their form of faith. In 1829, as the result of this great
+movement, the Catholics were finally relieved of the burden of penal
+laws which, originally laid on them by the Tudors, were rendered even
+more irksome and more unjust by Cromwell and William of Nassau,--men in
+other things esteemed enlightened and lovers of liberty.
+
+Thus the burden of persecution was finally taken away. To those who
+imposed it, the system of Penal Laws will remain a deep dishonor. But to
+those who bore that burden it has proved a safeguard of spiritual purity
+and faith. The religion of the indigenous race in Ireland was saved from
+the degeneration and corruption which ever besets a wealthy and
+prosperous church, and which never fails to engender hypocrisy, avarice
+and ambition. In England, the followers of the Apostles exercise the
+right to levy a second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second
+burden imposed upon the conquered Saxons. As a result, the leaders of
+the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part of their
+congregation; have sunk into practical atheism. In France, the reaction
+against a like state of things brought the church to the verge of
+destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and materialism. The
+result to the moral life of the people is too well known to need remark.
+Not less evil consequences have flowed from the enriching of the church
+in other lands. That wealth has always carried with it the curse, so
+prophetically pronounced, against those who trust in riches. For the
+ministers of religion, in a supreme degree, the love of money has been
+the root of evil.
+
+We may, therefore, see in the spirituality and unworldliness of the
+native church in Ireland a result of all the evil and persecution the
+church suffered during almost three hundred years. From this
+purification by fire it comes that the people of Ireland are almost
+singular throughout Christendom in believing sincerely in the religion
+of gentleness and mercy--the kingdom which is not of this world.
+
+In 1829 the Catholics were at last freed from the galling burdens which
+had weighed on them since 1537, when they failed to recognize Henry VIII
+as the representative of God on earth. They were still, however, under
+the shadow of a grave injustice, which continued to rest on them for
+many years. When their church lands were confiscated and their faith
+proscribed by law under the Tudors, a new clergy was overlaid on the
+country, a clergy which consented to recognize the Tudors and their
+successors as their spiritual head. As a reward, these new ministers of
+religion were allowed to levy a second tax on land, exactly as in
+England; and this tax they continued to collect until their privilege
+was finally taken away by Gladstone and the English Liberals. Needless
+to say that through three centuries and more four-fifths of this tax was
+levied on the indigenous Catholics, in support of what was to them an
+alien, and for most of the time a persecuting church.
+
+One heavy disability still lay on the whole land. With its partial
+removal a principle has emerged of such world-wide importance in the
+present, and even more in the future, that we may well trace its history
+in detail.
+
+The Normans, as we saw, paid themselves for conquering the Saxons and
+Angles by assuming a perpetual right to tax their produce; a right still
+in full force, and forming the very foundation of the ruling class in
+England. The land tenure thus created was, under the Tudors and the
+first Stuarts, bodily transferred to Ireland. In Ireland the land had
+ever been owned by the people, each tribe, as representing a single
+family, holding a certain area by communal tenure, and electing a chief
+to protect its territory from aggression. For this elective
+chieftainship the English law-courts substituted something wholly
+different: a tenure modeled on the feudal servitude of England. This new
+principle made the land of the country the property not of the whole
+people but of a limited and privileged class: the favorites of the
+ruling power--"hungry parasites" as the Congress of 1775 called them.
+This "landed" class continued to hold absolute sway until quite
+recently, and it was this class which succumbed to bribery in 1800, and
+passed the Act of Legislative Union with England. The clergy of the
+Established church were little more than the private chaplains of the
+"landed" class, the two alien bodies supporting each other.
+
+Folly, however, was the child of injustice; for so shortsighted were
+these hungry parasites that they developed a system of land-laws so bad
+as to cause universal poverty, and bring a reaction which is steadily
+sweeping the "landed" class of Ireland to extinction and oblivion. The
+fundamental principle of these bad land-laws was this: the tenant was
+compelled to renew his lease from year to year; and whenever, during the
+year, he had in any way improved the land in his possession,--by
+draining marshes, by reclaiming waste areas, by adding farm-buildings,
+the "owner" of the land could demand an enhanced rent, as the condition
+of renewing the lease. The tenant had to submit to a continually
+ascending scale of extortion, sanctioned by law and exacted by armed
+force; or, as an alternative, he had to give up the fruit of his
+industry without compensation and without redress.
+
+Anything more certain to destroy energy, to cut at the roots of thrift,
+to undermine all the best qualities of manhood, it would be impossible
+to imagine. The slave on the plantation could in time purchase his
+freedom. The tiller of the soil in Ireland found, on the contrary, that
+the greater his industry, the greater was the sum he had to pay for the
+right to exercise it. We saw that there never was any pretence of free
+contract in the feudal land-tenure of England; that there never was any
+pretence of an honest bargain between farmer and landlord, for their
+mutual benefit. The tenant paid the landlord for services rendered, not
+to him, but to his Norman conqueror. So it was, in an even greater
+degree, in Ireland. There was no pretence at all that tenant and
+landlord entered into a free contract for their mutual benefit. Nor did
+either law, custom, religion or opinion require the landlord to make any
+return to his tenants for the share of the fruit of their toil he
+annually carried away.
+
+The tiller of the soil, therefore, labored from year to year, through
+droughts and rains, through heat and cold, facing bad seasons with good.
+At the end of the year, after hard toil had gathered in the fruit of the
+harvest, he saw the best part of that fruit legally confiscated by an
+alien, who would have been speechless with wonder, had it been suggested
+to him that anything was due from him in return. Nor was that all. This
+alien was empowered, and by the force of public opinion incited, to
+exact the greatest possible share of the tiller's produce, and, as we
+saw, he was entitled to the whole benefit of whatever improvements the
+tiller of the soil had made; and could--and constantly did--expel the
+cultivator who was unable or unwilling to pay a higher tax, as the
+penalty for improving the land.
+
+It may be said that bad as this all was, it was not without a remedy;
+that the cultivator had the choice of other occupations, and might let
+the land lie fallow, while its "owner" starved. But this only brings to
+mind the fact that during the eighteenth century England had legislated
+with the deliberate intention of destroying the manufactures and
+shipping of Ireland, and had legislated with success. It should be added
+that this one measure affected all residents in Ireland equally,
+whatever faith or race. There was practically no alternative before the
+cultivator. He had the choice between robbery and starvation.
+
+It would be more than miraculous if this condition of things had not
+borne its fruit. The result was this: it ceased to be the interest of
+the cultivator of the land to till it effectively, or to make any
+improvement whatever, whether by drainage, reclaiming waste land, or
+building, or by adopting better agricultural methods. In every case, his
+increase of labor, of foresight and energy, would have met with but one
+reward: when the time came to renew the lease, he would have been told
+that his land had doubled in value during the year, and that he must,
+therefore, pay twice as much for the privilege of tilling it. If he
+refused, he at once forfeited every claim to the fruit of his own work,
+the whole of his improvements becoming the property of the land owner.
+
+The cultivators, as an inevitable consequence, lost every incentive to
+labor, energy, foresight and the moral qualities which are fostered by
+honestly rewarded work. They worked as little as possible on their
+farms, and the standard of cultivation steadily declined, while the mode
+of living grew perpetually worse. If it were intended to reduce a whole
+population to hopeless poverty, no better or more certain way could
+be imagined.
+
+The steady lowering of the arts of cultivation, the restriction of
+crops, the tendency to keep as close as possible to the margin of
+sustenance, thus zealously fostered, opened the way for the disastrous
+famine of 1846 and 1847, which marks the beginning of a rapid decline in
+population,--a decrease which has never since been checked. The
+inhabitants of Ireland shortly before the famine numbered considerably
+over eight millions. Since that time, there has been a decrease of about
+four millions--a thing without parallel in Christendom.
+
+The amendment of the land-laws, which were directly responsible for
+these evil results, was by no means initiated in consequence of the
+famine. It was due wholly to a great national agitation, carried out
+under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, which led to the
+land-acts of 1881 and 1887. These new laws at last guaranteed to the
+cultivator the fruit of his toil, and guarded him against arbitrary
+increase of the tax levied on him by the "owner" of the land. But they
+did not stop here; they initiated a principle which will finally make
+the cultivator absolute owner of his land, and abolish the feudal class
+with their rights of private taxation. This cannot fail to react on
+England, so that the burdens of the Angles and Saxons will at last be
+lifted from their shoulders, as a result of the example set them by the
+Gaels, for generations working persistently, and persistently advancing
+towards their goal. Nor will the tide thus set in motion spread only to
+Saxon and Angle; its influence will be felt wherever those who work are
+deprived unjustly of the fruit of their toil, whether by law or without
+law. The evils suffered by Ireland will thus be not unavailing; they
+will rather bring the best of all rewards: a reward to others, of
+whatever race and in whatever land, who are victims of a like injustice.
+
+The story of Ireland, through many centuries, has thus been told. The
+rest belongs to the future. We have seen the strong life of the prime
+bringing forth the virtues of war and peace; we have seen valor and
+beauty and wisdom come to perfect ripeness in the old pagan world. We
+have seen that old pagan world transformed by the new teaching of
+gentleness and mercy, a consciousness, wider, more humane and universal,
+added from above to the old genius of individual life. With the new
+teaching came the culture of Rome, and something of the lore of Hellas
+and Palestine, of Egypt and Chaldea, warmly welcomed and ardently
+cherished in Ireland at a time when Europe was submerged under barbarian
+inroads and laid waste by heathen hordes. We have seen the faith and
+culture thus preserved among our western seas generously shared with the
+nascent nations who emerged from the pagan invasions; the seeds of
+intellectual and spiritual life, sown with faith and fervor as far as
+the Alps and the Danube, springing up with God-given increase, and
+ripening to an abundant harvest.
+
+To that bright epoch of our story succeeded centuries of growing
+darkness and gathering storm. The forces of our national life, which
+until then had found such rich expression and flowered in such abundant
+beauty, were now checked, driven backward and inward, through war,
+oppression and devastation, until a point was reached when the whole
+indigenous population had no vestige of religious or civil rights; when
+they ceased even to exist in the eyes of the law.
+
+The tide of life, thus forced inward, gained a firm possession of the
+invisible world, with the eternal realities indwelling there. Thus fixed
+and founded in the real, that tide turned once again, flowing outwards
+and sweeping before it all the barriers in its way. The population of
+Ireland is diminishing in numbers; but the race to which they belong
+increases steadily: a race of clean life, of unimpaired vital power,
+unspoiled by wealth or luxury, the most virile force in the New World.
+
+It happens very rarely, under those mysterious laws which rule the life
+of all humanity, the laws which work their majestic will through the
+ages, using as their ministers the ambitions and passions of men--it
+happens rarely that a race keeps its unbroken life through thirty
+centuries, transformed time after time by new spiritual forces, yet in
+genius remaining ever the same. It may be doubted whether even once
+before throughout all history a race thus long-lived has altogether
+escaped the taint of corruption and degeneration. Never before, we may
+confidently say, has a single people emerged from such varied
+vicissitudes, stronger at the end in genius, in spiritual and moral
+power, than at the beginning, richer in vital force, clearer in
+understanding, in every way more mature and humane.
+
+For this is the real fruit of so much evil valiantly endured: a deep
+love of freedom, a hatred of oppression, a knowledge that the wish to
+dominate is a fruitful source of wrong. The new age now dawning before
+us carries many promises of good for all humanity; not less, it has its
+dangers, grave and full of menace; threatening, if left to work
+unchecked, to bring lasting evil to our life. Never before, it is true,
+have there been so wide opportunities for material well-being; but, on
+the other hand, never before have there been such universal temptations
+toward a low and sensual ideal. Our very mastery over natural forces and
+material energies entices us away from our real goal, hides from our
+eyes the human and divine powers of the soul, with which we are
+enduringly concerned. Our skill in handling nature's lower powers may be
+a means of great good; not less may it bring forth unexampled evil. The
+opportunities of well-being are increased; the opportunities of
+exclusive luxury are increased in equal measure; exclusion may bring
+resentment; resentment may call forth oppression, armed with new
+weapons, guided by wider understanding, but prompted by the same corrupt
+spirit as of old.
+
+In the choice which our new age must make between these two ways, very
+much may be done for the enduring well-being of mankind by a race full
+of clean vigor, a race taught by stern experience the evil of tyranny
+and oppression, a race profoundly believing the religion of gentleness
+and mercy, a race full of the sense of the invisible world, the world of
+our immortality.
+
+We see in Ireland a land with a wonderful past, rich in tradition and
+varied lore; a land where the memorials of the ages, built in enduring
+stone, would in themselves enable us to trace the life and progress of
+human history; we see in Ireland a land full of a singular fascination
+and beauty, where even the hills and rivers speak not of themselves but
+of the spirit which builds the worlds; a beauty, whether in brightness
+or gloom, finding its exact likeness in no other land; we see all this,
+but we see much more: not a memory of the past, but a promise of the
+future; no offering of earthly wealth, but rather a gift to the soul of
+man; not for Ireland only, but for all mankind.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+Abbey-Dorney, 303
+Abbey-feale, 303
+Abbey-leix, 303
+Abbey of Ballintober, 305
+Abbey-quarter, 29
+Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, words of, 369, 370
+Achill Island, 30
+Act of Union, 371
+Aed Allan, 225, 231
+Aed Finnliat, 247
+Aed Roin, 225
+Aed, son of Colgan, 226
+Ailill, 130, 131, 132, 141, 142, 146, 147, 152
+Aiterni, 150
+Alfred, king of the Northumbrian Saxons, 232
+Alfred, king, ode of to the country he visited, 232, 233
+Alny, 120, 129
+Amargin, 150
+Ambigatos, 103
+Ancient seats of learning, 221
+Ancient seats of learning, studies therein, 221, 222
+Anglicans, 322
+Angus, the Young, 92, 95, 96, 173
+"Annals," history of the times as recorded in the, 235, 252
+"Annals," quotations from, 224, 244, 264, 277, 293
+Antrim, 5, 196
+Archaic Darkness, 11
+Archaic Dawn, 12
+Ardan, 120, 129
+Ard-Maca, 200
+Armagh, 200, 208, 232, 241
+At-Cliat, 242, 243, 275
+Athlone, 140, 350, 354
+Ath-uinc�, 163
+Aughrim, 354, 355
+
+Ballinasloe, 354
+Ballysadare, 27, 87, 90
+Balor of the Evil Eye, 90, 91, 93
+Bangor, 221, 239, 240, 250, 342
+Bann, 146
+Bantry Bay, 104
+Barrow, valley of the, 42
+Battle of Kinvarra, 162
+Battle of the Headland of the Kings, 13
+Battle-verses, 248, 249
+Bay of Murbolg, 143
+Bay of Sligo, 29
+Bective Abbey, 301
+Bede, Venerable, 218
+Belgadan, 85
+Beltane, festival of, 47
+Beltaney, 47
+Black Lion Cromlech, 46
+Blackwater, 39, 82
+Bonamargy Abbey, 306
+Book of Kells, 209, 249
+Boyne, the, 5, 150, 242, 350
+Brandon Hill, 42
+Breagho, 34
+Breas, 83, 84, 99, 91, 105
+Breg, 149
+Brehon Laws, the, 206
+Brehon Laws, changes of, effected by St. Patrick, 207, 316
+Bruce, Edward, invasion by, 292
+Bruce, Edward, death of, 293
+Brugh, on the Boyne, 93, 95
+Bundoran, 29
+
+Cael, 163, 165, 194, 262
+Cael, poem of, 164, 165
+Caher, 161
+Caherconree, 32
+Cailt�, 162, 166
+Cairbr�, 89, 167, 168, 173, 241
+Cairpr� Nia Fer, 146, 147, 132
+Callan River, 199
+Calpurn, 182
+Cantyre, 119, 123, 143
+Carlingford Lough, 241
+Carlingford Mountains, 44
+Carrickfergus, 331, 344, 345, 347
+Carrowmore, 27, 29
+Cataract of the Oaks, 87, 90, 91
+Catbad, 141, 142, 150
+Cavan, 46
+Cavancarragh, 35, 66
+Cealleac, 224
+Charlemont, castle of, 343
+Chevalier de Tess�, 355
+Chiefs of Tara, 82
+Chieftain of the Silver Arm, 91
+Chronicler's record of battles fought, 210, 211, 212, 217, 218
+Chronicles of Ulster, 218
+Church architecture, 298
+Ciar, 104
+Cistercian Abbey, 306
+Clare, 31, 62
+Clare Abbey, 306
+Clidna, 166
+Clocar, 161
+Clondalkin, 241
+Clonmacnoise, 208
+Cluain Bronaig, 226
+Coleraine, 331
+Colum Kill, 208, 212
+Colum Kill, death of, 215
+Colum Kill, verses written by, 213, 214
+Colum of the Churches, 223, 237
+Conall Cernac, 149, 151
+Concobar, 13, 113, 114, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 141,
+142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 177, 194, 246, 258,
+262, 360
+Conditions existing in early years, 219, 220, 221, 222
+Congus the Abbot, 225
+Connacht, 5, 88, 133, 140, 144, 350, 357
+Connemara, 85
+Conn, lord of Connacht, 162
+Conn of the Five-Score Battles, 88, 162
+Copyright decision, an early, 213
+Cork, 5
+Cormac, 167, 171, 172
+Cormac, precepts of, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171
+Coroticus, 195
+Corrib, 85
+Cred� of the Yellow Hair, 163, 178, 194, 262
+Crimtan of the Yellow Hair, 162
+Cromlech-builders, the, 51, 68
+Cromlech of Howth, 43
+Cromlech of Lisbellaw. 47
+Cromlech of Lough Rea, 46
+Cromlechs, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52. 53,
+54, 55, 56, 57, 58
+Cromwell, 334, 339
+Croom, 161
+Cruacan, 131, 141, 146
+Cryptic Designs on cromlechs, 47
+Cuailgne, 132
+Cuigead Sreing, 88
+Culdaff, 47
+Cumal, 162
+Curlew hills, 37, 131
+Cuculain, 13, 14, 15, 16, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144,
+145, 152, 155, 181, 194, 246, 262, 360
+
+DAGDA Mor, 96, 148
+Dagda, the Mighty, 92, 95
+Dair�, 132, 133, 200, 262
+Danes, conversion of the, 275
+Danish Pyramid of Uby, 97
+Dark Ages, the, 260, 261, 262
+Day of Spirits, 140
+De Danaans, the, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96,
+97, 98, 99, 103, 105, 106, 112, 132, 148
+De Courcey, 277
+De Courceys, the, 319
+Deer-park, 29
+Deirdr�, 13, 14, 15, 115, 123, 124, 129, 130, 178, 262
+Deirdr�, the fate of, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122
+Deirdr�, the Lament of, 125
+De Lacys, the, 319
+Deny, 331, 341, 342, 344, 350
+Devenish, 250
+Devenish Island, 221
+Diarmuid, 171, 172, 173
+Dicu, 240
+Dingle Bay, 104
+Dinn-Rig by the Barrow, 146
+Dissenters, 322
+Domnall, 211, 231
+Donaghpatrick, 208
+Doncad, 231, 232
+Donegal, 29, 47
+Donegal Highlands, 26
+Donegal ranges, 5
+Douglas, 350
+Douin Cain, 81
+Down, 5, 46
+Downpatrick, 198, 240
+Drogheda, 342, 345
+Druids, 140
+Druim Dean, 162
+Drumbo, 46
+Dublin, 5, 252, 340, 345
+Dublin Parliament, 368
+Duke of Ormond, 359
+Dundalathglas, 240
+Dundalk, 342
+Dundelga, 143
+Dundrum, 146
+Dundrum Bay, 44, 45
+Durrow, 221, 250
+
+Early churches, 208
+Early schools of learning, tongues first studied in, 208
+Eclipses of the sun and moon, record of, 218
+Edgehill, battle of, 326
+Elias, Bishop of Angoul�me, France, testimony of, 250, 251
+Elizabeth, Queen, 321, 341
+Emain, Banquet-hall of, 111
+Emain of Maca, 13, 110, 112, 115, 122, 123, 129, 131, 140
+Engineering skill ten thousand years ago, 43
+Enniskillen, 34, 35, 341
+Eocaid, son of Erc, 81, 84, 86, 87
+Eocu, 146
+Erin, 141, 144
+Established Church, clergy of the, 376
+Etan, 89
+Evangel of Galilee, the, 16
+
+Factna, son of Cass, 113
+Fair Head, 143
+Feidlimid, 242
+Ferdiad, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140
+Fergus mac Roeg, 13, 15, 16, 113, 114, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130,
+131, 133
+Fergus the Eloquent, 166, 177, 262, 360
+Fermanagh, 33
+Feudal system, the, 289
+Feudal ownership, 291
+Find, ode to Spring of, 156
+Find, son of Cumal, 14, 16, 155, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 171, 172,
+173, 177, 194, 246, 262
+Find, son of Ros, 146, 147, 152
+Finian, school of learning and religion founded by, 212
+Finvoy, 46
+Firbolgs, 60, 61, 69. 70, 77, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 105, 106
+Flann, 248
+Fomorians, 69, 70, 77, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 106, 246
+Ford of Ferdiad, Ath-Fhirdia, 140
+Ford of Luan, 140
+Ford of Seannait, 226
+Ford of the Hurdles, 242, 243, 246
+Ford of the river, 14
+Franklin, Benjamin, letter of to Irish people, 367
+French Revolution, the, 372
+
+Gairec, 140
+Galian of Lagin, 144
+Galtee Mountains, 161
+Galway, 5, 62, 350, 357
+Galway Bay, 31, 162
+Galway Lakes, 31
+Gauls, the, 103
+Giant Stones, 30
+Ginkell, 354, 355, 357, 358
+Gladstone, 375
+Glanworth, 39
+Glendalough, 208, 221
+Glen Druid, 42
+Gold Mines River, 109
+Golden Vale, 161
+Goll Mac Norna, 162
+Grania, 15, 171, 172, 173, 178
+Grattan, Henry, address of, to Dublin Parliament, 368
+Gray Lake, 37
+Grey Abbey, 302
+
+Headland of the Kings, 148
+Hill of Barnec, 162
+Hill of Howth, 239, 252
+Hill of Luchra, 146
+Hill of Rudraige, 44
+Hill of Tara, 155
+Hill of the Willows, 200
+Hill of Ward, 140
+Holycross Abbey, 304
+House of Delga, 143
+House of Mead, 199
+Howth, 239
+Howth Head, 43
+Hyperboreans, 60, 61, 62, 64, 69
+
+Iarl Strangbow, 275
+Indec, son of De Domnand, 90, 91
+Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny, 21
+Inismurray, 237, 238, 239
+Iona, 215
+Ireland, art of working gold in, 108, 178
+Ireland, causes of uprising in, 320
+Ireland, condition of, in the eighteenth century, 365, 366, 367
+Ireland, English influence in, 318
+Ireland, life in, two thousand years ago, 177, 178, 179, 180
+Ireland, national debt of, 372
+Ireland, sympathy of U. S. Congress for people of, 366, 367
+Ireland, traditions of, 110
+Ireland, the Insurrection of, 370, 371, 372
+Ireland, visible and invisible, 3
+Irgalac, 149
+Iriel, 149
+Irish writing, earliest forms of, 177
+Islay, 143
+Islay Hills, 119
+
+James II., 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 353
+Jura, 119, 123, 143
+
+Kenmare, 39
+Kenmare Kiver, 39, 104
+Kerry, 5, 62
+Kildare, 210, 221, 232
+Kilkenny, 42, 325, 326, 349
+Killarney, 36, 39, 163
+Killee, 34
+Killmallock Abbey, 303
+Killteran Village, 43
+Kinsale, 340, 349
+King Gorm's Stone, 97
+King William, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 352, 365
+Knock-Mealdown Hills, 161
+Knockmoy Abbey, 306
+Knocknarea, 30
+
+Lake, General, statement of, 370
+Lake of Killarney, 161
+Lakes of Erne, 81
+Lambay, 236, 239, 241
+Land of the Cromlech-builders, 57
+Land of the Ever Young, 95, 96
+Land tenure, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380
+Laogaire, 199, 240
+Lame, 143
+Lauzun, 350
+Legamaddy, 45
+Leinster, 5, 162, 225, 226, 232, 345, 350
+Leitrim, 81
+Leitrim Hills, 26
+Lennan in Monaghan, 46
+Life of the Cromlech-builders, 68
+Liffey, the, 242
+Limerick, 349, 350, 351, 354, 357
+Leinstermen, 232, 238
+Loing Seac, 224
+Lough Erne, 341
+Loch Etive, 119, 121
+Lough Foyle, 247
+Lough Garra, 37
+Lough Gill, 29
+Lough Gur, 38, 39
+Lough Key, 37
+Lough Leane, 161, 163
+Lough Mask, 85
+Lough Neagh, 110, 200
+Lough Ree, 140
+Loughcrew Hills, 43
+Louis XIV, 337, 340, 353
+Lug, surnamed Lamfada, the Long-Armed, 92, 93
+Lusk, 241
+
+Maca, Queen, 110
+Maelbridge, 217
+Mag Breag, 223
+Mag Rein, 81
+Mag Tuiread, 85, 87, 246
+Mangerton, 162
+Marlborough, Duke of, 352
+Mask, 85
+Mayo, 5, 62
+Mayo Cliffs, 26
+Meave, Queen of Connacht, 13, 14, 15, 25, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134,
+136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 178, 262
+Meath, 155, 242
+Men of Oluemacht, 144
+Message of the New Way, 264
+Messenger of the Tidings, 182
+Mide, 149
+Miocene Age, the, 58
+Modern form of old Irish names, 234
+Monasterboice, 221
+Monk, 326
+Molana Abbey, 306
+Molaise, 237
+Monasteries and religious schools, 221
+Monroe, 324, 326, 327, 323, 329, 330, 331, 333
+Monument of Pillared Stones, 30
+Moore, 326
+Mount Venus Cromlech, 42
+Mountcashel, Lord, 342
+Mountains of Mourne, 44, 94, 146, 193, 231
+Mountains of Storms, 26, 87
+Moville, 221, 239, 262
+Moytura, 31, 85
+Munster, 5
+Munstermen of Great Muma, 144
+Murcad, 238
+
+Naisi, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 129, 130
+Napier, Sir William, testimony of, 370
+Nectain's Shield, 232
+Nemed's sons, 87
+Nessa, 15, 113
+Norsemen, waning of the, 284
+Northern Cromlech Region, 54
+Northmen, 234, 235, 236, 243, 251
+Nuada, the De Danaan king, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93
+
+O'Connell, Daniel, 373
+O'Donnell, 321, 322
+O'Neill, Owen Roe, 321, 322, 323, 324, 332, 333, 334, 338
+O'Neill, death of, 333
+O'Neill, defeat of English army by, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 360
+Ogma, of the Sunlike Face, 92, 95, 96
+Oscar, son of Ossin, 14
+Oscur, 155, 171
+Ossin, son of Find, 14, 15, 16, 155, 161, 162, 167, 171, 172, 177, 181,
+194, 246, 262
+Ox Mountains, 87
+
+Parliament at Dublin, 323
+Parliament of Ireland, 371
+Parnell, Charles Stewart, 380
+Patricius, 182
+Patricius, appeal of, to fellow-Christians of Coroticus, 195, 196
+Patricius, birthplace of, 182
+Patricius, letter of, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191,
+192, 193
+Patrick, 17
+Patrick, his first victory commemorated, 198
+Patrick, the dwelling of, 198
+Peat, age of, 34, 36
+Peat, rate of growth of, 33, 35, 66, 67
+Penal Laws, the system of, 373
+Plain of Nia, 85
+Plain of the Headland, 82
+Plain of the Pillars, 85
+Plain of Tirerril, 91
+Plantation of Ulster, 322
+Poem of Ossin, 156
+Potitus, 182
+Prince William of Nassau, 339, 340, 342
+Private taxation, 291
+Pyramids of stone, 93, 94
+
+Quoyle River, 198, 240
+
+Ragallac, 217
+Raid of the Northmen, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243
+Raids on islands of Irish coast, 257, 258, 259
+Raphoe, 47
+Rathcool, 162
+Rath-Laogaire, 199
+Rath of Badamar, 161
+Red Hills of Leinster, 162
+Reform Bill, the, 372
+Restoration, the, 339
+Roderick O'Conor, 61
+Ros Ruad, 152
+Ros, son of Rudraige, 112
+Rudraige, 44, 112
+Rudraige, hill of, 44, 231
+Runnymead, 317
+
+Saint Adamnan, 223, 224
+Saint Bernard, 298
+Saint Brigid, 210
+Saint Camin's "Commentary on the Psalms," 222
+"Saint Colum of the Churches," 212
+Saint Dominick, 298
+Saint Francis of Assisi, 298
+Saint Mansuy, 60
+Saint Patrick, body of laid at rest, 201
+Saint Patrick, delivery of message by, to King Laogaire, 199
+Saint Patrick, visit of to kings of Leinster and Munster, 200
+Saint Patrick, work of, 199, 205
+Saint Ruth, 354, 355
+Saint Ruth, death of, 356
+Saint Samtain, 226
+Saint Samtain, epitaph of the saintly virgin, 226, 227
+Sarsfield, 351, 353, 355
+Saul, 208, 221
+Schomberg, 342, 343, 344, 345, 347, 348
+Second Epoch, 13
+Senca, 144
+Shannon, the, 5, 32, 37, 130, 141, 146, 350, 354, 357
+Sheldon, 357, 358
+Slane, 347, 348
+Slieve Callan, 31, 39
+Slieve League, 26, 90
+Slieve Mish, 104, 132, 196
+Slievemore Mountain, 30
+Slieve na Calliagh, 95, 97
+Slieve-na-griddle, 45, 46
+Sligo, 25, 29, 90, 91
+Sligo Hills, 26
+Sons of Milid, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 112, 132
+Sound of Jura, 119, 123
+Southern Cromlech Province, 53
+Sreng, 82, 83, 84, 91, 93, 105
+Stone Circles, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 42, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52,
+53, 55, 72
+Stone Circles, clue to their building, 40
+Stone Circles, measure of their years, 40
+Strand of Tralee, 161
+Strangford, 45
+Strangford Lough, 198
+Stuarts, the, 339
+Sualtam, 13
+Succat, 182
+Suir, 161
+Sullane River, 39
+Summit of Prospects, 146
+
+Tailten, 106, 132
+Talbott, Earl of Tyrconnell, 359
+Tara, 81, 84, 106, 146, 147, 198
+Tara, Banquet-hall of, 112
+"The Church of the Oak-woods," 210
+The Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, 87
+Thenay Relics, the, 58
+Third Epoch, 14
+Three Waves of Erin, the, 146
+Tigearnac, 265
+Toppid Mountain, 35, 36
+Traig Eotaile, 87
+Tralee, 32
+Treaty of Limerick, 361, 365
+Tuata De Danaan, 79, 84
+Twelve Peaks of Connemara, 31
+Tyrconnell, Lady, 340
+Tyrconnell, Lord, 340, 343, 344, 345, 349, 351, 352, 353
+
+Uinc�, 162
+Ui-Neill, the, 225, 232
+Ulad, 113, 130, 131, 133, 141, 151
+Ulaid, 113, 145, 150, 152
+Ulaid, Councils of the, 113
+Ulaid, men of the, 130
+Ulster, 5, 345
+Upper Erne, 32
+Usnae, 115
+
+Venice of Lough Rea, 37
+Volunteer Movement, the, 367, 369
+
+Waterford, 349, 350, 352
+Water of Luachan, 146
+Wave of Clidna, the, 146, 151
+Wave of Rudraige, the, 146, 151
+Wave of Tuag Inbir, the, 146, 151
+Waves of Erin, the three, 146, 151
+Weight of Cromlech-stones, 56
+Wexford Harbor, 42
+Wicklow, 5
+Wicklow Gold-mines, the, 108, 109
+
+Yellow Ford of Athboy, 140
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ireland, Historic and Picturesque
+by Charles Johnston
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRELAND, HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE ***
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Ireland, by Charles Johnston.</title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Ireland, Historic and Picturesque, by Charles Johnston
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ireland, Historic and Picturesque
+
+Author: Charles Johnston
+
+Release Date: April 19, 2004 [EBook #12078]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRELAND, HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charlie Kirschner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
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+</pre>
+
+<a name="000.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/000.jpg"><img src="images/000.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>PEEP HOLE, BLARNEY CASTLE.</b></p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>IRELAND</h1>
+<h2>HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE</h2>
+<h4>BY</h4>
+<h3>CHARLES JOHNSTON</h3>
+<h4>ILLUSTRATED</h4>
+<h5>1902</h5>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+<center><a href="#I.">I. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.</a><br>
+<a href="#II.">II. THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.</a><br>
+<a href="#III.">III. THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.</a><br>
+<a href="#IV.">IV. THE DE DANAANS.</a><br>
+<a href="#V.">V. EMAIN OF MACA.</a><br>
+<a href="#VI.">VI. CUCULAIN THE HERO.</a><br>
+<a href="#VII.">VII. FIND AND OSSIN.</a><br>
+<a href="#VIII.">VIII. THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.</a><br>
+<a href="#IX.">IX. THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.</a><br>
+<a href="#X.">X. THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.</a><br>
+<a href="#XI.">XI. THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.</a><br>
+<a href="#XII.">XII. THE NORMANS.</a><br>
+<a href="#XIII.">XIII. THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.</a><br>
+<a href="#XIV.">XIV. THE JACOBITE WARS.</a><br>
+<a href="#XV.">XV. CONCLUSION.</a><br>
+<a href="#INDEX.">INDEX.</a></center>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.</h2>
+<center>Photogravures made by A.W. ELSON &amp; Co.<br>
+<br>
+<a href="#000.jpg">PEEP HOLE, BLARNEY CASTLE</a><br>
+<a href="#017.jpg">IN THE DARGLE, CO. WICKLOW</a><br>
+<a href="#037.jpg">MUCKROSS ABBEY, KILLARNEY</a><br>
+<a href="#053.jpg">BRANDY ISLAND, GLENGARRIFF</a><br>
+<a href="#063.jpg">SUGAR LOAF MOUNTAIN, GLENGARRIFF</a><br>
+<a href="#079.jpg">RIVER ERNE, BELLEEK</a><br>
+<a href="#097.jpg">WHITE ROCKS, PORTRUSH</a><br>
+<a href="#113.jpg">POWERSCOURT WATERFALL, CO. WICKLOW</a><br>
+<a href="#131.jpg">HONEYCOMB, GIANT'S CAUSEWAY</a><br>
+<a href="#145.jpg">GRAY MAN'S PATH, FAIR HEAD</a><br>
+<a href="#165.jpg">COLLEEN BAWN CAVES, KILLARNEY</a><br>
+<a href="#181.jpg">RUINS ON SCATTERY ISLAND</a><br>
+<a href="#209.jpg">VALLEY OF GLENDALOUGH AND RUINS OF THE SEVEN
+CHURCHES</a><br>
+<a href="#223.jpg">ANCIENT CROSS, GLENDALOUGH</a><br>
+<a href="#243.jpg">ROUND TOWER, ANTRIM</a><br>
+<a href="#259.jpg">GIANT'S HEAD AND DUNLUCE CASTLE, CO.
+ANTRIM</a><br>
+<a href="#267.jpg">ROCK CASHEL, RUINS OF OLD CATHEDRAL, KING
+CORMAC'S CHAPEL AND ROUND TOWER</a><br>
+<a href="#285.jpg">DUNLUCE CASTLE</a><br>
+<a href="#299.jpg">MELLIFONT ABBEY, CO. LOUTH</a><br>
+<a href="#305.jpg">HOLY CROSS ABBEY, CO. TIPPERARY</a><br>
+<a href="#325.jpg">DONEGAL CASTLE</a><br>
+<a href="#341.jpg">TULLYMORE PARK, CO. DOWN</a><br>
+<a href="#351.jpg">THOMOND BRIDGE, LIMERICK</a><br>
+<a href="#367.jpg">SALMON FISHERY, GALWAY</a><br>
+<a href="#373.jpg">O'CONNELL'S STATUE, DUBLIN</a><br>
+<a href="#394.jpg">MAP OF IRELAND</a></center>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page001" id="page001"></a>[pg
+001]</span>
+<h2>VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page002" id="page002"></a>[pg
+002]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page003" id="page003"></a>[pg
+003]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>IRELAND.</h2>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="I."></a>I.</h2>
+<h3>VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Here is an image by which you may call up and remember the
+natural form and appearance of Ireland:</p>
+<p>Think of the sea gradually rising around her coasts, until the
+waters, deepened everywhere by a hundred fathoms, close in upon the
+land. Of all Ireland there will now remain visible above the waves
+only two great armies of islands, facing each other obliquely
+across a channel of open sea. These two armies of islands will lie
+in ordered ranks, their lines stretching from northeast to
+southwest; they will be equal in size, each two hundred miles along
+the front, and seventy miles from front to rear. And the open sea
+between, which divides the two armies, will measure seventy miles
+across.</p>
+<p>Not an island of these two armies, as they lie thus obliquely
+facing each other, will rise as high as three <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page004" id="page004"></a>[pg 004]</span>
+thousand feet; only the captains among them will exceed a thousand;
+nor will there be great variety in their forms. All the islands,
+whether north or south, will have gently rounded backs, clothed in
+pastures nearly to the crest, with garments of purple heather lying
+under the sky upon their ridges. Yet for all this roundness of
+outline there will be, towards the Atlantic end of either army, a
+growing sternness of aspect, a more sombre ruggedness in the
+outline of the hills, with cliffs and steep ravines setting their
+brows frowning against the deep.</p>
+<p>Hold in mind the image of these two obliquely ranged
+archipelagoes, their length thrice their breadth, seaming the blue
+of the sea, and garmented in dark green and purple under the
+sunshine; and, thinking of them thus, picture to yourself a new
+rising of the land, a new withdrawal of the waters, the waves
+falling and ever falling, till all the hills come forth again, and
+the salt tides roll and ripple away from the valleys, leaving their
+faces for the winds to dry; let this go on till the land once more
+takes its familiar form, and you will easily call up the visible
+image of the whole.</p>
+<p>As you stand in the midst of the land, where first lay the
+channel of open sea, you will have, on your northern horizon, the
+beginning of a world of purple-outlined <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page005" id="page005"></a>[pg 005]</span> hills,
+outliers of the northern mountain region, which covers the upper
+third of the island. On all sides about you, from the eastern sea
+to the western ocean, you will have the great central plain,
+dappled with lakes and ribbed with silver rivers, another third of
+the island. Then once more, to the south, you will have a region of
+hills, the last third of Ireland, in size just equal to the
+northern mountains or the central plain.</p>
+<p>The lines of the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses
+of Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern
+Ulster and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear
+is held by the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness
+of the northern seas.</p>
+<p>The plain opens from the verge of these hills; the waters that
+gather on its pleasant pastures and fat fields, or among the green
+moss tracts of its lowlands, flow eastward by the Boyne or
+southwestward by the Shannon to the sea.</p>
+<p>Then with the granite mountains of Dublin and Wicklow begin the
+southern hills, stretching through south Leinster and Munster to
+the red sandstone ridges of Cork and Kerry, our last vantage-ground
+against the Atlantic.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page006" id="page006"></a>[pg
+006]</span>
+<p>Finally, encircling all, is the perpetual presence of the sea,
+with its foaming, thunderous life or its days of dreamy peace;
+around the silver sands or furrowed cliffs that gird the island our
+white waves rush forever, murmuring the music of eternity.</p>
+<p>Such is this land of Eir&eacute;, very old, yet full of
+perpetual youth; a thousand times darkened by sorrow, yet with a
+heart of living gladness; too often visited by evil and pale death,
+yet welling ever up in unconquerable life,--the youth and life and
+gladness that thrill through earth and air and sky, when the whole
+world grows beautiful in the front of Spring.</p>
+<p>For with us Spring is like the making of a new world in the dawn
+of time. Under the warm wind's caressing breath the grass comes
+forth upon the meadows and the hills, chasing dun Winter away.
+Every field is newly vestured in young corn or the olive greenness
+of wheat; the smell of the earth is full of sweetness. White
+daisies and yellow dandelions star all our pastures; and on the
+green ruggedness of every hillside, or along the shadowed banks of
+every river and every silver stream, amid velvet mosses and fringes
+of new-born ferns, in a million nooks and crannies throughout all
+the land, are strewn <span class="pagenum"><a name="page007" id=
+"page007"></a>[pg 007]</span> dark violets; and wreaths of yellow
+primroses with crimped green leaves pour forth a remote and divine
+fragrance; above them, the larches are dainty with new greenery and
+rosy tassels, and the young leaves of beech and oak quiver with
+fresh life.</p>
+<p>Still the benignance of Spring pours down upon us from the sky,
+till the darkening fields are hemmed in between barriers of white
+hawthorn, heavy with nectar, and twined with creamy honeysuckle,
+the finger-tips of every blossom coral-red. The living blue above
+throbs with the tremulous song of innumerable larks; the measured
+chant of cuckoos awakens the woods; and through the thickets a
+whole world's gladness sings itself forth from the throat of thrush
+and blackbird. Through the whole land between the four seas
+benediction is everywhere; blue-bells and the rosy fingers of heath
+deck the mountain-tops, where the grouse are crooning to each other
+among the whins; down the hillsides into every valley pour gladness
+and greenness and song; there are flowers everywhere, even to the
+very verge of the whispering sea. There, among the gray bent-spikes
+and brackens on the sandhills, primroses weave their yellow
+wreaths; and little pansies, golden and blue and purple, marshal
+their weird eyes against the spears <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page008" id="page008"></a>[pg 008]</span> of dark blue hyacinths,
+till the rich tribute of wild thyme makes peace between them.</p>
+<p>The blue sky overhead, with its flocks of sunlit clouds, softly
+bends over the gentle bosom of the earth. A living spirit throbs
+everywhere, palpable, audible, full of sweetness and sadness
+immeasurable--sadness that is only a more secret joy.</p>
+<br>
+<p>Then the day grows weary, making way for the magic of evening
+and the oncoming dark with its mystery. The tree-stems redden with
+the sunset; there is a chill sigh in the wind; the leaves turn
+before it, burnished against the purple sky. As the gloom rises up
+out of the earth, bands of dark red gather on the horizon, seaming
+the clear bronze of the sky, that passes upward into olive-color,
+merging in dark blue overhead. The sun swings down behind the
+hills, and purple darkness comes down out of the sky; the red fades
+from the tree-stems, the cloud-colors die away; the whole world
+glimmers with the fading whiteness of twilight. Silence gathers
+itself together out of the dark, deepened, not broken, by the
+hushing of the wind among the beech-leaves, or the startled cluck
+of a blackbird, or a wood-pigeon's soft murmur, as it dreams in the
+silver fir.</p>
+<p>Under the brown wings of the dark, the night <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page009" id="page009"></a>[pg 009]</span> throbs
+with mystic presences; the hills glimmer with an inward life;
+whispering voices hurry through the air. Another and magical land
+awakes in the dark, full of a living restlessness; sleepless as the
+ever-moving sea. Everywhere through the night-shrouded woods, the
+shadowy trees seem to interrupt their secret whispers till you are
+gone past. There is no sense of loneliness anywhere, but rather a
+host of teeming lives on every hand, palpable though hidden, remote
+from us though touching our lives, calling to us through the gloom
+with wordless voices, inviting us to enter and share with them the
+mystical life of this miraculous earth, great mother of us all, The
+dark is full of watching eyes.</p>
+<p>Summer with us is but a brighter Spring, as our Winter only
+prolongs the sadness of Autumn. So our year has but two moods, a
+gay one and a sad one. Yet each tinges the other--the mists of
+Autumn veiling the gleam of Spring--Spring smiling through the
+grief of Autumn. When the sad mood comes, stripping the trees of
+their leaves, and the fields of their greenness, white mists veil
+the hills and brood among the fading valleys. A shiver runs through
+the air, and the cold branches are starred with tears. A poignant
+grief is over the land, an almost desolation,--full <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page010" id="page010"></a>[pg 010]</span> of
+unspoken sorrow, tongue-tied with unuttered complaint. All the
+world is lost and forlorn, without hope or respite. Everything is
+given up to the dirges of the moaning seas, the white shrouds of
+weeping mist. Wander forth upon the uplands and among the lonely
+hills and rock-seamed sides of the mountains, and you will find the
+same sadness everywhere: a grieving world under a grieving sky.
+Quiet desolation hides among the hills, tears tremble on every
+brown grass-blade, white mists of melancholy shut out the lower
+world.</p>
+<p>Whoever has not felt the poignant sadness of the leafless days
+has never known the real Ireland; the sadness that is present,
+though veiled, in the green bravery of Spring, and under the songs
+of Summer. Nor have they ever known the real Ireland who have not
+divined beneath that poignant sadness a heart of joy, deep and
+perpetual, made only keener by that sad outward show.</p>
+<p>Here in our visible life is a whisper and hint of our life
+invisible; of the secret that runs through and interprets so much
+of our history. For very much of our nation's life has been like
+the sadness of those autumn days,--a tale of torn leaves, of broken
+branches, of tears everywhere. Tragedy upon <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page011" id="page011"></a>[pg 011]</span>
+tragedy has filled our land with woe and sorrow, and, as men count
+success, we have failed of it, and received only misery and
+deprivation. He has never known the true Ireland who does not feel
+that woe. Yet, more, he knows not the real Ireland who cannot feel
+within that woe the heart of power and joy,--the strong life
+outlasting darkest night,--the soul that throbs incessantly under
+all the calamities of the visible world, throughout the long
+tragedy of our history.</p>
+<p>This is our secret: the life that is in sorrow as in joy; the
+power that is not more in success than in failure--the one soul
+whose moods these are, who uses equally life and death.</p>
+<p>For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy. And we may outline
+now the manner in which that tale will be told. We shall have,
+first, a long, dim dawn,--mysterious peoples of the hidden past
+coming together to our land from the outlying darkness. A first
+period, which has left abundant and imperishable traces everywhere
+among our hills and valleys, writing a large history in massive
+stone, yet a history which, even now, is dim as the dawn it belongs
+to. What can be called forth from that Archaic Darkness, in the
+backward and abysm of Time, we shall <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page012" id="page012"></a>[pg 012]</span> try to evoke; drawing
+the outlines of a people who, with large energies in our visible
+world, toiled yet more for the world invisible; a people uniform
+through the whole land and beyond it, along many neighboring
+shores; a people everywhere building; looking back into a long
+past; looking forward through the mists of the future. A people
+commemorating the past in a form that should outlast the future. A
+people undertaking great enterprises for mysterious ends; whose
+works are everywhere among us, to this day, imperishable in giant
+stone; yet a people whose purposes are mysterious to us, whose very
+name and tongue are quite unknown. Their works still live all
+around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the four provinces, a
+world of the vanished past enduring among us into the present; and,
+so mightily did these old builders work, and with such large
+simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every
+handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows,
+bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race.</p>
+<p>After this Archaic Dawn we shall find a mingling of four races
+in Ireland, coming together from widely separated homes, unless one
+of the four be the descendant of the archaic race, as well it may
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page013" id="page013"></a>[pg
+013]</span> be. From the surging together of these four races we
+shall see, in almost pre-historic times, the growth of a well-knit
+polity; firm principalities founded, strong battles fought, a
+lasting foundation of law. In this Second Epoch, every thing that
+in the first was dim and vague grows firm in outline and defined.
+Names, places, persons,--we know them all as if they were of
+to-day. This is the age which flowered in the heroic days of Emain
+of Maca, Emain 'neath the beech-trees, the citadel of northeastern
+Ireland. Here we shall find the court of Fergus mac Roeg, a man too
+valiant, too passionate, too generous to rule altogether wisely;
+his star darkened by the gloomy genius of Concobar his stepson, the
+evil lover of ill-fated Deirdr&eacute;. Cuculain, too, the
+war-loving son of Sualtam, shall rise again,--in whom one part of
+our national genius finds its perfect flower. We shall hear the
+thunder of his chariot, at the Battle of the Headland of the Kings,
+when Meave the winsome and crafty queen of Connacht comes against
+him, holding in silken chains of her tresses the valiant spirit of
+Fergus. The whole life of that heroic epoch, still writ large upon
+the face of the land, shall come forth clear and definite; we shall
+stand by the threshold of Cuculain's dwelling, and move
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page014" id="page014"></a>[pg
+014]</span> among the banquet-halls of Emain of Maca. We shall look
+upon the hills and valleys that Meave and Deirdr&eacute; looked on,
+and hear the clash of spear and shield at the Ford of the
+river,--and this even though we must go back two thousand
+years.</p>
+<p>To this will follow a Third Epoch, where another side of
+Ireland's genius will write itself in epic all across the land,
+with songs for every hillside, and stories for every vale and
+grove. Here our more passionate and poetic force will break forth
+in the lives of Find, son of Cumal, the lord of warriors; in his
+son Ossin, most famous bard of the western lands, and Ossin's son
+Oscar, before whose might even the fiends and sprites cowered back
+dismayed. As the epoch of Cuculain shows us our valor finding its
+apotheosis, so shall we find in Find and Ossin and Oscar the
+perfect flower of our genius for story and song; for romantic life
+and fine insight into nature; for keen wit and gentler humor. The
+love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly the
+visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly,--a sense
+of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic
+life. We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and
+poetic side of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page015" id=
+"page015"></a>[pg 015]</span> Irish character as will leave little
+for coming ages to add. In these two early epochs we shall see the
+perfecting of the natural man; the moulding of rounded, gracious
+and harmonious lives, inspired with valor and the love of beauty
+and song.</p>
+<p>Did our human destiny stop there, with the perfect life of
+individual men and women, we might well say that these two epochs
+of Ireland contain it all; that our whole race could go no further.
+For no man lived more valiant than Cuculain, more generous than
+Fergus, more full of the fire of song than Ossin, son of Find. Nor
+amongst women were any sadder than Deirdr&eacute; and Grania;
+craftier than Meave, more winsome than Nessa the mother of
+Concobar. Perfected flowers of human life all of them,--if that be
+all of human life. So, were this all, we might well consent that
+with the death of Oscar our roll of history might close; there is
+nothing to add that the natural man could add.</p>
+<p>But where the perfecting of the natural man ends, our truer
+human life begins--the life of our ever-living soul. The natural
+man seeks victory; he seeks wealth and possessions and happiness;
+the love of women, and the loyalty of followers. But the natural
+man trembles in the face of defeat, of sorrow, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page016" id="page016"></a>[pg 016]</span> of
+subjection; the natural man cannot raise the black veil of
+death.</p>
+<p>Therefore for the whole world and for our land there was needed
+another epoch, a far more difficult lesson,--one so remote from
+what had been of old, that even now we only begin to understand it.
+To the Ireland that had seen the valor of Cuculain, that had
+watched the wars of Fergus,--to the Ireland that listened to the
+deeds of Find and the songs of Ossin,--came the Evangel of Galilee,
+the darkest yet brightest message ever brought to the children of
+earth. If we rightly read that Evangel, it brought the doom of the
+natural man, and his supersession by the man immortal; it brought
+the death of our personal perfecting and pride, and the rising from
+the dead of the common soul, whereby a man sees another self in his
+neighbor; sees all alike in the one Divine.</p>
+<p>Of this one Divine, wherein we all live and live forever, pain
+is no less the minister than pleasure; nay, pain is more its
+minister, since pleasure has already given its message to the
+natural man. Of that one Divine, sorrow and desolation are the
+messengers, alike with joy and gladness; even more than joy and
+gladness, for the natural man has tasted <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page017" id="page017"></a>[pg 017]</span> these.
+Of that one Divine, black and mysterious death is the servant, not
+less than bright life; and life we had learned of old in the
+sunshine.</p>
+<a name="017.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/017.jpg"><img src="images/017.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>IN THE DARGLE, CO. WICKLOW.</b></p>
+<p>There came, therefore, to Ireland, as to a land cherished for
+enduring purposes, first the gentler side, and then the sterner, of
+the Galilean message. First, the epoch almost idyllic which
+followed after the mission of Patrick; the epoch of learning and
+teaching the simpler phrases of the Word. Churches and schools rose
+everywhere, taking the place of fort and embattled camp. Chants
+went up at morning and at evening, with the incense of prayer, and
+heaven seemed descended upon earth. Our land, which had stood so
+high in the ranks of valor and romance, now rose not less eminent
+for piety and fervid zeal, sending forth messengers and ministers
+of the glad news to the heathen lands of northern and central
+Europe, and planting refuges of religion within their savage
+bounds. Beauty came forth in stone and missal, answering to the
+beauty of life it was inspired by; and here, if anywhere upon earth
+through a score of centuries, was realized the ideal of that prayer
+for the kingdom, as in heaven, so on earth. Here, again, we have
+most ample memorials scattered all abroad throughout the land; we
+can <span class="pagenum"><a name="page018" id="page018"></a>[pg
+018]</span> call up the whole epoch, and make it stand visible
+before us, visiting every shrine and sacred place of that saintly
+time, seeing, with inner eyes, the footsteps of those who followed
+that path, first traced out by the shores of Gennesaret.</p>
+<p>Once more, if the kingdom come upon earth were all of the
+message, we might halt here; for here forgiveness and gentle
+charity performed their perfect work, and learning was present with
+wise counsel to guide willing feet in the way. Yet this is not all;
+nor, if we rightly understand that darkest yet brightest message,
+are we or is mankind destined for such an earthly paradise; our
+kingdom is not of this world. Here was another happiness, another
+success; yet not in that happiness nor in that success was hid the
+secret; it lay far deeper. Therefore we find that morning with its
+sunshine rudely clouded over, its promise swept away in the black
+darkness of storms. Something more than holy living remained to be
+learned; there remained the mystery of failure and death--that
+death which is the doorway to our real life. Therefore upon our
+shores broke wave after wave of invasion, storm after storm of
+cruelest oppression and degradation. In the very dust was our race
+ground down, destitute, afflicted, tormented, according
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page019" id="page019"></a>[pg
+019]</span> to prophecy and promise. Nor was that the end. Every
+bitterness that the heart of man can conceive, that the heart of
+man can inflict, that the heart of man can endure, was poured into
+our cup, and we drained it to the dregs. Of that saddest yet most
+potent time we shall record enough to show not only what befell
+through our age of darkness, but also, so far as may be, what
+miraculous intent underlay it, what promise the darkness covered,
+of our future light; what golden rays of dawn were hidden in our
+gloom.</p>
+<p>Finally, from all our fiery trials we shall see the genius of
+our land emerge, tried indeed by fire, yet having gained fire's
+purity; we shall see that genius beginning, as yet with halting
+speech, to utter its most marvelous secret of the soul of man. We
+shall try at least to gain clear sight of our great destiny, and
+thereby of the like destiny of universal man.</p>
+<p>For we cannot doubt that what we have passed through, all men
+and all nations either have passed through already, or are to pass
+through in the time to come. There is but one divine law, one
+everlasting purpose and destiny for us all. And if we see other
+nations now entering that time of triumph which passed for us so
+long ago, that perfecting of the natural man, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page020" id="page020"></a>[pg 020]</span> with
+his valor and his song, we shall with fear and reverence remember
+that before them also lie the dark centuries of fiery trial; the
+long night of affliction, the vigils of humiliation and suffering.
+The one Divine has not yet laid aside the cup that holds the bitter
+draught,--the drinking of which comes ever before the final gift of
+the waters of life. What we passed through, they shall pass through
+also; what we suffered, they too shall suffer. Well will it be with
+them if, like us, they survive the fierce trial, and rise from the
+fire immortal, born again through sacrifice.</p>
+<p>Therefore I see in Ireland a miraculous and divine history, a
+life and destiny invisible, lying hid within her visible life. Like
+that throbbing presence of the night which whispers along the
+hills, this diviner whisper, this more miraculous and occult power,
+lurks in our apparent life. From the very gray of her morning, the
+children of Ireland were preoccupied with the invisible world; it
+was so in the darkest hours of our oppression and desolation;
+driven from this world, we took refuge in that; it was not the
+kingdom of heaven upon earth, but the children of earth seeking a
+refuge in heaven. So the same note rings and echoes through all our
+history; we <span class="pagenum"><a name="page021" id=
+"page021"></a>[pg 021]</span> live in the invisible world. If I
+rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To
+restore to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our
+immortality; as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean
+Evangel. We shall first learn, and then teach, that not with wealth
+can the soul of man be satisfied; that our enduring interest is not
+here but there, in the unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose
+purposes exist all the visible beauties of the world. If this be
+our mission and our purpose, well may our fair mysterious land
+deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page022" id="page022"></a>[pg
+022]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page023" id="page023"></a>[pg
+023]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page024" id="page024"></a>[pg
+024]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page025" id="page025"></a>[pg
+025]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="II."></a>II.</h2>
+<h3>THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Westward from Sligo--Town of the River of Shells--a tongue of
+land runs toward the sea between two long bays. Where the two bays
+join their waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray limestone
+rocks soaring sheer upwards, rugged and formidable. Within the
+shadow of the mountain is hidden a wonderful glen--a long tunnel
+between cliffs, densely arched over with trees and fringed with
+ferns; even at midday full of a green gloom. It is a fitting
+gateway to the beauty and mystery of the mountain.</p>
+<p>Slowly climbing by stony ways, the path reaches the summit, a
+rock table crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in
+olden days as a memorial of golden-haired Maeve. From the dead
+queen's pyramid a view of surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over
+sea and land, mingled valley and hill. The Atlantic stretches in
+illimitable blue, curved round the rim of the sky, a darker mirror
+of the blue above. It is full of throbbing silence and peace.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page026" id="page026"></a>[pg
+026]</span> Across blue fields of ocean, and facing the noonday
+brightness of the sun, rise the tremendous cliffs of Slieve League,
+gleaming with splendid colors through the shimmering air; broad
+bands of amber and orange barred with deeper red; the blue weaves
+beneath them and the green of the uplands above.</p>
+<p>The vast amber wall rises out of the ocean, and passes eastward
+in a golden band till it merges in the Donegal highlands with their
+immeasurable blue. Sweeping round a wide bay, the land drawls
+nearer again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to
+green and brown. The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and
+Sligo hills, a row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler
+and more translucent in the southern distance.</p>
+<p>Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across
+the plain, where brown and purple are blended with green in broad
+spaces of mingling color. To the west the ground rises again into
+hills crowded behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the
+Mountains of Storms. Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud-wreaths
+in the blue, are the hills that guard our western ocean. From their
+sunset-verges the land draws near again, in the long range of the
+Mayo cliffs,--fierce walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page027" id="page027"></a>[pg
+027]</span> from a wild world of storm-swept uplands. The cliffs
+gradually lessen, and their colors grow clearer, till they sink at
+last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare, divided from us only by
+a channel of shallow sea.</p>
+<p>The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain,
+is full of the silence of intense and mighty power. The ocean is
+tremulous with the breath of life. The mountains, in their stately
+beauty, rise like immortals in the clear azure. The signs of our
+present works are dwarfed to insignificance.</p>
+<p>Everywhere within that wide world of hill and plain, and hardly
+less ancient than the hills themselves, are strewn memorials of
+another world that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden
+past. A wordless history is written there, in giant circles of
+stone and cromlechs of piled blocks, so old that in a land of most
+venerable tradition their very legend has vanished away.</p>
+<p>Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs
+and stone circles, a very city of dead years. There is something
+awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered
+stones, the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts; that awe is
+deepened by the feeling of the tremendous power <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page028" id="page028"></a>[pg 028]</span>
+lavished in bringing them here, setting them up in their ordered
+groups, and piling the crowns of the cromlechs on other only less
+gigantic stones; awe gives place to overwhelming mystery when we
+can find no kinship to our own thoughts and aims in their stately
+grouping. We are in presence of archaic purposes recorded in a
+massive labyrinth, purposes darkly hidden from us in the
+unknown.</p>
+<p>There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances,
+firmly set upright in the earth. They loom vast, like beads of a
+giant necklace on the velvet grass. There are cromlechs set
+alone--a single huge boulder borne aloft in the air on three others
+of hardly less weight. There are cromlechs set in the midst of
+titanic circles of stone, with lesser boulders guarding the
+cromlechs closer at hand. There are circles beside circles rising
+in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting their
+aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their
+companion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmuring sea.</p>
+<p>Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages. When
+sunrise reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of
+darkness over the burnished grass. From morning to midday the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page029" id="page029"></a>[pg
+029]</span> shadows shrink, ever hiding from the sun; an army of
+wraiths, sprite-like able to grow gigantic or draw together into
+mere blots of darkness. When day declines, the shadows come forth
+again, joining ghostly hands from stone to stone, from circle to
+circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at last into the
+universal realm of night. Thus they weave their web, inexorable as
+tireless Time.</p>
+<p>There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore,
+under Knocknarea. Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials
+of dead years within our horizon. At Abbey-quarter, within the
+town-limits of Sligo itself, there is another great ring of
+boulders, the past and the present mingling together. On the
+northern coast, across the Bay of Sligo, where the headland of
+Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is another giant necklace
+of gray blocks ranged upon the moor. Farther along the shore, where
+Bundoran marks the boundary of Donegal, a cromlech and a stone
+circle rise among the sand-banks. All have the same rugged and
+enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery.</p>
+<p>Eastward from Sligo, Lough Gill lies like a mirror framed in
+hills, wreathed with dark green woods. On a hill-top north of the
+lake, in the Deer-park, is a <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page030" id="page030"></a>[pg 030]</span> monument of quite other
+character--a great oblong marked by pillared stones, like an open
+temple. At three points huge stones are laid across from pillar to
+pillar. The whole enclosure was doubtless so barred in days of old,
+a temple of open arches crowning the summit of the hill. The great
+ruin by the lake keeps its secret well.</p>
+<p>Another ring of giant stones rests on a hillside across the
+lake, under the Cairn hill, with its pyramid crown. All these are
+within easy view from our first vantage-point on Knocknarea, yet
+they are but the outposts of an army which spreads everywhere
+throughout the land. They are as common in wild and inaccessible
+places as on the open plain. Some rise in lonely islands off the
+coast; others on the summits of mountains; yet others in the midst
+of tilled fields. They bear no relation at all to the land as it is
+to-day. The very dispersion of these great stone monuments,
+scattered equally among places familiar or wild, speaks of a remote
+past--a past when all places were alike wild, or all alike
+familiar.</p>
+<p>Where the gale-swept moors of Achill Island rise up toward the
+slope of Slievemore Mountain, there are stone circles and cromlechs
+like the circles of Carrowmore. The wild storms of the Atlantic
+rush <span class="pagenum"><a name="page031" id="page031"></a>[pg
+031]</span> past them, and the breakers roar under their cliffs.
+The moorland round the towering mountain is stained with ochre and
+iron under a carpet of heather rough as the ocean winds.</p>
+<p>Away to the south from Slievemore the horizon is broken by an
+army of mountains, beginning with the Twelve Peaks of Connemara.
+Eastward of these hills are spread the great Galway lakes; eastward
+of these a wide expanse of plain. This is the famous Moytura of
+traditional history, whose story we shall presently tell. Ages ago
+a decisive battle was fought there; but ages before the battle, if
+we are not greatly misled, the stone circles of the plain were
+already there. Tradition says that these circles numbered seven in
+the beginning, but only two remain unbroken.</p>
+<p>Between Galway Bay and the wide estuary of the Shannon spread
+the moorlands of Clare, bleak under Atlantic gales, with never a
+tree for miles inward from the sea. Like a watch-tower above the
+moorlands stand. Slieve Callan, the crown of the mountain abruptly
+shorn. Under the shoulder of the great hill, with the rolling
+moorlands all about it, stands a solitary cromlech; formed of huge
+flat stones, it was at first a roomy chamber shut in on all four
+sides, and roofed by a single enormous block; the ends <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page032" id="page032"></a>[pg 032]</span> have
+fallen, so that it is now an open tunnel formed of three huge
+stones.</p>
+<p>The coast runs southward from the Shannon to the strand of
+Tralee, the frontier of the southern mountain world, where four
+ranges of red sandstone thrust themselves forth towards the ocean,
+with long fiords running inland between them. On a summit of the
+first of these red ranges, Caherconree above Tralee strand, there
+is a stone circle, massive, gigantic, dwelling in utter
+solitude.</p>
+<p>We have recorded a few only out of many of these great stone
+monuments strewn along our Atlantic coast, whether on moor or cliff
+or remote mountain-top.</p>
+<p>There are others as notable everywhere in the central plain, the
+limestone world of lakes and rivers. On a green hill-crest
+overlooking the network of inlets of Upper Erne there is a circle
+greater than any we have recorded. The stones are very massive,
+some of them twice the height of a tall man. To one who stands
+within the ring these huge blocks of stone shut out the world; they
+loom large against the sky, full of unspoken secrets like the
+Sphinx. Within this mighty ring the circle of Stonehenge might be
+set, leaving a broad road all round it on the grass.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page033" id="page033"></a>[pg
+033]</span>
+<p>From Fermanagh, where this huge circle is, we gain our best clue
+to the age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each
+other in their massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in
+their utter mystery. Round the lakes of Erne there are wide
+expanses of peat, dug as fuel for centuries, and in many places as
+much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of clay, the waste of old
+glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness, this whole mass
+of peat has grown since some of the great stone monuments were
+built; if we can tell the time thus taken for its growth we know at
+least the nearer limit of the time that divides us from their
+builders.</p>
+<p>Like a tree, the peat has its time of growth and its time of
+rest. Spring covers it with green, winter sees it brown and dead.
+Thus thin layers are spread over it, a layer for a year, and it
+steadily gains in thickness with the passing of the years. The
+deeper levels are buried and pressed down, slowly growing firm and
+rigid, but still keeping the marks of the layers that make them up.
+It is like a dry ocean gradually submerging the land. Gathering
+round the great stone circles as they stand on the clay, this black
+sea has risen slowly but surely, till at last it has covered them
+with its dark waves, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page034"
+id="page034"></a>[pg 034]</span> they rest in the quiet depths,
+with a green foam of spring freshness far above their heads.</p>
+<p>At Killee and Breagho, near Enniskillen, the peat has once more
+been cut away, restoring some of these great stones to the light.
+If we count the layers and measure the thickness of the peat, we
+can tell how many years are represented by its growth. We can,
+therefore, tell that the great stone circle, which the first growth
+of peat found already there, must be at least as old, and may be
+indefinitely older. By careful count it is found that one foot of
+black peat is made up of eight hundred layers; eight hundred
+summers and eight hundred winters went to the building of it. One
+foot of black peat, therefore, will measure the time from before
+the founding of Rome or the First Olympiad to the beginning of our
+era. Another foot will bring us to the crowning of Charlemagne. Yet
+another, to the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Since then,
+only a few inches have been added. Here is a chronometer worthy of
+our great cromlechs and stone circles.</p>
+<p>Some of these, as we saw, rest on the clay, with a sea of peat
+twelve feet deep around and above them. Every foot of the peat
+stands for eight centuries. Since the peat began to form, eight or
+ten <span class="pagenum"><a name="page035" id="page035"></a>[pg
+035]</span> thousand years have passed, and when that vast period
+began, the great monuments of stone were already there. How long
+they had stood in their silence before our chronometer began to run
+we cannot even guess.</p>
+<p>At Cavancarragh, on the shoulder of Toppid Mountain, some four
+miles from Enniskillen, there is one of these circles; a ring of
+huge stone boulders with equal spaces between stone and stone. A
+four-fold avenue of great blocks stretches away from it along the
+shoulder of the hill, ending quite abruptly at the edge of a
+ravine, the steep channel of a torrent. It looks as if the river,
+gradually undermining the hillside, had cut the avenue in halves,
+so that the ravine seems later in date than the stones. But that we
+cannot be quite sure of. This, however, we do certainly know: that
+since the avenue of boulders and the circle of huge red stones were
+ranged in order, a covering of peat in some parts twelve feet thick
+has grown around and above them, hiding them at last altogether
+from the day. In places the peat has been cut away again, leaving
+the stones once more open to the light, standing, as they always
+stood, on the surface of the clay.</p>
+<p>Here again we get the same measurement. At <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page036" id="page036"></a>[pg 036]</span> eight
+hundred annual layers to the foot, and with twelve feet of peat, we
+have nine thousand six hundred years,--not for the age of the stone
+circles, but for that part of their age which we are able to
+measure. For we know not how long they were there before the peat
+began to grow. It may have been a few years; it may have been a
+period as great or even greater than the ten thousand years we are
+able to measure.</p>
+<p>The peat gradually displaced an early forest of giant oaks.
+Their stems are still there, standing rooted in the older clay.
+Where they once stood no trees now grow. The whole face of the land
+has changed. Some great change of climate must lie behind this
+vanishing of vast forests, this gradual growth of peat-covered
+moors. A dry climate must have changed to one much damper; heat
+must have changed to cold, warm winds to chilly storms. In the
+southern promontories, among red sandstone hills, still linger
+survivors of that more genial clime--groves of arbutus that speak
+of Greece or Sicily; ferns, as at Killarney, found elsewhere only
+in the south, in Portugal, or the Canary Islands.</p>
+<a name="037.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/037.jpg"><img src="images/037.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>MUCKROSS ABBEY, KILLARNEY.</b></p>
+<p>On the southwestern horizon from Toppid Mountain, when the sky
+is clear after rain, you can trace <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page037" id="page037"></a>[pg 037]</span> the outline of the
+Curlew hills, our southern limit of view from Knocknarea. Up to the
+foot of the hills spreads a level country of pastures dappled with
+lakes, broken into a thousand fantastic inlets by the wasting of
+the limestone rock. The daisies are the stars in that green sky.
+Just beyond the young stream of the Shannon, where it links Lough
+Garra to Lough Key, there is a lonely cromlech, whose tremendous
+crown was once upheld by five massive pillars. There is a kindred
+wildness and mystery in the cromlech and the lonely hills.</p>
+<p>Southward again of this, where the town of Lough Rea takes its
+name from the Gray Lake, stands a high hill crowned by a cromlech,
+with an encircling earthwork. It marks a green ring of sacred
+ground alone upon the hill-top, shut off from all the world, and
+with the mysterious monument of piled stones in its centre; here,
+as always, one huge block upheld in the air by only lesser blocks.
+The Gray Lake itself, under this strange sentry on the hill, was in
+long-passed ages a little Venice; houses built on piles lined its
+shores, set far enough out into the lake for safety, ever ready to
+ward off attack from the land. This miniature Venice of Lough Rea
+is the type of a whole epoch of turbulent tribal war, when homes
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page038" id="page038"></a>[pg
+038]</span> were everywhere clustered within the defence of the
+waters, with stores laid up to last the rigors of a siege.</p>
+<p>The contrast between the insecurity and peril of the old lake
+dwellings and the present safety of the town, open on all sides,
+unguarded and free from fear, is very marked. But not less complete
+is the contrast between the ancient hamlet, thus hidden for
+security amid the waters, and the great cromlech, looming black
+against the sky on the hill's summit, exposed to the wildness of
+the winds, utterly unguarded, yet resting there in lonely
+serenity.</p>
+<p>A little farther south, Lough Gur lies like a white mirror among
+the rolling pasture-lands of Limerick, set amongst low hills. On
+the lake's shore is another metropolis of the dead, worthy to
+compare with Carrowmore on the Sligo headland. Some of the circles
+here are not formed of single stones set at some distance from each
+other, but of a continuous wall of great blocks crowded edge to
+edge. They are like round temples open to the sky, and within one
+of these unbroken rings is a lesser ring like an inner shrine. All
+round the lake there are like memorials--if we can call memorials
+these mighty groups of stone, which only remind us how much we have
+forgotten. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page039" id=
+"page039"></a>[pg 039]</span> There are huge circles of blocks
+either set close together or with an equal space dividing boulder
+from boulder; some of the giant circles are grouped together in
+twos and threes, others are isolated; one has its centre marked by
+a single enormous block, while another like block stands farther
+off in lonely vastness. Here also stands a chambered cromlech of
+four huge flat blocks roofed over like the cromlech under Slieve
+Callan across the Shannon mouth.</p>
+<p>The southern horizon from Lough Gur is broken by the hills of
+red sandstone rising around Glanworth. Beside the stream, a
+tributary of the Blackwater, a huge red cromlech rises over the
+greenness of the meadows like a belated mammoth in its uncouth
+might. To the southwest, under the red hills that guard Killarney
+on the south, the Sullane River flows towards the Lee. On its bank
+is another cromlech of red sandstone blocks, twin-brother to the
+Glanworth pile. Beyond it the road passes towards the sunset
+through mountain-shadowed glens, coming out at last where Kenmare
+River opens into a splendid fiord towards the Atlantic Ocean. At
+Kenmare, in a vale of perfect beauty green with groves of arbutus
+and fringed with thickets of fuchsia, stands a great stone circle,
+the last we shall <span class="pagenum"><a name="page040" id=
+"page040"></a>[pg 040]</span> record to the south. Like all the
+rest, it speaks of tremendous power, of unworldly and mysterious
+ends.</p>
+<p>The very antiquity of these huge stone circles suggests an
+affinity with the revolving years. And here, perhaps, we may find a
+clue to their building. They may have been destined to record great
+Time itself, great Time that circles forever through the circling
+years. There is first the year to be recorded, with its revolving
+days; white winter gleaming into spring; summer reddening and
+fading to autumn. Returning winter tells that the year has gone
+full circle; the sun among the stars gives the definite measure of
+the days. A ring of thirty-six great boulders, set ten paces apart,
+would give the measure of the year in days; and of circles like
+this there are more than one.</p>
+<p>In this endless ring of days the moon is the measurer, marking
+the hours and weeks upon the blue belt of night studded with golden
+stars. Moving stealthily among the stars, the moon presently
+changes her place by a distance equal to her own breadth; we call
+the time this takes an hour. From her rising to her setting, she
+gains her own breadth twelve times; therefore, the night and the
+day are divided <span class="pagenum"><a name="page041" id=
+"page041"></a>[pg 041]</span> each into twelve hours. Meanwhile she
+grows from crescent to full disk, to wane again to a sickle of
+light, and presently to lose herself in darkness at new moon. From
+full moon to full moon, or from one new moon to another, the
+nearest even measure is thirty days; a circle of thirty stones
+would record this, as the larger circle of thirty-six recorded the
+solar year. In three years there are thrice twelve full moons, with
+one added; a ring of thirty-seven stones representing this would
+show the simplest relation between sun and moon.</p>
+<p>The moon, as we saw, stealthily glides among the fixed stars,
+gaining her own width every hour. Passing thus along the mid belt
+of the sphere, she makes the complete circuit in twenty-seven days,
+returning to the same point among the stars, or, if it should so
+happen, to the same star, within that time. Because the earth has
+meanwhile moved forward, the moon needs three days more to overtake
+it and gain the same relative position towards earth and sun, thus
+growing full again, not after twenty-seven, but after thirty days.
+Circles of twenty-seven and thirty days would stand for these lunar
+epochs, and would, for those who understood them, further bear
+testimony to the earth's movement in its own great path
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page042" id="page042"></a>[pg
+042]</span> around the sun. Thus would rings of varying numbers
+mark the measures of time; and not these only, but the great sweep
+of orbs engendering them, the triumphal march of the spheres
+through pathless ether. The life of our own world would thus be
+shown bound up with the lives of others in ceaseless, ever-widening
+circles, that lead us to the Infinite, the Eternal.</p>
+<p>All the cromlechs and circles we have thus far recorded are in
+the western half of our land; there are as many, as worthy of note,
+in the eastern half. But as before we can only pick out a few. One
+of these crowns the volcanic peak of Brandon Hill, in Kilkenny,
+dividing the valleys of the Barrow and Nore. From the mountain-top
+you can trace the silver lines of the rivers coming together to the
+south, and flowing onward to the widening inlet of Wexford harbor,
+where they mingle with the waters of the River Suir. On the summit
+of Brandon Hill stands a great stone circle, a ring of huge basalt
+blocks dominating the rich valleys and the surrounding plain.</p>
+<p>In Glen Druid of the Dublin hills is a cromlech whose granite
+crown weighs seventy tons. Not far off is the Mount Venus cromlech,
+the covering block of which is even more titanic; it is a single
+stone <span class="pagenum"><a name="page043" id="page043"></a>[pg
+043]</span> eighty tons in weight. Near Killternan village, a short
+distance off, is yet another cromlech whose top-most boulder
+exceeds both of these, weighing not less than ninety tons. Yet vast
+as all these are, they are outstripped by the cromlech of Howth,
+whose upper block is twenty feet square and eight feet thick, a
+single enormous boulder one hundred tons in weight. This huge stone
+was borne in the air upon twelve massive pillars of quartz, seven
+feet above the ground, so that a man of average height standing on
+the ground and reaching upward could just touch the under surface
+of the block with his finger-tips. Even a tall man standing on the
+shoulders of another as tall would quite fail to touch the upper
+edge of the stone. If we give this marvelous monument the same age
+as the Fermanagh circles, as we well may, this raising of a single
+boulder of one hundred tons, and balancing it in the air on the
+crest of massive pillars may give us some insight into the
+engineering skill of the men of ten thousand years ago.</p>
+<p>Across the central plain from Howth Head the first break is the
+range of Loughcrew hills. Here are great stone circles in numbers,
+not standing alone like so many others, but encompassing still
+stranger monuments; chambered pyramids of boulders, to <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page044" id="page044"></a>[pg 044]</span> which
+we shall later return. They are lesser models of the three great
+pyramids of Brugh on the Boyne, where the river sweeps southward in
+a long curve, half-encircling a headland of holy ground.</p>
+<p>From near Howth to the Boyne and north of it, the coast is low
+and flat; sandhills matted with bent-grass and starred with red
+thyme and tiny pansies, yellow and purple and blue. Low tide
+carries the sea almost to the horizon, across a vast wilderness of
+dripping sand where the gulls chatter as they wade among the pools.
+Where the shore rises again towards the Carlingford Mountains,
+another cromlech stands under the shadow of granite hills.</p>
+<p>A long fiord with wooded walls divides the Carlingford range
+from the mountains of Mourne. The great dark range thrusts itself
+forth against the sea in somber beauty, overhanging the wide strand
+of Dundrum Bay. The lesser bay, across whose bar the sea moans
+under the storm-winds, is dominated by the hill of Rudraige, named
+in honor of a hero of old days; but under the shadow of the hill
+stands a more ancient monument, that was gray with age before the
+race of Rudraige was born. On five pillars of massive stone is
+upreared a sixth, of huge and formidable bulk, and carrying even to
+us in our day <span class="pagenum"><a name="page045" id=
+"page045"></a>[pg 045]</span> a sense of mystery and might. The
+potent atmosphere of a hidden past still breathes from it,
+whispering of vanished years, vanished races, vanished secrets of
+the prime.</p>
+<p>There are two circles of enormous stones on the tongue of land
+between Dundrum Bay and Strangford, both very perfect and marked
+each in its own way from among the rest. The first, at Legamaddy,
+has every huge boulder still in place. There is a lesser ring of
+stones within the first circle, with many outliers, of enormous
+size, dotted among the fields. It looks as if a herd of huge
+animals of the early world had come together in a circle for the
+night, the young being kept for safety within their ring, while
+others, grazing longer or wandering farther from the rest, were
+approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon them with dire
+magic turned them all to stone; and there they remain, sentient,
+yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies like
+this we may convey the feeling of mystery breathing from them.</p>
+<p>On the hill-top of Slieve-na-griddle is another circle of the
+same enormous boulders. A cromlech is piled in the midst of it, and
+an avenue of stones leads up to the circle. Its form is that of
+many circles <span class="pagenum"><a name="page046" id=
+"page046"></a>[pg 046]</span> with enclosed cromlechs at
+Carrowmore, though in these the avenue is missing. The thought that
+underlies them is the same, though they are separated by the whole
+width of the land; a single cult with a single ideal prompted the
+erection of both.</p>
+<p>At Drumbo, on the east bank of the Lagan before it reaches
+Belfast Lough, there is a massive cromlech surrounded by a wide
+ring of earth piled up high enough to cut off the sacred space
+within from all view of the outer world. Like the earthwork round
+the cromlech of Lough Rea, it marks the boundary of a great nature
+temple, open to the sky but shut off from mankind. Even now its
+very atmosphere breathes reverence.</p>
+<p>At Finvoy, in northern Antrim, among the meadows of the Bann,
+there is a cromlech within a great stone circle like that on
+Slieve-na-griddle in Down, and like many of the Carrowmore rings.
+The Black Lion cromlech in Cavan is encircled with a like ring of
+boulders, and another cromlech not far off rivals some of the
+largest in the immense size of its crowning block.</p>
+<p>Three cromlechs in the same limestone plain add something to the
+mystery that overhangs all the rest. The first, at Lennan in
+Monaghan, is marked with a <span class="pagenum"><a name="page047"
+id="page047"></a>[pg 047]</span> curious cryptic design, suggesting
+a clue, yet yielding none. There is a like script on the cromlech
+at Castlederg in Tyrone, if indeed the markings were ever the
+record of some thought to be remembered, and not mere ornament. The
+chambered cromlech of Lisbellaw in Fermanagh has like markings;
+they are too similar to be quite independent, yet almost too simple
+to contain a recorded thought.</p>
+<p>We come once more to Donegal. On the hill-top of Beltaney, near
+Raphoe, there is a very massive circle formed of sixty-seven huge
+blocks. Here again the Stonehenge ring might be set up within the
+Irish circle, leaving an avenue eight paces wide all round it. The
+sacred fire was formerly kindled here to mark the birth of Spring.
+The name of the old festival of Beltane still lingers on the hill.
+At Culdaff in north Donegal, at the end of the Inishowen peninsula,
+stands another great stone circle, with which we must close our
+survey of these titanic monuments.</p>
+<p>We have mentioned a few only among many; yet enough to show
+their presence everywhere throughout the land, in the valleys or on
+mountain summits, in the midst of pastures or on lonely and rugged
+isles. One group, as we have seen, cannot be younger than
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page048" id="page048"></a>[pg
+048]</span> ten thousand years, and may be far older. The others
+may be well coeval. Their magnitude, their ordered ranks, their
+universal presence, are a startling revelation of the material
+powers of the men of that remote age; they are a testimony, not
+less wonderful, of the moral force which dedicated so much power to
+ideal ends. Finally, they are a monument to remind us how little we
+yet know of the real history of our race.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page049" id="page049"></a>[pg
+049]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page050" id="page050"></a>[pg
+050]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page051" id="page051"></a>[pg
+051]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="III."></a>III.</h2>
+<h3>THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>In every district of Ireland, therefore, there remain these
+tremendous and solemn survivors of a mighty past. The cromlechs,
+with their enormous masses upheld in the air, rising among the
+fertile fields or daisy-dotted pastures; the great circles of
+standing stones, starred everywhere, in the valleys or upon the
+uplands, along the rough sides of heather-covered hills. They have
+everywhere the same aspect of august mystery, the same brooding
+presence, like sentinels of another world. It is impossible not to
+feel their overshadowing majesty. Everywhere they follow the same
+designs in large simplicity; inspired by the same purpose, and with
+the same tireless might overcoming the tremendous obstacles of
+their erection; they are devoted everywhere not to material and
+earthly ends, but to the ideal purposes of the invisible and
+everlasting, linked with the hidden life of those who pass away
+from us through the gates of death.</p>
+<p>Can we find any clue to the builders of these grand <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page052" id="page052"></a>[pg 052]</span> and
+enduring memorials, the conditions of their building, the age of
+our land to which they belong? If we wisely use the abundant
+knowledge of the past already in our possession, there is good
+reason to believe we can, establishing much with entire certainty
+and divining more.</p>
+<p>The standing stones and cromlechs, as we know, are everywhere
+spread over Ireland, so that it is probable that throughout the
+whole country one is never out of sight of one of these solemn
+monuments. Their uniform and universal presence shows, therefore, a
+uniform race dwelling everywhere within the four seas, a universal
+stability and order, allowing such great and enduring works to be
+undertaken and completed. We must believe, too, that the builders
+of these giant stone monuments were dominant throughout the land,
+possessing entire power over the labor of thousands everywhere; and
+even then the raising of these titanic masses is almost
+miraculous.</p>
+<p>But the history of the standing stones and cromlechs is not a
+page of Irish history only, nor can we limit to our own isle the
+presence of their builders, the conditions of dominion and order
+under which alone they could have been raised. We shall gain
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page053" id="page053"></a>[pg
+053]</span> our first trustworthy clue by tracing the limits of the
+larger territory, beyond our island, where these same gray
+memorials are found.</p>
+<a name="053.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/053.jpg"><img src="images/053.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>BRANDY ISLAND, GLENGARRIFF.</b></p>
+<p>The limits of the region in which alone we find these piles and
+circles of enormous stones are clearly and sharply defined, though
+this region itself is of immense and imposing extent. It is divided
+naturally into two provinces, both starting from a point somewhere
+in the neighborhood of Gibraltar or Mount Atlas, and spreading
+thence over a territory of hundreds of miles.</p>
+<p>The southern cromlech province, beginning at the Strait of
+Gibraltar, extends eastward along the African coast past Algiers to
+the headland of Tunis, where Carthage stood, at a date far later
+than the age of cromlechs. Were it not for the flaming southern
+sun, the scorched sands, the palms, the shimmering torrid air, we
+might believe these Algerian megaliths belonged to our own land, so
+perfect is the resemblance, so uniform the design, so identical the
+inspiration. The same huge boulders, oblong or egg-shaped,
+formidable, impressive, are raised aloft on massive supporting
+stones; there are the same circles of stones hardly less gigantic,
+with the same mysterious faces, the same silent solemnity.
+Following this line, we <span class="pagenum"><a name="page054" id=
+"page054"></a>[pg 054]</span> find them again in Minorca, Sardinia
+and Malta; everywhere under warm blue skies, in lands of olives and
+trailing vines, with the peacock-blue of the Mediterranean waves
+twinkling beneath them. Northward from Minorca, but still in our
+southern cromlech province, we find them in southeastern Spain, in
+the region of New Carthage, but far older than the oldest trace of
+that ancient city. In lesser numbers they follow the Spanish coast
+up towards the Ebro, through vinelands and lands of figs,
+everywhere under summer skies. This province, therefore, our
+southern cromlech province, covers most of the western
+Mediterranean; it does not cover, nor even approach, Italy or
+Greece or Egypt, the historic Mediterranean lands. We must look for
+its origin in the opposite direction--towards Gibraltar, the
+Pillars of Hercules.</p>
+<p>From the same point, the Pillars of Hercules, begins our second
+or northern cromlech region, even larger and more extensive than
+the first, though hardly richer in titanic memorials. From
+Gibraltar, the cromlech region passes northward, covering Portugal
+and western Spain; indeed, it probably merges in the other province
+to the eastward, the two including all Spain between them. From
+northern <span class="pagenum"><a name="page055" id=
+"page055"></a>[pg 055]</span> Spain, turning the flank of the giant
+Pyrenees at Fontarrabia, the cromlech region goes northward and
+ever northward, along the Atlantic coast of France, spreading
+eastward also through the central provinces, covering the mountains
+of the C&ocirc;te d'Or and the Cevennes, but nowhere entering north
+Italy or Germany, which limit France to the east. There is a
+tremendous culmination of the huge stone monuments on the capes and
+headlands of Brittany, where France thrusts herself forward against
+the Atlantic, centring in Carnac, the metropolis of a bygone world.
+Nowhere are there greater riches of titanic stone, in circles, in
+cromlechs, in ranged avenues like huge frozen armies or ordered
+hosts of sleeping elephants. From Brittany we pass to Ireland,
+whose wealth, inherited from dead ages, we have already
+inventoried, and Britain, where the same monuments reappear. More
+numerous to the south and west, they yet spread all over Britain,
+including remote northern Scotland and the Western Isles. Finally,
+there is a streamer stretching still northeastward, to Norway and
+some of the Baltic Islands.</p>
+<p>We are, therefore, confronted with the visible and enduring
+evidence of a mighty people, spreading in two main directions from
+the Pillars of Hercules--eastward <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page056" id="page056"></a>[pg 056]</span> through Gibraltar Strait
+to sunny Algeria, to southern Spain and the Mediterranean isles;
+and northward, along the stormy shores of the Atlantic, from within
+sight of Africa almost to the Arctic Circle, across Spain,
+Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain, and the lands of the Baltic and
+the North Sea. Throughout this vast territory there must have been
+a common people, a common purpose and inspiration, a common
+striving towards the hidden world; there must have been long ages
+of order, of power, of peace, during which men's hearts could
+conceive and their hands execute memorials so vast, so evidently
+meant to endure to a far distant future, so clearly destined to
+ideal ends. There must have been a great spiritual purpose, a
+living belief in the invisible world, and a large practical power
+over natural forces, before these huge monuments could be erected.
+Some of the stones upheld in the air in the Irish cromlechs weigh
+eighty or ninety or a hundred tons. If we estimate that a
+well-built man can lift two hundred pounds, it would demand the
+simultaneous work of a thousand men to erect them; and it is at
+least difficult to see how the effort of a thousand men could be
+applied.</p>
+<p>We are led, therefore, by evidence of the solidest <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page057" id="page057"></a>[pg 057]</span>
+material reality to see this great empire on the Atlantic and along
+the western Mediterranean; this Atlantean land of the
+cromlech-builders, as we may call it, for want of a better name. As
+the thought and purpose of its inhabitants are uniform throughout
+its whole vast extent, we are led to see in them a single
+homogeneous race, working without rivals, without obstacles,
+without contests, for they seem everywhere to have been free to
+choose what sites they would for their gigantic structures. And we
+are irresistibly led to believe that these conditions must have
+endured throughout a vast extent of time, for no nation which does
+not look back to a distant past will plan for a distant future. The
+spiritual sweep and view of the cromlech-builders are, therefore,
+as great as the extent of their territory. This mysterious people
+must have had a life as wonderful as that of Greece or Rome or
+Egypt, whose territories we find them everywhere approaching, but
+nowhere invading.</p>
+<p>What we now know of the past history of our race is so vast, so
+incredibly enormous, that we have ample space for such a territory,
+so widespread, so enduring, as we have seen demanded by the
+position of the cromlechs and standing stones; more than
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page058" id="page058"></a>[pg
+058]</span> that, so overwhelming are the distances in the dark
+backward and abysm of time, to which we must now carry the dawn of
+human history, that the time needed for the building of the
+cromlechs may seem quite recent and insignificant, in view of the
+mightier past, stretching back through geologic ages. The
+nineteenth century may well be called the age of resurrection, when
+long-forgotten epochs of man were born again into our knowledge. We
+can carry back that knowledge now to the early Miocene period, to
+which belong the human relics found by the Abb&eacute; Bourgeois on
+the uplands of Thenay, in central France; and no one believes that
+the early Miocene age can be as recent as a million years ago. A
+vast space separates the Thenay relics from the later traces of man
+found in Pliocene sands with the bones of the archaic meridional
+elephant,--at a date when the German ocean was a forest, full of
+southern trees and huge beasts now long since departed from the
+earth. A period hardly less vast must separate these from the close
+of the glacial age, when man roamed the plains of Europe, and
+sketched the herds of mammoths as they cropped the leaves. That
+huge beast, too, has long since departed into the abyss; but man
+the artist, who recorded the massive outline, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page059" id="page059"></a>[pg 059]</span> the
+huge bossed forehead, the formidable bulk of the shaggy arctic
+elephant, engraved in firm lines on a fragment of its tusk,--man
+still remains. Man was present when rhinoceros and elephant were as
+common in Britain as they are to-day in Southern India or Borneo;
+when the hippopotamus was as much at home in the waters of the
+Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like the grizzly
+of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked in Devon
+caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this epoch
+of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is a
+recent chapter of the great epic of man; there lies far more behind
+it, beyond the Age of Ice to the immensely distant Pliocene; beyond
+this as far as the early Miocene; beyond this, again, how much
+further we know not, towards the beginningless beginning, the
+infinite.</p>
+<p>We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost
+boundless ages, geologic epochs of human history succeeding each
+other in majestic procession, as the face of our island was now
+tropical, now arctic; as the seas swelled up and covered the hills,
+or the bottom of the deep drove back the ocean and became dry land,
+an unbroken continent. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="page060"
+id="page060"></a>[pg 060]</span> wild dreams of romance never
+approached the splendid outlines of this certain history.</p>
+<p>There are dim outlines of man throughout all these ages, but
+only at a comparatively recent date have we traditions and evidence
+pointing to still surviving races. At a period of only a few
+thousand years ago, we begin to catch glimpses of a northern race
+whom the old Greeks and Romans called Hyperboreans or
+Far-Northerners; a race wild and little skilled in the arts of
+life; a race of small stature, slight, dusky, with piercing eyes,
+low brows, and of forbidding face. This race was scattered over
+lands far north of the Mediterranean, dwelling in caves and dens of
+the earth, and lingering on unchanged from the days of mammoth and
+cave-bear. We have slight but definite knowledge of this very
+ancient race--enough to show us that its peculiar type lingers to
+this day in a few remote islands on the Galway and Kerry coast,
+mingled with many later races. This type we find described in old
+Gaelic records as the Firbolgs, a race weak and furtive, dusky and
+keen-eyed, subjected by later races of greater force. Yet from this
+race, as if to show the inherent and equal power of the soul, came
+holy saints and mighty warriors; to the old race of the Firbolgs
+belong Saint Mansuy, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page061" id=
+"page061"></a>[pg 061]</span> apostle of Belgium, and Roderick
+O'Conor, the last king of united Ireland. In gloomy mountain glens
+and lonely ocean islands still it lingers, unvanquished, tenacious,
+obscurely working out its secret destiny.</p>
+<p>This slight and low-browed race, of dark or sallow visage, and
+with black crisp hair, this Hyperborean people, is the oldest we
+can gain a clear view of in our island's history; but we know
+nothing of its extension or powers which would warrant us in
+believing that this was the race which built the cromlechs. Greek
+and Roman tradition, in this only corroborating the actual traces
+we ourselves possess of these old races, tells us of another people
+many thousand years ago overrunning and dominating the Firbolgs; a
+race of taller stature, of handsome features, though also dark, but
+with softer black hair, not crisp and tufted like the hair of the
+dwarfish earlier race. Of this second conquering race, tall and
+handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered from many lands where
+they dwelt; bodies preserved by art or nature, in caverns or
+sepulchres of stone; ornaments, pottery, works decorative and
+useful, and covering several thousand years in succession. But
+better than this, we have present, through nearly every land where
+we know of them in the past, a living remnant <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page062" id="page062"></a>[pg 062]</span> of
+this ancient race, like it in every particular of stature, form,
+complexion and visage, identical in character and temper, tendency
+and type of mind.</p>
+<p>In Ireland we find this tall, dark race over all the west of the
+island, but most numerous in Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo; in
+those regions where, we know, the older population was least
+disturbed. In remote villages among the mountains, reached by
+bridle-paths between heath-covered hills; in the settlements of
+fishermen, under some cliff or in the sheltered nook of one of our
+great western bays; or among the lonely, little visited Atlantic
+islands, this dark, handsome race, with its black hair, dark-brown
+eyes, sallow skin and high forehead, still holds its own, as a
+second layer above the remnant of the far more ancient Firbolg
+Hyperboreans. We find the same race also among the Donegal
+highlands, here and there in the central plain or in the south, and
+nowhere entirely missing among the varied races towards the eastern
+sea.</p>
+<a name="063.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/063.jpg"><img src="images/063.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>SUGAR LOAF MOUNTAIN, GLENGARRIFF.</b></p>
+<p>But it is by no means in Ireland only that this tall, dark,
+western race is found. It is numerously represented in the nearest
+extension of the continent, among the headlands and bays and isles
+of Brittany--a land so like our own western seaboard, with its
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page063" id="page063"></a>[pg
+063]</span> wild Atlantic storms. Following the ocean southward, we
+find the same race extending to the Loire, the Garonne, the
+Pyrenees; stretching somewhat inland also, but clinging everywhere
+to the Atlantic, as we also saw it cling in Ireland. In earlier
+centuries, long before our era opened, we find this same race
+spread far to the east,--as far, almost, as the German and Italian
+frontier,--so that at one time it held almost complete possession
+of France. South of the Pyrenees we find it once more; dominant in
+Portugal, less strongly represented in Spain, yet still supplying a
+considerable part of the population of the whole peninsula, as it
+does in Ireland at the present day. But it does not stop with
+Spain, or even Europe. We find the same race again in the Guanches
+of the Canary islands, off the African coast; and, stranger still,
+we find mummies of this race, of great antiquity, in the cave-tombs
+of Teneriffe. Further, we have ample evidence of its presence,
+until displaced by Moorish invaders, all along northern Africa as
+far as Tunis; and we come across it again amongst the living races
+in the Mediterranean isles, in Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy.
+Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central Sahara belong to the same type.
+Everywhere the same tall, dark race, handsome, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page064" id="page064"></a>[pg 064]</span>
+imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of eyes;
+a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and texture of
+hair.</p>
+<p>Thus far the southern extension of this, our second Irish race;
+we may look for a moment at its distribution in the north. Across
+the shallow sea which separates us from Britain we find the same
+race, clinging always to the Atlantic seaboard. It dominates south
+Wales, where its presence was remarked and commented on by the
+invading Romans. It is present elsewhere through the Welsh
+mountains, and much more sparsely over the east of England; but we
+have ample evidence that at one time this tall, dark race held the
+whole of England in undisputed possession, except, perhaps, for a
+remnant of the Hyperborean dwarfs. In the west of Scotland, and
+especially in the Western Isles, it is once more numerous; and we
+find offshoots of the same race in the dark-haired
+Norwegians,--still holding to the seaboard of the Atlantic.</p>
+<p>Such is the distribution of this once dominant but now dwindled
+race, which has gradually descended from the summit of power as
+ancient Rome descended, as Greece descended, or Assyria or Egypt.
+But we can look back with certainty to a time when this
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page065" id="page065"></a>[pg
+065]</span> race, and this race only, held complete possession of
+all the lands we have mentioned, in north or south, in Europe or
+northern Africa; holding everywhere to the Atlantic coast, or, as
+in the Mediterranean isles, evidently pressing inward from the
+Atlantic, past the Pillars of Hercules, through the Strait of
+Gibraltar.</p>
+<p>It is evident at once that the territory of this race
+corresponds exactly, throughout many countries, with the territory
+of the cromlechs and standing stones; where we find the one, as in
+Ireland, Brittany, Spain, we find the other; where the one is
+absent, as in Germany, or northern Italy or Greece, the other is
+likewise absent. The identity is complete. We are justified,
+therefore, in giving the same provisional name to both, and calling
+them Atlantean, from their evident origin not far from Atlas, and
+their everywhere clinging to the Atlantic coast. We can find traces
+of no other race which at all closely fulfills the necessary
+conditions of uniform and undisputed extension, through a long
+epoch, over the whole cromlech region--the only conditions under
+which we can conceive of the erection of these gigantic monuments,
+or of the long established and universally extended spiritual
+conditions which make possible such vast ideal enterprises.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page066" id="page066"></a>[pg
+066]</span>
+<p>In this race, therefore, which we have called Atlantean, we find
+the conditions fulfilled; of this race, and of no other, we still
+find a lingering remnant in each of the cromlech countries; and we
+hardly find a trace of this race, either now or in the past, in the
+lands which have no cromlechs or standing stones.</p>
+<p>We have already seen that the standing stones of Cavancarragh,
+four miles from Fermanagh, were, within the memory of men still
+living or of their fathers, buried under ten or twelve feet of
+peat, which had evidently formed there after their erection. We
+have here a natural chronometer; for we know the rate at which peat
+forms, and we can, therefore, assign a certain age to a given
+depth. We have given one mode of reckoning already; we find it
+corroborated by another. In the Somme valley, in northern France,
+we have a Nature's timepiece; in the peat, at different levels, are
+relics of the Roman age; of the Gaulish age which preceded it; and,
+far deeper, of pre-historic races, like our Atlanteans, who
+preceded the Gauls. The date of the Roman remains we know
+accurately; and from this standard we find that the peat grows
+regularly some three centimeters a century, or a foot in a thousand
+years.</p>
+<p>On the mountain side, as at Cavancarragh, the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page067" id="page067"></a>[pg 067]</span> growth
+is likely to be slower than in a river valley; yet we may take the
+same rate, a foot a thousand years, and we shall have, for this
+great stone circle, an antiquity of ten or twelve thousand years at
+least. This assumes that the peat began to form as soon as the
+monument was completed; but the contrary may be the case; centuries
+may have intervened.</p>
+<p>We may, however, take this as a provisional date, and say that
+our cromlech epoch, the epoch of the Atlantean builders, from
+Algeria to Ireland, from Ireland to the Baltic, is ten or twelve
+thousand years ago; extending, perhaps, much further back in the
+past, and in certain regions coming much further down towards the
+present, but having a period of twelve thousand years ago as its
+central date. It happens that we have traditions of a great
+dispersion from the very centre we have been led to fix, the
+neighborhood of Atlas or Gibraltar, and that to this dispersion
+tradition has given a date over eleven thousand years ago; but to
+this side of the subject we cannot more fully allude; it would take
+us too far afield.</p>
+<p>We have gone far enough to make it tolerably certain, first,
+that these great and wonderful monuments were built when uniform
+conditions of order, uniform religious beliefs and aspirations, and
+a uniform <span class="pagenum"><a name="page068" id=
+"page068"></a>[pg 068]</span> mastery over natural forces extended
+throughout a vast region spreading northward and eastward from
+Mount Atlas or Gibraltar; we have seen, next, that these conditions
+were furnished when a well-defined race, whom we have called
+Atlantean, was spread as the dominant element over this whole
+region; and, finally, we have seen reason to fix on a period some
+eleven or twelve thousand years ago as the central period of that
+domination, though it may have begun, and probably did begin, many
+centuries earlier. The distribution of the cromlechs is certain;
+the distribution of the race is certain; the age of one
+characteristic group of the monuments is certain. Further than this
+we need not go.</p>
+<p>When we try to form a clearer image of the life of this tall
+archaic race of cromlech-builders, we can divine very much to fill
+the picture. We note, to begin with, that not only do they always
+hold to the Atlantic ocean as something kindred and familiar, but
+that they are found everywhere in islands at such distances from
+the nearest coasts as would demand a certain seamanship for their
+arrival. This is true of their presence in Malta, Minorca,
+Sardinia; it is even more true of Ireland, the Western Isles of
+Scotland, the Norwegian Isles; all of which are surrounded by
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page069" id="page069"></a>[pg
+069]</span> stormy and treacherous seas, where wrecks are very
+common even in our day. We must believe that our tail, dark
+invaders were a race of seamen, thoroughly skilled in the dangerous
+navigation of these dark seas; Caesar marveled at, and imitated,
+the ship-building of the natives of Brittany in his day; we equally
+admire the prowess of their sons, the Breton fishermen, in our own
+times. We find, too, that in the western districts and ocean
+islands of our own Ireland the tall, dark race often follows the
+sea, showing the same hereditary skill and daring; a skill which
+certainly marked the first invaders of that race, or they would
+never have reached our island at all. We are the more justified in
+seeing, in these dark cromlech-builders, the Fomorians of old
+Gaelic tradition, who came up out of the sea and subjugated the
+Firbolgs.</p>
+<p>Even to those familiar with the geological record of man it is
+sufficiently startling to find that the Firbolgs, the early
+dwarfish race of Hyperboreans, in all probability were ignorant of
+boats; that they almost certainly came to our island dry-shod, as
+they had come earlier to Britain, migrating over unbroken spaces of
+land to what afterwards became the isle of Erin; for this race we
+find everywhere associated <span class="pagenum"><a name="page070"
+id="page070"></a>[pg 070]</span> with the mammoth--on the
+continent, in Britain, in our own island--and the mammoths
+certainly never came over in ships. Needless to say, there is
+abundant geological evidence as well, to show our former union with
+continental Europe,--though of course at a time immensely more
+remote than ten or twelve thousand years ago.</p>
+<p>We are, therefore, led to identify our Atlantean race of hardy
+seamen with the Fomorians who came up out of the sea and found the
+furtive Firbolgs in possession of our island; and to this race, the
+Fomorians of the sea, we credit the building of cromlechs and
+standing stones, not only among ourselves, but in Norway, in
+Britain, in Brittany, in Spain, in Africa.</p>
+<p>We shall presently pick up the thread of tradition, as we find
+it in Ireland, and try to follow the doings and life of the
+Fomorian invaders; but in the meantime we may try to gain some
+insight into the most mysterious and enduring of their works. The
+cromlechs which have been excavated in many cases are found to
+contain the funereal urns of a people who burned their dead. It
+does not follow that their first and only use was as tombs; but if
+we think of them as tombs only, we must the more marvel at the
+faith <span class="pagenum"><a name="page071" id="page071"></a>[pg
+071]</span> of the builders, and their firm belief in the reality
+and overwhelming import of the other world which we enter at death.
+For of dwellings for the living, of fortresses or storehouses, of
+defences against the foes who later invaded them, we find few
+traces; nothing at all to compare with their massive mausoleums.
+The other world, for them, was a far weightier concern than this,
+and to the purposes of that world, as they conceived it, all their
+energies were directed. We can hardly doubt that, like other races
+who pay extreme reverence to the dead, their inner vision beheld
+these departed ones still around them and among them, forming with
+them a single race, a single family, a single life. This world was
+for them only the threshold of the other, the place of preparation.
+To that other their thoughts all turned, for that other they raised
+these titanic buildings. The solemn masses and simple grandeur of
+the cromlechs fitly symbolize the mood of reverence in which they
+drew near to the sublime world of the hidden; the awe with which
+their handiwork affirmed how greatly that world outweighs this. At
+these houses of the dead they were joined in spirit and communion
+with those who had passed away; once more united with their fathers
+and their fathers' <span class="pagenum"><a name="page072" id=
+"page072"></a>[pg 072]</span> fathers, from the dim beginning of
+their race. The air, for them, was full of spirits. Only the dead
+truly lived.</p>
+<p>The circles of standing stones are also devoted to ideal ends.
+Though the men who set them up could have built not less wonderful
+forts or dwellings of stone, we find none of these; nor has any
+worldly purpose ever been assigned to the stone circles. Yet there
+seems to be a very simple interpretation of their symbology; the
+circle, through all antiquity, stood for the circling year, which
+ever returns to its point of departure, spring repeating spring,
+summer answering to summer, winter with its icy winds only the
+return of former winters: the circling year and its landmarks,
+whether four seasons, or twelve months, or twenty-seven lunar
+mansions, through one of which the wandering moon passes in a day.
+We should thus have circles of twelve or twenty-seven stones, or
+four outlying stones at equal distances, for the four seasons, the
+regents of the year. By counting the stones in each circle we can
+tell to which division of the year they belonged, whether the solar
+months or the lunar mansions.</p>
+<p>But with all ancient nations the cycle of the year was only the
+symbol of the spiritual cycle of the <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page073" id="page073"></a>[pg 073]</span> soul, the path of birth
+and death. We must remember that even for ourselves the same
+symbolism holds: in the winter we celebrate the Incarnation; in
+spring, the Crucifixion; in summer, the birth of the beloved
+disciple; in autumn, the day of All Souls, the feast of the dead.
+Thus for us, too, the succeeding seasons only symbolize the stages
+of a spiritual life, the august procession of the soul.</p>
+<p>We cannot think it was otherwise with a people who lived and
+built so majestically for the hidden world; these great stone
+circles symbolized for them, we must believe, the circling life of
+the soul, the cycle of necessity, with the door of liberation to
+the home of the blest, who have reached perfect freedom and go no
+more out. We may picture in imagination their solemn celebrations;
+priests robed, perhaps, in the mingled green and purple of their
+hills, passing within the circle, chanting some archaic hymn of the
+Divine.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page074" id="page074"></a>[pg
+074]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page075" id="page075"></a>[pg
+075]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE DE DANAANS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page076" id="page076"></a>[pg
+076]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page077" id="page077"></a>[pg
+077]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="IV."></a>IV.</h2>
+<h3>THE DE DANAANS.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>In the dim days of Fomorian and Firbolg, and for ages after,
+Erin was a land of forests, full of wild cattle and deer and
+wolves. The central plain was altogether hidden under green clouds
+of oak-woods, full of long, mysterious alleys, dimpled with sunny
+glades, echoing in spring and summer to the songs of innumerable
+birds. Everywhere through the wide and gloomy forests were the blue
+mirrors of lakes, starred with shaggy islands, the hanging hills
+descending verdant to the water's edge. Silver rivers spread their
+network among the woods, and the lakes and the quiet reaches of the
+rivers teemed with trout and salmon. The hilly lands to the north
+and south showed purple under the sky from among their forests, oak
+mingling with pine; and the four seas beat around our island with
+their white fringe of hovering gulls. Over all, the arch of the
+blue, clearer and less clouded then than now. A pleasant land, full
+of gladness and mystery.</p>
+<p>We can but obscurely image to ourselves the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page078" id="page078"></a>[pg 078]</span>
+thoughts and deeds of the earliest dwellers in our island. We know
+that they were skilled in many arts of peace and inured to the
+shock of war. The sky spread above them as over us, and all around
+them was the green gloom of the forests, the whiteness of lakes and
+rivers, the rough purple of the heather. The great happenings of
+life, childhood and age and death, were for them what they are for
+us, yet their blood flowed warmer than ours. Browned by wind and
+sun, wet by the rain and the early dew of the morning, they
+delighted in the vigor of the prime. Their love for kindred, for
+their friends and lovers, was as ours; and when friends and kindred
+passed into the darkness, they still kept touch with their souls in
+the invisible Beyond.</p>
+<a name="079.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/079.jpg"><img src="images/079.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>RIVER ERNE, BELLEEK.</b></p>
+<p>The vision of our days is darkened by too much poring over
+earthly things; but the men of old, like many of our simpler races
+now, looked confidently and with intent faith across the threshold.
+For them the dead did not depart--hidden but from their eyes, while
+very near to their souls. Those in the beyond were still linked to
+those on earth; all together made one undivided life, neither in
+the visible world alone nor in the hidden world alone, but in both;
+each according to their destinies and duties. <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page079" id="page079"></a>[pg 079]</span> The
+men of old were immeasurably strong in this sense of immortality--a
+sense based not on faith but on knowledge; on a living touch with
+those who had gone before. They knew both over-world and
+under-world, because they held their souls open to the knowledge of
+both, and did not set their hearts on earthly things alone. A
+strong life close to the life of the natural world, a death that
+was no separation, the same human hearts as ours,--further we need
+not go in imagining that far-off time.</p>
+<p>A third people was presently added to these two, at an epoch
+fixed by tradition some four thousand years ago. A vivid picture of
+their coming has been handed down to us, and this picture we shall
+reproduce, as many circumstances and particulars of our knowledge
+drawn from other sources concur to show that our old legend is near
+to the truth, both in time and happenings.</p>
+<p>The name these newcomers bore was Tuata De Danaan, the De Danaan
+tribes; they were golden-haired and full of knowledge, and their
+coming was heavy with destiny for the dark races of Fomor and
+Firbolg. Even to-day, mysterious whispers of the De Danaans linger
+among the remote valleys and <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page080" id="page080"></a>[pg 080]</span> hillsides of our island,
+and truth is hidden in every legend of their deeds. They have borne
+a constant repute for magical knowledge, and the first tradition of
+their coming not only echoes that repute, but shows how first they
+came by it.</p>
+<p>The De Danaans came from the north; from what land, we shall
+presently inquire. They landed somewhere on the northeast coast of
+our island, says the tradition; the coast of Antrim was doubtless
+the place of their arrival, and we have our choice between Larne
+and the estuary of the Foyle. All between, lofty cliffs face a dark
+and angry sea, where no one not familiar with the coast would
+willingly approach; their later course in the island makes it very
+probable that they came to the Foyle.</p>
+<p>There, still within sight of the Caledonian isles and headlands
+hovering in blue shadows over the sea, they entered, where the sun
+rose over long silver sands and hills of chalk, with a grim
+headland on the west towering up into sombre mountains. Once within
+the strait, they had a wide expanse of quiet waters on all sides,
+running deep among the rugged hills, and receiving at its further
+end the river Foyle, tempting them further and further with their
+ships. Up the Foyle went the De Danaan fleet, among the oak-woods,
+the deer gazing wide-eyed at <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page081" id="page081"></a>[pg 081]</span> them from dark caverns
+of shadow, the wolves peering after them in the night. Then, when
+their ships would serve them no further, they landed, and, to set
+the seal on their coming, burned their boats, casting in their lot
+with the fate of their new home. Still following the streams of the
+Foyle, for rivers were the only pathways through the darkness of
+the woods, they came to the Lakes of Erne, then, as now, beautiful
+with innumerable islands, and draped with curtains of forest.
+Beyond Erne, they fixed their first settlement at Mag Rein, the
+Plain of the Headland, within the bounds of what afterwards was
+Leitrim; and at this camp their legend takes up the tale.</p>
+<p>It would seem that the Fomorians were then gathered further to
+the west, as well as in the northern isles. The Firbolgs had their
+central stronghold at Douin Cain, the Beautiful Eminence, which,
+tradition tells us, later bore the name of Tara. The chief among
+their chiefs was Eocaid, son of Ere, remembered as the last ruler
+of the Firbolgs. Every man of them was a hunter, used to spear and
+shield, and the skins of deer and the shaggy hides of wolves were
+their garments; their dwellings were built of well-fitted oak. To
+the chief, Eocaid, Erc's son, came rumor of the strangers near the
+Lakes of Erne; <span class="pagenum"><a name="page082" id=
+"page082"></a>[pg 082]</span> their ships, burned at their
+debarking, were not there to tell of the manner of their coming,
+and the De Danaans themselves bruited it abroad that they had come
+hither by magic, borne upon the wings of the wind. The chiefs of
+Tara gathered together, within their fort of earth crowned with a
+stockade, and took counsel how to meet this new adventure. After
+long consultation they chose one from among them, Sreng by name, a
+man of uncommon strength, a warrior tried and proven, who should go
+westward to find out more of the De Danaans.</p>
+<p>Doubtless taking certain chosen companions with him, Sreng, the
+man of valor from among the Firbolgs, set forth on his quest. As in
+all forest-covered countries, the only pathways lay along the
+river-banks, or, in times of drought, through the sand or pebbles
+of their beds. Where the woods pressed closest upon the streams,
+the path wound from one bank to the other, crossing by fords or
+stepping-stones, or by a bridge of tree-trunks. So went Sreng,
+careful and keen-eyed, up the stream of the Blackwater, and thence
+to the Erne, and so drew near to the Plain of the Headland, where
+was the De Danaan camp. They, too, had word of his coming from
+their scouts and hunters, and <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page083" id="page083"></a>[pg 083]</span> sent forth Breas, one
+among their bravest, to meet the envoy.</p>
+<p>They sighted each other and halted, each setting his shield in
+the earth, peering at his adversary above its rim. Then, reassured,
+they came together, and Breas first spoke to Sreng. After the first
+words they fell, warrior-like, to examining each other's weapons;
+Sreng saw that the two spears of Breas the De Danaan were thin,
+slender and long, and sharp-pointed, while his own were heavy,
+thick and point-less, but sharply rounded.</p>
+<p>Here we have a note of reality, for spears of these two types
+are well known to us; those of Sreng were chisel-shaped,
+round-edged, socketed celts; the De Danaan lances were long and
+slender, like our spears. There are two materials also--a beautiful
+golden bronze, shining and gleaming in the sunlight, and a darker,
+ruddier metal, dull and heavy; and these darker spears have sockets
+for greatly thicker hafts. Both also carried swords, made, very
+likely, the one of golden, the other of dull, copper-colored
+bronze.</p>
+<p>Then, putting these pleasant things aside, they turned to
+weightier matters, and Breas made a proposal for the De Danaan men.
+The island was large, the forests wide and full of game, the waters
+sweet <span class="pagenum"><a name="page084" id="page084"></a>[pg
+084]</span> and well-stocked with fish. Might they not share it
+between them, and join hands to keep out all future comers? Sreng
+could give no final answer; he could only put the matter before the
+Firbolg chiefs; so, exchanging spears in sign of friendship and for
+a token between them, they returned each to his own camp.</p>
+<p>Sreng of the Firbolgs retraced his path some four-score miles
+among the central forests, and came to the Beautiful Eminence,
+where the Firbolgs had their settlement. Eocaid, Erc's son, their
+chieftain, called the lesser chiefs around him, and Sreng made full
+report of what he had seen and heard. The Firbolgs, pressed on by
+their fate, decided to refuse all terms with the De Danaans, but to
+give them battle, and drive them from the island. So they made
+ready, each man seeing to the straps of his shield, the burnishing
+of his thick sword and heavy spear. Eyes gleamed out beneath
+lowering brows all about the dwellings of Tara, and hot words were
+muttered of the coming fight. The dark faces of the Firbolgs were
+full of wrath.</p>
+<p>Breas, returning to the camp of the Tuata De Danaan, gave such
+account of the fierceness and strength of Sreng, and the weight and
+sturdiness of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page085" id=
+"page085"></a>[pg 085]</span> his weapons, that the hearts of the
+golden-haired newcomers misgave them, and they drew away westward
+to the strip of land that lies between the lakes of Corrib and
+Mask. There, tradition tells us, they made an encampment upon the
+hill of Belgadan, near the stream that flows through caverns
+beneath the rocks from the northern to the southern lake. From
+their hill-top they had clear view of the plain stretching
+eastward, across which the Firbolg warriors must come; to the right
+hand and to the left were spread the great white waters of the
+lakes, stretching far away to the northern and southern verge of
+the sky. Islands dotted the lakes, and trees mirrored themselves in
+the waters. Behind them, to the westward, rose a square-topped
+mountain, crowned by a clear tarn; and, behind that, tier upon tier
+of hills, stretching dark and sombre along Lough Mask to the north,
+and spreading westward to the twelve crystal hills of
+Connemara.</p>
+<p>Across the plain to the east, then called the Plain of Nia, but
+thereafter Mag Tuiread or Moytura, the Plain of the Pillars, lay
+the forests, and thence issued forth the hosts of the Firbolgs,
+encamping on the eastern verge of the open space. Nuada, the De
+Danaan king, once more sought a peaceful issue to <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page086" id="page086"></a>[pg 086]</span> their
+meeting, but Erc's son Eocaid refused all terms, and it was plain
+to all that they must fight.</p>
+<p>It was midsummer. The air was warm about them, the lake-shores
+and the plain clothed in green of many gently blended shades. The
+sun shone down upon them, and the lakes mirrored the clear blue
+above. From their hill of encampment descended the De Danaans, with
+their long slender spears gleaming like bright gold, their swords
+of golden bronze firmly grasped, their left hands griping the thong
+of their shields. Golden-haired, with flowing tresses, they
+descended to the fight; what stately battle-song they chanted, what
+Powers they called on for a blessing, we cannot tell; nor in what
+terms the dark-browed Firbolgs answered them as they approached
+across the plain. All that day did the hosts surge together, spear
+launched against spear, and bronze sword clashing against shield;
+all that day and for three days more, and then the fate of the
+Firbolgs was decided. Great and dire was the slaughter of them, so
+that Erc's son Eocaid saw that all was lost. Withdrawing with a
+hundred of his own men about him, Eocaid was seeking water to
+quench his thirst, for the heat of the battle was upon him, when he
+was pursued by a greater band <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page087" id="page087"></a>[pg 087]</span> of the De Danaans, under
+the three sons of Nemed, one of their chieftains.</p>
+<p>Eocaid and his bodyguard fled before Nemed's sons, making their
+way northeastward along the Moy river, under the shadow of the
+Mountains of Storms, now wrongly named Ox Mountains. They came at
+last to the great strand called Traig Eotaile, but now Ballysadare,
+the Cataract of the Oaks,--where the descending river is cloven
+into white terraces by the rocks, and the sea, retreating at low
+tide, leaves a world of wet sand glinting under the moonlight. At
+the very sea's margin a great battle was fought between the last
+king of the Firbolgs with his men, and the De Danaans under Nemed's
+sons; so relentless was the fight along the tideways that few
+remained to tell of it, for Erc's son Eocaid fell, but Nemed's
+three sons fell likewise, The three De Danaan brothers were buried
+at the western end of the strand, and the place was called The
+Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, in their memory. The son of Erc
+was buried on the strand, where the waves lap along the shore, and
+his cairn of Traig Eotaile still stands by the water-side, last
+resting-place of the last ruler of the Firbolgs.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile the fighting had gone on at Mag Tuiread <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page088" id="page088"></a>[pg 088]</span> by the
+lakes, till but three hundred of the Firbolgs were left, with
+Sreng, the fierce fighter, at their head. Sreng had gained enduring
+fame by meeting Nuada, the De Danaan king, in combat, and smiting
+him so that he clove the shield-rim and cut down deep into Nuada's
+shoulder, disabling him utterly from the battle. Seeing themselves
+quite outnumbered, therefore, the survivors of the Firbolgs with
+Sreng demanded single combat with De Danaan champions, but the
+victors offered them worthy terms of peace. The Firbolgs were to
+hold in lordship and freedom whichever they might choose of the
+five provinces; the conquerors were to have the rest.</p>
+<p>Sreng looked around among his band of survivors,--a little band,
+though of great valor,--and he remembered the hosts of his people
+that had entered the battle three days before, but now lay strewn
+upon the plain; and thinking that they had done enough for valor he
+accepted the offered terms, choosing the Western Province for his
+men. In memory of him it was called Cuigead Sreing for generations,
+until Conn of the Five-Score Battles changed the name for his own,
+calling the province Connacht, as it is to this day.</p>
+<p>It fared less well with the victors, and with their <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page089" id="page089"></a>[pg 089]</span>
+victory were sown seeds of future discord. For Nuada, the king,
+being grievously wounded, was in no state to rule, so that the
+chief power was given to Breas, first envoy of the De Danaans. Now
+Breas was only half De Danaan, half Fomor, and would not recognize
+the De Danaan rites or laws of hospitality, but was a very
+tyrannous and overbearing ruler, so that much evil came of his
+government. Yet for seven years he was endured, even though meat
+nor ale was dispensed at his banquets, according to De Danaan
+law.</p>
+<br>
+<p>Mutterings against Breas were rife among the chiefs and their
+followers when the bard Cairbr&eacute;, whose mother Etan was also
+a maker of verses, came to the assembly of Breas. But the bard was
+shown little honor and given a mean lodging,--a room without fire
+or bed, with three dry loaves for his fare. The bard was full of
+resentment and set himself to make songs against Breas, so that all
+men repeated his verses, and the name of Breas fell into contempt.
+All men's minds were enkindled by the bard, and they drove Breas
+forth from the chieftainship. Breas fled to his Fomor kindred in
+the isles, with his heart full of anger and revenge against the De
+Danaans.</p>
+<p>He sought help of his kindred, and their design <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page090" id="page090"></a>[pg 090]</span> was
+told to the Fomorian chieftains--to Balor of the Evil Eye, and to
+Indec, son of De Domnand, chiefs of the Isles. These two leaders
+gathered ships from all the harbors and settlements of the
+Fomorians, from the Hebrides, the Shetlands, and far-distant
+Norway, so that their fleet was thick as gulls above a shoal of
+fish along the north shores of Erin.</p>
+<p>Coming down from the northern isles, they sighted the coast of
+Erin, the peaks of the northwestern mountains rising purple towards
+the clouds, with white seas foaming around them. Past towering
+headlands they sailed; then, drawing in towards the shore, they
+crept under the great cliffs of Slieve League, that rose like a
+many-colored wall from the sea to the sky--so high that the great
+eagles on their summits were but specks seen from beneath, so high
+that the ships below seemed like sea-shells to those who watched
+them from above. With the wall of the cliffs on their left hand,
+and the lesser headlands and hills of Sligo on their right, they
+came to that same strand of Ballysadare, the Cataract of the Oaks,
+where the last of the Firbolgs fell. Drawing their long ships up on
+the beach, with furled sail and oars drawn in, they debarked their
+army on the shore. It was a landing of ill-omen for the Fomorians,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page091" id="page091"></a>[pg
+091]</span> that landing beside the cairn of Eocaid; a landing of
+ill-omen for Indec, son of De Domnand, and for Balor of the Evil
+Eye.</p>
+<p>It was the fall of the leaf when they came; the winds ran crying
+through the forests, tearing the leaves and branches from the oaks,
+and mourning among the pines of the uplands. The sea was gray as a
+gull's back, with dark shadows under the cliffs and white tresses
+of foam along the headlands. At evening a cold wind brought the
+rain beating in from the ocean. Thus the Fomorians landed at the
+Cataract of the Oaks, and marched inland to the plain now called
+Tirerril in Sligo. The murky sky spread over the black and withered
+waste of the plain, hemmed in with gloomy hills, wild rocks and
+ravines, and with all the northern horizon broken by distant
+mountains. Here Indec and Balor, and Breas the cause of their
+coming, fixed their camp. They sent a message of defiance to the De
+Danaans, challenging them to fight or surrender. The De Danaans
+heard the challenge and made ready to fight.</p>
+<p>Nuada, now called the chieftain of the Silver Arm, because the
+mischief wrought by Sreng's blow on his shoulder had been hidden by
+a silver casing, was once more ruler since Breas had been driven
+out. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page092" id="page092"></a>[pg
+092]</span> Besides Nuada, these were De Danaan chieftains: Dagda,
+the Mighty; Lug, son of Cian, son of Diancect, surnamed Lamfada,
+the Long Armed; Ogma, of the Sunlike Face; and Angus, the Young.
+They summoned the workers in bronze and the armorers, and bid them
+prepare sword and spear for battle, charging the makers of
+spear-haft and shield to perfect their work. The heralds also were
+ready to proclaim the rank of the warriors, and those skilled in
+healing herbs stood prepared to succor the wounded. The bards were
+there also to arouse valor and ardor with their songs.</p>
+<p>Then marching westward to the plain of the battle among the
+hills, they set their camp and advanced upon the Fomorians. Each
+man had two spears bound with a thong to draw them back after the
+cast, with a shield to ward off blows, and a broad-bladed sword of
+bronze for close combat. With war-chants and invocations the two
+hosts met. The spears, well poised and leveled, clove the air,
+hissing between them, and under the weight of the spear-heads and
+their sharp points many in both hosts fell. There were cries of the
+wounded now, mingled with battle-songs, and hoarse shouting for
+vengeance among those whose sons and brothers and sworn friends
+fell. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page093" id="page093"></a>[pg
+093]</span> Another cast of the spears, seaming the air between as
+the hosts closed in, and they fell on each other with their swords,
+shields upraised and gold-bronze sword-points darting beneath like
+the tongues of serpents. They cut and thrust, each with his eyes
+fixed on the fierce eyes of his foe.</p>
+<p>They fought on the day of the Spirits, now the Eve of All
+Saints; the Fomorians were routed, and their chieftains slain. But
+of the De Danaans, Nuada, once wounded by Sreng of the Firbolgs,
+now fell by the hand of Balor; yet Balor also fell, slain by Lug,
+his own daughter's son.</p>
+<p>Thus was the might of the Fomorians broken, and the De Danaans
+ruled unopposed, their power and the works of their hands spreading
+throughout the length and breadth of the land.</p>
+<p>Many monuments are accredited to them by tradition, but greatest
+and most wonderful are the pyramids of stone at Brugh on the Boyne.
+Some nine miles from the sandy seashore, where the Boyne loses
+itself in the waves, there is a broad tongue of meadowland, shut in
+on three sides southward by the Boyne, and to the northeast cut off
+by a lesser stream that joins it. This remote and quiet headland,
+very famous in the annals, was in old days so surrounded
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page094" id="page094"></a>[pg
+094]</span> by woods that it was like a quiet glade in the forest
+rimmed by the clear waters of the Boyne. The Mourne Mountains to
+the north and the lesser summits on the southern sky-line were
+hidden by the trees. The forest wall encircled the green
+meadowland, and the river fringed with blue forget-me-nots.</p>
+<p>In this quiet spot was the sacred place of the De Danaans, and
+three great pyramids of stone, a mile apart along the river, mark
+their three chief sanctuaries. The central is the greatest; two
+hundred thousand tons of stone heaped up, within a circular wall of
+stone, itself surrounded by a great outer circle of standing
+stones, thirty in number, like gray sentinels guarding the shrine.
+In the very heart of the pyramid, hushed in perpetual stillness and
+peace, is the inmost sanctuary, a chamber formed like a cross,
+domed with a lofty roof, and adorned with mysterious tracings on
+the rocks. Shrines like this are found in many lands, whether
+within the heart of the pyramids of Egypt or in the recesses of
+India's hills; and in all lands they have the same purpose. They
+are secret and holy sanctuaries, guarded well from all outward
+influence, where, in the mystic solitude, the valiant and great
+among the living may commune with the spirits of the mighty dead.
+The dead, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page095" id=
+"page095"></a>[pg 095]</span> though hidden, are not passed away;
+their souls are in perpetual nearness to ours. If we enter deep
+within ourselves, to the remote shrine of the heart, as they
+entered that secluded shrine, we may find the mysterious threshold
+where their world and our world meet.</p>
+<p>In the gloom and silence of those pyramid-chambers, the De
+Danaans thus sought the souls of their mighty ones--the Dagda,
+surnamed the Mighty, and Lug the Long-Armed, and Ogma of the
+Sunlike Face, and Angus the Young. From these luminous guardians
+they sought the inbreathing of wisdom, drawing into themselves the
+might of these mightier ones, and rising toward the power of their
+immortal world. And to these sacred recesses they brought the ashes
+of their mighty dead, as a token that they, too, had passed through
+the secret gateway to the Land of the Ever Young.</p>
+<p>Some thirty miles to the west of Brugh, on the Boyne, a low
+range of hills rises from the central plain, now bearing the name
+of Slieve na Calliagh, the Witch's Hill. In the days of the great
+forest this was the first large open space to the west coming from
+Brugh, and, like it, a quiet and remote refuge among the woods. On
+the hillsides of Slieve na Calliagh are <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page096" id="page096"></a>[pg 096]</span> other
+pyramids of stone, in all things like those of Brugh, and with the
+same chambered sanctuaries, but of lesser size; belonging, perhaps,
+to a later age, when the De Danaans were no longer supreme in the
+land, but took their place beside newcome invaders. These lesser
+shrines were also sacred places, doorways to the hidden world,
+entrance-gates to the Land of the Ever Young. There also was beheld
+the vision of the radiant departed; there also were fonts of
+baptism, basins wrought of granite brought hither from the distant
+hills of Mourne or Wicklow. As in all lands, these fonts were used
+in the consecration of the new birth, from which man rises
+conscious of his immortality.</p>
+<p>In harmony with this faith of theirs, our present tradition sees
+in the De Danaans a still haunting impalpable presence, a race
+invisible yet real, dwelling even now among our hills and valleys.
+When the life of the visible world is hushed, they say, there is
+another life in the hidden, where the Dagda Mor and Ogma and Lug
+and Angus still guard the De Danaan hosts. The radiance of their
+nearness is all through the land, like the radiance of the sun
+hidden behind storm-clouds, glimmering through the veil.</p>
+<a name="097.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/097.jpg"><img src="images/097.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>WHITE ROCKS, PORTRUSH.</b></p>
+<p>In the chambers of those pyramid-shrines are still <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page097" id="page097"></a>[pg 097]</span> traces
+of the material presence of the De Danaans; not only their
+baptismal fonts, but more earthly things--ornaments, beads of glass
+and amber, and combs with which they combed their golden locks.
+These amber beads, like so many things in the De Danaan history,
+call us to far northern lands by the Baltic, whence in all
+likelihood the De Danaans came; for in those Baltic lands we find
+just such pyramid shrines as those at Brugh and on the hillsides of
+Slieve na Calliagh, and their ornaments are the same, and the
+fashion of their spear-heads and shields. The plan of the Danish
+pyramid of Uby is like the pyramids of Newgrange and Nowth and
+Dowth by the Boyne, and the carvings on King Gorm's stone by the
+Baltic are like the carvings of stones in our own island. On the
+Baltic shores, too, of most ancient date and belonging to forgotten
+times, are still found fragments and even perfect hulls of just
+such long ships as were needed for the Danaans' coming, like the
+ships they burnt along the reaches of the Foyle.</p>
+<p>By the Baltic, too, and nowhere else, were there races with hair
+yellow as their own amber, or, as our island bards say, "so bright
+that the new-molten gold was not brighter; yellow as the yellow
+flag-lilies along the verges of the rivers." Therefore, in
+character of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page098" id=
+"page098"></a>[pg 098]</span> race, in face and feature, in color
+and complexion, in the form and make of sword and spear and shield,
+in their knowledge of ships and the paths of the sea, as in their
+ornaments and decorative art, and in those majestic pyramids and
+shrines where they sought mystic wisdom, and whither they carried
+the ashes of their dead, as to a place of sacred rest--in all these
+the life of the De Danaans speaks of the Baltic shores and the
+ancient race of golden-haired heroes who dwelt there. The honoring
+of bards, the heraldic keeping of traditions and the names of
+ancestors, also speak of the same home; and with a college of
+heraldic bards, well-ordered and holding due rank and honor, we can
+well see how the stories of their past have come down even to our
+days, lingering among our hills and valleys, as the De Danaan
+themselves linger, hidden yet not departed.</p>
+<p>The traditional time of their coming, too, agrees well with all
+we know. Without bronze tools they could not have carved the
+beautifully adorned stones that are built into the pyramids by the
+Boyne; yet there is a certain early ruggedness about these stones
+that falls far short of the perfection of later times. Early in the
+bronze age, therefore, they must be placed; and the early bronze
+age, wherever its <span class="pagenum"><a name="page099" id=
+"page099"></a>[pg 099]</span> remoteness can be measured, as in the
+Swiss lakes or the peat-mosses of Denmark, cannot be less than four
+thousand years ago, thus well agreeing with our De Danaan
+tradition. We are, therefore, led to believe that the tale told by
+these traditions is in the main a true one; that the races recorded
+by them came in the recorded order; that their places of landing
+are faithfully remembered; that all traditions pointing to their
+earlier homes are worthy of belief, and in full accord with all our
+other knowledge.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page100" id="page100"></a>[pg
+100]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page101" id="page101"></a>[pg
+101]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>EMAIN OF MACA.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page102" id="page102"></a>[pg
+102]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page103" id="page103"></a>[pg
+103]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="V."></a>V.</h2>
+<h3>EMAIN OF MACA.</h3>
+<h3>B.C. 50--A.D. 50.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The battles of Southern and Northern Moytura gave the De Danaans
+sway over the island. After they had ruled for many centuries, they
+in their turn were subjected to invasion, as the Firbolg and
+Fomorian had been before them. The newcomers were the Sons of
+Milid, and their former home was either Gaul or Spain. But whether
+from Gaul or Spain, the sons of Milid were of undoubted Gaelic
+race, in every feature of character and complexion resembling the
+continental Gauls.</p>
+<p>We must remember that, in the centuries before the northward
+spread of Rome, the Gauls were the great central European power.
+Twenty-six hundred years ago their earlier tribal life was
+consolidated into a stable empire under Ambigatos; Galicia in
+Eastern Austria and Galicia in Western Spain mark their extreme
+borders towards the rising and setting sun.</p>
+<p>Several centuries before the days of Ambigatos, in the older
+period of tribal confederation, was the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page104" id="page104"></a>[pg 104]</span> coming
+of the Gaelic Sons of Milid to Ireland. Tradition places the date
+between three and four thousand years ago. Yet even after that long
+interval of isolation the resemblance between the Irish and
+continental Gaels is perfect; they are tall, solidly built, rather
+inclined to stoutness; they are fair-skinned, or even florid,
+easily browned by sun and wind. Their eyes are gray, greenish or
+hazel, not clear blue, like the eyes of the Baltic race; and though
+fair-haired, they are easily distinguished from the golden-haired
+Norsemen. Such are the descendants of the Sons of Milid. Coming
+from Gaul or Spain, the Sons of Milid landed in one of the great
+fiords that penetrate between the mountains of Kerry--long after so
+named from the descendants of Ciar. These same fiords between the
+hills have been the halting-place of continental invaders for ages;
+hardly a century has passed since the last landing there of
+continental soldiers; there was another invasion a century before
+that, and yet another a hundred years earlier. But the Sons of
+Milid showed the way. They may have come by Bantry Bay or the
+Kenmare River or Dingle Bay; more probably the last, for tradition
+still points to the battlefield where they were opposed, on the
+hills of Slieve Mish, above the Dingle fiord.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page105" id="page105"></a>[pg
+105]</span>
+<p>But wherever they debarked on that southwestern coast they found
+a land warm and winning as the south they had left behind--a land
+of ever-green woods, yew and arbutus mingling with beech and oak
+and fir; rich southern heaths carpeting the hillsides, and a soft
+drapery of ferns upon the rocks. There were red masses of
+overhanging mountain, but in the valleys, sheltered and sun-warmed,
+they found a refuge like the Isles of the Blest. The Atlantic,
+surging in great blue rollers, brought the warmth of tropical seas,
+and a rich and vivid growth through all the glens and vales
+responded to the sun's caress.</p>
+<p>The De Danaans must ere this have spread through all of the
+island, except the western province assigned to the Firbolgs; for
+we find them opposing,--but vainly opposing,--the Sons of Milid, at
+the very place of their landing. Here again we find the old
+tradition verified; for at the spot recorded of old by the bards
+and heralds, among the hills by the pass that leads from Dingle to
+Tralee Bay, numberless arrow-heads have been gathered, the
+gleanings after a great combat. The De Danaans fought with sword
+and spear, but, unless they had added to their weapons since the
+days of Breas and Sreng, they did not shoot with the bow; this was,
+perhaps, the cause of their defeat, for the De Danaans were
+defeated <span class="pagenum"><a name="page106" id=
+"page106"></a>[pg 106]</span> among the hills on that long
+headland.</p>
+<p>From their battlefield they could see the sea on either hand,
+stretching far inland northward and southward; across these arms of
+the sea rose other headlands, more distant, the armies of hills
+along them fading from green to purple, from purple to clear blue.
+But the De Danaans had burned their boats; they sought refuge
+rather by land, retreating northward till they came to the shelter
+of the great central woods. The Sons of Milid pursued them, and,
+overtaking them at Tailten on the Blackwater, some ten miles
+northwest of Tara, they fought another battle; after it, the
+supremacy of the De Danaans definitely passed away.</p>
+<p>Yet we have no reason to believe that, any more than the
+Fomorians or Firbolgs, the De Danaans ceased to fill their own
+place in the land. They seem, indeed, to have been preponderant in
+the north, and in all likelihood they hold their own there even
+now; for every addition to our knowledge shows us more and more how
+tenacious is the life of races, how firmly they cling to their
+earliest dwellings. And though we read of races perishing before
+invaders, this is the mere boasting of conquerors; <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page107" id="page107"></a>[pg 107]</span> more
+often the newcomers are absorbed among the earlier race, and
+nothing distinctive remains of them but a name. We have abundant
+evidence to show that at the present day, as throughout the last
+three thousand years, the four races we have described continue to
+make up the bulk of our population, and pure types of each still
+linger unblended in their most ancient seats; for, though races
+mingle, they do not thereby lose their own character. The law is
+rather that the type of one or other will come out clear in their
+descendants, all undefined forms tending to disappear.</p>
+<p>Nor did any subsequent invasion add new elements; for as all
+northern Europe is peopled by the same few types, every
+newcomer,--whether from Norway, Denmark, Britain or Continental
+Europe,--but reinforced one of these earlier races. Yet even where
+the ethnical elements are alike, there seems to be a difference of
+destiny and promise--as if the very land itself brooded over its
+children, transforming them and molding them to a larger purpose.
+The spiritual life of races goes far deeper than their ethnic
+history.</p>
+<p>It would seem that with the coming of the Sons of Milid the
+destiny of Ireland was rounded and <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page108" id="page108"></a>[pg 108]</span> completed; from that
+time onward, for more than two thousand years, was a period of
+uniform growth and settled life and ideals; a period whose history
+and achievements we are only beginning to understand. At the
+beginning of that long epoch of settled life the art of working
+gold was developed and perfected; and we have abundance of
+beautiful gold-work from remote times, of such fine design and
+execution that there is nothing in the world to equal it. The
+modern work of countries where gold is found in quantities is
+commonplace, vulgar and inartistic, when compared with the work of
+the old Irish period. Torques, or twisted ribbons of gold, of
+varying size and shape, were worn as diadems, collars, or even
+belts; crescent bands of finely embossed sheet-gold were worn above
+the forehead; brooches and pins of most delicate and imaginative
+workmanship were used to catch together the folds of richly colored
+cloaks, and rings and bracelets were of not less various and
+exquisite forms.</p>
+<p>We are at no loss to understand the abundance of our old
+goldsmiths' work when we know that even now, after being worked for
+centuries, the Wicklow gold-mines have an average yearly yield of
+some five hundred ounces, found, for the most part, in nuggets
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page109" id="page109"></a>[pg
+109]</span> in the beds of streams flowing into the two Avons. One
+mountain torrent bears the name of Gold Mines River at the present
+day, showing the unbroken presence of the yellow metal from the
+time of its first discovery, over three thousand years ago. It
+seems probable that a liberal alloy of gold gave the golden bronze
+its peculiar excellence and beauty; for so rich is the lustre, so
+fine the color of many of our bronze axes and spears, that they are
+hardly less splendid than weapons of pure gold. From the perfect
+design and workmanship of these things of gold and bronze, more
+than from any other source, we gain an insight into the high
+culture and skill in the arts which marked that most distinctively
+Irish period, lasting, as we have seen, more than two thousand
+years.</p>
+<p>Early in this same epoch we find traditions of the clearing of
+forests, the sowing of cornfields, the skill of dyers in seven
+colors, earliest of which were purple, blue and green. Wells were
+dug to insure an easily accessible supply of pure water, so that we
+begin to think of a settled population dwelling among fields of
+golden grain, pasturing their cattle in rich meadows, and depending
+less on the deer and wild oxen of the forest, the salmon of lake
+and river, and the abundant fish along the shores.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page110" id="page110"></a>[pg
+110]</span>
+<p>Tradition speaks persistently of bards, heralds, poets and
+poetesses; of music and song; of cordial and generous social life;
+and to the presence of these bards, like the skalds of the
+Northmen, we owe pictures, even now full of life and color and
+movement, of those days of long ago.</p>
+<p>At a period rather more than two thousand years ago, a
+warrior-queen, Maca by name, founded a great fort and citadel at
+Emain, some two miles west of Armagh, in the undulating country of
+green hills and meadows to the south of Lough Neagh. The ramparts
+and earthworks of that ancient fortress can still be traced, and we
+can follow and verify what the ancient bards told of the greatness
+of the stronghold of Maca. The plans of all forts of that time seem
+to have been much the same--a wide ring of earthwork, with a deep
+moat, guarded them, and a stockade of oak stakes rose above the
+earthwork, behind which the defenders stood, firing volleys of
+arrows at the attacking host. Within this outer circle of defence
+there was almost always a central stronghold, raised on a great
+mound of earth; and this was the dwelling of the chief, provincial
+ruler, or king. Lesser mounds upheld the houses of lesser chiefs,
+and all alike seem to have been built of oak, with plank
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page111" id="page111"></a>[pg
+111]</span> roofs. Safe storehouses of stone were often sunk
+underground, beneath the chief's dwelling. In the fort of Emain, as
+in the great fort of Tara in the Boyne Valley, there was a
+banqueting-hall for the warriors, and the bards thus describe one
+of these in the days of its glory: "The banquet-hall had twelve
+divisions in each wing, with tables and passages round them; there
+were sixteen attendants on each side, eight for the star-watchers,
+the historians and the scribes, in the rear of the hall, and two to
+each table at the door,--a hundred guests in all; two oxen, two
+sheep and two hogs were divided equally on each side at each meal.
+Beautiful was the appearance of the king in that assembly--flowing,
+slightly curling golden hair upon him; a red buckler with stars and
+beasts wrought of gold and fastenings of silver upon him; a crimson
+cloak in wide descending folds upon him, fastened at his breast by
+a golden brooch set with precious stones; a neck-torque of gold
+around his neck; a white shirt with a full collar, and intertwined
+with threads of gold, upon him; a girdle of gold inlaid with
+precious stones around him; two wonderful shoes of gold with
+runings of gold upon him; two spears with golden sockets in his
+hand."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page112" id="page112"></a>[pg
+112]</span>
+<p>We are the more disposed to trust the fidelity of the picture,
+since the foundations of the Tara banquet-hall are to be clearly
+traced to this day--an oblong earthwork over seven hundred feet
+long by ninety wide, with the twelve doors still distinctly marked;
+as for the brooches and torques of gold, some we have surpass in
+magnificence anything here described, and their artistic beauty is
+eloquent of the refinement of spirit that conceived and the skill
+that fashioned them. Spear-heads, too, are of beautiful
+bronze-gold, with tracings round the socket of great excellence and
+charm.</p>
+<a name="113.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/113.jpg"><img src="images/113.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>POWERSCOURT WATERFALL, CO. WICKLOW.</b></p>
+<p>For a picture of the life of that age, we cannot do better than
+return to Emain of Maca, telling the story of one famous generation
+of warriors and fair women who loved and fought there two thousand
+years ago. The ideal of beauty was still the golden hair and blue
+eyes of the De Danaans, and we cannot doubt that their race
+persisted side by side with the Sons of Milid, retaining a certain
+predominance in the north and northeast of the island, the first
+landing-place of the De Danaan invaders. Of this mingled race was
+the great Rudraige, from whom the most famous rulers of Emain
+descended. Ros was the son of Rudraige, and from Roeg and Cass,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page113" id="page113"></a>[pg
+113]</span> the sons of Ros, came the princes Fergus and Factna.
+Factna, son of Cass, wedded the beautiful Nessa, and from their
+union sprang Concobar, the great hero and ruler of Ulster--in those
+days named Ulad, and the dwellers there the Ulaid. Factna died
+while Concobar was yet a boy; and Nessa, left desolate, was yet so
+beautiful in her sadness that Fergus became her slave, and sued for
+her favor, though himself a king whose favors others sued. Nessa's
+heart was wholly with her son, her life wrapt up in his. She
+answered, therefore, that she would renounce her mourning and give
+her widowed hand to Fergus the king, if the king, on his part,
+would promise that Nessa's son Concobar should succeed him, rather
+than the children of Fergus. Full of longing, and held in thrall by
+her beauty, Fergus promised; and this promise was the beginning of
+many calamities, for Nessa, the queen, feeling her sway over
+Fergus, and full of ambition for her child, won a promise from
+Fergus that the youth should sit beside him on the throne, hearing
+all pleadings and disputes, and learning the art of ruling. But the
+spirit of Concobar was subtle and strong and masterful, and he
+quickly took the greater place in the councils of the Ulaid, until
+Nessa, still confident in her charm, took a <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page114" id="page114"></a>[pg 114]</span>
+promise from Fergus that Concobar should reign for one year.</p>
+<p>Fergus, great-hearted warrior, but tender and gentle and fond of
+feasts and merrymaking, was very willing to lift the cares of rule
+from his shoulders to the younger shoulders of Nessa's son, and the
+one year thus granted became many years, so that Fergus never again
+mounted his throne. Yet for the love he bore to Nessa, Fergus
+willingly admitted his stepson's rule, and remained faithfully
+upholding him, ever merry at the banquets, and leading the martial
+sports and exercises of the youths, the sons of chieftains, at the
+court. Thus Concobar, son of Nessa, came to be ruler over the great
+fort of Emain, with its citadel, its earthworks and outer forts,
+its strong stockade and moat; ruler of these, and of the chiefs of
+the Ulaid, and chief commander of all the fighting-men that
+followed them. To him came the tribute of cattle and horses, of
+scarlet cloaks and dyed fabrics, purple and blue and green, and the
+beryls and emeralds from the mountains of Mourne where the sea
+thunders in the caves, near the great fort of Rudraige. Fergus was
+lord only of the banqueting-hall and of the merrymakings of the
+young chiefs; but in all else the will of Concobar was supreme and
+his word was law.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page115" id="page115"></a>[pg
+115]</span>
+<p>It happened that before this a child had been born, a girl
+golden-haired and with blue eyes, of whom the Druids had foretold
+many dark and terrible things. That the evil might not be wrought
+through this child of sad destiny, the king had from her earliest
+childhood kept her securely hidden in a lonely fort, and there
+Deirdr&eacute; grew in solitude, daily increasing in beauty and
+winsomeness. She so won the love of those set in guard over her
+that they relaxed something of the strictness of their watch,
+letting her wander a little in the meadows and the verges of the
+woods, gathering flowers, and watching the life of birds and wild
+things there.</p>
+<p>Among the chieftains of the court of Emain was one Usnac, of
+whom were three sons, with Naisi strongest and handsomest of the
+three. Naisi was dark, with black locks hanging upon his shoulders
+and dark, gleaming eyes; and so strongly is unlike drawn to unlike
+that golden-haired Deirdr&eacute;, seeing him in one of her
+wanderings, felt her heart go forth to him utterly. Falling into
+talk with him, they exchanged promises of enduring love. Thus the
+heart of Naisi went to Deirdr&eacute;, as hers had gone to him, so
+that all things were changed for them, growing radiant with
+tremulous hope and wistful with longing. <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page116" id="page116"></a>[pg 116]</span> Yet
+the fate that lay upon Deirdr&eacute; was heavy, and all men
+dreaded it but Naisi; so that even his brothers, the sons of Usnac,
+feared greatly and would have dissuaded him from giving his life to
+the ill-fated one. But Naisi would not be dissuaded; so they met
+secretly many times, in the twilight at the verge of the wood,
+Deirdr&eacute;'s golden hair catching the last gleam of sunlight
+and holding it long into the darkness, while the black locks of
+Naisi, even ere sunset, foreshadowed the coming night. In their
+hearts it was not otherwise; for Deirdr&eacute;, full of wonder at
+the change that had come over her, at the song of the birds that
+echoed ever around her even in her dreams, at the radiance of the
+flowers and trees, the sunshine on the waters of the river, the
+vivid gladness over all,-- Deirdr&eacute; knew nothing of the dread
+doom that was upon her, and was all joy and wonderment at the
+meetings with her lover, full of fancies and tender words and shy
+caresses; but Naisi, who knew well the fate that overshadowed them
+like a black cloud above a cliff of the sea, strove to be glad and
+show a bold face to his mistress, though his heart many a time grew
+cold within him, thinking on what had befallen and what might
+befall.</p>
+<p>For the old foretelling of the star-watchers was not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page117" id="page117"></a>[pg
+117]</span> the only doom laid upon Deirdr&eacute;. Concobar the
+king, stern and masterful, crafty and secret in counsel though
+swift as an eagle to slay,--Concobar the king had watched
+Deirdr&eacute; in her captivity, ever unseen of her, and his heart
+had been moved by the fair softness of her skin, the glow of her
+cheek, the brightness of her eyes and hair; so that the king had
+steadfastly determined in his mind that Deirdr&eacute; should be
+his, in scorn of all prophecies and warnings; that her beauty
+should be for him alone. This the king had determined; and it was
+known to Naisi the son of Usnac. It was known to him also that what
+Concobar the king determined, he steadfastly carried out; for the
+will of Concobar was strong and masterful over all around him.</p>
+<p>Therefore at their meetings two clouds lay upon the heart of
+Naisi: the presentment of the king's power and anger, and his
+relentless hand pursuing through the night, and the darker dread of
+the sightless doom pronounced of old at the birth of
+Deirdr&eacute;, of which the will of Concobar was but the tool.
+There was gloom in his eyes and silence on his lips and a secret
+dread in his heart. Deirdr&eacute; wondered at it, her own heart
+being so full of gladness, her eyes sparkling, and endearing words
+ever ready on her <span class="pagenum"><a name="page118" id=
+"page118"></a>[pg 118]</span> lips. Deirdr&eacute; wondered, yet
+found a new delight and wonderment in the silence of Naisi, and the
+gloomy lightning in his eyes, as being the more contrasted with
+herself, and therefore the more to be beloved.</p>
+<p>Yet the time came when Naisi determined to tell her all and risk
+the worst that fate could do against them, finding death with her
+greatly better than life without her. Yet death with her was not to
+be granted to him. Deirdr&eacute; heard, wondering and trembling,
+and Naisi must tell her the tale many times before she
+understood,--so utter had been her solitude and so perfect was yet
+her ignorance of all things beyond the fort where she was captive,
+and of all the doings of men. Concobar was not even a name to her,
+and she knew nothing of his power or the stronghold of Emain, the
+armies of the Ulaid, or the tributes of gold and cattle and horses.
+Spears and swords and those who wielded them were not even dreams
+to her until the coming of Naisi, when his gloom blended with her
+sunshine.</p>
+<p>Talking long through the twilight, until the red gold of the
+west was dulled to bronze over the hills, and the bronze tarnished
+and darkened with the coming of the eastern stars, they planned
+together what <span class="pagenum"><a name="page119" id=
+"page119"></a>[pg 119]</span> they should do; and, the heart of
+Deirdr&eacute; at last growing resolute, they made their way
+through the night to where the brothers of Naisi were, and all fled
+together towards the northern sea. Amongst the fishermen of the
+north they found those who were willing to carry them beyond the
+reach of Concobar's anger, and with a southerly breeze set sail for
+the distant headlands of Scotland, that they had seen from the
+cliff-top lying like blue clouds along the horizon. They set forth
+early in the morning, as the sun came up out of the east over blue
+Alban capes, and when the sun went down it reddened the dark rocks
+of Islay; so that, making for the shore, they camped that night
+under the Islay Hills. On their setting forth again, the sea was
+like a wild grey lake between Jura on the left and the long
+headland of Cantyre on their right; and thus they sped forward
+between long ranks of gloomy hills, growing ever nearer them on
+both sides, till they passed through the Sound of Jura and rounded
+into Loch Etive.</p>
+<p>There they made the land, drawing up under the shadow of dark
+hills, and there they dwelt for many a day. Very familiar to
+Deirdr&eacute;, though at first strange and wild and terrible
+beyond words, grew <span class="pagenum"><a name="page120" id=
+"page120"></a>[pg 120]</span> that vast amphitheatre of hills in
+their eternal grayness, with the long Loch stretching down like a
+horn through their midst. Very familiar to inland-bred
+Deirdr&eacute;, though at first strange and fearful, grew the gray
+surges of the incoming tides, the white foam of the waves seething
+along boulders of granite, and the long arms of seaweed waving as
+she peered downward into the clear green water. Very familiar to
+Deirdr&eacute;, though at first strange and confusing, grew the
+arms of Naisi around her in the darkness and his warm lips on her
+cheek. Happy were those wild days in the great glen of Etive, and
+dear did the sons of Usnac grow to her heart, loved as brothers by
+her who never knew a brother, or the gentleness of a mother's
+watching, or the solace of dear kindred.</p>
+<p>The sons of Usnac sped forth before dawn among the hills from
+their green dwelling roofed with pine branches and reeds and moss;
+early they went forth to track the deer, pursuing them with their
+arrows, till the red flank of the buck was laced with brighter red.
+One of the three ever stayed behind with Deirdr&eacute;, whether it
+was Naisi himself, or Alny, or Ardan, and the two thus remaining
+were like children playing together, whether gathering sticks and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page121" id="page121"></a>[pg
+121]</span> dry rushes and long spears of withered grass for their
+fire, or wandering by the white curling waves, or sending flat
+pebbles skipping over the wavelets; and the sound of their laughter
+many a time echoed along the Loch's green waters and up the hills,
+till the does peered and wondered from among the heather, and the
+heron, startled at his fishing, flew upwards croaking, with
+flapping wings. Happy were those days for Deirdr&eacute;, and with
+utter sadness she looked back to them afterwards, when the doom
+foretold had fallen upon her. Happy sped the days, till once in the
+gray of the dawn, while Deirdr&eacute; was resting in their green
+refuge with Naisi, she cried out in her sleep and waked, telling
+him, weeping, that she had heard the voice of the bird of doom in
+her dreams.</p>
+<p>The voice she heard was indeed the voice of their doom; yet it
+was a cheerful voice, full of friendly gladness; the voice of
+Fergus, son of Roeg, former King of Emain, and now come to Loch
+Etive as messenger of Concobar, Fergus came up from the sea-beach
+towards the answering shout of the sons of Usnac, and glad
+greetings passed among them at the door of their refuge. Fergus
+looked long in admiration at the blue eyes and golden locks, the
+clear skin <span class="pagenum"><a name="page122" id=
+"page122"></a>[pg 122]</span> and gentle breast of Deirdr&eacute;,
+nor wondered, as he looked, that Naisi had dared fate to possess
+her. Then Fergus told the story of his coming; how they had
+discovered the flight of the sons of Usnac from Emain, and how
+terrible was the black anger of Concobar; what passionate fire had
+gleamed in his eyes as he tossed the golden locks back from his
+shoulders and grasped the haft of his spear, and pledged himself to
+be avenged on Naisi and all his kin, swearing that he would have
+Deirdr&eacute; back again.</p>
+<p>Thus Fergus told the tale, laughingly, as at a danger that was
+past, a storm-cloud that had lost its arrows of white hail and was
+no longer fearful. For, he said, Concobar had forgotten his anger,
+had promised a truce to the sons of Usnac, and most of all to
+Naisi, and had bidden them return as his guests to Emain of Maca,
+where Deirdr&eacute; should dwell happy with her beloved. The
+comrades of Fergus by this time had tied their boat and come up
+from the shore, and the sons of Usnac were ready to depart. Yet
+Deirdr&eacute;'s heart misgave her as she thought of the days among
+those purple hills and granite rocks, by the long green water of
+the Loch, and her clear-seeing soul spoke words of doom for
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page123" id="page123"></a>[pg
+123]</span> them all: words soon to be fulfilled. Amongst the
+comrades of Fergus were certain of the adherents of Concobar,
+treacherous as he; for he had no thought of pardoning the sons of
+Usnac, nor any intent but to draw Deirdr&eacute; back within his
+reach; the image of her bright eyes and the redness of her lips,
+and her soft breast and shining hair was ever before him, and his
+heart gnawed within him for longing and the bitterness of
+desire.</p>
+<p>Therefore he had designed this embassy; and Fergus, believing
+all things and trusting all things, had gladly undertaken to be the
+messenger of forgiveness; fated, instead, to be the instrument of
+betrayal. So they turned their faces homewards towards Emain,
+Deirdr&eacute; full of desponding, as one whose day of grace is
+past. They set sail again through the long Sound of Jura, with the
+islands now on their right hand and the gray hills of Cantyre on
+their left. So they passed Jura, and later Islay, and came at last
+under the cliffs of Rathlin and the white Antrim headlands.
+Deirdr&eacute;'s heart never lightened, nor did laughter play about
+her lips or in her eyes through all the time of her journey, but
+sadness lay ever upon her, like the heavy darkness of a winter's
+night, when a storm is gathering <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page124" id="page124"></a>[pg 124]</span> out of the West. But
+Fergus made merry, rejoicing at the reconciling; bidden to a
+treacherous banquet by the partisans of Concobar, his heart never
+misgave him, but giving the charge of Deirdr&eacute; and the sons
+of Usnac to his sons, he went to the banquet, delaying long in
+carousing and singing, while Deirdr&eacute; and the three brothers
+were carried southwards to Emain. There the treachery plotted
+against them was carried out, as they sat in the banquet-hall; for
+Concobar's men brought against them the power of cowardly flames,
+setting fire to the hall, and slaying the sons of Usnac as they
+hurried forth from under the burning roof.</p>
+<p>One of the sons of Fergus shamefully betrayed them, bought by
+the gold and promises of Concobar, but the other bravely fell,
+fighting back to back with one of the sons of Usnac, when they fell
+overpowered by the warriors of Concobar. Thus was the doom of
+Deirdr&eacute; consummated, her lover treacherously done to death,
+and she herself condemned to bear the hated caress of Concobar,
+thinking ever of those other lips, in the days of her joy among the
+northern hills. This is the lament of Deirdr&eacute; for Usnac's
+sons:</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page125" id="page125"></a>[pg
+125]</span>
+<blockquote>The lions of the hill are gone,<br>
+And I am left alone, alone;<br>
+Dig the grave both wide and deep,<br>
+For I am sick and fain would sleep!<br>
+<br>
+The falcons of the wood are flown,<br>
+And I am left alone, alone;<br>
+Dig the grave both deep and wide,<br>
+And let us slumber side by side.<br>
+<br>
+Lay their spears and bucklers bright<br>
+By the warriors' sides aright;<br>
+Many a day the three before me<br>
+On their linked bucklers bore me.<br>
+<br>
+Dig the grave both wide and deep,<br>
+Sick I am and fain would sleep.<br>
+Dig the grave both deep and wide,<br>
+And let us slumber side by side.</blockquote>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page126" id="page126"></a>[pg
+126]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page127" id="page127"></a>[pg
+127]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CUCULAIN THE HERO.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page128" id="page128"></a>[pg
+128]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page129" id="page129"></a>[pg
+129]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VI."></a>VI.</h2>
+<h3>CUCULAIN THE HERO.</h3>
+<h3>B.C. 50--A.D. 50.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The treacherous death of Naisi and his brothers Ardan and Alny,
+and her own bereavement and misery, were not the end of the doom
+pronounced at her birth for Deirdr&eacute;, but rather the
+beginning. Yet the burden of the evils that followed fell on
+Concobar and his lands and his warriors.</p>
+<p>For Fergus, son of Roeg, former king over Emain, who had stayed
+behind his charges feasting and banqueting, came presently to
+Emain, fearing nothing and thinking no evil, but still warm with
+the reconciliation that he had accomplished; and, coming to Emain
+of Maca, found the sons of Usnac dead, with the sods still soft on
+their graves, and his own son also dead, Deirdr&eacute; in the
+hands of Concobar, and the plighted word of Fergus and his generous
+pledge of safety most traitorously and basely broken; broken by
+Concobar, whom he himself had guarded and set upon the throne.</p>
+<p>Fergus changed from gladness to fierce wrath, and <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page130" id="page130"></a>[pg 130]</span> his
+countenance was altered with anger, as he uttered his bitter
+indignation against Concobar to the warriors and heroes of Emain
+and the men of Ulad. The warriors were parted in two by his words,
+swaying to the right and to the left, as tall wheat sways before
+one who passes through it. For some of them sided with Fergus,
+saying that he had done great wrong to put Concobar on the throne,
+and that even now he should cast him down again, for the baseness
+and treachery of his deed; but others took Concobar's part, saying
+that the first betraying was Naisi's, who stole away
+Deirdr&eacute;,--the hostage, as it were, of evil doom, so that he
+drew the doom upon himself. They further said that Concobar was
+chief and ruler among them, the strong and masterful leader, able
+to uphold their cause amongst men. So indeed it befell, for the
+sedition of Fergus and his fight to avenge his wrong upon Concobar
+failed, so that he fled defeated to Meave, Queen of Connacht, at
+her stronghold amid the lakes whence issues forth the Shannon.</p>
+<a name="131.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/131.jpg"><img src="images/131.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>HONEYCOMB, GIANT'S CAUSEWAY.</b></p>
+<p>Meave, whose power and genius overtopped her lord Ailill,
+received the exiled king gladly, and put many honors upon him,
+holding him as the pillar of her army, with the two thousand men of
+the Ulaid <span class="pagenum"><a name="page131" id=
+"page131"></a>[pg 131]</span> who came with him;--those who had
+fought for him against the party of Concobar. At Cruacan, on the
+hillside, with the lakes of the Great River all around them, with
+the sun setting red behind the Curlew hills, with green meadows and
+beech-woods to gladden them, Meave and Ailill kept their court, and
+thence they sent many forays against Emain of Maca and Concobar,
+with Fergus the fallen king ever raging in the van, and, for the
+wrong that was done him, working measureless wrong on his own
+kingdom and the kingdom of his fathers.</p>
+<p>After many a foray had gone forth against Ulad, crossing the
+level plains, it befell that Meave and Ailill her lord disputed
+between them as to which had the greatest wealth; nor would either
+yield until their most precious possessions had been brought and
+matched the one against the other. Their jewels of gold,
+wonderfully wrought, and set with emeralds and beryls and red
+carbuncles, were brought forth, their crescents for the brow, with
+hammered tracery upon them, their necklets and torques, like
+twisted ribbons of gold, their bracelets and arm-rings set with
+gold, their gems of silver and all their adornments, cloaks of
+scarlet and blue and purple, were all brought, and no advantage in
+the one was <span class="pagenum"><a name="page132" id=
+"page132"></a>[pg 132]</span> found over the other. Their
+battle-steeds also were brought, their horses for chariots; and
+likewise their herds of lowing wealth, their sheep with soft
+fleeces. When the cattle were driven up before them, it was found
+that among the herds of Ailill was one bull, matchless, with white
+horns shining and polished; and equal to this bull was none among
+the herds of the queen. She would not admit her lord's advantage,
+but sent forthwith to seek where another bull like the bull of
+Ailill might be found, and tidings were brought to her of the brown
+bull of Cuailgne,--of Cuailgne named after a chief of the Sons of
+Milid, fallen ages ago in the pursuit of the De Danaans, when the
+De Danaans retreated before the Sons of Milid from the southern
+headland of Slieve Mish to the ford at green Tailten by the Boyne,
+and thence further northwards to where Cuailgne of the Sons of
+Milid was killed. At that same place had grown up a dwelling with a
+fortress, and there was the brown bull that Meave heard the report
+of. She sent, therefore, and her embassy bore orders to
+Dair&eacute;, the owner of the bull, asking that the bull might be
+sent to her for a year, and offering fifty heifers in payment.
+Dair&eacute; received her messengers well, and willingly consented
+to her request; but the messengers <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page133" id="page133"></a>[pg 133]</span> of Meave from feasting
+fell to drinking, from drinking to boasting; one of them declaring
+that it was a small thing that Dair&eacute; had granted the
+request, since they themselves would have compelled him, even
+unwillingly, and would have driven off the brown bull by force. The
+taunt stung Dair&eacute;, after his hospitality, and in wrath he
+sent them forth empty-handed, and so they came slighted to
+Meave.</p>
+<p>The queen, conceiving her honor impeached, would by no means
+suffer the matter so to rest, but stirred up wrath and dissension,
+till the armies of Connacht with their allies set forth to sack and
+burn in Ulad, and at all hazards to bring the brown bull. Fergus
+and the men who fought by his side went with them, and marching
+thus eastwards they came, after three days march through fair lands
+and fertile, to the river Dee--the frontier of Ulad, and the scene
+of many well-fought fights.</p>
+<p>The army of Ulad was not yet ready to meet them, but one
+champion with his band confronted them at the ford. That champion
+was Cuculain, whose true name was Setanta, son of Sualtam, chief at
+Dundelga, and of Dectira the sister of Concobar. Cuculain was
+accounted the greatest and most skillful warrior of his time, and
+bards for ages after told <span class="pagenum"><a name="page134"
+id="page134"></a>[pg 134]</span> how he kept the ford. For by the
+laws of honor, amongst them, the host from Connacht could not pass
+the ford so long as Cuculain held the ford and offered single
+combat to the champions. They must take up his challenge one by
+one; and while he stood there challenging, the host could not
+pass.</p>
+<p>Many of their champions fell there by the ford, so that queen
+Meave's heart chafed within her, and her army was hot to do battle,
+but still Cuculain kept the ford. Last of the western champions
+came forth Ferdiad, taught in the famous northern school of arms, a
+dear friend and companion of Cuculain, who now must meet him to
+slay or be slain. This is the story of their combat, as the
+traditions tell it:</p>
+<p>When they ceased fighting on the first day, they cast their
+weapons away from them into the hands of their charioteers. Each of
+them approached the other forthwith, and each put his hand round
+the other's neck, and gave him three kisses. Their horses were in
+the same paddock that night, and their charioteers at the same
+fire; and their charioteers spread beds of green rushes for them,
+with wounded men's pillows to them. The men of healing came to heal
+and solace them, applying herbs that should assuage to every cut or
+gash upon their <span class="pagenum"><a name="page135" id=
+"page135"></a>[pg 135]</span> bodies, and to all their wounds. Of
+every healing herb that was laid on the hurts of Cuculain, he sent
+an equal share to Ferdiad, sending it westward over the ford, so
+that men might not say that through the healing virtue of the herbs
+he was able to overcome him. And of all food and invigorating drink
+that was set before Ferdiad, he sent an equal portion northwards
+over the ford to Cuculain, for those that prepared food for him
+were more than those who made ready food for Cuculain. Thus that
+night they rested.</p>
+<p>They fought with spears on the next day, and so great was the
+strength of each, so dire their skill in combat, that both were
+grievously wounded, for all the protection of their shields. The
+men of healing art could do little for them beyond the staunching
+of their blood, that it might not flow from their wounds, laying
+herbs upon their red wounds.</p>
+<p>On the third day they arose early in the morning and came
+forward to the place of combat. Cuculain saw that the face of
+Ferdiad was dark as a black cloud, and thus addressed him: "Thy
+face is darkened, Ferdiad, and thine eye has lost its fire, nor are
+the form and features thine!" And Ferdiad answered, "O, Cuculain,
+it is not from fear or dread <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page136" id="page136"></a>[pg 136]</span> that my face is changed,
+for I am ready to meet all champions in the fight." Cuculain
+reproached him, wondering that, for the persuasions of Meave,
+Ferdiad was willing thus to fight against his friend, coming to
+spoil his land. But Ferdiad replied that fate compelled him, since
+every man is constrained to come unto the sod where shall be his
+last resting-place. That day the heroes fought with swords, but
+such was the skill of both that neither could break down the
+other's guard.</p>
+<p>In the dusk they cast away their weapons, ceasing from the
+fight; and though the meeting of the two had been full of vigor and
+friendship in the morning, yet was their parting at night mournful
+and full of sorrow. That night their horses were not in the same
+enclosure, nor did their charioteers rest at the same fire.</p>
+<p>Then Ferdiad arose early in the morning and went forth to the
+place of contest, knowing well that that day would decide whether
+he should fall or Cuculain; knowing that the sun would set on one
+of them dead that night. Cuculain, seeing him come forth, spoke
+thus to his charioteer: "I see the might and skill of Ferdiad,
+coming forth to the combat. If it be I that shall begin to yield
+to-day, do thou <span class="pagenum"><a name="page137" id=
+"page137"></a>[pg 137]</span> stir my valor, uttering reproaches
+and words of condemnation against me, so that my wrath shall grow
+upon me, enkindling me again for the battle." And the charioteer
+assented and promised.</p>
+<p>Great was the deed that was performed that day at the ford by
+the two heroes, the two warriors, the two champions of western
+lands, the two gift-bestowing hands of the northwest of the world,
+the two beloved pillars of the valor of the Gael, the two keys of
+the bravery of the Gael, brought to fight from afar through the
+schemes of Meave the queen.</p>
+<p>They began to shoot with their missiles from the dawn of the
+day, from early morning till noon. And when midday came the ire of
+the men waxed more furious, and they drew nearer together. Then
+Cuculain sprang from the river-bank against the boss of the shield
+of Ferdiad, son of Daman, to strike at his head over the rim of the
+shield from above. But Ferdiad gave the shield so strong a turn
+with his left arm that he cast Cuculain from him like a bird.
+Cuculain sprang again upon him, to strike him from above. But the
+son of Daman so struck the shield with his left knee that he cast
+Cuculain from him like a child.</p>
+<p>Then the charioteer of Cuculain spoke to chide <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page138" id="page138"></a>[pg 138]</span> him:
+"Woe for thee, whom the warrior thus casts aside as an evil mother
+casts away her offspring. He throws thee as foam is thrown by the
+river. He grinds thee as a mill would grind fresh grain. He pierces
+thee as the ax of the woodman cleaves the oak. He binds thee as the
+woodbine binds the tree. He darts on thee as the hawk darts on
+finches, so that henceforth thou hast no claim or name or fame for
+valor, until thy life's end, thou phantom sprite!"</p>
+<p>Then Cuculain sprang up fleet as the wind and swift as the
+swallow, fierce as a dragon, strong as a lion, advancing against
+Ferdiad through clouds of dust, and forcing himself upon his
+shield, to strike at him from above. Yet even then Ferdiad shook
+him off, driving him backwards into the ford.</p>
+<p>Then Cuculain's countenance was changed, and his heart swelled
+and grew great within him till he towered demoniac and gigantic,
+rising like one of the Fomor upon Ferdiad. So fierce was the fight
+they now fought that their heads met above and their feet below and
+their arms in the midst, past the rims of the shields. So fierce
+was the fight they fought that they cleft the shields to their
+centers. So fierce was the fight they fought that their spears were
+shivered from socket to haft. So fierce was <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page139" id="page139"></a>[pg 139]</span> the
+fight they fought that the demons of the air screamed along the
+rims of the shields, and from the hilts of their swords and from
+the hafts of their spears. So fierce was the fight they fought that
+they cast the river out of its bed, so that not a drop of water lay
+there unless from the fierceness of the champion heroes hewing each
+other in the midst of the ford. So fierce was the fight they fought
+that the horses of the Gael fled away in fright, breaking their
+chains and their yokes, and the women and youths and camp-followers
+broke from the camp, flying forth southwards and westwards.</p>
+<p>They were fighting with the edges of their swords, and Ferdiad,
+finding a break in the guard of Cuculain, gave him a stroke of the
+straight-edged sword, burying it in his body until the blood fell
+into his girdle, until the ford was red with the blood of the
+hero's body. Then Cuculain thrust an unerring spear over the rim of
+the shield, and through the breast of Ferdiad's armor, so that the
+point of the spear pierced his heart and showed through his
+body.</p>
+<p>"That is enough, now," said Ferdiad: "I fall for that!" Then
+Cuculain ran towards him, and clasped his two arms about him, and
+bore him with his arms and armor across the ford northwards.
+Cuculain <span class="pagenum"><a name="page140" id=
+"page140"></a>[pg 140]</span> laid Ferdiad down there, bowing over
+his body in faintness and weakness. But the charioteer cried to
+him, "Rise up, Cuculain, for the host is coming upon us, and it is
+not single combat they will give thee, since Ferdiad, son of Daman,
+son of Dair&eacute;, has fallen before thee!"</p>
+<p>"Friend," Cuculain made answer, "what avails it for me to rise
+after him that has fallen by me?"</p>
+<p>Thus did Cuculain keep the ford, still known as the ford of
+Ferdiad, Ath-Fhirdia on the Dee, in the midst of the green plain of
+Louth. And while he fought at the ford of Ferdiad the army of Ulad
+assembled, and coming southwards over the hills before Emain,
+turned back the host of Meave the queen and pursued them. The army
+of Meave fled westwards and southwards towards Connacht, passing
+the Yellow Ford of Athboy and the Hill of Ward, the place of
+sacrifice, where the fires on the Day of Spirits summoned the
+priests and Druids to the offering. Fleeing still westwards from
+the Yellow Ford, they passed between the lakes of Owel and Ennel,
+with the men of Ulad still hot in their rear. Thus came pursued and
+pursuers to Gairec, close by Athlone--the Ford of Luan--and the
+wooded shore of the great Lough Ree. There was <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page141" id="page141"></a>[pg 141]</span> fought
+a battle hardly less fatal to victors than to vanquished, for
+though the hosts of Meave were routed, yet Concobar's men could not
+continue the pursuit. Thus Meave escaped and Fergus with her, and
+came to their great fort on the green hillside of Cruacan amid the
+headwaters of the Shannon.</p>
+<p>The victory of Concobar's men was like a defeat. There was not
+food that pleased him, nor did sleep come to him by flight, so that
+the Ulad wondered, and Catbad the right-wonderful Druid, himself a
+warrior who had taught Concobar and reared him, went to Concobar to
+learn the secret of his trouble. Therefore Catbad asked of Concobar
+what wound had wounded him, what obstinate sickness had come upon
+him, making him faint and pale, day after day.</p>
+<p>"Great reason have I for it," answered Concobar, "for the four
+great provinces of Erin have come against me, bringing with them
+their bards and singers, that their ravages and devastations might
+be recorded, and they have burned our fortresses and dwellings, and
+Ailill and Meave have gained a battle against me. Therefore I would
+be avenged upon Meave the queen."</p>
+<p>"Thou hast already avenged it sternly, O Red-handed <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page142" id="page142"></a>[pg 142]</span>
+Concobar," Catbad made answer, "by winning the battle over the four
+provinces of Erin."</p>
+<p>"That is no battle," Concobar answered, "where a strong king
+falls not by hard fighting and by fury. That an army should escape
+from a goodly battle! Unless Ailill should fall, and Meave, by me
+in this encounter with valorous hosts, I tell you that my heart
+will break, O Catbad!"</p>
+<p>"This is my counsel for thee," replied Catbad, "to stay for the
+present. For the winds are rough, and the roads are foul, and the
+streams and the rivers are in flood, and the hands of the warriors
+are busy making forts and strongholds among strangers. So wait till
+the summer days come upon us, till every grassy sod is a pillow,
+till our horses are full of spirit and our colts are strong, till
+our men are whole of their wounds and hurts, till the nights are
+short to watch and to ward and to guard in the land of enemies and
+in the territories of strangers. Spring is not the time for an
+invasion. But meanwhile let tidings be sent to thy friends in
+absence, in the islands and throughout the northern seas."</p>
+<p>Therefore messengers were sent with the tidings, and the friends
+in absence of Concobar were summoned. They set forth with ships
+from the islands <span class="pagenum"><a name="page143" id=
+"page143"></a>[pg 143]</span> of the northern seas, and came
+forward with the tide to the Cantyre headland. The green surges of
+the tremendous sea rose about them, and a mighty storm rose against
+them. Such was the strength of the storm that the fleet was parted
+in three. A third of them, with the son of Amargin, came under the
+cliffs of Fair Head, to the Bay of Murbolg, where huge columns
+tower upward on the face of the cliff, high as the nests of the
+eagles; cliffs ruddy and mighty, frowning tremendous across the
+channel to Cantyre and Islay and far-away Jura. A third of the
+ships came to the safer harbor of Larne, where bands of white seam
+the cliff's redness, where the great headland is thrust forth
+northwards, sheltering the bay from the eastern waves. A third of
+the fleet came to the strand beside Dundelga, hard by the great
+hill of earth where was reared the stronghold of Cuculain.</p>
+<p>At that same time came Concobar with a thousand men to the fort
+of Cuculain, and feasting was prepared for him at the House of
+Delga. Nor was Concobar long there till he saw the bent spars of
+sails and the full-crewed ships, and the scarlet pavilions, and the
+many-colored banners, and the blue bright lances, and the weapons
+of war. Then Concobar <span class="pagenum"><a name="page144" id=
+"page144"></a>[pg 144]</span> called on the chiefs that were about
+him, for the territory and land he had bestowed upon them, and for
+the jewels he had given them, to stand firm and faithful. For he
+knew not whether the ships were ships of his foes, of the Galian of
+Lagin, now called Leinster, or the Munstermen of great Muma, or the
+men of Olnemact, called afterwards Connacht; for the estuary of the
+river and the strand were full of men.</p>
+<p>Then Senca son of Ailill answered for the chieftains: "I give my
+word, indeed, that Erin holds not a soldier who lays his hand in
+the hand of a chieftain that is not known to me. If they be the men
+of Erin thy foes that are there, I shall ask a truce of battle from
+them; but if they be thy friends and allies, thou shalt the more
+rejoice."</p>
+<p>Then Senca son of Ailill went forward to the place where the
+ships were, and learned that they were the friends in absence of
+Concobar, come to be his allies against the four provinces of Erin.
+Then Concobar spoke to Cuculain:</p>
+<p>"Well, O Cuculain, let the horses of the plain of Murtemni be
+caught by thee; let four-wheeled chariots be harnessed for them;
+bring with them hither my friends from the ships in chariots and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page145" id="page145"></a>[pg
+145]</span> four-wheeled cars, that feasting and enjoyment may be
+prepared for them."</p>
+<a name="145.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/145.jpg"><img src="images/145.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>GRAY MAN'S PATH, FAIR HEAD.</b></p>
+<p>They were brought in chariots to the feast, and carvers carved
+for them, and serving-men carried the cups of mead. Songs were sung
+to them, and they tarried there till sunrise on the morrow. Then
+Concobar spoke again to Cuculain:</p>
+<p>"It is well, Cuculain. Let messengers now be sent through the
+lands of the Ulaid to the warriors of the Ulaid, that the foreign
+friends may be ministered to by them also, while I make my camp
+here by the river. And bid the thrice fifty veteran champions come
+hither to me, that I may have their aid and counsel in battle."</p>
+<p>But Cuculain would not. Therefore Concobar went himself to
+summon the veterans. When they asked the cause of his coming,
+Concobar answered, "Have you not heard how the four provinces of
+Erin came against us, bringing with them their bards and singers,
+that their ravages and devastations might the better be recorded,
+and burning and plundering our fortresses and dwellings? Therefore
+I would make an expedition of hostility against them, and with your
+guidance and counsel would I make the expedition."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page146" id="page146"></a>[pg
+146]</span>
+<p>"Let our old steeds be caught by thee," they answered, "and let
+our old chariots be yoked by thee, so that we may go on this
+journey and expedition with thee." Then their old chargers were
+caught, and their old chariots yoked, so that they too came to the
+camp at the Water of Luachan.</p>
+<p>This was told to the four provinces. The Three Waves of Erin
+thundered in the night; the Wave of Clidna at Glandore in the
+South; the Wave of Rudraige along the bent-carpeted sandhills of
+Dundrum, under the Mountains of Mourne; and the Wave of Tuag Inbir,
+at the bar of northern Bann. For these are the Three Waves of Fate
+in Erin. Then the four provinces hosted their men. The son of
+Lucta, the north Munster king, assembled his tribes at the Hill of
+Luchra, between the Shannon mouth and the Summit of Prospects.
+Ailill and Meave hosted the men of the west at Cruacan. Find, son
+of Ros, king over the Galian of Leinster, gathered his army at
+Dinn-Rig by the Barrow. Cairpr&eacute; Nia Fer assembled his host
+about him at Tara, in the valley of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>This was the proposal of Eocu, son of Lucta, king of north
+Munster by the Shannon: That everything should have its payment,
+and that reparation should <span class="pagenum"><a name="page147"
+id="page147"></a>[pg 147]</span> be made to Concobar for the
+invasion; that a fort should be paid for every fort, for every
+house a house, for every cow a cow, for every bull a bull; that the
+great brown bull should be sent back, that the breadth of the face
+of the bull in red gold should be given to Concobar, and that there
+should be no more hostility among the men of Erin.</p>
+<p>This was reported to Meave, but the queen answered, "A false
+hand was his who gave this counsel. For so long as there shall be
+among us one who can hold a sword, who can wear the shield-strap
+about his neck, that proposal shall not go to him."</p>
+<p>"Thy counsel is not mine," replied Ailill, "for not greater
+shall be our part of that payment than the part of all the four
+provinces who went on that raid for the bull." Therefore Meave
+consented, and messengers were sent, and came to Tara by the Boyne,
+where were Find, son of Ros, king of Leinster, and his brother
+Cairpr&eacute; Nia Fer, king of Tara. Thence they sent messengers
+to treat with Concobar, but Concobar rejected the terms. "I give my
+word, indeed," answered Concobar, "that I will not take terms from
+you till my tent has been pitched in every province of Erin."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page148" id="page148"></a>[pg
+148]</span>
+<p>"Good, O Concobar," they replied; "where wilt thou now make thy
+encampment to-night?"</p>
+<p>"In the Headland of the Kings, by the clear bright Boyne,"
+answered Concobar, for Concobar concealed not ever from his enemy
+the place in which he would take station or camp, that they might
+not say that it was fear or dread that caused him not to say it.
+Concobar, therefore, marched toward the Headland of the Kings,
+across the Boyne to the southward, and facing the northern bank
+where are the pyramids of the Dagda Mor and the De Danaans. But the
+southern armies were there already, so Concobar halted before the
+river. Then were their positions fixed and their pavilions pitched,
+their huts and their tents were made. Their fires were kindled,
+cooking and food and drink were prepared; baths of clean bathing
+were made by them, and their hair was smooth-combed; their bodies
+were minutely cleansed, supper and food were eaten by them; and
+tunes and merry songs and eulogies were sung by them.</p>
+<p>Then Concobar sent men to reconnoitre the southern and western
+armies. Two went and returned not, falling indeed into the hands of
+the foe. It seemed long to Concobar that the two were gone.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page149" id="page149"></a>[pg
+149]</span> He spoke, therefore, to his kinsman: "Good indeed,
+Irgalac, son of Macclac, son of Congal, son of Rudraige, sayest
+thou who is proper to go to estimate and to reconnoitre the
+army?"</p>
+<p>"Who should go there," answered Irgalac, "but Iriel good at
+arms, great-kneed son of Conall Cernac. He is a Conall for havoc, a
+Cuculain for dexterity of feats. He is a Catbad, a right-wonderful
+Druid, for intelligence and counsel, he is a Senca son of Ailill
+for peace and for good speech, he is a Celtcair son of Utecar for
+valor, he is a Concobar son of Factna Fatac for kingliness and
+wide-eyed-ness, for giving of treasures and of wealth and of
+riches. Who but Iriel should go?"</p>
+<p>Therefore Iriel went forward: standing on the pyramid of the
+Dagda, he began measuring and reconnoitering the army. His spirit,
+or his mind, or his thoughts did not fret over them at all. He
+brought their description with him to the place in which Concobar
+was.</p>
+<p>"How, my life, Iriel?" said Concobar. "I give my word truly,"
+said Iriel; "it seems to me that there is not ford on river, or
+stone on hill, nor highway nor road in the territory of Breg or
+Mide, that is not full of their horse-teams and of their servants.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page150" id="page150"></a>[pg
+150]</span> It seems to me that their apparel and their gear and
+their garments are the blaze of a royal house from the plain."</p>
+<p>"Good, O Ulaid," said Concobar, "what is your advice to us for
+the battle?" "Our advice is," said the Ulaid, "to wait till our
+strong men and our leaders and our commanders and our supporters of
+battle come." Not long was their waiting, and not great was their
+stay, till they saw three chariot-warriors approaching them, and a
+band of twelve hundred along with each rider of them. It is these
+that were there--three of the goodly men of science of the Ulaid,
+to wit, Catbad the right-wonderful Druid, and Aiterni the
+Importunate, and Amargin the man of science and art. After them
+came other valiant leaders with troops. Then Concobar arose and
+took his gear of battle and of conflict and of combat about him,
+saying, "Why should we not give battle?"</p>
+<p>A third of the army of the Ulaid rose with him, too. And they
+went over the river Boyne. And the other armies arose against them
+as they were crossing the river. And each of them took to hacking
+and to cutting down the other, destroying and wounding till there
+was no similitude of the Ulaid at that <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page151" id="page151"></a>[pg 151]</span> point
+of time, unless it were a huge sturdy oakwood in the middle of the
+plain, and a great army were to go close to it, and the slender and
+the small of the wood were cut off, but its huge sturdy oaks were
+left behind. Thus their young were cut off, and none but their
+champions and their battle-warriors and their good heroes of valor
+were left.</p>
+<p>The shield of Concobar was struck so that it moaned, and the
+three Waves of Erin, the Wave of Clidna, the Wave of Rudraige, and
+the Wave of Tuag Inbir echoed that moan, and all the shields of the
+Ulaid resounded, every one of them that was on their shoulders and
+in their chariots. As the Ulaid were retreating, fresh troops came
+up for them under Conall Cernac. A tree of shelter and a wreath of
+laurel and a hand above them was Conall to them. So their flight
+was stayed. Then Conall drew the sharp long sword out of its sheath
+of war and played the music of his sword on the armies. The ring of
+Conall's sword was heard through the battalions on both sides. And
+when they heard the music of Conall's sword their hearts quaked and
+their eyes fluttered and their faces whitened, and each of them
+withdrew back into his place of battle and of combat. But so fierce
+was the onset of the southern armies <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page152" id="page152"></a>[pg 152]</span> that the fight of the
+Ulaid against them was as a breast against a great flood, or an
+arrow against the rock, or the striking of a head against cliffs.
+Yet through the great might of Cuculain the Ulaid prevailed, and
+Cairpr&eacute; the King of Tara was slain. After the battle,
+Concobar spoke thus: "There were three sons of Ros Ruad the
+king--Find in Alend, Ailill in Cruac, Cairpr&eacute; in Tara;
+together they performed their deeds of valor, the three brothers in
+every strife; together they used to give their battle. They were
+three pillars of gold about their hills, abiding in strength; great
+is their loss since the third son has fallen."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page153" id="page153"></a>[pg
+153]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>FIND AND OSSIN.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page154" id="page154"></a>[pg
+154]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page155" id="page155"></a>[pg
+155]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VII."></a>VII.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>FIND AND OSSIN.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 200--290.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Seventeen centuries ago, two hundred summers after the death of
+Cuculain the hero, came the great and wonderful time of Find the
+son of Cumal, Ossin the son of Find, and Find's grandson Oscur. It
+was a period of growth and efflorescence; the spirit and
+imaginative powers of the people burst forth with the freshness of
+the prime. The life of the land was more united, coming to a
+national consciousness.</p>
+<p>The five kingdoms were now clearly defined, with Meath, in the
+central plain, predominant over the others, and in a certain sense
+ruling all Ireland from the Hill of Tara. The code of honor was
+fixed; justice had taken well-defined forms; social life had
+ripened to genial urbanity. The warriors were gathered together
+into something like a regular army, a power rivaling the kings. Of
+this army, Find, son of Cumal, was the most renowned leader--a
+warrior and a poet, who embodied in himself the very genius of the
+time, its fresh naturalness, its ripeness, its <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page156" id="page156"></a>[pg 156]</span>
+imagination. No better symbol of the spirit of his age could be
+found than Find's own "Ode to Spring":</p>
+<p>"May-day! delightful time! How beautiful the color! The
+blackbirds sing their full lay. Would that Laigay were here! The
+cuckoos call in constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble
+brightness of the season. On the margin of the leafy pools the
+summer swallows skim the stream. Swift horses seek the pools. The
+heath spreads out its long hair. The white, gentle cotton-grass
+grows. The sea is lulled to rest. Flowers cover the earth."</p>
+<p>Find's large and imaginative personality is well drawn in one of
+the poems of his golden-tongued son Ossin, though much of the
+beauty of Ossin's form is lost in the change of tongue:</p>
+<blockquote>"Six thousand gallant men of war<br>
+We sought the rath o'er Badamar;<br>
+To the king's palace home we bent<br>
+Our way. His bidden guests we went.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;'Twas Clocar Fair,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And Find was there,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Fians from the hills around<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Had gathered to the race-course ground.<br>
+From valley deep and wooded glen<br>
+Fair Munster sent its mighty men;<br>
+And Fiaca, Owen's son, the king,<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page157" id="page157"></a>[pg
+157]</span> Was there the contest witnessing.<br>
+'Twas gallant sport! With what delight<br>
+Leaped thousand pulses at the sight.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;How all hearts bound<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As to the ground<br>
+First are brought forth the Fian steeds,<br>
+Then those from Luimnea's sunny meads.<br>
+Three heats on Mac Mareda's green<br>
+They run; and foremost still is seen<br>
+Dill Mac Decreca's coal-black steed.<br>
+At Crag-Lochgur he takes the lead.<br>
+<br>
+"His is the day--and, lo! the king<br>
+The coal-black steed soliciting<br>
+From Dill the Druid!--'Take for it<br>
+A hundred beeves; for it is fit<br>
+The black horse should be mine to pay<br>
+Find for his deeds of many a day.'<br>
+<br>
+"Then spoke the Druid, answering<br>
+His grandson, Fiaca the king:<br>
+'Take my blessing; take the steed,<br>
+For the hero's fitting meed:<br>
+Give it for thy honor's sake.'<br>
+And to Find the King thus spake<br>
+<br>
+"'Hero, take the swift black steed,<br>
+Of thy valor fitting meed;<br>
+And my car, in battle-raid<br>
+Gazed on by the foe with fear;<br>
+And a seemly steed for thy charioteer.<br>
+Chieftain, be this good sword thine,<br>
+Purchased with a hundred kine,<br>
+In thine hand be it our aid.<br>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page158" id="page158"></a>[pg
+158]</span> Take this spear, whose point the breath<br>
+Of venomed words has armed with death,<br>
+And the silver-orb&egrave;d shield,<br>
+Sunbeam of the battlefield!<br>
+And take with thee<br>
+My grayhounds three,<br>
+Slender and tall,<br>
+Bright-spotted all,<br>
+Take them with thee, chieftain bold,<br>
+With their chainlets light<br>
+Of the silver white,<br>
+And their neck-rings of the tawny gold.<br>
+Slight not thou our offering,<br>
+Son of Cumal, mighty king!"<br>
+<br>
+"Uprose Find our chieftain bold,<br>
+Stood before the Fian ranks,<br>
+To the king spoke gracious thanks,<br>
+Took the gifts the monarch gave;<br>
+Then each to each these champions brave<br>
+Glorious sight to see and tell,<br>
+Spoke their soldier-like farewell!<br>
+<br>
+"The way before us Find led then;<br>
+We followed him, six thousand men,<br>
+From out the Fair, six thousand brave,<br>
+To Caicer's house of Cloon-na-Dave.<br>
+<br>
+"Three nights, three days, did all of us<br>
+Keep joyous feast in Caicer's house;<br>
+Fifty rings of the yellow gold<br>
+To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain told;<br>
+As many cows and horses gave<br>
+To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain brave.<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page159" id="page159"></a>[pg
+159]</span> Well did Find of Innisfail<br>
+Pay the price of his food and ale.<br>
+<br>
+"Find rode o'er the Luacra, joyous man,<br>
+Till he reached the strand at Barriman;<br>
+At the lake where the foam on the billow's top<br>
+Leaps white, did Find and the Fians stop.<br>
+<br>
+"'Twas then that our chieftain rode and ran<br>
+Along the strand of Barriman;<br>
+Trying the speed<br>
+Of his swift black steed,--<br>
+Who now but Find was a happy man?<br>
+<br>
+"Myself and Cailt&eacute; at each side,<br>
+In wantonness of youthful pride,<br>
+Would ride with him where he might ride.<br>
+Fast and furious rode he,<br>
+Urging his steed to far Tralee.<br>
+On from Tralee by Lerg duv-glass,<br>
+And o'er Fraegmoy, o'er Finnass,<br>
+O'er Moydeo, o'er Monaken,<br>
+On to Shan-iber, o'er Shan-glen,<br>
+Till the clear stream of Flesk we win,<br>
+And reach the pillar of Crofinn;<br>
+O'er Sru-Muny, o'er Moneket,<br>
+And where the fisher spreads his net<br>
+To snare the salmon of Lemain,<br>
+And thence to where our coursers' feet<br>
+Wake the glad echoes of Loch Leane;<br>
+And thus fled he,<br>
+Nor slow were we;<br>
+Through rough and smooth our course we strain.<br>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page160" id="page160"></a>[pg
+160]</span> "Long and swift our stride,--more fleet<br>
+Than the deer of the mountain our coursers' feet!<br>
+Away to Flesk by Carnwood dun;<br>
+And past Mac Scalv&eacute;'s Mangerton,<br>
+Till Find reached Barnec Hill at last;<br>
+There rested he, and then we passed<br>
+Up the high hill before him, and:<br>
+'Is there no hunting hut at hand?'<br>
+He thus addressed us; 'The daylight<br>
+Is gone, and shelter for the night<br>
+We lack.' He scarce had ended, when<br>
+Gazing adown the rocky glen,<br>
+On the left hand, just opposite,<br>
+He saw a house with its fire lit;<br>
+'That house till now I've never seen,<br>
+Though many a time and oft I've been<br>
+In this wild glen. Come, look at it!'<br>
+<br>
+"Yes, there are things that our poor wit<br>
+Knows little of,' said Cailt&eacute;; 'thus<br>
+This may be some miraculous<br>
+Hostel we see, whose generous blaze<br>
+Thy hospitality repays,<br>
+Large-handed son of Cumal!'--So<br>
+On to the house all three we go...."</blockquote>
+<p>Of their entry to the mysterious house, of the ogre and the
+witch they found there, of the horrors that gathered on all sides,
+when</p>
+<blockquote>"From iron benches on the right<br>
+Nine headless bodies rose to sight,<br>
+And on the left, from grim repose,<br>
+Nine heads that had no bodies rose,..."</blockquote>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page161" id="page161"></a>[pg
+161]</span>
+<p>Ossin likewise tells, and how, overcome, they fell at last into
+a deathlike trance and stupor, till the sunlight woke them lying on
+the heathery hillside, the house utterly vanished away.</p>
+<p>The scenes of all the happenings in the story are well known:
+the rath of Badamar is near Caher on the Suir, in the midst of the
+Golden Vale, a plain of wonderful richness and beauty, walled in by
+the red precipices of the Galtee Mountains, and the Knock-Mealdown
+Hills. From the rath of Badamar Find could watch the western
+mountains reddening and glowing in front of the dawn, as the
+sun-rays shot level over the burnished plain. Clocar is thirty
+miles westward over the Golden Vale, near where Croom now stands;
+and here were run the races; here Find gained the gift of the
+coal-black steed. It is some forty miles still westwards to the
+Strand of Tralee; the last half of the way among hills carpeted
+with heather; and the Strand itself, with the tide out, leaves a
+splendid level of white sand as far as the eye can reach, tempting
+Find to try his famous courser. The race carried them southwards
+some fifteen miles to the beautiful waters of Lough Leane, with its
+overhanging wooded hills, the Lake of Killarney, southward of which
+rises the huge red mass <span class="pagenum"><a name="page162" id=
+"page162"></a>[pg 162]</span> of Mangerton, in the midst of a
+country everywhere rich in beauty. The Hill of Barnec is close by,
+but the site of the magic dwelling, who can tell? Perhaps Find; or
+Cailt&eacute;, or golden-tongued Ossin himself.</p>
+<p>There was abundant fighting in those days, for well within
+memory was the time of Conn of the Five-score Fights, against whom
+Cumal had warred because Conn lord of Connacht had raised Crimtan
+of the Yellow Hair to the kingship of Leinster. Cumal fought at the
+Rath that bears his name, now softened to Rathcool, twelve miles
+inward from the sea at Dublin, with the hills rising up from the
+plain to the south of the Rath. Cumal fought and fell, slain by
+Goll Mac Morna, and enmity long endured between Find and Goll who
+slew his sire. But like valiant men they were reconciled, and when
+Goll in his turn died, Find made a stirring poem on Goll's mighty
+deeds.</p>
+<p>Another fateful fight for Find was the battle of Kinvarra, among
+the southern rocks of Galway Bay; for though he broke through the
+host of his foeman Uinc&eacute;, that chieftain himself escaped,
+and, riding swiftly with a score of men, came to Find's own
+dwelling at Druim Dean on the Red Hills of Leinster, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page163" id="page163"></a>[pg 163]</span> and
+burned the dwelling, leaving it a smoldering ruin. Find pursuing,
+overtook them, slaying them at the ford called to this day
+Ath-uinc&eacute;, the ford of Uinc&eacute;. Returning homewards,
+Find found his house desolate, and the song he sang still holds the
+memory of his sorrow.</p>
+<p>Two poems he made, on the Plain of Swans and on Roirend in
+Offaly, full of vivid pictures and legends; and one of romantic
+tragedy, telling how the two daughters of King Tuatal Tectmar were
+treacherously slain, through the malice of the Leinster king. But
+of romances and songs of fair women in the days of Find, the best
+is the Poem of Gael, who composed it to win a princess for his
+bride.</p>
+<p>Of fair Cred&eacute; of the Yellow Hair it was said that there
+was scarce a gem in all Erin that she had not got as a love-token,
+but that she would give her heart to none. Cred&eacute; had vowed
+that she would marry the man who made the best verses on her home,
+a richly-adorned dwelling in the south, under the twin cones of the
+Paps, and within sight of Lough Leane and Killarney. Cael took up
+the challenge, and invoking the Genius that dwelt in the sacred
+pyramid of Brugh on the Boyne he made these verses, and came to
+recite them to yellow-haired Cred&eacute;:</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page164" id="page164"></a>[pg
+164]</span>
+<blockquote>"It would be happy for me to be in her home,<br>
+Among her soft and downy couches,<br>
+Should Cred&eacute; deign to hear me;<br>
+Happy for me would be my journey.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A bowl she has, whence berry-juice
+flows,<br>
+With which she colors her eyebrows black;<br>
+She has clear vessels of fermenting ale;<br>
+Cups she has, and beautiful goblets.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The color of her house is white like
+lime;<br>
+Within it are couches and green rushes;<br>
+Within it are silks and blue mantles;<br>
+Within it are red gold and crystal cups.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of its sunny chamber the corner stones<br>
+Are all of silver and yellow gold,<br>
+Its roof in stripes of faultless order<br>
+Of wings of brown and crimson red.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Two doorposts of green I see,<br>
+Nor is the door devoid of beauty;<br>
+Of carved silver,--long has it been renowned,--<br>
+Is the lintel that is over the door.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Cred&eacute;'s chair is on your right
+hand,<br>
+The pleasantest of the pleasant it is;<br>
+All over a blaze of Alpine gold,<br>
+At the foot of her beautiful couch...<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The household which is in her house<br>
+To the happiest fate has been destined;<br>
+Grey and glossy are their garments;<br>
+Twisted and fair is their flowing hair.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Wounded men would sink in sleep,<br>
+Though ever so heavily teeming with blood,<br>
+With the warbling of the fairy birds<br>
+From the eaves of her sunny summer-room.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;If I am blessed with the lady's grace,<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page165" id="page165"></a>[pg
+165]</span> Fair Cred&eacute; for whom the cuckoo sings,<br>
+In songs of praise shall ever live,<br>
+If she but repay me for my gift....<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;There is a vat of royal bronze,<br>
+Whence flows the pleasant; nice of malt;<br>
+An apple-tree stands over the vat,<br>
+With abundance of weighty fruit.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;When Cred&eacute;'s goblet is filled<br>
+With the ale of the noble vat,<br>
+There drop down into the cup forthwith<br>
+Four apples at the same time.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The four attendants that have been
+named,<br>
+Arise and go to the distributing,<br>
+They present to four of the guests around<br>
+A drink to each man and an apple.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;She who possesses all these things,<br>
+With the strand and the stream that flow by them,<br>
+Cred&eacute; of the three-pointed hill,<br>
+Is a spear-cast beyond the women of Erin.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Here is a poem for her,--no mean gift.<br>
+It is not a hasty, rash composition;<br>
+To Cred&eacute; now it is here presented:<br>
+May my journey be brightness to her!"</blockquote>
+<a name="165.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/165.jpg"><img src="images/165.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>COLLEEN BAWN CAVES, KILLARNEY.</b></p>
+<p>Tradition says that the heart of the yellow-haired beauty was
+utterly softened and won, so that she delayed not to make Cael
+master of the dwelling he so well celebrated; master, perhaps, of
+all the jewels of Erin that her suitors had given her. Yet their
+young love was not destined to meet the storms and frosts of the
+years; for Cael the gallant fell in battle, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page166" id="page166"></a>[pg 166]</span> his
+melodious lips for ever stilled. Thus have these two become
+immortal in song.</p>
+<p>We have seen Cailt&eacute; with Ossin following Find in his wild
+ride through the mountains of Killarney, and to Cailt&eacute; is
+attributed the saying that echoes down the ages: "There are things
+that our poor wit knows nothing off!" Cailt&eacute; was a great
+lover of the supernatural, yet there was in him also a vein of
+sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of Clidna--"Clidna the
+fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was tragically drowned at
+Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith still moans upon
+the bar, in hours of fate for the people of Erin.</p>
+<p>In a gayer vein is the poem of Fergus the Eloquent, who sang the
+legend of Tipra Seangarmna, the Fountain of the Feale River, which
+flows westward to the sea from the mountains north of Killarney.
+The river rises among precipices, gloomy caverns and ravines, and
+passes through vales full of mysterious echoes amid mist-shrouded
+hills. There, as Fergus sings, were Ossin and his following
+hunting, when certain ominous fair women lured them to a
+cave,--women who were but insubstantial wraiths,--to hold them
+captive till the seasons ran full circle, summer giving place again
+to winter and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page167" id=
+"page167"></a>[pg 167]</span> spring. But Ossin, being himself of
+more than human wisdom, found a way to trick the spirits; for daily
+he cut chips from his spear and sent them floating down the spring,
+till Find at last saw them, and knew the tokens as Ossin's, and,
+coming, delivered his son from durance among ghosts.</p>
+<p>The great romantic theme of the time binds the name of Find, son
+of Cumal, with that of Cormac, son of Art, and grandson of Conn of
+the Five-score Battles. This Cormac was himself a notable man of
+wisdom, and here are some of the Precepts he taught to
+Cairbr&eacute;, his son:</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbr&eacute; asked him, "what
+is good for a king?"</p>
+<p>"This is plain," answered Cormac. "It is good for him to have
+patience and not to dispute, self-government without anger,
+affability without haughtiness, diligent attention to history,
+strict observance of covenants and agreements, justice tempered by
+mercy in the execution of the laws. It is good for him to make
+fertile land, to invite ships, to import jewels of price from
+across the sea, to purchase and distribute raiment, to keep
+vigorous swordsmen who may protect his territory, to make war
+beyond his territory, to attend to the sick, to discipline his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page168" id="page168"></a>[pg
+168]</span> soldiers. Let him enforce fear, let him perfect peace,
+let him give mead and wine, let him pronounce just judgments of
+light, let him speak all truth, for it is through the truth of a
+king that God gives favorable seasons."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbr&eacute; again asked him,
+"what is good for the welfare of a country?"</p>
+<p>"This is plain," answered Cormac. "Frequent assemblies of wise
+and good men to investigate its affairs, to abolish every evil and
+retain every wholesome institution, to attend to the precepts of
+the seniors; let every assembly be convened according to the law,
+let the law be in the hands of the noblest, let the chieftains be
+upright and unwilling to oppress the poor."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," again asked Cairbr&eacute;,
+"what are duties of a prince in the banqueting-house?"</p>
+<p>"A prince on the Day of Spirits should light his lamps and
+welcome his guests with clapping of hands, offering comfortable
+seats; the cup-bearers should be active in distributing meat and
+drink. Let there be moderation of music, short stories, a welcoming
+countenance, a greeting for the learned, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page169" id="page169"></a>[pg 169]</span>
+pleasant conversation. These are the duties of a prince and the
+arrangement of a banqueting-house."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, for what qualifications is a king
+elected over countries and tribes of people?"</p>
+<p>"From the goodness of his shape and family, from his experience
+and wisdom, from his prudence and magnanimity, from his eloquence
+and bravery in battle, and from the number of his friends."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what was thy deportment when a
+youth?"</p>
+<p>"I was cheerful at the banquet of the House of Mead, I was
+fierce in battle, but vigilant and careful. I was kind to friends,
+a physician to the sick, merciful to the weak, stern toward the
+headstrong. Though possessed of knowledge, I loved silence. Though
+strong, I was not overbearing. Though young, I mocked not the old.
+Though valiant, I was not vain. When I spoke of one absent I
+praised and blamed him not, for by conduct like this are we known
+to be courteous and refined."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what is good for me?"</p>
+<p>"If thou attend to my command, thou wilt not scorn the old
+though thou art young, nor the poor <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page170" id="page170"></a>[pg 170]</span> though thou art well
+clad, nor the lame though thou art swift, nor the blind though thou
+seest, nor the weak though thou art strong, nor the ignorant though
+thou art wise. Be not slothful, be not passionate, be not greedy,
+be not idle, be not jealous; for he who is so is hateful to God and
+man."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, I would know how to hold myself
+with the wise and the foolish, with friends and strangers, with old
+and young."</p>
+<p>"Be not too knowing or simple, too proud or inactive, too humble
+or haughty, talkative or too silent, timid or too severe. For if
+thou art too knowing, thou wilt be mocked at and abused; if too
+simple, thou wilt be deceived; if proud, thou wilt be shunned; if
+too humble, thou wilt suffer; if talkative, thou wilt be thought
+foolish; if too severe, men will speak ill of thee; if timid, thy
+rights will suffer."</p>
+<p>"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, how shall I discern the
+characters of women?"</p>
+<p>"I know them, but I cannot describe them. Their counsel is
+foolish, they are forgetful of love, most headstrong in their
+desires, fond of folly, prone to enter rashly into engagements,
+given to swearing, proud to be asked in marriage, tenacious of
+enmity, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page171" id=
+"page171"></a>[pg 171]</span> cheerless at the banquet, rejectors
+of reconciliation, prone to strife, of much garrulity. Until evil
+be good, until hell be heaven, until the sun hide his light, until
+the stars of heaven fall, women will remain as we have declared.
+Woe to him, my son, who desires or serves a bad woman, woe to him
+who has a bad wife."</p>
+<p>Was there some thought of his daughter Grania in Cormac's mind,
+behind these keen-edged; words?--of Grania, beloved of Diarmuid?
+When the winters of the years were already white on Find, son of
+Cumal, when Ossin his son had a son of his own, Oscur the valiant,
+the two old men, Cormac the king and Find leader of the warriors,
+bethought them to make a match between Find and Grania, one of the
+famous beauties of the olden time. A banquet was set in the great
+House of Mead, and Find and his men were there, Diarmuid son of
+Duibn&eacute; being also there, best beloved among Find's warriors.
+There was a custom, much in honor among the chieftains, that a
+princess should send her goblet to the guests, offering it to each
+with gentle courtesy. This grace fell to the lady Grania, whose
+whole heart rose up against her grey-bearded lover, and was indeed
+set on Diarmuid the son of Duibn&eacute;. Grania compounded
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page172" id="page172"></a>[pg
+172]</span> a dreamy draught to mix with the mead, so that all the
+chieftains and warriors, with Cormac and Find himself, even while
+praising the drink, fell straightway a-nodding, and were soon in
+silent sleep, all except Ossin and Diarmuid, whom Grania had bidden
+not to drink.</p>
+<p>Then Grania, her voice all tremulous with tears, told to Ossin
+the fate that awaited her, looking at him, but speaking for
+Diarmuid; bewailing bitterly the misery of fair youth in the arms
+of withered eld, and at last turning and openly begging Diarmuid to
+save her from her fate. To carry away a king's daughter, betrothed
+to the leader of the warriors, was a perilous thing, and Diarmuid's
+heart stood still at the thought of it; yet Grania's tears
+prevailed, and they two fled forth that night to the hills and
+forests. Dire and ruinous was the wrath of Cormac and of Find when
+they awoke and found that these two were fled; and whatever might
+was in the king's hand, whatever power in the hosts of Find, was
+straightway turned against them in pursuit. Yet the two fled as the
+deer might fly, visiting with their loves every wood and valley in
+Erin, till the memory of them lingers throughout all the hills.
+Finally, after a year's joyful and fearsome fleeing, the Fian
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page173" id="page173"></a>[pg
+173]</span> warriors everywhere aiding them for love of Diarmuid,
+swift death came upon Diarmuid, and Grania was left desolate.</p>
+<p>But Angus the Ever-Young, guardian Genius of the pyramid-shrine
+of Brugh by the Boyne, De Danaan dweller in the secret house, Angus
+of the Immortals received the spirit of Diarmuid, opening for him
+the ways of the hidden world.</p>
+<p>But enmity grew between Find with his warriors and Cormac the
+king, till at last a battle was fought where Find's men fell, and
+Cairbr&eacute;, the well-instructed son of Cormac also fell. Thus
+passed away the ruling spirits of that age, the flowering time of
+the genius of Erin.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page174" id="page174"></a>[pg
+174]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page175" id="page175"></a>[pg
+175]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page176" id="page176"></a>[pg
+176]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page177" id="page177"></a>[pg
+177]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="VIII."></a>VIII.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 410-493.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The valor of Fergus and Cuculain, the rich imaginative life of
+Find and Ossin, were the flower of heroic centuries. Strong men had
+fought for generations before Concobar reigned at Emain of Maca.
+Poets had sung their deeds of valor, and the loves of fair women,
+and the magical beauty of the world, through hardly changing ages.
+The heroes of fame were but the best fruit in the garden of the
+nation's life. So ripe was that life, more than two thousand years
+ago, that it is hard to say what they did not know, of the things
+which make for amenity and comity. The colors of the picture are
+everywhere rich, yet perfectly harmonized.</p>
+<p>The earliest forms of Irish writing seem to have come from the
+Baltic runes, and these, in their turn, from an old Greek script of
+twenty-five hundred years ago. The runes spread as far as the
+Orkneys, and there they were well within the horizon of Ireland's
+knowledge. Nothing would be more natural <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page178" id="page178"></a>[pg 178]</span> than
+the keeping of written records in Erin for three or four hundred
+years before Cuculain's birth, nineteen hundred years ago.</p>
+<p>The arts of life were very perfect; the gold-work of that time
+is unsurpassed--has never been surpassed. At a far earlier time
+there were beautifully moulded and decorated gold-bronze spears,
+that show what richness of feeling and imagination, what just taste
+and fine skill were there. All our knowledge goes to show that the
+suitor of Cred&eacute; has drawn a true picture of her house and
+the generous social life belonging to it. We know, too, that the
+great dining-hall of Tara has been faithfully celebrated by the
+bards; the picture of the king in his scarlet cloak is
+representative of the whole epoch.</p>
+<p>The story of Cred&eacute; also shows the freedom and honor
+accorded to women, as does the queenship of Meave, with the record
+of her separate riches. The tragedies of Deirdr&eacute; and Grania
+would never have been remembered, had not the freedom and high
+regard of women been universal. Such decorative skill as is shown
+in the metal-work and pottery that have come down to us must have
+borne fruit in every realm of social life, in embroideries,
+tapestries, well-designed and beautifully adorned homes. Music
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page179" id="page179"></a>[pg
+179]</span> is everywhere spoken of in the old traditions, and the
+skill of the poets we can judge for ourselves.</p>
+<p>In all that concerns the natural man, therefore, a very high
+perfection had been reached. A frame of life had grown habitual,
+which brought out the finest vigor and strength and beauty.
+Romantic love added its riches to valor, and dignity was given by
+the ever-present memory of the heroic past, merging on the horizon
+with the divine dawn of the world. Manhood and womanhood had come
+to perfect flower. The crown rested on the brow of the nation's
+life.</p>
+<p>When the life of the natural man is perfected, the time comes to
+strike the note of the immortal, to open the door of our real and
+enduring destiny. Sensual success, the ideal of unregenerate man,
+was perfectly realized in Concobar and ten thousand like him. The
+destiny of triumphant individual life, the strong man victorious
+over nature and other men, was fulfilled. Individual prowess,
+individual accomplishment, could go no further.</p>
+<p>Nor should we overlook the dark shadows of the picture. Glory is
+to the victor, but woe to the vanquished. The continual warfare
+between tribe and tribe, between chief and chief, which made every
+valley a home of warriors dominated by a rath-fortress,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page180" id="page180"></a>[pg
+180]</span> bore abundant fruits of evil. Death in battle need not
+be reckoned, or may be counted as pure gain; but the fate of the
+wounded, maimed and miserable, the destitution of women and
+children left behind, the worse fate of the captives, sold as they
+were into exile and slavery,--all these must be included in the
+total.</p>
+<p>Nor are these material losses the worst. The great evil of the
+epoch of tribal war is its reaction on the human spirit. The
+continual struggle of ambition draws forth egotism, the desire to
+dominate for mere domination, the sense of separation and
+antagonism between man and man, tribe and tribe, province and
+province.</p>
+<p>But our real human life begins only when these evil tendencies
+are abated; when we learn to watch the life of others as if it were
+our own,--as being indeed a part of our own life,--and in every act
+and motion of our minds do only that which shall be to the best
+advantage of both ourselves and our neighbor. For only thus, only
+by the incessant practice of this in imagination and act, can the
+door of our wider and more humane consciousness be opened.</p>
+<a name="181.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/181.jpg"><img src="images/181.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>RUINS ON SCATTERY ISLAND.</b></p>
+<p>Nor is this all. There are in us vast unexplored tracts of power
+and wisdom; tracts not properly belonging <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page181" id="page181"></a>[pg 181]</span> to our
+personal and material selves, but rather to the impersonal and
+universal consciousness which touches us from within, and which we
+call divine. Our personal fate is closed by death; but we have a
+larger destiny which death does not touch; a destiny enduring and
+immortal. The door to this larger destiny can only be opened after
+we have laid down the weapons of egotism; after we have become
+veritably humane. There must be a death to militant self-assertion,
+a new birth to wide and universal purposes, before this larger life
+can be understood and known.</p>
+<p>With all the valor and rich life of the days of Cuculain and
+Ossin, the destructive instinct of antagonism was very deeply
+rooted in all hearts; it did endless harm to the larger interests
+of the land, and laid Ireland open to attack from without. Because
+the genius of the race was strong and highly developed, the harm
+went all the deeper; even now, after centuries, it is not wholly
+gone.</p>
+<p>The message of the humane and the divine, taught among the
+Galilean hills and on the shores of Gennesaret, was after four
+centuries brought to Ireland--a word of new life to the warriors
+and chieftains, enkindling and transforming their heroic world.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page182" id="page182"></a>[pg
+182]</span> Britain had received the message before, for Britain
+was a part of the dominion of Rome, which already had its imperial
+converts. Roman life and culture and knowledge of the Latin tongue
+had spread throughout the island up to the northern barrier between
+the Forth and Clyde. Beyond this was a wilderness of warring
+tribes.</p>
+<p>Where the Clyde comes forth from the plain to the long estuary
+of the sea, the Messenger of the Tidings was born. His father,
+Calpurn, was a Roman patrician; from this his son, whose personal
+name was Succat, was surnamed Patricius, a title raised by his
+greatness into a personal name. His letters give us a vivid picture
+of his captivity, and the stress of life which gradually aroused in
+him the inspiration of the humane and divine ripened later into a
+full knowledge of his apostolate.</p>
+<p>"I Patricius, a sinner," he writes, "and most unlearned of
+believers, looked down upon by many, had for my father the deacon
+Calpurn, son of the elder Potitus, of a place called Bannova in
+Tabernia, near to which was his country home. There I was taken
+captive, when not quite sixteen. I knew not the Eternal. Being led
+into captivity with thousands of others, I was brought to
+Ireland,--a fate well <span class="pagenum"><a name="page183" id=
+"page183"></a>[pg 183]</span> deserved. For we had turned from the
+Eternal, nor kept the laws of the Eternal. Nor had we heeded the
+teachers who urged us to seek safety. Therefore the Eternal, justly
+wroth, scattered us among unbelievers, to the uttermost parts of
+the earth; here, where my poor worth is now seen among strangers,
+where the Eternal liberated the power hid in my unenkindled heart,
+that even though late I should recognize my error, and turn with
+all my heart to the Eternal....</p>
+<p>"I have long had it in mind to write, but until now have
+hesitated; for I feared blame, because I had not studied law and
+the sacred writings,--as have others who have never changed their
+language, but gone on to perfection in it; but my speech is
+translated into another language, and the roughness of my writing
+shows how little I have been taught. As the Sage says, 'Show by thy
+speech thy wisdom and knowledge and learning.' But what profits
+this excuse? since all can see how in my old age I struggle after
+what I should have learned as a boy. For then my sinfulness
+hindered me. I was but a beardless boy when I was taken captive,
+not knowing what to do and what to avoid; therefore I am ashamed to
+show my ignorance now? because I never learned to <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page184" id="page184"></a>[pg 184]</span>
+express great matters succinctly and well;--great matters like the
+moving of the soul and mind by the Divine Breath.... Nor, indeed,
+was I worthy that the Master should so greatly favor me, after all
+my hard labor and heavy toil, and the years of captivity amongst
+this people,--that the Master should show me such graciousness as I
+never knew nor hoped for till I came to Ireland.</p>
+<p>"But daily herding cattle here, and aspiring many times a day,
+the fear of the Eternal grew daily in me. A divine dread and
+aspiration grew in me, so that I often prayed a hundred times a
+day, and as many times in the night. I often remained in the woods
+and on the hills, rising to pray while it was yet dark, in snow or
+frost or rain; yet I took no harm. The Breath of the Divine burned
+within me, so that nothing remained in me unenkindled.</p>
+<p>"One night, while I was sleeping, I heard a voice saying to me,
+'You have fasted well, and soon you shall see your home and your
+native land.' Soon after, I heard the voice again, saying, 'The
+ship is ready for you.' But the ship was not near, but two hundred
+miles off, in a district I had never visited, and where I knew no
+one. Therefore I fled, leaving <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page185" id="page185"></a>[pg 185]</span> the master I had served
+for six years, and found the ship by divine guidance, going without
+fear....</p>
+<p>"We reached the land after three days' sail; then for
+twenty-eight days we wandered through a wilderness.... Once more,
+after years of exile, I was at home again with my kindred, among
+the Britons. All welcomed me like a son, earnestly begging me that,
+after the great dangers I had passed through, I would never again
+leave my home.</p>
+<p>"While I was at home, in a vision of the night I saw one who
+seemed to come from Ireland, bringing innumerable letters. He gave
+me one of the letters, in which I read, 'The voices of the Irish
+...;' and while I read, it seemed to me that I heard the cry of the
+dwellers by the forest of Foclut, by the Western Ocean, calling
+with one voice to me, 'Come and dwell with us!' My heart was so
+moved that I awoke, and I give thanks to my God who after many
+years has given to them according to their petition.</p>
+<p>"On another night, whether within me or without me I know not,
+God knows, One prayed with very wonderful words that I could not
+comprehend, till at last He said, 'It is He who gave His soul for
+you, that speaks!' I awoke for joy. And once in a vision I saw Him
+praying within me, as it were; I <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page186" id="page186"></a>[pg 186]</span> saw myself, as it were,
+within myself; and I heard Him praying urgently and strongly over
+the inner man; I being meanwhile astonished, and wondering who thus
+prayed within me, till at the end He declared that I should be an
+overseer for Him....</p>
+<p>"I had not believed in the living Divine from childhood, but had
+remained in the realm of death until hunger and nakedness and daily
+slavery in Ireland--for I came there as a captive--had so afflicted
+me that I almost broke down. Yet these things brought good, for
+through that daily suffering I was so changed that I work and toil
+now for the well-being of others, I who formerly took no care even
+for myself....</p>
+<p>"Therefore I thank Him who kept me faithful in the day of trial,
+that I live to offer myself daily as a living offering to Him who
+saves and guards me. Well may I say, 'Master, what am I, what is my
+calling, that such grace and divine help are given to me--that I am
+every day raised to greater power among these unbelievers, while I
+everywhere praise thy name? Whatever comes to me, whether happiness
+or misery, whether good or evil fortune, I hold it all the same;
+giving Thee equal thanks for it, because Thou hast unveiled for me
+the One, sure and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page187" id=
+"page187"></a>[pg 187]</span> unchanging, in whom I may for ever
+believe. So that in these latter days, even though I am ignorant, I
+may dare to undertake so righteous a work, and so wonderful, that
+makes me like those who, according to His promise, should carry His
+message to all people before the end of the world.</p>
+<p>"It were long in whole or even in part to tell of my labours, or
+how the all-powerful One many times set me free from bondage, and
+from twelve perils wherein my life was in danger, and from nameless
+pitfalls. It were ill to try the reader too far, when I have within
+me the Author himself, who knows all things even before they
+happen, as He knows me, His poor disciple. The voice that so often
+guides me is divine; and thence it is that wisdom has come to me,
+who had no wisdom, knowing not Him, nor the number of my days:
+thence comes my knowledge and heart's joy in His great and healing
+gift, for the sake of which I willingly left my home and kindred,
+though they offered me many gifts with tears and sorrow.</p>
+<p>"Many of the older people also disapproved, but through divine
+help I would not give way. It was no grace of mine, but the divine
+power in me that stood out against all, so that I came to bear the
+Message <span class="pagenum"><a name="page188" id=
+"page188"></a>[pg 188]</span> here among the people of Ireland,
+suffering the scorn of those who believed not, and bearing derision
+and many persecutions, and even chains. Nay, I even lost my
+patrician rank for the good of others. But if I be worthy to do
+something for the Divine, I am ready with all my heart to yield
+service, even to the death, since it has been permitted that
+through me many might be reborn to the divine, and that others
+might be appointed to teach them....</p>
+<p>"The people of Ireland, who formerly had only their idols and
+pagan ritual, not knowing the Master, have now become His children.
+The sons of the Scoti and their kings' daughters are now become
+sons of the Master and handmaidens of the Anointed. And one nobly
+born lady among them, a beautiful woman whom I baptized myself,
+came soon after to tell me that she was divinely admonished to live
+in maidenhood, drawing nearer to Him. Six days later she entered
+the grade that all the handmaidens of the Anointed desire, though
+their fathers and mothers would hinder them, reproaching and
+afflicting them; nevertheless, they grow in number, so that I know
+not how many they are, besides widows and continent women, who
+suffer most from those who hold them in bondage. Yet they stand
+firm, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page189" id="page189"></a>[pg
+189]</span> and God grants grace to many of them worthily to follow
+Him.</p>
+<p>"Therefore I might even leave them, to go among the
+Britons,--for willingly would I see my own kindred and my native
+land again, or even go as far as Gaul to visit my brothers, and see
+the faces of my Master's holy men. But I am bound in the Spirit,
+and would be unfaithful if I went. Nor would I willingly risk the
+fruit of all my work. Yet it is not I who decide, but the Master,
+who bid me come hither, to spend my whole life in serving, as
+indeed I think I shall....</p>
+<p>"Therefore I should ever thank Him who was so tolerant of my
+ignorance and sluggishness, so many times; treating me not in anger
+but as a fellow-worker, though I was slow to learn the work set for
+me by the Spirit. He pitied me amongst many thousands, for he saw
+that I was very willing, but did net know how to offer my
+testimony. For they all opposed my mission, and talked behind my
+back, saying, 'He wishes to risk his life among enemies who know
+nothing of the Master'; not speaking maliciously, but opposing me
+because I was so ignorant. Nor did I myself at once perceive the
+power that was in me....</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page190" id="page190"></a>[pg
+190]</span>
+<p>"Thus simply, brothers and fellow-workers for the Master, who
+with me have believed, I have told you how it happened that I
+preached and still preach, to strengthen and confirm you in
+aspiration, hoping that we may all rise yet higher. Let that be my
+reward, as 'the wise son is the glory of his father.' You know, and
+the Master knows, how from my youth I have lived among you, in
+aspiration and truth and with single heart; that I have declared
+the faith to those among whom I dwell, and still declare it. The
+Master knows that I have deceived no man in anything, nor ever
+shall, for His sake and His people's. Nor shall I ever arouse
+uncharity in them or in any, lest His name should be spoken evil
+of....</p>
+<p>"I have striven in my poor way to help my brothers and the
+handmaidens of the Anointed, and the holy women who often
+volunteered to give me presents and to lay their jewels on my
+altar; but these I always gave back to them, even though they were
+hurt by it; and I have so lived my life, for the hope of the life
+eternal, that none may find the least cause of offence in my
+ministry; that my least act might not tarnish my good name, so that
+unbelievers might speak evil of me....</p>
+<p>"If I have asked of any as much as the value of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page191" id="page191"></a>[pg 191]</span> a
+shoe, tell me. I will repay it and more. I rather spent my own
+wealth on you and among you, wherever I went, for your sakes,
+through many dangers, to regions where no believer had ever come to
+baptize, to ordain teachers or to confirm the flock. With the
+divine help I very willingly and lovingly paid all. Sometimes I
+gave presents to the kings,--in giving presents to their sons who
+convoyed us, to guard us against being taken captive. Once they
+sought to kill me, but my time was not yet come. But they took away
+all we possessed, and kept me bound, till the Master liberated me
+on the fourteenth day, and all our goods were given back, because
+of the Master and of those who convoyed us. You yourselves know
+what gifts I gave to those who administer the law through the
+districts I visited oftenest. I think I spent not less than the
+fine of fifteen men among them, in order that I might come among
+you. Nor do I regret it, nor count it enough, for I still spend,
+and shall ever spend, happy if the Master allows me to spend my
+soul for you....For I know certainly that poverty and plain living
+are better for me than riches and luxury. The Anointed our Master
+was poor for us. I am poorer still, for I could not have wealth if
+I wished it. Nor do I now judge <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page192" id="page192"></a>[pg 192]</span> myself, for I look
+forward daily to a violent death, or to be taken captive and sold
+into slavery, or some like end. But I fear none of these ...but let
+me not lose the flock I feed for Him, here in the uttermost parts
+of the earth....</p>
+<p>"I am willing for His sake to shed my blood, to go without
+burial, even though my body be torn by dogs and wild beasts and the
+fowls of the air; for I know that thus I should through my body
+enrich my soul. And I know that in that day we shall arise in the
+brightness of the sun, in the glory of the Anointed Master, as sons
+of the divine and co-heirs with Him, made in His likeness. For the
+sun we see rises daily by divine ordinance; but it is not ordained
+to rise for ever, nor shall its light last for ever. The sun of
+this world shall fade, with those that worship it; but we bow to
+the spiritual Sun, the Anointed, that shall never perish, nor they
+who do His will, but shall endure for ever like the Anointed
+himself, who reigns with the Father and the Divine Spirit now and
+ever....</p>
+<p>"This I beg, that no believer or servant of the Master, who
+reads or receives this writing, which I, Patricius, a sinner and
+very unlearned, wrote in Ireland,--I beg that none may say that
+whatever is good <span class="pagenum"><a name="page193" id=
+"page193"></a>[pg 193]</span> in it was dictated by my ignorance,
+but rather that it came from Him. This is my Confession, before I
+die."</p>
+<p>That is the story of the most vital event in the life of
+Ireland, in the words of the man who was chiefly instrumental in
+bringing it about. Though an unskilled writer, as he says himself
+he has nevertheless succeeded in breathing into every part of his
+epistle the power and greatness of his soul, the sense and vivid
+reality of the divine breath which stirred in him and transformed
+him, the spiritual power, humane and universal, which enkindled him
+from within; these are the words of a man who had first-hand
+knowledge of the things of our deeper life; not a mere servant of
+tradition, living on the words and convictions of other men. He has
+drawn in large and universal outline the death to egotism--reached
+in his case through hunger, nakedness and slavery--and the new
+birth from above, the divine Soul enkindling the inner man, and
+wakening him to new powers and a knowledge of his genius and
+immortal destiny.</p>
+<p>Not less vivid is the sense he conveyed, of the world in which
+he moved; the feeling of his dignity as a Roman Patrician, having a
+share of the greatness <span class="pagenum"><a name="page194" id=
+"page194"></a>[pg 194]</span> of empire; the sense of a
+dividing-line between the Christian realms of Rome and the outer
+barbarians yet in darkness. Yet the picture he gives of these outer
+realms is as certainly true. There are the rival chieftains, each
+with his own tribe and his own fort, and bearing the title of king.
+They are perpetually striving among themselves, so that from the
+province of one he must move to the province of another with an
+escort, led by the king's son, who receives gifts in return for
+this protection. This is the world of Concobar and Cuculain; of
+Find and Ossin, as they themselves have painted it.</p>
+<p>The world of Find and Ossin, of Cael and Cred&eacute;, was
+marked by a certain urbanity and freedom, a large-mindedness and
+imaginative power. We are therefore prepared to expect that the
+Messenger of the new life would be received with openness of mind,
+and allowed to deliver his message without any very violent
+opposition. It was the meeting of unarmed moral power and armed
+valor; and the victory of the apostle was a victory of spiritual
+force, of character, of large-heartedness; the man himself was the
+embodiment of his message, and through his forceful genius his
+message was effective. He visibly represented the New Way; the way
+of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page195" id="page195"></a>[pg
+195]</span> humane and the divine, transforming the destructive
+instinct of self-assertion. He visibly represented the divine and
+the immortal in us, the new birth from above.</p>
+<p>Yet there were tragedies in his apostolate. In another letter a
+very vivid and pathetic account is given of one of these.
+Coroticus, a chieftain of Britain, and therefore nominally a
+Christian and a citizen of Rome, had sent marauding bands to
+Ireland to capture slaves. Some of the new converts were taken
+captive by these slave-hunters, an outrage which drew forth an
+indignant protest from the great Messenger:</p>
+<p>"My neophytes in their white robes, the baptismal chrism still
+wet and glistening on their foreheads, were taken captive with the
+sword by these murderers. The next day I sent letters begging them
+to liberate the baptized captives, but they answered my prayer with
+mocking laughter. I know not which I should mourn for more,--those
+who were slain, those who were taken prisoner, or those who in this
+were Satan's instruments, since these must suffer everlasting
+punishment in perdition."</p>
+<p>He appeals indignantly to the fellow-Christians of Coroticus in
+Britain: "I pray you, all that are <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page196" id="page196"></a>[pg 196]</span> righteous and humble, to
+hold no converse with those who do these things. Eat not, drink not
+with them, accept no gifts from them, until they have repented and
+made atonement, setting free these newly-baptized handmaidens of
+Christ, for whom He died.... They seem to think we are not children
+of one Father!"</p>
+<p>The work and mission of this great man grow daily better known.
+The scenes of each marked event are certainly identified. His early
+slavery, his time of probation, was spent in Antrim, on the
+hillside of Slieve Mish, and in the woods that then covered its
+flanks and valleys. Wandering there with his flocks to the
+hill-top, he looked down over the green darkness of the woods, with
+the fertile open country stretching park-like beyond, to the coast
+eight miles away. From his lonely summit he could gaze over the
+silvery grayness of the sea, and trace on the distant horizon the
+headlands of his dear native land. The exile's heart must have
+ached to look at them, as he thought of his hunger and nakedness
+and toil. There in deep pity came home to him the fate of the weak
+ones of the earth, the vanquished, the afflicted, the losers in the
+race. Compassion showed him the better way, the way of sympathy
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page197" id="page197"></a>[pg
+197]</span> and union, instead of contest and dominion. A firm and
+fixed purpose grew up within him to make the appeal of gentleness
+to the chiefs and rulers, in the name of Him who was all sympathy
+for the weak. Thus the inspiration of the Message awakened his soul
+to its immortal powers.</p>
+<p>Later, returning with the clear purpose of his message formed,
+he began his great work not far from his first place of captivity.
+His strong personality led him always to the presence of the chiefs
+and warriors, and he talked to them freely as an equal, gradually
+giving them an insight into his own vision of life, of the kinship
+between soul and soul, of our immortal power and inheritance. He
+appealed always to his own inner knowledge of things divine, to the
+light and power unveiled within himself; and the commanding genius
+in his words lit a like fire in the hearts of those who heard,
+awakening an enthusiasm for the New Way. He had a constant sense of
+his divine mission:</p>
+<p>"Was it without divine promise, or in the body only, that I came
+to Ireland? Who led me? Who took captive my soul, that I should no
+more see friends and kindred? Whence came my inspiration of pity
+for the race that had enslaved me?"</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page198" id="page198"></a>[pg
+198]</span>
+<p>The memory of his first victories is perpetuated in the name,
+Downpatrick,--that is: the Dwelling of Patrick.--where Dicu son of
+Tricem, chief of the district, gave him a tract of land to build a
+place of meeting and prayer for his disciples; while the church was
+being built, the chief offered his barn as a meeting-place, an
+incident commemorated in the name of Saul, on a hill above the
+town,--a name softened from Sabal, "a barn." This first victory was
+won among the rounded hills south of the Quoyle River, where it
+widens toward Strangford Lough; from the hill-top of Saul there is
+a wide prospect over the reed-covered flats with the river winding
+among them, the hills with their oak-woods in the bends of the
+river, and the widening lough with its innumerable islands, its
+sand-flats lit up with red under the dawn. The sun sets among the
+mountains of Mourne, flushing from behind the purple profile of the
+hills, and sending golden arrows over the rich fertility of the
+plain. The year 432 is the probable date of this first
+conversion.</p>
+<p>The strong genius of the Messenger carried him after a few
+months to the center of power in the land, to Tara with its
+fortresses, its earthworks, its great banquet-halls and granaries
+and well-adorned <span class="pagenum"><a name="page199" id=
+"page199"></a>[pg 199]</span> dwellings of chief and king. A huge
+oval earthwork defended the king's house; northward of this was the
+splendid House of Mead,--the banquet-hall, with lesser fortresses
+beyond it. Southward of the central dwelling and its defence was
+the new ringed fort of Laogaire the king, son of the more famous
+king Nial of the Hostages. At this circular fort, Rath-Laogaire, on
+Easter day, Saint Patrick met the king face to face, and delivered
+to him the message of the New Way, telling him of the unveiling of
+the Divine within himself, of the voice that had bidden him come,
+of the large soul of immortal pity that breathed in the teachings
+among the hills of Galilee, of the new life there begun for the
+world. Tradition says that the coming of the Messenger had been
+foretold by the Druids, and the great work he should accomplish;
+the wise men of the West catching the inner brightness of the
+Light, as the Eastern Magians had caught it more than four
+centuries before. The fruits of that day's teaching in the plain of
+Tara, in the assembly of Laogaire the king, were to be gathered
+through long centuries to come.</p>
+<p>In the year 444, the work of the teacher had so thriven that he
+was able to build a larger church on a hill above the Callan River,
+in the undulating <span class="pagenum"><a name="page200" id=
+"page200"></a>[pg 200]</span> country south of Lough Neagh. This
+hill, called in the old days the Hill of the Willows, was only two
+miles from the famous fortress of Emain of Maca. It was a gift from
+the ruler Dair&eacute;, who, like so many other chiefs, had felt
+and acknowledged the Messenger's power. Later, the hill came to be
+called Ard-Maca, the Height of Maca; a name now softened into
+Armagh, ever since esteemed the central stronghold of the first
+Messenger's followers.</p>
+<p>The Messenger passed on from chief to chief, from province to
+province, meeting with success everywhere, yet facing grave perils.
+Later histories take him to the kings of Leinster and Munster, and
+he himself tells us that the prayer of the children of Foclut was
+answered by his coming, so that he must have reached the western
+ocean. It was a tremendous victory of moral force, of the divine
+and immortal working through him, that the Messenger was able to
+move unarmed among the warriors of many tribes that were often at
+war with each other; everywhere meeting the chiefs and kings, and
+meeting them as an equal: the unarmed bringer of good tidings
+confronting the king in the midst of his warriors, and winning him
+to his better vision.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page201" id="page201"></a>[pg
+201]</span>
+<p>For sixty years the Messenger worked, sowing seed and gathering
+the fruit of his labor; and at last his body was laid at rest close
+to his first church at Saul. Thus one of the great men of the world
+accomplished his task.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page202" id="page202"></a>[pg
+202]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page203" id="page203"></a>[pg
+203]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page204" id="page204"></a>[pg
+204]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page205" id="page205"></a>[pg
+205]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="IX."></a>IX.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 493-750.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>It would be hard to find in the whole history of early
+Christianity a record of greater and more enduring success than the
+work of St. Patrick. None of the Messengers of the New Way, as they
+were called first by St. Luke, unless the phrase is St. Paul's,
+accomplished single-handed so wonderful a work, conquering so large
+a territory, and leaving such enduring monuments of his victory.
+Amongst the world's masters, the son of Calpurn the Decurion
+deserves a place with the greatest.</p>
+<p>Not less noteworthy than the wide range of his work was the way
+in which he gained success. He addressed himself always to the
+chiefs, the kings, the men of personal weight and power. And his
+address was almost invariably successful,--a thing that would have
+been impossible had he not been himself a personality of singular
+force and fire, able to meet the great ones of the land as an
+equal. His manner was that of an ambassador, full of tact,
+knowledge <span class="pagenum"><a name="page206" id=
+"page206"></a>[pg 206]</span> of men and of the world. Nor can we
+find in him--or, indeed, in the whole history of the churches
+founded by him--anything of that bitter zeal and fanaticism which,
+nearly two centuries nearer to apostolic times, marred the work of
+the Councils under Constantius; the fierce animosity between
+Christian and Christian which marked the Arian controversy. The
+Apostle of Ireland showed far more urbanity, far more humane and
+liberal wisdom, far more gentleness, humor and good feeling, in his
+treatment of the pre-Christian institutions and ideals of Ireland
+than warring Christian sects have generally been willing to show to
+each other.</p>
+<p>It was doubtless due to this urbane wisdom that the history of
+the conversion of Ireland is without one story of martyrdom. The
+change was carried out in open-hearted frankness and good-will, the
+old order giving place to the new as gently as spring changes to
+summer. The most marvelous example of St. Patrick's wisdom, and at
+the same time the most wonderful testimony to his personal force,
+is his action towards the existing civil and religious law of the
+country, commonly known as the Brehon Law. Principles had by long
+usage been wrought into the fabric of the Brehon Laws which were in
+flat <span class="pagenum"><a name="page207" id="page207"></a>[pg
+207]</span> contradiction to St. Patrick's teaching of the New Way.
+Instead of fiercely denouncing the whole system, he talked with the
+chief jurists and heralds,--custodians of the old system,--and
+convinced them that changes in their laws would give effect to more
+humane and liberal principles. They admitted the justice of his
+view, and agreed to a meeting between three great chieftains or
+kings, three Brehons or jurists, and three of St. Patrick's
+converts, to revise the whole system of law, substituting the more
+humane principles, which they had already accepted as just and
+right. These changes were made and universally applied; so that,
+without any violent revolution, without strife or bloodshed, the
+better way became the accepted law. It would be hard to find in all
+history a finer example of wisdom and moderation, of the great and
+worthy way of accomplishing right ends.</p>
+<p>We have seen the great Messenger himself founding monasteries,
+houses of religious study, and churches for his converts, on land
+given to him by chieftains who were moved by his character and
+ideals. We can judge of the immediate spread of his teaching if we
+remember that these churches were generally sixty feet long, thus
+giving room for many <span class="pagenum"><a name="page208" id=
+"page208"></a>[pg 208]</span> worshippers. They seem to have been
+built of stone--almost the first use of that material in Ireland
+since the archaic days. Among the first churches of this type were
+those at Saul, at Donaghpatrick on the Blackwater, and at Armagh,
+with others further from the central region of St. Patrick's work.
+The schools of learning which grew up beside them were universally
+esteemed and protected, and from them came successive generations
+of men and women who worthily carried on the work so wisely begun.
+The tongues first studied were Latin and Irish. We have works of
+very early periods in both, as, for instance, the Latin epistles of
+St. Patrick himself, and the Irish poems of the hardly less eminent
+Colum Kill. But other languages were presently added.</p>
+<a name="209.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/209.jpg"><img src="images/209.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>VALLEY OF GLENDALOUGH AND RUINS OF THE SEVEN CHURCHES.</b></p>
+<p>These schools and churches gradually made their way throughout
+the whole country; some of the oldest of them are still to be seen,
+as at Donaghpatrick, Clonmacnoise and Glendalough. Roofed with
+stone, they are well fitted to resist the waste of time. An intense
+spiritual and moral life inspired the students, a life rich also in
+purely intellectual and artistic force. The ancient churches speak
+for themselves; the artistic spirit of the time is splendidly
+embodied <span class="pagenum"><a name="page209" id=
+"page209"></a>[pg 209]</span> in the famous Latin manuscript of the
+Gospels, called the Book of Kells, the most beautiful specimen of
+illumination in the world. The wonderful colored initial letters
+reproduce and develop the designs of the old gold work, the motives
+of which came, it would seem, from the Baltic, with the De Danaan
+tribes. We can judge of the quiet and security of the early
+disciples at Kells, the comfort and amenity of their daily life,
+the spirit of comity and good-will, the purity of inspiration of
+that early time, by the artistic truth and beauty of these
+illuminated pages and the perfection with which the work was done.
+Refined and difficult arts are the evidence of refined feeling,
+abundant moral and spiritual force, and a certain material security
+and ease surrounding the artist. When these arts are freely offered
+in the service of religion, they are further evidence of widespread
+fervor and aspiration, a high and worthy ideal of life.</p>
+<p>Yet we shall be quite wrong if we imagine an era of peace and
+security following the epoch of the first great Messenger. Nothing
+is further from the truth. The old tribal strife continued for long
+centuries; the instincts which inspired it are, even now, not quite
+outworn. Chief continued to war against chief, province
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page210" id="page210"></a>[pg
+210]</span> against province, tribe against tribe, even among the
+fervent converts of the first teachers.</p>
+<p>Saint Brigid is one of the great figures in the epoch
+immediately succeeding the first coming of the Word. She was the
+foundress of a school of religious teaching for women at Kildare,
+or Killdara, "The Church of the Oak-woods," whose name still
+records her work. Her work, her genius, her power, the immense
+spiritual influence for good which flowed from her, entitle her to
+be remembered with the women of apostolic times, who devoted their
+whole lives to the service of the divine. We have seen the esteem
+in which women were always held in Ireland. St. Brigid and those
+who followed in her steps gave effect to that high estimation, and
+turned it to a more spiritual quality, so that now, as in all past
+centuries, the ideal of womanly purity is higher in Ireland than in
+any country in the world.</p>
+<p>This great soul departed from earthly life in the year 525, a
+generation after the death of the first Messenger. To show how the
+old order continued with the new, we may record the words of the
+Chronicler for the following year: "526: The battle of Eiblinne, by
+Muirceartac son of Erc; the battle of Mag-Ailbe; the battle of
+Almain; the battle of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page211" id=
+"page211"></a>[pg 211]</span> Ceann-eic; the plundering of the
+Cliacs; and the battle of Eidne against the men of Connacht." Three
+of these battles were fought at no great distance from St. Brigid's
+Convent.</p>
+<p>The mediaeval Chronicler quotes the old Annalist for the
+following year: "The king, the son of Erc, returned to the side of
+the descendants of Nial. Blood reached the girdle in each plain.
+The exterior territories were enriched. Seventeen times nine
+chariots he brought, and long shall it be remembered. He bore away
+the hostages of the Ui-Neill with the hostages of the plain of
+Munster."</p>
+<p>Ten years later we find the two sons of this same king,
+Muirceartac son of Erc, by name Fergus and Domnall, fighting under
+the shadow of Knocknarea mountain against Eogan Bel the king of
+Connacht; the ancient Annalist, doubtless contemporary with the
+events recorded, thus commemorated the battle in verse:</p>
+<p>"The battle of the Ui-Fiacrac was fought with the fury of edged
+weapons against Bel;</p>
+<p>"The kine of the enemy roared with the javelins, the battle was
+spread out at Crinder;</p>
+<p>"The River of Shells bore to the great sea the blood of men with
+their flesh;</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page212" id="page212"></a>[pg
+212]</span>
+<p>"They carried many trophies across Eaba, together with the head
+of Eogan Bel."</p>
+<p>During this stormy time, which only carried forward the long
+progress of fighting since the days of the prime, a famous school
+of learning and religion had been founded at Moville by Finian,
+"the tutor of the saints of Ireland." The home of his church and
+school is a very beautiful one, with sombre mountains behind rising
+from oak-woods into shaggy masses of heather, the blue waters of
+Lough Foyle in front, and across the mouth of the lough the silver
+sands and furrowed chalk hills of Antrim, blending into green
+plains. Here the Psalms and the Gospels were taught in Latin to
+pupils who had in no wise given up their love for the old poetry
+and traditions of their motherland. Here Colum studied, afterwards
+called Colum Kill, "Saint Colum of the Churches," and here arose a
+memorable dispute concerning a Latin manuscript of the Psalms. The
+manuscript belonged to Finian, founder of the school, and was
+esteemed one of the treasures of his college. Colum, then a young
+student, ardently longed for a copy, and, remaining in the church
+after service, he daily copied a part of the sacred text. When his
+work was completed, Finian discovered it, and at once <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page213" id="page213"></a>[pg 213]</span>
+claimed the copy of his book as also his. The matter was submitted
+to an umpire, who gave the famous decision: "Unto every cow her
+calf; unto every book its copy"--the copy belonged to the owner of
+the book. This early decision of copyright was by no means
+acceptable to the student Colum. He disputed its justice, and the
+quarrel spread till it resulted in a battle. The discredit
+attaching to the whole episode resulted in the banishment of Colum,
+who sailed away northward and eastward towards the isles and fiords
+of that land which, from the Irish Scoti who civilized it, now
+bears the name of Scotland. Let us recall a few verses written by
+Colum on his departure, in a version which echoes something of the
+original melody and form:</p>
+<blockquote>"We are rounding Moy-n-Olurg, we sweep by its head
+and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;We plunge through the Foyle,<br>
+Whose swans could enchant with their music the dead and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Make pleasure of toil....<br>
+Oh, Erin, were wealth my desire, what a wealth were<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To gain far from thee,<br>
+In the land of the stranger, but there even health were<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A sickness to me!<br>
+Alas for the voyage, oh high King of Heaven,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Enjoined upon me,<br>
+For that I on the red plain of bloody Cooldrevin<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Was present to see.<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page214" id="page214"></a>[pg
+214]</span> How happy the son is of Dima; no sorrow<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For him is designed,<br>
+He is having this hour, round his own Kill in Durrow,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The wish of his mind.<br>
+The sound of the wind in the elms, like the strings of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A harp being played,<br>
+The note of the blackbird that claps with the wings of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Delight in the glade.<br>
+With him in Ros-grenca the cattle are lowing<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;At earliest dawn,<br>
+On the brink of the summer the pigeons are cooing<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And doves on the lawn...."</blockquote>
+<p>In another measure, he again mourns his exile: "Happy to be on
+Ben Edar, before going over the sea; white, white the dashing of
+the wave against its face; the bareness of its shore and its
+border....</p>
+<blockquote>"How swiftly we travel; there is a grey eye<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Looks back upon Erin, but it no more<br>
+Shall see while the stars shall endure in the sky,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Her women, her men, or her stainless
+shore...."</blockquote>
+<p>This great-hearted and impetuous exile did not waste his life in
+useless regrets. Calling forth the fire of his genius, and facing
+the reality of life, he set himself to work, spreading the teaching
+of the New Way among the Picts of the north--the same Picts who, in
+years gone by, had raged against the barrier of Hadrian between
+Forth and Clyde. The <span class="pagenum"><a name="page215" id=
+"page215"></a>[pg 215]</span> year of his setting out was 563; the
+great center of his work was in the sacred isle of Iona, off the
+Ross of Mull. Iona stands in the rush of Atlantic surges and fierce
+western storms, yet it is an island of rare beauty amid the tinted
+mists of summer dawns. Under the year 592, a century after Saint
+Patrick's death, we find this entry in the Chronicle: "Colum Kill,
+son of Feidlimid, Apostle of Scotland, head of the piety of the
+most part of Ireland and Scotland after Patrick, died in his own
+church in Iona in Scotland, after the thirty-fifth year of his
+pilgrimage, on Sunday night, the ninth of June. Seventy-seven years
+was his whole age when he resigned his spirit to heaven." The
+corrected date is 596.</p>
+<p>We can see in Colum of the Churches the very spirit of
+turbulence and adventure, the fierce impetuosity and readiness for
+dispute, which led to the contests between the chieftains of
+Ireland, the wars between province and province, often between
+valley and valley. It is the same spiritual energy, working itself
+out in another way, transmuted by the sacred fire into a divine
+mission. In the same way the strong will of Meave, the romantic
+power of Deirdr&eacute; and Grania, transmuted to ideal purposes,
+was the inspiration of Saint Brigid and so many like her,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page216" id="page216"></a>[pg
+216]</span> who devoted their powers to the religious teaching of
+women.</p>
+<p>We should doubtless fail utterly to understand the riddle of
+history, were we to regret the wild warring of these early times as
+a mere lamentable loss of life, a useless and cruel bloodshed. We
+are too much given to measuring other times and other moods of the
+soul by our own, and many false judgments issue from this error.
+Peaceful material production is our main purpose, and we learn many
+lessons of the Will embodied in the material world when we follow
+this purpose honestly. But before our age could begin, it was
+necessary for the races to come to personal consciousness. This end
+seems everywhere to have been reached by a long epoch of strife,
+the contending of man against man, of tribe against tribe. Thus
+were brought to full consciousness the instinct of personal valor,
+personal honor and personal readiness to face death.</p>
+<p>Only after this high personal consciousness is kindled can a
+race enter the wider path of national life, where vivid and intense
+individuals unite their forces to a common end, reaching a common
+consciousness, and holding their power in common for the purposes
+of all. After the lessons of fighting come the lessons <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page217" id="page217"></a>[pg 217]</span> of
+work. For these lessons of work, for the direct touch with the
+everlasting Will gained in all honest work, our own age is to be
+valued, far more than for the visible and material fruits which
+that work produces.</p>
+<p>In like manner the old epoch of war is to be esteemed for the
+lessons it taught of high valor, sacrifice, heroic daring. And to
+what admirable ends these same qualities may tend we can see in a
+life like that of Colum Kill, "head of the piety of the most part
+of Ireland and Scotland after Patrick."</p>
+<p>Yet the days of old were grim enough to live in. Let this record
+of some half-century later testify. It is but one year culled from
+a long red rank of years. We give the Chronicler's own words: "645:
+The sixth year of Conall and Ceallac. Mac Laisre, abbot of Bangor,
+died on May 16. Ragallac son of Uatac, King of Connacht, was killed
+by Maelbrigde son of Motlacan, of which was said:</p>
+<blockquote>"Ragallac son of Uatac was pierced on the back of a
+white<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; steed;<br>
+<br>
+Muiream has well lamented him; Catal has well avenged him.<br>
+<br>
+Catal is this day in battle, though bound to peace in the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; presence of kings;<br>
+<br>
+Though Catal is without a father, his father is not without<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; vengeance.<br>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page218" id="page218"></a>[pg
+218]</span> Estimate his terrible revenge from the account of it
+related:<br>
+<br>
+He slew six men and fifty; he made sixteen devastations;<br>
+<br>
+I had my share like another in the revenge of Ragallac,--<br>
+<br>
+I have the gray beard in my hand, of Maelbrigde son of
+Motlacan."</blockquote>
+<p>These are evidently the very words of one who fought in the
+battle. Nor need this in any way surprise us, for we have far older
+Chronicles set down year by year in unbroken record. The matter is
+easy to prove. The Chronicles of Ulster record eclipses of the sun
+and moon as early as 495,--two years after Saint Patrick's death.
+It was, of course, the habit of astronomers to reckon eclipses
+backwards, and of annalists to avail themselves of these
+reckonings. The Venerable Bede, for example, has thus inserted
+eclipses in his history. The result is that the Venerable Bede has
+the dates several days wrong, while the Chronicles of Ulster, where
+direct observation took the place of faulty reckoning, has them
+right, to the day and hour. It is only in quite modern times that
+we have reached sufficiently accurate knowledge of the moon's
+movements to vindicate the old Ulster Annalists, who began their
+work not less than a hundred and fifty years before the battle we
+have just recorded.</p>
+<p>Nor should we exaggerate the condition of the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page219" id="page219"></a>[pg 219]</span> time,
+thinking of it as altogether given over to ravaging and
+devastation. Even though there were two or three expeditions and
+battles every year, these would only affect a small part of the
+whole country. Over all the rest, the tending of cattle in the
+glades of the forest, the sowing and reaping of wheat and oats, the
+gathering of fruit and nuts, continued in quiet contentment and
+peace. The young men practiced the arts of war and exercised
+themselves in warlike games. The poets sang to them, the heralds
+recounted the great doings of old, how Cuculain kept the ford, how
+Concobar thirsted in his heart for Deirdr&eacute;, how the son of
+Cumal went to war, how golden-tongued Ossin was ensnared by the
+spirits. The gentle life of tillage and the keeping of cattle could
+never engage the whole mental force of so vigorous a race. What
+wonder, then, that, when a chieftain had some real or imagined
+wrong to avenge, or some adventure to propose,--what wonder that
+bold spirits were ever ready to accompany him, leaving the women to
+their distaffs and the tending of children and the grinding of
+corn? Mounting their horses, they rode forth through the woods,
+under the huge arms of the oak-trees; along the banks of
+swift-gliding rivers, through <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page220" id="page220"></a>[pg 220]</span> passes of the lowering
+hills. While still in familiar territory, the time of the march was
+passed in song and story. Then came increased precaution, and
+gradually heightened pulses marked the stages of the way. The rival
+chieftain, warned by his scouts and outlying tribesmen, got word of
+their approach, and hastily replenishing his granaries and driving
+the cattle into the great circle of his embankments, prepared to
+meet the coming foe. Swords, spears, bows, arrows were the arms of
+both sides. Though leather tunics were common, coats of mail came
+only at a later date. The attackers under cover of the night sped
+across the open ground before the fort, and tried to storm the
+fortress, the defenders meanwhile showering down keen-pointed
+arrows on them from above. Both parties, under the chieftains'
+guidance, fought fiercely, in a fever of excitement, giving no heed
+to wounds, seeing nothing but the foe and the battlements to be
+scaled. Then either a successful sortie broke the ranks of the
+assailants and sent them back to their forest camp in wild
+disorder, or, the stockade giving way, the stormers swept in like a
+wave of the sea, and all was chaos and wild struggle hand to hand.
+Whatever the outcome, both sides thought of the wild surge of will
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page221" id="page221"></a>[pg
+221]</span> and valor in that hour as the crowning event of their
+lives.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, within the quiet enclosures of the monasteries and
+religious schools, the spirit of the time was working with not less
+fervor, to invisible and ideal ends. At Bangor, on the neck of the
+northern Ards; at Moville, where Lough Foyle spreads its inland
+sea; at Saul, where the first Messenger won his first convert; at
+Devenish Island amid the waters of Lough Erne; at Monasterboice in
+the plain of Louth; at Grlendalough, among the solemn hills of
+Wicklow; at Kildare, beneath the oak-woods; at Durrow, amid the
+central marshes, and many another ancient seat of learning, the way
+of wisdom and holiness was trod with gladness. Latin had been
+taught since the early days of the Message; the native tongue of
+Ireland, consecrated in the hymns of St. Patrick and the poems of
+St. Colum of the Churches, was the language in which all pupils
+were taught, the modern ministrant to the classical speech of Rome.
+Nor were the Scriptures alone studied. Terence, Virgil, Ovid, the
+Augustans and the men of the silver age, were familiar in the Irish
+schools; and to these Latin writers were soon added the Greeks,
+more especially--as was natural--the <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page222" id="page222"></a>[pg 222]</span> Greek Fathers, the
+religious philosophers, and those who embodied the thought and
+controversies of the early Christian centuries. To Greek, Hebrew
+was added, so that both Old and New Testaments were known in their
+proper tongues. About the time when "Ragallac son of Uatac was
+pierced on the back of a white steed," Saint Camin in his island
+school at Inis Caltra, where red mountains hem in Lough Derg of the
+Shannon, was writing his Commentary on the Psalms, recording the
+Hebrew readings on the margin of the page. A few years before that
+battle, in 634, Saint Cummian of Durrow, some thirty miles to the
+east of Camin's Holy Island, wrote to his brother, the Abbot of
+Iona in the northern seas, quoting Latin writers sacred and
+secular, as well as Origen, Cyril and Pachomius among the Greeks.
+The learned man discusses the astronomical systems of the
+Mediterranean world, giving the names of months and cycles in
+Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, and telling of his researches into the
+true time of Easter, while on a journey to Italy and Rome. This
+letter, which has come down to our days, is first-hand testimony to
+the learning of the early Irish schools.</p>
+<a name="223.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/223.jpg"><img src="images/223.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>ANCIENT CROSS, GLENDALOUGH.</b></p>
+<p>Fifty years later, in 683, we hear of the Saxons <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page223" id="page223"></a>[pg 223]</span> for
+the first and almost the last time in the history of Ireland. It is
+recorded that the North Saxons raided Mag Breag in the East of
+Meath, attacking both churches and chieftains. They carried away
+many hostages and much spoil, but the captives were soon after set
+at liberty and sent home again, on the intercession of a remarkable
+man, Adamnan, the biographer of Colum of the Churches, whose
+success in his mission was held to be miraculous.</p>
+<p>For more than a century after this single Saxon raid Ireland was
+wholly undisturbed by foreign invasion, and the work of building
+churches, founding schools, studying Hebrew and Greek and Latin,
+went on with increasing vigor and success. An army of missionaries
+went forth to other lands, following in the footsteps of Colum of
+the Churches, and of these we shall presently speak. The life of
+the church was so rich and fruitful that we are led to think of
+this as a period of childlike and idyllic peace.</p>
+<p>Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The raids,
+devastations and wars between province and province, tribe and
+tribe, went on without a year's interruption. This was the normal
+course of the nation's life, the natural outlet of the nation's
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page224" id="page224"></a>[pg
+224]</span> energy: not less a visible sign of invisible inward
+power than the faith and fervor of the schools. We shall get the
+truest flavor of the times by quoting again from the old Annals.
+That they were recorded year by year, we have already seen; the
+records of frosts, great snow-storms, years of rich harvests and
+the like, interspersed among the fates of kings, show how
+faithfully the annals were kept,--as, for example, the winter of
+great cold, "when all the rivers and lakes of Ireland were frozen
+over," in the year after the Saxon raid.</p>
+<p>Here again, under the year 701, is the word of a man then
+living: "After Loing Seac son of Angus son of Domnall had been
+eight years in the sovreignty of Ireland, he was slain in the
+battle of Ceann by Cealleac of Lough Cime, the son of Ragallac, as
+Cealleac himself testifies:</p>
+<blockquote>"'For his deeds of ambition he was slain in the morning
+at<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Glas Cuilg;<br>
+<br>
+I wounded Loing Seac with a sword, the monarch of Ireland<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; round.'"</blockquote>
+<p>Two years later Saint Adamnan died, after governing the Abbey of
+Iona for six and twenty years. It was said of him that "He made a
+slave of himself to his virtues," and his great life-work, the
+Latin <span class="pagenum"><a name="page225" id="page225"></a>[pg
+225]</span> history of Saint Colum of the Churches, founder of the
+Iona Abbey, to this day testifies to his high learning and
+wisdom.</p>
+<p>Fourteen years later "Leinster was five times devastated by the
+Ui-Neill," the descendants of Nial, and a battle was fought between
+the men of Connacht and Munster. Thus the lives of saints and
+warriors were interwoven. On very rare occasions the two lives of
+the race came into collision. Thus, a quarrel arose between Congus
+the Abbot and Aed Roin king of Ulad. Congus summoned to his aid the
+chief of the Ui-Neill, Aed Allan by name, in these verses:</p>
+<blockquote>"Say to the cold Aed Allan that I have been oppressed
+by<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a feeble enemy:<br>
+<br>
+Aed Roin insulted me last night at Cill Cunna of the sweet<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;music."</blockquote>
+<p>Aed Allan made these verses on his way to battle to avenge the
+insult:</p>
+<blockquote>"For Cill Cunna the church of my spiritual father,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I take this day a journey on the road.<br>
+Aed Roin shall leave his head with me,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Or I shall leave my head with
+him."</blockquote>
+<p>The further history of that same year, 733, is best told in the
+words of the Annals: "Aed Allan, king <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page226" id="page226"></a>[pg 226]</span> of
+Ireland, assembled his forces to proceed into Leinster, and he
+arrived at the Ford of Seannait (in Kildare). The Leinstermen
+collected the greatest number they were able, to defend their
+rights against him. The king Aed Allan himself went into the
+battle, and the chieftains of the north along with him. The
+chieftains of Leinster came with their kings into the battle, and
+bloodily and heroically was the battle fought between them. Heroes
+were slaughtered and bodies were hacked. Aed Allan and Aed, son of
+Colgan, king of Leinster, met each other, and Aed son of Colgan was
+slain by Aed Allan. The Leinstermen were killed, slaughtered, cut
+off, and dreadfully exterminated in this battle, so that there
+escaped of them but a small remnant and a few fugitives."</p>
+<p>To round out the picture, to contrast the two streams of the
+nation's life, let us give this, from the following year: "734:
+Fifth year of Aed Allan. Saint Samtain, virgin, of Cluain Bronaig
+(Longford), died on December 19. It was of her that Aed Allan gave
+this testimony:</p>
+<blockquote>"Samtain for enlightening various sinners,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A servant who observed stern chastity,<br>
+In the wide plain of fertile Meath<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Great suffering did Samtain endure;<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page227" id="page227"></a>[pg
+227]</span> She undertook a thing not easy,--<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Fasting for the kingdom above.<br>
+She lived on scanty food;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Hard were her girdles;<br>
+She struggled in venomous conflicts;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Pure was her heart amid the wicked.<br>
+To the bosom of the Lord, with a pure death,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Samtain passed from her
+trials."</blockquote>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page228" id="page228"></a>[pg
+228]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page229" id="page229"></a>[pg
+229]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page230" id="page230"></a>[pg
+230]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page231" id="page231"></a>[pg
+231]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="X."></a>X.</h2>
+<h3>THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 750-1050.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Aed Allan, the king who so feelingly wrote the epitaph of the
+saintly virgin Samtain, needed an epitaph himself four years later,
+for he fell in battle with Domnall son of Murcad son of Diarmaid,
+who succeeded him on the throne. It is recorded that, in the
+following year, the sea cast ashore a whale under the mountains of
+Mourne, to the great wonder of those who dwelt by the hill of
+Rudraige. Thus do the Chronicles establish their good faith, by
+putting on record things trifling or grave, with equal
+impartiality.</p>
+<p>They were presently to have something more memorable to record
+than the loss of a battle or the stranding of a whale. But before
+we come to this new chapter in the life of Ireland, let us show the
+continuity of the forces we have already depicted. The old tribal
+turmoil went on unabated. In 771, the first year of Doncad son of
+Domnall in the sovereignty over Ireland, that ruler made a full
+muster <span class="pagenum"><a name="page232" id="page232"></a>[pg
+232]</span> of the Ui-Neill and marched into Leinster. The
+Leinstermen moved before the monarch and his forces, until they
+arrived at the fort called Nectain's Shield in Kildare. Domcad with
+his forces was entrenched at Aillin, whence his people continued to
+fire, burn, plunder and devastate the province for the space of a
+week, when the Leinstermen at last submitted to his will. Seventeen
+years later it is recorded that the church and abbey of Ardmaca,
+or, as we may now begin to call it, Armagh, were struck by
+lightning, and the night was terrible with thunder, lightning and
+wind.</p>
+<p>We see, therefore, that the double life of the people, the life
+of valor and the life of wisdom, were following their steady course
+in camp and school. We may call up a very interesting witness to
+the whole condition of Ireland during this epoch: Alfred king of
+the Northumbrian Saxons, who spent several years traveling through
+the land and studying in the schools. On his departure, he wrote an
+ode of acknowledgment to the country he was leaving, in the verse
+of the native Irish tongue. From this ode we may quote a few
+picturesque lines, taking them from a version which preserves
+something of the original rhythm:</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page233" id="page233"></a>[pg
+233]</span>
+<blockquote>"I traveled its fruitful provinces round,<br>
+And in every one of the five I found,<br>
+Alike in church and in palace hall,<br>
+Abundant apparel and food for all.<br>
+Gold and silver I found, and money,<br>
+Plenty of wheat and plenty of honey;<br>
+I found God's people rich in pity;<br>
+Found many a feast and many a city....<br>
+I found in each great church moreo'er,<br>
+Whether on island or on shore,<br>
+Piety, learning, fond affection,<br>
+Holy welcome and kind protection....<br>
+I found in Munster unfettered of any<br>
+Kings and queens and poets a many,<br>
+Poets well skilled in music and measure;<br>
+Prosperous doings, mirth and pleasure.<br>
+I found in Connacht the just, redundance<br>
+Of riches, milk in lavish abundance;<br>
+Hospitality, vigor, fame,<br>
+In Crimean's land of heroic name....<br>
+I found in Ulster, from hill to glen,<br>
+Hardy warriors, resolute men.<br>
+Beauty that bloomed when youth was gone,<br>
+And strength transmitted from sire to son....<br>
+I found in Leinster the smooth and sleek,<br>
+From Dublin to Slewmargy's peak,<br>
+Flourishing pastures, valor, health,<br>
+Song-loving worthies, commerce, wealth....<br>
+I found in Meath's fair principality<br>
+Virtue, vigor, and hospitality;<br>
+Candor, joyfulness, bravery, purity--<br>
+Ireland's bulwark and security.<br>
+I found strict morals in age and youth,<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page234" id="page234"></a>[pg
+234]</span> I found historians recording truth.<br>
+The things I sing of in verse unsmooth<br>
+I found them all; I have written sooth."</blockquote>
+<p>The modern form of the names used by the translator gives this
+version a slightly misleading tone. Ulster, Munster, Leinster were
+still known by their old names: Ulad, Mumain and Lagin. The Danish
+termination by which we know them had not been added. In like
+manner, Dublin in those days and far later was still called
+At-Cliat, the Ford of the Hurdles. Yet the tribute which the Saxon
+king paid to Ireland has a true ring. It thoroughly supports what
+we have said: that incessant tribal warfare rather expressed than
+detracted from the vigor of the nation's life. It had this grave
+defect, however: it so kindled and cherished the instinct of
+separateness that union in face of a common foe was almost
+impossible. Long years of adverse fate were needed to merge the
+keen individual instinct of old into the common consciousness of
+to-day.</p>
+<p>Modern historians generally write as if the onslaught of the
+Northmen had had this unifying effect; as if it had been a great
+calamity, overwhelming the country for several centuries, and
+submerging its original life under a tide of conquest. Here again
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page235" id="page235"></a>[pg
+235]</span> the history of the time, as recorded year by year in
+the Annals, leads us to a wholly different conclusion. We find
+inroads of the Northmen, it is true; but they are only interludes
+in the old national life of storm and struggle. That enduring
+tribal conflict, of which we have already seen so much, did not
+cease even for a year. Nor can it have greatly mattered to the
+dwellers in some remote valley whether they were sacked, their
+cattle driven off, and their children taken captive by strangers or
+by men of their own land.</p>
+<p>There was one chief difference: the foreigners, being still
+heathens, did not spare the churches and the schools. The golden or
+silver reliquaries, the jeweled manuscript-cases, the offerings of
+precious stones and rich ornaments laid on the altars: these things
+proved an irresistible temptation to the roving sea-kings. They
+often burned or cast away the manuscripts, eager only to take the
+jeweled coverings, and in this way many monuments of the olden time
+have been lost, and many gaps in the history of the nation made
+irreparable. Yet it would seem that even the loss of manuscripts
+has been exaggerated, since such lavish abundance remains to us
+from the times before the first northern raiders came. Many
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page236" id="page236"></a>[pg
+236]</span> a remote shrine was never even approached by the
+northern wanderers; and, in the long times of peace between raid
+and raid, one school had time to gain from another copies of the
+books which were lost. We may hope that the somewhat rigid views of
+copyright expressed in the matter of St. Finian's Psalter were not
+invariably adhered to. We have Chronicles kept with unbroken
+regularity year by year through the whole of the epoch of Northern
+raids, and they by no means indicate a period of national
+depression, nor justify us in thinking of these raids as much more
+than episodes in the general fighting of the nation,--the martial
+state through which every modern country has passed before emerging
+to homogeneous life.</p>
+<p>To come to the events themselves, as they appeared to the men
+who witnessed them. We find the first record of the Northern
+raiders under the year 795: "The burning of Lambay by the Gentiles.
+The shrines were broken and plundered." This Lambay is an island of
+considerable extent, off the Dublin coast, some six or seven miles
+north of Howth. It rises gradually from the south extremity into a
+purple cliff of porphyry facing the northern sea, and on the
+sheltered slope under the sun a little church <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page237" id="page237"></a>[pg 237]</span> colony
+with schools and dwelling-houses had been built. Against this
+peaceful solitude the raiders came, burning and plundering, and
+when they rowed away again in their long ships towards the north, a
+smoldering black ruin bore testimony that they were indeed
+Gentiles, unblessed by Christian baptism.</p>
+<p>Three years later the little island of St. Patrick, six miles
+north of Lambay, met with a like fate. It was "burned by the
+Gentiles," as the Chronicles say. And from that time forth we hear
+of their long ships again and again, hovering hawk-like around the
+coasts of Ireland and Scotland. In 802, and again in 806, the
+Scottish Iona of Colum of the Churches was raided, and the next
+year we find the pirates making a descent upon Inismurray, off the
+Sligo coast, between the summit of Knocknarea and the cliffs of
+Slieve League. This last settlement of saints and scholars was
+founded by Molaise,--he who had pronounced sentence of exile on
+Colum of the Churches, the banishment that was the beginning of
+grace for the northern Picts. His oratory still remains on the
+island, beside the Church of the Men, the Church of the Women and
+the circular stone fort, which was very likely built to guard
+against new attacks, after this first raid. There are holy wells
+and altars there <span class="pagenum"><a name="page238" id=
+"page238"></a>[pg 238]</span> also, and Inismurray, better than any
+other place, gives us a picture of the old scholastic life of that
+remote and wonderful time.</p>
+<p>Five years later, the Northern raiders made their way further
+round the coast, under the shadow of the western mountains and the
+great cliffs of Achill; we read of "a slaughter of the people of
+Connemara by the Gentiles" in that year, and the year following,
+other battles with Gentiles are recorded in the same part of
+Ireland.</p>
+<p>In 818, if we are to believe the Annalist, a singular thing
+happened: "An army was led by Murcad, having the Ui-Neill of the
+North with him. Concobar king of Ireland with the Ui-Neill of the
+South and the Leinstermen came from the South on the other hand.
+When they came to one place, it happened, through a miracle of God,
+that they separated from each other for that time without slaughter
+or one of them spilling a drop of the other's blood." That entry
+better than any other shows the restless spirit of the times. It
+shows, too, that the first shock of Norse invasion had not in any
+sense warned the people and chieftains of Ireland of coming danger,
+nor had it in any degree checked the steady course of the nation's
+growth through storm and strife to <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page239" id="page239"></a>[pg 239]</span> personal consciousness,
+as the stepping-stone to the wider common consciousness of the
+modern world.</p>
+<p>The year following we read of "a plundering of Howth by the
+Gentiles, who carried off a great prey of women." These captives
+were doubtless the first to bring the Message of the New Way to the
+wild granite lands of the north, where the mountains in their
+grandeur frown upon the long inlets of the fiords. They taught to
+their children in those wild lands of exile the lessons of grace
+and holiness, so rudely interrupted when the long ships of the
+Norsemen were sighted from the Hill of Howth.</p>
+<p>A year later, in 820, the raiders had found their way to the
+southernmost extremity of the island; to Cape Clear, off the coast
+of Cork. This once again brings to our notice the position of so
+many of the early religious settlements,--on rocky islands off the
+coasts, well out of the turmoil of tribal strife which raged
+uninterrupted on the mainland. St. Patrick's Island and Lambay on
+the east, Clear Island on the south, and Inismurray on the
+northwest, so well protected by the sea from disturbance at home,
+were, by that very isolation, terribly exposed to these foreign
+raiders from the sea. Howth, Moville and Bangor, all on peninsulas,
+all by the seashore, enjoyed a like <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page240" id="page240"></a>[pg 240]</span> immunity and were open
+to a like danger. Therefore we are not surprised to find that, two
+years later, Bangor was "plundered by the Gentiles."</p>
+<p>It will be remembered that St. Patrick's first church was built
+on land given him by Dicu, chieftain of the district round
+Downpatrick, a name which commemorates the presence of the
+Messenger. Two sons of this same Dicu had been held as hostages by
+Laogaire the king, and their marvelous escape from durance was
+recorded in the name, Dun-da-lath-glas, the Dwelling of the Two
+Broken Fetters, given to Downpatrick. The place was of old renown.
+Known to Ptolemy as Dunum, it was, during Concobar's sway at Emain
+of Maca, the fortress of the strong chief, Celtcar, whose huge
+embattled hill of earth still rises formidable over the Quoyle
+River. In the year 823, we read, Dundalathglas was plundered by the
+Gentiles; but the story does not stop here, for we are further told
+that these same Gentiles were beaten by the Ulad armies not far
+from the great fort of Celtcar. This is the first entry of this
+tenor. Hitherto, the Northmen seem to have fallen only on outlying
+religious communities, in remote islands or on the seashore; but
+this last raid brought them to one of the very few church-schools
+which had been built <span class="pagenum"><a name="page241" id=
+"page241"></a>[pg 241]</span> close to a strong fortress, with the
+result that the Northmen were beaten and driven back into their
+ships.</p>
+<p>Three years later the Gentiles plundered Lusk on the mainland
+opposite Lambay, but in that same year they were twice defeated in
+battle, once by Cairbr&eacute; son of Catal, and once by the king
+of Ulad. The raids of the Norse warriors grow more frequent and
+determined from this time; in itself a testimony to the wealth and
+prosperity of the country, the abundance of gold and of accumulated
+riches, whether cattle or corn, ornaments or richly dyed stuffs,
+red and purple and blue. Word seems to have been carried to the
+wild hills and fiords of frozen Scandinavia that here was booty in
+abundance, and the pirate hordes came down in swarms.</p>
+<p>Thus we read that Armagh, the center of St. Patrick's work, and
+the chief home of learning, was thrice plundered in 830, the
+raiders sailing up Carlingford Lough and then making a dash of some
+fifteen miles across the undulating country separating them from
+the city of churches. This is the first time they ventured out of
+sight of their boats. Two years later they plundered Clondalkin,
+nine miles inland from the Dublin coast, where the Round Tower
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page242" id="page242"></a>[pg
+242]</span> still marks the site of the old church and school. To
+the growing frequency of these raids, it would seem, the building
+of Round Towers is to be attributed; they were at once belfries and
+places of refuge. We find, therefore, that the door is almost
+always many feet above the ground, being reached by a ladder
+afterwards drawn up by those inside. The number of these Round
+Towers all over the country, and the perfect preservation of many
+of them, show how universal this precaution was, and how effective
+were the refugees thus provided. It is instructive to read under
+this same year, 832, that "a great number of the family of
+Clonmacnoise were slain by Feidlimid king of Cashel, all their land
+being burned by him up to the door of the church." Thus the
+progress of tribal struggle was uninterrupted by the Gentile
+raids.</p>
+<p>Four years later, a fleet of sixty Norse fighting galleys sailed
+up the Boyne. Sixty long ships entered the Liffey in the same year,
+and a year later they captured the fortress of the Ford of the
+Hurdles, At-Cliat,--the old name of Dublin. Three years later we
+find the king of Munster plundering Meath and West Meath, showing
+that no sense of common danger disturbed the native kings. This
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page243" id="page243"></a>[pg
+243]</span> strengthens the view we have already taken: that the
+attacks of the Norse sea-kings were only an interlude in the
+incessant contests between the tribes of province and province;
+contests perfectly natural and normal to the development of the
+land, and through which every country has at some period
+passed.</p>
+<a name="243.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/243.jpg"><img src="images/243.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>ROUND TOWER, ANTRIM.</b></p>
+<p>It would seem that the Northmen who captured the Ford of the
+Hurdles departed from their former usage. Fortifying themselves, or
+strengthening the existent fortress, they determined to pass the
+winter in Ireland, instead of returning, as they had always done up
+to this time, before the autumn storms made dangerous the
+navigation of the wild northern seas. Their presence in this fort
+gave the native powers a center upon which to concentrate their
+attack, and as a result the year 846 was marked by a signal victory
+over the Northmen, twelve hundred of those at At-Cliat being slain.
+Four other successful contests with the raiders are recorded for
+the same year, and we can thoroughly trust the Annalists who, up to
+this time, have so faithfully recorded the disasters of their own
+race.</p>
+<p>About the same time the Northmen gained a second point of
+vantage by seizing and fortifying a strong <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page244" id="page244"></a>[pg 244]</span>
+position where the town of Cork now stands. Indeed their instinct
+of seamanship, their knowledge of good harbors and the conditions
+which make them, led them to fix their first entrenchments at
+Dublin, Cork and Limerick,--which remained for centuries after the
+great ports of the country on the east, south and west; and the
+Norse flavor still lingers in the names of Carlingford, Wexford and
+Waterford, the Fiords of Cairlinn, Weis and Vadre. A wonderful
+side-light on the whole epoch is shed by this entry for 847: "In
+this year sevenscore ships of the Gentiles from abroad fought
+against the Gentiles in Ireland." It would seem that the earlier
+comers, who had drawn up their long ships on the beach, and thrown
+up earthworks round their camp, instantly resented the attempt of
+later arrivals to poach on their preserves, and that a fierce fight
+was the result. During the whole of the following century we find
+signs of like rivalry between different bands of raiders, and it
+becomes evident that they were as much divided amongst themselves
+as were the native tribes they fought against.</p>
+<p>Two years later a further light is shed on this mutual strife
+when we are told that "Dark Gentiles came to At-Cliat and
+slaughtered the Fair Gentiles, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page245" id="page245"></a>[pg 245]</span> plundering their fort
+and carrying away both people and property." The next year saw a
+new struggle between the Dark Gentiles and the Fair Gentiles, with
+much mutual slaughter. This leads us to realize that these raiders,
+vaguely grouped by modern writers under the single name of Danes,
+really belonged to several different races, and doubtless came from
+many parts of the Baltic coasts, as well as from the fiords of the
+great Scandinavian peninsula. The Dark Foreigners are without doubt
+some of that same race of southern origin which we saw, ages
+earlier, migrating northwards along the Atlantic seaboard,--a race
+full of the spirit of the sea, and never happier than when the
+waves were curling and breaking under their prows. They found their
+way, we saw, as far northwards as the coast of Scotland, the
+Western Isles, and distant Norway over the foam, where the long
+fiords and rugged precipices gave them a congenial home. We find
+them hovering over the shores of Ireland at the very dawn of her
+history; and, in later but still remote ages, their power waned
+before the De Danaan tribes. This same dark race returning now from
+Norway, swooped hawk-like upon the rich shrines of the Irish island
+sanctuaries, only to come into hostile contact once <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page246" id="page246"></a>[pg 246]</span> more
+with sons of that golden-haired race which scattered the dark
+Fomorians at Mag Tuiread of the North. For the Fair Gentiles of our
+mediaeval Chronicle are no other than the golden-haired
+Scandinavians; the yellow-locked Baltic race that gave conquerors
+and a new ideal of beauty to the whole modern world. And this
+Baltic race, as we saw in an earlier epoch, was the source and
+mother of the old De Danaans, whose hair was like new-smelted gold
+or the yellow flag-lilies of our lakes and rivers. Thus after long
+ages the struggle of Fomor and De Danaan was renewed at the Ford of
+the Hurdles between the Dark and Fair Strangers, rivals for the
+plunder of the Irish religious schools.</p>
+<p>Though the personalities of this age do not stand forth with the
+high relief of Cuculain and Concobar, though we can hardly quote
+poems to equal the songs of Find son of Cumal and Ossin of the
+golden tongue, yet genuine inspiration never failed in the hearts
+of the warriors and on the lips of the bards. Thus in 860 did a
+poet lament the death of a king:</p>
+<blockquote>"Mournfully is spread her veil of grief over Erin<br>
+Since Maelseaclain, chieftain of our race has perished,--<br>
+Maelseaclain of the flowing Shannon.<br>
+Many a moan resounds in every place;<br>
+It is mournful news among the Gael.<br>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page247" id="page247"></a>[pg
+247]</span> Red wine has been spilled into the valley:<br>
+Erin's monarch has died.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Though he was wont to ride a white charger.<br>
+Though he had many steeds,<br>
+His car this day is drawn by a yoke of oxen.<br>
+The king of Erin is dead."</blockquote>
+<p>Four years afterwards the contest between the raiders and the
+chieftains grew keener, more centered, more like organized war. "A
+complete muster of the North was made by Aed Finnliat, so that he
+plundered the fortresses of the foreigners, wherever they were in
+the north; and he carried off their cattle and accoutrements, their
+goods and chattels. The foreigners of the province came together at
+Lough Foyle. After Aed king of Ireland had heard that this
+gathering of strangers was on the borders of his country, he was
+not negligent in attending to them. For he marched towards them
+with all his forces, and a battle was fought fiercely and
+spiritedly between them. The victory was gained over the
+foreigners, and a slaughter was made of them. Their heads were
+collected to one place, in the presence of the king, and
+twelve-score heads were reckoned before him, which was the number
+slain in that battle, besides the numbers of those who were wounded
+and carried off by him in the agonies of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page248" id="page248"></a>[pg 248]</span> death,
+and who died of their wounds some time afterwards."</p>
+<p>A renewal of tribal warfare in the second year after this, when
+this same Aed the king was attacked by Flann the lord of Breag in
+Meath, called forth certain battle-verses full of the fire and
+fervor of the time.</p>
+<p>A poet sang:</p>
+<blockquote>"At Kiladerry this day the ravens shall taste sips of
+blood:<br>
+A victory shall be gained over the magic host of the Gentiles<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; and over Flann."</blockquote>
+<p>The mother of Flann sang:</p>
+<blockquote>"Happiness! Woe! Good news! Bad news! The gaining of a
+great<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;triumphant battle.<br>
+<br>
+Happy the king whom it makes victorious; unhappy the king who<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;was defeated.<br>
+<br>
+Unhappy the host of Leat Cuin, to have fallen by the sprites<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;of Slain;<br>
+<br>
+Happy the reign of great Aed, and unhappy the loss of
+Flann."</blockquote>
+<p>Aed the victorious king sang:</p>
+<blockquote>"The troops of Leinster are with him, with the added
+men of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;swift Boyne;<br>
+<br>
+This shows the treachery of Flann: the concord of Gentiles<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;at his side."</blockquote>
+<p>After ten years, a bard thus sings the dirge of Aed:</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page249" id="page249"></a>[pg
+249]</span>
+<blockquote>"Long is the wintry night, with rough gusts of
+wind;<br>
+Under pressing grief we meet it, since the red-speared king<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; of the noble house lives not.<br>
+It is fearful to watch how the waves heave from the bottom;<br>
+To them may be compared all those who with us lament him.<br>
+A generous, wise, staid man, of whose renown the populous<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Tara was full.<br>
+A shielded oak that sheltered the palace of Milid's sons.<br>
+Master of the games of the fair hilled Taillten,<br>
+King of Tara of a hundred conflicts;<br>
+Chief of Fodla the noble, Aed of Oileac who died too soon.<br>
+Popular, not forgotten, he departed from this world,<br>
+A yew without any blemish upon him was he of the long-flowing<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; hair."</blockquote>
+<p>Nor must it be thought that these repeated raids which we have
+recorded in any way checked the full spiritual life of the nation.
+It is true that there was not that quiet serenity from which came
+the perfect beauty and art of the old Book of Kells, but a keenness
+and fire kindled the breasts of those who learned the New Way and
+the Ancient Learning. The schools sent forth a host of eminent men
+who over all western Europe laid the intellectual basis of the
+modern world. This view of Ireland's history might well be expanded
+almost without limit or possibility of exaggeration. Receiving, as
+we saw, the learning and traditions of Rome while Rome was yet
+mighty and a name of old imperial renown, Ireland <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page250" id="page250"></a>[pg 250]</span> kept
+and cherished the classical wisdom and learning, not less than the
+lore of Palestine. Then the northern garrisons of Rome were beaten
+back, and Britain and Gaul alike were devastated by hordes from
+beyond the Rhine. The first wild deluge of these fierce invaders
+was now over, and during the lull of the storm teachers went forth
+from Ireland to Scotland, as we have seen; they went also to
+Britain; to Belgium; to northern, central and southern Gaul; and to
+countries beyond the Rhine and in the south; to Switzerland and
+Austria, where one Irishman gave his name to the Canton of St.
+Gall, while another founded the famous see of Salzburg, a
+rallying-point through all the Middle Ages. It was not only for
+pure spiritual zeal and high inspiration that these teachers were
+famed. They had not less renown for all refined learning and
+culture. The famous universities of Oxford, Paris and Pavia count
+among the great spirits at their inception men who were worthy
+pupils of the schools of Devenish and Durrow, of Bangor and
+Moville.</p>
+<p>We have recorded the tribute paid by Alfred the Saxon king to
+the Ireland of his day. Let us add to it the testimony of a great
+divine of France. Elias, Bishop of Angoul&ecirc;me, who died in
+875, wrote thus: <span class="pagenum"><a name="page251" id=
+"page251"></a>[pg 251]</span> "What need to speak of Ireland;
+setting at nought, as it does, the difficulties of the sea, and
+coming almost in a body to our shores, with its crowd of
+philosophers, the most intelligent of whom are subjecting
+themselves to a voluntary exile."</p>
+<p>We have traced the raids of the Northmen for nearly a century.
+They continued for a century and a quarter longer. Through all this
+time the course of the nation's life was as we have described it: a
+raid from the sea, or from one of their seaboard fortresses by the
+Dark Gentiles or the Fair; an assembling of the hosts of the native
+chieftains against them; a fierce and spirited battle against the
+pirates in their mail-coats and armed with great battle-axes.
+Sometimes the chosen people prevailed, and sometimes the Gentiles;
+but in either case the heads of the slain were heaped up at the
+feet of the victor, many cattle were driven away as spoil, and
+young men and maidens were taken into captivity. It would seem that
+at no time was there any union between the foreigners of one and
+another seaboard fortress, any more than there was unity among the
+tribes whom they raided and who defeated them in their turn. It was
+a strife of warring units, without fusion; small groups round
+chosen leaders, and these <span class="pagenum"><a name="page252"
+id="page252"></a>[pg 252]</span> merging for awhile in greater
+groups. Thus the life of the times, in its warlike aspect. Its
+spiritual vigor we have sufficiently shown, not less in the
+inspirations of the saints than in the fiery songs of the bards,
+called forth by battles and the death of kings. Everywhere there
+was fierce force and seething energy, bringing forth fruit of piety
+or prowess.</p>
+<p>The raiders slowly lost their grasp of the fortresses they had
+seized. Newcomers ceased to fill their thinning ranks. Their force
+was finally shattered at the battle of Clontarf, which the Annalist
+thus records: "1013: The Foreigners of the west of Europe assembled
+against Brian and Maelseaclain, and they took with them a thousand
+men with coats of mail. A spirited, fierce, violent, vengeful and
+furious battle was fought between them, the likeness of which was
+not to be found in that time, at Cluain-tarb, the Lawn of the
+Bulls. In this battle was slain Brian son of Ceinneidig, monarch of
+Ireland, who was the Augustus of all the west of Europe, in the
+eighty-eighth year of his age."</p>
+<p>The scene of this famous conflict is on the coast, between
+Dublin and the Hill of Howth. A wide strand of boulders is laid
+bare by the receding tide, with green sea-grass carpeting the
+stones. At the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page253" id=
+"page253"></a>[pg 253]</span> very verge of the farthest tide are
+two huge sand-banks, where the waves roar and rumble with a sound
+like the bellowing of bulls, and this tumultuous roaring is
+preserved in the name of the place unto this day.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page254" id="page254"></a>[pg
+254]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page255" id="page255"></a>[pg
+255]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page256" id="page256"></a>[pg
+256]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page257" id="page257"></a>[pg
+257]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XI."></a>XI.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1013-1250.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>There was, as we have seen, no "Danish Conquest" of Ireland, nor
+anything approaching a conquest. What really happened during the
+ninth and tenth centuries was this: Raiders from the shores of the
+Northern seas, from the Scandinavian peninsula and the Western
+Isles of Scotland, sailed in their long ships among the islands of
+the Irish coast, looking for opportunities to plunder the
+treasuries of the religious schools, and carrying off the gold and
+silver reliquaries and manuscript cases, far more valuable to these
+heathen seamen than the Latin or Gaelic manuscripts they
+contained.</p>
+<p>These raids had little connection with each other; they were the
+outcome of individual daring, mere boat's-crews from one or another
+of the Northern fiords. A few of the more persistent gradually grew
+reluctant to retreat with their booty to the frozen north, and
+tried to gain a footing on the shores of the fertile and wealthy
+island they had discovered. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page258"
+id="page258"></a>[pg 258]</span> They made temporary camps on the
+beach, always beside the best harbors, and threw up earthworks
+round them, or perhaps more lasting forts of stone. Thus they
+established a secondary base for raids inland, and a place of
+refuge whither they might carry the cattle, corn and captives which
+these raids brought them from the territories of the native clans.
+These camps on the shore were the germ of a chain of sea-ports at
+Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.</p>
+<p>From these points raiding went on, and battles were fought in
+which the raiders were as often vanquished as victorious. There was
+little union between the various Norse forts, and indeed we
+sometimes find them fighting valiantly among themselves. Meanwhile,
+the old tribal contest went on everywhere throughout the island.
+The south invaded the north and was presently invaded in return.
+The east and the west sent expeditions against each other. Clan
+went forth against clan, chief against chief, and cattle and
+captives many times changed hands. These captives, it would seem,
+became the agricultural class in each clan, being made to work as
+the penalty for unsuccessful fighting. The old tribal life went on
+unbroken during the whole of this period; nor did it <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page259" id="page259"></a>[pg 259]</span>
+subsequently yield to pressure from without, but rather passed
+away, during succeeding centuries, as the result of inward growth.
+Meanwhile the religious schools continued their work, studying
+Latin and Greek as well as the old Gaelic, and copying manuscripts
+as before; and one fruit of their work we see in the gradual
+conversion of the heathen Norsemen, who were baptized and admitted
+to the native church. The old bardic schools likewise continued, so
+that we have a wealth of native manuscripts belonging to this time,
+embodying the finest tradition and literature of the earlier pagan
+ages.</p>
+<a name="259.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/259.jpg"><img src="images/259.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>GIANT'S HEAD AND DUNLUCE CASTLE, CO. ANTRIM.</b></p>
+<p>If the Danes and Northern raiders never conquered Ireland, on
+the other hand they never were expelled. Through the cessation of
+the original impulse of unrest which brought them, they gradually
+ceased to receive accessions from the North, and at the same time
+the forces of amalgamation were slowly merging them into the
+national and tribal life of their new home. Their separate
+influence grew less and less, but their race continued, and
+continues to this day in the sea-ports we have named.</p>
+<p>We shall presently have to record another series of Norse
+inroads, this time not directly from the North, but mediately,
+through France and Britain, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page260"
+id="page260"></a>[pg 260]</span> and we shall find that much of our
+subsequent history was influenced by the new elements and
+principles then added. We shall do well, therefore, to linger for a
+moment before this new transition, to gain a clear view of the
+tendencies of the epoch then closed, the wider significance of that
+chapter of our nation's life.</p>
+<p>The culture of Ireland, during the period before the Northern
+raids, bridged over the abyss between the classical and the
+mediaeval world. During the whole of that period the rest of Europe
+was hidden under the clouds of the Dark Ages. Ireland stood alone
+as the one cultured nation. Receiving the classical learning from
+Roman Gaul and Britain and Italy, while the old world was still
+alive, Ireland carried that culture onward when Rome and the Roman
+Empire fell, crushed under the hordes of Northern barbarians: the
+Franks in Gaul; the Lombards, Goths and Vandals in Spain and Italy;
+the Angles, Saxons and Danes in Britain; and the Picts and Northmen
+in the Scottish lowlands. Austria was meanwhile overrun by Asian
+nomads, the Huns and Magyars; Russia and Germany, with the
+Scandinavian lands, were still pagan.</p>
+<p>Thus all Europe was submerged under a deluge of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page261" id="page261"></a>[pg 261]</span>
+heathenism, and the old Latin culture was swept away. The tradition
+of ancient Greece still lingered at Constantinople behind the wall
+of the Balkans, but it had no influence at all on the northern
+nations beyond the wall. Ireland was thus the one exception, the
+ark of safety for the old wisdom and beauty of classical days. And
+from Ireland, when the tide of heathen invasion slackened, the
+light of classical times and the spirit of the New Way went forth
+to all the nascent nations, the great pagan tribes that were to
+form the modern world. Thus Ireland was the bridge over the Dark
+Ages, the first of modern nations, keeping the old and blending it
+with the new.</p>
+<p>Yet another view of Ireland's significance must not be
+forgotten. Of the original life of the great pagan world which
+swept over the Roman Empire we know almost nothing. How much do we
+realize of the thought and genius of Aleman, Frank and Vandal, of
+Angle and Lombard and Burgundian?</p>
+<p>Nothing at all. The darkness that shrouds them is complete. But
+what a contrast when we come to Ireland! If we leave out the basin
+of the Mediterranean, with its Asian and African traditions,
+Ireland is the one European nation which has clear records
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page262" id="page262"></a>[pg
+262]</span> of its pagan history. And how excellent that history
+was, how full of humanity and the rich wine of life, the stories of
+Fergus and Concobar and Cuculain, of Find and Ossin and Gael, of
+Meave and Deirdr&eacute; and Cred&eacute; bear sufficient witness.
+The tide of Irish life to which they belong, and which brought them
+forth, flowed on without break to a time so recent that their whole
+tradition has come down to us, practically at first hand, from the
+heralds and bards themselves. Ireland is, therefore, our one
+doorway to the history of northern Europe through the long era of
+pagan times.</p>
+<p>That history was everywhere a fierce tale of tribal warfare. Its
+heroes are valiant fighters, keen leaders of forays, champion
+swordsmen and defenders of forts. The air throbs to the
+battle-drum, rings to the call of the war-trumpet. Every tribe,
+every clan, is in turn victor and vanquished, raider and victim of
+raids. Everywhere are struggle and unrest, tales of captivity and
+slaughter.</p>
+<p>We fall into vain lamenting over this red rapine and wrath,
+until we divine the genius and secret purpose of that wonderful
+epoch, so wholly different in inspiration from our own. The life of
+races, like the life of men, has its ordered stages, and none can
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page263" id="page263"></a>[pg
+263]</span> ripen out of season. That was the epoch of dawning
+individual consciousness, when men were coming to a keen and vivid
+realization of themselves and their powers. Keen consciousness and
+strong personal will could be developed only through
+struggle--through long ages of individual and independent fighting,
+where the best man led, and often fought for his right to lead with
+the best of his followers. Innumerable centers of initiative and
+force were needed, and these the old tribal life abundantly gave.
+The territory of a chief hardly stretched farther than he could
+ride in a day, so that every part of it had a real place in his
+heart. Nor was he the owner of that territory. He was simply the
+chosen leader of the men who lived there, perhaps the strongest
+among many brothers who shared it equally between them. If another
+thought himself the better man, the matter was forthwith decided by
+fighting.</p>
+<p>The purpose of all this was not the "survival of the fittest" in
+the material sense, but a harvest purely spiritual: the ripening of
+keen personal consciousness and will in all the combatants, to the
+full measure of their powers. The chiefs were the strongest men who
+set the standard and served as models for the rest, but that
+standard held the minds <span class="pagenum"><a name="page264" id=
+"page264"></a>[pg 264]</span> of all, the model of perfect valor
+was in the hearts of all. Thus was personal consciousness gained
+and perfected.</p>
+<p>If we keep this in mind as the keynote of the whole pagan epoch,
+we shall be better able to comprehend the new forces which were
+added to that epoch, and which gradually transformed it. The
+greatest was the Message of the New Way. Deeds are stronger than
+words, and in the deeds of the first Messengers we can see the new
+spirit bearing fruit. The slave of Slemish mountain returned
+breathing not vengeance for his captivity but pity and generous
+kindness towards his captors. Colum the exile did not seek to
+enlist the Picts against his native land, but sought rather to give
+the message of that land to the wild Pictish warriors, and to
+spread humane and generous feeling among them. Thus was laid the
+foundation of a wide and universal consciousness; a bridge was
+built between soul and soul.</p>
+<p>From the waning of the Norsemen to the first coming of the
+Normans is a period of about a hundred and fifty years. We shall
+best gain an insight into the national and religious life of that
+time by gleaning from the Annals the vivid and living pictures they
+never fail to give,--pictures which are the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page265" id="page265"></a>[pg 265]</span>
+records of eye-witnesses. The strictly contemporary character of
+the records is vouched for by the correct entry of eclipses: for
+instance, "on the day before the calends of September, in the year
+1030, there was a darkening of the sun."</p>
+<p>We see the genius of the Norsemen suffering a like eclipse the
+year before: "1029: Olaf son of Sitric, lord of the Foreigners, was
+taken prisoner by Matgamain Ua Riagain lord of Breag, who exacted
+twelve hundred cows as his ransom, together with seven score
+British horses, three score ounces of gold, the sword of Carlus,
+the Irish hostages, sixty ounces of white silver as the ransom of
+his fetters, eighty cows for word and supplication, and four
+hostages to Ua Riagain as a security of peace."</p>
+<p>Two generations later we read: "1088: Tigearnac Ua Briain, chief
+successor of Ciaran and Coman, died. He was a paragon of learning
+and history." The work of the paragon Tigearnac, a history of
+Ireland, is extant and writ in choice Latin, a monument at once of
+the classical learning of our schools and of the historical spirit
+carried down from the days of the pagan heralds and bards.
+Tigearnac quotes abundantly from Greek and Latin authors,
+fortifying his conclusions with passages from Eusebius,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page266" id="page266"></a>[pg
+266]</span> Orosius, Julius Africanus, Josephus, Jerome and
+Bede.</p>
+<p>A half-century later we get a quaint and vivid glimpse into the
+religious life of the time: "1145: A lime-kiln which was sixty feet
+every way was erected opposite Emain Maca by Gilla Mac Liag, the
+successor of Patrick, and Patrick's clergy in general." Here is the
+glow of that devotion through work which gave us the great
+mediaeval cathedrals, the fervor and artistic power, which in
+former times adorned the Gospels of the Book of Kells, now working
+out its way in lasting stone. The date of this lime-kiln lies
+indeed just half-way between the consecration of Cormac's Chapel at
+Cashel in 1134 and the foundation of the beautiful cathedral beside
+it by the lord of Tuaid-Muma or Thomond in 1152. Cormac's Chapel is
+a very pure example of native style, untouched by foreign or
+continental influence.</p>
+<a name="267.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/267.jpg"><img src="images/267.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>ROCK CASHEL, RUINS OF OLD CATHEDRAL, KING CORMAC'S CHAPEL AND
+ROUND TOWER.</b></p>
+<p>We can divine the figure of one of the great men of the
+religious world in the records for the year 1148: "A synod was
+convened at Saint Patrick's Isle by Maelmaedog, called also
+Malachias, successor of Patrick, at which were present fifteen
+bishops and two hundred priests, to establish rules and morals for
+all. Maelmaedog by the advice of the synod went <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page267" id="page267"></a>[pg 267]</span> a
+second time to Rome, to confer with the successor of Peter." A few
+months later we read this record of his death: "Malachias, that is,
+Maelmaedog Ua Morgair, Archbishop of the chair of Patrick, chief
+head of the piety of the West of Europe, legate of the successor of
+Peter, the only head whom the Irish and the Foreigners obeyed,
+chief paragon of wisdom and piety, a brilliant lamp which illumined
+territories and churches by preaching and good works, faithful
+shepherd of the church in general,--after having ordained bishops
+and priests and persons of every degree; after having consecrated
+many churches and cemeteries; after having performed every
+ecclesiastical work throughout Ireland; after having bestowed
+jewels and food upon the mighty and the needy; after having founded
+churches and monasteries, for by him was repaired in Ireland every
+church which had been consigned to decay and neglect, and they had
+been neglected from times remote; --after leaving every rule and
+every good moral in the churches of Ireland in general; after
+having been the second time in the legateship; after having been
+fourteen years in the primacy; and after the fifty-fourth year of
+his age, resigned his spirit to heaven on the second day of
+November, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="page268" id=
+"page268"></a>[pg 268]</span> was buried in the monastery of Saint
+Bernard at Claravallis in France."</p>
+<p>This is the same worthy under whose influence was built the
+great lime-kiln over against the fort of Emain, where Concobar once
+ruled. Even from the scant notices which we have quoted he stands
+forth clear and strong, full of spiritual and moral vigor, a great
+man in every sense, and one in whom we divine a lovable and
+admirable spirit. At that time there were four archbishoprics in
+Ireland, at Armagh, Cashel, Dublin and Tuam; the primacy belonging
+to the first, as the seat of the Damliag Mor or Great Stone Church,
+built by Saint Patrick himself. A sentence in the Annals shows how
+the revenues were raised: "A horse from every chieftain, a sheep
+from every hearth." A few passages like these are enough to light
+up whole epochs of that mediaeval time, and to show us how
+sympathetic, strong and pure that life was, in so many ways.</p>
+<p>We find, meanwhile, that the tribal struggle continued as of
+old: "1154: Toirdealbac Ua Concobar brought a fleet round Ireland
+northwards, and plundered Tir-Conaill and Inis Eogain. The Cinel
+Eogain sent to hire the fleets of the Hebrides, Arran, Cantyre and
+Man, and the borders of Alba in general, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page269" id="page269"></a>[pg 269]</span> and
+they fell in with the other fleet and a naval battle was fiercely
+and spiritedly fought between them. They continued the conflict
+from, the beginning of the day till evening, but the foreign fleet
+was defeated." This records perhaps the only lesson learned from
+the Norsemen, the art of naval warfare. We may regret that the new
+knowledge was not turned to a more national end.</p>
+<p>Four years later, "a wicker bridge was made by Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar at Athlone, for the purpose of making incursions into
+Meath. There was a pacific meeting between Ruaidri Ua Concobar and
+Tigearnan, and they made peace, and took mutual oaths before
+sureties and relics." This is our first meeting with a king as
+remarkable in his way as the great archbishop his contemporary.
+Ruaidri descendant of Concobar was king of Connacht, holding the
+land from the western ocean up to the great frontier of the river
+Shannon. Eager to plunder his neighbors and bring back "a countless
+number of cows," he undertook this wonderful work, a pile bridge
+across the river, seemingly the first of its kind to be built
+there, and in structure very like the famous bridge which Caesar
+built across the Rhine,--or like many of the wooden bridges across
+the upper streams <span class="pagenum"><a name="page270" id=
+"page270"></a>[pg 270]</span> of the Danube at the present day. We
+shall record a few more of this enterprising and large-minded
+prince's undertakings, following the course of the years.</p>
+<p>In parenthesis, we find a clue to the standard of value of the
+time in this record: "1161: The visitation of Osraige was made by
+Flaitbeartac, successor of Colum Kill; the tribute due to him was
+seven score oxen, but he selected, as a substitute for these, four
+hundred and twenty ounces of pure silver." The price of an ox was,
+therefore, three ounces of silver. The old-time barter, an echo of
+which still lingers in the word "pecuniary" from the Latin name for
+"cattle," was evidently yielding to the more convenient form of
+exchange through the medium of the metals, which are easily carried
+and divided, and suffer no detriment from the passage of time. With
+the wicker bridge and the lime-kiln, this change from a tribute in
+cattle to a payment in silver may remind us that we are on the
+threshold of the modern world.</p>
+<p>In 1162 we find the king of Connacht in a new adventure: "An
+army was led by Muirceartac Ua Lochlain, accompanied by the people
+of the north of Ireland, the men of Meath, and a battalion of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page271" id="page271"></a>[pg
+271]</span> Connacht men, to At-Cliat, to lay siege to the
+Foreigners and the Irish; but Ua Lochlain retired without battle or
+hostages after having plundered the Fair Strangers. A peace was
+afterwards concluded between the Foreigners and the Gaels; and six
+score ounces of gold were given by the Foreigners to Ua Lochlain,
+and five score ounces of gold were paid by Diarmaid Ua Maelseaclain
+to Ruaidri Ua Concobar for West Meath." Here again we see the
+"countless cows" giving place to counted gold in the levying of
+tribute. We note also, in the following year, that "a lime-kiln
+measuring seventy feet every way was made by the successor of Colum
+Kill and the clergy of Colum Kill in twenty days," in evident
+emulation of the work of the Armagh see.</p>
+<p>The synod already recorded as having been held in the little
+island of Saint Patrick off the Dublin coast, gives us a general
+view of the church at that time, the number of sees and parishes,
+and the spirit animating them. We gain a like view of the civil
+state in the record of a great assembly convened in 1167 by the
+energetic and enterprising Connacht king: "A great meeting was
+called together by Ruaidri Ua Concobar and the chiefs of Leat Cuin,
+both lay and ecclesiastic, and the chiefs of At-boy,--the Yellow
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page272" id="page272"></a>[pg
+272]</span> Ford across one of the streams of the Boyne in Meath.
+To it came the successor of Patrick, the archbishop of Connacht,
+the archbishop of Leinster, the lord of Breifne, the lord of
+Oirgialla, the king of Ulster, the king of Tara, and Ragnall son of
+Ragnall, lord of the Foreigners. The whole of their gathering and
+assemblage was 19,000 horsemen, of which 6000 were Connachtmen,
+4000 with the lord of Breifne, 2000 with the king of Tara, 4000
+with the lord of Oirgialla and the king of Ulster, 2000 with the
+chief of Ui-Failge, and 1000 with the Foreigners of At-Cliat. They
+passed many good resolutions at this meeting, respecting veneration
+for churches and clerics, and control of tribes and territories, so
+that women used to traverse Ireland alone; and a restoration of his
+prey was made by the chief of the Ui-Failge at the hands of the
+kings aforesaid. They afterwards separated in peace and amity,
+without battle or controversy, or without anyone complaining of
+another at that meeting, in consequence of the prosperousness of
+the king, who had assembled these chiefs with their forces at one
+place."</p>
+<p>Here is a foreshadowing of the representative assemblies of our
+modern times, and the same wise spirit is shown in another event of
+the same year, thus <span class="pagenum"><a name="page273" id=
+"page273"></a>[pg 273]</span> recorded: "A hosting and a mustering
+of the men of Ireland, with their chieftains, by Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar; thither came the lord of Deas-muma, the lord of
+Tuaid-muma, the king of Meath, the lord of Oirgialla and all the
+chieftains of Leinster. They arrived in Tir-Eogain, and allotted
+the part of it north of Slieve Gullion,--now the eastern part of
+Derry,--to Nial Ua Lochlain for two hostages, and allotted the part
+of the country of the clan to the south of the mountain to Aed Ua
+Neill for two other hostages. Then the men of Ireland returned back
+southwards over Slieve Fuaid, through Tir-Eogain and Tir-Connaill,
+and over Assaroe--the Cataract of the Erne--and Ruaidri Ua Concobar
+escorted the lord of Deas-muma with his forces southwards through
+Tuaid-muma as far as Cnoc-Ain&eacute;--in Limerick--and the lord of
+Deas-muma departed with gifts of many jewels and riches."</p>
+<p>While the Norse foreigners were a power at Dublin, Waterford,
+Cork and Limerick, there were not wanting occasions when one of the
+native tribes called on them for aid against another tribe, sharing
+with them the joys of victory or the sorrow of defeat, and, where
+fortune favored, dividing with them the "countless cows" taken in a
+raid. In like manner <span class="pagenum"><a name="page274" id=
+"page274"></a>[pg 274]</span> the Cinel Eogain, as we saw, hired
+the fleet of the Norsemen of the Western Isles of Scotland to help
+them to resist a raid of the Connachtmen. The example thus set was
+followed repeatedly in the coming years, and we find mention of
+Flemings, Welshmen and Saxons brought over to take one side or
+other in the tribal wars.</p>
+<p>In the same year that saw the two assemblings of the chieftains
+under Ruaidri Ua Concobar, another chieftain, Diarmaid son of
+Murcad brought in from "the land of the Saxons," as it was called,
+one of these bands of foreign mercenaries, for the most part Welsh
+descendants of the old Gaelic Britons, to aid him in his contest
+for "the kingdom of the sons of Ceinnsealaig." Two years later,
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar "granted ten cows every year from himself and
+from every king that should follow him for ever, to the Lector of
+Ard Maca, in honor of Patrick, to instruct the youths of Ireland
+and Alba in Literature."</p>
+<p>For the next year, 1170, we find this record: "Robert Mac Stepni
+and Ricard Mac Gillebert--Iarl Strangbow--came from Saxonland into
+Erin with a numerous force, and many knights and archers, in the
+army of the son of Murcad, to contest Leinster <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page275" id="page275"></a>[pg 275]</span> for
+him, and to disturb the Gaels of Erin in general; and the son of
+Murcad gave his daughter to Iarl Strangbow for coming into his
+army. They took Loch Garman--Wexford--and Port
+Lairge--Waterford--by force; and they took Gillemaire the officer
+of the fortress and Ua Faelain lord of the Deisi and his son, and
+they killed seven hundred persons there. Domnall Breagac with
+numbers of the men of Breag fell by the Leinstermen on that
+occasion. An army was led by Ruaidri Ua Concobar with the lord of
+Breifne and the lord of Oirgialla against Leinster and the
+Foreigners aforesaid, and there was a challenge of battle between
+them for the space of three days." This contest was indecisive. The
+most noteworthy event of the battle was the plundering and
+slaughter of the Danes of At-Cliat by the newcomers under Iarl
+Strangbow. The Danes had long before this given up their old pagan
+faith, converted by their captives and their Gaelic neighbors.
+Christ Church Cathedral in At-Cliat or Dublin was founded early in
+the preceding century by Sitric son of Olaf, king of the Danes of
+Dublin, and Donatus the first Danish bishop; but the oldest part of
+the present structure belongs to the time we are now speaking of:
+the close of the twelfth century. The transepts with <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page276" id="page276"></a>[pg 276]</span> their
+chevron mouldings and the principal doorway are of that period, and
+we may regard them as an offering in expiation of the early heathen
+raids on Lambay, Saint Patrick's Isle, and the early schools of the
+church.</p>
+<p>The ambitious Diarmaid Mac Murcad died shortly after the last
+battle we have recorded, "perishing without sacrament, of a
+loathsome disease;" a manifest judgment, in the eyes of the
+Chronicler, for the crime of bringing the Normans to Ireland. In
+the year that saw his death, "Henry the Second, king of the Saxons
+and duke of the Normans, came to Ireland with two hundred and forty
+ships." He established a footing in the land, as one of many
+contesting powers, but the immediate results of his coming were
+slight. This we can judge from the record of three years later: "A
+brave battle was fought by the Foreigners under Iarl Strangbow and
+the Gaels under Ruaidri Ua Concobar at Thurles, in which the
+Foreigners were finally defeated by dint of fighting. Seventeen
+hundred of the Foreigners were slain in the battle, and only a few
+of them survived with the Iarl, who proceeded in sorrow to his home
+at Port Lairge--Waterford." Iarl Strangbow died two years later at
+Dublin.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page277" id="page277"></a>[pg
+277]</span>
+<p>Norman warriors continue to appear during the succeeding years,
+fighting against the native chieftains and against each other,
+while the native chieftains continue their own quarrels, just as in
+the days of the first Norse raids. Thus in the year of Iarl
+Strangbow's death, Kells was laid waste by the Foreigners in
+alliance with the native Ui-Briain, while later in the same year
+the Foreigners were driven from Limerick by Domnall Ua-Briain, who
+laid siege to them and forced them to surrender.</p>
+<p>Two years later, four hundred and fifty of the followers of De
+Courcy, another great Norman warrior, were defeated at Maghera
+Conall in Louth, some being drowned in the river, while others were
+slain on the battlefield. In the same year De Courcy was again
+defeated with great slaughter in Down, and escaped severely wounded
+to Dublin. For At-Cliat, from being a fortress of the Danes and
+Norsemen, was gradually becoming a Norman town. The doorway of
+Christ Church Cathedral, which dates from about this time, is of
+pure Norman style.</p>
+<p>In 1186 we find a son of the great Ruaidri Ua Concobar paying a
+band of these same Foreigners three thousand cows as "wages," for
+joining him in some plundering expedition against his neighbors.
+The <span class="pagenum"><a name="page278" id="page278"></a>[pg
+278]</span> genius of strife reigned supreme, and the newcomers
+were as completely under its sway as the old clansmen. Just as we
+saw the Dark Norsemen of the ninth century coming in their long
+ships to plunder the Fair Norsemen of At-Cliat, and the Fair
+Norsemen not less vigorously retaliating, so now we find wars
+breaking out among the Normans who followed in the steps of the
+Norsemen. In 1205 the Norman chieftain who held a part of Meath
+under his armed sway, and who had already built a strong castle at
+Kells, was at war with the De Bermingham family, who at that time
+held the old Danish stronghold of Limerick. Two years later another
+contest broke out between the De Berminghams and William Marescal,
+and yet another struggle between Hugo de Lacy and De Bermingham,
+very disastrous to the retainers of the latter, for the Chronicler
+tells us that "nearly all his people were ruined."</p>
+<p>Thus the old life of tribal struggle went on. The country was
+wealthy, full of cattle and herds, silver and gold, stored corn and
+fruit, rich dyed stuffs and ornaments. The chieftains and
+provincial kings lived in state within their forts, with their
+loyal warriors around them, feasting and making merry, and the
+bards and heralds recited for their delight the great <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page279" id="page279"></a>[pg 279]</span> deeds
+of the men of old, their forefathers; the harpers charmed or
+saddened them with the world-old melodies that Deirdr&eacute; had
+played for Naisi, that Meave had listened to, that Cred&eacute;
+sang for her poet lover.</p>
+<p>The life of the church was not less vigorous and vital. There
+are many churches and cathedrals of that period of transition, as
+of the epoch before the first Norman came, which show the same
+fervor and devotion, the same faith made manifest by works of
+beauty. In truth no country in the world has so full and rich a
+record in lasting stone, beginning with the dwellings of the early
+saints who had seen the first Messenger face to face, and passing
+down through age after age, showing the life and growth of the
+faith from generation to generation.</p>
+<p>The schools, as we saw, carried on the old classical tradition,
+bringing forth monuments like the Annals of Tigearnac; and there
+was the same vigor and vital force in every part of the nation's
+life. The coming of the Normans changed this in no essential
+regard. There was something added in architecture, the Norman
+modifying the old native style; the castle and keep gradually
+taking the place of the earthwork and stone fort. And in the tenure
+of land <span class="pagenum"><a name="page280" id=
+"page280"></a>[pg 280]</span> certain new principles were
+introduced. But the sum of national life went on unbroken, less
+modified, probably, than it had been by the old Norse raids.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page281" id="page281"></a>[pg
+281]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE NORMANS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page282" id="page282"></a>[pg
+282]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page283" id="page283"></a>[pg
+283]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XII."></a>XII.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE NORMANS.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1250-1603.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>When summing up each epoch of Irish history, we may find both
+interest and profit in considering what the future of the land and
+the people might have been had certain new elements not been added.
+Thus we may try to picture to ourselves what would have been our
+history had our life moved forward from the times of Cuculain and
+Concobar, of Find and Cormac son of Art, without that transforming
+power which the fifth century brought. We may imagine the tribal
+strife and stress growing keener and fiercer, till the whole life
+and strength of the people was fruitlessly consumed in plundering
+and destroying.</p>
+<p>Or we may imagine an unbroken continuance of the epoch of
+saintly aspiration, the building of churches, the illumination of
+holy books, so dividing the religious from the secular community as
+almost to make two nations in one, a nation altogether absorbed in
+the present life, with another nation living <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page284" id="page284"></a>[pg 284]</span> in its
+midst, but dwelling wholly in the thought of the other world.
+Religion would have grown to superstition, ecstasy would have ruled
+in the hearts of the religious devotees, weakening their hold on
+the real, and wafting them away into misty regions of paradise. We
+should have had every exaggeration of ascetic practice, hermitages
+multiplying among the rocks and islands of the sea, men and women
+torturing their bodies for the saving of their souls.</p>
+<p>The raids of the Norsemen turned the strong aspirations of the
+religious schools into better channels, bringing them to a sense of
+their identity with the rest of the people, compelling them to bear
+their part of the burden of calamity and strife. The two nations
+which might have wandered farther and farther apart were thus
+welded into one, so that the spirit of religion became what it has
+ever since remained, something essential and inherent in the life
+of the whole people.</p>
+<p>After the waning of the Norsemen, a period opened full of great
+national promise in many ways. We see the church strengthened and
+confirmed, putting forth its power in admirable works of art,
+churches and cathedrals full of the fire and fervor of devotion,
+and conceived in a style truly national, with a sense <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page285" id="page285"></a>[pg 285]</span> of
+beauty altogether its own. Good morals and generous feeling mark
+the whole life of the church through this period, and the great
+archbishop whose figure we have drawn in outline is only one of
+many fine and vigorous souls among his contemporaries.</p>
+<a name="285.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/285.jpg"><img src="images/285.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>DUNLUCE CASTLE.</b></p>
+<p>The civil life of the nation, too, shows signs of singular
+promise at the same time, a promise embodied in the person of the
+king of Connacht, Ruaidri Ua Concobar, some of whose deeds we have
+recorded. There was a clearer sense of national feeling and
+national unity than ever before, a recognition of the method of
+conciliation and mutual understanding, rather than the old appeal
+to armed force, as under the genius of tribal strife. We see
+Ruaidri convoking the kings, chieftains and warriors to a solemn
+assembly, presided over by the king and the archbishops of the
+realm, and "passing good resolutions" for the settlement of
+religious and civil matters, and the better ordering of territories
+and tribes. That assembly was convened a half-century before the
+famous meeting between King John and his barons, at Runnymead among
+the Windsor meadows; and the seed then sown might have brought
+forth fruit as full of promise and potency for the future as the
+Great Charter itself. The contrast between these <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page286" id="page286"></a>[pg 286]</span> two
+historic assemblies is instructive. In the one case, we have a
+provincial king from the rich and beautiful country beyond the
+Shannon, gradually gaining such influence over the kings of the
+provinces and the chieftains of the tribes that he had come to be
+regarded as in a sense the overlord of the whole land, not through
+inherent sovreignty or divine right, but first as the chosen chief
+of his own tribe, and then as the elect of the whole body of
+chieftains, first among his peers. In this character we see Ruaidri
+settling disputes between two sections of the great Northern clan,
+and fixing a boundary between them; giving presents to the
+chieftains of the south for their support in this difficult
+decision, and exercising a beneficent influence over the whole
+people, a moral sway rather than a sovereign and despotic
+authority. It is pleasant to find the same king establishing a
+college foundation for the instruction of the youth of Ireland and
+Scotland in literature.</p>
+<p>This is what we have on the one hand. On the other, we have the
+Norman king surrounded by his barons, over whom he claimed, but
+could not exercise, despotic authority; and the Norman barons
+taking advantage of his necessity to extort promises <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page287" id="page287"></a>[pg 287]</span> and
+privileges for their own order rather than for the whole people.
+For we must remember that the Angles and Saxons had been reduced by
+conquest to a servile condition, from which they never wholly
+recovered. The ruling classes of Britain at the present day are at
+least nominal descendants of those same Norman barons; and between
+them and the mass of the people--the sons of the Saxons and
+Angles--there is still a great gulf fixed. It is quite impossible
+for one of the tillers of the soil to stand on a footing of
+equality with the old baronial class, and the gulf has widened,
+rather than closed, since the battle of Hastings and the final
+overthrow of the Saxon power.</p>
+<p>We see here the full contrast between the ideal of kingship in
+Ireland and that which grew up among the Norman conquerors of the
+Saxons. The Irish king was always in theory and often in fact a
+real representative, duly elected by the free suffrage of his
+tribesmen; he was not owner of the tribal land, as the duke of the
+Normans was; he was rather the leader of the tribe, chosen to guard
+their common possessions. The communal system of Ireland stands
+here face to face with the feudal system of the Normans.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page288" id="page288"></a>[pg
+288]</span>
+<p>It would be a study of great interest to consider what form of
+national life might have resulted in Ireland from the free growth
+of this principle of communal chieftainship. There are many
+analogies in other lands, all of which point to the likelihood of a
+slow emergence of the hereditary principle; a single family finally
+overtopping the whole nation. Had this free development taken
+place, we might have had a strong and vigorous national evolution,
+an abundant flowering of all our energies and powers through the
+Middle Ages, a rich and vigorous production of art and literature,
+equal to the wonderful blossoming of genius in the Val d'Arno and
+Venice and Rome; but we should have missed something much greater
+than all these; something towards which events and destiny have
+been leading us, through the whole of the Middle Ages and modern
+times.</p>
+<p>From this point forward we shall have to trace the working of
+that destiny, not manifested in a free blossoming and harvesting of
+our national life, but rather in the suppression and involution of
+our powers; in a development arrested by pressure from without and
+kept thus suspended until the field was ready for its real work.
+Had our fate been otherwise, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page289" id="page289"></a>[pg 289]</span> we might now be looking
+back to a great mediaeval past, as Spain and Austria look back; it
+is fated that we shall look not back but forwards, brought as we
+are by destiny into the midst of the modern world, a people with
+energy unimpaired, full of vigorous vital force, uncorrupted by the
+weakening influence of wealth, taught by our own history the
+measureless evil of oppression, and therefore cured once for all of
+the desire to dominate others. Finally, the intense inner life
+towards which we have been led by the checking of our outward
+energies has opened to us secrets of the invisible world which are
+of untold value, of measureless promise for all future time.</p>
+<p>We have, therefore, to trace the gradual involution of our
+national life; the checking and restraining of that free
+development which would assuredly have been ours, had our national
+life grown forward unimpeded and uninfluenced from without, from
+the days when the Norse power waned. The first great check to that
+free development came from the feudal system, the principle of
+which was brought over by Robert FitzStephen, Richard FitzGilbert,
+the De Courcys, the De Lacys, the De Berminghams and their peers,
+whose coming we have recorded. They <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page290" id="page290"></a>[pg 290]</span> added new elements to
+the old struggle of district against district, tribe against tribe,
+but they added something more enduring--an idea and principle
+destined almost wholly to supplant the old communal tenure which
+was the genius of the native polity. The outward and visible sign
+of that new principle was manifested in the rapid growth of feudal
+castles, with their strong keeps, at every point of vantage gained
+by the Norman lords. They were lords of the land, not leaders of
+the tribe, and their lordship was fitly symbolized in the great
+gloomy towers of stone that everywhere bear witness to their
+strength, almost untouched as they are by the hand of time.</p>
+<p>When the duke of the Normans overthrew the Saxon king at
+Hastings, he became real owner of the soil of England. His barons
+and lords held their estates from him, in return for services to be
+rendered to him direct. To reward them for supporting him, first in
+that decisive battle, and then in whatever contests he might engage
+in, they were granted the right to tax certain tracts of country,
+baronies, earldoms, or counties, according to the title they bore.
+This tax was exacted first in service, then in produce, and finally
+in coin. It was the penalty of conquest, the tribute of the subject
+Saxons and Angles. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page291" id=
+"page291"></a>[pg 291]</span> There was no pretence of a free
+contract; no pretence that the baron returned to the farmer or
+laborer an equal value for the tax thus exacted. It was tribute
+pure and simple, with no claim to be anything else. That system of
+tribute has been consecrated in the land tenure of England, and the
+class enriched by that tribute, and still bearing the territorial
+titles which are its hall-mark, has always been, as it is to-day,
+the dominant class alike in political and social life. In other
+words, the Norman subjugation of Saxon and Angle is thoroughly
+effective at this moment.</p>
+<p>This principle of private taxation, as a right granted by the
+sovereign, came over to Ireland with the De Courcys and De Lacys
+and their like. But it by no means overspread Ireland in a single
+tide, as in England, after Hastings was lost and won. Its progress
+was slow; so slow, indeed, that the old communal system lingers
+here and there at the present day. The communal chiefs lived their
+lives side by side with the Norman barons, fighting now with the
+barons, now with each other; and the same generous rivalry, as we
+have seen, led to abundant fighting among the barons also. The
+principle of feudal ownership was working its way, however. We
+shall see later how great was its ultimate influence,--not
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page292" id="page292"></a>[pg
+292]</span> so much by direct action, as in the quite modern
+reaction which its abuse provoked--a reaction from which have been
+evolved certain principles of value to the whole world.</p>
+<p>Leaving this force to work its way through the centuries, we may
+turn now to the life of the times as it appeared to the men and
+women who lived in them, and as they themselves have recorded it.
+We shall find fewer great personalities; nor should we expect this
+to be otherwise, if we are right in thinking that the age of
+struggle, with its efflorescence of great persons, had done its
+work, and was already giving way before the modern spirit, with its
+genius for the universal rather than the personal. We shall have
+contests to chronicle during the following centuries, whether
+engendered within or forced upon us from without; but they are no
+longer the substance of our history. They are only the last clouds
+of a departing storm; the mists before the dawn of the modern
+world.</p>
+<p>The most noteworthy of these contests in the early Norman age
+was the invasion under Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king,
+who brought a great fleet and army to Larne, then as now the Irish
+port nearest to the northern kingdom. The first sufferers
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page293" id="page293"></a>[pg
+293]</span> by this invasion were the Normans of Heath, and we
+presently find these same Normans allied with Feidlimid son of Aed
+Ua Concobar and the Connachtmen, fighting side by side against the
+common foe. This was in 1315; two years later Robert Bruce joined
+his brother, and it was not till 1319 that Edward Bruce finally
+fell at Dundalk, "and no achievement had been performed in Ireland
+for a long time before," the Chronicler tells us, "from which
+greater benefit had accrued to the country than from this; for
+during the three and a half years that Edward had spent in it, a
+universal famine prevailed to such a degree that men were wont to
+devour one another."</p>
+<p>A ray of light is thus shed on the intellectual and moral life
+of the time: "1398: Garrett Earl of Desmond--or Deas-muma--a
+cheerful and courteous man, who excelled all the Normans and many
+of the Irish in the knowledge of the Irish language, poetry,
+history and other learning, died after the victory of peace." We
+see that the Normans are already fallen under the same influence of
+assimilation which had transformed the Danes two hundred years
+before.</p>
+<p>A half-century later, we get a vigorous and lurid picture of the
+survival of the old tribal strife: "1454: Donell O'Donell was
+installed in the lordship of <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page294" id="page294"></a>[pg 294]</span> Tyrconnell, in
+opposition to Rury O'Donell. Not long after this, Donell was
+treacherously taken captive and imprisoned in the castle of
+Inis--an island in Lough Swilly. As soon as Rury received tidings
+of this, he mustered an army thither, and proceeded to demolish the
+castle in which Donell was imprisoned with a few men to guard him.
+Rury and his army burned the great door of the castle, and set the
+stairs on fire; whereupon Donell, thinking that his life would be
+taken as soon as the army should reach the castle,--it being his
+dying request, as he thought-- that he might be loosed from his
+fetters, as he deemed it a disgrace to be killed while imprisoned
+and fettered. His request was granted, and he was loosed from his
+fetters; after which he ascended to the battlements of the castle,
+to view the motions of the invading army. And he saw Rury beneath,
+with eyes flashing enmity, and waiting until the fire should
+subside, that he might enter and kill him. Donell then, finding a
+large stone by his side, hurled it directly down upon Rury, so that
+it fell on the crest of his helmet, on the top of his head, and
+crushed it, so that he instantly died. The invading forces were
+afterwards defeated, and by this throw Donell saved his own life
+and acquired the lordship of Tyrconnell."</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page295" id="page295"></a>[pg
+295]</span>
+<p>There is a whole historical romance in that single picture; the
+passage could not easily be surpassed for direct and forcible
+narrative. A few years later, we come on one of the most amusing
+things in the whole series of annals, a perfect contrast to the
+grim ferocity of the feud of the O'Donells. In 1472 "a wonderful
+animal was sent to Ireland by the king of England. She resembled a
+mare, and was of a yellow color, with the hoofs of a cow, a long
+neck, a very large head, a large tail, which was ugly and scant of
+hair. She had a saddle of her own. Wheat and salt were her usual
+food. She used to draw the largest sled-burden behind her. She used
+to kneel when passing under any doorway, however high, and also to
+let her rider mount." It is evident that the Gaelic language in the
+fifteenth century lacked a name for the camel. The same year, we
+are told, "the young earl of Desmond was set at liberty by the
+MacCarthys; he disabled Garrett, son of the earl of Kildare."</p>
+<p>Here is another passage which vies in vividness and force with
+the story of the death of Rury O'Donell: "1557: Two spies, Donough
+and Maurice by name, entered the camp of John O'Neill by Lough
+Swilly, and mingled with the troop without being noticed; for in
+consequence of the number and <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page296" id="page296"></a>[pg 296]</span> variety of the troops
+who were there, it was not easy for them to discriminate between
+one another, even if it were day, except by recognizing their
+chieftains alone. The two persons aforesaid proceeded from one fire
+to another, until they came to the great central fire, which was at
+the entrance of the son of O'Neill's tent; and a huge torch,
+thicker than a man's body, was continually flaming at a short
+distance from the fire, and sixty grim and redoubtable warriors
+with sharp, keen axes, terrible and ready for action, and sixty
+stern and terrific Scots, with massive, broad and heavy striking
+swords in their hands, ready to strike and parry, were guarding the
+son of O'Neill. When the time came for the troops to dine, and food
+was divided and distributed among them, the two spies whom we have
+mentioned stretched out their hands to the distributor like the
+rest, and that which fell to their share was a measure of meal, and
+a suitable complement of butter. With this testimony of their
+adventure they returned to their own people."</p>
+<p>Here again, what a picture of the camp-life of the age; the
+darkness of night, the great central fire with the sixty grim and
+redoubtable warriors armed with keen axes, terrible and ready for
+action, and the sixty stern and terrific Scots with their massive
+swords. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page297" id=
+"page297"></a>[pg 297]</span> The admirable manner of the narrative
+is as striking as the fierce vigor of the life portrayed. So we
+might go on, adding red pages of martial records, but in reality
+adding nothing to our understanding of the times. The life of the
+land was as full and abundant as of old, and one outcome of that
+life we may touch on rather more at length.</p>
+<p>We have said much of the old religious schools of Ireland, with
+their fine and vigorous intellectual life, which did so much to
+carry forward the torch of culture to our modern world. For nearly
+seven hundred years these great schools seem to have developed
+wholly along indigenous lines, once they had accepted the body of
+classical culture from the Roman Empire, then tottering to its
+fall. The full history of that remarkable chapter in the world's
+spiritual life has yet to be written; but this we can foretell,
+that when written, it will abound with rich material and ample
+evidence of a sound and generous culture, inspired throughout with
+the fervor of true faith.</p>
+<p>About the time when the Norman warriors began to mingle with the
+fighting chieftains of the old native tribes, a change came over
+the religious history of the country. After sending forth men of
+power and light to the awakening lands of modern Europe, Ireland
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page298" id="page298"></a>[pg
+298]</span> began to receive a returning tide, to reap a harvest
+from these same lands, in the friars and abbots of the great
+Continental orders founded by men like Saint Bernard, Saint
+Dominick and Saint Francis of Assisi. A change in the church
+architecture of the period visibly records this spiritual change;
+continental forms appear, beginning with the rounded arches of the
+Normans, and passing gradually into the various forms of pointed
+arches which we know as Gothic. Very beautiful Abbeys belonging to
+this epoch remain everywhere throughout the island, making once
+more evident--what strikes us at every point of our study--that no
+country in the world is so rich in these lasting records of every
+step of our national life, whether in pagan or Christian times.</p>
+<p>We have said much of the archaic cromlechs. We have recorded the
+great Pyramids by the Boyne telling us of the genius of the De
+Danaans. The Milesian epoch is even now revealed to us in the great
+earthworks of Tara and Emain and Cruacan. We can, if we wish, climb
+the mound of heaped-up earth where was the fortress of Cuculain, or
+look over the green plains from the hill of Find.</p>
+<a name="299.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/299.jpg"><img src="images/299.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>MELLIFONT ABBEY, CO. LOUTH.</b></p>
+<p>In like manner, there is an unbroken series of monuments through
+the early Christian epoch, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page299"
+id="page299"></a>[pg 299]</span> beginning with the oratories of
+the sixth century, continuing through the early churches of
+Killiney, Moville, Dalkey, Glendalough and Monasterboice, from
+before the Norse inroads; followed by the epoch of Round Towers, or
+protected belfries, with their churches, nearly three score of
+these Round Towers remaining in fair preservation, while many are
+perfect from base to apex; and culminating in Cormac's chapel and
+the beautiful group of buildings on Cashel Rock. For the next
+period, the age of transition after the waning of the Norsemen and
+the coming of the first Normans, we have many monuments in the
+Norman style, like the door of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin,
+with its romance of Danish conversion and Norse religious
+fervor.</p>
+<p>Finally, we come to the age whose progress we have just
+recorded, which covers the whole of the Middle Ages. For this
+period, which was for Ireland an epoch of foreign influence much
+more than of foreign rule, we have many beautiful Abbeys, built for
+those foreign orders whose coming was in a sense a return tide, a
+backward flow of the old missionary spirit which went forth from
+Ireland over nascent modern Europe. The life of these abbeys was
+full of rich imaginative and religious power; it <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page300" id="page300"></a>[pg 300]</span>
+abounded in urbanity and ripe culture of a somewhat selfish and
+exclusive type. Yet we cannot but feel a limitless affection and
+sympathy for the abbots and friars of the days of old who have left
+us such a rich heritage of beauty and grace.</p>
+<p>All these abbeys seem to have been formed on a single plan: a
+cruciform church symbolized the source of all their inspiration,
+its choir extending towards the east, whence the Light had come;
+the nave, or main body of the church, was entered by the great
+western door, and the arms of the cross, the transepts, extended to
+the north and south. Here is a very beautiful symbol, a true
+embodiment of the whole spirit and inspiration of the monastic
+orders. From one of the transepts a side door generally led to the
+domestic buildings, the dormitory, the refectory, the chapter
+house, where the friars assembled in conclave under the presidency
+of the abbot. There were lesser buildings, store-rooms, granaries,
+work-rooms, but these were the kernel of the establishment. The
+church was the center of all things, and under its floor the friars
+were at last laid to rest, while brother friars carved tombs for
+them and epitaphs, adding a new richness of decoration to the
+already beautiful church.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page301" id="page301"></a>[pg
+301]</span>
+<p>We may record a few of these old foundations, showing at the
+same time the present state of the old abbey buildings. At Newtown
+on the northern bank of the Boyne, about a mile below Trim, Simon
+Rochfort founded an abbey for the Augustinian Canons in 1206,
+dedicating it to Saint Peter and Saint Paul. The capitals of the
+pillars in the church, the vaulting of the roof and the shafts of
+the arches which supported the tower are full of singular grace and
+beauty, even now when the abbey is roofless and in part destroyed,
+while the corbels and mouldings round the lancet-shaped windows are
+full of luxuriant fancy and charm. We can divine from them the full
+and rich spiritual life which brought forth such exquisite flowers
+of beauty; we can imagine the fine aroma of fervor and saintly
+peace which brooded over these consecrated aisles.</p>
+<p>A few miles below Trim, and an equal distance from the old royal
+palace of Tara, Bective Abbey stands on the northern bank of the
+Boyne, with a square, battlemented tower overshadowing its
+cloistered quadrangle. The cinque-foil cloister arches, the fillets
+that bind the clustered shafts of the pillars, the leaf ornaments
+of the plinths at their base all speak of a luxuriant sense of
+beauty and grace, of a <span class="pagenum"><a name="page302" id=
+"page302"></a>[pg 302]</span> spirit of pure and admirable artistic
+work. This rich creative power thus breaking forth in lovely
+handiwork is only the outward sign of a full inner life, kindled by
+the fire of aspiration, and glowing with the warm ardor of
+devotion. Bective Abbey dates from about 1150. We are told that the
+king of Meath who founded it for the Cistercian order "endowed it
+with two hundred and forty-five acres of land, a fishing-weir and a
+mill." From this meager outline we can almost restore the picture
+of the life, altogether idyllic and full of quiet delight, that the
+old Friars lived among the meadows of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>Grey Abbey was founded a little later, in 1193, for the same
+Cistercian order, where the promontory of the Ards divides
+Strangford Lough from the eastern sea. Over the waters of the
+lough, the red sandstone hills of north Down make a frame for the
+green of the meadows, as the tide laps and murmurs close to the old
+monastic church. Grey Abbey owes its foundation to the piety of a
+princess of the Isle of Man, wedded to De Courcy, the Norman
+warrior whose victories and defeats we have recorded. The great
+beauty of its church is due to the soaring loftiness of the eastern
+window, and the graceful daring of the arches which in former days
+upheld the central tower.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page303" id="page303"></a>[pg
+303]</span>
+<p>Other Cistercian foundations are commemorated in the names of
+Abbey-leix in Queen's county, and Abbey-dorney and Abbey-feale in
+Kerry; all three dating from after the reformation of the order by
+Saint Bernard the Younger, though the work of that ardent
+missionary did not apparently extend its influence to Ireland until
+a later date. This reformer of the Cistercians must not be confused
+with the elder Saint Bernard, whose hospice guards the pass of the
+Alps which bears his name. Saint Bernard of the Alps died in 1008,
+while Saint Bernard the reformer was born in 1093, dying sixty
+years later as abbot of Clara vallis or Clairvaux, on the bank of
+the Aube in northern France. It was at this Abbey of the Bright
+Vale, or Clara vallis, that Archbishop Maelmaedog resigned his
+spirit to heaven, five years before the death of the younger Saint
+Bernard, then abbot there. This is a link between the old
+indigenous church and the continental orders of the Friars.</p>
+<p>Killmallock Abbey, in Limerick, belonged to the order of the
+Dominicans, founded by the scion of the Guzmans, the ardent apostle
+of Old Castile, known to history as Saint Dominick. Here again we
+have a beautiful abbey church with a square central tower,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page304" id="page304"></a>[pg
+304]</span> upborne on soaring and graceful arches from the point
+where the nave joined the choir. There is only one transept--on the
+south--so that the church is not fully cruciform, a peculiarity
+shared by several other Dominican buildings. The eastern window and
+the window of this transept are full of delicate grace and beauty,
+each containing five lights, and marked by the singularly charming
+manner in which the mullions are interlaced above. Enough remains
+of the cloister and the domestic buildings for us to bring back to
+life the picture of the old monastic days, when the good Friars
+worked and prayed there, with the sunlight falling on them through
+the delicate network of the windows.</p>
+<p>Holycross Abbey, near Thurles in Tipperary, was another of the
+Cistercian foundations, its charter, dating from 1182, being still
+in existence. Its church is cruciform; the nave is separated from
+the north aisle by round arches, and from the south aisle by
+pointed arches, which gives it a singular and unusual beauty. The
+great western window of the nave, with its six lights, is also very
+wonderful. Two chapels are attached to the north transept, with a
+passage between them, its roof supported by a double row of pointed
+arches upheld by twisted pillars. The <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page305" id="page305"></a>[pg 305]</span> roof
+is delicately groined, as is the roof of the choir, and the whole
+abbey breathes a luxuriant richness of imagination, bearing
+everywhere the signs of high creative genius. The same lavish
+imagination is shown everywhere in the interlaced tracery, the
+black limestone giving the artist an admirable vehicle for his
+work. Though the charter dates from the twelfth century, some of
+the work is about two centuries later, showing finely the
+continuity of life and spiritual power in the old monastic
+days.</p>
+<a name="305.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/305.jpg"><img src="images/305.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>HOLY CROSS ABBEY, CO. TIPPERARY.</b></p>
+<p>The Friars of Saint Augustine, who were in possession of the
+abbey at Newtown on the Boyne, had another foundation not far from
+West port in Mayo, in the Abbey of Ballintober, founded in 1216 by
+a son of the great Ruaidri Ua Concobar. Here also we have the
+cruciform church, with four splendid arches rising from the
+intersection of nave and choir, and once supporting the tower. The
+Norman windows over the altar, with their dog-tooth mouldings, are
+very perfect. In a chapel on the south of the choir are figures of
+the old abbots carved in stone.</p>
+<p>One of the Ui-Briain founded a Franciscan Abbey at Ennis in
+Clare about 1240, which is more perfectly preserved than any of
+those we have described. The tower still stands, rising over the
+junction <span class="pagenum"><a name="page306" id=
+"page306"></a>[pg 306]</span> of nave and choir; the refectory,
+chapter house, and some other buildings still remain, while the
+figure of the patron, Saint Francis of Assisi, still stands beside
+the altar at the north pier of the nave.</p>
+<p>Clare Abbey, a mile from Ennis, was founded for the Augustine
+Friars in 1195, and here also the tower still stands, dominating
+the surrounding plain. Three miles further south, on the shore of
+Killone Lake, was yet another abbey of the same period, while
+twenty miles to the north, at Corcomroe on the shore of Galway Bay,
+the Cistercians had yet another home.</p>
+<p>We might continue the list indefinitely. Some of the most
+beautiful of our abbeys still remain to be recorded, but we can do
+no more than give their names: Bonamargy was built for the
+Franciscans in Antrim in the fifteenth century; the Dominican
+priory at Roscommon dates from 1257; the Cistercian Abbey of
+Jerpoint in Kilkenny was begun in 1180; Molana Abbey, in Waterford,
+was built for the Augustinians on the site of a very old church;
+and finally Knockmoy Abbey in Galway, famous for its fourteenth
+century frescoes, was begun in 1189. We must remember that every
+one of these represents, and by its variations of style indicates,
+an unbroken <span class="pagenum"><a name="page307" id=
+"page307"></a>[pg 307]</span> life through several centuries. The
+death-knell of the old life of the abbeys and priories, in Ireland
+as in England, was struck in the year 1537 by the law which
+declared their lands forfeited to the crown; as the result of the
+religious controversies of the beginning of the sixteenth
+century.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page308" id="page308"></a>[pg
+308]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page309" id="page309"></a>[pg
+309]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page310" id="page310"></a>[pg
+310]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page311" id="page311"></a>[pg
+311]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIII."></a>XIII.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1603-1660.</h3>
+<p>The confiscation of the abbey lands, as the result of religious
+controversy, closed an epoch of ecclesiastical life in Ireland,
+which we cannot look back on without great regret for the noble and
+beautiful qualities it brought forth in such abundance. There is a
+perennial charm and fascination in the quiet life of the old
+religious houses--in the world, yet not of the world--which appeals
+to aesthetic and moral elements in our minds in equal degree. From
+their lovely churches and chapter-houses the spirits of the old
+monks invite us to join them in an unworldly peace on earth, a
+renewal of the golden age, a life full of aspiration and
+self-forgetfulness, with all the burdens of egotism laid aside.</p>
+<p>Yet after all is said, we can hardly fail to see that out of the
+spoliation and scattering of the religious orders much good came.
+There was a danger that, like the older indigenous schools which
+they supplanted, these later foundations might divide the nation
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page312" id="page312"></a>[pg
+312]</span> in two, all things within their consecrated walls being
+deemed holy, while all without was unregenerate, given up to wrath.
+A barrier of feelings and hopes thus springing up, tends to harden
+from year to year, till at last we have a religious caste grown
+proud and arrogant, and losing all trace of the spiritual fervor
+which is its sole reason for being.</p>
+<p>The evils which surround a wealthy church are great and easily
+to be understood, nor need we lay stress on them. There is, indeed,
+cause for wonder in the spectacle of the followers of him "who had
+not where to lay his head" become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest
+owners of land in Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses
+without number might and did often arise from this very fact.
+Ambition, the desire of wealth, the mere love of ease, led many to
+profess a religious life who had never passed through that
+transformation of will and understanding which is the essence of
+religion. The very purpose of religion was forgotten, or allowed to
+be hidden away under things excellent in themselves, yet not
+essential; and difference of view about these unessential things
+led to fierce and bitter controversy, and later to open strife and
+war.</p>
+<p>We take religion, in its human aspect, to mean the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page313" id="page313"></a>[pg 313]</span> growth
+of a new and wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive
+consciousness of the individual; a superseding of the personal by
+the humane; a change from egotism to a more universal
+understanding; so that each shall act, not in order to gain an
+advantage over others, but rather to attain the greatest good for
+himself and others equally; that one shall not dominate another for
+his own profit, but shall rather seek to draw forth in that other
+whatever is best and truest, so that both may find their finest
+growth. Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one's
+neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul,
+the common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse
+from the beginning. Individual consciousness is in no way effaced;
+something new, wider and more humane, something universal, is added
+to it from above; something consciously common to all souls. And
+through the inspiration of that larger soul, the individual life
+for the first time comes to its true power--a power which is held
+by all pure souls in common.</p>
+<p>We can see that something like this was the original inspiration
+of the religious orders. Their very name of Friars or Brothers
+speaks of the ideal of a common life above egotism. They sought a
+new <span class="pagenum"><a name="page314" id="page314"></a>[pg
+314]</span> birth through the death of selfishness, through
+self-sacrifice and renunciation. All their life in common was a
+symbol of the single soul inspiring them, the very form of their
+churches bearing testimony to their devotion. More than that, the
+beauty and inspiration which still radiate from the old abbey
+buildings show how often and in how large a degree that ideal was
+actually attained.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless we can very well see how the possession of large
+wealth and costly offerings might be a hindrance to that spirit,
+fanning back to life the smouldering fires of desire. We can see
+even more clearly that the division between the secular and the
+religious life would tend to raise a moral barrier, hardening that
+very sense of separation which the humane and universal
+consciousness seeks to kill. Finally, we should see what the world
+has often seen: the disciples of the Nazarene dwelling in palaces,
+and vying with princes in the splendor of their retinues. This is
+hardly the way to make real the teaching of "the kingdom not of
+this world." This world, in the meaning of that saying, is the old
+world of egotism, of self-assertion, of selfish rivalry, of the
+sense of separation. The kingdom is that very realm of humane and
+universal consciousness <span class="pagenum"><a name="page315" id=
+"page315"></a>[pg 315]</span> added from above, the sense of the
+one soul common to all men and working through all men, whether
+they know it or not.</p>
+<p>We can, therefore, see that the confiscation of the monasteries,
+and even the persecution of the religious orders, might be the
+cause of lasting spiritual good; it was like the opening of
+granaries and the scattering of grain abroad over the fields. The
+religious force, instead of drawing men out of the world,
+thenceforth was compelled to work among all men, not creating
+beautiful abbeys but transforming common lives. Persecution was the
+safeguard of sincerity, the fire of purification, from which men's
+spirits came forth pure gold. Among all nations of the world,
+Ireland has long held the first place for pure morals, especially
+in the relations of sex; and this is increasingly true of those
+provinces where the old indigenous element is most firmly
+established. We may affirm that the spiritualizing of religious
+feeling through persecution has had its share in bringing this
+admirable result, working, as it did, on a race which has ever held
+a high ideal of purity.</p>
+<p>Thus out of evil comes good; out of oppression, rapacity and
+confiscation grow pure unselfishness, an unworldly ideal, a sense
+of the invisible realm. We <span class="pagenum"><a name="page316"
+id="page316"></a>[pg 316]</span> shall presently see the same
+forces of rapacity and avarice sowing the seeds for a not less
+excellent harvest in the world of civil life.</p>
+<p>The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first
+Norman adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal
+recognition over the whole country until the seventeenth. The old
+communal tenure of the Brehon law was gradually superseded, so
+that, instead of innumerable tribal territories with elected
+chiefs, there grew up a system of estates, where the land was owned
+by one man and tilled by others. The germ of this tenure was the
+right of private taxation over certain districts, granted by the
+Norman duke to his barons and warriors as the reward for their help
+in battle. Feudal land tenure never was, and never pretended to be,
+a contract between cultivator and landowner for their mutual
+benefit. It was rather the right to prey on the farmer, assigned to
+the landowner by the king, and paid for in past or present services
+to the king. In other words, the head of the Norman army invited
+his officers to help themselves to a share of the cattle and crops
+over certain districts of England, and promised to aid them in
+securing their plunder, in case the Saxon cultivator was rash
+enough to resist. The baronial <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page317" id="page317"></a>[pg 317]</span> order presently ceased
+to render any real service to their duke, beyond upholding him that
+he might uphold them. But there was no such surcease for the Saxon
+cultivator. The share of his cattle and crops which he was
+compelled to give up to the Norman baron became more rigidly
+defined, more strictly exacted, with every succeeding century, and
+the whole civil state of England was built up on this
+principle.</p>
+<p>The baronial order assembled at Runnymead to force the hand of
+the king. From that time forward their power increased, while the
+king's power waned. But there was no Runnymead for the Saxon
+cultivator. He continued, as to this day he continues, to pay the
+share of his cattle and crops to the Norman baron or his successor,
+in return for services--no longer rendered--to the king. The whole
+civil state of England, therefore, depends on the principle of
+private taxation; the Norman barons and their successors receiving
+a share of the cattle and crops of the whole country, year after
+year, generation after generation, century after century, as
+payment for services long become purely imaginary, and even in the
+beginning rendered not to the cultivator who was taxed, but to the
+head of the armed invaders, who <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page318" id="page318"></a>[pg 318]</span> stood ready to enforce
+the payment. The Constitution of England embodies this very
+principle even now, in the twentieth century. Two of the three
+Estates,--King, Lords and Commons,--in whom the law-making power is
+vested, represent the Norman conquest, while even the third, still
+called the Lower House, boasts of being "an assembly of gentlemen,"
+that is, of those who possess the right of private taxation of
+land, the right to claim a share of the cattle and crops of the
+whole country without giving anything at all in return.</p>
+<p>This is the system which English influence slowly introduced
+into Ireland, and with the reign of the first Stuarts the change
+was practically complete, guaranteed by law, and enforced by armed
+power. The tribesmen were now tenants of their former elected
+chief, in whom the ownership of the tribal land was invested; the
+right of privately taxing the tribesmen was guaranteed to the chief
+by law, and a share of all cattle and crops was his by legal right,
+not as head of the tribe, but as owner of the land, with power to
+dispossess the tribesmen if they failed to pay his tax.</p>
+<p>But very many districts had long before this come under the
+dominion of Norman adventurers, like the <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page319" id="page319"></a>[pg 319]</span> De
+Courcys, the De Lacys, and the rest, of whose coming we have told.
+They also enjoyed the right of private taxation over the districts
+under their dominion, and, naturally, had power to assign this
+right to others,--not only to their heirs, but to their
+creditors,--or even simply to sell the right of taxing a certain
+district to the highest bidder in open market.</p>
+<p>The tribal warfare of the Middle Ages had brought many of the
+old chiefs and Norman lords into open strife with the central
+power, with the result that the possessions of unsuccessful chiefs
+and lords were continually assigned by the law-courts to those who
+stood on the side of the central power, the right to tax certain
+districts thus changing hands indefinitely. The law-courts thus
+came into possession of a very potent weapon, whether for rewarding
+the friends or punishing the enemies of the central power, or
+simply for the payment of personal and partisan favors.</p>
+<p>During the reign of the first Stuarts the full significance of
+this weapon seems to have been grasped. We see an unlimited traffic
+in the right to tax; estates confiscated and assigned to
+time-serving officials, and endless abuses arising from the
+corruption of the courts, the judges being appointed by the very
+persons who were presently to invoke the law <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page320" id="page320"></a>[pg 320]</span> to
+their own profit. The tribal system was submerged, and the time of
+uncertainty was taken advantage of to introduce unlimited abuses,
+to assign to adventurers a fat share of other men's goods, to
+create a class legally owning the land, and entitled, in virtue of
+that ownership, to a share of the cattle and crops which they had
+done nothing to produce.</p>
+<p>The Stuarts were at this very time sowing the seeds of civil war
+in England by the introduction of like abuses, the story of which
+has been repeatedly told; and we are all familiar with the history
+of the great uprising which was thereby provoked, to the temporary
+eclipse of the power of the crown. The story of the like uprising
+at the same epoch, and from kindred causes, in Ireland, is much
+more obscure, but equally worth recording, and to this uprising we
+may now turn.</p>
+<p>Its moral causes we have already spoken of. There was, first,
+the confiscation of the abbey lands, and the transfer of church
+revenues and buildings to Anglican clergy--clergy, that is, who
+recognized the sovreign of England as the head of the church. This
+double confiscation touched the well-springs of intense animosity,
+the dispossessed abbots using all the influences of their order in
+foreign lands to bring <span class="pagenum"><a name="page321" id=
+"page321"></a>[pg 321]</span> about their re-installation, while
+the controversy as to the headship of the church aroused all the
+fierce and warring passions that had been raging on the Continent
+since the beginning of the sixteenth century.</p>
+<p>There were, besides, the griefs of the dispossessed chieftains,
+whose tribal lands had been given to others. Chief among these was
+the famous house of O'Neill, the descendants of Nial, the old pagan
+monarch whose wars are thought to have brought the captive of
+Slemish Mountain to Ireland. The O'Neills, like their neighbors the
+O'Donnells, descendants of Domnall, had been one of the great
+forces of tribal strife for eighty generations, and they now saw
+their lands confiscated and given over to strangers. But they were
+only representatives of a feeling which was universal; an indignant
+opposition to arbitrary and tyrannous expropriation.</p>
+<p>The head of the O'Neills had made his peace with the Tudors on
+the very day Queen Elizabeth died, and the tribal lands had been
+guaranteed to him in perpetuity. But within four years plots were
+set on foot by the central authorities, possibly acting in good
+faith, to dispossess him and the chief of the O'Donnells on a
+charge of treason; and in 1607 both <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page322" id="page322"></a>[pg 322]</span> fled to the Continent.
+Their example was followed by numberless others, and the more
+restless and combative spirits among the tribesmen, who preferred
+fighting to the tilling of their fields, entered the continental
+armies in large numbers.</p>
+<p>When the chiefs of the north fled to the Continent, their lands
+were held to have reverted to the crown; and not only was the right
+to tax the produce of these lands assigned to adherents of the
+central power, but numbers of farmers from the Scottish lowlands,
+and in lesser degree from England, were brought over and settled on
+the old tribal territory. The tribesmen, with their cattle, were
+driven to less fertile districts, and the valleys were tilled by
+the transplanted farmers of Scotland. This was the Plantation of
+Ulster, of 1611,--four years after the flight of O'Neill and
+O'Donnell. The religious controversies of Scotland were thereby
+introduced into Ireland, so that there were three parties now in
+conflict--the old indigenous church, dispossessed of revenues and
+buildings, and even of civil rights; the Anglicans who had received
+these revenues and buildings, and, lastly, the
+Dissenters--Presbyterians and Puritans--equally opposed to both the
+former.</p>
+<p>The struggle between the king and Parliament of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page323" id="page323"></a>[pg 323]</span>
+England now found an echo in Ireland, the Anglican party
+representing the king, while the Scottish and English newcomers
+sympathized with the Parliament. A cross-fire of interests and
+animosities was thus aroused, which greatly complicated the first
+elements of strife. The Parliament at Dublin was in the hands of
+the Puritan party, and was in no sense representative of the other
+elements of the country. There was a Puritan army of about ten
+thousand, as a garrison of defence for the Puritan newcomers in
+Ulster, and there were abundant materials of an opposing national
+army in the tribal warriors both at home and on the Continent.</p>
+<p>These national materials were presently drawn together by the
+head of the O'Neills, known to history as Owen Roe, an admirable
+leader and a most accomplished man, who wrote and spoke Latin,
+Spanish, French and English, as well as his mother-tongue. Owen Roe
+O'Neill had won renown on many continental battlefields, and was
+admirably fitted by genius and training to lead a national party,
+not only in council but in the field. The nucleus of his army he
+established in Tyrone, gaining numbers of recruits whom he rapidly
+turned into excellent soldiers.</p>
+<p>This took place at the end of 1641 and the beginning
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page324" id="page324"></a>[pg
+324]</span> of 1642, and the other forces of the country were
+organized about the same time. The lines of difference between the
+Anglican and Catholic parties were at this time very lightly drawn,
+and the Norman lords found themselves able to co-operate with the
+Catholic bishops in forming a General Assembly at Kells, which
+straightway set itself to frame a Constitution for the country.</p>
+<p>The Norman lords had meanwhile assembled and organized their
+retainers, so that there were now three armies in Ireland: the
+garrison of the Scottish settlers under Monroe, strongly in
+sympathy with the Puritans; the tribal army under Owen Roe O'Neill;
+and the army of the Norman lords. The General Assembly outlined a
+system of parliamentary representation in which the Lords and
+Commons were to form a single House, the latter, two hundred and
+twenty-six in number, representing all the important cities and
+towns. A supreme Cabinet was to be formed, composed of six members
+for each of the four provinces, twenty-four in all, who might be
+lords spiritual or temporal, or commoners, according to the choice
+of the Parliament. This Cabinet, thus selected from the whole
+Parliament, was the responsible executive of the country; and under
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page325" id="page325"></a>[pg
+325]</span> Supreme Council a series of Provincial Councils and
+County Councils were to be formed along the same lines.</p>
+<a name="325.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/325.jpg"><img src="images/325.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>DONEGAL CASTLE.</b></p>
+<p>This plan was adopted at a general meeting of all the
+influential forces of the country, which assembled in May at
+Kilkenny, where many Parliaments had sat during the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries. Writs were issued for elections under the new
+Constitution, and the date of the first assembly of the new
+Parliament was fixed for October. The new national body enjoyed
+abundant revenues, and no small state marked its deliberations in
+Kilkenny. We read of an endless series of illuminations,
+receptions, banquets and balls,--the whole of the Norman nobility
+of Leinster lavishing their great wealth in magnificent display.
+The Supreme Council journeyed in state from Kilkenny to Wexford,
+from Wexford to Waterford, from Waterford to Limerick and Galway,
+surrounded by hundreds of horsemen with drawn swords, and
+accompanied by an army of officials. We hear of "civil and military
+representations of comedies and stage plays, feasts and banquets,
+and palate-enticing dishes."</p>
+<p>The General Assembly, duly elected, finally met on October 23,
+1642, at Kilkenny. On the same <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page326" id="page326"></a>[pg 326]</span> day was fought the
+battle of Edgehill, between the king of England and the forces of
+the English Parliament. This battle was the signal for division of
+counsels in the new Assembly. The Norman lords of Leinster, who
+stood on the ground of feudalism, and lived under the shadow of
+royal authority, were strongly drawn to take the side of the king
+against the English Parliament, and overtures of negotiation were
+made, which came near gaining a recognition and legalization of the
+General Assembly by the English Crown.</p>
+<p>While the leaders at Kilkenny were being drawn towards the
+royalists of England, Owen Roe O'Neill was successfully holding
+Ulster against the Puritan forces under Monroe and Leslie, with
+their headquarters at Carrickfergus. Thus matters went on till the
+autumn of 1643, when we find him inflicting a serious defeat on the
+English army under Monk and Moore at Portlester in Meath, in which
+Moore was killed and his forces driven back within the walls of
+Drogheda.</p>
+<p>The General Assembly continued to exercise sovreign authority at
+Kilkenny, collecting revenues, maintaining courts of justice in the
+provinces, and keeping several armies in the field, most effective
+of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page327" id="page327"></a>[pg
+327]</span> which was undoubtedly that of Owen Roe O'Neill. We find
+matters still in this condition three years later, in May, 1646,
+when Monroe and the Scottish forces prepared to inaugurate an
+offensive campaign from their base at Carrickfergus. General Robert
+Monroe had about seven thousand men at Carrickfergus; his brother
+George had five hundred at Coleraine; while there was a Scottish
+army at Derry, numbering about two thousand men. It was decided to
+converge these three forces on Clones, in Monaghan, and thence to
+proceed southwards against the government of the General Assembly,
+then centered at Limerick. Clones was sixty miles from Derry, and
+rather more from Coleraine and Carrickfergus, the two other points
+of departure.</p>
+<p>Owen Roe O'Neill was then at Cavan, fourteen miles south of
+Clones, with five thousand foot and five hundred horse, all "good,
+hopeful men," to use his own words. General Robert Monroe, starting
+from Carrickfergus, and marching by Lisburn and Armagh, expected to
+reach Glasslough, some sixteen miles from Clones, on June 5th. By a
+forced march from Cavan, Owen Roe O'Neill reached Glasslough a day
+earlier, and marching along the northern Blackwater, pitched his
+camp on the north bank of <span class="pagenum"><a name="page328"
+id="page328"></a>[pg 328]</span> the river. Here he was directly in
+the line between the two Monroes, who could only join their forces
+after dislodging him; and Robert Monroe, who by that time had
+reached Armagh, saw that it would be necessary to give battle
+without delay if the much smaller forces from the north were not to
+be cut off.</p>
+<p>Robert Monroe began a movement northwards towards Owen Roe's
+position at dawn on June 5th, and presently reached the Blackwater,
+to find himself face to face with Owen Roe's army across the river.
+The two forces kept parallel with each other for some time, till
+Robert Monroe finally forded the Blackwater at Caledon, Owen Roe
+then retiring in the direction of the current, which here flows
+north. Owen Roe, in his movement of withdrawal, brought his army
+through a narrow pass, which he left in charge of one of his best
+infantry regiments, with orders to hold it only so long as the
+enemy could be safely harassed, meanwhile carrying his main body
+back to the hill of Knocknacloy, the position he had chosen from
+the first for the battle, and to gain which he had up to this time
+been manoeuvering.</p>
+<p>At Knocknacloy he had the center of his army protected by the
+hill, the right by a marsh, and the <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page329" id="page329"></a>[pg 329]</span> left by the river, so
+that, a flanking movement on Monroe's part being impossible, the
+Scottish general was forced to make a frontal attack. Under cover
+of the rearguard action at the pass, which caused both delay and
+confusion to Monroe's army, Owen Roe formed his men in order of
+battle. His first line was of four columns, with considerable
+spaces between them; his cavalry was on the right and left wings,
+behind this first line; while three columns more were drawn up some
+distance farther back, behind the openings in the front line, and
+forming the reserve. We should remember that not only was Owen
+Roe's army outnumbered by Monroe's, but also that Owen Roe had no
+artillery, while Monroe was well supplied with guns.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile Monroe's army came into touch with Owen Roe's force,
+and the Scottish general opened fire with guns and muskets, to
+which the muskets of Owen Roe as vigorously replied. The Scottish
+artillery was planted on a hillock a quarter-mile from Owen Roe's
+center, and under cover of its fire an infantry charge was
+attempted, which was brilliantly repulsed by the pikemen of Owen
+Roe's army. A second attack was made by the Scottish cavalry, who
+tried to ford the river, and thus turn the left flank <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page330" id="page330"></a>[pg 330]</span> of the
+Irish army, but they were met and routed by the Irish horse. This
+was about six in the evening, and the sun, hanging low in the sky,
+fell full in the faces of the Scottish troops. Owen Roe promptly
+followed up the rout of the Scottish horse by an advance, making a
+sweeping movement from right to left, and thereby forcing Monroe
+towards the junction of two streams, where he had no space to move.
+At this point Owen Roe's army received a notable accession of
+strength in the form of four squadrons of cavalry, sent earlier in
+the day to guard against the possible approach of George Monroe
+from Coleraine.</p>
+<p>At a signal from Owen Roe, his army advanced upon Monroe's
+force, to be met by a charge of the Scottish cavalry, instantly
+replied to by a charge of the Irish cavalry through the three open
+spaces in the front infantry line of Owen Roe's army. Monroe's
+first line was broken, and the Irish pikemen, the equivalent of a
+bayonet charge, steadily forced him backwards. It was a fierce
+struggle, hand to hand, eye to eye, and blade to blade. The order
+of Owen Roe's advance was admirably preserved, while the Scottish
+and English forces were in confusion, already broken and crowded
+into a narrow and constricted space between the two rivers. Finally
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page331" id="page331"></a>[pg
+331]</span> advancing Irish army reached and stormed the hillock
+where Monroe's artillery was placed, and victory was palpably won.
+The defeat of the Scottish and English army became an utter rout,
+and when the sun set more than three thousand of them lay dead on
+the field.</p>
+<p>It is almost incredible that the Irish losses were only seventy,
+yet such is the number recorded, while not only was the opposing
+army utterly defeated and dispersed, but Monroe's whole artillery,
+his tents and baggage, fifteen hundred horses, twenty stand of
+colors, two months' provisions and numbers of prisoners of war fell
+into the hands of Owen Roe; while, as a result of the battle, the
+two auxiliary forces were forced to retreat and take refuge in
+Coleraine and Derry, General Robert Monroe escaping meanwhile to
+Carrickfergus. It is only just to him to say that our best accounts
+of the battle come from officers in Monroe's army, Owen Roe
+contenting himself with the merest outline of the result gained,
+but saying nothing of the consummate generalship that gained
+it.</p>
+<p>For the next two years we see Owen Roe O'Neill holding the great
+central plain, the west and most of the north of Ireland against
+the armies of the English <span class="pagenum"><a name="page332"
+id="page332"></a>[pg 332]</span> Parliamentarians and Royalists
+alike, and gaining victory after victory, generally against
+superior numbers, better armed and better equipped. We find him
+time after time almost betrayed by the Supreme Council, in which
+the Norman lords of Leinster, perpetually anxious for their own
+feudal estates, were ready to treat with whichever of the English
+parties was for the moment victorious, hoping that, whatever might
+be the outcome of the great English struggle, they themselves might
+be gainers. At this time they were in possession of many of the
+abbey lands, and there was perpetual friction between them and the
+ecclesiastics, their co-religionists, who had been driven from
+these same lands, so that the Norman landowners were the element of
+fatal weakness throughout this whole movement, willing to wound,
+and yet afraid to strike. While praying for the final defeat of the
+English parliamentary forces, they dreaded to see this defeat
+brought about by Owen Roe O'Neill, in whom they saw the
+representative of the old tribal ownership of Gaelic times, a
+return to which would mean their own extinction.</p>
+<p>Matters went so far that the Supreme Council, representing
+chiefly these Norman lords, had practically betrayed its trust to
+the Royalist party in <span class="pagenum"><a name="page333" id=
+"page333"></a>[pg 333]</span> England, and would have completed
+that betrayal had not the beheading of King Charles signalized the
+triumph of the Parliamentarians. Even then the Norman lords hoped
+for the Restoration, and strove in every way to undermine the
+authority of their own general, Owen Roe O'Neill, who was almost
+forced to enter into an alliance with the Puritans by the treachery
+of the Norman lords. It is of the greatest interest to find Monroe
+writing thus to Owen Roe in August, 1649: "By my own extraction, I
+have an interest in the Irish nation. I know how your lands have
+been taken, and your people made hewers of wood and drawers of
+water. If an Irishman can be a scourge to his own nation, the
+English will give him fair words but keep him from all trust, that
+they may destroy him when they have served themselves by him."</p>
+<p>On November 6, 1649, this great general died after a brief
+illness, having for seven years led his armies to constant victory,
+while the Norman lords, who were in name his allies, were secretly
+plotting against him for their own profit. Yet so strong and
+dominant was his genius that he overcame not only the forces of his
+foes but the treacheries of his friends, and his last days saw him
+at one with the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page334" id=
+"page334"></a>[pg 334]</span> Normans, while the forces of the
+Parliamentarians in Ireland were calling on him for help.</p>
+<p>We sea, therefore, that for full eight years, from the beginning
+of 1642 to the close of 1649, Ireland had an independent national
+government, with a regularly elected Representative Assembly, and a
+central authority, the Supreme Council, appointed by that Assembly,
+with judges going circuit and holding their courts regularly, while
+the Supreme Council held a state of almost regal magnificence, and
+kept several armies continuously in the field. While Owen Roe
+O'Neill lived, that part of the army under his command was able not
+only to secure an unbroken series of victories for itself, but also
+to retrieve the defeats suffered by less competent commanders, so
+that at his death he was at the summit of power and fame. If regret
+were ever profitable, we might well regret that he did not follow
+the example of the great English commander, his contemporary, and
+declare himself Lord Protector of Ireland, with despotic power.</p>
+<p>After his death, the work he had done so well was all undone
+again, in part by treachery, in part by the victories of Oliver
+Cromwell. Yet ten years after the Lord Protector's arrival in
+Ireland, his <span class="pagenum"><a name="page335" id=
+"page335"></a>[pg 335]</span> own work was undone not less
+completely, and the Restoration saw once more enthroned every
+principle against which Cromwell had so stubbornly contended.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page336" id="page336"></a>[pg
+336]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page337" id="page337"></a>[pg
+337]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE JACOBITE WARS.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page338" id="page338"></a>[pg
+338]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page339" id="page339"></a>[pg
+339]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XIV."></a>XIV.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>THE JACOBITE WARS.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1660-1750.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The Restoration saw Cromwell's work completely undone; nor did
+the class which helped him to his victories again rise above the
+surface. The genius of the Stuarts was already sowing the seeds of
+new revolutions; but the struggle was presently to be fought out,
+not between the king and the people, but between the king and the
+more liberal or more ambitious elements of the baronial class, who
+saw in the despotic aspirations of the Stuarts a menace to their
+own power.</p>
+<p>These liberal elements in England selected as their champion
+Prince William of Nassau, before whose coming the English king
+found it expedient to fly to France, seeking and finding a friend
+in that apostle of absolutism, Louis XIV. We have already seen how
+the interests of the feudal lords of Ireland, with the old Norman
+families as their core, drew them towards the Stuarts. The divine
+right of the landowner depended, as we saw, on the divine right of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page340" id="page340"></a>[pg
+340]</span> kings; so that they naturally gravitated towards the
+Stuarts, and drew their tenants and retainers after them. Thus a
+considerable part of Ireland was enlisted on the side of James II,
+and shared the misfortunes which presently overtook him--or in
+truth did not overtake him, as the valiant gentleman outran them
+and escaped. Nothing is more firmly fixed in the memories of the
+whole Irish people than a good-natured contempt for this runaway
+English king, whose cause they were induced by the feudal lords to
+espouse. We shall follow the account of an officer in the Jacobite
+army in narrating the events of the campaigns that ensued.</p>
+<p>James, having gained courage and funds from his sojourn at the
+court of Louis XIV, presently made his appearance in Ireland,
+relying on the support of the feudal lords. He landed at Kinsale,
+in Cork, on March 12, 1688, according to the Old Style, and reached
+Dublin twelve days later, warmly welcomed by Lord and Lady
+Tyrconnell. The only place in the country which strongly declared
+for William was the walled city of Derry, whence we have seen the
+Puritan forces issuing during the wars of the preceding generation.
+James, this officer says, went north to Derry, in spite of the
+bitterness of the season, "in <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page341" id="page341"></a>[pg 341]</span> order to preserve his
+Protestant subjects there from the ill-treatment which he
+apprehended they might receive from the Irish," and was mightily
+surprised when the gates were shut in his face and the citizens
+opened fire upon him from the walls.</p>
+<a name="341.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/341.jpg"><img src="images/341.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>TULLYMORE PARK, CO. DOWN.</b></p>
+<p>James withdrew immediately to Dublin, assembled a Parliament
+there, and spent several months in vain discussions, not even
+finding courage to repeal the penal laws which Queen Elizabeth had
+passed against all who refused to recognize her as the head of the
+church. James was already embarked on a career of duplicity,
+professing great love for Ireland, yet fearing to carry out his
+professions lest he might arouse animosity in England, and so close
+the door against his hoped-for return.</p>
+<p>Enniskillen, on an island in Lough Erne, dominated by a strong
+castle, was, like Derry, a settlement of Scottish and English
+colonists brought over by the first of the Stuarts. These colonists
+were up in arms against the grandson of their first patron, and had
+successfully attacked his forces which were besieging Derry. James,
+therefore, sent a small body of troops against them; but the
+expedition ended in an ignominious rout rather than a battle, for
+the Jacobite army seems hardly to have struck a blow. The Irish
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page342" id="page342"></a>[pg
+342]</span> leader, Lord Mountcashel, who manfully stood his ground
+in the general panic, was wounded and taken prisoner.</p>
+<p>The armies of James, meanwhile, made no headway against the
+courageous and determined defenders of Derry, where the siege was
+degenerating into a blockade, the scanty rations and sickness of
+the besieged being a far more formidable danger than the attacks of
+the besiegers. James even weakened the attacking forces by
+withdrawing a part of the troops to Dublin, being resolved at all
+risks to protect himself.</p>
+<p>So devoid of resolution and foresight was James that we only
+find him taking means to raise an army when Schomberg, the able
+lieutenant of William, was about to invade the north of Ireland.
+Schomberg landed at Bangor in Down in August, 1689, and marched
+south towards Drogheda, but finding that James was there before
+him, he withdrew and established a strongly fortified camp near
+Dundalk. James advanced to a point about seven miles from
+Schomberg, and there entrenched himself in turn, and so the two
+armies remained; as one of Schomberg's officers says, "our General
+would not risk anything, nor King James venture anything." The long
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page343" id="page343"></a>[pg
+343]</span> delay was very fatal to Schomberg's army, his losses by
+sickness and disease being more than six thousand men.</p>
+<p>Early in November, as winter was already making itself felt,
+James decided to withdraw to Dublin; as our narrator says, "the
+young commanders were in some haste to return to the capital, where
+the ladies expected them with great impatience; so that King James,
+being once more persuaded to disband the new levies and raising his
+camp a little of the soonest, dispersed his men too early into
+winter quarters, having spent that campaign without any advantage,
+vainly expecting that his Protestant subjects of England who were
+in the camp of Schomberg would come over to him. And now the winter
+season, which should be employed in serious consultations, and
+making the necessary preparations for the ensuing campaign, was
+idly spent in revels, in gaming, and other debauches unfit for a
+Catholic court. But warlike Schomberg, who, after the retreat of
+James, had leisure to remove his sickly soldiers, to bury the dead,
+and put the few men that remained alive and were healthy into
+winter quarters of refreshment, took the field early in spring,
+before Tyrconnell was awake, and reduced the castle of Charlemont,
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page344" id="page344"></a>[pg
+344]</span> only place that held for James in Ulster, which was
+lost for want of provisions; and the concerns of the unfortunate
+James were ill-managed by those whom he entrusted with the
+administration of public affairs."</p>
+<p>We come thus to the spring of 1690. Derry was still holding out
+valiantly against the horrors of famine and sickness, the blockade
+being maintained, though nothing like a determined storm was
+attempted. A little of the courage shown by the apprentices of
+Derry, had he possessed it, might have revived the drooping
+fortunes of the fugitive English king. It seems, however, that even
+Schomberg's withdrawal to Carrickfergus failed to arouse him to
+more vigorous and valiant measures. It is clear that he was ready
+to abandon his Irish allies, hoping by their betrayal to gain favor
+with his "subjects in England," whom he confidently expected to
+recall him, as they had recalled his brother Charles thirty years
+before. James found an able lieutenant in Tyrconnell, who
+thoroughly entered into his master's schemes of duplicity; and it
+is fairly clear that these two worthies, had occasion offered,
+would have betrayed each other with a perfectly good grace.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page345" id="page345"></a>[pg
+345]</span>
+<p>Thus matters dragged on quite indecisively until June, 1690,
+when King William landed at Carrickfergus with a mixed force of
+English, Scottish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and German troops, and
+joined his forces to the remnant of Schomberg's army. James, as we
+saw, had disbanded his army on breaking up his camp in the previous
+autumn, and had made no effective effort to get a new army
+together. Nor could he have used a strong army, had he possessed
+one. Nevertheless James marched north with such troops as were
+available, leaving Dublin on June 16th. He took up a strong
+position on the borders of Ulster and Leinster, thus blocking
+William's way south to the capital, only to abandon it again on the
+news of William's approach, when he retired to Drogheda and
+encamped there. He thus gave the whole advantage of initiative into
+the hands of his opponent, a brave man and a skillful general.</p>
+<p>James seems to have hoped that William's army would be mowed
+down by disease, as Schomberg's had been in the preceding campaign.
+And there is reason to believe that Tyrconnell, foreseeing the
+defeat of James, wished to avoid any serious fighting, which would
+be an obstacle in his way when he <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page346" id="page346"></a>[pg 346]</span> sought to patch up a
+peace with the victor and make terms for himself. But his opponent
+was inspired by a very different temper, and William's army
+advanced steadily southwards, to find James encamped on the
+southern bank of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>There were several fords by which William's army would have to
+cross on its way south. But James was such an incapable general
+that he did not even throw up trenches to defend the fords.
+William's army arrived and encamped on the north bank of the river,
+and the next day, June 30th, was employed in an artillery duel
+between the two armies, when considerable injury was inflicted on
+William's forces, although he was far stronger in artillery than
+his opponent. During that night, James, already certain of defeat,
+sent away most of his artillery to Dublin, leaving only six guns
+with his army on the Boyne.</p>
+<p>It seems tolerably certain that, when the battle began again
+next day, William's army numbered between forty-five and fifty
+thousand, with the usual proportion of cavalry,--probably a tenth
+of the whole. James, on the other hand, had from twenty to
+twenty-five thousand men, about a tenth of them, probably, being
+mounted; he had, by his own fault, <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page347" id="page347"></a>[pg 347]</span> only six guns against
+about fifty in William's batteries. William's line of battle was
+formed, as usual, with the infantry in the center and the cavalry
+on the wings. He gave the elder Schomberg command of the center,
+while Schomberg's son, with the cavalry of the right wing, was sent
+four or five miles up the river to Slane, to cross there and turn
+the left flank of the opposing army. William himself led the
+cavalry on the left wing, and later on in the battle, descending
+the river, crossed at a lower ford. He could thus attack the right
+flank of his opponent; the infantry composing the center of his
+army advancing, meanwhile, under cover of a heavy artillery fire,
+and forcing the fords of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>The river is shallow here, and in the middle of summer the water
+is nowhere too deep for wading, so that it was a very slight
+protection to the army of James. A better general would at least
+have chosen a stronger position, and one which would have given him
+some manifest advantage. Such positions were to be found all along
+the road by which William had advanced from Carrickfergus. The
+country on both sides of the Boyne is flat; rolling meadows with
+the shallow river dividing them--a country giving every opportunity
+to cavalry.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page348" id="page348"></a>[pg
+348]</span>
+<p>William's right, under the younger Schomberg, made several
+unsuccessful attempts to cross the river at Slane, being repeatedly
+beaten back by Arthur O'Neill's horse. Finally, however, the way
+was cleared for him by a vigorous cannonade, to which O'Neill,
+having no cannon, was unable to reply, and William's right wing
+thus forced the passage of the Boyne.</p>
+<p>William's center now advanced, and began the passage of the
+river, under cover of a heavy artillery fire. Every foot of the
+advance was stubbornly contested, and such headway was made by the
+Irish troops that Schomberg's bodyguard was scattered or cut to
+pieces, and he himself was slain. The center of William's army was
+undoubtedly being beaten back, when, crossing lower down with
+eighteen squadrons of cavalry, he fiercely attacked the right flank
+of the Irish army and thus turned the possibility of defeat into
+certain victory. That the Irish troops, although outnumbered two to
+one and led by a coward, fought valiantly, is admitted on all
+sides. They charged and re-charged ten times in succession, and
+only gave way at last under pressure of greatly superior numbers.
+The retreat of the Irish army was orderly,--the more so, doubtless,
+because <span class="pagenum"><a name="page349" id=
+"page349"></a>[pg 349]</span> the former king of England was no
+longer among them, having most valiantly fled to Dublin, and thence
+to Kinsale, where he took ship for France, leaving behind him a
+reputation quite singular in the annals of Ireland.</p>
+<p>Within a week after the battle, the Irish army, which had
+preserved order and discipline even in the face of the flight of
+James, occupied Limerick, and made preparations to hold that strong
+position, with the untouched resources of the western province
+behind them, and the hope, unshaken by their rude experience, that
+the runaway king might reinforce them by sea. Through all the
+events that followed, presently to be narrated, it must be
+understood that Tyrconnell was steadily seeking to undermine the
+resolution of the Irish army, hoping the sooner to make his peace
+with King William, to secure his Irish estates, and, very possibly,
+be appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, under the new king.</p>
+<p>William meanwhile brought his army southwards, being welcomed to
+Dublin by the large English element there, and presently continued
+his march to Waterford, which was surrendered to him, as was
+alleged, by Tyrconnell's orders. He also reduced Kilkenny, to which
+Tyrconnell had failed to send <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page350" id="page350"></a>[pg 350]</span> reinforcements, though
+repeatedly appealed to by its commander. About this time, on July
+28th or a day or two later, the brave garrison of Derry was
+relieved by some of William's ships, which broke the line of
+blockade across the river and brought abundant provisions to the
+emaciated defenders.</p>
+<p>A section of William's army under Douglas was sent to take
+Athlone, the strong fortress which guarded the ford, and later the
+bridge across the Shannon--the high road from Leinster to the
+western province of Connacht, beyond the river. Douglas, after a
+fierce attack lasting seven days, was compelled to retreat again to
+the main army encamped at Waterford. The French auxiliaries under
+Lauzun, who had not hitherto greatly distinguished themselves for
+valor, losing less than a score of men at the Boyne, now deserted
+Limerick and retreated to Galway, taking with them, if the fugitive
+king may be credited, a great quantity of ammunition from the
+fortress of Limerick.</p>
+<a name="351.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/351.jpg"><img src="images/351.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>THOMOND BRIDGE, LIMERICK.</b></p>
+<p>Finally, on August 9th, William's army appeared before Limerick,
+and the famous siege began. Tyrconnell signalized himself by
+deserting the fords over the Shannon and departing to Galway,
+declaring that the town would certainly surrender within a week.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page351" id="page351"></a>[pg
+351]</span> The city, however, was of a different opinion. The
+garrison, under Sarsfield, made vigorous preparation for a defence,
+and a party under Sarsfield himself cut off one of William's
+convoys from Dublin, destroying the siege-train which was being
+brought for the attack on the city. William's cavalry, taking
+advantage of Tyrconnell's retreat, crossed the ford of the Shannon
+to complete the investment of the city on that side, but they
+presently returned, having done nothing effective.</p>
+<p>We hear of more attempts by Tyrconnell to undermine the
+resolution of the army, and of attacks by William's force, which
+gave him possession of the outworks, so that he was able presently
+to begin cannonading the walls, to make a breach for an assault.
+The officer in the Irish army whom we have already quoted, gives
+this account of the siege: "Never was a town better attacked and
+better defended than the city of Limerick. William left nothing
+unattempted that the art of war, the skill of a great captain and
+the valor of veteran soldiers could put in execution to gain the
+place; and the Irish omitted nothing that courage and constancy
+could practice to defend it. The continual assaults of the one and
+the frequent sallies of the other consumed a <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page352" id="page352"></a>[pg 352]</span> great
+many brave men both of the army and the garrison. On the nineteenth
+day, William, after fighting for every inch of ground he gained,
+having made a large breach in the wall, gave a general assault
+which lasted for three hours; and though his men mounted the
+breach, and some even entered the town, they were gallantly
+repulsed and forced to retire with considerable loss. William,
+resolving to renew the assault next day, could not persuade his men
+to advance, though he offered to lead them in person. Whereupon,
+all in a rage, he left the camp, and never stopped till he came to
+Waterford, where he took shipping for England; his army in the
+meantime retiring by night from Limerick."</p>
+<p>During this first siege of Limerick the garrison numbered some
+twenty thousand, by no means well armed. William's besieging army
+was about forty thousand, with forty cannon and mortars. His loss
+was between three and four thousand, while the loss of the
+defenders was about half that number.</p>
+<p>William, presently arriving in England, sent reinforcements to
+his generals in Ireland, under Lord Churchill, afterwards famous as
+the Duke of Marlborough. Tyrconnell had meantime followed his
+runaway king to France, as was involved in a maze of <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page353" id="page353"></a>[pg 353]</span>
+contradictory designs, the one clear principle of which was the
+future advantage of Tyrconnell. Louis XIV, who had reasons of his
+own for wishing to keep the armies of William locked up in Ireland,
+was altogether willing to advise and help a continuance of
+hostilities in that country. James seems to have recognized his
+incapacity too clearly to attempt anything definite, or, what is
+more probable, was too irresolute by nature even to determine to
+give up the fight. Tyrconnell himself sincerely wished to make his
+peace with William, so that he might once more enjoy the revenues
+of his estates. The Irish army was thoroughly determined to hold
+out to the end.</p>
+<p>With these conflicting desires and designs, no single-hearted
+and resolute action was possible. Matters seem to have drifted till
+about January, 1691, when Tyrconnell returned; "but he brought with
+him no soldiers, very few arms, little provision and no money." A
+month later a messenger came direct to Sarsfield, then with the
+army at Galway, from Louis XIV, promising reinforcements under the
+renowned soldier Saint Ruth. This letter to a great extent revealed
+the double part Tyrconnell had been playing at the French court,
+and did much to <span class="pagenum"><a name="page354" id=
+"page354"></a>[pg 354]</span> undermine his credit with the better
+elements in the Irish army.</p>
+<p>The French fleet finally arrived at Limerick in May, 1691, under
+Saint Ruth, bringing a considerable quantity of provisions for the
+Irish army; but it is doubtful whether this arrival added any real
+element of strength to the army. The Irish army, soon after this,
+was assembled at Athlone, to defend the passage of the Shannon.
+Much vigorous fighting took place, but Ginkell, William's general,
+finally captured that important fortress in June. The road to
+Galway was now open, and Ginkell's army prepared to march on that
+important city, the strongest place in Connacht. Saint Ruth
+prepared to resist their approach, fixing his camp at Aughrim, The
+Hill of the Horses, some eighteen miles from Athlone and
+thirty-five from Galway. We may once more tell the story in the
+words of an eye-witness:</p>
+<p>"Aughrim was then a ruined town, and the castle was not much
+better, situated in a bottom on the north side of the hill, where
+the Irish army encamped. The direct way from Ballinasloe was close
+by the castle, but there was another way about, on the south-east
+side of the hill. The rest of the ground fronting the camp was a
+marsh, passable only for <span class="pagenum"><a name="page355"
+id="page355"></a>[pg 355]</span> foot. The army of Ginkell appeared
+in sight of Aughrim on July 12th. The Irish army, composed of about
+ten thousand foot, two thousand men-at-arms, and as many light
+horse, was soon drawn up by Saint Ruth in two lines; the cavalry on
+both wings flanking the foot; and having placed Chevalier de
+Tess&eacute; on the right wing of the horse, and Sarsfield on the
+left, and giving their several posts to the rest of the chief
+commanders, Saint Ruth obliged himself to no certain place, but
+rode constantly from one side to another to give the necessary
+orders where he saw occasion. Ginkell being now come up at so near
+a distance that his guns and other battering engines might do
+execution, he ordered them to be discharged, and as he had a vast
+number of them he made them play incessantly on the Irish army,
+hoping by that means to force them from the hill, which was of
+great advantage. But the Irish, encouraged by the presence and
+conduct of Saint Ruth, kept their ground and beat the English as
+often as they advanced towards them. The fight continued from noon
+till sunset, the Irish foot having still the better of the enemy;
+and Saint Ruth, observing the advantage of his side, and that the
+enemy's foot were much disordered, was resolved, by advancing with
+the cavalry, to make the <span class="pagenum"><a name="page356"
+id="page356"></a>[pg 356]</span> victory complete, when an unlucky
+shot from one of the terrible new engines, hitting him in the head,
+made an end of his life, and took away the courage of his army. For
+Ginkell, observing the Irish to be in some disorder, gave a notable
+conjecture that the general was either killed or wounded, whereupon
+he commanded his army to advance. The Irish cavalry, discouraged by
+the death of Saint Ruth, and none of the general officers coming to
+head them in his place, gave back, and quitted the field. The foot
+who were engaged with the enemy, knowing nothing of the general's
+death or the retreat of the cavalry, continued fighting till they
+were surrounded by the whole English army; so that the most of them
+were cut off, and no quarter given but to a very few; the rest, by
+favor of the night then approaching, for Saint Ruth was killed
+about sunset, made their escape."</p>
+<p>To this we may add the testimony of the runaway monarch: "The
+Irish behaved with great spirit. They convinced the English they
+had to do with men no less resolute than themselves. Never assault
+was made with greater fury nor sustained with greater obstinacy.
+The Irish foot repulsed the enemy several times, particularly in
+the center. They even looked upon the victory as certain.... The
+Irish lost <span class="pagenum"><a name="page357" id=
+"page357"></a>[pg 357]</span> four thousand men. The loss of the
+English was not much inferior."</p>
+<p>The army of Ginkell, thus in possession of the key of Connacht,
+advanced upon its most important city, arriving before Galway a few
+days after the battle of Aughrim. Galway, however, was full of
+divided counsels, and speedily surrendered, so that Limerick alone
+remained. Limerick was greatly weakened, now that Galway, and with
+Galway the whole of Connacht to which alone Limerick could look for
+supplies, was in the hands of the enemy. Ginkell turned all his
+efforts in the direction of Limerick, appearing before the city and
+pitching his camp there on August 25, 1691. Beginning with the next
+day, our narrator tells us, "he placed his cannon and other
+battering engines, which played furiously night and day without
+intermission, reducing that famous city almost to ashes. No
+memorable action, however, happened till the night between
+September 15 and 16, when he made a bridge of boats over the
+Shannon, which being ready by break of day, he passed over with a
+considerable body of horse and foot on the Connacht side of the
+river, without any opposition. This so alarmed Sheldon, who
+commanded the cavalry at that time, that without staying for
+orders, he immediately <span class="pagenum"><a name="page358" id=
+"page358"></a>[pg 358]</span> retired to a mountain a good distance
+from Limerick, and marched with such precipitation and disorder,
+that if a hundred of the enemy's horse had charged him in the rear,
+they would in all likelihood have defeated his whole party, though
+he had near upon four thousand men-at-arms and light horse; for the
+man, if he was faithful, wanted either courage or conduct, and the
+party were altogether discouraged to be under his command. But
+Ginkell did not advance far, and after showing himself on that side
+of the bridge, returned back into his camp the same day. Yet
+Sheldon never rested till he came, about midnight, fifteen miles
+from the Shannon, and encamped in a fallow field where there was
+not a bit of grass to be had: as if he had designed to harass the
+horses by day and starve them by night.... Ginkell, understanding
+that the Irish horse was removed to such a distance, passed the
+river on the twenty-third day with the greatest part of his
+cavalry, and a considerable body of foot, and encamped half-way
+between Limerick and the Irish horse camp, whereby he hindered all
+communication between them and the town. On the twenty-fourth, the
+captains within Limerick sent out a trumpet, desiring a parley,"
+and as a result of this parley, a treaty was ultimately signed
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page359" id="page359"></a>[pg
+359]</span> between the two parties, Limerick was evacuated, and
+the war came to an end. This was early in October, 1691.</p>
+<p>The war had, therefore, lasted nearly four years, a sufficient
+testimony to the military qualities of the Irish, seeing that
+throughout the whole period they had matched against them greatly
+superior numbers of the finest troops in Europe, veterans trained
+in continental wars, and at all points better armed and equipped
+than their adversaries.</p>
+<p>What moves our unbounded admiration, however, is to see the
+troops displaying these qualities of valor not only without good
+leadership, but in face of the cowardice of the English king, and
+of duplicity amounting to treachery on the part of his chief
+adherents. Foremost among these time-servers was Talbot, Earl of
+Tyrconnell, whose name shows him to have sprung from one of the
+Norman families, and we see here the recurrence of a principle
+which had worked much harm in the eight years' war of the preceding
+generation. The Duke of Ormond, sprung from the Norman Butlers, was
+then the chief representative of the policy of intrigue, and many
+of the reverses of both these wars are to be attributed to the same
+race.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page360" id="page360"></a>[pg
+360]</span>
+<p>It is tragical to find the descendants of the old Norman barons,
+who at any rate were valiant fighters, descending thus to practices
+quite unworthy; yet we can easily understand how the fundamental
+injustice of the feudal principle on which they stood, not less
+than the boundless abuse of that already bad principle under the
+first Stuarts, could not fail to undermine their sense of honor and
+justice, preparing them at length for a policy of mere
+self-seeking, carried on by methods always doubtful, and often
+openly treacherous.</p>
+<p>The old tribal chieftains lived to fight, and went down fighting
+into the night of time. Owen Roe O'Neill, last great son of a
+heroic race, splendidly upheld their high tradition and ideal. No
+nobler figure, and few more gifted captains, can be found in the
+annals of those warlike centuries. The valor of Cuculain, the
+wisdom of Concobar, the chivalry of Fergus--all were his, and with
+them a gentle and tolerant spirit in all things concerning
+religion, very admirable in an age when so many men, in other
+things not lacking in elements of nobility, were full of bitter
+animosity, and zealous to persecute all those who differed from
+them concerning things shrouded in mystery.</p>
+<p>It may be said, indeed, that Owen Roe is in this only a type of
+all his countrymen, who, though they suffered <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page361" id="page361"></a>[pg 361]</span>
+centuries of persecution for a religious principle, never
+persecuted in return. Their conduct throughout the epoch of
+religious war and persecution was always tolerant and full of the
+sense of justice, contrasting in this, and contrasting to their
+honor, with the conduct of nearly every other nation in
+Christendom.</p>
+<p>The history of Ireland, for the half century which followed this
+war, offers few salient features for description. The Catholics
+during all this time were under the ban of penal laws. The old
+tribal chiefs were gone. The Norman lords were also gone. The life
+of the land hardly went beyond the tilling of the fields and the
+gathering of the harvests. And even here, men only labored for
+others to enter into their labor. The right of private taxation,
+confirmed by law, and now forfeited by the feudal lords, was given
+as a reward to the adherents of the dominant party in England, and
+their yearly exactions were enforced by an armed garrison. The more
+vigorous and restless elements of our race, unable to accept these
+conditions of life, sailed in great numbers to the continent, and
+entered the armies of many European powers. It is estimated that,
+during the half century after the Treaty of Limerick, fully half a
+million Irishmen fell in the service of France alone.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page362" id="page362"></a>[pg
+362]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page363" id="page363"></a>[pg
+363]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CONCLUSION.</h2>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page364" id="page364"></a>[pg
+364]</span><br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page365" id="page365"></a>[pg
+365]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="XV."></a>XV.</h2>
+<br>
+<h3>CONCLUSION.</h3>
+<h3>A.D. 1750-1901.</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The Treaty of Limerick, signed when the army of Sarsfield came
+to terms with the besiegers, guaranteed equal liberty to all
+Ireland, without regard to difference of religion. There is no
+doubt that William of Nassau, scion of a race which had done much
+for liberty, a house that had felt the bitterness of oppression,
+would willingly have carried this treaty out in a spirit of
+fidelity and honor. But he was, helpless. The dominant powers in
+England and Ireland were too strong for him, and within the next
+few years the treaty was violated in letter and spirit, and the
+indigenous population of Ireland was disarmed, deprived of civil
+rights, reduced to servitude.</p>
+<p>It is best, wherever possible, to secure the word of witnesses
+who cannot be suspected of prejudice or favor. We shall do this,
+therefore, in describing the condition of Ireland during the
+eighteenth century. We find the Lord Chancellor of England
+declaring, during the first half of that period, that "in
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page366" id="page366"></a>[pg
+366]</span> the eye of the law no Catholic existed in Ireland." The
+Lord Chief Justice affirms the same doctrine: "It appears plain
+that the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish
+Roman Catholic." The law, therefore, as created by England for
+Ireland, deprived of all civil, religious, intellectual and moral
+rights four-fifths of the whole population, and gave them over as a
+lawful prey to the remaining fifth: a band of colonists and
+adventurers, who favored the policy of the party then dominant in
+England. This was the condition of the law. We shall see,
+presently, what was its result on the life of the nation. It should
+be a warning, for all time, of the dangers which arise when one
+nation undertakes to govern another. For it must be clearly
+understood that the Sovreign and Parliament of England believed
+that in this they stood for honor and righteousness, and had a true
+insight into the spirit and will of the Most High. It was, indeed,
+on this superior knowledge of the divine will that they based their
+whole policy; for what else is the meaning of legal discrimination
+against the holders of a certain form of faith?</p>
+<a name="367.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/367.jpg"><img src="images/367.jpg"
+width="80%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>SALMON FISHERY, GALWAY.</b></p>
+<p>In the second half of the eighteenth century, in 1775, the
+Congress of the United States sent its <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page367" id="page367"></a>[pg 367]</span>
+sympathy in these words to the people of Ireland: "We know that you
+are not without your grievances; we sympathize with you in your
+distress, and we are pleased to find that the design of subjugating
+us has persuaded the administration to dispense to Ireland some
+vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. Even the tender mercies of
+the government have long been cruel to you. In the rich pastures of
+Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong to labor for
+her destruction."</p>
+<p>Three years later, in 1778, Benjamin Franklin wrote thus to the
+Irish people: "The misery and distress which your ill-fated country
+has been so frequently exposed to, and has so often experienced, by
+such a combination of rapine, treachery and violence as would have
+disgraced the name of government in the most arbitrary country in
+the world, has most sincerely affected your friends in America, and
+has engaged the most serious attention of Congress."</p>
+<p>It must be assumed that the men who drew up the Declaration of
+Independence knew the value of words, and that when they spoke of
+misery and cruelty, of rapine, treachery and distress, they meant
+what they said. Franklin's letter brings us to the eve of the
+Volunteer Movement, of which much has <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page368" id="page368"></a>[pg 368]</span> been
+said in a spirit of warm praise, but which seems to have wrought
+evil rather than good. This Movement, at first initiated wholly by
+the Scottish and English colonists and their adherents, was later
+widened so as to include a certain number of the indigenous
+population; and an armed force was thus formed, which was able to
+gain certain legislative favors from England, with the result that
+a Parliament sitting in Dublin from 1782 to 1799 passed laws with
+something more resembling justice than Ireland was accustomed
+to.</p>
+<p>But this Parliament was in no sense national or representative.
+It was wholly composed of the Scottish and English colonists and
+their friends, and the indigenous population had no voice in its
+deliberations. It is, therefore, the more honor to Henry Grattan
+that we find him addressing that Parliament thus: "I will never
+claim freedom for six hundred thousand of my countrymen while I
+leave two million or more of them in chains. Give the Catholics of
+Ireland their civil rights and their franchise; give them the power
+to return members to the Irish Parliament, and let the nation be
+represented." At this time, therefore, four-fifths of the nation
+had neither civil rights nor franchise,--because they differed
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page369" id="page369"></a>[pg
+369]</span> from the dominant party in England as to the precedence
+of the disciples of Jesus.</p>
+<p>It may be supposed, however, that, even without civil or
+religious rights, the fate of the people of Ireland was tolerable;
+that a certain measure of happiness and well-being was theirs, if
+not by law, at least by grace. The answer to this we shall
+presently see. The Volunteer Movement, as we saw, included certain
+elements of the indigenous population. The dominant party in
+England professed to see in this a grave danger, and determined to
+ward off that danger by sending an army to Ireland, and quartering
+troops on the peasants of all suspected districts. We must remember
+that the peasants, on whom a hostile soldiery was thus quartered,
+had no civil rights as a safeguard; that the authorities were
+everywhere bitterly hostile, full of cowardly animosity towards
+them.</p>
+<p>The result we may best describe in the words of the English
+generals at the head of this army. We find Sir Ralph Abercrombie
+speaking thus: "The very disgraceful frequency of great crimes and
+cruelties, and the many complaints of the conduct of the troops in
+this kingdom--Ireland--has too unfortunately proved the army to be
+in a state of licentiousness <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page370" id="page370"></a>[pg 370]</span> that renders it
+formidable to everyone except the enemy." Sir Ralph Abercrombie
+declared himself so frightened and disgusted at the conduct of the
+soldiers that he threw up his commission, and refused the command
+of the army.</p>
+<p>General Lake, who was sent to take his place, speaks thus: "The
+state of the country, and its occupation previous to the
+insurrection, is not to be imagined, except by those who witnessed
+the atrocities of every description committed by the
+military,"--and he gives a list of hangings, burnings and
+murders.</p>
+<p>Finally, we have the testimony of another English soldier, Sir
+William Napier, speaking some years later: "What manner of soldiers
+were these fellows who were let loose upon the wretched districts,
+killing, burning and confiscating every man's property? ... We
+ourselves were young at the time; yet, being connected with the
+army, we were continually among the soldiers, listening with boyish
+eagerness to their experiences: and well remember, with horror, to
+this day, the tales of lust, of bloodshed and pillage, and the
+recital of their foul actions against the miserable peasantry,
+which they used to relate."</p>
+<p>The insurrection against this misery and violence, <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page371" id="page371"></a>[pg 371]</span> which
+began in May, 1798, and its repression, we may pass over, coming to
+their political consequences. It is admitted on all hands that the
+morality and religion of England reached their lowest ebb at this
+very time; we are, therefore, ready to learn that the Act of Union
+between England and Ireland, which followed on the heels of this
+insurrection, was carried by unlimited bribery and corruption. The
+Parliament of Ireland, as we know, was solely composed of
+Protestants, the Catholics having neither the right to sit nor the
+right to vote; so that the ignominy of this universal corruption
+must be borne by the class of English and Scottish settlers
+alone.</p>
+<p>The curious may read lists of the various bribes paid to secure
+the passage of the Act of Union in 1800, the total being about six
+million dollars--a much more considerable sum then than now. And it
+must be remembered that this entire sum was drawn from the revenues
+of Ireland, besides the whole cost of an army numbering 125,000
+men, which England maintained in Ireland at the time the Act was
+passed. What the amenities of the last three years of the
+eighteenth century cost Ireland we may judge from these figures: in
+1797, while the hangings, burnings and torturings which brought
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page372" id="page372"></a>[pg
+372]</span> about the insurrection of the following year were in an
+early stage, the national debt of Ireland was under $20,000,000;
+three years later that debt amounted to over $130,000,000. It is
+profitless to pursue the subject further. We may close it by saying
+that hardly can we find in history a story more discreditable to
+our common humanity than the conduct of England towards Ireland
+during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.</p>
+<p>The French Revolution wrought a salutary change of heart in the
+governing class in England, for it must in justice be added that
+the tyranny of this class was as keenly felt by the "lower orders"
+in England as in Ireland itself. It is fairly certain that only the
+Reform Bill and the change of sovreigns which shortly followed
+prevented an insurrection of the peasants and servile classes in
+England which would have outdone in horrors the French Revolution
+itself. The Reform Bill was the final surrender of the baronial
+class in England; a surrender rather apparent than real, however,
+since most of the political and all the social power in the land
+still remains in the hands of the same class.</p>
+<a name="373.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/373.jpg"><img src="images/373.jpg"
+width="40%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>O'CONNELL'S STATUE, DUBLIN.</b></p>
+<p>Through the salutary fear which was inspired by the horrors of
+the French Revolution, and perhaps <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page373" id="page373"></a>[pg 373]</span> through a certain moral
+awakening, the governing classes in England came to a less vicious
+mind in their dealings with Ireland. They were, therefore, the more
+ready to respond to the great national movement headed by Daniel
+O'Connell, with his demand that Irishmen might all equally enjoy
+civil and political rights, regardless of their form of faith. In
+1829, as the result of this great movement, the Catholics were
+finally relieved of the burden of penal laws which, originally laid
+on them by the Tudors, were rendered even more irksome and more
+unjust by Cromwell and William of Nassau,--men in other things
+esteemed enlightened and lovers of liberty.</p>
+<p>Thus the burden of persecution was finally taken away. To those
+who imposed it, the system of Penal Laws will remain a deep
+dishonor. But to those who bore that burden it has proved a
+safeguard of spiritual purity and faith. The religion of the
+indigenous race in Ireland was saved from the degeneration and
+corruption which ever besets a wealthy and prosperous church, and
+which never fails to engender hypocrisy, avarice and ambition. In
+England, the followers of the Apostles exercise the right to levy a
+second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second burden
+imposed upon the conquered Saxons. <span class="pagenum"><a name=
+"page374" id="page374"></a>[pg 374]</span> As a result, the leaders
+of the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part
+of their congregation; have sunk into practical atheism. In France,
+the reaction against a like state of things brought the church to
+the verge of destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and
+materialism. The result to the moral life of the people is too well
+known to need remark. Not less evil consequences have flowed from
+the enriching of the church in other lands. That wealth has always
+carried with it the curse, so prophetically pronounced, against
+those who trust in riches. For the ministers of religion, in a
+supreme degree, the love of money has been the root of evil.</p>
+<p>We may, therefore, see in the spirituality and unworldliness of
+the native church in Ireland a result of all the evil and
+persecution the church suffered during almost three hundred years.
+From this purification by fire it comes that the people of Ireland
+are almost singular throughout Christendom in believing sincerely
+in the religion of gentleness and mercy--the kingdom which is not
+of this world.</p>
+<p>In 1829 the Catholics were at last freed from the galling
+burdens which had weighed on them since 1537, when they failed to
+recognize Henry VIII as the representative of God on earth. They
+were still, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page375" id=
+"page375"></a>[pg 375]</span> however, under the shadow of a grave
+injustice, which continued to rest on them for many years. When
+their church lands were confiscated and their faith proscribed by
+law under the Tudors, a new clergy was overlaid on the country, a
+clergy which consented to recognize the Tudors and their successors
+as their spiritual head. As a reward, these new ministers of
+religion were allowed to levy a second tax on land, exactly as in
+England; and this tax they continued to collect until their
+privilege was finally taken away by Gladstone and the English
+Liberals. Needless to say that through three centuries and more
+four-fifths of this tax was levied on the indigenous Catholics, in
+support of what was to them an alien, and for most of the time a
+persecuting church.</p>
+<p>One heavy disability still lay on the whole land. With its
+partial removal a principle has emerged of such world-wide
+importance in the present, and even more in the future, that we may
+well trace its history in detail.</p>
+<p>The Normans, as we saw, paid themselves for conquering the
+Saxons and Angles by assuming a perpetual right to tax their
+produce; a right still in full force, and forming the very
+foundation of the ruling class in England. The land tenure thus
+created was, <span class="pagenum"><a name="page376" id=
+"page376"></a>[pg 376]</span> under the Tudors and the first
+Stuarts, bodily transferred to Ireland. In Ireland the land had
+ever been owned by the people, each tribe, as representing a single
+family, holding a certain area by communal tenure, and electing a
+chief to protect its territory from aggression. For this elective
+chieftainship the English law-courts substituted something wholly
+different: a tenure modeled on the feudal servitude of England.
+This new principle made the land of the country the property not of
+the whole people but of a limited and privileged class: the
+favorites of the ruling power--"hungry parasites" as the Congress
+of 1775 called them. This "landed" class continued to hold absolute
+sway until quite recently, and it was this class which succumbed to
+bribery in 1800, and passed the Act of Legislative Union with
+England. The clergy of the Established church were little more than
+the private chaplains of the "landed" class, the two alien bodies
+supporting each other.</p>
+<p>Folly, however, was the child of injustice; for so shortsighted
+were these hungry parasites that they developed a system of
+land-laws so bad as to cause universal poverty, and bring a
+reaction which is steadily sweeping the "landed" class of Ireland
+to extinction and oblivion. The fundamental principle <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page377" id="page377"></a>[pg 377]</span> of
+these bad land-laws was this: the tenant was compelled to renew his
+lease from year to year; and whenever, during the year, he had in
+any way improved the land in his possession,--by draining marshes,
+by reclaiming waste areas, by adding farm-buildings, the "owner" of
+the land could demand an enhanced rent, as the condition of
+renewing the lease. The tenant had to submit to a continually
+ascending scale of extortion, sanctioned by law and exacted by
+armed force; or, as an alternative, he had to give up the fruit of
+his industry without compensation and without redress.</p>
+<p>Anything more certain to destroy energy, to cut at the roots of
+thrift, to undermine all the best qualities of manhood, it would be
+impossible to imagine. The slave on the plantation could in time
+purchase his freedom. The tiller of the soil in Ireland found, on
+the contrary, that the greater his industry, the greater was the
+sum he had to pay for the right to exercise it. We saw that there
+never was any pretence of free contract in the feudal land-tenure
+of England; that there never was any pretence of an honest bargain
+between farmer and landlord, for their mutual benefit. The tenant
+paid the landlord for services rendered, not to him, but to his
+Norman conqueror. <span class="pagenum"><a name="page378" id=
+"page378"></a>[pg 378]</span> So it was, in an even greater degree,
+in Ireland. There was no pretence at all that tenant and landlord
+entered into a free contract for their mutual benefit. Nor did
+either law, custom, religion or opinion require the landlord to
+make any return to his tenants for the share of the fruit of their
+toil he annually carried away.</p>
+<p>The tiller of the soil, therefore, labored from year to year,
+through droughts and rains, through heat and cold, facing bad
+seasons with good. At the end of the year, after hard toil had
+gathered in the fruit of the harvest, he saw the best part of that
+fruit legally confiscated by an alien, who would have been
+speechless with wonder, had it been suggested to him that anything
+was due from him in return. Nor was that all. This alien was
+empowered, and by the force of public opinion incited, to exact the
+greatest possible share of the tiller's produce, and, as we saw, he
+was entitled to the whole benefit of whatever improvements the
+tiller of the soil had made; and could--and constantly did--expel
+the cultivator who was unable or unwilling to pay a higher tax, as
+the penalty for improving the land.</p>
+<p>It may be said that bad as this all was, it was not without a
+remedy; that the cultivator had the choice <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page379" id="page379"></a>[pg 379]</span> of
+other occupations, and might let the land lie fallow, while its
+"owner" starved. But this only brings to mind the fact that during
+the eighteenth century England had legislated with the deliberate
+intention of destroying the manufactures and shipping of Ireland,
+and had legislated with success. It should be added that this one
+measure affected all residents in Ireland equally, whatever faith
+or race. There was practically no alternative before the
+cultivator. He had the choice between robbery and starvation.</p>
+<p>It would be more than miraculous if this condition of things had
+not borne its fruit. The result was this: it ceased to be the
+interest of the cultivator of the land to till it effectively, or
+to make any improvement whatever, whether by drainage, reclaiming
+waste land, or building, or by adopting better agricultural
+methods. In every case, his increase of labor, of foresight and
+energy, would have met with but one reward: when the time came to
+renew the lease, he would have been told that his land had doubled
+in value during the year, and that he must, therefore, pay twice as
+much for the privilege of tilling it. If he refused, he at once
+forfeited every claim to the fruit of his own work, the whole of
+his improvements becoming the property of the land owner.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page380" id="page380"></a>[pg
+380]</span>
+<p>The cultivators, as an inevitable consequence, lost every
+incentive to labor, energy, foresight and the moral qualities which
+are fostered by honestly rewarded work. They worked as little as
+possible on their farms, and the standard of cultivation steadily
+declined, while the mode of living grew perpetually worse. If it
+were intended to reduce a whole population to hopeless poverty, no
+better or more certain way could be imagined.</p>
+<p>The steady lowering of the arts of cultivation, the restriction
+of crops, the tendency to keep as close as possible to the margin
+of sustenance, thus zealously fostered, opened the way for the
+disastrous famine of 1846 and 1847, which marks the beginning of a
+rapid decline in population,--a decrease which has never since been
+checked. The inhabitants of Ireland shortly before the famine
+numbered considerably over eight millions. Since that time, there
+has been a decrease of about four millions--a thing without
+parallel in Christendom.</p>
+<p>The amendment of the land-laws, which were directly responsible
+for these evil results, was by no means initiated in consequence of
+the famine. It was due wholly to a great national agitation,
+carried out under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page381" id="page381"></a>[pg
+381]</span> which led to the land-acts of 1881 and 1887. These new
+laws at last guaranteed to the cultivator the fruit of his toil,
+and guarded him against arbitrary increase of the tax levied on him
+by the "owner" of the land. But they did not stop here; they
+initiated a principle which will finally make the cultivator
+absolute owner of his land, and abolish the feudal class with their
+rights of private taxation. This cannot fail to react on England,
+so that the burdens of the Angles and Saxons will at last be lifted
+from their shoulders, as a result of the example set them by the
+Gaels, for generations working persistently, and persistently
+advancing towards their goal. Nor will the tide thus set in motion
+spread only to Saxon and Angle; its influence will be felt wherever
+those who work are deprived unjustly of the fruit of their toil,
+whether by law or without law. The evils suffered by Ireland will
+thus be not unavailing; they will rather bring the best of all
+rewards: a reward to others, of whatever race and in whatever land,
+who are victims of a like injustice.</p>
+<p>The story of Ireland, through many centuries, has thus been
+told. The rest belongs to the future. We have seen the strong life
+of the prime bringing forth the virtues of war and peace; we have
+seen valor <span class="pagenum"><a name="page382" id=
+"page382"></a>[pg 382]</span> and beauty and wisdom come to perfect
+ripeness in the old pagan world. We have seen that old pagan world
+transformed by the new teaching of gentleness and mercy, a
+consciousness, wider, more humane and universal, added from above
+to the old genius of individual life. With the new teaching came
+the culture of Rome, and something of the lore of Hellas and
+Palestine, of Egypt and Chaldea, warmly welcomed and ardently
+cherished in Ireland at a time when Europe was submerged under
+barbarian inroads and laid waste by heathen hordes. We have seen
+the faith and culture thus preserved among our western seas
+generously shared with the nascent nations who emerged from the
+pagan invasions; the seeds of intellectual and spiritual life, sown
+with faith and fervor as far as the Alps and the Danube, springing
+up with God-given increase, and ripening to an abundant
+harvest.</p>
+<p>To that bright epoch of our story succeeded centuries of growing
+darkness and gathering storm. The forces of our national life,
+which until then had found such rich expression and flowered in
+such abundant beauty, were now checked, driven backward and inward,
+through war, oppression and devastation, until a point was reached
+when the whole indigenous <span class="pagenum"><a name="page383"
+id="page383"></a>[pg 383]</span> population had no vestige of
+religious or civil rights; when they ceased even to exist in the
+eyes of the law.</p>
+<p>The tide of life, thus forced inward, gained a firm possession
+of the invisible world, with the eternal realities indwelling
+there. Thus fixed and founded in the real, that tide turned once
+again, flowing outwards and sweeping before it all the barriers in
+its way. The population of Ireland is diminishing in numbers; but
+the race to which they belong increases steadily: a race of clean
+life, of unimpaired vital power, unspoiled by wealth or luxury, the
+most virile force in the New World.</p>
+<p>It happens very rarely, under those mysterious laws which rule
+the life of all humanity, the laws which work their majestic will
+through the ages, using as their ministers the ambitions and
+passions of men--it happens rarely that a race keeps its unbroken
+life through thirty centuries, transformed time after time by new
+spiritual forces, yet in genius remaining ever the same. It may be
+doubted whether even once before throughout all history a race thus
+long-lived has altogether escaped the taint of corruption and
+degeneration. Never before, we may confidently say, has a single
+people emerged <span class="pagenum"><a name="page384" id=
+"page384"></a>[pg 384]</span> from such varied vicissitudes,
+stronger at the end in genius, in spiritual and moral power, than
+at the beginning, richer in vital force, clearer in understanding,
+in every way more mature and humane.</p>
+<p>For this is the real fruit of so much evil valiantly endured: a
+deep love of freedom, a hatred of oppression, a knowledge that the
+wish to dominate is a fruitful source of wrong. The new age now
+dawning before us carries many promises of good for all humanity;
+not less, it has its dangers, grave and full of menace;
+threatening, if left to work unchecked, to bring lasting evil to
+our life. Never before, it is true, have there been so wide
+opportunities for material well-being; but, on the other hand,
+never before have there been such universal temptations toward a
+low and sensual ideal. Our very mastery over natural forces and
+material energies entices us away from our real goal, hides from
+our eyes the human and divine powers of the soul, with which we are
+enduringly concerned. Our skill in handling nature's lower powers
+may be a means of great good; not less may it bring forth
+unexampled evil. The opportunities of well-being are increased; the
+opportunities of exclusive luxury are increased in equal measure;
+exclusion may bring resentment; resentment <span class=
+"pagenum"><a name="page385" id="page385"></a>[pg 385]</span> may
+call forth oppression, armed with new weapons, guided by wider
+understanding, but prompted by the same corrupt spirit as of
+old.</p>
+<p>In the choice which our new age must make between these two
+ways, very much may be done for the enduring well-being of mankind
+by a race full of clean vigor, a race taught by stern experience
+the evil of tyranny and oppression, a race profoundly believing the
+religion of gentleness and mercy, a race full of the sense of the
+invisible world, the world of our immortality.</p>
+<p>We see in Ireland a land with a wonderful past, rich in
+tradition and varied lore; a land where the memorials of the ages,
+built in enduring stone, would in themselves enable us to trace the
+life and progress of human history; we see in Ireland a land full
+of a singular fascination and beauty, where even the hills and
+rivers speak not of themselves but of the spirit which builds the
+worlds; a beauty, whether in brightness or gloom, finding its exact
+likeness in no other land; we see all this, but we see much more:
+not a memory of the past, but a promise of the future; no offering
+of earthly wealth, but rather a gift to the soul of man; not for
+Ireland only, but for all mankind.</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page386" id="page386"></a>[pg
+386]</span><br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2><a name="INDEX."></a>INDEX.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Abbey-Dorney, <a href="#page303">303</a><br>
+Abbey-feale, <a href="#page303">303</a><br>
+Abbey-leix, <a href="#page303">303</a><br>
+Abbey of Ballintober, <a href="#page305">305</a><br>
+Abbey-quarter, <a href="#page029">29</a><br>
+Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, words of, <a href="#page369">369</a>,
+<a href="#page370">370</a><br>
+Achill Island, <a href="#page030">30</a><br>
+Act of Union, <a href="#page371">371</a><br>
+Aed Allan, <a href="#page225">225</a>, <a href=
+"#page231">231</a><br>
+Aed Finnliat, <a href="#page247">247</a><br>
+Aed Roin, <a href="#page225">225</a><br>
+Aed, son of Colgan, <a href="#page226">226</a><br>
+Ailill, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href="#page131">131</a>,
+<a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href=
+"#page142">142</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page152">152</a><br>
+Aiterni, <a href="#page150">150</a><br>
+Alfred, king of the Northumbrian Saxons, <a href=
+"#page232">232</a><br>
+Alfred, king, ode of to the country he visited, <a href=
+"#page232">232</a>, <a href="#page233">233</a><br>
+Alny, <a href="#page120">120</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a><br>
+Amargin, <a href="#page150">150</a><br>
+Ambigatos, <a href="#page103">103</a><br>
+Ancient seats of learning, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Ancient seats of learning, studies therein, <a href=
+"#page221">221</a>, <a href="#page222">222</a><br>
+Anglicans, <a href="#page322">322</a><br>
+Angus, the Young, <a href="#page092">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a>, <a href="#page096">96</a>, <a href=
+"#page173">173</a><br>
+"Annals," history of the times as recorded in the, <a href=
+"#page235">235</a>, <a href="#page252">252</a><br>
+"Annals," quotations from, <a href="#page224">224</a>, <a href=
+"#page244">244</a>, <a href="#page264">264</a>, <a href=
+"#page277">277</a>, <a href="#page293">293</a><br>
+Antrim, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page196">196</a><br>
+Archaic Darkness, <a href="#page011">11</a><br>
+Archaic Dawn, <a href="#page012">12</a><br>
+Ardan, <a href="#page120">120</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a><br>
+Ard-Maca, <a href="#page200">200</a><br>
+Armagh, <a href="#page200">200</a>, <a href="#page208">208</a>,
+<a href="#page232">232</a>, <a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+At-Cliat, <a href="#page242">242</a>, <a href="#page243">243</a>,
+<a href="#page275">275</a><br>
+Athlone, <a href="#page140">140</a>, <a href="#page350">350</a>,
+<a href="#page354">354</a><br>
+Ath-uinc&eacute;, <a href="#page163">163</a><br>
+Aughrim, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href="#page355">355</a></p>
+<p>Ballinasloe, <a href="#page354">354</a><br>
+Ballysadare, <a href="#page027">27</a>, <a href="#page087">87</a>,
+<a href="#page090">90</a><br>
+Balor of the Evil Eye, <a href="#page090">90</a>, <a href=
+"#page091">91</a>, <a href="#page093">93</a><br>
+Bangor, <a href="#page221">221</a>, <a href="#page239">239</a>,
+<a href="#page240">240</a>, <a href="#page250">250</a>, <a href=
+"#page342">342</a><br>
+Bann, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Bantry Bay, <a href="#page104">104</a><br>
+Barrow, valley of the, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Battle of Kinvarra, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Battle of the Headland of the Kings, <a href="#page013">13</a><br>
+Battle-verses, <a href="#page248">248</a>, <a href=
+"#page249">249</a><br>
+Bay of Murbolg, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Bay of Sligo, <a href="#page029">29</a><br>
+Bective Abbey, <a href="#page301">301</a><br>
+Bede, Venerable, <a href="#page218">218</a><br>
+Belgadan, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Beltane, festival of, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Beltaney, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Black Lion Cromlech, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Blackwater, <a href="#page039">39</a>, <a href=
+"#page082">82</a><br>
+Bonamargy Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Book of Kells, <a href="#page209">209</a>, <a href=
+"#page249">249</a><br>
+Boyne, the, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page150">150</a>,
+<a href="#page242">242</a>, <a href="#page350">350</a><br>
+Brandon Hill, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Breagho, <a href="#page034">34</a><br>
+Breas, <a href="#page083">83</a>, <a href="#page084">84</a>,
+<a href="#page099">99</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page105">105</a><br>
+Breg, <a href="#page149">149</a><br>
+Brehon Laws, the, <a href="#page206">206</a><br>
+Brehon Laws, changes of, effected by St. Patrick, <a href=
+"#page207">207</a>, <a href="#page316">316</a><br>
+Bruce, Edward, invasion by, <a href="#page292">292</a><br>
+Bruce, Edward, death of, <a href="#page293">293</a><br>
+Brugh, on the Boyne, <a href="#page093">93</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a><br>
+Bundoran, <a href="#page029">29</a></p>
+<p>Cael, <a href="#page163">163</a>, <a href="#page165">165</a>,
+<a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a><br>
+Cael, poem of, <a href="#page164">164</a>, <a href=
+"#page165">165</a><br>
+Caher, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Caherconree, <a href="#page032">32</a><br>
+Cailt&eacute;, <a href="#page162">162</a>, <a href=
+"#page166">166</a><br>
+Cairbr&eacute;, <a href="#page089">89</a>, <a href=
+"#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page168">168</a>, <a href=
+"#page173">173</a>, <a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+Cairpr&eacute; Nia Fer, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a><br>
+Callan River, <a href="#page199">199</a><br>
+Calpurn, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Cantyre, <a href="#page119">119</a>, <a href="#page123">123</a>,
+<a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Carlingford Lough, <a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+Carlingford Mountains, <a href="#page044">44</a><br>
+Carrickfergus, <a href="#page331">331</a>, <a href=
+"#page344">344</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a>, <a href=
+"#page347">347</a><br>
+Carrowmore, <a href="#page027">27</a>, <a href=
+"#page029">29</a><br>
+Cataract of the Oaks, <a href="#page087">87</a>, <a href=
+"#page090">90</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a><br>
+Catbad, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href="#page142">142</a>,
+<a href="#page150">150</a><br>
+Cavan, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Cavancarragh, <a href="#page035">35</a>, <a href=
+"#page066">66</a><br>
+Cealleac, <a href="#page224">224</a><br>
+Charlemont, castle of, <a href="#page343">343</a><br>
+Chevalier de Tess&eacute;, <a href="#page355">355</a><br>
+Chiefs of Tara, <a href="#page082">82</a><br>
+Chieftain of the Silver Arm, <a href="#page091">91</a><br>
+Chronicler's record of battles fought, <a href="#page210">210</a>,
+<a href="#page211">211</a>, <a href="#page212">212</a>, <a href=
+"#page217">217</a>, <a href="#page">218</a><br>
+Chronicles of Ulster, <a href="#page218">218</a><br>
+Church architecture, <a href="#page298">298</a><br>
+Ciar, <a href="#page104">104</a><br>
+Cistercian Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Clare,031 <a href="#page">31</a>, <a href="#page062">62</a><br>
+Clare Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Clidna, <a href="#page166">166</a><br>
+Clocar, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Clondalkin, <a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+Clonmacnoise, <a href="#page208">208</a><br>
+Cluain Bronaig, <a href="#page226">226</a><br>
+Coleraine, <a href="#page331">331</a><br>
+Colum Kill, <a href="#page208">208</a>, <a href=
+"#page212">212</a><br>
+Colum Kill, death of, <a href="#page215">215</a><br>
+Colum Kill, verses written by, <a href="#page213">213</a>, <a href=
+"#page214">214</a><br>
+Colum of the Churches, <a href="#page223">223</a>, <a href=
+"#page237">237</a><br>
+Conall Cernac, <a href="#page149">149</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Concobar, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href="#page113">113</a>,
+<a href="#page114">114</a>, <a href="#page117">117</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a>, <a href=
+"#page123">123</a>, <a href="#page124">124</a>, <a href=
+"#page129">129</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href=
+"#page142">142</a>, <a href="#page143">143</a>, <a href=
+"#page144">144</a>, <a href="#page145">145</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page148">148</a>, <a href=
+"#page149">149</a>, <a href="#page150">150</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a>, <a href="#page152">152</a>, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href=
+"#page246">246</a>, <a href="#page258">258</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a>, <a href="#page360">360</a><br>
+Conditions existing in early years, <a href="#page219">219</a>,
+<a href="#page220">220</a>, <a href="#page221">221</a>, <a href=
+"#page222">222</a><br>
+Congus the Abbot, <a href="#page225">225</a><br>
+Connacht, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page088">88</a>,
+<a href="#page133">133</a>, <a href="#page140">140</a>, <a href=
+"#page144">144</a>, <a href="#page350">350</a>, <a href=
+"#page357">357</a><br>
+Connemara, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Conn, lord of Connacht, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Conn of the Five-Score Battles, <a href="#page088">88</a>, <a href=
+"#page162">162</a><br>
+Copyright decision, an early, <a href="#page213">213</a><br>
+Cork, <a href="#page005">5</a><br>
+Cormac, <a href="#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page">171</a>,
+<a href="#page172">172</a><br>
+Cormac, precepts of, <a href="#page167">167</a>, <a href=
+"#page168">168</a>, <a href="#page169">169</a>, <a href=
+"#page170">170</a>, <a href="#page171">171</a><br>
+Coroticus, <a href="#page195">195</a><br>
+Corrib, <a href="#page">85</a><br>
+Cred&eacute; of the Yellow Hair, <a href="#page163">163</a>,
+<a href="#page178">178</a>, <a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Crimtan of the Yellow Hair, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Cromlech-builders, the, <a href="#page051">51</a>, <a href=
+"#page068">68</a><br>
+Cromlech of Howth, <a href="#page043">43</a><br>
+Cromlech of Lisbellaw. <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Cromlech of Lough Rea, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Cromlechs, <a href="#page027">27</a>, <a href="#page028">28</a>,
+<a href="#page029">29</a>, <a href="#page030">30</a>, <a href=
+"#page031">31</a>, <a href="#page037">37</a>, <a href=
+"#page039">39</a>, <a href="#page042">42</a>, <a href=
+"#page043">43</a>, <a href="#page045">45</a>, <a href=
+"#page046">46</a>, <a href="#page047">47</a>, <a href=
+"#page051">51</a>, <a href="#page052">52</a>. <a href=
+"#page053">53</a>, <a href="#page054">54</a>, <a href=
+"#page055">55</a>, <a href="#page056">56</a>, <a href=
+"#page057">57</a>, <a href="#page058">58</a><br>
+Cromwell, <a href="#page334">334</a>, <a href=
+"#page339">339</a><br>
+Croom, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Cruacan, <a href="#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page141">141</a>,
+<a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Cryptic Designs on cromlechs, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Cuailgne, <a href="#page132">132</a><br>
+Cuigead Sreing, <a href="#page088">88</a><br>
+Culdaff, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Cumal, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Curlew hills, <a href="#page037">37</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a><br>
+Cuculain, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href="#page014">14</a>,
+<a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page016">16</a>, <a href=
+"#page133">133</a>, <a href="#page134">134</a>, <a href=
+"#page135">135</a>, <a href="#page136">136</a>, <a href=
+"#page137">137</a>, <a href="#page138">138</a>, <a href=
+"#page139">139</a>, <a href="#page143">143</a>, <a href=
+"#page144">144</a>, <a href="#page145">145</a>, <a href=
+"#page152">152</a>, <a href="#page155">155</a>, <a href=
+"#page181">181</a>, <a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href=
+"#page246">246</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a>, <a href=
+"#page360">360</a></p>
+<p>DAGDA Mor, <a href="#page096">96</a>, <a href=
+"#page148">148</a><br>
+Dagda, the Mighty, <a href="#page092">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a><br>
+Dair&eacute;, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page133">133</a>, <a href="#page200">200</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Danes, conversion of the, <a href="#page275">275</a><br>
+Danish Pyramid of Uby, <a href="#page097">97</a><br>
+Dark Ages, the, <a href="#page260">260</a>, <a href=
+"#page261">261</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a><br>
+Day of Spirits, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+De Danaans, the, <a href="#page077">77</a>, <a href=
+"#page079">79</a>, <a href="#page080">80</a>, <a href=
+"#page082">82</a>, <a href="#page084">84</a>, <a href=
+"#page086">86</a>, <a href="#page087">87</a>, <a href=
+"#page089">89</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page093">93</a>, <a href="#page094">94</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a>, <a href="#page096">96</a>, <a href=
+"#page097">97</a>, <a href="#page098">98</a>, <a href=
+"#page099">99</a>, <a href="#page103">103</a>, <a href=
+"#page105">105</a>, <a href="#page106">106</a>, <a href=
+"#page112">112</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page148">148</a><br>
+De Courcey, <a href="#page277">277</a><br>
+De Courceys, the, <a href="#page319">319</a><br>
+Deer-park, <a href="#page029">29</a><br>
+Deirdr&eacute;, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href=
+"#page014">14</a>, <a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href=
+"#page115">115</a>, <a href="#page123">123</a>, <a href=
+"#page124">124</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a>, <a href=
+"#page130">130</a>, <a href="#page178">178</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Deirdr&eacute;, the fate of, <a href="#page116">116</a>, <a href=
+"#page117">117</a>, <a href="#page118">118</a>, <a href=
+"#page119">119</a>, <a href="#page120">120</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a><br>
+Deirdr&eacute;, the Lament of, <a href="#page125">125</a><br>
+De Lacys, the, <a href="#page319">319</a><br>
+Deny, <a href="#page331">331</a>, <a href="#page341">341</a>,
+<a href="#page342">342</a>, <a href="#page344">344</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a><br>
+Devenish, <a href="#page250">250</a><br>
+Devenish Island, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Diarmuid, <a href="#page171">171</a>, <a href="#page172">172</a>,
+<a href="#page173">173</a><br>
+Dicu, <a href="#page240">240</a><br>
+Dingle Bay, <a href="#page104">104</a><br>
+Dinn-Rig by the Barrow, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Dissenters, <a href="#page322">322</a><br>
+Domna, <a href="#page011">11</a>, <a href="#page211">211</a>,
+<a href="#page231">231</a><br>
+Donaghpatrick, <a href="#page208">208</a><br>
+Doncad, <a href="#page231">231</a>, <a href="#page232">232</a><br>
+Donegal, <a href="#page029">29</a>, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Donegal Highlands, <a href="#page026">26</a><br>
+Donegal ranges, <a href="#page005">5</a><br>
+Douglas, <a href="#page350">350</a><br>
+Douin Cain, <a href="#page081">81</a><br>
+Down, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Downpatrick, <a href="#page198">198</a>, <a href=
+"#page240">240</a><br>
+Drogheda, <a href="#page342">342</a>, <a href=
+"#page345">345</a><br>
+Druids, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Druim Dean, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Drumbo, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Dublin, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page252">252</a>,
+<a href="#page340">340</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a><br>
+Dublin Parliament, <a href="#page368">368</a><br>
+Duke of Ormond, <a href="#page359">359</a><br>
+Dundalathglas, <a href="#page240">240</a><br>
+Dundalk, <a href="#page342">342</a><br>
+Dundelga, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Dundrum, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Dundrum Bay, <a href="#page044">44</a>, <a href=
+"#page045">45</a><br>
+Durrow, <a href="#page221">221</a>, <a href="#page250">250</a></p>
+<p>Early churches, <a href="#page208">208</a><br>
+Early schools of learning, tongues first studied in, <a href=
+"#page208">208</a><br>
+Eclipses of the sun and moon, record of, <a href=
+"#page218">218</a><br>
+Edgehill, battle of, <a href="#page326">326</a><br>
+Elias, Bishop of Angoul&ecirc;me, France, testimony of, <a href=
+"#page">250</a>, <a href="#page">251</a><br>
+Elizabeth, Queen, <a href="#page">321</a>, <a href=
+"#page">341</a><br>
+Emain, Banquet-hall of, <a href="#page111">111</a><br>
+Emain of Maca, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href=
+"#page110">110</a>, <a href="#page112">112</a>, <a href=
+"#page115">115</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a>, <a href=
+"#page123">123</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Engineering skill ten thousand years ago, <a href=
+"#page043">43</a><br>
+Enniskillen, <a href="#page034">34</a>, <a href="#page035">35</a>,
+<a href="#page341">341</a><br>
+Eocaid, son of Erc, <a href="#page081">81</a>, <a href=
+"#page084">84</a>, <a href="#page086">86</a>, <a href=
+"#page087">87</a><br>
+Eocu, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Erin, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Established Church, clergy of the, <a href="#page376">376</a><br>
+Etan, <a href="#page089">89</a><br>
+Evangel of Galilee, the, <a href="#page016">16</a></p>
+<p>Factna, son of Cass, <a href="#page113">113</a><br>
+Fair Head, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Feidlimid, <a href="#page242">242</a><br>
+Ferdiad, <a href="#page134">134</a>, <a href="#page135">135</a>,
+<a href="#page136">136</a>, <a href="#page138">138</a>, <a href=
+"#page139">139</a>, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Fergus mac Roeg, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href=
+"#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page016">16</a>, <a href=
+"#page113">113</a>, <a href="#page114">114</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a>, <a href="#page122">122</a>, <a href=
+"#page123">123</a>, <a href="#page124">124</a>, <a href=
+"#page129">129</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page133">133</a><br>
+Fergus the Eloquent, <a href="#page166">166</a>, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a>, <a href=
+"#page360">360</a><br>
+Fermanagh, <a href="#page033">33</a><br>
+Feudal system, the, <a href="#page289">289</a><br>
+Feudal ownership, <a href="#page291">291</a><br>
+Find, ode to Spring of, <a href="#page156">156</a><br>
+Find, son of Cumal, <a href="#page014">14</a>, <a href=
+"#page016">16</a>, <a href="#page155">155</a>, <a href=
+"#page161">161</a>, <a href="#page162">162</a>, <a href=
+"#page163">163</a>, <a href="#page166">166</a>, <a href=
+"#page167">167</a>, <a href="#page171">171</a>, <a href=
+"#page172">172</a>, <a href="#page173">173</a>, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page194">194</a>, <a href=
+"#page246">246</a>, <a href="#page262">262</a><br>
+Find, son of Ros, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page152">152</a><br>
+Finian, school of learning and religion founded by, <a href=
+"#page212">212</a><br>
+Finvoy, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Firbolgs, <a href="#page060">60</a>, <a href="#page061">61</a>,
+<a href="#page069">69</a>. <a href="#page070">70</a>, <a href=
+"#page077">77</a>, <a href="#page081">81</a>, <a href=
+"#page082">82</a>, <a href="#page084">84</a>, <a href=
+"#page085">85</a>, <a href="#page086">86</a>, <a href=
+"#page087">87</a>, <a href="#page088">88</a>, <a href=
+"#page090">90</a>, <a href="#page105">105</a>, <a href=
+"#page106">106</a><br>
+Flann, <a href="#page248">248</a><br>
+Fomorians, <a href="#page069">69</a>, <a href="#page070">70</a>,
+<a href="#page077">77</a>, <a href="#page081">81</a>, <a href=
+"#page090">90</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page092">92</a>, <a href="#page093">93</a>, <a href=
+"#page106">106</a>, <a href="#page246">246</a><br>
+Ford of Ferdiad, Ath-Fhirdia, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Ford of Luan, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Ford of Seannait, <a href="#page226">226</a><br>
+Ford of the Hurdles, <a href="#page242">242</a>, <a href=
+"#page243">243</a>, <a href="#page246">246</a><br>
+Ford of the river, <a href="#page014">14</a><br>
+Franklin, Benjamin, letter of to Irish people, <a href=
+"#page367">367</a><br>
+French Revolution, the, <a href="#page372">372</a></p>
+<p>Gairec, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Galian of Lagin, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Galtee Mountains, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Galway, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page062">62</a>,
+<a href="#page">350</a>, <a href="#page357">357</a><br>
+Galway Bay, <a href="#page031">31</a>, <a href=
+"#page162">162</a><br>
+Galway Lakes, <a href="#page031">31</a><br>
+Gauls, the, <a href="#page103">103</a><br>
+Giant Stones, <a href="#page030">30</a><br>
+Ginkell, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href="#page355">355</a>,
+<a href="#page357">357</a>, <a href="#page358">358</a><br>
+Gladstone, <a href="#page375">375</a><br>
+Glanworth, <a href="#page039">39</a><br>
+Glendalough, <a href="#page208">208</a>, <a href=
+"#page221">221</a><br>
+Glen Druid, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Gold Mines River, <a href="#page109">109</a><br>
+Golden Vale, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Goll Mac Norna, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Grania, <a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page171">171</a>,
+<a href="#page172">172</a>, <a href="#page173">173</a>, <a href=
+"#page178">178</a><br>
+Grattan, Henry, address of, to Dublin Parliament, <a href=
+"#page368">368</a><br>
+Gray Lake, <a href="#page037">37</a><br>
+Grey Abbey, <a href="#page302">302</a></p>
+<p>Headland of the Kings, <a href="#page148">148</a><br>
+Hill of Barnec, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Hill of Howth, <a href="#page239">239</a>, <a href=
+"#page252">252</a><br>
+Hill of Luchra, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Hill of Rudraige, <a href="#page044">44</a><br>
+Hill of Tara, <a href="#page155">155</a><br>
+Hill of the Willows, <a href="#page200">200</a><br>
+Hill of Ward, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Holycross Abbey, <a href="#page304">304</a><br>
+House of Delga, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+House of Mead, <a href="#page199">199</a><br>
+Howth, <a href="#page239">239</a><br>
+Howth Head, <a href="#page043">43</a><br>
+Hyperboreans, <a href="#page060">60</a>, <a href="#page061">61</a>,
+<a href="#page062">62</a>, <a href="#page064">64</a>, <a href=
+"#page069">69</a></p>
+<p>Iarl Strangbow, <a href="#page275">275</a><br>
+Indec, son of De Domnand, <a href="#page090">90</a>, <a href=
+"#page091">91</a><br>
+Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny, <a href="#page021">21</a><br>
+Inismurray, <a href="#page237">237</a>, <a href="#page238">238</a>,
+<a href="#page239">239</a><br>
+Iona, <a href="#page215">215</a><br>
+Ireland, art of working gold in, <a href="#page108">108</a>,
+<a href="#page178">178</a><br>
+Ireland, causes of uprising in, <a href="#page320">320</a><br>
+Ireland, condition of, in the eighteenth century, <a href=
+"#page365">365</a>, <a href="#page366">366</a>, <a href=
+"#page367">367</a><br>
+Ireland, English influence in, <a href="#page318">318</a><br>
+Ireland, life in, two thousand years ago, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page178">178</a>, <a href=
+"#page179">179</a>, <a href="#page180">180</a><br>
+Ireland, national debt of, <a href="#page372">372</a><br>
+Ireland, sympathy of U. S. Congress for people of, <a href=
+"#page366">366</a>, <a href="#page367">367</a><br>
+Ireland, traditions of, <a href="#page110">110</a><br>
+Ireland, the Insurrection of, <a href="#page370">370</a>, <a href=
+"#page371">371</a>, <a href="#page372">372</a><br>
+Ireland, visible and invisible, <a href="#page003">3</a><br>
+Irgalac, <a href="#page149">149</a><br>
+Iriel, <a href="#page149">149</a><br>
+Irish writing, earliest forms of, <a href="#page177">177</a><br>
+Islay, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Islay Hills, <a href="#page119">119</a></p>
+<p>James II., <a href="#page340">340</a>, <a href=
+"#page341">341</a>, <a href="#page342">342</a>, <a href=
+"#page343">343</a>, <a href="#page344">344</a>, <a href=
+"#page345">345</a>, <a href="#page346">346</a>, <a href=
+"#page347">347</a>, <a href="#page353">353</a><br>
+Jura, <a href="#page119">119</a>, <a href="#page123">123</a>,
+<a href="#page143">143</a></p>
+<p>Kenmare, <a href="#page039">39</a><br>
+Kenmare Kiver, <a href="#page039">39</a>, <a href=
+"#page104">104</a><br>
+Kerry, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page062">62</a><br>
+Kildare, <a href="#page210">210</a>, <a href="#page221">221</a>,
+<a href="#page232">232</a><br>
+Kilkenny, <a href="#page042">42</a>, <a href="#page325">325</a>,
+<a href="#page326">326</a>, <a href="#page349">349</a><br>
+Killarney, <a href="#page036">36</a>, <a href="#page039">39</a>,
+<a href="#page163">163</a><br>
+Killee, <a href="#page034">34</a><br>
+Killmallock Abbey, <a href="#page303">303</a><br>
+Killteran Village, <a href="#page043">43</a><br>
+Kinsale, <a href="#page340">340</a>, <a href="#page349">349</a><br>
+King Gorm's Stone, <a href="#page097">97</a><br>
+King William, <a href="#page345">345</a>, <a href=
+"#page346">346</a>, <a href="#page347">347</a>, <a href=
+"#page348">348</a>, <a href="#page349">349</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a>, <a href="#page352">352</a>, <a href=
+"#page365">365</a><br>
+Knock-Mealdown Hills, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Knockmoy Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Knocknarea, <a href="#page030">30</a></p>
+<p>Lake, General, statement of, <a href="#page370">370</a><br>
+Lake of Killarney, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Lakes of Erne, <a href="#page081">81</a><br>
+Lambay, <a href="#page236">236</a>, <a href="#page239">239</a>,
+<a href="#page241">241</a><br>
+Land of the Cromlech-builders, <a href="#page057">57</a><br>
+Land of the Ever Young, <a href="#page095">95</a>, <a href=
+"#page096">96</a><br>
+Land tenure, <a href="#page375">375</a>, <a href=
+"#page376">376</a>, <a href="#page377">377</a>, <a href=
+"#page378">378</a>, <a href="#page389">379</a>, <a href=
+"#page380">380</a><br>
+Laogaire, <a href="#page199">199</a>, <a href=
+"#page240">240</a><br>
+Lame, <a href="#page143">143</a><br>
+Lauzun, <a href="#page350">350</a><br>
+Legamaddy, <a href="#page045">45</a><br>
+Leinster, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page162">162</a>,
+<a href="#page225">225</a>, <a href="#page226">226</a>, <a href=
+"#page232">232</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a><br>
+Leitrim, <a href="#page081">81</a><br>
+Leitrim Hills, <a href="#page026">26</a><br>
+Lennan in Monaghan, <a href="#page046">46</a><br>
+Life of the Cromlech-builders, <a href="#page068">68</a><br>
+Liffey, the, <a href="#page242">242</a><br>
+Limerick, <a href="#page349">349</a>, <a href="#page350">350</a>,
+<a href="#page351">351</a>, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href=
+"#page357">357</a><br>
+Leinstermen, <a href="#page232">232</a>, <a href=
+"#page238">238</a><br>
+Loing Seac, <a href="#page224">224</a><br>
+Lough Erne, <a href="#page341">341</a><br>
+Loch Etive, <a href="#page119">119</a>, <a href=
+"#page121">121</a><br>
+Lough Foyle, <a href="#page247">247</a><br>
+Lough Garra, <a href="#page037">37</a><br>
+Lough Gill, <a href="#page029">29</a><br>
+Lough Gur, <a href="#page038">38</a>, <a href="#page039">39</a><br>
+Lough Key, <a href="#page037">37</a><br>
+Lough Leane, <a href="#page161">161</a>, <a href=
+"#page163">163</a><br>
+Lough Mask, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Lough Neagh, <a href="#page110">110</a>, <a href=
+"#page200">200</a><br>
+Lough Ree, <a href="#page140">140</a><br>
+Loughcrew Hills, <a href="#page043">43</a><br>
+Louis XIV, <a href="#page337">337</a>, <a href="#page340">340</a>,
+<a href="#page353">353</a><br>
+Lug, surnamed Lamfada, the Long-Armed, <a href="#page092">92</a>,
+<a href="#page093">93</a><br>
+Lusk, <a href="#page241">241</a></p>
+<p>Maca, Queen, <a href="#page110">110</a><br>
+Maelbridge, <a href="#page217">217</a><br>
+Mag Breag, <a href="#page223">223</a><br>
+Mag Rein, <a href="#page081">81</a><br>
+Mag Tuiread, <a href="#page085">85</a>, <a href="#page087">87</a>,
+<a href="#page246">246</a><br>
+Mangerton, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Marlborough, Duke of, <a href="#page352">352</a><br>
+Mask, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Mayo, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page062">62</a><br>
+Mayo Cliffs, <a href="#page026">26</a><br>
+Meave, Queen of Connacht, <a href="#page013">13</a>, <a href=
+"#page014">14</a>, <a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href=
+"#page025">25</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href=
+"#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a>, <a href=
+"#page133">133</a>, <a href="#page134">134</a>, <a href=
+"#page136">136</a>, <a href="#page137">137</a>, <a href=
+"#page140">140</a>, <a href="#page141">141</a>, <a href=
+"#page142">142</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page178">178</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Meath, <a href="#page155">155</a>, <a href="#page242">242</a><br>
+Men of Oluemacht, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Message of the New Way, <a href="#page264">264</a><br>
+Messenger of the Tidings, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Mide, <a href="#page149">149</a><br>
+Miocene Age, the, <a href="#page058">58</a><br>
+Modern form of old Irish names, <a href="#page234">234</a><br>
+Monasterboice, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Monk, <a href="#page326">326</a><br>
+Molana Abbey, <a href="#page306">306</a><br>
+Molaise, <a href="#page237">237</a><br>
+Monasteries and religious schools, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Monroe, <a href="#page324">324</a>, <a href="#page326">326</a>,
+<a href="#page327">327</a>, <a href="#page328">328</a>, <a href=
+"#page329">329</a>, <a href="#page330">330</a>, <a href=
+"#page331">331</a>, <a href="#page333">333</a><br>
+Monument of Pillared Stones, <a href="#page030">30</a><br>
+Moore, <a href="#page326">326</a><br>
+Mount Venus Cromlech, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Mountcashel, Lord, <a href="#page342">342</a><br>
+Mountains of Mourne, <a href="#page044">44</a>, <a href=
+"#page094">94</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page193">193</a>, <a href="#page231">231</a><br>
+Mountains of Storms, <a href="#page026">26</a>, <a href=
+"#page087">87</a><br>
+Moville, <a href="#page221">221</a>, <a href="#page239">239</a>,
+<a href="#page262">262</a><br>
+Moytura, <a href="#page031">31</a>, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Munster, <a href="#page005">5</a><br>
+Munstermen of Great Muma, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Murcad, <a href="#page238">238</a></p>
+<p>Naisi, <a href="#page115">115</a>, <a href="#page116">116</a>,
+<a href="#page117">117</a>, <a href="#page118">118</a>, <a href=
+"#page120">120</a>, <a href="#page121">121</a>, <a href=
+"#page122">122</a>, <a href="#page129">129</a>, <a href=
+"#page130">130</a><br>
+Napier, Sir William, testimony of, <a href="#page370">370</a><br>
+Nectain's Shield, <a href="#page232">232</a><br>
+Nemed's sons, <a href="#page087">87</a><br>
+Nessa, <a href="#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page113">113</a><br>
+Norsemen, waning of the, <a href="#page284">284</a><br>
+Northern Cromlech Region, <a href="#page054">54</a><br>
+Northmen, <a href="#page234">234</a>, <a href="#page235">235</a>,
+<a href="#page236">236</a>, <a href="#page243">243</a>, <a href=
+"#page251">251</a><br>
+Nuada, the De Danaan king, <a href="#page085">85</a>, <a href=
+"#page088">88</a>, <a href="#page089">89</a>, <a href=
+"#page091">91</a>, <a href="#page092">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page093">93</a></p>
+<p>O'Connell, Daniel, <a href="#page373">373</a><br>
+O'Donnell, <a href="#page321">321</a>, <a href=
+"#page322">322</a><br>
+O'Neill, Owen Roe, <a href="#page321">321</a>, <a href=
+"#page322">322</a>, <a href="#page323">323</a>, <a href=
+"#page324">324</a>, <a href="#page332">332</a>, <a href=
+"#page333">333</a>, <a href="#page334">334</a>, <a href=
+"#page338">338</a><br>
+O'Neill, death of, <a href="#page333">333</a><br>
+O'Neill, defeat of English army by, <a href="#page326">326</a>,
+<a href="#page327">327</a>, <a href="#page328">328</a>, <a href=
+"#page329">329</a>, <a href="#page330">330</a>, <a href=
+"#page331">331</a>, <a href="#page360">360</a><br>
+Ogma, of the Sunlike Face, <a href="#page092">92</a>, <a href=
+"#page095">95</a>, <a href="#page096">96</a><br>
+Oscar, son of Ossin, <a href="#page014">14</a><br>
+Oscur, <a href="#page55">155</a>, <a href="#page171">171</a><br>
+Ossin, son of Find, <a href="#page014">14</a>, <a href=
+"#page015">15</a>, <a href="#page016">16</a>, <a href=
+"#page155">155</a>, <a href="#page161">161</a>, <a href=
+"#page162">162</a>, <a href="#page167">167</a>, <a href=
+"#page171">171</a>, <a href="#page172">172</a>, <a href=
+"#page177">177</a>, <a href="#page181">181</a>, <a href=
+"#page194">194</a>, <a href="#page246">246</a>, <a href=
+"#page262">262</a><br>
+Ox Mountains, <a href="#page087">87</a></p>
+<p>Parliament at Dublin, <a href="#page323">323</a><br>
+Parliament of Ireland, <a href="#page371">371</a><br>
+Parnell, Charles Stewart, <a href="#page380">380</a><br>
+Patricius, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Patricius, appeal of, to fellow-Christians of Coroticus, <a href=
+"#page195">195</a>, <a href="#page196">196</a><br>
+Patricius, birthplace of, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Patricius, letter of, <a href="#page182">182</a>, <a href=
+"#page183">183</a>, <a href="#page184">184</a>, <a href=
+"#page185">185</a>, <a href="#page186">186</a>, <a href=
+"#page187">187</a>, <a href="#page188">188</a>, <a href=
+"#page189">189</a>, <a href="#page190">190</a>, <a href=
+"#page191">191</a>, <a href="#page192">192</a>, <a href=
+"#page193">193</a><br>
+Patrick, <a href="#page017">17</a><br>
+Patrick, his first victory commemorated, <a href=
+"#page198">198</a><br>
+Patrick, the dwelling of, <a href="#page198">198</a><br>
+Peat, age of, <a href="#page034">34</a>, <a href=
+"#page036">36</a><br>
+Peat, rate of growth of, <a href="#page033">33</a>, <a href=
+"#page035">35</a>, <a href="#page066">66</a>, <a href=
+"#page067">67</a><br>
+Penal Laws, the system of, <a href="#page373">373</a><br>
+Plain of Nia, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Plain of the Headland, <a href="#page082">82</a><br>
+Plain of the Pillars, <a href="#page085">85</a><br>
+Plain of Tirerril, <a href="#page091">91</a><br>
+Plantation of Ulster, <a href="#page322">322</a><br>
+Poem of Ossin, <a href="#page156">156</a><br>
+Potitus, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Prince William of Nassau, <a href="#page339">339</a>, <a href=
+"#page340">340</a>, <a href="#page342">342</a><br>
+Private taxation, <a href="#page291">291</a><br>
+Pyramids of stone, <a href="#page093">93</a>, <a href=
+"#page094198">94</a></p>
+<p>Quoyle River, <a href="#page198">198</a>, <a href=
+"#page240">240</a></p>
+<p>Ragallac, <a href="#page217">217</a><br>
+Raid of the Northmen, <a href="#page234">234</a>, <a href=
+"#page235">235</a>, <a href="#page236">236</a>, <a href=
+"#page237">237</a>, <a href="#page238">238</a>, <a href=
+"#page239">239</a>, <a href="#page240">240</a>, <a href=
+"#page241">241</a>, <a href="#page242">242</a>, <a href=
+"#page243">243</a><br>
+Raids on islands of Irish coast, <a href="#page257">257</a>,
+<a href="#page258">258</a>, <a href="#page259">259</a><br>
+Raphoe, <a href="#page047">47</a><br>
+Rathcool, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Rath-Laogaire, <a href="#page199">199</a><br>
+Rath of Badamar, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Red Hills of Leinster, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Reform Bill, the, <a href="#page372">372</a><br>
+Restoration, the, <a href="#page339">339</a><br>
+Roderick O'Conor, <a href="#page061">61</a><br>
+Ros Ruad, <a href="#page152">152</a><br>
+Ros, son of Rudraige, <a href="#page112">112</a><br>
+Rudraige, <a href="#page044">44</a>, <a href="#page112">112</a><br>
+Rudraige, hill of, <a href="#page044">44</a>, <a href=
+"#page231">231</a><br>
+Runnymead, <a href="#page317">317</a></p>
+<p>Saint Adamnan, <a href="#page223">223</a>, <a href=
+"#page224">224</a><br>
+Saint Bernard, <a href="#page298">298</a><br>
+Saint Brigid, <a href="#page210">210</a><br>
+Saint Camin's "Commentary on the Psalms," <a href=
+"#page222">222</a><br>
+"Saint Colum of the Churches," <a href="#page212">212</a><br>
+Saint Dominick, <a href="#page298">298</a><br>
+Saint Francis of Assisi, <a href="#page298">298</a><br>
+Saint Mansuy, <a href="#page060">60</a><br>
+Saint Patrick, body of laid at rest, <a href="#page201">201</a><br>
+Saint Patrick, delivery of message by, to King Laogaire, <a href=
+"#page199">199</a><br>
+Saint Patrick, visit of to kings of Leinster and Munster, <a href=
+"#page200">200</a><br>
+Saint Patrick, work of, <a href="#page199">199</a>, <a href=
+"#page205">205</a><br>
+Saint Ruth, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href=
+"#page355">355</a><br>
+Saint Ruth, death of, <a href="#page356">356</a><br>
+Saint Samtain, <a href="#page226">226</a><br>
+Saint Samtain, epitaph of the saintly virgin, <a href=
+"#page226">226</a>, <a href="#page227">227</a><br>
+Sarsfield, <a href="#page351">351</a>, <a href="#page353">353</a>,
+<a href="#page355">355</a><br>
+Saul, <a href="#page208">208</a>, <a href="#page221">221</a><br>
+Schomberg, <a href="#page342">342</a>, <a href="#page343">343</a>,
+<a href="#page344">344</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a>, <a href=
+"#page347">347</a>, <a href="#page348">348</a><br>
+Second Epoch, <a href="#page013">13</a><br>
+Senca, <a href="#page144">144</a><br>
+Shannon, the, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page032">32</a>,
+<a href="#page037">37</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>, <a href=
+"#page141">141</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a>, <a href="#page354">354</a>, <a href=
+"#page357">357</a><br>
+Sheldon, <a href="#page357">357</a>, <a href="#page358">358</a><br>
+Slane, <a href="#page347">347</a>, <a href="#page348">348</a><br>
+Slieve Callan, <a href="#page031">31</a>, <a href=
+"#page039">39</a><br>
+Slieve League, <a href="#page026">26</a>, <a href=
+"#page090">90</a><br>
+Slieve Mish, <a href="#page104">104</a>, <a href=
+"#page132">132</a>, <a href="#page196">196</a><br>
+Slievemore Mountain, <a href="#page030">30</a><br>
+Slieve na Calliagh, <a href="#page095">95</a>, <a href=
+"#page097">97</a><br>
+Slieve-na-griddle, <a href="#page045">45</a>, <a href=
+"#page046">46</a><br>
+Sligo, <a href="#page025">25</a>, <a href="#page029">29</a>,
+<a href="#page090">90</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a><br>
+Sligo Hills, <a href="#page026">26</a><br>
+Sons of Milid, <a href="#page103">103</a>, <a href=
+"#page104">104</a>, <a href="#page105">105</a>, <a href=
+"#page106">106</a>, <a href="#page107">107</a>, <a href=
+"#page112">112</a>, <a href="#page132">132</a><br>
+Sound of Jura, <a href="#page119">119</a>, <a href=
+"#page123">123</a><br>
+Southern Cromlech Province, <a href="#page053">53</a><br>
+Sreng, <a href="#page082">82</a>, <a href="#page083">83</a>,
+<a href="#page084">84</a>, <a href="#page091">91</a>, <a href=
+"#page093">93</a>, <a href="#page105">105</a><br>
+Stone Circles, <a href="#page027">27</a>, <a href=
+"#page028">28</a>, <a href="#page029">29</a>, <a href=
+"#page030">30</a>, <a href="#page032">32</a>, <a href=
+"#page033">33</a>, <a href="#page034">34</a>, <a href=
+"#page035">35</a>, <a href="#page038">38</a>, <a href=
+"#page042">42</a>, <a href="#page045">45</a>, <a href=
+"#page046">46</a>, <a href="#page047">47</a>, <a href=
+"#page051">51</a>, <a href="#page052">52</a>, <a href=
+"#page053">53</a>, <a href="#page055">55</a>, <a href=
+"#page072">72</a><br>
+Stone Circles, clue to their building, <a href=
+"#page040">40</a><br>
+Stone Circles, measure of their years, <a href=
+"#page040">40</a><br>
+Strand of Tralee, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Strangford, <a href="#page045">45</a><br>
+Strangford Lough, <a href="#page198">198</a><br>
+Stuarts, the, <a href="#page339">339</a><br>
+Sualtam, <a href="#page013">13</a><br>
+Succat, <a href="#page182">182</a><br>
+Suir, <a href="#page161">161</a><br>
+Sullane River, <a href="#page039">39</a><br>
+Summit of Prospects, <a href="#page046">146</a></p>
+<p>Tailten, <a href="#page106">106</a>, <a href=
+"#page132">132</a><br>
+Talbott, Earl of Tyrconnell, <a href="#page359">359</a><br>
+Tara, <a href="#page081">81</a>, <a href="#page084">84</a>,
+<a href="#page106">106</a>, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page147">147</a>, <a href="#page198">198</a><br>
+Tara, Banquet-hall of, <a href="#page112">112</a><br>
+"The Church of the Oak-woods," <a href="#page210">210</a><br>
+The Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, <a href="#page087">87</a><br>
+Thenay Relics, the, <a href="#page058">58</a><br>
+Third Epoch, <a href="#page014">14</a><br>
+Three Waves of Erin, the, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Tigearnac, <a href="#page265">265</a><br>
+Toppid Mountain, <a href="#page035">35</a>, <a href=
+"#page036">36</a><br>
+Traig Eotaile, <a href="#page087">87</a><br>
+Tralee, <a href="#page032">32</a><br>
+Treaty of Limerick, <a href="#page361">361</a>, <a href=
+"#page365">365</a><br>
+Tuata De Danaan, <a href="#page079">79</a>, <a href=
+"#page084">84</a><br>
+Twelve Peaks of Connemara, <a href="#page031">31</a><br>
+Tyrconnell, Lady, <a href="#page340">340</a><br>
+Tyrconnell, Lord, <a href="#page340">340</a>, <a href=
+"#page343">343</a>, <a href="#page344">344</a>, <a href=
+"#page345">345</a>, <a href="#page349">349</a>, <a href=
+"#page351">351</a>, <a href="#page352">352</a>, <a href=
+"#page353">353</a></p>
+<p>Uinc&eacute;, <a href="#page162">162</a><br>
+Ui-Neill, the, <a href="#page225">225</a>, <a href=
+"#page232">232</a><br>
+Ulad, <a href="#page113">113</a>, <a href="#page130">130</a>,
+<a href="#page131">131</a>, <a href="#page133">133</a>, <a href=
+"#page141">141</a>, <a href="#page151">151</a><br>
+Ulaid, <a href="#page113">113</a>, <a href="#page145">145</a>,
+<a href="#page150">150</a>, <a href="#page152">152</a><br>
+Ulaid, Councils of the, <a href="#page113">113</a><br>
+Ulaid, men of the, <a href="#page130">130</a><br>
+Ulster, <a href="#page005">5</a>, <a href="#page345">345</a><br>
+Upper Erne, <a href="#page032">32</a><br>
+Usnae, <a href="#page115">115</a></p>
+<p>Venice of Lough Rea, <a href="#page037">37</a><br>
+Volunteer Movement, the, <a href="#page367">367</a>, <a href=
+"#page369">369</a></p>
+<p>Waterford, <a href="#page349">349</a>, <a href=
+"#page350">350</a>, <a href="#page352">352</a><br>
+Water of Luachan, <a href="#page146">146</a><br>
+Wave of Clidna, the, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Wave of Rudraige, the, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Wave of Tuag Inbir, the, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Waves of Erin, the three, <a href="#page146">146</a>, <a href=
+"#page151">151</a><br>
+Weight of Cromlech-stones, <a href="#page056">56</a><br>
+Wexford Harbor, <a href="#page042">42</a><br>
+Wicklow, <a href="#page005">5</a><br>
+Wicklow Gold-mines, the, <a href="#page108">108</a>, <a href=
+"#page109">109</a></p>
+<p>Yellow Ford of Athboy, <a href="#page140">140</a></p>
+<br>
+<a name="394.jpg"></a>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="images/394.jpg"><img src="images/394.jpg"
+width="100%" alt=""></a><br>
+<b>MAP OF IRELAND.</b></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ireland, Historic and Picturesque
+by Charles Johnston
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRELAND, HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE ***
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+Project Gutenberg's Ireland, Historic and Picturesque, by Charles Johnston
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ireland, Historic and Picturesque
+
+Author: Charles Johnston
+
+Release Date: April 19, 2004 [EBook #12078]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRELAND, HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charlie Kirschner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+IRELAND
+
+HISTORIC AND PICTURESQUE
+
+BY
+
+CHARLES JOHNSTON
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+1902
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+I. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.
+
+II. THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.
+
+III. THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.
+
+IV. THE DE DANAANS.
+
+V. EMAIN OF MACA.
+
+VI. CUCULAIN THE HERO.
+
+VII. FIND AND OSSIN.
+
+VIII. THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.
+
+IX. THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.
+
+X. THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.
+
+XI. THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.
+
+XII. THE NORMANS.
+
+XIII. THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.
+
+XIV. THE JACOBITE WARS.
+
+XV. CONCLUSION.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+Photogravures made by A.W. ELSON & Co.
+
+
+PEEP HOLE, BLARNEY CASTLE
+IN THE DARGLE, CO. WICKLOW
+MUCKROSS ABBEY, KILLARNEY
+BRANDY ISLAND, GLENGARRIFF
+SUGAR LOAF MOUNTAIN, GLENGARRIFF
+RIVER ERNE, BELLEEK
+WHITE ROCKS, PORTRUSH
+POWERSCOURT WATERFALL, CO. WICKLOW
+HONEYCOMB, GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
+GRAY MAN'S PATH, FAIR HEAD
+COLLEEN BAWN CAVES, KILLARNEY
+RUINS ON SCATTERY ISLAND
+VALLEY OF GLENDALOUGH AND RUINS OF THE SEVEN
+  CHURCHES
+ANCIENT CROSS, GLENDALOUGH
+ROUND TOWER, ANTRIM
+GIANT'S HEAD AND DUNLUCE CASTLE, CO. ANTRIM
+ROCK CASHEL, RUINS OF OLD CATHEDRAL, KING CORMAC'S
+  CHAPEL AND ROUND TOWER
+DUNLUCE CASTLE
+MELLIFONT ABBEY, CO. LOUTH
+HOLY CROSS ABBEY, CO. TIPPERARY
+DONEGAL CASTLE
+TULLYMORE PARK, CO. DOWN
+THOMOND BRIDGE, LIMERICK
+SALMON FISHERY, GALWAY
+O'CONNELL'S STATUE, DUBLIN
+
+
+
+
+IRELAND.
+
+I.
+
+VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.
+
+Here is an image by which you may call up and remember the natural form
+and appearance of Ireland:
+
+Think of the sea gradually rising around her coasts, until the waters,
+deepened everywhere by a hundred fathoms, close in upon the land. Of all
+Ireland there will now remain visible above the waves only two great
+armies of islands, facing each other obliquely across a channel of open
+sea. These two armies of islands will lie in ordered ranks, their lines
+stretching from northeast to southwest; they will be equal in size, each
+two hundred miles along the front, and seventy miles from front to rear.
+And the open sea between, which divides the two armies, will measure
+seventy miles across.
+
+Not an island of these two armies, as they lie thus obliquely facing
+each other, will rise as high as three thousand feet; only the captains
+among them will exceed a thousand; nor will there be great variety in
+their forms. All the islands, whether north or south, will have gently
+rounded backs, clothed in pastures nearly to the crest, with garments of
+purple heather lying under the sky upon their ridges. Yet for all this
+roundness of outline there will be, towards the Atlantic end of either
+army, a growing sternness of aspect, a more sombre ruggedness in the
+outline of the hills, with cliffs and steep ravines setting their brows
+frowning against the deep.
+
+Hold in mind the image of these two obliquely ranged archipelagoes,
+their length thrice their breadth, seaming the blue of the sea, and
+garmented in dark green and purple under the sunshine; and, thinking of
+them thus, picture to yourself a new rising of the land, a new
+withdrawal of the waters, the waves falling and ever falling, till all
+the hills come forth again, and the salt tides roll and ripple away from
+the valleys, leaving their faces for the winds to dry; let this go on
+till the land once more takes its familiar form, and you will easily
+call up the visible image of the whole.
+
+As you stand in the midst of the land, where first lay the channel of
+open sea, you will have, on your northern horizon, the beginning of a
+world of purple-outlined hills, outliers of the northern mountain
+region, which covers the upper third of the island. On all sides about
+you, from the eastern sea to the western ocean, you will have the great
+central plain, dappled with lakes and ribbed with silver rivers, another
+third of the island. Then once more, to the south, you will have a
+region of hills, the last third of Ireland, in size just equal to the
+northern mountains or the central plain.
+
+The lines of the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses of
+Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern Ulster
+and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear is held by
+the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness of the
+northern seas.
+
+The plain opens from the verge of these hills; the waters that gather on
+its pleasant pastures and fat fields, or among the green moss tracts of
+its lowlands, flow eastward by the Boyne or southwestward by the Shannon
+to the sea.
+
+Then with the granite mountains of Dublin and Wicklow begin the southern
+hills, stretching through south Leinster and Munster to the red
+sandstone ridges of Cork and Kerry, our last vantage-ground against
+the Atlantic.
+
+Finally, encircling all, is the perpetual presence of the sea, with its
+foaming, thunderous life or its days of dreamy peace; around the silver
+sands or furrowed cliffs that gird the island our white waves rush
+forever, murmuring the music of eternity.
+
+Such is this land of Eire, very old, yet full of perpetual youth; a
+thousand times darkened by sorrow, yet with a heart of living gladness;
+too often visited by evil and pale death, yet welling ever up in
+unconquerable life,--the youth and life and gladness that thrill through
+earth and air and sky, when the whole world grows beautiful in the front
+of Spring.
+
+For with us Spring is like the making of a new world in the dawn of
+time. Under the warm wind's caressing breath the grass comes forth upon
+the meadows and the hills, chasing dun Winter away. Every field is newly
+vestured in young corn or the olive greenness of wheat; the smell of the
+earth is full of sweetness. White daisies and yellow dandelions star all
+our pastures; and on the green ruggedness of every hillside, or along
+the shadowed banks of every river and every silver stream, amid velvet
+mosses and fringes of new-born ferns, in a million nooks and crannies
+throughout all the land, are strewn dark violets; and wreaths of yellow
+primroses with crimped green leaves pour forth a remote and divine
+fragrance; above them, the larches are dainty with new greenery and rosy
+tassels, and the young leaves of beech and oak quiver with fresh life.
+
+Still the benignance of Spring pours down upon us from the sky, till the
+darkening fields are hemmed in between barriers of white hawthorn, heavy
+with nectar, and twined with creamy honeysuckle, the finger-tips of
+every blossom coral-red. The living blue above throbs with the tremulous
+song of innumerable larks; the measured chant of cuckoos awakens the
+woods; and through the thickets a whole world's gladness sings itself
+forth from the throat of thrush and blackbird. Through the whole land
+between the four seas benediction is everywhere; blue-bells and the rosy
+fingers of heath deck the mountain-tops, where the grouse are crooning
+to each other among the whins; down the hillsides into every valley pour
+gladness and greenness and song; there are flowers everywhere, even to
+the very verge of the whispering sea. There, among the gray bent-spikes
+and brackens on the sandhills, primroses weave their yellow wreaths; and
+little pansies, golden and blue and purple, marshal their weird eyes
+against the spears of dark blue hyacinths, till the rich tribute of
+wild thyme makes peace between them.
+
+The blue sky overhead, with its flocks of sunlit clouds, softly bends
+over the gentle bosom of the earth. A living spirit throbs everywhere,
+palpable, audible, full of sweetness and sadness immeasurable--sadness
+that is only a more secret joy.
+
+Then the day grows weary, making way for the magic of evening and the
+oncoming dark with its mystery. The tree-stems redden with the sunset;
+there is a chill sigh in the wind; the leaves turn before it, burnished
+against the purple sky. As the gloom rises up out of the earth, bands of
+dark red gather on the horizon, seaming the clear bronze of the sky,
+that passes upward into olive-color, merging in dark blue overhead. The
+sun swings down behind the hills, and purple darkness comes down out of
+the sky; the red fades from the tree-stems, the cloud-colors die away;
+the whole world glimmers with the fading whiteness of twilight. Silence
+gathers itself together out of the dark, deepened, not broken, by the
+hushing of the wind among the beech-leaves, or the startled cluck of a
+blackbird, or a wood-pigeon's soft murmur, as it dreams in the
+silver fir.
+
+Under the brown wings of the dark, the night throbs with mystic
+presences; the hills glimmer with an inward life; whispering voices
+hurry through the air. Another and magical land awakes in the dark, full
+of a living restlessness; sleepless as the ever-moving sea. Everywhere
+through the night-shrouded woods, the shadowy trees seem to interrupt
+their secret whispers till you are gone past. There is no sense of
+loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand,
+palpable though hidden, remote from us though touching our lives,
+calling to us through the gloom with wordless voices, inviting us to
+enter and share with them the mystical life of this miraculous earth,
+great mother of us all, The dark is full of watching eyes.
+
+Summer with us is but a brighter Spring, as our Winter only prolongs the
+sadness of Autumn. So our year has but two moods, a gay one and a sad
+one. Yet each tinges the other--the mists of Autumn veiling the gleam of
+Spring--Spring smiling through the grief of Autumn. When the sad mood
+comes, stripping the trees of their leaves, and the fields of their
+greenness, white mists veil the hills and brood among the fading
+valleys. A shiver runs through the air, and the cold branches are
+starred with tears. A poignant grief is over the land, an almost
+desolation,--full of unspoken sorrow, tongue-tied with unuttered
+complaint. All the world is lost and forlorn, without hope or respite.
+Everything is given up to the dirges of the moaning seas, the white
+shrouds of weeping mist. Wander forth upon the uplands and among the
+lonely hills and rock-seamed sides of the mountains, and you will find
+the same sadness everywhere: a grieving world under a grieving sky.
+Quiet desolation hides among the hills, tears tremble on every brown
+grass-blade, white mists of melancholy shut out the lower world.
+
+Whoever has not felt the poignant sadness of the leafless days has never
+known the real Ireland; the sadness that is present, though veiled, in
+the green bravery of Spring, and under the songs of Summer. Nor have
+they ever known the real Ireland who have not divined beneath that
+poignant sadness a heart of joy, deep and perpetual, made only keener by
+that sad outward show.
+
+Here in our visible life is a whisper and hint of our life invisible; of
+the secret that runs through and interprets so much of our history. For
+very much of our nation's life has been like the sadness of those autumn
+days,--a tale of torn leaves, of broken branches, of tears everywhere.
+Tragedy upon tragedy has filled our land with woe and sorrow, and, as
+men count success, we have failed of it, and received only misery and
+deprivation. He has never known the true Ireland who does not feel that
+woe. Yet, more, he knows not the real Ireland who cannot feel within
+that woe the heart of power and joy,--the strong life outlasting darkest
+night,--the soul that throbs incessantly under all the calamities of the
+visible world, throughout the long tragedy of our history.
+
+This is our secret: the life that is in sorrow as in joy; the power that
+is not more in success than in failure--the one soul whose moods these
+are, who uses equally life and death.
+
+For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy. And we may outline now the
+manner in which that tale will be told. We shall have, first, a long,
+dim dawn,--mysterious peoples of the hidden past coming together to our
+land from the outlying darkness. A first period, which has left abundant
+and imperishable traces everywhere among our hills and valleys, writing
+a large history in massive stone, yet a history which, even now, is dim
+as the dawn it belongs to. What can be called forth from that Archaic
+Darkness, in the backward and abysm of Time, we shall try to evoke;
+drawing the outlines of a people who, with large energies in our visible
+world, toiled yet more for the world invisible; a people uniform through
+the whole land and beyond it, along many neighboring shores; a people
+everywhere building; looking back into a long past; looking forward
+through the mists of the future. A people commemorating the past in a
+form that should outlast the future. A people undertaking great
+enterprises for mysterious ends; whose works are everywhere among us, to
+this day, imperishable in giant stone; yet a people whose purposes are
+mysterious to us, whose very name and tongue are quite unknown. Their
+works still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the
+four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the
+present; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such
+large simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every
+handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows,
+bridging the morning and evening twilight of our race.
+
+After this Archaic Dawn we shall find a mingling of four races in
+Ireland, coming together from widely separated homes, unless one of the
+four be the descendant of the archaic race, as well it may be. From the
+surging together of these four races we shall see, in almost
+pre-historic times, the growth of a well-knit polity; firm
+principalities founded, strong battles fought, a lasting foundation of
+law. In this Second Epoch, every thing that in the first was dim and
+vague grows firm in outline and defined. Names, places, persons,--we
+know them all as if they were of to-day. This is the age which flowered
+in the heroic days of Emain of Maca, Emain 'neath the beech-trees, the
+citadel of northeastern Ireland. Here we shall find the court of Fergus
+mac Roeg, a man too valiant, too passionate, too generous to rule
+altogether wisely; his star darkened by the gloomy genius of Concobar
+his stepson, the evil lover of ill-fated Deirdre. Cuculain, too, the
+war-loving son of Sualtam, shall rise again,--in whom one part of our
+national genius finds its perfect flower. We shall hear the thunder of
+his chariot, at the Battle of the Headland of the Kings, when Meave the
+winsome and crafty queen of Connacht comes against him, holding in
+silken chains of her tresses the valiant spirit of Fergus. The whole
+life of that heroic epoch, still writ large upon the face of the land,
+shall come forth clear and definite; we shall stand by the threshold of
+Cuculain's dwelling, and move among the banquet-halls of Emain of Maca.
+We shall look upon the hills and valleys that Meave and Deirdre looked
+on, and hear the clash of spear and shield at the Ford of the
+river,--and this even though we must go back two thousand years.
+
+To this will follow a Third Epoch, where another side of Ireland's
+genius will write itself in epic all across the land, with songs for
+every hillside, and stories for every vale and grove. Here our more
+passionate and poetic force will break forth in the lives of Find, son
+of Cumal, the lord of warriors; in his son Ossin, most famous bard of
+the western lands, and Ossin's son Oscar, before whose might even the
+fiends and sprites cowered back dismayed. As the epoch of Cuculain shows
+us our valor finding its apotheosis, so shall we find in Find and Ossin
+and Oscar the perfect flower of our genius for story and song; for
+romantic life and fine insight into nature; for keen wit and gentler
+humor. The love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly
+the visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly,--a sense
+of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic
+life. We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and poetic
+side of Irish character as will leave little for coming ages to add. In
+these two early epochs we shall see the perfecting of the natural man;
+the moulding of rounded, gracious and harmonious lives, inspired with
+valor and the love of beauty and song.
+
+Did our human destiny stop there, with the perfect life of individual
+men and women, we might well say that these two epochs of Ireland
+contain it all; that our whole race could go no further. For no man
+lived more valiant than Cuculain, more generous than Fergus, more full
+of the fire of song than Ossin, son of Find. Nor amongst women were any
+sadder than Deirdre and Grania; craftier than Meave, more winsome than
+Nessa the mother of Concobar. Perfected flowers of human life all of
+them,--if that be all of human life. So, were this all, we might well
+consent that with the death of Oscar our roll of history might close;
+there is nothing to add that the natural man could add.
+
+But where the perfecting of the natural man ends, our truer human life
+begins--the life of our ever-living soul. The natural man seeks victory;
+he seeks wealth and possessions and happiness; the love of women, and
+the loyalty of followers. But the natural man trembles in the face of
+defeat, of sorrow, of subjection; the natural man cannot raise the
+black veil of death.
+
+Therefore for the whole world and for our land there was needed another
+epoch, a far more difficult lesson,--one so remote from what had been of
+old, that even now we only begin to understand it. To the Ireland that
+had seen the valor of Cuculain, that had watched the wars of Fergus,--to
+the Ireland that listened to the deeds of Find and the songs of
+Ossin,--came the Evangel of Galilee, the darkest yet brightest message
+ever brought to the children of earth. If we rightly read that Evangel,
+it brought the doom of the natural man, and his supersession by the man
+immortal; it brought the death of our personal perfecting and pride, and
+the rising from the dead of the common soul, whereby a man sees another
+self in his neighbor; sees all alike in the one Divine.
+
+Of this one Divine, wherein we all live and live forever, pain is no
+less the minister than pleasure; nay, pain is more its minister, since
+pleasure has already given its message to the natural man. Of that one
+Divine, sorrow and desolation are the messengers, alike with joy and
+gladness; even more than joy and gladness, for the natural man has
+tasted these. Of that one Divine, black and mysterious death is the
+servant, not less than bright life; and life we had learned of old in
+the sunshine.
+
+[Illustration: In the Dargle, Co. Wicklow]
+
+There came, therefore, to Ireland, as to a land cherished for enduring
+purposes, first the gentler side, and then the sterner, of the Galilean
+message. First, the epoch almost idyllic which followed after the
+mission of Patrick; the epoch of learning and teaching the simpler
+phrases of the Word. Churches and schools rose everywhere, taking the
+place of fort and embattled camp. Chants went up at morning and at
+evening, with the incense of prayer, and heaven seemed descended upon
+earth. Our land, which had stood so high in the ranks of valor and
+romance, now rose not less eminent for piety and fervid zeal, sending
+forth messengers and ministers of the glad news to the heathen lands of
+northern and central Europe, and planting refuges of religion within
+their savage bounds. Beauty came forth in stone and missal, answering to
+the beauty of life it was inspired by; and here, if anywhere upon earth
+through a score of centuries, was realized the ideal of that prayer for
+the kingdom, as in heaven, so on earth. Here, again, we have most ample
+memorials scattered all abroad throughout the land; we can call up the
+whole epoch, and make it stand visible before us, visiting every shrine
+and sacred place of that saintly time, seeing, with inner eyes, the
+footsteps of those who followed that path, first traced out by the
+shores of Gennesaret.
+
+Once more, if the kingdom come upon earth were all of the message, we
+might halt here; for here forgiveness and gentle charity performed their
+perfect work, and learning was present with wise counsel to guide
+willing feet in the way. Yet this is not all; nor, if we rightly
+understand that darkest yet brightest message, are we or is mankind
+destined for such an earthly paradise; our kingdom is not of this world.
+Here was another happiness, another success; yet not in that happiness
+nor in that success was hid the secret; it lay far deeper. Therefore we
+find that morning with its sunshine rudely clouded over, its promise
+swept away in the black darkness of storms. Something more than holy
+living remained to be learned; there remained the mystery of failure and
+death--that death which is the doorway to our real life. Therefore upon
+our shores broke wave after wave of invasion, storm after storm of
+cruelest oppression and degradation. In the very dust was our race
+ground down, destitute, afflicted, tormented, according to prophecy and
+promise. Nor was that the end. Every bitterness that the heart of man
+can conceive, that the heart of man can inflict, that the heart of man
+can endure, was poured into our cup, and we drained it to the dregs. Of
+that saddest yet most potent time we shall record enough to show not
+only what befell through our age of darkness, but also, so far as may
+be, what miraculous intent underlay it, what promise the darkness
+covered, of our future light; what golden rays of dawn were hidden in
+our gloom.
+
+Finally, from all our fiery trials we shall see the genius of our land
+emerge, tried indeed by fire, yet having gained fire's purity; we shall
+see that genius beginning, as yet with halting speech, to utter its most
+marvelous secret of the soul of man. We shall try at least to gain clear
+sight of our great destiny, and thereby of the like destiny of
+universal man.
+
+For we cannot doubt that what we have passed through, all men and all
+nations either have passed through already, or are to pass through in
+the time to come. There is but one divine law, one everlasting purpose
+and destiny for us all. And if we see other nations now entering that
+time of triumph which passed for us so long ago, that perfecting of the
+natural man, with his valor and his song, we shall with fear and
+reverence remember that before them also lie the dark centuries of fiery
+trial; the long night of affliction, the vigils of humiliation and
+suffering. The one Divine has not yet laid aside the cup that holds the
+bitter draught,--the drinking of which comes ever before the final gift
+of the waters of life. What we passed through, they shall pass through
+also; what we suffered, they too shall suffer. Well will it be with them
+if, like us, they survive the fierce trial, and rise from the fire
+immortal, born again through sacrifice.
+
+Therefore I see in Ireland a miraculous and divine history, a life and
+destiny invisible, lying hid within her visible life. Like that
+throbbing presence of the night which whispers along the hills, this
+diviner whisper, this more miraculous and occult power, lurks in our
+apparent life. From the very gray of her morning, the children of
+Ireland were preoccupied with the invisible world; it was so in the
+darkest hours of our oppression and desolation; driven from this world,
+we took refuge in that; it was not the kingdom of heaven upon earth, but
+the children of earth seeking a refuge in heaven. So the same note rings
+and echoes through all our history; we live in the invisible world. If
+I rightly understand our mission and our destiny, it is this: To restore
+to other men the sense of that invisible; that world of our immortality;
+as of old our race went forth carrying the Galilean Evangel. We shall
+first learn, and then teach, that not with wealth can the soul of man be
+satisfied; that our enduring interest is not here but there, in the
+unseen, the hidden, the immortal, for whose purposes exist all the
+visible beauties of the world. If this be our mission and our purpose,
+well may our fair mysterious land deserve her name: Inis Fail, the Isle
+of Destiny.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE GREAT STONE MONUMENTS.
+
+Westward from Sligo--Town of the River of Shells--a tongue of land runs
+toward the sea between two long bays. Where the two bays join their
+waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray limestone rocks soaring
+sheer upwards, rugged and formidable. Within the shadow of the mountain
+is hidden a wonderful glen--a long tunnel between cliffs, densely arched
+over with trees and fringed with ferns; even at midday full of a green
+gloom. It is a fitting gateway to the beauty and mystery of
+the mountain.
+
+Slowly climbing by stony ways, the path reaches the summit, a rock table
+crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in olden days as a
+memorial of golden-haired Maeve. From the dead queen's pyramid a view of
+surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over sea and land, mingled valley
+and hill. The Atlantic stretches in illimitable blue, curved round the
+rim of the sky, a darker mirror of the blue above. It is full of
+throbbing silence and peace. Across blue fields of ocean, and facing
+the noonday brightness of the sun, rise the tremendous cliffs of Slieve
+League, gleaming with splendid colors through the shimmering air; broad
+bands of amber and orange barred with deeper red; the blue weaves
+beneath them and the green of the uplands above.
+
+The vast amber wall rises out of the ocean, and passes eastward in a
+golden band till it merges in the Donegal highlands with their
+immeasurable blue. Sweeping round a wide bay, the land drawls nearer
+again, the far-away blue darkening to purple, and then to green and
+brown. The sky is cut by the outlines of the Leitrim and Sligo hills, a
+row of rounded peaks against the blue, growing paler and more
+translucent in the southern distance.
+
+Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across the plain,
+where brown and purple are blended with green in broad spaces of
+mingling color. To the west the ground rises again into hills crowded
+behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the Mountains of
+Storms. Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud-wreaths in the blue, are
+the hills that guard our western ocean. From their sunset-verges the
+land draws near again, in the long range of the Mayo cliffs,--fierce
+walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean from a wild world of
+storm-swept uplands. The cliffs gradually lessen, and their colors grow
+clearer, till they sink at last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare,
+divided from us only by a channel of shallow sea.
+
+The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain, is full
+of the silence of intense and mighty power. The ocean is tremulous with
+the breath of life. The mountains, in their stately beauty, rise like
+immortals in the clear azure. The signs of our present works are dwarfed
+to insignificance.
+
+Everywhere within that wide world of hill and plain, and hardly less
+ancient than the hills themselves, are strewn memorials of another world
+that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden past. A wordless
+history is written there, in giant circles of stone and cromlechs of
+piled blocks, so old that in a land of most venerable tradition their
+very legend has vanished away.
+
+Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs and
+stone circles, a very city of dead years. There is something
+awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered stones,
+the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts; that awe is deepened by
+the feeling of the tremendous power lavished in bringing them here,
+setting them up in their ordered groups, and piling the crowns of the
+cromlechs on other only less gigantic stones; awe gives place to
+overwhelming mystery when we can find no kinship to our own thoughts and
+aims in their stately grouping. We are in presence of archaic purposes
+recorded in a massive labyrinth, purposes darkly hidden from us in
+the unknown.
+
+There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances, firmly set
+upright in the earth. They loom vast, like beads of a giant necklace on
+the velvet grass. There are cromlechs set alone--a single huge boulder
+borne aloft in the air on three others of hardly less weight. There are
+cromlechs set in the midst of titanic circles of stone, with lesser
+boulders guarding the cromlechs closer at hand. There are circles beside
+circles rising in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting
+their aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their
+companion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmuring sea.
+
+Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages. When sunrise
+reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over
+the burnished grass. From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever
+hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow
+gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness. When day
+declines, the shadows come forth again, joining ghostly hands from stone
+to stone, from circle to circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at
+last into the universal realm of night. Thus they weave their web,
+inexorable as tireless Time.
+
+There are more than threescore of these circles at Carrowmore, under
+Knocknarea. Yet Carrowmore is only one among many memorials of dead
+years within our horizon. At Abbey-quarter, within the town-limits of
+Sligo itself, there is another great ring of boulders, the past and the
+present mingling together. On the northern coast, across the Bay of
+Sligo, where the headland of Streedagh juts forth into the sea, there is
+another giant necklace of gray blocks ranged upon the moor. Farther
+along the shore, where Bundoran marks the boundary of Donegal, a
+cromlech and a stone circle rise among the sand-banks. All have the same
+rugged and enduring massiveness, all are wrapped in the same mystery.
+
+Eastward from Sligo, Lough Gill lies like a mirror framed in hills,
+wreathed with dark green woods. On a hill-top north of the lake, in the
+Deer-park, is a monument of quite other character--a great oblong
+marked by pillared stones, like an open temple. At three points huge
+stones are laid across from pillar to pillar. The whole enclosure was
+doubtless so barred in days of old, a temple of open arches crowning the
+summit of the hill. The great ruin by the lake keeps its secret well.
+
+Another ring of giant stones rests on a hillside across the lake, under
+the Cairn hill, with its pyramid crown. All these are within easy view
+from our first vantage-point on Knocknarea, yet they are but the
+outposts of an army which spreads everywhere throughout the land. They
+are as common in wild and inaccessible places as on the open plain. Some
+rise in lonely islands off the coast; others on the summits of
+mountains; yet others in the midst of tilled fields. They bear no
+relation at all to the land as it is to-day. The very dispersion of
+these great stone monuments, scattered equally among places familiar or
+wild, speaks of a remote past--a past when all places were alike wild,
+or all alike familiar.
+
+Where the gale-swept moors of Achill Island rise up toward the slope of
+Slievemore Mountain, there are stone circles and cromlechs like the
+circles of Carrowmore. The wild storms of the Atlantic rush past them,
+and the breakers roar under their cliffs. The moorland round the
+towering mountain is stained with ochre and iron under a carpet of
+heather rough as the ocean winds.
+
+Away to the south from Slievemore the horizon is broken by an army of
+mountains, beginning with the Twelve Peaks of Connemara. Eastward of
+these hills are spread the great Galway lakes; eastward of these a wide
+expanse of plain. This is the famous Moytura of traditional history,
+whose story we shall presently tell. Ages ago a decisive battle was
+fought there; but ages before the battle, if we are not greatly misled,
+the stone circles of the plain were already there. Tradition says that
+these circles numbered seven in the beginning, but only two
+remain unbroken.
+
+Between Galway Bay and the wide estuary of the Shannon spread the
+moorlands of Clare, bleak under Atlantic gales, with never a tree for
+miles inward from the sea. Like a watch-tower above the moorlands stand.
+Slieve Callan, the crown of the mountain abruptly shorn. Under the
+shoulder of the great hill, with the rolling moorlands all about it,
+stands a solitary cromlech; formed of huge flat stones, it was at first
+a roomy chamber shut in on all four sides, and roofed by a single
+enormous block; the ends have fallen, so that it is now an open tunnel
+formed of three huge stones.
+
+The coast runs southward from the Shannon to the strand of Tralee, the
+frontier of the southern mountain world, where four ranges of red
+sandstone thrust themselves forth towards the ocean, with long fiords
+running inland between them. On a summit of the first of these red
+ranges, Caherconree above Tralee strand, there is a stone circle,
+massive, gigantic, dwelling in utter solitude.
+
+We have recorded a few only out of many of these great stone monuments
+strewn along our Atlantic coast, whether on moor or cliff or remote
+mountain-top.
+
+There are others as notable everywhere in the central plain, the
+limestone world of lakes and rivers. On a green hill-crest overlooking
+the network of inlets of Upper Erne there is a circle greater than any
+we have recorded. The stones are very massive, some of them twice the
+height of a tall man. To one who stands within the ring these huge
+blocks of stone shut out the world; they loom large against the sky,
+full of unspoken secrets like the Sphinx. Within this mighty ring the
+circle of Stonehenge might be set, leaving a broad road all round it on
+the grass.
+
+From Fermanagh, where this huge circle is, we gain our best clue to the
+age of all these monuments, everywhere so much like each other in their
+massive form and dimensions, everywhere so like in their utter mystery.
+Round the lakes of Erne there are wide expanses of peat, dug as fuel for
+centuries, and in many places as much as twelve feet deep, on a bed of
+clay, the waste of old glaciers. Though formed with incredible slowness,
+this whole mass of peat has grown since some of the great stone
+monuments were built; if we can tell the time thus taken for its growth
+we know at least the nearer limit of the time that divides us from
+their builders.
+
+Like a tree, the peat has its time of growth and its time of rest.
+Spring covers it with green, winter sees it brown and dead. Thus thin
+layers are spread over it, a layer for a year, and it steadily gains in
+thickness with the passing of the years. The deeper levels are buried
+and pressed down, slowly growing firm and rigid, but still keeping the
+marks of the layers that make them up. It is like a dry ocean gradually
+submerging the land. Gathering round the great stone circles as they
+stand on the clay, this black sea has risen slowly but surely, till at
+last it has covered them with its dark waves, and they rest in the
+quiet depths, with a green foam of spring freshness far above
+their heads.
+
+At Killee and Breagho, near Enniskillen, the peat has once more been cut
+away, restoring some of these great stones to the light. If we count the
+layers and measure the thickness of the peat, we can tell how many years
+are represented by its growth. We can, therefore, tell that the great
+stone circle, which the first growth of peat found already there, must
+be at least as old, and may be indefinitely older. By careful count it
+is found that one foot of black peat is made up of eight hundred layers;
+eight hundred summers and eight hundred winters went to the building of
+it. One foot of black peat, therefore, will measure the time from before
+the founding of Rome or the First Olympiad to the beginning of our era.
+Another foot will bring us to the crowning of Charlemagne. Yet another,
+to the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Since then, only a few inches
+have been added. Here is a chronometer worthy of our great cromlechs and
+stone circles.
+
+Some of these, as we saw, rest on the clay, with a sea of peat twelve
+feet deep around and above them. Every foot of the peat stands for eight
+centuries. Since the peat began to form, eight or ten thousand years
+have passed, and when that vast period began, the great monuments of
+stone were already there. How long they had stood in their silence
+before our chronometer began to run we cannot even guess.
+
+At Cavancarragh, on the shoulder of Toppid Mountain, some four miles
+from Enniskillen, there is one of these circles; a ring of huge stone
+boulders with equal spaces between stone and stone. A four-fold avenue
+of great blocks stretches away from it along the shoulder of the hill,
+ending quite abruptly at the edge of a ravine, the steep channel of a
+torrent. It looks as if the river, gradually undermining the hillside,
+had cut the avenue in halves, so that the ravine seems later in date
+than the stones. But that we cannot be quite sure of. This, however, we
+do certainly know: that since the avenue of boulders and the circle of
+huge red stones were ranged in order, a covering of peat in some parts
+twelve feet thick has grown around and above them, hiding them at last
+altogether from the day. In places the peat has been cut away again,
+leaving the stones once more open to the light, standing, as they always
+stood, on the surface of the clay.
+
+Here again we get the same measurement. At eight hundred annual layers
+to the foot, and with twelve feet of peat, we have nine thousand six
+hundred years,--not for the age of the stone circles, but for that part
+of their age which we are able to measure. For we know not how long they
+were there before the peat began to grow. It may have been a few years;
+it may have been a period as great or even greater than the ten thousand
+years we are able to measure.
+
+The peat gradually displaced an early forest of giant oaks. Their stems
+are still there, standing rooted in the older clay. Where they once
+stood no trees now grow. The whole face of the land has changed. Some
+great change of climate must lie behind this vanishing of vast forests,
+this gradual growth of peat-covered moors. A dry climate must have
+changed to one much damper; heat must have changed to cold, warm winds
+to chilly storms. In the southern promontories, among red sandstone
+hills, still linger survivors of that more genial clime--groves of
+arbutus that speak of Greece or Sicily; ferns, as at Killarney, found
+elsewhere only in the south, in Portugal, or the Canary Islands.
+
+[Illustration: Muckross Abbey, Killarney.]
+
+On the southwestern horizon from Toppid Mountain, when the sky is clear
+after rain, you can trace the outline of the Curlew hills, our
+southern limit of view from Knocknarea. Up to the foot of the hills
+spreads a level country of pastures dappled with lakes, broken into a
+thousand fantastic inlets by the wasting of the limestone rock. The
+daisies are the stars in that green sky. Just beyond the young stream of
+the Shannon, where it links Lough Garra to Lough Key, there is a lonely
+cromlech, whose tremendous crown was once upheld by five massive
+pillars. There is a kindred wildness and mystery in the cromlech and the
+lonely hills.
+
+Southward again of this, where the town of Lough Rea takes its name from
+the Gray Lake, stands a high hill crowned by a cromlech, with an
+encircling earthwork. It marks a green ring of sacred ground alone upon
+the hill-top, shut off from all the world, and with the mysterious
+monument of piled stones in its centre; here, as always, one huge block
+upheld in the air by only lesser blocks. The Gray Lake itself, under
+this strange sentry on the hill, was in long-passed ages a little
+Venice; houses built on piles lined its shores, set far enough out into
+the lake for safety, ever ready to ward off attack from the land. This
+miniature Venice of Lough Rea is the type of a whole epoch of turbulent
+tribal war, when homes were everywhere clustered within the defence of
+the waters, with stores laid up to last the rigors of a siege.
+
+The contrast between the insecurity and peril of the old lake dwellings
+and the present safety of the town, open on all sides, unguarded and
+free from fear, is very marked. But not less complete is the contrast
+between the ancient hamlet, thus hidden for security amid the waters,
+and the great cromlech, looming black against the sky on the hill's
+summit, exposed to the wildness of the winds, utterly unguarded, yet
+resting there in lonely serenity.
+
+A little farther south, Lough Gur lies like a white mirror among the
+rolling pasture-lands of Limerick, set amongst low hills. On the lake's
+shore is another metropolis of the dead, worthy to compare with
+Carrowmore on the Sligo headland. Some of the circles here are not
+formed of single stones set at some distance from each other, but of a
+continuous wall of great blocks crowded edge to edge. They are like
+round temples open to the sky, and within one of these unbroken rings is
+a lesser ring like an inner shrine. All round the lake there are like
+memorials--if we can call memorials these mighty groups of stone, which
+only remind us how much we have forgotten. There are huge circles of
+blocks either set close together or with an equal space dividing boulder
+from boulder; some of the giant circles are grouped together in twos and
+threes, others are isolated; one has its centre marked by a single
+enormous block, while another like block stands farther off in lonely
+vastness. Here also stands a chambered cromlech of four huge flat blocks
+roofed over like the cromlech under Slieve Callan across the
+Shannon mouth.
+
+The southern horizon from Lough Gur is broken by the hills of red
+sandstone rising around Glanworth. Beside the stream, a tributary of the
+Blackwater, a huge red cromlech rises over the greenness of the meadows
+like a belated mammoth in its uncouth might. To the southwest, under the
+red hills that guard Killarney on the south, the Sullane River flows
+towards the Lee. On its bank is another cromlech of red sandstone
+blocks, twin-brother to the Glanworth pile. Beyond it the road passes
+towards the sunset through mountain-shadowed glens, coming out at last
+where Kenmare River opens into a splendid fiord towards the Atlantic
+Ocean. At Kenmare, in a vale of perfect beauty green with groves of
+arbutus and fringed with thickets of fuchsia, stands a great stone
+circle, the last we shall record to the south. Like all the rest, it
+speaks of tremendous power, of unworldly and mysterious ends.
+
+The very antiquity of these huge stone circles suggests an affinity with
+the revolving years. And here, perhaps, we may find a clue to their
+building. They may have been destined to record great Time itself, great
+Time that circles forever through the circling years. There is first the
+year to be recorded, with its revolving days; white winter gleaming into
+spring; summer reddening and fading to autumn. Returning winter tells
+that the year has gone full circle; the sun among the stars gives the
+definite measure of the days. A ring of thirty-six great boulders, set
+ten paces apart, would give the measure of the year in days; and of
+circles like this there are more than one.
+
+In this endless ring of days the moon is the measurer, marking the hours
+and weeks upon the blue belt of night studded with golden stars. Moving
+stealthily among the stars, the moon presently changes her place by a
+distance equal to her own breadth; we call the time this takes an hour.
+From her rising to her setting, she gains her own breadth twelve times;
+therefore, the night and the day are divided each into twelve hours.
+Meanwhile she grows from crescent to full disk, to wane again to a
+sickle of light, and presently to lose herself in darkness at new moon.
+From full moon to full moon, or from one new moon to another, the
+nearest even measure is thirty days; a circle of thirty stones would
+record this, as the larger circle of thirty-six recorded the solar year.
+In three years there are thrice twelve full moons, with one added; a
+ring of thirty-seven stones representing this would show the simplest
+relation between sun and moon.
+
+The moon, as we saw, stealthily glides among the fixed stars, gaining
+her own width every hour. Passing thus along the mid belt of the sphere,
+she makes the complete circuit in twenty-seven days, returning to the
+same point among the stars, or, if it should so happen, to the same
+star, within that time. Because the earth has meanwhile moved forward,
+the moon needs three days more to overtake it and gain the same relative
+position towards earth and sun, thus growing full again, not after
+twenty-seven, but after thirty days. Circles of twenty-seven and thirty
+days would stand for these lunar epochs, and would, for those who
+understood them, further bear testimony to the earth's movement in its
+own great path around the sun. Thus would rings of varying numbers mark
+the measures of time; and not these only, but the great sweep of orbs
+engendering them, the triumphal march of the spheres through pathless
+ether. The life of our own world would thus be shown bound up with the
+lives of others in ceaseless, ever-widening circles, that lead us to the
+Infinite, the Eternal.
+
+All the cromlechs and circles we have thus far recorded are in the
+western half of our land; there are as many, as worthy of note, in the
+eastern half. But as before we can only pick out a few. One of these
+crowns the volcanic peak of Brandon Hill, in Kilkenny, dividing the
+valleys of the Barrow and Nore. From the mountain-top you can trace the
+silver lines of the rivers coming together to the south, and flowing
+onward to the widening inlet of Wexford harbor, where they mingle with
+the waters of the River Suir. On the summit of Brandon Hill stands a
+great stone circle, a ring of huge basalt blocks dominating the rich
+valleys and the surrounding plain.
+
+In Glen Druid of the Dublin hills is a cromlech whose granite crown
+weighs seventy tons. Not far off is the Mount Venus cromlech, the
+covering block of which is even more titanic; it is a single stone
+eighty tons in weight. Near Killternan village, a short distance off, is
+yet another cromlech whose top-most boulder exceeds both of these,
+weighing not less than ninety tons. Yet vast as all these are, they are
+outstripped by the cromlech of Howth, whose upper block is twenty feet
+square and eight feet thick, a single enormous boulder one hundred tons
+in weight. This huge stone was borne in the air upon twelve massive
+pillars of quartz, seven feet above the ground, so that a man of average
+height standing on the ground and reaching upward could just touch the
+under surface of the block with his finger-tips. Even a tall man
+standing on the shoulders of another as tall would quite fail to touch
+the upper edge of the stone. If we give this marvelous monument the same
+age as the Fermanagh circles, as we well may, this raising of a single
+boulder of one hundred tons, and balancing it in the air on the crest of
+massive pillars may give us some insight into the engineering skill of
+the men of ten thousand years ago.
+
+Across the central plain from Howth Head the first break is the range of
+Loughcrew hills. Here are great stone circles in numbers, not standing
+alone like so many others, but encompassing still stranger monuments;
+chambered pyramids of boulders, to which we shall later return. They
+are lesser models of the three great pyramids of Brugh on the Boyne,
+where the river sweeps southward in a long curve, half-encircling a
+headland of holy ground.
+
+From near Howth to the Boyne and north of it, the coast is low and flat;
+sandhills matted with bent-grass and starred with red thyme and tiny
+pansies, yellow and purple and blue. Low tide carries the sea almost to
+the horizon, across a vast wilderness of dripping sand where the gulls
+chatter as they wade among the pools. Where the shore rises again
+towards the Carlingford Mountains, another cromlech stands under the
+shadow of granite hills.
+
+A long fiord with wooded walls divides the Carlingford range from the
+mountains of Mourne. The great dark range thrusts itself forth against
+the sea in somber beauty, overhanging the wide strand of Dundrum Bay.
+The lesser bay, across whose bar the sea moans under the storm-winds, is
+dominated by the hill of Rudraige, named in honor of a hero of old days;
+but under the shadow of the hill stands a more ancient monument, that
+was gray with age before the race of Rudraige was born. On five pillars
+of massive stone is upreared a sixth, of huge and formidable bulk, and
+carrying even to us in our day a sense of mystery and might. The potent
+atmosphere of a hidden past still breathes from it, whispering of
+vanished years, vanished races, vanished secrets of the prime.
+
+There are two circles of enormous stones on the tongue of land between
+Dundrum Bay and Strangford, both very perfect and marked each in its own
+way from among the rest. The first, at Legamaddy, has every huge boulder
+still in place. There is a lesser ring of stones within the first
+circle, with many outliers, of enormous size, dotted among the fields.
+It looks as if a herd of huge animals of the early world had come
+together in a circle for the night, the young being kept for safety
+within their ring, while others, grazing longer or wandering farther
+from the rest, were approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon
+them with dire magic turned them all to stone; and there they remain,
+sentient, yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies
+like this we may convey the feeling of mystery breathing from them.
+
+On the hill-top of Slieve-na-griddle is another circle of the same
+enormous boulders. A cromlech is piled in the midst of it, and an avenue
+of stones leads up to the circle. Its form is that of many circles with
+enclosed cromlechs at Carrowmore, though in these the avenue is missing.
+The thought that underlies them is the same, though they are separated
+by the whole width of the land; a single cult with a single ideal
+prompted the erection of both.
+
+At Drumbo, on the east bank of the Lagan before it reaches Belfast
+Lough, there is a massive cromlech surrounded by a wide ring of earth
+piled up high enough to cut off the sacred space within from all view of
+the outer world. Like the earthwork round the cromlech of Lough Rea, it
+marks the boundary of a great nature temple, open to the sky but shut
+off from mankind. Even now its very atmosphere breathes reverence.
+
+At Finvoy, in northern Antrim, among the meadows of the Bann, there is a
+cromlech within a great stone circle like that on Slieve-na-griddle in
+Down, and like many of the Carrowmore rings. The Black Lion cromlech in
+Cavan is encircled with a like ring of boulders, and another cromlech
+not far off rivals some of the largest in the immense size of its
+crowning block.
+
+Three cromlechs in the same limestone plain add something to the mystery
+that overhangs all the rest. The first, at Lennan in Monaghan, is marked
+with a curious cryptic design, suggesting a clue, yet yielding none.
+There is a like script on the cromlech at Castlederg in Tyrone, if
+indeed the markings were ever the record of some thought to be
+remembered, and not mere ornament. The chambered cromlech of Lisbellaw
+in Fermanagh has like markings; they are too similar to be quite
+independent, yet almost too simple to contain a recorded thought.
+
+We come once more to Donegal. On the hill-top of Beltaney, near Raphoe,
+there is a very massive circle formed of sixty-seven huge blocks. Here
+again the Stonehenge ring might be set up within the Irish circle,
+leaving an avenue eight paces wide all round it. The sacred fire was
+formerly kindled here to mark the birth of Spring. The name of the old
+festival of Beltane still lingers on the hill. At Culdaff in north
+Donegal, at the end of the Inishowen peninsula, stands another great
+stone circle, with which we must close our survey of these titanic
+monuments.
+
+We have mentioned a few only among many; yet enough to show their
+presence everywhere throughout the land, in the valleys or on mountain
+summits, in the midst of pastures or on lonely and rugged isles. One
+group, as we have seen, cannot be younger than ten thousand years, and
+may be far older. The others may be well coeval. Their magnitude, their
+ordered ranks, their universal presence, are a startling revelation of
+the material powers of the men of that remote age; they are a testimony,
+not less wonderful, of the moral force which dedicated so much power to
+ideal ends. Finally, they are a monument to remind us how little we yet
+know of the real history of our race.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+THE CROMLECH BUILDERS.
+
+In every district of Ireland, therefore, there remain these tremendous
+and solemn survivors of a mighty past. The cromlechs, with their
+enormous masses upheld in the air, rising among the fertile fields or
+daisy-dotted pastures; the great circles of standing stones, starred
+everywhere, in the valleys or upon the uplands, along the rough sides of
+heather-covered hills. They have everywhere the same aspect of august
+mystery, the same brooding presence, like sentinels of another world. It
+is impossible not to feel their overshadowing majesty. Everywhere they
+follow the same designs in large simplicity; inspired by the same
+purpose, and with the same tireless might overcoming the tremendous
+obstacles of their erection; they are devoted everywhere not to material
+and earthly ends, but to the ideal purposes of the invisible and
+everlasting, linked with the hidden life of those who pass away from us
+through the gates of death.
+
+Can we find any clue to the builders of these grand and enduring
+memorials, the conditions of their building, the age of our land to
+which they belong? If we wisely use the abundant knowledge of the past
+already in our possession, there is good reason to believe we can,
+establishing much with entire certainty and divining more.
+
+The standing stones and cromlechs, as we know, are everywhere spread
+over Ireland, so that it is probable that throughout the whole country
+one is never out of sight of one of these solemn monuments. Their
+uniform and universal presence shows, therefore, a uniform race dwelling
+everywhere within the four seas, a universal stability and order,
+allowing such great and enduring works to be undertaken and completed.
+We must believe, too, that the builders of these giant stone monuments
+were dominant throughout the land, possessing entire power over the
+labor of thousands everywhere; and even then the raising of these
+titanic masses is almost miraculous.
+
+But the history of the standing stones and cromlechs is not a page of
+Irish history only, nor can we limit to our own isle the presence of
+their builders, the conditions of dominion and order under which alone
+they could have been raised. We shall gain our first trustworthy clue
+by tracing the limits of the larger territory, beyond our island, where
+these same gray memorials are found.
+
+[Illustration: Brandy Island, Glengarriff.]
+
+The limits of the region in which alone we find these piles and circles
+of enormous stones are clearly and sharply defined, though this region
+itself is of immense and imposing extent. It is divided naturally into
+two provinces, both starting from a point somewhere in the neighborhood
+of Gibraltar or Mount Atlas, and spreading thence over a territory of
+hundreds of miles.
+
+The southern cromlech province, beginning at the Strait of Gibraltar,
+extends eastward along the African coast past Algiers to the headland of
+Tunis, where Carthage stood, at a date far later than the age of
+cromlechs. Were it not for the flaming southern sun, the scorched sands,
+the palms, the shimmering torrid air, we might believe these Algerian
+megaliths belonged to our own land, so perfect is the resemblance, so
+uniform the design, so identical the inspiration. The same huge
+boulders, oblong or egg-shaped, formidable, impressive, are raised aloft
+on massive supporting stones; there are the same circles of stones
+hardly less gigantic, with the same mysterious faces, the same silent
+solemnity. Following this line, we find them again in Minorca, Sardinia
+and Malta; everywhere under warm blue skies, in lands of olives and
+trailing vines, with the peacock-blue of the Mediterranean waves
+twinkling beneath them. Northward from Minorca, but still in our
+southern cromlech province, we find them in southeastern Spain, in the
+region of New Carthage, but far older than the oldest trace of that
+ancient city. In lesser numbers they follow the Spanish coast up towards
+the Ebro, through vinelands and lands of figs, everywhere under summer
+skies. This province, therefore, our southern cromlech province, covers
+most of the western Mediterranean; it does not cover, nor even approach,
+Italy or Greece or Egypt, the historic Mediterranean lands. We must look
+for its origin in the opposite direction--towards Gibraltar, the Pillars
+of Hercules.
+
+From the same point, the Pillars of Hercules, begins our second or
+northern cromlech region, even larger and more extensive than the first,
+though hardly richer in titanic memorials. From Gibraltar, the cromlech
+region passes northward, covering Portugal and western Spain; indeed, it
+probably merges in the other province to the eastward, the two including
+all Spain between them. From northern Spain, turning the flank of the
+giant Pyrenees at Fontarrabia, the cromlech region goes northward and
+ever northward, along the Atlantic coast of France, spreading eastward
+also through the central provinces, covering the mountains of the Cote
+d'Or and the Cevennes, but nowhere entering north Italy or Germany,
+which limit France to the east. There is a tremendous culmination of the
+huge stone monuments on the capes and headlands of Brittany, where
+France thrusts herself forward against the Atlantic, centring in Carnac,
+the metropolis of a bygone world. Nowhere are there greater riches of
+titanic stone, in circles, in cromlechs, in ranged avenues like huge
+frozen armies or ordered hosts of sleeping elephants. From Brittany we
+pass to Ireland, whose wealth, inherited from dead ages, we have already
+inventoried, and Britain, where the same monuments reappear. More
+numerous to the south and west, they yet spread all over Britain,
+including remote northern Scotland and the Western Isles. Finally, there
+is a streamer stretching still northeastward, to Norway and some of the
+Baltic Islands.
+
+We are, therefore, confronted with the visible and enduring evidence of
+a mighty people, spreading in two main directions from the Pillars of
+Hercules--eastward through Gibraltar Strait to sunny Algeria, to
+southern Spain and the Mediterranean isles; and northward, along the
+stormy shores of the Atlantic, from within sight of Africa almost to the
+Arctic Circle, across Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Britain, and the
+lands of the Baltic and the North Sea. Throughout this vast territory
+there must have been a common people, a common purpose and inspiration,
+a common striving towards the hidden world; there must have been long
+ages of order, of power, of peace, during which men's hearts could
+conceive and their hands execute memorials so vast, so evidently meant
+to endure to a far distant future, so clearly destined to ideal ends.
+There must have been a great spiritual purpose, a living belief in the
+invisible world, and a large practical power over natural forces, before
+these huge monuments could be erected. Some of the stones upheld in the
+air in the Irish cromlechs weigh eighty or ninety or a hundred tons. If
+we estimate that a well-built man can lift two hundred pounds, it would
+demand the simultaneous work of a thousand men to erect them; and it is
+at least difficult to see how the effort of a thousand men could
+be applied.
+
+We are led, therefore, by evidence of the solidest material reality to
+see this great empire on the Atlantic and along the western
+Mediterranean; this Atlantean land of the cromlech-builders, as we may
+call it, for want of a better name. As the thought and purpose of its
+inhabitants are uniform throughout its whole vast extent, we are led to
+see in them a single homogeneous race, working without rivals, without
+obstacles, without contests, for they seem everywhere to have been free
+to choose what sites they would for their gigantic structures. And we
+are irresistibly led to believe that these conditions must have endured
+throughout a vast extent of time, for no nation which does not look back
+to a distant past will plan for a distant future. The spiritual sweep
+and view of the cromlech-builders are, therefore, as great as the extent
+of their territory. This mysterious people must have had a life as
+wonderful as that of Greece or Rome or Egypt, whose territories we find
+them everywhere approaching, but nowhere invading.
+
+What we now know of the past history of our race is so vast, so
+incredibly enormous, that we have ample space for such a territory, so
+widespread, so enduring, as we have seen demanded by the position of the
+cromlechs and standing stones; more than that, so overwhelming are the
+distances in the dark backward and abysm of time, to which we must now
+carry the dawn of human history, that the time needed for the building
+of the cromlechs may seem quite recent and insignificant, in view of the
+mightier past, stretching back through geologic ages. The nineteenth
+century may well be called the age of resurrection, when long-forgotten
+epochs of man were born again into our knowledge. We can carry back that
+knowledge now to the early Miocene period, to which belong the human
+relics found by the Abbe Bourgeois on the uplands of Thenay, in central
+France; and no one believes that the early Miocene age can be as recent
+as a million years ago. A vast space separates the Thenay relics from
+the later traces of man found in Pliocene sands with the bones of the
+archaic meridional elephant,--at a date when the German ocean was a
+forest, full of southern trees and huge beasts now long since departed
+from the earth. A period hardly less vast must separate these from the
+close of the glacial age, when man roamed the plains of Europe, and
+sketched the herds of mammoths as they cropped the leaves. That huge
+beast, too, has long since departed into the abyss; but man the artist,
+who recorded the massive outline, the huge bossed forehead, the
+formidable bulk of the shaggy arctic elephant, engraved in firm lines on
+a fragment of its tusk,--man still remains. Man was present when
+rhinoceros and elephant were as common in Britain as they are to-day in
+Southern India or Borneo; when the hippopotamus was as much at home in
+the waters of the Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like
+the grizzly of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked
+in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this
+epoch of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is
+a recent chapter of the great epic of man; there lies far more behind
+it, beyond the Age of Ice to the immensely distant Pliocene; beyond this
+as far as the early Miocene; beyond this, again, how much further we
+know not, towards the beginningless beginning, the infinite.
+
+We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost
+boundless ages, geologic epochs of human history succeeding each other
+in majestic procession, as the face of our island was now tropical, now
+arctic; as the seas swelled up and covered the hills, or the bottom of
+the deep drove back the ocean and became dry land, an unbroken
+continent. The wild dreams of romance never approached the splendid
+outlines of this certain history.
+
+There are dim outlines of man throughout all these ages, but only at a
+comparatively recent date have we traditions and evidence pointing to
+still surviving races. At a period of only a few thousand years ago, we
+begin to catch glimpses of a northern race whom the old Greeks and
+Romans called Hyperboreans or Far-Northerners; a race wild and little
+skilled in the arts of life; a race of small stature, slight, dusky,
+with piercing eyes, low brows, and of forbidding face. This race was
+scattered over lands far north of the Mediterranean, dwelling in caves
+and dens of the earth, and lingering on unchanged from the days of
+mammoth and cave-bear. We have slight but definite knowledge of this
+very ancient race--enough to show us that its peculiar type lingers to
+this day in a few remote islands on the Galway and Kerry coast, mingled
+with many later races. This type we find described in old Gaelic records
+as the Firbolgs, a race weak and furtive, dusky and keen-eyed, subjected
+by later races of greater force. Yet from this race, as if to show the
+inherent and equal power of the soul, came holy saints and mighty
+warriors; to the old race of the Firbolgs belong Saint Mansuy, apostle
+of Belgium, and Roderick O'Conor, the last king of united Ireland. In
+gloomy mountain glens and lonely ocean islands still it lingers,
+unvanquished, tenacious, obscurely working out its secret destiny.
+
+This slight and low-browed race, of dark or sallow visage, and with
+black crisp hair, this Hyperborean people, is the oldest we can gain a
+clear view of in our island's history; but we know nothing of its
+extension or powers which would warrant us in believing that this was
+the race which built the cromlechs. Greek and Roman tradition, in this
+only corroborating the actual traces we ourselves possess of these old
+races, tells us of another people many thousand years ago overrunning
+and dominating the Firbolgs; a race of taller stature, of handsome
+features, though also dark, but with softer black hair, not crisp and
+tufted like the hair of the dwarfish earlier race. Of this second
+conquering race, tall and handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered
+from many lands where they dwelt; bodies preserved by art or nature, in
+caverns or sepulchres of stone; ornaments, pottery, works decorative and
+useful, and covering several thousand years in succession. But better
+than this, we have present, through nearly every land where we know of
+them in the past, a living remnant of this ancient race, like it in
+every particular of stature, form, complexion and visage, identical in
+character and temper, tendency and type of mind.
+
+In Ireland we find this tall, dark race over all the west of the island,
+but most numerous in Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo; in those regions
+where, we know, the older population was least disturbed. In remote
+villages among the mountains, reached by bridle-paths between
+heath-covered hills; in the settlements of fishermen, under some cliff
+or in the sheltered nook of one of our great western bays; or among the
+lonely, little visited Atlantic islands, this dark, handsome race, with
+its black hair, dark-brown eyes, sallow skin and high forehead, still
+holds its own, as a second layer above the remnant of the far more
+ancient Firbolg Hyperboreans. We find the same race also among the
+Donegal highlands, here and there in the central plain or in the south,
+and nowhere entirely missing among the varied races towards the
+eastern sea.
+
+[Illustration: Sugar Loaf Mountain, Glengarriff.]
+
+But it is by no means in Ireland only that this tall, dark, western race
+is found. It is numerously represented in the nearest extension of the
+continent, among the headlands and bays and isles of Brittany--a land so
+like our own western seaboard, with its wild Atlantic storms.
+Following the ocean southward, we find the same race extending to the
+Loire, the Garonne, the Pyrenees; stretching somewhat inland also, but
+clinging everywhere to the Atlantic, as we also saw it cling in Ireland.
+In earlier centuries, long before our era opened, we find this same race
+spread far to the east,--as far, almost, as the German and Italian
+frontier,--so that at one time it held almost complete possession of
+France. South of the Pyrenees we find it once more; dominant in
+Portugal, less strongly represented in Spain, yet still supplying a
+considerable part of the population of the whole peninsula, as it does
+in Ireland at the present day. But it does not stop with Spain, or even
+Europe. We find the same race again in the Guanches of the Canary
+islands, off the African coast; and, stranger still, we find mummies of
+this race, of great antiquity, in the cave-tombs of Teneriffe. Further,
+we have ample evidence of its presence, until displaced by Moorish
+invaders, all along northern Africa as far as Tunis; and we come across
+it again amongst the living races in the Mediterranean isles, in
+Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy. Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central
+Sahara belong to the same type. Everywhere the same tall, dark race,
+handsome, imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of
+eyes; a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and texture
+of hair.
+
+Thus far the southern extension of this, our second Irish race; we may
+look for a moment at its distribution in the north. Across the shallow
+sea which separates us from Britain we find the same race, clinging
+always to the Atlantic seaboard. It dominates south Wales, where its
+presence was remarked and commented on by the invading Romans. It is
+present elsewhere through the Welsh mountains, and much more sparsely
+over the east of England; but we have ample evidence that at one time
+this tall, dark race held the whole of England in undisputed possession,
+except, perhaps, for a remnant of the Hyperborean dwarfs. In the west of
+Scotland, and especially in the Western Isles, it is once more numerous;
+and we find offshoots of the same race in the dark-haired
+Norwegians,--still holding to the seaboard of the Atlantic.
+
+Such is the distribution of this once dominant but now dwindled race,
+which has gradually descended from the summit of power as ancient Rome
+descended, as Greece descended, or Assyria or Egypt. But we can look
+back with certainty to a time when this race, and this race only, held
+complete possession of all the lands we have mentioned, in north or
+south, in Europe or northern Africa; holding everywhere to the Atlantic
+coast, or, as in the Mediterranean isles, evidently pressing inward from
+the Atlantic, past the Pillars of Hercules, through the Strait of
+Gibraltar.
+
+It is evident at once that the territory of this race corresponds
+exactly, throughout many countries, with the territory of the cromlechs
+and standing stones; where we find the one, as in Ireland, Brittany,
+Spain, we find the other; where the one is absent, as in Germany, or
+northern Italy or Greece, the other is likewise absent. The identity is
+complete. We are justified, therefore, in giving the same provisional
+name to both, and calling them Atlantean, from their evident origin not
+far from Atlas, and their everywhere clinging to the Atlantic coast. We
+can find traces of no other race which at all closely fulfills the
+necessary conditions of uniform and undisputed extension, through a long
+epoch, over the whole cromlech region--the only conditions under which
+we can conceive of the erection of these gigantic monuments, or of the
+long established and universally extended spiritual conditions which
+make possible such vast ideal enterprises.
+
+In this race, therefore, which we have called Atlantean, we find the
+conditions fulfilled; of this race, and of no other, we still find a
+lingering remnant in each of the cromlech countries; and we hardly find
+a trace of this race, either now or in the past, in the lands which have
+no cromlechs or standing stones.
+
+We have already seen that the standing stones of Cavancarragh, four
+miles from Fermanagh, were, within the memory of men still living or of
+their fathers, buried under ten or twelve feet of peat, which had
+evidently formed there after their erection. We have here a natural
+chronometer; for we know the rate at which peat forms, and we can,
+therefore, assign a certain age to a given depth. We have given one mode
+of reckoning already; we find it corroborated by another. In the Somme
+valley, in northern France, we have a Nature's timepiece; in the peat,
+at different levels, are relics of the Roman age; of the Gaulish age
+which preceded it; and, far deeper, of pre-historic races, like our
+Atlanteans, who preceded the Gauls. The date of the Roman remains we
+know accurately; and from this standard we find that the peat grows
+regularly some three centimeters a century, or a foot in a
+thousand years.
+
+On the mountain side, as at Cavancarragh, the growth is likely to be
+slower than in a river valley; yet we may take the same rate, a foot a
+thousand years, and we shall have, for this great stone circle, an
+antiquity of ten or twelve thousand years at least. This assumes that
+the peat began to form as soon as the monument was completed; but the
+contrary may be the case; centuries may have intervened.
+
+We may, however, take this as a provisional date, and say that our
+cromlech epoch, the epoch of the Atlantean builders, from Algeria to
+Ireland, from Ireland to the Baltic, is ten or twelve thousand years
+ago; extending, perhaps, much further back in the past, and in certain
+regions coming much further down towards the present, but having a
+period of twelve thousand years ago as its central date. It happens that
+we have traditions of a great dispersion from the very centre we have
+been led to fix, the neighborhood of Atlas or Gibraltar, and that to
+this dispersion tradition has given a date over eleven thousand years
+ago; but to this side of the subject we cannot more fully allude; it
+would take us too far afield.
+
+We have gone far enough to make it tolerably certain, first, that these
+great and wonderful monuments were built when uniform conditions of
+order, uniform religious beliefs and aspirations, and a uniform mastery
+over natural forces extended throughout a vast region spreading
+northward and eastward from Mount Atlas or Gibraltar; we have seen,
+next, that these conditions were furnished when a well-defined race,
+whom we have called Atlantean, was spread as the dominant element over
+this whole region; and, finally, we have seen reason to fix on a period
+some eleven or twelve thousand years ago as the central period of that
+domination, though it may have begun, and probably did begin, many
+centuries earlier. The distribution of the cromlechs is certain; the
+distribution of the race is certain; the age of one characteristic group
+of the monuments is certain. Further than this we need not go.
+
+When we try to form a clearer image of the life of this tall archaic
+race of cromlech-builders, we can divine very much to fill the picture.
+We note, to begin with, that not only do they always hold to the
+Atlantic ocean as something kindred and familiar, but that they are
+found everywhere in islands at such distances from the nearest coasts as
+would demand a certain seamanship for their arrival. This is true of
+their presence in Malta, Minorca, Sardinia; it is even more true of
+Ireland, the Western Isles of Scotland, the Norwegian Isles; all of
+which are surrounded by stormy and treacherous seas, where wrecks are
+very common even in our day. We must believe that our tail, dark
+invaders were a race of seamen, thoroughly skilled in the dangerous
+navigation of these dark seas; Caesar marveled at, and imitated, the
+ship-building of the natives of Brittany in his day; we equally admire
+the prowess of their sons, the Breton fishermen, in our own times. We
+find, too, that in the western districts and ocean islands of our own
+Ireland the tall, dark race often follows the sea, showing the same
+hereditary skill and daring; a skill which certainly marked the first
+invaders of that race, or they would never have reached our island at
+all. We are the more justified in seeing, in these dark
+cromlech-builders, the Fomorians of old Gaelic tradition, who came up
+out of the sea and subjugated the Firbolgs.
+
+Even to those familiar with the geological record of man it is
+sufficiently startling to find that the Firbolgs, the early dwarfish
+race of Hyperboreans, in all probability were ignorant of boats; that
+they almost certainly came to our island dry-shod, as they had come
+earlier to Britain, migrating over unbroken spaces of land to what
+afterwards became the isle of Erin; for this race we find everywhere
+associated with the mammoth--on the continent, in Britain, in our own
+island--and the mammoths certainly never came over in ships. Needless to
+say, there is abundant geological evidence as well, to show our former
+union with continental Europe,--though of course at a time immensely
+more remote than ten or twelve thousand years ago.
+
+We are, therefore, led to identify our Atlantean race of hardy seamen
+with the Fomorians who came up out of the sea and found the furtive
+Firbolgs in possession of our island; and to this race, the Fomorians of
+the sea, we credit the building of cromlechs and standing stones, not
+only among ourselves, but in Norway, in Britain, in Brittany, in Spain,
+in Africa.
+
+We shall presently pick up the thread of tradition, as we find it in
+Ireland, and try to follow the doings and life of the Fomorian invaders;
+but in the meantime we may try to gain some insight into the most
+mysterious and enduring of their works. The cromlechs which have been
+excavated in many cases are found to contain the funereal urns of a
+people who burned their dead. It does not follow that their first and
+only use was as tombs; but if we think of them as tombs only, we must
+the more marvel at the faith of the builders, and their firm belief in
+the reality and overwhelming import of the other world which we enter at
+death. For of dwellings for the living, of fortresses or storehouses, of
+defences against the foes who later invaded them, we find few traces;
+nothing at all to compare with their massive mausoleums. The other
+world, for them, was a far weightier concern than this, and to the
+purposes of that world, as they conceived it, all their energies were
+directed. We can hardly doubt that, like other races who pay extreme
+reverence to the dead, their inner vision beheld these departed ones
+still around them and among them, forming with them a single race, a
+single family, a single life. This world was for them only the threshold
+of the other, the place of preparation. To that other their thoughts all
+turned, for that other they raised these titanic buildings. The solemn
+masses and simple grandeur of the cromlechs fitly symbolize the mood of
+reverence in which they drew near to the sublime world of the hidden;
+the awe with which their handiwork affirmed how greatly that world
+outweighs this. At these houses of the dead they were joined in spirit
+and communion with those who had passed away; once more united with
+their fathers and their fathers' fathers, from the dim beginning of
+their race. The air, for them, was full of spirits. Only the dead
+truly lived.
+
+The circles of standing stones are also devoted to ideal ends. Though
+the men who set them up could have built not less wonderful forts or
+dwellings of stone, we find none of these; nor has any worldly purpose
+ever been assigned to the stone circles. Yet there seems to be a very
+simple interpretation of their symbology; the circle, through all
+antiquity, stood for the circling year, which ever returns to its point
+of departure, spring repeating spring, summer answering to summer,
+winter with its icy winds only the return of former winters: the
+circling year and its landmarks, whether four seasons, or twelve months,
+or twenty-seven lunar mansions, through one of which the wandering moon
+passes in a day. We should thus have circles of twelve or twenty-seven
+stones, or four outlying stones at equal distances, for the four
+seasons, the regents of the year. By counting the stones in each circle
+we can tell to which division of the year they belonged, whether the
+solar months or the lunar mansions.
+
+But with all ancient nations the cycle of the year was only the symbol
+of the spiritual cycle of the soul, the path of birth and death. We
+must remember that even for ourselves the same symbolism holds: in the
+winter we celebrate the Incarnation; in spring, the Crucifixion; in
+summer, the birth of the beloved disciple; in autumn, the day of All
+Souls, the feast of the dead. Thus for us, too, the succeeding seasons
+only symbolize the stages of a spiritual life, the august procession
+of the soul.
+
+We cannot think it was otherwise with a people who lived and built so
+majestically for the hidden world; these great stone circles symbolized
+for them, we must believe, the circling life of the soul, the cycle of
+necessity, with the door of liberation to the home of the blest, who
+have reached perfect freedom and go no more out. We may picture in
+imagination their solemn celebrations; priests robed, perhaps, in the
+mingled green and purple of their hills, passing within the circle,
+chanting some archaic hymn of the Divine.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+THE DE DANAANS.
+
+In the dim days of Fomorian and Firbolg, and for ages after, Erin was a
+land of forests, full of wild cattle and deer and wolves. The central
+plain was altogether hidden under green clouds of oak-woods, full of
+long, mysterious alleys, dimpled with sunny glades, echoing in spring
+and summer to the songs of innumerable birds. Everywhere through the
+wide and gloomy forests were the blue mirrors of lakes, starred with
+shaggy islands, the hanging hills descending verdant to the water's
+edge. Silver rivers spread their network among the woods, and the lakes
+and the quiet reaches of the rivers teemed with trout and salmon. The
+hilly lands to the north and south showed purple under the sky from
+among their forests, oak mingling with pine; and the four seas beat
+around our island with their white fringe of hovering gulls. Over all,
+the arch of the blue, clearer and less clouded then than now. A pleasant
+land, full of gladness and mystery.
+
+We can but obscurely image to ourselves the thoughts and deeds of the
+earliest dwellers in our island. We know that they were skilled in many
+arts of peace and inured to the shock of war. The sky spread above them
+as over us, and all around them was the green gloom of the forests, the
+whiteness of lakes and rivers, the rough purple of the heather. The
+great happenings of life, childhood and age and death, were for them
+what they are for us, yet their blood flowed warmer than ours. Browned
+by wind and sun, wet by the rain and the early dew of the morning, they
+delighted in the vigor of the prime. Their love for kindred, for their
+friends and lovers, was as ours; and when friends and kindred passed
+into the darkness, they still kept touch with their souls in the
+invisible Beyond.
+
+[Illustration: River Erne, Belleek.]
+
+The vision of our days is darkened by too much poring over earthly
+things; but the men of old, like many of our simpler races now, looked
+confidently and with intent faith across the threshold. For them the
+dead did not depart--hidden but from their eyes, while very near to
+their souls. Those in the beyond were still linked to those on earth;
+all together made one undivided life, neither in the visible world alone
+nor in the hidden world alone, but in both; each according to their
+destinies and duties. The men of old were immeasurably strong in this
+sense of immortality--a sense based not on faith but on knowledge; on a
+living touch with those who had gone before. They knew both over-world
+and under-world, because they held their souls open to the knowledge of
+both, and did not set their hearts on earthly things alone. A strong
+life close to the life of the natural world, a death that was no
+separation, the same human hearts as ours,--further we need not go in
+imagining that far-off time.
+
+A third people was presently added to these two, at an epoch fixed by
+tradition some four thousand years ago. A vivid picture of their coming
+has been handed down to us, and this picture we shall reproduce, as many
+circumstances and particulars of our knowledge drawn from other sources
+concur to show that our old legend is near to the truth, both in time
+and happenings.
+
+The name these newcomers bore was Tuata De Danaan, the De Danaan tribes;
+they were golden-haired and full of knowledge, and their coming was
+heavy with destiny for the dark races of Fomor and Firbolg. Even to-day,
+mysterious whispers of the De Danaans linger among the remote valleys
+and hillsides of our island, and truth is hidden in every legend of
+their deeds. They have borne a constant repute for magical knowledge,
+and the first tradition of their coming not only echoes that repute, but
+shows how first they came by it.
+
+The De Danaans came from the north; from what land, we shall presently
+inquire. They landed somewhere on the northeast coast of our island,
+says the tradition; the coast of Antrim was doubtless the place of their
+arrival, and we have our choice between Larne and the estuary of the
+Foyle. All between, lofty cliffs face a dark and angry sea, where no one
+not familiar with the coast would willingly approach; their later course
+in the island makes it very probable that they came to the Foyle.
+
+There, still within sight of the Caledonian isles and headlands hovering
+in blue shadows over the sea, they entered, where the sun rose over long
+silver sands and hills of chalk, with a grim headland on the west
+towering up into sombre mountains. Once within the strait, they had a
+wide expanse of quiet waters on all sides, running deep among the rugged
+hills, and receiving at its further end the river Foyle, tempting them
+further and further with their ships. Up the Foyle went the De Danaan
+fleet, among the oak-woods, the deer gazing wide-eyed at them from dark
+caverns of shadow, the wolves peering after them in the night. Then,
+when their ships would serve them no further, they landed, and, to set
+the seal on their coming, burned their boats, casting in their lot with
+the fate of their new home. Still following the streams of the Foyle,
+for rivers were the only pathways through the darkness of the woods,
+they came to the Lakes of Erne, then, as now, beautiful with innumerable
+islands, and draped with curtains of forest. Beyond Erne, they fixed
+their first settlement at Mag Rein, the Plain of the Headland, within
+the bounds of what afterwards was Leitrim; and at this camp their legend
+takes up the tale.
+
+It would seem that the Fomorians were then gathered further to the west,
+as well as in the northern isles. The Firbolgs had their central
+stronghold at Douin Cain, the Beautiful Eminence, which, tradition tells
+us, later bore the name of Tara. The chief among their chiefs was
+Eocaid, son of Ere, remembered as the last ruler of the Firbolgs. Every
+man of them was a hunter, used to spear and shield, and the skins of
+deer and the shaggy hides of wolves were their garments; their dwellings
+were built of well-fitted oak. To the chief, Eocaid, Erc's son, came
+rumor of the strangers near the Lakes of Erne; their ships, burned at
+their debarking, were not there to tell of the manner of their coming,
+and the De Danaans themselves bruited it abroad that they had come
+hither by magic, borne upon the wings of the wind. The chiefs of Tara
+gathered together, within their fort of earth crowned with a stockade,
+and took counsel how to meet this new adventure. After long consultation
+they chose one from among them, Sreng by name, a man of uncommon
+strength, a warrior tried and proven, who should go westward to find out
+more of the De Danaans.
+
+Doubtless taking certain chosen companions with him, Sreng, the man of
+valor from among the Firbolgs, set forth on his quest. As in all
+forest-covered countries, the only pathways lay along the river-banks,
+or, in times of drought, through the sand or pebbles of their beds.
+Where the woods pressed closest upon the streams, the path wound from
+one bank to the other, crossing by fords or stepping-stones, or by a
+bridge of tree-trunks. So went Sreng, careful and keen-eyed, up the
+stream of the Blackwater, and thence to the Erne, and so drew near to
+the Plain of the Headland, where was the De Danaan camp. They, too, had
+word of his coming from their scouts and hunters, and sent forth Breas,
+one among their bravest, to meet the envoy.
+
+They sighted each other and halted, each setting his shield in the
+earth, peering at his adversary above its rim. Then, reassured, they
+came together, and Breas first spoke to Sreng. After the first words
+they fell, warrior-like, to examining each other's weapons; Sreng saw
+that the two spears of Breas the De Danaan were thin, slender and long,
+and sharp-pointed, while his own were heavy, thick and point-less, but
+sharply rounded.
+
+Here we have a note of reality, for spears of these two types are well
+known to us; those of Sreng were chisel-shaped, round-edged, socketed
+celts; the De Danaan lances were long and slender, like our spears.
+There are two materials also--a beautiful golden bronze, shining and
+gleaming in the sunlight, and a darker, ruddier metal, dull and heavy;
+and these darker spears have sockets for greatly thicker hafts. Both
+also carried swords, made, very likely, the one of golden, the other of
+dull, copper-colored bronze.
+
+Then, putting these pleasant things aside, they turned to weightier
+matters, and Breas made a proposal for the De Danaan men. The island was
+large, the forests wide and full of game, the waters sweet and
+well-stocked with fish. Might they not share it between them, and join
+hands to keep out all future comers? Sreng could give no final answer;
+he could only put the matter before the Firbolg chiefs; so, exchanging
+spears in sign of friendship and for a token between them, they returned
+each to his own camp.
+
+Sreng of the Firbolgs retraced his path some four-score miles among the
+central forests, and came to the Beautiful Eminence, where the Firbolgs
+had their settlement. Eocaid, Erc's son, their chieftain, called the
+lesser chiefs around him, and Sreng made full report of what he had seen
+and heard. The Firbolgs, pressed on by their fate, decided to refuse all
+terms with the De Danaans, but to give them battle, and drive them from
+the island. So they made ready, each man seeing to the straps of his
+shield, the burnishing of his thick sword and heavy spear. Eyes gleamed
+out beneath lowering brows all about the dwellings of Tara, and hot
+words were muttered of the coming fight. The dark faces of the Firbolgs
+were full of wrath.
+
+Breas, returning to the camp of the Tuata De Danaan, gave such account
+of the fierceness and strength of Sreng, and the weight and sturdiness
+of his weapons, that the hearts of the golden-haired newcomers misgave
+them, and they drew away westward to the strip of land that lies between
+the lakes of Corrib and Mask. There, tradition tells us, they made an
+encampment upon the hill of Belgadan, near the stream that flows through
+caverns beneath the rocks from the northern to the southern lake. From
+their hill-top they had clear view of the plain stretching eastward,
+across which the Firbolg warriors must come; to the right hand and to
+the left were spread the great white waters of the lakes, stretching far
+away to the northern and southern verge of the sky. Islands dotted the
+lakes, and trees mirrored themselves in the waters. Behind them, to the
+westward, rose a square-topped mountain, crowned by a clear tarn; and,
+behind that, tier upon tier of hills, stretching dark and sombre along
+Lough Mask to the north, and spreading westward to the twelve crystal
+hills of Connemara.
+
+Across the plain to the east, then called the Plain of Nia, but
+thereafter Mag Tuiread or Moytura, the Plain of the Pillars, lay the
+forests, and thence issued forth the hosts of the Firbolgs, encamping on
+the eastern verge of the open space. Nuada, the De Danaan king, once
+more sought a peaceful issue to their meeting, but Erc's son Eocaid
+refused all terms, and it was plain to all that they must fight.
+
+It was midsummer. The air was warm about them, the lake-shores and the
+plain clothed in green of many gently blended shades. The sun shone down
+upon them, and the lakes mirrored the clear blue above. From their hill
+of encampment descended the De Danaans, with their long slender spears
+gleaming like bright gold, their swords of golden bronze firmly grasped,
+their left hands griping the thong of their shields. Golden-haired, with
+flowing tresses, they descended to the fight; what stately battle-song
+they chanted, what Powers they called on for a blessing, we cannot tell;
+nor in what terms the dark-browed Firbolgs answered them as they
+approached across the plain. All that day did the hosts surge together,
+spear launched against spear, and bronze sword clashing against shield;
+all that day and for three days more, and then the fate of the Firbolgs
+was decided. Great and dire was the slaughter of them, so that Erc's son
+Eocaid saw that all was lost. Withdrawing with a hundred of his own men
+about him, Eocaid was seeking water to quench his thirst, for the heat
+of the battle was upon him, when he was pursued by a greater band of
+the De Danaans, under the three sons of Nemed, one of their chieftains.
+
+Eocaid and his bodyguard fled before Nemed's sons, making their way
+northeastward along the Moy river, under the shadow of the Mountains of
+Storms, now wrongly named Ox Mountains. They came at last to the great
+strand called Traig Eotaile, but now Ballysadare, the Cataract of the
+Oaks,--where the descending river is cloven into white terraces by the
+rocks, and the sea, retreating at low tide, leaves a world of wet sand
+glinting under the moonlight. At the very sea's margin a great battle
+was fought between the last king of the Firbolgs with his men, and the
+De Danaans under Nemed's sons; so relentless was the fight along the
+tideways that few remained to tell of it, for Erc's son Eocaid fell, but
+Nemed's three sons fell likewise, The three De Danaan brothers were
+buried at the western end of the strand, and the place was called The
+Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, in their memory. The son of Erc was
+buried on the strand, where the waves lap along the shore, and his cairn
+of Traig Eotaile still stands by the water-side, last resting-place of
+the last ruler of the Firbolgs.
+
+Meanwhile the fighting had gone on at Mag Tuiread by the lakes, till
+but three hundred of the Firbolgs were left, with Sreng, the fierce
+fighter, at their head. Sreng had gained enduring fame by meeting Nuada,
+the De Danaan king, in combat, and smiting him so that he clove the
+shield-rim and cut down deep into Nuada's shoulder, disabling him
+utterly from the battle. Seeing themselves quite outnumbered, therefore,
+the survivors of the Firbolgs with Sreng demanded single combat with De
+Danaan champions, but the victors offered them worthy terms of peace.
+The Firbolgs were to hold in lordship and freedom whichever they might
+choose of the five provinces; the conquerors were to have the rest.
+
+Sreng looked around among his band of survivors,--a little band, though
+of great valor,--and he remembered the hosts of his people that had
+entered the battle three days before, but now lay strewn upon the plain;
+and thinking that they had done enough for valor he accepted the offered
+terms, choosing the Western Province for his men. In memory of him it
+was called Cuigead Sreing for generations, until Conn of the Five-Score
+Battles changed the name for his own, calling the province Connacht, as
+it is to this day.
+
+It fared less well with the victors, and with their victory were sown
+seeds of future discord. For Nuada, the king, being grievously wounded,
+was in no state to rule, so that the chief power was given to Breas,
+first envoy of the De Danaans. Now Breas was only half De Danaan, half
+Fomor, and would not recognize the De Danaan rites or laws of
+hospitality, but was a very tyrannous and overbearing ruler, so that
+much evil came of his government. Yet for seven years he was endured,
+even though meat nor ale was dispensed at his banquets, according to De
+Danaan law.
+
+Mutterings against Breas were rife among the chiefs and their followers
+when the bard Cairbre, whose mother Etan was also a maker of verses,
+came to the assembly of Breas. But the bard was shown little honor and
+given a mean lodging,--a room without fire or bed, with three dry loaves
+for his fare. The bard was full of resentment and set himself to make
+songs against Breas, so that all men repeated his verses, and the name
+of Breas fell into contempt. All men's minds were enkindled by the bard,
+and they drove Breas forth from the chieftainship. Breas fled to his
+Fomor kindred in the isles, with his heart full of anger and revenge
+against the De Danaans.
+
+He sought help of his kindred, and their design was told to the
+Fomorian chieftains--to Balor of the Evil Eye, and to Indec, son of De
+Domnand, chiefs of the Isles. These two leaders gathered ships from all
+the harbors and settlements of the Fomorians, from the Hebrides, the
+Shetlands, and far-distant Norway, so that their fleet was thick as
+gulls above a shoal of fish along the north shores of Erin.
+
+Coming down from the northern isles, they sighted the coast of Erin, the
+peaks of the northwestern mountains rising purple towards the clouds,
+with white seas foaming around them. Past towering headlands they
+sailed; then, drawing in towards the shore, they crept under the great
+cliffs of Slieve League, that rose like a many-colored wall from the sea
+to the sky--so high that the great eagles on their summits were but
+specks seen from beneath, so high that the ships below seemed like
+sea-shells to those who watched them from above. With the wall of the
+cliffs on their left hand, and the lesser headlands and hills of Sligo
+on their right, they came to that same strand of Ballysadare, the
+Cataract of the Oaks, where the last of the Firbolgs fell. Drawing their
+long ships up on the beach, with furled sail and oars drawn in, they
+debarked their army on the shore. It was a landing of ill-omen for the
+Fomorians, that landing beside the cairn of Eocaid; a landing of
+ill-omen for Indec, son of De Domnand, and for Balor of the Evil Eye.
+
+It was the fall of the leaf when they came; the winds ran crying through
+the forests, tearing the leaves and branches from the oaks, and mourning
+among the pines of the uplands. The sea was gray as a gull's back, with
+dark shadows under the cliffs and white tresses of foam along the
+headlands. At evening a cold wind brought the rain beating in from the
+ocean. Thus the Fomorians landed at the Cataract of the Oaks, and
+marched inland to the plain now called Tirerril in Sligo. The murky sky
+spread over the black and withered waste of the plain, hemmed in with
+gloomy hills, wild rocks and ravines, and with all the northern horizon
+broken by distant mountains. Here Indec and Balor, and Breas the cause
+of their coming, fixed their camp. They sent a message of defiance to
+the De Danaans, challenging them to fight or surrender. The De Danaans
+heard the challenge and made ready to fight.
+
+Nuada, now called the chieftain of the Silver Arm, because the mischief
+wrought by Sreng's blow on his shoulder had been hidden by a silver
+casing, was once more ruler since Breas had been driven out. Besides
+Nuada, these were De Danaan chieftains: Dagda, the Mighty; Lug, son of
+Cian, son of Diancect, surnamed Lamfada, the Long Armed; Ogma, of the
+Sunlike Face; and Angus, the Young. They summoned the workers in bronze
+and the armorers, and bid them prepare sword and spear for battle,
+charging the makers of spear-haft and shield to perfect their work. The
+heralds also were ready to proclaim the rank of the warriors, and those
+skilled in healing herbs stood prepared to succor the wounded. The bards
+were there also to arouse valor and ardor with their songs.
+
+Then marching westward to the plain of the battle among the hills, they
+set their camp and advanced upon the Fomorians. Each man had two spears
+bound with a thong to draw them back after the cast, with a shield to
+ward off blows, and a broad-bladed sword of bronze for close combat.
+With war-chants and invocations the two hosts met. The spears, well
+poised and leveled, clove the air, hissing between them, and under the
+weight of the spear-heads and their sharp points many in both hosts
+fell. There were cries of the wounded now, mingled with battle-songs,
+and hoarse shouting for vengeance among those whose sons and brothers
+and sworn friends fell. Another cast of the spears, seaming the air
+between as the hosts closed in, and they fell on each other with their
+swords, shields upraised and gold-bronze sword-points darting beneath
+like the tongues of serpents. They cut and thrust, each with his eyes
+fixed on the fierce eyes of his foe.
+
+They fought on the day of the Spirits, now the Eve of All Saints; the
+Fomorians were routed, and their chieftains slain. But of the De
+Danaans, Nuada, once wounded by Sreng of the Firbolgs, now fell by the
+hand of Balor; yet Balor also fell, slain by Lug, his own
+daughter's son.
+
+Thus was the might of the Fomorians broken, and the De Danaans ruled
+unopposed, their power and the works of their hands spreading throughout
+the length and breadth of the land.
+
+Many monuments are accredited to them by tradition, but greatest and
+most wonderful are the pyramids of stone at Brugh on the Boyne. Some
+nine miles from the sandy seashore, where the Boyne loses itself in the
+waves, there is a broad tongue of meadowland, shut in on three sides
+southward by the Boyne, and to the northeast cut off by a lesser stream
+that joins it. This remote and quiet headland, very famous in the
+annals, was in old days so surrounded by woods that it was like a quiet
+glade in the forest rimmed by the clear waters of the Boyne. The Mourne
+Mountains to the north and the lesser summits on the southern sky-line
+were hidden by the trees. The forest wall encircled the green
+meadowland, and the river fringed with blue forget-me-nots.
+
+In this quiet spot was the sacred place of the De Danaans, and three
+great pyramids of stone, a mile apart along the river, mark their three
+chief sanctuaries. The central is the greatest; two hundred thousand
+tons of stone heaped up, within a circular wall of stone, itself
+surrounded by a great outer circle of standing stones, thirty in number,
+like gray sentinels guarding the shrine. In the very heart of the
+pyramid, hushed in perpetual stillness and peace, is the inmost
+sanctuary, a chamber formed like a cross, domed with a lofty roof, and
+adorned with mysterious tracings on the rocks. Shrines like this are
+found in many lands, whether within the heart of the pyramids of Egypt
+or in the recesses of India's hills; and in all lands they have the same
+purpose. They are secret and holy sanctuaries, guarded well from all
+outward influence, where, in the mystic solitude, the valiant and great
+among the living may commune with the spirits of the mighty dead. The
+dead, though hidden, are not passed away; their souls are in perpetual
+nearness to ours. If we enter deep within ourselves, to the remote
+shrine of the heart, as they entered that secluded shrine, we may find
+the mysterious threshold where their world and our world meet.
+
+In the gloom and silence of those pyramid-chambers, the De Danaans thus
+sought the souls of their mighty ones--the Dagda, surnamed the Mighty,
+and Lug the Long-Armed, and Ogma of the Sunlike Face, and Angus the
+Young. From these luminous guardians they sought the inbreathing of
+wisdom, drawing into themselves the might of these mightier ones, and
+rising toward the power of their immortal world. And to these sacred
+recesses they brought the ashes of their mighty dead, as a token that
+they, too, had passed through the secret gateway to the Land of the
+Ever Young.
+
+Some thirty miles to the west of Brugh, on the Boyne, a low range of
+hills rises from the central plain, now bearing the name of Slieve na
+Calliagh, the Witch's Hill. In the days of the great forest this was the
+first large open space to the west coming from Brugh, and, like it, a
+quiet and remote refuge among the woods. On the hillsides of Slieve na
+Calliagh are other pyramids of stone, in all things like those of
+Brugh, and with the same chambered sanctuaries, but of lesser size;
+belonging, perhaps, to a later age, when the De Danaans were no longer
+supreme in the land, but took their place beside newcome invaders. These
+lesser shrines were also sacred places, doorways to the hidden world,
+entrance-gates to the Land of the Ever Young. There also was beheld the
+vision of the radiant departed; there also were fonts of baptism, basins
+wrought of granite brought hither from the distant hills of Mourne or
+Wicklow. As in all lands, these fonts were used in the consecration of
+the new birth, from which man rises conscious of his immortality.
+
+In harmony with this faith of theirs, our present tradition sees in the
+De Danaans a still haunting impalpable presence, a race invisible yet
+real, dwelling even now among our hills and valleys. When the life of
+the visible world is hushed, they say, there is another life in the
+hidden, where the Dagda Mor and Ogma and Lug and Angus still guard the
+De Danaan hosts. The radiance of their nearness is all through the land,
+like the radiance of the sun hidden behind storm-clouds, glimmering
+through the veil.
+
+[Illustration: White Rocks, Portrush]
+
+In the chambers of those pyramid-shrines are still traces of the
+material presence of the De Danaans; not only their baptismal fonts, but
+more earthly things--ornaments, beads of glass and amber, and combs with
+which they combed their golden locks. These amber beads, like so many
+things in the De Danaan history, call us to far northern lands by the
+Baltic, whence in all likelihood the De Danaans came; for in those
+Baltic lands we find just such pyramid shrines as those at Brugh and on
+the hillsides of Slieve na Calliagh, and their ornaments are the same,
+and the fashion of their spear-heads and shields. The plan of the Danish
+pyramid of Uby is like the pyramids of Newgrange and Nowth and Dowth by
+the Boyne, and the carvings on King Gorm's stone by the Baltic are like
+the carvings of stones in our own island. On the Baltic shores, too, of
+most ancient date and belonging to forgotten times, are still found
+fragments and even perfect hulls of just such long ships as were needed
+for the Danaans' coming, like the ships they burnt along the reaches of
+the Foyle.
+
+By the Baltic, too, and nowhere else, were there races with hair yellow
+as their own amber, or, as our island bards say, "so bright that the
+new-molten gold was not brighter; yellow as the yellow flag-lilies along
+the verges of the rivers." Therefore, in character of race, in face and
+feature, in color and complexion, in the form and make of sword and
+spear and shield, in their knowledge of ships and the paths of the sea,
+as in their ornaments and decorative art, and in those majestic pyramids
+and shrines where they sought mystic wisdom, and whither they carried
+the ashes of their dead, as to a place of sacred rest--in all these the
+life of the De Danaans speaks of the Baltic shores and the ancient race
+of golden-haired heroes who dwelt there. The honoring of bards, the
+heraldic keeping of traditions and the names of ancestors, also speak of
+the same home; and with a college of heraldic bards, well-ordered and
+holding due rank and honor, we can well see how the stories of their
+past have come down even to our days, lingering among our hills and
+valleys, as the De Danaan themselves linger, hidden yet not departed.
+
+The traditional time of their coming, too, agrees well with all we know.
+Without bronze tools they could not have carved the beautifully adorned
+stones that are built into the pyramids by the Boyne; yet there is a
+certain early ruggedness about these stones that falls far short of the
+perfection of later times. Early in the bronze age, therefore, they must
+be placed; and the early bronze age, wherever its remoteness can be
+measured, as in the Swiss lakes or the peat-mosses of Denmark, cannot be
+less than four thousand years ago, thus well agreeing with our De Danaan
+tradition. We are, therefore, led to believe that the tale told by these
+traditions is in the main a true one; that the races recorded by them
+came in the recorded order; that their places of landing are faithfully
+remembered; that all traditions pointing to their earlier homes are
+worthy of belief, and in full accord with all our other knowledge.
+
+
+
+V.
+
+EMAIN OF MACA.
+
+B.C. 50--A.D. 50.
+
+The battles of Southern and Northern Moytura gave the De Danaans sway
+over the island. After they had ruled for many centuries, they in their
+turn were subjected to invasion, as the Firbolg and Fomorian had been
+before them. The newcomers were the Sons of Milid, and their former home
+was either Gaul or Spain. But whether from Gaul or Spain, the sons of
+Milid were of undoubted Gaelic race, in every feature of character and
+complexion resembling the continental Gauls.
+
+We must remember that, in the centuries before the northward spread of
+Rome, the Gauls were the great central European power. Twenty-six
+hundred years ago their earlier tribal life was consolidated into a
+stable empire under Ambigatos; Galicia in Eastern Austria and Galicia in
+Western Spain mark their extreme borders towards the rising and
+setting sun.
+
+Several centuries before the days of Ambigatos, in the older period of
+tribal confederation, was the coming of the Gaelic Sons of Milid to
+Ireland. Tradition places the date between three and four thousand years
+ago. Yet even after that long interval of isolation the resemblance
+between the Irish and continental Gaels is perfect; they are tall,
+solidly built, rather inclined to stoutness; they are fair-skinned, or
+even florid, easily browned by sun and wind. Their eyes are gray,
+greenish or hazel, not clear blue, like the eyes of the Baltic race; and
+though fair-haired, they are easily distinguished from the golden-haired
+Norsemen. Such are the descendants of the Sons of Milid. Coming from
+Gaul or Spain, the Sons of Milid landed in one of the great fiords that
+penetrate between the mountains of Kerry--long after so named from the
+descendants of Ciar. These same fiords between the hills have been the
+halting-place of continental invaders for ages; hardly a century has
+passed since the last landing there of continental soldiers; there was
+another invasion a century before that, and yet another a hundred years
+earlier. But the Sons of Milid showed the way. They may have come by
+Bantry Bay or the Kenmare River or Dingle Bay; more probably the last,
+for tradition still points to the battlefield where they were opposed,
+on the hills of Slieve Mish, above the Dingle fiord.
+
+But wherever they debarked on that southwestern coast they found a land
+warm and winning as the south they had left behind--a land of ever-green
+woods, yew and arbutus mingling with beech and oak and fir; rich
+southern heaths carpeting the hillsides, and a soft drapery of ferns
+upon the rocks. There were red masses of overhanging mountain, but in
+the valleys, sheltered and sun-warmed, they found a refuge like the
+Isles of the Blest. The Atlantic, surging in great blue rollers, brought
+the warmth of tropical seas, and a rich and vivid growth through all the
+glens and vales responded to the sun's caress.
+
+The De Danaans must ere this have spread through all of the island,
+except the western province assigned to the Firbolgs; for we find them
+opposing,--but vainly opposing,--the Sons of Milid, at the very place of
+their landing. Here again we find the old tradition verified; for at the
+spot recorded of old by the bards and heralds, among the hills by the
+pass that leads from Dingle to Tralee Bay, numberless arrow-heads have
+been gathered, the gleanings after a great combat. The De Danaans fought
+with sword and spear, but, unless they had added to their weapons since
+the days of Breas and Sreng, they did not shoot with the bow; this was,
+perhaps, the cause of their defeat, for the De Danaans were defeated
+among the hills on that long headland.
+
+From their battlefield they could see the sea on either hand, stretching
+far inland northward and southward; across these arms of the sea rose
+other headlands, more distant, the armies of hills along them fading
+from green to purple, from purple to clear blue. But the De Danaans had
+burned their boats; they sought refuge rather by land, retreating
+northward till they came to the shelter of the great central woods. The
+Sons of Milid pursued them, and, overtaking them at Tailten on the
+Blackwater, some ten miles northwest of Tara, they fought another
+battle; after it, the supremacy of the De Danaans definitely
+passed away.
+
+Yet we have no reason to believe that, any more than the Fomorians or
+Firbolgs, the De Danaans ceased to fill their own place in the land.
+They seem, indeed, to have been preponderant in the north, and in all
+likelihood they hold their own there even now; for every addition to our
+knowledge shows us more and more how tenacious is the life of races, how
+firmly they cling to their earliest dwellings. And though we read of
+races perishing before invaders, this is the mere boasting of
+conquerors; more often the newcomers are absorbed among the earlier
+race, and nothing distinctive remains of them but a name. We have
+abundant evidence to show that at the present day, as throughout the
+last three thousand years, the four races we have described continue to
+make up the bulk of our population, and pure types of each still linger
+unblended in their most ancient seats; for, though races mingle, they do
+not thereby lose their own character. The law is rather that the type of
+one or other will come out clear in their descendants, all undefined
+forms tending to disappear.
+
+Nor did any subsequent invasion add new elements; for as all northern
+Europe is peopled by the same few types, every newcomer,--whether from
+Norway, Denmark, Britain or Continental Europe,--but reinforced one of
+these earlier races. Yet even where the ethnical elements are alike,
+there seems to be a difference of destiny and promise--as if the very
+land itself brooded over its children, transforming them and molding
+them to a larger purpose. The spiritual life of races goes far deeper
+than their ethnic history.
+
+It would seem that with the coming of the Sons of Milid the destiny of
+Ireland was rounded and completed; from that time onward, for more than
+two thousand years, was a period of uniform growth and settled life and
+ideals; a period whose history and achievements we are only beginning to
+understand. At the beginning of that long epoch of settled life the art
+of working gold was developed and perfected; and we have abundance of
+beautiful gold-work from remote times, of such fine design and execution
+that there is nothing in the world to equal it. The modern work of
+countries where gold is found in quantities is commonplace, vulgar and
+inartistic, when compared with the work of the old Irish period.
+Torques, or twisted ribbons of gold, of varying size and shape, were
+worn as diadems, collars, or even belts; crescent bands of finely
+embossed sheet-gold were worn above the forehead; brooches and pins of
+most delicate and imaginative workmanship were used to catch together
+the folds of richly colored cloaks, and rings and bracelets were of not
+less various and exquisite forms.
+
+We are at no loss to understand the abundance of our old goldsmiths'
+work when we know that even now, after being worked for centuries, the
+Wicklow gold-mines have an average yearly yield of some five hundred
+ounces, found, for the most part, in nuggets in the beds of streams
+flowing into the two Avons. One mountain torrent bears the name of Gold
+Mines River at the present day, showing the unbroken presence of the
+yellow metal from the time of its first discovery, over three thousand
+years ago. It seems probable that a liberal alloy of gold gave the
+golden bronze its peculiar excellence and beauty; for so rich is the
+lustre, so fine the color of many of our bronze axes and spears, that
+they are hardly less splendid than weapons of pure gold. From the
+perfect design and workmanship of these things of gold and bronze, more
+than from any other source, we gain an insight into the high culture and
+skill in the arts which marked that most distinctively Irish period,
+lasting, as we have seen, more than two thousand years.
+
+Early in this same epoch we find traditions of the clearing of forests,
+the sowing of cornfields, the skill of dyers in seven colors, earliest
+of which were purple, blue and green. Wells were dug to insure an easily
+accessible supply of pure water, so that we begin to think of a settled
+population dwelling among fields of golden grain, pasturing their cattle
+in rich meadows, and depending less on the deer and wild oxen of the
+forest, the salmon of lake and river, and the abundant fish along
+the shores.
+
+Tradition speaks persistently of bards, heralds, poets and poetesses;
+of music and song; of cordial and generous social life; and to the
+presence of these bards, like the skalds of the Northmen, we owe
+pictures, even now full of life and color and movement, of those days
+of long ago.
+
+At a period rather more than two thousand years ago, a warrior-queen,
+Maca by name, founded a great fort and citadel at Emain, some two miles
+west of Armagh, in the undulating country of green hills and meadows to
+the south of Lough Neagh. The ramparts and earthworks of that ancient
+fortress can still be traced, and we can follow and verify what the
+ancient bards told of the greatness of the stronghold of Maca. The plans
+of all forts of that time seem to have been much the same--a wide ring
+of earthwork, with a deep moat, guarded them, and a stockade of oak
+stakes rose above the earthwork, behind which the defenders stood,
+firing volleys of arrows at the attacking host. Within this outer circle
+of defence there was almost always a central stronghold, raised on a
+great mound of earth; and this was the dwelling of the chief, provincial
+ruler, or king. Lesser mounds upheld the houses of lesser chiefs, and
+all alike seem to have been built of oak, with plank roofs. Safe
+storehouses of stone were often sunk underground, beneath the chief's
+dwelling. In the fort of Emain, as in the great fort of Tara in the
+Boyne Valley, there was a banqueting-hall for the warriors, and the
+bards thus describe one of these in the days of its glory: "The
+banquet-hall had twelve divisions in each wing, with tables and passages
+round them; there were sixteen attendants on each side, eight for the
+star-watchers, the historians and the scribes, in the rear of the hall,
+and two to each table at the door,--a hundred guests in all; two oxen,
+two sheep and two hogs were divided equally on each side at each meal.
+Beautiful was the appearance of the king in that assembly--flowing,
+slightly curling golden hair upon him; a red buckler with stars and
+beasts wrought of gold and fastenings of silver upon him; a crimson
+cloak in wide descending folds upon him, fastened at his breast by a
+golden brooch set with precious stones; a neck-torque of gold around his
+neck; a white shirt with a full collar, and intertwined with threads of
+gold, upon him; a girdle of gold inlaid with precious stones around him;
+two wonderful shoes of gold with runings of gold upon him; two spears
+with golden sockets in his hand."
+
+We are the more disposed to trust the fidelity of the picture, since
+the foundations of the Tara banquet-hall are to be clearly traced to
+this day--an oblong earthwork over seven hundred feet long by ninety
+wide, with the twelve doors still distinctly marked; as for the brooches
+and torques of gold, some we have surpass in magnificence anything here
+described, and their artistic beauty is eloquent of the refinement of
+spirit that conceived and the skill that fashioned them. Spear-heads,
+too, are of beautiful bronze-gold, with tracings round the socket of
+great excellence and charm.
+
+[Illustration: Powerscourt Waterfall, Co. Wicklow]
+
+For a picture of the life of that age, we cannot do better than return
+to Emain of Maca, telling the story of one famous generation of warriors
+and fair women who loved and fought there two thousand years ago. The
+ideal of beauty was still the golden hair and blue eyes of the De
+Danaans, and we cannot doubt that their race persisted side by side with
+the Sons of Milid, retaining a certain predominance in the north and
+northeast of the island, the first landing-place of the De Danaan
+invaders. Of this mingled race was the great Rudraige, from whom the
+most famous rulers of Emain descended. Ros was the son of Rudraige, and
+from Roeg and Cass, the sons of Ros, came the princes Fergus and
+Factna. Factna, son of Cass, wedded the beautiful Nessa, and from their
+union sprang Concobar, the great hero and ruler of Ulster--in those days
+named Ulad, and the dwellers there the Ulaid. Factna died while Concobar
+was yet a boy; and Nessa, left desolate, was yet so beautiful in her
+sadness that Fergus became her slave, and sued for her favor, though
+himself a king whose favors others sued. Nessa's heart was wholly with
+her son, her life wrapt up in his. She answered, therefore, that she
+would renounce her mourning and give her widowed hand to Fergus the
+king, if the king, on his part, would promise that Nessa's son Concobar
+should succeed him, rather than the children of Fergus. Full of longing,
+and held in thrall by her beauty, Fergus promised; and this promise was
+the beginning of many calamities, for Nessa, the queen, feeling her sway
+over Fergus, and full of ambition for her child, won a promise from
+Fergus that the youth should sit beside him on the throne, hearing all
+pleadings and disputes, and learning the art of ruling. But the spirit
+of Concobar was subtle and strong and masterful, and he quickly took the
+greater place in the councils of the Ulaid, until Nessa, still confident
+in her charm, took a promise from Fergus that Concobar should reign
+for one year.
+
+Fergus, great-hearted warrior, but tender and gentle and fond of feasts
+and merrymaking, was very willing to lift the cares of rule from his
+shoulders to the younger shoulders of Nessa's son, and the one year thus
+granted became many years, so that Fergus never again mounted his
+throne. Yet for the love he bore to Nessa, Fergus willingly admitted his
+stepson's rule, and remained faithfully upholding him, ever merry at the
+banquets, and leading the martial sports and exercises of the youths,
+the sons of chieftains, at the court. Thus Concobar, son of Nessa, came
+to be ruler over the great fort of Emain, with its citadel, its
+earthworks and outer forts, its strong stockade and moat; ruler of
+these, and of the chiefs of the Ulaid, and chief commander of all the
+fighting-men that followed them. To him came the tribute of cattle and
+horses, of scarlet cloaks and dyed fabrics, purple and blue and green,
+and the beryls and emeralds from the mountains of Mourne where the sea
+thunders in the caves, near the great fort of Rudraige. Fergus was lord
+only of the banqueting-hall and of the merrymakings of the young chiefs;
+but in all else the will of Concobar was supreme and his word was law.
+
+It happened that before this a child had been born, a girl
+golden-haired and with blue eyes, of whom the Druids had foretold many
+dark and terrible things. That the evil might not be wrought through
+this child of sad destiny, the king had from her earliest childhood kept
+her securely hidden in a lonely fort, and there Deirdre grew in
+solitude, daily increasing in beauty and winsomeness. She so won the
+love of those set in guard over her that they relaxed something of the
+strictness of their watch, letting her wander a little in the meadows
+and the verges of the woods, gathering flowers, and watching the life of
+birds and wild things there.
+
+Among the chieftains of the court of Emain was one Usnac, of whom were
+three sons, with Naisi strongest and handsomest of the three. Naisi was
+dark, with black locks hanging upon his shoulders and dark, gleaming
+eyes; and so strongly is unlike drawn to unlike that golden-haired
+Deirdre, seeing him in one of her wanderings, felt her heart go forth to
+him utterly. Falling into talk with him, they exchanged promises of
+enduring love. Thus the heart of Naisi went to Deirdre, as hers had gone
+to him, so that all things were changed for them, growing radiant with
+tremulous hope and wistful with longing. Yet the fate that lay upon
+Deirdre was heavy, and all men dreaded it but Naisi; so that even his
+brothers, the sons of Usnac, feared greatly and would have dissuaded him
+from giving his life to the ill-fated one. But Naisi would not be
+dissuaded; so they met secretly many times, in the twilight at the verge
+of the wood, Deirdre's golden hair catching the last gleam of sunlight
+and holding it long into the darkness, while the black locks of Naisi,
+even ere sunset, foreshadowed the coming night. In their hearts it was
+not otherwise; for Deirdre, full of wonder at the change that had come
+over her, at the song of the birds that echoed ever around her even in
+her dreams, at the radiance of the flowers and trees, the sunshine on
+the waters of the river, the vivid gladness over all,--Deirdre knew
+nothing of the dread doom that was upon her, and was all joy and
+wonderment at the meetings with her lover, full of fancies and tender
+words and shy caresses; but Naisi, who knew well the fate that
+overshadowed them like a black cloud above a cliff of the sea, strove to
+be glad and show a bold face to his mistress, though his heart many a
+time grew cold within him, thinking on what had befallen and what
+might befall.
+
+For the old foretelling of the star-watchers was not the only doom laid
+upon Deirdre. Concobar the king, stern and masterful, crafty and secret
+in counsel though swift as an eagle to slay,--Concobar the king had
+watched Deirdre in her captivity, ever unseen of her, and his heart had
+been moved by the fair softness of her skin, the glow of her cheek, the
+brightness of her eyes and hair; so that the king had steadfastly
+determined in his mind that Deirdre should be his, in scorn of all
+prophecies and warnings; that her beauty should be for him alone. This
+the king had determined; and it was known to Naisi the son of Usnac. It
+was known to him also that what Concobar the king determined, he
+steadfastly carried out; for the will of Concobar was strong and
+masterful over all around him.
+
+Therefore at their meetings two clouds lay upon the heart of Naisi: the
+presentment of the king's power and anger, and his relentless hand
+pursuing through the night, and the darker dread of the sightless doom
+pronounced of old at the birth of Deirdre, of which the will of Concobar
+was but the tool. There was gloom in his eyes and silence on his lips
+and a secret dread in his heart. Deirdre wondered at it, her own heart
+being so full of gladness, her eyes sparkling, and endearing words ever
+ready on her lips. Deirdre wondered, yet found a new delight and
+wonderment in the silence of Naisi, and the gloomy lightning in his
+eyes, as being the more contrasted with herself, and therefore the more
+to be beloved.
+
+Yet the time came when Naisi determined to tell her all and risk the
+worst that fate could do against them, finding death with her greatly
+better than life without her. Yet death with her was not to be granted
+to him. Deirdre heard, wondering and trembling, and Naisi must tell her
+the tale many times before she understood,--so utter had been her
+solitude and so perfect was yet her ignorance of all things beyond the
+fort where she was captive, and of all the doings of men. Concobar was
+not even a name to her, and she knew nothing of his power or the
+stronghold of Emain, the armies of the Ulaid, or the tributes of gold
+and cattle and horses. Spears and swords and those who wielded them were
+not even dreams to her until the coming of Naisi, when his gloom blended
+with her sunshine.
+
+Talking long through the twilight, until the red gold of the west was
+dulled to bronze over the hills, and the bronze tarnished and darkened
+with the coming of the eastern stars, they planned together what they
+should do; and, the heart of Deirdre at last growing resolute, they made
+their way through the night to where the brothers of Naisi were, and all
+fled together towards the northern sea. Amongst the fishermen of the
+north they found those who were willing to carry them beyond the reach
+of Concobar's anger, and with a southerly breeze set sail for the
+distant headlands of Scotland, that they had seen from the cliff-top
+lying like blue clouds along the horizon. They set forth early in the
+morning, as the sun came up out of the east over blue Alban capes, and
+when the sun went down it reddened the dark rocks of Islay; so that,
+making for the shore, they camped that night under the Islay Hills. On
+their setting forth again, the sea was like a wild grey lake between
+Jura on the left and the long headland of Cantyre on their right; and
+thus they sped forward between long ranks of gloomy hills, growing ever
+nearer them on both sides, till they passed through the Sound of Jura
+and rounded into Loch Etive.
+
+There they made the land, drawing up under the shadow of dark hills, and
+there they dwelt for many a day. Very familiar to Deirdre, though at
+first strange and wild and terrible beyond words, grew that vast
+amphitheatre of hills in their eternal grayness, with the long Loch
+stretching down like a horn through their midst. Very familiar to
+inland-bred Deirdre, though at first strange and fearful, grew the gray
+surges of the incoming tides, the white foam of the waves seething along
+boulders of granite, and the long arms of seaweed waving as she peered
+downward into the clear green water. Very familiar to Deirdre, though at
+first strange and confusing, grew the arms of Naisi around her in the
+darkness and his warm lips on her cheek. Happy were those wild days in
+the great glen of Etive, and dear did the sons of Usnac grow to her
+heart, loved as brothers by her who never knew a brother, or the
+gentleness of a mother's watching, or the solace of dear kindred.
+
+The sons of Usnac sped forth before dawn among the hills from their
+green dwelling roofed with pine branches and reeds and moss; early they
+went forth to track the deer, pursuing them with their arrows, till the
+red flank of the buck was laced with brighter red. One of the three ever
+stayed behind with Deirdre, whether it was Naisi himself, or Alny, or
+Ardan, and the two thus remaining were like children playing together,
+whether gathering sticks and dry rushes and long spears of withered
+grass for their fire, or wandering by the white curling waves, or
+sending flat pebbles skipping over the wavelets; and the sound of their
+laughter many a time echoed along the Loch's green waters and up the
+hills, till the does peered and wondered from among the heather, and the
+heron, startled at his fishing, flew upwards croaking, with flapping
+wings. Happy were those days for Deirdre, and with utter sadness she
+looked back to them afterwards, when the doom foretold had fallen upon
+her. Happy sped the days, till once in the gray of the dawn, while
+Deirdre was resting in their green refuge with Naisi, she cried out in
+her sleep and waked, telling him, weeping, that she had heard the voice
+of the bird of doom in her dreams.
+
+The voice she heard was indeed the voice of their doom; yet it was a
+cheerful voice, full of friendly gladness; the voice of Fergus, son of
+Roeg, former King of Emain, and now come to Loch Etive as messenger of
+Concobar, Fergus came up from the sea-beach towards the answering shout
+of the sons of Usnac, and glad greetings passed among them at the door
+of their refuge. Fergus looked long in admiration at the blue eyes and
+golden locks, the clear skin and gentle breast of Deirdre, nor
+wondered, as he looked, that Naisi had dared fate to possess her. Then
+Fergus told the story of his coming; how they had discovered the flight
+of the sons of Usnac from Emain, and how terrible was the black anger of
+Concobar; what passionate fire had gleamed in his eyes as he tossed the
+golden locks back from his shoulders and grasped the haft of his spear,
+and pledged himself to be avenged on Naisi and all his kin, swearing
+that he would have Deirdre back again.
+
+Thus Fergus told the tale, laughingly, as at a danger that was past, a
+storm-cloud that had lost its arrows of white hail and was no longer
+fearful. For, he said, Concobar had forgotten his anger, had promised a
+truce to the sons of Usnac, and most of all to Naisi, and had bidden
+them return as his guests to Emain of Maca, where Deirdre should dwell
+happy with her beloved. The comrades of Fergus by this time had tied
+their boat and come up from the shore, and the sons of Usnac were ready
+to depart. Yet Deirdre's heart misgave her as she thought of the days
+among those purple hills and granite rocks, by the long green water of
+the Loch, and her clear-seeing soul spoke words of doom for them all:
+words soon to be fulfilled. Amongst the comrades of Fergus were certain
+of the adherents of Concobar, treacherous as he; for he had no thought
+of pardoning the sons of Usnac, nor any intent but to draw Deirdre back
+within his reach; the image of her bright eyes and the redness of her
+lips, and her soft breast and shining hair was ever before him, and his
+heart gnawed within him for longing and the bitterness of desire.
+
+Therefore he had designed this embassy; and Fergus, believing all things
+and trusting all things, had gladly undertaken to be the messenger of
+forgiveness; fated, instead, to be the instrument of betrayal. So they
+turned their faces homewards towards Emain, Deirdre full of desponding,
+as one whose day of grace is past. They set sail again through the long
+Sound of Jura, with the islands now on their right hand and the gray
+hills of Cantyre on their left. So they passed Jura, and later Islay,
+and came at last under the cliffs of Rathlin and the white Antrim
+headlands. Deirdre's heart never lightened, nor did laughter play about
+her lips or in her eyes through all the time of her journey, but sadness
+lay ever upon her, like the heavy darkness of a winter's night, when a
+storm is gathering out of the West. But Fergus made merry, rejoicing at
+the reconciling; bidden to a treacherous banquet by the partisans of
+Concobar, his heart never misgave him, but giving the charge of Deirdre
+and the sons of Usnac to his sons, he went to the banquet, delaying long
+in carousing and singing, while Deirdre and the three brothers were
+carried southwards to Emain. There the treachery plotted against them
+was carried out, as they sat in the banquet-hall; for Concobar's men
+brought against them the power of cowardly flames, setting fire to the
+hall, and slaying the sons of Usnac as they hurried forth from under the
+burning roof.
+
+One of the sons of Fergus shamefully betrayed them, bought by the gold
+and promises of Concobar, but the other bravely fell, fighting back to
+back with one of the sons of Usnac, when they fell overpowered by the
+warriors of Concobar. Thus was the doom of Deirdre consummated, her
+lover treacherously done to death, and she herself condemned to bear the
+hated caress of Concobar, thinking ever of those other lips, in the days
+of her joy among the northern hills. This is the lament of Deirdre for
+Usnac's sons:
+
+     The lions of the hill are gone,
+     And I am left alone, alone;
+     Dig the grave both wide and deep,
+     For I am sick and fain would sleep!
+
+     The falcons of the wood are flown,
+     And I am left alone, alone;
+     Dig the grave both deep and wide,
+     And let us slumber side by side.
+
+     Lay their spears and bucklers bright
+     By the warriors' sides aright;
+     Many a day the three before me
+     On their linked bucklers bore me.
+
+     Dig the grave both wide and deep,
+     Sick I am and fain would sleep.
+     Dig the grave both deep and wide,
+     And let us slumber side by side.
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+CUCULAIN THE HERO.
+
+B.C. 50--A.D. 50.
+
+The treacherous death of Naisi and his brothers Ardan and Alny, and her
+own bereavement and misery, were not the end of the doom pronounced at
+her birth for Deirdre, but rather the beginning. Yet the burden of the
+evils that followed fell on Concobar and his lands and his warriors.
+
+For Fergus, son of Roeg, former king over Emain, who had stayed behind
+his charges feasting and banqueting, came presently to Emain, fearing
+nothing and thinking no evil, but still warm with the reconciliation
+that he had accomplished; and, coming to Emain of Maca, found the sons
+of Usnac dead, with the sods still soft on their graves, and his own son
+also dead, Deirdre in the hands of Concobar, and the plighted word of
+Fergus and his generous pledge of safety most traitorously and basely
+broken; broken by Concobar, whom he himself had guarded and set upon
+the throne.
+
+Fergus changed from gladness to fierce wrath, and his countenance was
+altered with anger, as he uttered his bitter indignation against
+Concobar to the warriors and heroes of Emain and the men of Ulad. The
+warriors were parted in two by his words, swaying to the right and to
+the left, as tall wheat sways before one who passes through it. For some
+of them sided with Fergus, saying that he had done great wrong to put
+Concobar on the throne, and that even now he should cast him down again,
+for the baseness and treachery of his deed; but others took Concobar's
+part, saying that the first betraying was Naisi's, who stole away
+Deirdre,--the hostage, as it were, of evil doom, so that he drew the
+doom upon himself. They further said that Concobar was chief and ruler
+among them, the strong and masterful leader, able to uphold their cause
+amongst men. So indeed it befell, for the sedition of Fergus and his
+fight to avenge his wrong upon Concobar failed, so that he fled defeated
+to Meave, Queen of Connacht, at her stronghold amid the lakes whence
+issues forth the Shannon.
+
+[Illustration: Honeycomb, Giant's Causeway.]
+
+Meave, whose power and genius overtopped her lord Ailill, received the
+exiled king gladly, and put many honors upon him, holding him as the
+pillar of her army, with the two thousand men of the Ulaid who came
+with him;--those who had fought for him against the party of Concobar.
+At Cruacan, on the hillside, with the lakes of the Great River all
+around them, with the sun setting red behind the Curlew hills, with
+green meadows and beech-woods to gladden them, Meave and Ailill kept
+their court, and thence they sent many forays against Emain of Maca and
+Concobar, with Fergus the fallen king ever raging in the van, and, for
+the wrong that was done him, working measureless wrong on his own
+kingdom and the kingdom of his fathers.
+
+After many a foray had gone forth against Ulad, crossing the level
+plains, it befell that Meave and Ailill her lord disputed between them
+as to which had the greatest wealth; nor would either yield until their
+most precious possessions had been brought and matched the one against
+the other. Their jewels of gold, wonderfully wrought, and set with
+emeralds and beryls and red carbuncles, were brought forth, their
+crescents for the brow, with hammered tracery upon them, their necklets
+and torques, like twisted ribbons of gold, their bracelets and arm-rings
+set with gold, their gems of silver and all their adornments, cloaks of
+scarlet and blue and purple, were all brought, and no advantage in the
+one was found over the other. Their battle-steeds also were brought,
+their horses for chariots; and likewise their herds of lowing wealth,
+their sheep with soft fleeces. When the cattle were driven up before
+them, it was found that among the herds of Ailill was one bull,
+matchless, with white horns shining and polished; and equal to this bull
+was none among the herds of the queen. She would not admit her lord's
+advantage, but sent forthwith to seek where another bull like the bull
+of Ailill might be found, and tidings were brought to her of the brown
+bull of Cuailgne,--of Cuailgne named after a chief of the Sons of Milid,
+fallen ages ago in the pursuit of the De Danaans, when the De Danaans
+retreated before the Sons of Milid from the southern headland of Slieve
+Mish to the ford at green Tailten by the Boyne, and thence further
+northwards to where Cuailgne of the Sons of Milid was killed. At that
+same place had grown up a dwelling with a fortress, and there was the
+brown bull that Meave heard the report of. She sent, therefore, and her
+embassy bore orders to Daire, the owner of the bull, asking that the
+bull might be sent to her for a year, and offering fifty heifers in
+payment. Daire received her messengers well, and willingly consented to
+her request; but the messengers of Meave from feasting fell to
+drinking, from drinking to boasting; one of them declaring that it was a
+small thing that Daire had granted the request, since they themselves
+would have compelled him, even unwillingly, and would have driven off
+the brown bull by force. The taunt stung Daire, after his hospitality,
+and in wrath he sent them forth empty-handed, and so they came
+slighted to Meave.
+
+The queen, conceiving her honor impeached, would by no means suffer the
+matter so to rest, but stirred up wrath and dissension, till the armies
+of Connacht with their allies set forth to sack and burn in Ulad, and at
+all hazards to bring the brown bull. Fergus and the men who fought by
+his side went with them, and marching thus eastwards they came, after
+three days march through fair lands and fertile, to the river Dee--the
+frontier of Ulad, and the scene of many well-fought fights.
+
+The army of Ulad was not yet ready to meet them, but one champion with
+his band confronted them at the ford. That champion was Cuculain, whose
+true name was Setanta, son of Sualtam, chief at Dundelga, and of Dectira
+the sister of Concobar. Cuculain was accounted the greatest and most
+skillful warrior of his time, and bards for ages after told how he kept
+the ford. For by the laws of honor, amongst them, the host from Connacht
+could not pass the ford so long as Cuculain held the ford and offered
+single combat to the champions. They must take up his challenge one by
+one; and while he stood there challenging, the host could not pass.
+
+Many of their champions fell there by the ford, so that queen Meave's
+heart chafed within her, and her army was hot to do battle, but still
+Cuculain kept the ford. Last of the western champions came forth
+Ferdiad, taught in the famous northern school of arms, a dear friend and
+companion of Cuculain, who now must meet him to slay or be slain. This
+is the story of their combat, as the traditions tell it:
+
+When they ceased fighting on the first day, they cast their weapons away
+from them into the hands of their charioteers. Each of them approached
+the other forthwith, and each put his hand round the other's neck, and
+gave him three kisses. Their horses were in the same paddock that night,
+and their charioteers at the same fire; and their charioteers spread
+beds of green rushes for them, with wounded men's pillows to them. The
+men of healing came to heal and solace them, applying herbs that should
+assuage to every cut or gash upon their bodies, and to all their
+wounds. Of every healing herb that was laid on the hurts of Cuculain, he
+sent an equal share to Ferdiad, sending it westward over the ford, so
+that men might not say that through the healing virtue of the herbs he
+was able to overcome him. And of all food and invigorating drink that
+was set before Ferdiad, he sent an equal portion northwards over the
+ford to Cuculain, for those that prepared food for him were more than
+those who made ready food for Cuculain. Thus that night they rested.
+
+They fought with spears on the next day, and so great was the strength
+of each, so dire their skill in combat, that both were grievously
+wounded, for all the protection of their shields. The men of healing art
+could do little for them beyond the staunching of their blood, that it
+might not flow from their wounds, laying herbs upon their red wounds.
+
+On the third day they arose early in the morning and came forward to the
+place of combat. Cuculain saw that the face of Ferdiad was dark as a
+black cloud, and thus addressed him: "Thy face is darkened, Ferdiad, and
+thine eye has lost its fire, nor are the form and features thine!" And
+Ferdiad answered, "O, Cuculain, it is not from fear or dread that my
+face is changed, for I am ready to meet all champions in the fight."
+Cuculain reproached him, wondering that, for the persuasions of Meave,
+Ferdiad was willing thus to fight against his friend, coming to spoil
+his land. But Ferdiad replied that fate compelled him, since every man
+is constrained to come unto the sod where shall be his last
+resting-place. That day the heroes fought with swords, but such was the
+skill of both that neither could break down the other's guard.
+
+In the dusk they cast away their weapons, ceasing from the fight; and
+though the meeting of the two had been full of vigor and friendship in
+the morning, yet was their parting at night mournful and full of sorrow.
+That night their horses were not in the same enclosure, nor did their
+charioteers rest at the same fire.
+
+Then Ferdiad arose early in the morning and went forth to the place of
+contest, knowing well that that day would decide whether he should fall
+or Cuculain; knowing that the sun would set on one of them dead that
+night. Cuculain, seeing him come forth, spoke thus to his charioteer: "I
+see the might and skill of Ferdiad, coming forth to the combat. If it be
+I that shall begin to yield to-day, do thou stir my valor, uttering
+reproaches and words of condemnation against me, so that my wrath shall
+grow upon me, enkindling me again for the battle." And the charioteer
+assented and promised.
+
+Great was the deed that was performed that day at the ford by the two
+heroes, the two warriors, the two champions of western lands, the two
+gift-bestowing hands of the northwest of the world, the two beloved
+pillars of the valor of the Gael, the two keys of the bravery of the
+Gael, brought to fight from afar through the schemes of Meave the queen.
+
+They began to shoot with their missiles from the dawn of the day, from
+early morning till noon. And when midday came the ire of the men waxed
+more furious, and they drew nearer together. Then Cuculain sprang from
+the river-bank against the boss of the shield of Ferdiad, son of Daman,
+to strike at his head over the rim of the shield from above. But Ferdiad
+gave the shield so strong a turn with his left arm that he cast Cuculain
+from him like a bird. Cuculain sprang again upon him, to strike him from
+above. But the son of Daman so struck the shield with his left knee that
+he cast Cuculain from him like a child.
+
+Then the charioteer of Cuculain spoke to chide him: "Woe for thee, whom
+the warrior thus casts aside as an evil mother casts away her offspring.
+He throws thee as foam is thrown by the river. He grinds thee as a mill
+would grind fresh grain. He pierces thee as the ax of the woodman
+cleaves the oak. He binds thee as the woodbine binds the tree. He darts
+on thee as the hawk darts on finches, so that henceforth thou hast no
+claim or name or fame for valor, until thy life's end, thou
+phantom sprite!"
+
+Then Cuculain sprang up fleet as the wind and swift as the swallow,
+fierce as a dragon, strong as a lion, advancing against Ferdiad through
+clouds of dust, and forcing himself upon his shield, to strike at him
+from above. Yet even then Ferdiad shook him off, driving him backwards
+into the ford.
+
+Then Cuculain's countenance was changed, and his heart swelled and grew
+great within him till he towered demoniac and gigantic, rising like one
+of the Fomor upon Ferdiad. So fierce was the fight they now fought that
+their heads met above and their feet below and their arms in the midst,
+past the rims of the shields. So fierce was the fight they fought that
+they cleft the shields to their centers. So fierce was the fight they
+fought that their spears were shivered from socket to haft. So fierce
+was the fight they fought that the demons of the air screamed along the
+rims of the shields, and from the hilts of their swords and from the
+hafts of their spears. So fierce was the fight they fought that they
+cast the river out of its bed, so that not a drop of water lay there
+unless from the fierceness of the champion heroes hewing each other in
+the midst of the ford. So fierce was the fight they fought that the
+horses of the Gael fled away in fright, breaking their chains and their
+yokes, and the women and youths and camp-followers broke from the camp,
+flying forth southwards and westwards.
+
+They were fighting with the edges of their swords, and Ferdiad, finding
+a break in the guard of Cuculain, gave him a stroke of the
+straight-edged sword, burying it in his body until the blood fell into
+his girdle, until the ford was red with the blood of the hero's body.
+Then Cuculain thrust an unerring spear over the rim of the shield, and
+through the breast of Ferdiad's armor, so that the point of the spear
+pierced his heart and showed through his body.
+
+"That is enough, now," said Ferdiad: "I fall for that!" Then Cuculain
+ran towards him, and clasped his two arms about him, and bore him with
+his arms and armor across the ford northwards. Cuculain laid Ferdiad
+down there, bowing over his body in faintness and weakness. But the
+charioteer cried to him, "Rise up, Cuculain, for the host is coming upon
+us, and it is not single combat they will give thee, since Ferdiad, son
+of Daman, son of Daire, has fallen before thee!"
+
+"Friend," Cuculain made answer, "what avails it for me to rise after him
+that has fallen by me?"
+
+Thus did Cuculain keep the ford, still known as the ford of Ferdiad,
+Ath-Fhirdia on the Dee, in the midst of the green plain of Louth. And
+while he fought at the ford of Ferdiad the army of Ulad assembled, and
+coming southwards over the hills before Emain, turned back the host of
+Meave the queen and pursued them. The army of Meave fled westwards and
+southwards towards Connacht, passing the Yellow Ford of Athboy and the
+Hill of Ward, the place of sacrifice, where the fires on the Day of
+Spirits summoned the priests and Druids to the offering. Fleeing still
+westwards from the Yellow Ford, they passed between the lakes of Owel
+and Ennel, with the men of Ulad still hot in their rear. Thus came
+pursued and pursuers to Gairec, close by Athlone--the Ford of Luan--and
+the wooded shore of the great Lough Ree. There was fought a battle
+hardly less fatal to victors than to vanquished, for though the hosts of
+Meave were routed, yet Concobar's men could not continue the pursuit.
+Thus Meave escaped and Fergus with her, and came to their great fort on
+the green hillside of Cruacan amid the headwaters of the Shannon.
+
+The victory of Concobar's men was like a defeat. There was not food that
+pleased him, nor did sleep come to him by flight, so that the Ulad
+wondered, and Catbad the right-wonderful Druid, himself a warrior who
+had taught Concobar and reared him, went to Concobar to learn the secret
+of his trouble. Therefore Catbad asked of Concobar what wound had
+wounded him, what obstinate sickness had come upon him, making him faint
+and pale, day after day.
+
+"Great reason have I for it," answered Concobar, "for the four great
+provinces of Erin have come against me, bringing with them their bards
+and singers, that their ravages and devastations might be recorded, and
+they have burned our fortresses and dwellings, and Ailill and Meave have
+gained a battle against me. Therefore I would be avenged upon Meave
+the queen."
+
+"Thou hast already avenged it sternly, O Red-handed Concobar," Catbad
+made answer, "by winning the battle over the four provinces of Erin."
+
+"That is no battle," Concobar answered, "where a strong king falls not
+by hard fighting and by fury. That an army should escape from a goodly
+battle! Unless Ailill should fall, and Meave, by me in this encounter
+with valorous hosts, I tell you that my heart will break, O Catbad!"
+
+"This is my counsel for thee," replied Catbad, "to stay for the present.
+For the winds are rough, and the roads are foul, and the streams and the
+rivers are in flood, and the hands of the warriors are busy making forts
+and strongholds among strangers. So wait till the summer days come upon
+us, till every grassy sod is a pillow, till our horses are full of
+spirit and our colts are strong, till our men are whole of their wounds
+and hurts, till the nights are short to watch and to ward and to guard
+in the land of enemies and in the territories of strangers. Spring is
+not the time for an invasion. But meanwhile let tidings be sent to thy
+friends in absence, in the islands and throughout the northern seas."
+
+Therefore messengers were sent with the tidings, and the friends in
+absence of Concobar were summoned. They set forth with ships from the
+islands of the northern seas, and came forward with the tide to the
+Cantyre headland. The green surges of the tremendous sea rose about
+them, and a mighty storm rose against them. Such was the strength of the
+storm that the fleet was parted in three. A third of them, with the son
+of Amargin, came under the cliffs of Fair Head, to the Bay of Murbolg,
+where huge columns tower upward on the face of the cliff, high as the
+nests of the eagles; cliffs ruddy and mighty, frowning tremendous across
+the channel to Cantyre and Islay and far-away Jura. A third of the ships
+came to the safer harbor of Larne, where bands of white seam the cliff's
+redness, where the great headland is thrust forth northwards, sheltering
+the bay from the eastern waves. A third of the fleet came to the strand
+beside Dundelga, hard by the great hill of earth where was reared the
+stronghold of Cuculain.
+
+At that same time came Concobar with a thousand men to the fort of
+Cuculain, and feasting was prepared for him at the House of Delga. Nor
+was Concobar long there till he saw the bent spars of sails and the
+full-crewed ships, and the scarlet pavilions, and the many-colored
+banners, and the blue bright lances, and the weapons of war. Then
+Concobar called on the chiefs that were about him, for the territory
+and land he had bestowed upon them, and for the jewels he had given
+them, to stand firm and faithful. For he knew not whether the ships were
+ships of his foes, of the Galian of Lagin, now called Leinster, or the
+Munstermen of great Muma, or the men of Olnemact, called afterwards
+Connacht; for the estuary of the river and the strand were full of men.
+
+Then Senca son of Ailill answered for the chieftains: "I give my word,
+indeed, that Erin holds not a soldier who lays his hand in the hand of a
+chieftain that is not known to me. If they be the men of Erin thy foes
+that are there, I shall ask a truce of battle from them; but if they be
+thy friends and allies, thou shalt the more rejoice."
+
+Then Senca son of Ailill went forward to the place where the ships were,
+and learned that they were the friends in absence of Concobar, come to
+be his allies against the four provinces of Erin. Then Concobar spoke
+to Cuculain:
+
+"Well, O Cuculain, let the horses of the plain of Murtemni be caught by
+thee; let four-wheeled chariots be harnessed for them; bring with them
+hither my friends from the ships in chariots and four-wheeled cars,
+that feasting and enjoyment may be prepared for them."
+
+[Illustration: Gray Man's Path, Fair Head.]
+
+They were brought in chariots to the feast, and carvers carved for them,
+and serving-men carried the cups of mead. Songs were sung to them, and
+they tarried there till sunrise on the morrow. Then Concobar spoke again
+to Cuculain:
+
+"It is well, Cuculain. Let messengers now be sent through the lands of
+the Ulaid to the warriors of the Ulaid, that the foreign friends may be
+ministered to by them also, while I make my camp here by the river. And
+bid the thrice fifty veteran champions come hither to me, that I may
+have their aid and counsel in battle."
+
+But Cuculain would not. Therefore Concobar went himself to summon the
+veterans. When they asked the cause of his coming, Concobar answered,
+"Have you not heard how the four provinces of Erin came against us,
+bringing with them their bards and singers, that their ravages and
+devastations might the better be recorded, and burning and plundering
+our fortresses and dwellings? Therefore I would make an expedition of
+hostility against them, and with your guidance and counsel would I make
+the expedition."
+
+"Let our old steeds be caught by thee," they answered, "and let our old
+chariots be yoked by thee, so that we may go on this journey and
+expedition with thee." Then their old chargers were caught, and their
+old chariots yoked, so that they too came to the camp at the Water
+of Luachan.
+
+This was told to the four provinces. The Three Waves of Erin thundered
+in the night; the Wave of Clidna at Glandore in the South; the Wave of
+Rudraige along the bent-carpeted sandhills of Dundrum, under the
+Mountains of Mourne; and the Wave of Tuag Inbir, at the bar of northern
+Bann. For these are the Three Waves of Fate in Erin. Then the four
+provinces hosted their men. The son of Lucta, the north Munster king,
+assembled his tribes at the Hill of Luchra, between the Shannon mouth
+and the Summit of Prospects. Ailill and Meave hosted the men of the west
+at Cruacan. Find, son of Ros, king over the Galian of Leinster, gathered
+his army at Dinn-Rig by the Barrow. Cairpre Nia Fer assembled his host
+about him at Tara, in the valley of the Boyne.
+
+This was the proposal of Eocu, son of Lucta, king of north Munster by
+the Shannon: That everything should have its payment, and that
+reparation should be made to Concobar for the invasion; that a fort
+should be paid for every fort, for every house a house, for every cow a
+cow, for every bull a bull; that the great brown bull should be sent
+back, that the breadth of the face of the bull in red gold should be
+given to Concobar, and that there should be no more hostility among the
+men of Erin.
+
+This was reported to Meave, but the queen answered, "A false hand was
+his who gave this counsel. For so long as there shall be among us one
+who can hold a sword, who can wear the shield-strap about his neck, that
+proposal shall not go to him."
+
+"Thy counsel is not mine," replied Ailill, "for not greater shall be our
+part of that payment than the part of all the four provinces who went on
+that raid for the bull." Therefore Meave consented, and messengers were
+sent, and came to Tara by the Boyne, where were Find, son of Ros, king
+of Leinster, and his brother Cairpre Nia Fer, king of Tara. Thence they
+sent messengers to treat with Concobar, but Concobar rejected the terms.
+"I give my word, indeed," answered Concobar, "that I will not take terms
+from you till my tent has been pitched in every province of Erin."
+
+"Good, O Concobar," they replied; "where wilt thou now make thy
+encampment to-night?"
+
+"In the Headland of the Kings, by the clear bright Boyne," answered
+Concobar, for Concobar concealed not ever from his enemy the place in
+which he would take station or camp, that they might not say that it was
+fear or dread that caused him not to say it. Concobar, therefore,
+marched toward the Headland of the Kings, across the Boyne to the
+southward, and facing the northern bank where are the pyramids of the
+Dagda Mor and the De Danaans. But the southern armies were there
+already, so Concobar halted before the river. Then were their positions
+fixed and their pavilions pitched, their huts and their tents were made.
+Their fires were kindled, cooking and food and drink were prepared;
+baths of clean bathing were made by them, and their hair was
+smooth-combed; their bodies were minutely cleansed, supper and food were
+eaten by them; and tunes and merry songs and eulogies were sung by them.
+
+Then Concobar sent men to reconnoitre the southern and western armies.
+Two went and returned not, falling indeed into the hands of the foe. It
+seemed long to Concobar that the two were gone. He spoke, therefore, to
+his kinsman: "Good indeed, Irgalac, son of Macclac, son of Congal, son
+of Rudraige, sayest thou who is proper to go to estimate and to
+reconnoitre the army?"
+
+"Who should go there," answered Irgalac, "but Iriel good at arms,
+great-kneed son of Conall Cernac. He is a Conall for havoc, a Cuculain
+for dexterity of feats. He is a Catbad, a right-wonderful Druid, for
+intelligence and counsel, he is a Senca son of Ailill for peace and for
+good speech, he is a Celtcair son of Utecar for valor, he is a Concobar
+son of Factna Fatac for kingliness and wide-eyed-ness, for giving of
+treasures and of wealth and of riches. Who but Iriel should go?"
+
+Therefore Iriel went forward: standing on the pyramid of the Dagda, he
+began measuring and reconnoitering the army. His spirit, or his mind, or
+his thoughts did not fret over them at all. He brought their description
+with him to the place in which Concobar was.
+
+"How, my life, Iriel?" said Concobar. "I give my word truly," said
+Iriel; "it seems to me that there is not ford on river, or stone on
+hill, nor highway nor road in the territory of Breg or Mide, that is not
+full of their horse-teams and of their servants. It seems to me that
+their apparel and their gear and their garments are the blaze of a royal
+house from the plain."
+
+"Good, O Ulaid," said Concobar, "what is your advice to us for the
+battle?" "Our advice is," said the Ulaid, "to wait till our strong men
+and our leaders and our commanders and our supporters of battle come."
+Not long was their waiting, and not great was their stay, till they saw
+three chariot-warriors approaching them, and a band of twelve hundred
+along with each rider of them. It is these that were there--three of the
+goodly men of science of the Ulaid, to wit, Catbad the right-wonderful
+Druid, and Aiterni the Importunate, and Amargin the man of science and
+art. After them came other valiant leaders with troops. Then Concobar
+arose and took his gear of battle and of conflict and of combat about
+him, saying, "Why should we not give battle?"
+
+A third of the army of the Ulaid rose with him, too. And they went over
+the river Boyne. And the other armies arose against them as they were
+crossing the river. And each of them took to hacking and to cutting down
+the other, destroying and wounding till there was no similitude of the
+Ulaid at that point of time, unless it were a huge sturdy oakwood in
+the middle of the plain, and a great army were to go close to it, and
+the slender and the small of the wood were cut off, but its huge sturdy
+oaks were left behind. Thus their young were cut off, and none but their
+champions and their battle-warriors and their good heroes of valor
+were left.
+
+The shield of Concobar was struck so that it moaned, and the three Waves
+of Erin, the Wave of Clidna, the Wave of Rudraige, and the Wave of Tuag
+Inbir echoed that moan, and all the shields of the Ulaid resounded,
+every one of them that was on their shoulders and in their chariots. As
+the Ulaid were retreating, fresh troops came up for them under Conall
+Cernac. A tree of shelter and a wreath of laurel and a hand above them
+was Conall to them. So their flight was stayed. Then Conall drew the
+sharp long sword out of its sheath of war and played the music of his
+sword on the armies. The ring of Conall's sword was heard through the
+battalions on both sides. And when they heard the music of Conall's
+sword their hearts quaked and their eyes fluttered and their faces
+whitened, and each of them withdrew back into his place of battle and of
+combat. But so fierce was the onset of the southern armies that the
+fight of the Ulaid against them was as a breast against a great flood,
+or an arrow against the rock, or the striking of a head against cliffs.
+Yet through the great might of Cuculain the Ulaid prevailed, and Cairpre
+the King of Tara was slain. After the battle, Concobar spoke thus:
+"There were three sons of Ros Ruad the king--Find in Alend, Ailill in
+Cruac, Cairpre in Tara; together they performed their deeds of valor,
+the three brothers in every strife; together they used to give their
+battle. They were three pillars of gold about their hills, abiding in
+strength; great is their loss since the third son has fallen."
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+FIND AND OSSIN.
+
+A.D. 200--290.
+
+Seventeen centuries ago, two hundred summers after the death of Cuculain
+the hero, came the great and wonderful time of Find the son of Cumal,
+Ossin the son of Find, and Find's grandson Oscur. It was a period of
+growth and efflorescence; the spirit and imaginative powers of the
+people burst forth with the freshness of the prime. The life of the land
+was more united, coming to a national consciousness.
+
+The five kingdoms were now clearly defined, with Meath, in the central
+plain, predominant over the others, and in a certain sense ruling all
+Ireland from the Hill of Tara. The code of honor was fixed; justice had
+taken well-defined forms; social life had ripened to genial urbanity.
+The warriors were gathered together into something like a regular army,
+a power rivaling the kings. Of this army, Find, son of Cumal, was the
+most renowned leader--a warrior and a poet, who embodied in himself the
+very genius of the time, its fresh naturalness, its ripeness, its
+imagination. No better symbol of the spirit of his age could be found
+than Find's own "Ode to Spring":
+
+"May-day! delightful time! How beautiful the color! The blackbirds sing
+their full lay. Would that Laigay were here! The cuckoos call in
+constant strains. How welcome is ever the noble brightness of the
+season. On the margin of the leafy pools the summer swallows skim the
+stream. Swift horses seek the pools. The heath spreads out its long
+hair. The white, gentle cotton-grass grows. The sea is lulled to rest.
+Flowers cover the earth."
+
+Find's large and imaginative personality is well drawn in one of the
+poems of his golden-tongued son Ossin, though much of the beauty of
+Ossin's form is lost in the change of tongue:
+
+     "Six thousand gallant men of war
+     We sought the rath o'er Badamar;
+     To the king's palace home we bent
+     Our way. His bidden guests we went.
+         'Twas Clocar Fair,
+         And Find was there,
+         The Fians from the hills around
+         Had gathered to the race-course ground.
+     From valley deep and wooded glen
+     Fair Munster sent its mighty men;
+     And Fiaca, Owen's son, the king,
+     Was there the contest witnessing.
+     'Twas gallant sport! With what delight
+     Leaped thousand pulses at the sight.
+         How all hearts bound
+         As to the ground
+     First are brought forth the Fian steeds,
+     Then those from Luimnea's sunny meads.
+     Three heats on Mac Mareda's green
+     They run; and foremost still is seen
+     Dill Mac Decreca's coal-black steed.
+     At Crag-Lochgur he takes the lead.
+
+     "His is the day--and, lo! the king
+     The coal-black steed soliciting
+     From Dill the Druid!--'Take for it
+     A hundred beeves; for it is fit
+     The black horse should be mine to pay
+     Find for his deeds of many a day.'
+
+     "Then spoke the Druid, answering
+     His grandson, Fiaca the king:
+     'Take my blessing; take the steed,
+     For the hero's fitting meed:
+     Give it for thy honor's sake.'
+     And to Find the King thus spake
+
+     "'Hero, take the swift black steed,
+     Of thy valor fitting meed;
+     And my car, in battle-raid
+     Gazed on by the foe with fear;
+     And a seemly steed for thy charioteer.
+     Chieftain, be this good sword thine,
+     Purchased with a hundred kine,
+     In thine hand be it our aid.
+
+     Take this spear, whose point the breath
+     Of venomed words has armed with death,
+     And the silver-orbed shield,
+     Sunbeam of the battlefield!
+     And take with thee
+     My grayhounds three,
+     Slender and tall,
+     Bright-spotted all,
+     Take them with thee, chieftain bold,
+     With their chainlets light
+     Of the silver white,
+     And their neck-rings of the tawny gold.
+     Slight not thou our offering,
+     Son of Cumal, mighty king!"
+
+     "Uprose Find our chieftain bold,
+     Stood before the Fian ranks,
+     To the king spoke gracious thanks,
+     Took the gifts the monarch gave;
+     Then each to each these champions brave
+     Glorious sight to see and tell,
+     Spoke their soldier-like farewell!
+
+     "The way before us Find led then;
+     We followed him, six thousand men,
+     From out the Fair, six thousand brave,
+     To Caicer's house of Cloon-na-Dave.
+
+     "Three nights, three days, did all of us
+     Keep joyous feast in Caicer's house;
+     Fifty rings of the yellow gold
+     To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain told;
+     As many cows and horses gave
+     To Caicer Mac Caroll our chieftain brave.
+     Well did Find of Innisfail
+     Pay the price of his food and ale.
+
+     "Find rode o'er the Luacra, joyous man,
+     Till he reached the strand at Barriman;
+     At the lake where the foam on the billow's top
+     Leaps white, did Find and the Fians stop.
+
+     "'Twas then that our chieftain rode and ran
+     Along the strand of Barriman;
+     Trying the speed
+     Of his swift black steed,--
+     Who now but Find was a happy man?
+
+     "Myself and Cailte at each side,
+     In wantonness of youthful pride,
+     Would ride with him where he might ride.
+     Fast and furious rode he,
+     Urging his steed to far Tralee.
+     On from Tralee by Lerg duv-glass,
+     And o'er Fraegmoy, o'er Finnass,
+     O'er Moydeo, o'er Monaken,
+     On to Shan-iber, o'er Shan-glen,
+     Till the clear stream of Flesk we win,
+     And reach the pillar of Crofinn;
+     O'er Sru-Muny, o'er Moneket,
+     And where the fisher spreads his net
+     To snare the salmon of Lemain,
+     And thence to where our coursers' feet
+     Wake the glad echoes of Loch Leane;
+     And thus fled he,
+     Nor slow were we;
+     Through rough and smooth our course we strain.
+
+     "Long and swift our stride,--more fleet
+     Than the deer of the mountain our coursers' feet!
+     Away to Flesk by Carnwood dun;
+     And past Mac Scalve's Mangerton,
+     Till Find reached Barnec Hill at last;
+     There rested he, and then we passed
+     Up the high hill before him, and:
+     'Is there no hunting hut at hand?'
+     He thus addressed us; 'The daylight
+     Is gone, and shelter for the night
+     We lack.' He scarce had ended, when
+     Gazing adown the rocky glen,
+     On the left hand, just opposite,
+     He saw a house with its fire lit;
+     'That house till now I've never seen,
+     Though many a time and oft I've been
+     In this wild glen. Come, look at it!'
+
+     "Yes, there are things that our poor wit
+     Knows little of,' said Cailte; 'thus
+     This may be some miraculous
+     Hostel we see, whose generous blaze
+     Thy hospitality repays,
+     Large-handed son of Cumal!'--So
+     On to the house all three we go...."
+
+Of their entry to the mysterious house, of the ogre and the witch they
+found there, of the horrors that gathered on all sides, when
+
+     "From iron benches on the right
+     Nine headless bodies rose to sight,
+     And on the left, from grim repose,
+     Nine heads that had no bodies rose,..."
+
+Ossin likewise tells, and how, overcome, they fell at last into a
+deathlike trance and stupor, till the sunlight woke them lying on the
+heathery hillside, the house utterly vanished away.
+
+The scenes of all the happenings in the story are well known: the rath
+of Badamar is near Caher on the Suir, in the midst of the Golden Vale, a
+plain of wonderful richness and beauty, walled in by the red precipices
+of the Galtee Mountains, and the Knock-Mealdown Hills. From the rath of
+Badamar Find could watch the western mountains reddening and glowing in
+front of the dawn, as the sun-rays shot level over the burnished plain.
+Clocar is thirty miles westward over the Golden Vale, near where Croom
+now stands; and here were run the races; here Find gained the gift of
+the coal-black steed. It is some forty miles still westwards to the
+Strand of Tralee; the last half of the way among hills carpeted with
+heather; and the Strand itself, with the tide out, leaves a splendid
+level of white sand as far as the eye can reach, tempting Find to try
+his famous courser. The race carried them southwards some fifteen miles
+to the beautiful waters of Lough Leane, with its overhanging wooded
+hills, the Lake of Killarney, southward of which rises the huge red
+mass of Mangerton, in the midst of a country everywhere rich in beauty.
+The Hill of Barnec is close by, but the site of the magic dwelling, who
+can tell? Perhaps Find; or Cailte, or golden-tongued Ossin himself.
+
+There was abundant fighting in those days, for well within memory was
+the time of Conn of the Five-score Fights, against whom Cumal had warred
+because Conn lord of Connacht had raised Crimtan of the Yellow Hair to
+the kingship of Leinster. Cumal fought at the Rath that bears his name,
+now softened to Rathcool, twelve miles inward from the sea at Dublin,
+with the hills rising up from the plain to the south of the Rath. Cumal
+fought and fell, slain by Goll Mac Morna, and enmity long endured
+between Find and Goll who slew his sire. But like valiant men they were
+reconciled, and when Goll in his turn died, Find made a stirring poem on
+Goll's mighty deeds.
+
+Another fateful fight for Find was the battle of Kinvarra, among the
+southern rocks of Galway Bay; for though he broke through the host of
+his foeman Uince, that chieftain himself escaped, and, riding swiftly
+with a score of men, came to Find's own dwelling at Druim Dean on the
+Red Hills of Leinster, and burned the dwelling, leaving it a smoldering
+ruin. Find pursuing, overtook them, slaying them at the ford called to
+this day Ath-uince, the ford of Uince. Returning homewards, Find found
+his house desolate, and the song he sang still holds the memory of
+his sorrow.
+
+Two poems he made, on the Plain of Swans and on Roirend in Offaly, full
+of vivid pictures and legends; and one of romantic tragedy, telling how
+the two daughters of King Tuatal Tectmar were treacherously slain,
+through the malice of the Leinster king. But of romances and songs of
+fair women in the days of Find, the best is the Poem of Gael, who
+composed it to win a princess for his bride.
+
+Of fair Crede of the Yellow Hair it was said that there was scarce a gem
+in all Erin that she had not got as a love-token, but that she would
+give her heart to none. Crede had vowed that she would marry the man who
+made the best verses on her home, a richly-adorned dwelling in the
+south, under the twin cones of the Paps, and within sight of Lough Leane
+and Killarney. Cael took up the challenge, and invoking the Genius that
+dwelt in the sacred pyramid of Brugh on the Boyne he made these verses,
+and came to recite them to yellow-haired Crede:
+
+     "It would be happy for me to be in her home,
+     Among her soft and downy couches,
+     Should Crede deign to hear me;
+     Happy for me would be my journey.
+         A bowl she has, whence berry-juice flows,
+     With which she colors her eyebrows black;
+     She has clear vessels of fermenting ale;
+     Cups she has, and beautiful goblets.
+         The color of her house is white like lime;
+     Within it are couches and green rushes;
+     Within it are silks and blue mantles;
+     Within it are red gold and crystal cups.
+         Of its sunny chamber the corner stones
+     Are all of silver and yellow gold,
+     Its roof in stripes of faultless order
+     Of wings of brown and crimson red.
+         Two doorposts of green I see,
+     Nor is the door devoid of beauty;
+     Of carved silver,--long has it been renowned,--
+     Is the lintel that is over the door.
+         Crede's chair is on your right hand,
+     The pleasantest of the pleasant it is;
+     All over a blaze of Alpine gold,
+     At the foot of her beautiful couch...
+         The household which is in her house
+     To the happiest fate has been destined;
+     Grey and glossy are their garments;
+     Twisted and fair is their flowing hair.
+         Wounded men would sink in sleep,
+     Though ever so heavily teeming with blood,
+     With the warbling of the fairy birds
+     From the eaves of her sunny summer-room.
+         If I am blessed with the lady's grace,
+     Fair Crede for whom the cuckoo sings,
+     In songs of praise shall ever live,
+     If she but repay me for my gift....
+         There is a vat of royal bronze,
+     Whence flows the pleasant; nice of malt;
+     An apple-tree stands over the vat,
+     With abundance of weighty fruit.
+         When Crede's goblet is filled
+     With the ale of the noble vat,
+     There drop down into the cup forthwith
+     Four apples at the same time.
+         The four attendants that have been named,
+     Arise and go to the distributing,
+     They present to four of the guests around
+     A drink to each man and an apple.
+         She who possesses all these things,
+     With the strand and the stream that flow by them,
+     Crede of the three-pointed hill,
+     Is a spear-cast beyond the women of Erin.
+       Here is a poem for her,--no mean gift.
+     It is not a hasty, rash composition;
+     To Crede now it is here presented:
+     May my journey be brightness to her!"
+
+[Illustration: Colleen Bawn Caves, Klllarney.]
+
+Tradition says that the heart of the yellow-haired beauty was utterly
+softened and won, so that she delayed not to make Cael master of the
+dwelling he so well celebrated; master, perhaps, of all the jewels of
+Erin that her suitors had given her. Yet their young love was not
+destined to meet the storms and frosts of the years; for Cael the
+gallant fell in battle, his melodious lips for ever stilled. Thus have
+these two become immortal in song.
+
+We have seen Cailte with Ossin following Find in his wild ride through
+the mountains of Killarney, and to Cailte is attributed the saying that
+echoes down the ages: "There are things that our poor wit knows nothing
+off!" Cailte was a great lover of the supernatural, yet there was in him
+also a vein of sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of
+Clidna--"Clidna the fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was
+tragically drowned at Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith
+still moans upon the bar, in hours of fate for the people of Erin.
+
+In a gayer vein is the poem of Fergus the Eloquent, who sang the legend
+of Tipra Seangarmna, the Fountain of the Feale River, which flows
+westward to the sea from the mountains north of Killarney. The river
+rises among precipices, gloomy caverns and ravines, and passes through
+vales full of mysterious echoes amid mist-shrouded hills. There, as
+Fergus sings, were Ossin and his following hunting, when certain ominous
+fair women lured them to a cave,--women who were but insubstantial
+wraiths,--to hold them captive till the seasons ran full circle, summer
+giving place again to winter and spring. But Ossin, being himself of
+more than human wisdom, found a way to trick the spirits; for daily he
+cut chips from his spear and sent them floating down the spring, till
+Find at last saw them, and knew the tokens as Ossin's, and, coming,
+delivered his son from durance among ghosts.
+
+The great romantic theme of the time binds the name of Find, son of
+Cumal, with that of Cormac, son of Art, and grandson of Conn of the
+Five-score Battles. This Cormac was himself a notable man of wisdom, and
+here are some of the Precepts he taught to Cairbre, his son:
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbre asked him, "what is good for a
+king?"
+
+"This is plain," answered Cormac. "It is good for him to have patience
+and not to dispute, self-government without anger, affability without
+haughtiness, diligent attention to history, strict observance of
+covenants and agreements, justice tempered by mercy in the execution of
+the laws. It is good for him to make fertile land, to invite ships, to
+import jewels of price from across the sea, to purchase and distribute
+raiment, to keep vigorous swordsmen who may protect his territory, to
+make war beyond his territory, to attend to the sick, to discipline his
+soldiers. Let him enforce fear, let him perfect peace, let him give mead
+and wine, let him pronounce just judgments of light, let him speak all
+truth, for it is through the truth of a king that God gives
+favorable seasons."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," Cairbre again asked him, "what is good
+for the welfare of a country?"
+
+"This is plain," answered Cormac. "Frequent assemblies of wise and good
+men to investigate its affairs, to abolish every evil and retain every
+wholesome institution, to attend to the precepts of the seniors; let
+every assembly be convened according to the law, let the law be in the
+hands of the noblest, let the chieftains be upright and unwilling to
+oppress the poor."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," again asked Cairbre, "what are duties of
+a prince in the banqueting-house?"
+
+"A prince on the Day of Spirits should light his lamps and welcome his
+guests with clapping of hands, offering comfortable seats; the
+cup-bearers should be active in distributing meat and drink. Let there
+be moderation of music, short stories, a welcoming countenance, a
+greeting for the learned, pleasant conversation. These are the duties
+of a prince and the arrangement of a banqueting-house."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, for what qualifications is a king elected
+over countries and tribes of people?"
+
+"From the goodness of his shape and family, from his experience and
+wisdom, from his prudence and magnanimity, from his eloquence and
+bravery in battle, and from the number of his friends."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what was thy deportment when a youth?"
+
+"I was cheerful at the banquet of the House of Mead, I was fierce in
+battle, but vigilant and careful. I was kind to friends, a physician to
+the sick, merciful to the weak, stern toward the headstrong. Though
+possessed of knowledge, I loved silence. Though strong, I was not
+overbearing. Though young, I mocked not the old. Though valiant, I was
+not vain. When I spoke of one absent I praised and blamed him not, for
+by conduct like this are we known to be courteous and refined."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, what is good for me?"
+
+"If thou attend to my command, thou wilt not scorn the old though thou
+art young, nor the poor though thou art well clad, nor the lame though
+thou art swift, nor the blind though thou seest, nor the weak though
+thou art strong, nor the ignorant though thou art wise. Be not slothful,
+be not passionate, be not greedy, be not idle, be not jealous; for he
+who is so is hateful to God and man."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, I would know how to hold myself with the
+wise and the foolish, with friends and strangers, with old and young."
+
+"Be not too knowing or simple, too proud or inactive, too humble or
+haughty, talkative or too silent, timid or too severe. For if thou art
+too knowing, thou wilt be mocked at and abused; if too simple, thou wilt
+be deceived; if proud, thou wilt be shunned; if too humble, thou wilt
+suffer; if talkative, thou wilt be thought foolish; if too severe, men
+will speak ill of thee; if timid, thy rights will suffer."
+
+"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac, how shall I discern the characters of
+women?"
+
+"I know them, but I cannot describe them. Their counsel is foolish, they
+are forgetful of love, most headstrong in their desires, fond of folly,
+prone to enter rashly into engagements, given to swearing, proud to be
+asked in marriage, tenacious of enmity, cheerless at the banquet,
+rejectors of reconciliation, prone to strife, of much garrulity. Until
+evil be good, until hell be heaven, until the sun hide his light, until
+the stars of heaven fall, women will remain as we have declared. Woe to
+him, my son, who desires or serves a bad woman, woe to him who has a
+bad wife."
+
+Was there some thought of his daughter Grania in Cormac's mind, behind
+these keen-edged; words?--of Grania, beloved of Diarmuid? When the
+winters of the years were already white on Find, son of Cumal, when
+Ossin his son had a son of his own, Oscur the valiant, the two old men,
+Cormac the king and Find leader of the warriors, bethought them to make
+a match between Find and Grania, one of the famous beauties of the olden
+time. A banquet was set in the great House of Mead, and Find and his men
+were there, Diarmuid son of Duibne being also there, best beloved among
+Find's warriors. There was a custom, much in honor among the chieftains,
+that a princess should send her goblet to the guests, offering it to
+each with gentle courtesy. This grace fell to the lady Grania, whose
+whole heart rose up against her grey-bearded lover, and was indeed set
+on Diarmuid the son of Duibne. Grania compounded a dreamy draught to
+mix with the mead, so that all the chieftains and warriors, with Cormac
+and Find himself, even while praising the drink, fell straightway
+a-nodding, and were soon in silent sleep, all except Ossin and Diarmuid,
+whom Grania had bidden not to drink.
+
+Then Grania, her voice all tremulous with tears, told to Ossin the fate
+that awaited her, looking at him, but speaking for Diarmuid; bewailing
+bitterly the misery of fair youth in the arms of withered eld, and at
+last turning and openly begging Diarmuid to save her from her fate. To
+carry away a king's daughter, betrothed to the leader of the warriors,
+was a perilous thing, and Diarmuid's heart stood still at the thought of
+it; yet Grania's tears prevailed, and they two fled forth that night to
+the hills and forests. Dire and ruinous was the wrath of Cormac and of
+Find when they awoke and found that these two were fled; and whatever
+might was in the king's hand, whatever power in the hosts of Find, was
+straightway turned against them in pursuit. Yet the two fled as the deer
+might fly, visiting with their loves every wood and valley in Erin, till
+the memory of them lingers throughout all the hills. Finally, after a
+year's joyful and fearsome fleeing, the Fian warriors everywhere aiding
+them for love of Diarmuid, swift death came upon Diarmuid, and Grania
+was left desolate.
+
+But Angus the Ever-Young, guardian Genius of the pyramid-shrine of Brugh
+by the Boyne, De Danaan dweller in the secret house, Angus of the
+Immortals received the spirit of Diarmuid, opening for him the ways of
+the hidden world.
+
+But enmity grew between Find with his warriors and Cormac the king, till
+at last a battle was fought where Find's men fell, and Cairbre, the
+well-instructed son of Cormac also fell. Thus passed away the ruling
+spirits of that age, the flowering time of the genius of Erin.
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+THE MESSENGER OF THE NEW WAY.
+
+A.D. 410-493.
+
+The valor of Fergus and Cuculain, the rich imaginative life of Find and
+Ossin, were the flower of heroic centuries. Strong men had fought for
+generations before Concobar reigned at Emain of Maca. Poets had sung
+their deeds of valor, and the loves of fair women, and the magical
+beauty of the world, through hardly changing ages. The heroes of fame
+were but the best fruit in the garden of the nation's life. So ripe was
+that life, more than two thousand years ago, that it is hard to say what
+they did not know, of the things which make for amenity and comity. The
+colors of the picture are everywhere rich, yet perfectly harmonized.
+
+The earliest forms of Irish writing seem to have come from the Baltic
+runes, and these, in their turn, from an old Greek script of twenty-five
+hundred years ago. The runes spread as far as the Orkneys, and there
+they were well within the horizon of Ireland's knowledge. Nothing would
+be more natural than the keeping of written records in Erin for three
+or four hundred years before Cuculain's birth, nineteen hundred
+years ago.
+
+The arts of life were very perfect; the gold-work of that time is
+unsurpassed--has never been surpassed. At a far earlier time there were
+beautifully moulded and decorated gold-bronze spears, that show what
+richness of feeling and imagination, what just taste and fine skill were
+there. All our knowledge goes to show that the suitor of Crede has drawn
+a true picture of her house and the generous social life belonging to
+it. We know, too, that the great dining-hall of Tara has been faithfully
+celebrated by the bards; the picture of the king in his scarlet cloak is
+representative of the whole epoch.
+
+The story of Crede also shows the freedom and honor accorded to women,
+as does the queenship of Meave, with the record of her separate riches.
+The tragedies of Deirdre and Grania would never have been remembered,
+had not the freedom and high regard of women been universal. Such
+decorative skill as is shown in the metal-work and pottery that have
+come down to us must have borne fruit in every realm of social life, in
+embroideries, tapestries, well-designed and beautifully adorned homes.
+Music is everywhere spoken of in the old traditions, and the skill of
+the poets we can judge for ourselves.
+
+In all that concerns the natural man, therefore, a very high perfection
+had been reached. A frame of life had grown habitual, which brought out
+the finest vigor and strength and beauty. Romantic love added its riches
+to valor, and dignity was given by the ever-present memory of the heroic
+past, merging on the horizon with the divine dawn of the world. Manhood
+and womanhood had come to perfect flower. The crown rested on the brow
+of the nation's life.
+
+When the life of the natural man is perfected, the time comes to strike
+the note of the immortal, to open the door of our real and enduring
+destiny. Sensual success, the ideal of unregenerate man, was perfectly
+realized in Concobar and ten thousand like him. The destiny of
+triumphant individual life, the strong man victorious over nature and
+other men, was fulfilled. Individual prowess, individual accomplishment,
+could go no further.
+
+Nor should we overlook the dark shadows of the picture. Glory is to the
+victor, but woe to the vanquished. The continual warfare between tribe
+and tribe, between chief and chief, which made every valley a home of
+warriors dominated by a rath-fortress, bore abundant fruits of evil.
+Death in battle need not be reckoned, or may be counted as pure gain;
+but the fate of the wounded, maimed and miserable, the destitution of
+women and children left behind, the worse fate of the captives, sold as
+they were into exile and slavery,--all these must be included in
+the total.
+
+Nor are these material losses the worst. The great evil of the epoch of
+tribal war is its reaction on the human spirit. The continual struggle
+of ambition draws forth egotism, the desire to dominate for mere
+domination, the sense of separation and antagonism between man and man,
+tribe and tribe, province and province.
+
+But our real human life begins only when these evil tendencies are
+abated; when we learn to watch the life of others as if it were our
+own,--as being indeed a part of our own life,--and in every act and
+motion of our minds do only that which shall be to the best advantage of
+both ourselves and our neighbor. For only thus, only by the incessant
+practice of this in imagination and act, can the door of our wider and
+more humane consciousness be opened.
+
+[Illustration: Ruins on Scattery Island.]
+
+Nor is this all. There are in us vast unexplored tracts of power and
+wisdom; tracts not properly belonging to our personal and material
+selves, but rather to the impersonal and universal consciousness which
+touches us from within, and which we call divine. Our personal fate is
+closed by death; but we have a larger destiny which death does not
+touch; a destiny enduring and immortal. The door to this larger destiny
+can only be opened after we have laid down the weapons of egotism; after
+we have become veritably humane. There must be a death to militant
+self-assertion, a new birth to wide and universal purposes, before this
+larger life can be understood and known.
+
+With all the valor and rich life of the days of Cuculain and Ossin, the
+destructive instinct of antagonism was very deeply rooted in all hearts;
+it did endless harm to the larger interests of the land, and laid
+Ireland open to attack from without. Because the genius of the race was
+strong and highly developed, the harm went all the deeper; even now,
+after centuries, it is not wholly gone.
+
+The message of the humane and the divine, taught among the Galilean
+hills and on the shores of Gennesaret, was after four centuries brought
+to Ireland--a word of new life to the warriors and chieftains,
+enkindling and transforming their heroic world. Britain had received
+the message before, for Britain was a part of the dominion of Rome,
+which already had its imperial converts. Roman life and culture and
+knowledge of the Latin tongue had spread throughout the island up to the
+northern barrier between the Forth and Clyde. Beyond this was a
+wilderness of warring tribes.
+
+Where the Clyde comes forth from the plain to the long estuary of the
+sea, the Messenger of the Tidings was born. His father, Calpurn, was a
+Roman patrician; from this his son, whose personal name was Succat, was
+surnamed Patricius, a title raised by his greatness into a personal
+name. His letters give us a vivid picture of his captivity, and the
+stress of life which gradually aroused in him the inspiration of the
+humane and divine ripened later into a full knowledge of his apostolate.
+
+"I Patricius, a sinner," he writes, "and most unlearned of believers,
+looked down upon by many, had for my father the deacon Calpurn, son of
+the elder Potitus, of a place called Bannova in Tabernia, near to which
+was his country home. There I was taken captive, when not quite sixteen.
+I knew not the Eternal. Being led into captivity with thousands of
+others, I was brought to Ireland,--a fate well deserved. For we had
+turned from the Eternal, nor kept the laws of the Eternal. Nor had we
+heeded the teachers who urged us to seek safety. Therefore the Eternal,
+justly wroth, scattered us among unbelievers, to the uttermost parts of
+the earth; here, where my poor worth is now seen among strangers, where
+the Eternal liberated the power hid in my unenkindled heart, that even
+though late I should recognize my error, and turn with all my heart to
+the Eternal....
+
+"I have long had it in mind to write, but until now have hesitated; for
+I feared blame, because I had not studied law and the sacred
+writings,--as have others who have never changed their language, but
+gone on to perfection in it; but my speech is translated into another
+language, and the roughness of my writing shows how little I have been
+taught. As the Sage says, 'Show by thy speech thy wisdom and knowledge
+and learning.' But what profits this excuse? since all can see how in my
+old age I struggle after what I should have learned as a boy. For then
+my sinfulness hindered me. I was but a beardless boy when I was taken
+captive, not knowing what to do and what to avoid; therefore I am
+ashamed to show my ignorance now? because I never learned to express
+great matters succinctly and well;--great matters like the moving of the
+soul and mind by the Divine Breath.... Nor, indeed, was I worthy that
+the Master should so greatly favor me, after all my hard labor and heavy
+toil, and the years of captivity amongst this people,--that the Master
+should show me such graciousness as I never knew nor hoped for till I
+came to Ireland.
+
+"But daily herding cattle here, and aspiring many times a day, the fear
+of the Eternal grew daily in me. A divine dread and aspiration grew in
+me, so that I often prayed a hundred times a day, and as many times in
+the night. I often remained in the woods and on the hills, rising to
+pray while it was yet dark, in snow or frost or rain; yet I took no
+harm. The Breath of the Divine burned within me, so that nothing
+remained in me unenkindled.
+
+"One night, while I was sleeping, I heard a voice saying to me, 'You
+have fasted well, and soon you shall see your home and your native
+land.' Soon after, I heard the voice again, saying, 'The ship is ready
+for you.' But the ship was not near, but two hundred miles off, in a
+district I had never visited, and where I knew no one. Therefore I fled,
+leaving the master I had served for six years, and found the ship by
+divine guidance, going without fear....
+
+"We reached the land after three days' sail; then for twenty-eight days
+we wandered through a wilderness.... Once more, after years of exile, I
+was at home again with my kindred, among the Britons. All welcomed me
+like a son, earnestly begging me that, after the great dangers I had
+passed through, I would never again leave my home.
+
+"While I was at home, in a vision of the night I saw one who seemed to
+come from Ireland, bringing innumerable letters. He gave me one of the
+letters, in which I read, 'The voices of the Irish ...;' and while I
+read, it seemed to me that I heard the cry of the dwellers by the forest
+of Foclut, by the Western Ocean, calling with one voice to me, 'Come and
+dwell with us!' My heart was so moved that I awoke, and I give thanks to
+my God who after many years has given to them according to
+their petition.
+
+"On another night, whether within me or without me I know not, God
+knows, One prayed with very wonderful words that I could not comprehend,
+till at last He said, 'It is He who gave His soul for you, that speaks!'
+I awoke for joy. And once in a vision I saw Him praying within me, as it
+were; I saw myself, as it were, within myself; and I heard Him praying
+urgently and strongly over the inner man; I being meanwhile astonished,
+and wondering who thus prayed within me, till at the end He declared
+that I should be an overseer for Him....
+
+"I had not believed in the living Divine from childhood, but had
+remained in the realm of death until hunger and nakedness and daily
+slavery in Ireland--for I came there as a captive--had so afflicted me
+that I almost broke down. Yet these things brought good, for through
+that daily suffering I was so changed that I work and toil now for the
+well-being of others, I who formerly took no care even for myself....
+
+"Therefore I thank Him who kept me faithful in the day of trial, that I
+live to offer myself daily as a living offering to Him who saves and
+guards me. Well may I say, 'Master, what am I, what is my calling, that
+such grace and divine help are given to me--that I am every day raised
+to greater power among these unbelievers, while I everywhere praise thy
+name? Whatever comes to me, whether happiness or misery, whether good or
+evil fortune, I hold it all the same; giving Thee equal thanks for it,
+because Thou hast unveiled for me the One, sure and unchanging, in whom
+I may for ever believe. So that in these latter days, even though I am
+ignorant, I may dare to undertake so righteous a work, and so wonderful,
+that makes me like those who, according to His promise, should carry His
+message to all people before the end of the world.
+
+"It were long in whole or even in part to tell of my labours, or how the
+all-powerful One many times set me free from bondage, and from twelve
+perils wherein my life was in danger, and from nameless pitfalls. It
+were ill to try the reader too far, when I have within me the Author
+himself, who knows all things even before they happen, as He knows me,
+His poor disciple. The voice that so often guides me is divine; and
+thence it is that wisdom has come to me, who had no wisdom, knowing not
+Him, nor the number of my days: thence comes my knowledge and heart's
+joy in His great and healing gift, for the sake of which I willingly
+left my home and kindred, though they offered me many gifts with tears
+and sorrow.
+
+"Many of the older people also disapproved, but through divine help I
+would not give way. It was no grace of mine, but the divine power in me
+that stood out against all, so that I came to bear the Message here
+among the people of Ireland, suffering the scorn of those who believed
+not, and bearing derision and many persecutions, and even chains. Nay, I
+even lost my patrician rank for the good of others. But if I be worthy
+to do something for the Divine, I am ready with all my heart to yield
+service, even to the death, since it has been permitted that through me
+many might be reborn to the divine, and that others might be appointed
+to teach them....
+
+"The people of Ireland, who formerly had only their idols and pagan
+ritual, not knowing the Master, have now become His children. The sons
+of the Scoti and their kings' daughters are now become sons of the
+Master and handmaidens of the Anointed. And one nobly born lady among
+them, a beautiful woman whom I baptized myself, came soon after to tell
+me that she was divinely admonished to live in maidenhood, drawing
+nearer to Him. Six days later she entered the grade that all the
+handmaidens of the Anointed desire, though their fathers and mothers
+would hinder them, reproaching and afflicting them; nevertheless, they
+grow in number, so that I know not how many they are, besides widows and
+continent women, who suffer most from those who hold them in bondage.
+Yet they stand firm, and God grants grace to many of them worthily to
+follow Him.
+
+"Therefore I might even leave them, to go among the Britons,--for
+willingly would I see my own kindred and my native land again, or even
+go as far as Gaul to visit my brothers, and see the faces of my Master's
+holy men. But I am bound in the Spirit, and would be unfaithful if I
+went. Nor would I willingly risk the fruit of all my work. Yet it is not
+I who decide, but the Master, who bid me come hither, to spend my whole
+life in serving, as indeed I think I shall....
+
+"Therefore I should ever thank Him who was so tolerant of my ignorance
+and sluggishness, so many times; treating me not in anger but as a
+fellow-worker, though I was slow to learn the work set for me by the
+Spirit. He pitied me amongst many thousands, for he saw that I was very
+willing, but did net know how to offer my testimony. For they all
+opposed my mission, and talked behind my back, saying, 'He wishes to
+risk his life among enemies who know nothing of the Master'; not
+speaking maliciously, but opposing me because I was so ignorant. Nor did
+I myself at once perceive the power that was in me....
+
+"Thus simply, brothers and fellow-workers for the Master, who with me
+have believed, I have told you how it happened that I preached and still
+preach, to strengthen and confirm you in aspiration, hoping that we may
+all rise yet higher. Let that be my reward, as 'the wise son is the
+glory of his father.' You know, and the Master knows, how from my youth
+I have lived among you, in aspiration and truth and with single heart;
+that I have declared the faith to those among whom I dwell, and still
+declare it. The Master knows that I have deceived no man in anything,
+nor ever shall, for His sake and His people's. Nor shall I ever arouse
+uncharity in them or in any, lest His name should be spoken evil of....
+
+"I have striven in my poor way to help my brothers and the handmaidens
+of the Anointed, and the holy women who often volunteered to give me
+presents and to lay their jewels on my altar; but these I always gave
+back to them, even though they were hurt by it; and I have so lived my
+life, for the hope of the life eternal, that none may find the least
+cause of offence in my ministry; that my least act might not tarnish my
+good name, so that unbelievers might speak evil of me....
+
+"If I have asked of any as much as the value of a shoe, tell me. I will
+repay it and more. I rather spent my own wealth on you and among you,
+wherever I went, for your sakes, through many dangers, to regions where
+no believer had ever come to baptize, to ordain teachers or to confirm
+the flock. With the divine help I very willingly and lovingly paid all.
+Sometimes I gave presents to the kings,--in giving presents to their
+sons who convoyed us, to guard us against being taken captive. Once they
+sought to kill me, but my time was not yet come. But they took away all
+we possessed, and kept me bound, till the Master liberated me on the
+fourteenth day, and all our goods were given back, because of the Master
+and of those who convoyed us. You yourselves know what gifts I gave to
+those who administer the law through the districts I visited oftenest. I
+think I spent not less than the fine of fifteen men among them, in order
+that I might come among you. Nor do I regret it, nor count it enough,
+for I still spend, and shall ever spend, happy if the Master allows me
+to spend my soul for you....For I know certainly that poverty and plain
+living are better for me than riches and luxury. The Anointed our Master
+was poor for us. I am poorer still, for I could not have wealth if I
+wished it. Nor do I now judge myself, for I look forward daily to a
+violent death, or to be taken captive and sold into slavery, or some
+like end. But I fear none of these ...but let me not lose the flock I
+feed for Him, here in the uttermost parts of the earth....
+
+"I am willing for His sake to shed my blood, to go without burial, even
+though my body be torn by dogs and wild beasts and the fowls of the air;
+for I know that thus I should through my body enrich my soul. And I know
+that in that day we shall arise in the brightness of the sun, in the
+glory of the Anointed Master, as sons of the divine and co-heirs with
+Him, made in His likeness. For the sun we see rises daily by divine
+ordinance; but it is not ordained to rise for ever, nor shall its light
+last for ever. The sun of this world shall fade, with those that worship
+it; but we bow to the spiritual Sun, the Anointed, that shall never
+perish, nor they who do His will, but shall endure for ever like the
+Anointed himself, who reigns with the Father and the Divine Spirit now
+and ever....
+
+"This I beg, that no believer or servant of the Master, who reads or
+receives this writing, which I, Patricius, a sinner and very unlearned,
+wrote in Ireland,--I beg that none may say that whatever is good in it
+was dictated by my ignorance, but rather that it came from Him. This is
+my Confession, before I die."
+
+That is the story of the most vital event in the life of Ireland, in the
+words of the man who was chiefly instrumental in bringing it about.
+Though an unskilled writer, as he says himself he has nevertheless
+succeeded in breathing into every part of his epistle the power and
+greatness of his soul, the sense and vivid reality of the divine breath
+which stirred in him and transformed him, the spiritual power, humane
+and universal, which enkindled him from within; these are the words of a
+man who had first-hand knowledge of the things of our deeper life; not a
+mere servant of tradition, living on the words and convictions of other
+men. He has drawn in large and universal outline the death to
+egotism--reached in his case through hunger, nakedness and slavery--and
+the new birth from above, the divine Soul enkindling the inner man, and
+wakening him to new powers and a knowledge of his genius and
+immortal destiny.
+
+Not less vivid is the sense he conveyed, of the world in which he moved;
+the feeling of his dignity as a Roman Patrician, having a share of the
+greatness of empire; the sense of a dividing-line between the Christian
+realms of Rome and the outer barbarians yet in darkness. Yet the picture
+he gives of these outer realms is as certainly true. There are the rival
+chieftains, each with his own tribe and his own fort, and bearing the
+title of king. They are perpetually striving among themselves, so that
+from the province of one he must move to the province of another with an
+escort, led by the king's son, who receives gifts in return for this
+protection. This is the world of Concobar and Cuculain; of Find and
+Ossin, as they themselves have painted it.
+
+The world of Find and Ossin, of Cael and Crede, was marked by a certain
+urbanity and freedom, a large-mindedness and imaginative power. We are
+therefore prepared to expect that the Messenger of the new life would be
+received with openness of mind, and allowed to deliver his message
+without any very violent opposition. It was the meeting of unarmed moral
+power and armed valor; and the victory of the apostle was a victory of
+spiritual force, of character, of large-heartedness; the man himself was
+the embodiment of his message, and through his forceful genius his
+message was effective. He visibly represented the New Way; the way of
+the humane and the divine, transforming the destructive instinct of
+self-assertion. He visibly represented the divine and the immortal in
+us, the new birth from above.
+
+Yet there were tragedies in his apostolate. In another letter a very
+vivid and pathetic account is given of one of these. Coroticus, a
+chieftain of Britain, and therefore nominally a Christian and a citizen
+of Rome, had sent marauding bands to Ireland to capture slaves. Some of
+the new converts were taken captive by these slave-hunters, an outrage
+which drew forth an indignant protest from the great Messenger:
+
+"My neophytes in their white robes, the baptismal chrism still wet and
+glistening on their foreheads, were taken captive with the sword by
+these murderers. The next day I sent letters begging them to liberate
+the baptized captives, but they answered my prayer with mocking
+laughter. I know not which I should mourn for more,--those who were
+slain, those who were taken prisoner, or those who in this were Satan's
+instruments, since these must suffer everlasting punishment in
+perdition."
+
+He appeals indignantly to the fellow-Christians of Coroticus in Britain:
+"I pray you, all that are righteous and humble, to hold no converse
+with those who do these things. Eat not, drink not with them, accept no
+gifts from them, until they have repented and made atonement, setting
+free these newly-baptized handmaidens of Christ, for whom He died....
+They seem to think we are not children of one Father!"
+
+The work and mission of this great man grow daily better known. The
+scenes of each marked event are certainly identified. His early slavery,
+his time of probation, was spent in Antrim, on the hillside of Slieve
+Mish, and in the woods that then covered its flanks and valleys.
+Wandering there with his flocks to the hill-top, he looked down over the
+green darkness of the woods, with the fertile open country stretching
+park-like beyond, to the coast eight miles away. From his lonely summit
+he could gaze over the silvery grayness of the sea, and trace on the
+distant horizon the headlands of his dear native land. The exile's heart
+must have ached to look at them, as he thought of his hunger and
+nakedness and toil. There in deep pity came home to him the fate of the
+weak ones of the earth, the vanquished, the afflicted, the losers in the
+race. Compassion showed him the better way, the way of sympathy and
+union, instead of contest and dominion. A firm and fixed purpose grew up
+within him to make the appeal of gentleness to the chiefs and rulers, in
+the name of Him who was all sympathy for the weak. Thus the inspiration
+of the Message awakened his soul to its immortal powers.
+
+Later, returning with the clear purpose of his message formed, he began
+his great work not far from his first place of captivity. His strong
+personality led him always to the presence of the chiefs and warriors,
+and he talked to them freely as an equal, gradually giving them an
+insight into his own vision of life, of the kinship between soul and
+soul, of our immortal power and inheritance. He appealed always to his
+own inner knowledge of things divine, to the light and power unveiled
+within himself; and the commanding genius in his words lit a like fire
+in the hearts of those who heard, awakening an enthusiasm for the New
+Way. He had a constant sense of his divine mission:
+
+"Was it without divine promise, or in the body only, that I came to
+Ireland? Who led me? Who took captive my soul, that I should no more see
+friends and kindred? Whence came my inspiration of pity for the race
+that had enslaved me?"
+
+The memory of his first victories is perpetuated in the name,
+Downpatrick,--that is: the Dwelling of Patrick.--where Dicu son of
+Tricem, chief of the district, gave him a tract of land to build a place
+of meeting and prayer for his disciples; while the church was being
+built, the chief offered his barn as a meeting-place, an incident
+commemorated in the name of Saul, on a hill above the town,--a name
+softened from Sabal, "a barn." This first victory was won among the
+rounded hills south of the Quoyle River, where it widens toward
+Strangford Lough; from the hill-top of Saul there is a wide prospect
+over the reed-covered flats with the river winding among them, the hills
+with their oak-woods in the bends of the river, and the widening lough
+with its innumerable islands, its sand-flats lit up with red under the
+dawn. The sun sets among the mountains of Mourne, flushing from behind
+the purple profile of the hills, and sending golden arrows over the rich
+fertility of the plain. The year 432 is the probable date of this first
+conversion.
+
+The strong genius of the Messenger carried him after a few months to the
+center of power in the land, to Tara with its fortresses, its
+earthworks, its great banquet-halls and granaries and well-adorned
+dwellings of chief and king. A huge oval earthwork defended the king's
+house; northward of this was the splendid House of Mead,--the
+banquet-hall, with lesser fortresses beyond it. Southward of the central
+dwelling and its defence was the new ringed fort of Laogaire the king,
+son of the more famous king Nial of the Hostages. At this circular fort,
+Rath-Laogaire, on Easter day, Saint Patrick met the king face to face,
+and delivered to him the message of the New Way, telling him of the
+unveiling of the Divine within himself, of the voice that had bidden him
+come, of the large soul of immortal pity that breathed in the teachings
+among the hills of Galilee, of the new life there begun for the world.
+Tradition says that the coming of the Messenger had been foretold by the
+Druids, and the great work he should accomplish; the wise men of the
+West catching the inner brightness of the Light, as the Eastern Magians
+had caught it more than four centuries before. The fruits of that day's
+teaching in the plain of Tara, in the assembly of Laogaire the king,
+were to be gathered through long centuries to come.
+
+In the year 444, the work of the teacher had so thriven that he was able
+to build a larger church on a hill above the Callan River, in the
+undulating country south of Lough Neagh. This hill, called in the old
+days the Hill of the Willows, was only two miles from the famous
+fortress of Emain of Maca. It was a gift from the ruler Daire, who, like
+so many other chiefs, had felt and acknowledged the Messenger's power.
+Later, the hill came to be called Ard-Maca, the Height of Maca; a name
+now softened into Armagh, ever since esteemed the central stronghold of
+the first Messenger's followers.
+
+The Messenger passed on from chief to chief, from province to province,
+meeting with success everywhere, yet facing grave perils. Later
+histories take him to the kings of Leinster and Munster, and he himself
+tells us that the prayer of the children of Foclut was answered by his
+coming, so that he must have reached the western ocean. It was a
+tremendous victory of moral force, of the divine and immortal working
+through him, that the Messenger was able to move unarmed among the
+warriors of many tribes that were often at war with each other;
+everywhere meeting the chiefs and kings, and meeting them as an equal:
+the unarmed bringer of good tidings confronting the king in the midst of
+his warriors, and winning him to his better vision.
+
+For sixty years the Messenger worked, sowing seed and gathering the
+fruit of his labor; and at last his body was laid at rest close to his
+first church at Saul. Thus one of the great men of the world
+accomplished his task.
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+THE SAINTS AND SCHOLARS.
+
+A.D. 493-750.
+
+It would be hard to find in the whole history of early Christianity a
+record of greater and more enduring success than the work of St.
+Patrick. None of the Messengers of the New Way, as they were called
+first by St. Luke, unless the phrase is St. Paul's, accomplished
+single-handed so wonderful a work, conquering so large a territory, and
+leaving such enduring monuments of his victory. Amongst the world's
+masters, the son of Calpurn the Decurion deserves a place with
+the greatest.
+
+Not less noteworthy than the wide range of his work was the way in which
+he gained success. He addressed himself always to the chiefs, the kings,
+the men of personal weight and power. And his address was almost
+invariably successful,--a thing that would have been impossible had he
+not been himself a personality of singular force and fire, able to meet
+the great ones of the land as an equal. His manner was that of an
+ambassador, full of tact, knowledge of men and of the world. Nor can we
+find in him--or, indeed, in the whole history of the churches founded by
+him--anything of that bitter zeal and fanaticism which, nearly two
+centuries nearer to apostolic times, marred the work of the Councils
+under Constantius; the fierce animosity between Christian and Christian
+which marked the Arian controversy. The Apostle of Ireland showed far
+more urbanity, far more humane and liberal wisdom, far more gentleness,
+humor and good feeling, in his treatment of the pre-Christian
+institutions and ideals of Ireland than warring Christian sects have
+generally been willing to show to each other.
+
+It was doubtless due to this urbane wisdom that the history of the
+conversion of Ireland is without one story of martyrdom. The change was
+carried out in open-hearted frankness and good-will, the old order
+giving place to the new as gently as spring changes to summer. The most
+marvelous example of St. Patrick's wisdom, and at the same time the most
+wonderful testimony to his personal force, is his action towards the
+existing civil and religious law of the country, commonly known as the
+Brehon Law. Principles had by long usage been wrought into the fabric of
+the Brehon Laws which were in flat contradiction to St. Patrick's
+teaching of the New Way. Instead of fiercely denouncing the whole
+system, he talked with the chief jurists and heralds,--custodians of the
+old system,--and convinced them that changes in their laws would give
+effect to more humane and liberal principles. They admitted the justice
+of his view, and agreed to a meeting between three great chieftains or
+kings, three Brehons or jurists, and three of St. Patrick's converts, to
+revise the whole system of law, substituting the more humane principles,
+which they had already accepted as just and right. These changes were
+made and universally applied; so that, without any violent revolution,
+without strife or bloodshed, the better way became the accepted law. It
+would be hard to find in all history a finer example of wisdom and
+moderation, of the great and worthy way of accomplishing right ends.
+
+We have seen the great Messenger himself founding monasteries, houses of
+religious study, and churches for his converts, on land given to him by
+chieftains who were moved by his character and ideals. We can judge of
+the immediate spread of his teaching if we remember that these churches
+were generally sixty feet long, thus giving room for many worshippers.
+They seem to have been built of stone--almost the first use of that
+material in Ireland since the archaic days. Among the first churches of
+this type were those at Saul, at Donaghpatrick on the Blackwater, and at
+Armagh, with others further from the central region of St. Patrick's
+work. The schools of learning which grew up beside them were universally
+esteemed and protected, and from them came successive generations of men
+and women who worthily carried on the work so wisely begun. The tongues
+first studied were Latin and Irish. We have works of very early periods
+in both, as, for instance, the Latin epistles of St. Patrick himself,
+and the Irish poems of the hardly less eminent Colum Kill. But other
+languages were presently added.
+
+[Illustration: Valley of Glendalough and Ruins of the Seven Churches.]
+
+These schools and churches gradually made their way throughout the whole
+country; some of the oldest of them are still to be seen, as at
+Donaghpatrick, Clonmacnoise and Glendalough. Roofed with stone, they are
+well fitted to resist the waste of time. An intense spiritual and moral
+life inspired the students, a life rich also in purely intellectual and
+artistic force. The ancient churches speak for themselves; the artistic
+spirit of the time is splendidly embodied in the famous Latin
+manuscript of the Gospels, called the Book of Kells, the most beautiful
+specimen of illumination in the world. The wonderful colored initial
+letters reproduce and develop the designs of the old gold work, the
+motives of which came, it would seem, from the Baltic, with the De
+Danaan tribes. We can judge of the quiet and security of the early
+disciples at Kells, the comfort and amenity of their daily life, the
+spirit of comity and good-will, the purity of inspiration of that early
+time, by the artistic truth and beauty of these illuminated pages and
+the perfection with which the work was done. Refined and difficult arts
+are the evidence of refined feeling, abundant moral and spiritual force,
+and a certain material security and ease surrounding the artist. When
+these arts are freely offered in the service of religion, they are
+further evidence of widespread fervor and aspiration, a high and worthy
+ideal of life.
+
+Yet we shall be quite wrong if we imagine an era of peace and security
+following the epoch of the first great Messenger. Nothing is further
+from the truth. The old tribal strife continued for long centuries; the
+instincts which inspired it are, even now, not quite outworn. Chief
+continued to war against chief, province against province, tribe
+against tribe, even among the fervent converts of the first teachers.
+
+Saint Brigid is one of the great figures in the epoch immediately
+succeeding the first coming of the Word. She was the foundress of a
+school of religious teaching for women at Kildare, or Killdara, "The
+Church of the Oak-woods," whose name still records her work. Her work,
+her genius, her power, the immense spiritual influence for good which
+flowed from her, entitle her to be remembered with the women of
+apostolic times, who devoted their whole lives to the service of the
+divine. We have seen the esteem in which women were always held in
+Ireland. St. Brigid and those who followed in her steps gave effect to
+that high estimation, and turned it to a more spiritual quality, so that
+now, as in all past centuries, the ideal of womanly purity is higher in
+Ireland than in any country in the world.
+
+This great soul departed from earthly life in the year 525, a generation
+after the death of the first Messenger. To show how the old order
+continued with the new, we may record the words of the Chronicler for
+the following year: "526: The battle of Eiblinne, by Muirceartac son of
+Erc; the battle of Mag-Ailbe; the battle of Almain; the battle of
+Ceann-eic; the plundering of the Cliacs; and the battle of Eidne against
+the men of Connacht." Three of these battles were fought at no great
+distance from St. Brigid's Convent.
+
+The mediaeval Chronicler quotes the old Annalist for the following year:
+"The king, the son of Erc, returned to the side of the descendants of
+Nial. Blood reached the girdle in each plain. The exterior territories
+were enriched. Seventeen times nine chariots he brought, and long shall
+it be remembered. He bore away the hostages of the Ui-Neill with the
+hostages of the plain of Munster."
+
+Ten years later we find the two sons of this same king, Muirceartac son
+of Erc, by name Fergus and Domnall, fighting under the shadow of
+Knocknarea mountain against Eogan Bel the king of Connacht; the ancient
+Annalist, doubtless contemporary with the events recorded, thus
+commemorated the battle in verse:
+
+"The battle of the Ui-Fiacrac was fought with the fury of edged weapons
+against Bel;
+
+"The kine of the enemy roared with the javelins, the battle was spread
+out at Crinder;
+
+"The River of Shells bore to the great sea the blood of men with their
+flesh;
+
+"They carried many trophies across Eaba, together with the head of
+Eogan Bel."
+
+During this stormy time, which only carried forward the long progress of
+fighting since the days of the prime, a famous school of learning and
+religion had been founded at Moville by Finian, "the tutor of the saints
+of Ireland." The home of his church and school is a very beautiful one,
+with sombre mountains behind rising from oak-woods into shaggy masses of
+heather, the blue waters of Lough Foyle in front, and across the mouth
+of the lough the silver sands and furrowed chalk hills of Antrim,
+blending into green plains. Here the Psalms and the Gospels were taught
+in Latin to pupils who had in no wise given up their love for the old
+poetry and traditions of their motherland. Here Colum studied,
+afterwards called Colum Kill, "Saint Colum of the Churches," and here
+arose a memorable dispute concerning a Latin manuscript of the Psalms.
+The manuscript belonged to Finian, founder of the school, and was
+esteemed one of the treasures of his college. Colum, then a young
+student, ardently longed for a copy, and, remaining in the church after
+service, he daily copied a part of the sacred text. When his work was
+completed, Finian discovered it, and at once claimed the copy of his
+book as also his. The matter was submitted to an umpire, who gave the
+famous decision: "Unto every cow her calf; unto every book its
+copy"--the copy belonged to the owner of the book. This early decision
+of copyright was by no means acceptable to the student Colum. He
+disputed its justice, and the quarrel spread till it resulted in a
+battle. The discredit attaching to the whole episode resulted in the
+banishment of Colum, who sailed away northward and eastward towards the
+isles and fiords of that land which, from the Irish Scoti who civilized
+it, now bears the name of Scotland. Let us recall a few verses written
+by Colum on his departure, in a version which echoes something of the
+original melody and form:
+
+     "We are rounding Moy-n-Olurg, we sweep by its head and
+         We plunge through the Foyle,
+     Whose swans could enchant with their music the dead and
+         Make pleasure of toil....
+     Oh, Erin, were wealth my desire, what a wealth were
+         To gain far from thee,
+     In the land of the stranger, but there even health were
+         A sickness to me!
+     Alas for the voyage, oh high King of Heaven,
+         Enjoined upon me,
+     For that I on the red plain of bloody Cooldrevin
+         Was present to see.
+     How happy the son is of Dima; no sorrow
+         For him is designed,
+     He is having this hour, round his own Kill in Durrow,
+         The wish of his mind.
+     The sound of the wind in the elms, like the strings of
+         A harp being played,
+     The note of the blackbird that claps with the wings of
+         Delight in the glade.
+     With him in Ros-grenca the cattle are lowing
+         At earliest dawn,
+     On the brink of the summer the pigeons are cooing
+         And doves on the lawn...."
+
+In another measure, he again mourns his exile: "Happy to be on Ben Edar,
+before going over the sea; white, white the dashing of the wave against
+its face; the bareness of its shore and its border....
+
+     "How swiftly we travel; there is a grey eye
+       Looks back upon Erin, but it no more
+     Shall see while the stars shall endure in the sky,
+       Her women, her men, or her stainless shore...."
+
+This great-hearted and impetuous exile did not waste his life in useless
+regrets. Calling forth the fire of his genius, and facing the reality of
+life, he set himself to work, spreading the teaching of the New Way
+among the Picts of the north--the same Picts who, in years gone by, had
+raged against the barrier of Hadrian between Forth and Clyde. The year
+of his setting out was 563; the great center of his work was in the
+sacred isle of Iona, off the Ross of Mull. Iona stands in the rush of
+Atlantic surges and fierce western storms, yet it is an island of rare
+beauty amid the tinted mists of summer dawns. Under the year 592, a
+century after Saint Patrick's death, we find this entry in the
+Chronicle: "Colum Kill, son of Feidlimid, Apostle of Scotland, head of
+the piety of the most part of Ireland and Scotland after Patrick, died
+in his own church in Iona in Scotland, after the thirty-fifth year of
+his pilgrimage, on Sunday night, the ninth of June. Seventy-seven years
+was his whole age when he resigned his spirit to heaven." The corrected
+date is 596.
+
+We can see in Colum of the Churches the very spirit of turbulence and
+adventure, the fierce impetuosity and readiness for dispute, which led
+to the contests between the chieftains of Ireland, the wars between
+province and province, often between valley and valley. It is the same
+spiritual energy, working itself out in another way, transmuted by the
+sacred fire into a divine mission. In the same way the strong will of
+Meave, the romantic power of Deirdre and Grania, transmuted to ideal
+purposes, was the inspiration of Saint Brigid and so many like her, who
+devoted their powers to the religious teaching of women.
+
+We should doubtless fail utterly to understand the riddle of history,
+were we to regret the wild warring of these early times as a mere
+lamentable loss of life, a useless and cruel bloodshed. We are too much
+given to measuring other times and other moods of the soul by our own,
+and many false judgments issue from this error. Peaceful material
+production is our main purpose, and we learn many lessons of the Will
+embodied in the material world when we follow this purpose honestly. But
+before our age could begin, it was necessary for the races to come to
+personal consciousness. This end seems everywhere to have been reached
+by a long epoch of strife, the contending of man against man, of tribe
+against tribe. Thus were brought to full consciousness the instinct of
+personal valor, personal honor and personal readiness to face death.
+
+Only after this high personal consciousness is kindled can a race enter
+the wider path of national life, where vivid and intense individuals
+unite their forces to a common end, reaching a common consciousness, and
+holding their power in common for the purposes of all. After the lessons
+of fighting come the lessons of work. For these lessons of work, for
+the direct touch with the everlasting Will gained in all honest work,
+our own age is to be valued, far more than for the visible and material
+fruits which that work produces.
+
+In like manner the old epoch of war is to be esteemed for the lessons it
+taught of high valor, sacrifice, heroic daring. And to what admirable
+ends these same qualities may tend we can see in a life like that of
+Colum Kill, "head of the piety of the most part of Ireland and Scotland
+after Patrick."
+
+Yet the days of old were grim enough to live in. Let this record of some
+half-century later testify. It is but one year culled from a long red
+rank of years. We give the Chronicler's own words: "645: The sixth year
+of Conall and Ceallac. Mac Laisre, abbot of Bangor, died on May 16.
+Ragallac son of Uatac, King of Connacht, was killed by Maelbrigde son of
+Motlacan, of which was said:
+
+     "Ragallac son of Uatac was pierced on the back of a white
+        steed;
+
+     Muiream has well lamented him; Catal has well avenged him.
+
+     Catal is this day in battle, though bound to peace in the
+        presence of kings;
+
+     Though Catal is without a father, his father is not without
+        vengeance.
+
+     Estimate his terrible revenge from the account of it related:
+
+     He slew six men and fifty; he made sixteen devastations;
+
+     I had my share like another in the revenge of Ragallac,--
+
+     I have the gray beard in my hand, of Maelbrigde son of Motlacan."
+
+These are evidently the very words of one who fought in the battle. Nor
+need this in any way surprise us, for we have far older Chronicles set
+down year by year in unbroken record. The matter is easy to prove. The
+Chronicles of Ulster record eclipses of the sun and moon as early as
+495,--two years after Saint Patrick's death. It was, of course, the
+habit of astronomers to reckon eclipses backwards, and of annalists to
+avail themselves of these reckonings. The Venerable Bede, for example,
+has thus inserted eclipses in his history. The result is that the
+Venerable Bede has the dates several days wrong, while the Chronicles of
+Ulster, where direct observation took the place of faulty reckoning, has
+them right, to the day and hour. It is only in quite modern times that
+we have reached sufficiently accurate knowledge of the moon's movements
+to vindicate the old Ulster Annalists, who began their work not less
+than a hundred and fifty years before the battle we have just recorded.
+
+Nor should we exaggerate the condition of the time, thinking of it as
+altogether given over to ravaging and devastation. Even though there
+were two or three expeditions and battles every year, these would only
+affect a small part of the whole country. Over all the rest, the tending
+of cattle in the glades of the forest, the sowing and reaping of wheat
+and oats, the gathering of fruit and nuts, continued in quiet
+contentment and peace. The young men practiced the arts of war and
+exercised themselves in warlike games. The poets sang to them, the
+heralds recounted the great doings of old, how Cuculain kept the ford,
+how Concobar thirsted in his heart for Deirdre, how the son of Cumal
+went to war, how golden-tongued Ossin was ensnared by the spirits. The
+gentle life of tillage and the keeping of cattle could never engage the
+whole mental force of so vigorous a race. What wonder, then, that, when
+a chieftain had some real or imagined wrong to avenge, or some adventure
+to propose,--what wonder that bold spirits were ever ready to accompany
+him, leaving the women to their distaffs and the tending of children and
+the grinding of corn? Mounting their horses, they rode forth through the
+woods, under the huge arms of the oak-trees; along the banks of
+swift-gliding rivers, through passes of the lowering hills. While still
+in familiar territory, the time of the march was passed in song and
+story. Then came increased precaution, and gradually heightened pulses
+marked the stages of the way. The rival chieftain, warned by his scouts
+and outlying tribesmen, got word of their approach, and hastily
+replenishing his granaries and driving the cattle into the great circle
+of his embankments, prepared to meet the coming foe. Swords, spears,
+bows, arrows were the arms of both sides. Though leather tunics were
+common, coats of mail came only at a later date. The attackers under
+cover of the night sped across the open ground before the fort, and
+tried to storm the fortress, the defenders meanwhile showering down
+keen-pointed arrows on them from above. Both parties, under the
+chieftains' guidance, fought fiercely, in a fever of excitement, giving
+no heed to wounds, seeing nothing but the foe and the battlements to be
+scaled. Then either a successful sortie broke the ranks of the
+assailants and sent them back to their forest camp in wild disorder, or,
+the stockade giving way, the stormers swept in like a wave of the sea,
+and all was chaos and wild struggle hand to hand. Whatever the outcome,
+both sides thought of the wild surge of will and valor in that hour as
+the crowning event of their lives.
+
+Meanwhile, within the quiet enclosures of the monasteries and religious
+schools, the spirit of the time was working with not less fervor, to
+invisible and ideal ends. At Bangor, on the neck of the northern Ards;
+at Moville, where Lough Foyle spreads its inland sea; at Saul, where the
+first Messenger won his first convert; at Devenish Island amid the
+waters of Lough Erne; at Monasterboice in the plain of Louth; at
+Grlendalough, among the solemn hills of Wicklow; at Kildare, beneath the
+oak-woods; at Durrow, amid the central marshes, and many another ancient
+seat of learning, the way of wisdom and holiness was trod with gladness.
+Latin had been taught since the early days of the Message; the native
+tongue of Ireland, consecrated in the hymns of St. Patrick and the poems
+of St. Colum of the Churches, was the language in which all pupils were
+taught, the modern ministrant to the classical speech of Rome. Nor were
+the Scriptures alone studied. Terence, Virgil, Ovid, the Augustans and
+the men of the silver age, were familiar in the Irish schools; and to
+these Latin writers were soon added the Greeks, more especially--as was
+natural--the Greek Fathers, the religious philosophers, and those who
+embodied the thought and controversies of the early Christian centuries.
+To Greek, Hebrew was added, so that both Old and New Testaments were
+known in their proper tongues. About the time when "Ragallac son of
+Uatac was pierced on the back of a white steed," Saint Camin in his
+island school at Inis Caltra, where red mountains hem in Lough Derg of
+the Shannon, was writing his Commentary on the Psalms, recording the
+Hebrew readings on the margin of the page. A few years before that
+battle, in 634, Saint Cummian of Durrow, some thirty miles to the east
+of Camin's Holy Island, wrote to his brother, the Abbot of Iona in the
+northern seas, quoting Latin writers sacred and secular, as well as
+Origen, Cyril and Pachomius among the Greeks. The learned man discusses
+the astronomical systems of the Mediterranean world, giving the names of
+months and cycles in Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian, and telling of his
+researches into the true time of Easter, while on a journey to Italy and
+Rome. This letter, which has come down to our days, is first-hand
+testimony to the learning of the early Irish schools.
+
+[Illustration: Ancient Cross, Glendalough.]
+
+Fifty years later, in 683, we hear of the Saxons for the first and
+almost the last time in the history of Ireland. It is recorded that the
+North Saxons raided Mag Breag in the East of Meath, attacking both
+churches and chieftains. They carried away many hostages and much spoil,
+but the captives were soon after set at liberty and sent home again, on
+the intercession of a remarkable man, Adamnan, the biographer of Colum
+of the Churches, whose success in his mission was held to be miraculous.
+
+For more than a century after this single Saxon raid Ireland was wholly
+undisturbed by foreign invasion, and the work of building churches,
+founding schools, studying Hebrew and Greek and Latin, went on with
+increasing vigor and success. An army of missionaries went forth to
+other lands, following in the footsteps of Colum of the Churches, and of
+these we shall presently speak. The life of the church was so rich and
+fruitful that we are led to think of this as a period of childlike and
+idyllic peace.
+
+Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The raids,
+devastations and wars between province and province, tribe and tribe,
+went on without a year's interruption. This was the normal course of the
+nation's life, the natural outlet of the nation's energy: not less a
+visible sign of invisible inward power than the faith and fervor of the
+schools. We shall get the truest flavor of the times by quoting again
+from the old Annals. That they were recorded year by year, we have
+already seen; the records of frosts, great snow-storms, years of rich
+harvests and the like, interspersed among the fates of kings, show how
+faithfully the annals were kept,--as, for example, the winter of great
+cold, "when all the rivers and lakes of Ireland were frozen over," in
+the year after the Saxon raid.
+
+Here again, under the year 701, is the word of a man then living: "After
+Loing Seac son of Angus son of Domnall had been eight years in the
+sovreignty of Ireland, he was slain in the battle of Ceann by Cealleac
+of Lough Cime, the son of Ragallac, as Cealleac himself testifies:
+
+
+     "'For his deeds of ambition he was slain in the morning at
+          Glas Cuilg;
+
+     I wounded Loing Seac with a sword, the monarch of Ireland
+          round.'"
+
+Two years later Saint Adamnan died, after governing the Abbey of Iona
+for six and twenty years. It was said of him that "He made a slave of
+himself to his virtues," and his great life-work, the Latin history of
+Saint Colum of the Churches, founder of the Iona Abbey, to this day
+testifies to his high learning and wisdom.
+
+Fourteen years later "Leinster was five times devastated by the
+Ui-Neill," the descendants of Nial, and a battle was fought between the
+men of Connacht and Munster. Thus the lives of saints and warriors were
+interwoven. On very rare occasions the two lives of the race came into
+collision. Thus, a quarrel arose between Congus the Abbot and Aed Roin
+king of Ulad. Congus summoned to his aid the chief of the Ui-Neill, Aed
+Allan by name, in these verses:
+
+     "Say to the cold Aed Allan that I have been oppressed by
+         a feeble enemy:
+
+     Aed Roin insulted me last night at Cill Cunna of the sweet
+         music."
+
+Aed Allan made these verses on his way to battle to avenge the insult:
+
+     "For Cill Cunna the church of my spiritual father,
+         I take this day a journey on the road.
+     Aed Roin shall leave his head with me,
+         Or I shall leave my head with him."
+
+The further history of that same year, 733, is best told in the words of
+the Annals: "Aed Allan, king of Ireland, assembled his forces to
+proceed into Leinster, and he arrived at the Ford of Seannait (in
+Kildare). The Leinstermen collected the greatest number they were able,
+to defend their rights against him. The king Aed Allan himself went into
+the battle, and the chieftains of the north along with him. The
+chieftains of Leinster came with their kings into the battle, and
+bloodily and heroically was the battle fought between them. Heroes were
+slaughtered and bodies were hacked. Aed Allan and Aed, son of Colgan,
+king of Leinster, met each other, and Aed son of Colgan was slain by Aed
+Allan. The Leinstermen were killed, slaughtered, cut off, and dreadfully
+exterminated in this battle, so that there escaped of them but a small
+remnant and a few fugitives."
+
+To round out the picture, to contrast the two streams of the nation's
+life, let us give this, from the following year: "734: Fifth year of Aed
+Allan. Saint Samtain, virgin, of Cluain Bronaig (Longford), died on
+December 19. It was of her that Aed Allan gave this testimony:
+
+     "Samtain for enlightening various sinners,
+         A servant who observed stern chastity,
+     In the wide plain of fertile Meath
+         Great suffering did Samtain endure;
+     She undertook a thing not easy,--
+         Fasting for the kingdom above.
+     She lived on scanty food;
+         Hard were her girdles;
+     She struggled in venomous conflicts;
+         Pure was her heart amid the wicked.
+     To the bosom of the Lord, with a pure death,
+         Samtain passed from her trials."
+
+
+
+X.
+
+THE RAIDS OF THE NORTHMEN.
+
+A.D. 750-1050.
+
+Aed Allan, the king who so feelingly wrote the epitaph of the saintly
+virgin Samtain, needed an epitaph himself four years later, for he fell
+in battle with Domnall son of Murcad son of Diarmaid, who succeeded him
+on the throne. It is recorded that, in the following year, the sea cast
+ashore a whale under the mountains of Mourne, to the great wonder of
+those who dwelt by the hill of Rudraige. Thus do the Chronicles
+establish their good faith, by putting on record things trifling or
+grave, with equal impartiality.
+
+They were presently to have something more memorable to record than the
+loss of a battle or the stranding of a whale. But before we come to this
+new chapter in the life of Ireland, let us show the continuity of the
+forces we have already depicted. The old tribal turmoil went on
+unabated. In 771, the first year of Doncad son of Domnall in the
+sovereignty over Ireland, that ruler made a full muster of the Ui-Neill
+and marched into Leinster. The Leinstermen moved before the monarch and
+his forces, until they arrived at the fort called Nectain's Shield in
+Kildare. Domcad with his forces was entrenched at Aillin, whence his
+people continued to fire, burn, plunder and devastate the province for
+the space of a week, when the Leinstermen at last submitted to his will.
+Seventeen years later it is recorded that the church and abbey of
+Ardmaca, or, as we may now begin to call it, Armagh, were struck by
+lightning, and the night was terrible with thunder, lightning and wind.
+
+We see, therefore, that the double life of the people, the life of valor
+and the life of wisdom, were following their steady course in camp and
+school. We may call up a very interesting witness to the whole condition
+of Ireland during this epoch: Alfred king of the Northumbrian Saxons,
+who spent several years traveling through the land and studying in the
+schools. On his departure, he wrote an ode of acknowledgment to the
+country he was leaving, in the verse of the native Irish tongue. From
+this ode we may quote a few picturesque lines, taking them from a
+version which preserves something of the original rhythm:
+
+     "I traveled its fruitful provinces round,
+     And in every one of the five I found,
+     Alike in church and in palace hall,
+     Abundant apparel and food for all.
+     Gold and silver I found, and money,
+     Plenty of wheat and plenty of honey;
+     I found God's people rich in pity;
+     Found many a feast and many a city....
+     I found in each great church moreo'er,
+     Whether on island or on shore,
+     Piety, learning, fond affection,
+     Holy welcome and kind protection....
+     I found in Munster unfettered of any
+     Kings and queens and poets a many,
+     Poets well skilled in music and measure;
+     Prosperous doings, mirth and pleasure.
+     I found in Connacht the just, redundance
+     Of riches, milk in lavish abundance;
+     Hospitality, vigor, fame,
+     In Crimean's land of heroic name....
+     I found in Ulster, from hill to glen,
+     Hardy warriors, resolute men.
+     Beauty that bloomed when youth was gone,
+     And strength transmitted from sire to son....
+     I found in Leinster the smooth and sleek,
+     From Dublin to Slewmargy's peak,
+     Flourishing pastures, valor, health,
+     Song-loving worthies, commerce, wealth....
+     I found in Meath's fair principality
+     Virtue, vigor, and hospitality;
+     Candor, joyfulness, bravery, purity--
+     Ireland's bulwark and security.
+     I found strict morals in age and youth,
+     I found historians recording truth.
+     The things I sing of in verse unsmooth
+     I found them all; I have written sooth."
+
+The modern form of the names used by the translator gives this version a
+slightly misleading tone. Ulster, Munster, Leinster were still known by
+their old names: Ulad, Mumain and Lagin. The Danish termination by which
+we know them had not been added. In like manner, Dublin in those days
+and far later was still called At-Cliat, the Ford of the Hurdles. Yet
+the tribute which the Saxon king paid to Ireland has a true ring. It
+thoroughly supports what we have said: that incessant tribal warfare
+rather expressed than detracted from the vigor of the nation's life. It
+had this grave defect, however: it so kindled and cherished the instinct
+of separateness that union in face of a common foe was almost
+impossible. Long years of adverse fate were needed to merge the keen
+individual instinct of old into the common consciousness of to-day.
+
+Modern historians generally write as if the onslaught of the Northmen
+had had this unifying effect; as if it had been a great calamity,
+overwhelming the country for several centuries, and submerging its
+original life under a tide of conquest. Here again the history of the
+time, as recorded year by year in the Annals, leads us to a wholly
+different conclusion. We find inroads of the Northmen, it is true; but
+they are only interludes in the old national life of storm and struggle.
+That enduring tribal conflict, of which we have already seen so much,
+did not cease even for a year. Nor can it have greatly mattered to the
+dwellers in some remote valley whether they were sacked, their cattle
+driven off, and their children taken captive by strangers or by men of
+their own land.
+
+There was one chief difference: the foreigners, being still heathens,
+did not spare the churches and the schools. The golden or silver
+reliquaries, the jeweled manuscript-cases, the offerings of precious
+stones and rich ornaments laid on the altars: these things proved an
+irresistible temptation to the roving sea-kings. They often burned or
+cast away the manuscripts, eager only to take the jeweled coverings, and
+in this way many monuments of the olden time have been lost, and many
+gaps in the history of the nation made irreparable. Yet it would seem
+that even the loss of manuscripts has been exaggerated, since such
+lavish abundance remains to us from the times before the first northern
+raiders came. Many a remote shrine was never even approached by the
+northern wanderers; and, in the long times of peace between raid and
+raid, one school had time to gain from another copies of the books which
+were lost. We may hope that the somewhat rigid views of copyright
+expressed in the matter of St. Finian's Psalter were not invariably
+adhered to. We have Chronicles kept with unbroken regularity year by
+year through the whole of the epoch of Northern raids, and they by no
+means indicate a period of national depression, nor justify us in
+thinking of these raids as much more than episodes in the general
+fighting of the nation,--the martial state through which every modern
+country has passed before emerging to homogeneous life.
+
+To come to the events themselves, as they appeared to the men who
+witnessed them. We find the first record of the Northern raiders under
+the year 795: "The burning of Lambay by the Gentiles. The shrines were
+broken and plundered." This Lambay is an island of considerable extent,
+off the Dublin coast, some six or seven miles north of Howth. It rises
+gradually from the south extremity into a purple cliff of porphyry
+facing the northern sea, and on the sheltered slope under the sun a
+little church colony with schools and dwelling-houses had been built.
+Against this peaceful solitude the raiders came, burning and plundering,
+and when they rowed away again in their long ships towards the north, a
+smoldering black ruin bore testimony that they were indeed Gentiles,
+unblessed by Christian baptism.
+
+Three years later the little island of St. Patrick, six miles north of
+Lambay, met with a like fate. It was "burned by the Gentiles," as the
+Chronicles say. And from that time forth we hear of their long ships
+again and again, hovering hawk-like around the coasts of Ireland and
+Scotland. In 802, and again in 806, the Scottish Iona of Colum of the
+Churches was raided, and the next year we find the pirates making a
+descent upon Inismurray, off the Sligo coast, between the summit of
+Knocknarea and the cliffs of Slieve League. This last settlement of
+saints and scholars was founded by Molaise,--he who had pronounced
+sentence of exile on Colum of the Churches, the banishment that was the
+beginning of grace for the northern Picts. His oratory still remains on
+the island, beside the Church of the Men, the Church of the Women and
+the circular stone fort, which was very likely built to guard against
+new attacks, after this first raid. There are holy wells and altars
+there also, and Inismurray, better than any other place, gives us a
+picture of the old scholastic life of that remote and wonderful time.
+
+Five years later, the Northern raiders made their way further round the
+coast, under the shadow of the western mountains and the great cliffs of
+Achill; we read of "a slaughter of the people of Connemara by the
+Gentiles" in that year, and the year following, other battles with
+Gentiles are recorded in the same part of Ireland.
+
+In 818, if we are to believe the Annalist, a singular thing happened:
+"An army was led by Murcad, having the Ui-Neill of the North with him.
+Concobar king of Ireland with the Ui-Neill of the South and the
+Leinstermen came from the South on the other hand. When they came to one
+place, it happened, through a miracle of God, that they separated from
+each other for that time without slaughter or one of them spilling a
+drop of the other's blood." That entry better than any other shows the
+restless spirit of the times. It shows, too, that the first shock of
+Norse invasion had not in any sense warned the people and chieftains of
+Ireland of coming danger, nor had it in any degree checked the steady
+course of the nation's growth through storm and strife to personal
+consciousness, as the stepping-stone to the wider common consciousness
+of the modern world.
+
+The year following we read of "a plundering of Howth by the Gentiles,
+who carried off a great prey of women." These captives were doubtless
+the first to bring the Message of the New Way to the wild granite lands
+of the north, where the mountains in their grandeur frown upon the long
+inlets of the fiords. They taught to their children in those wild lands
+of exile the lessons of grace and holiness, so rudely interrupted when
+the long ships of the Norsemen were sighted from the Hill of Howth.
+
+A year later, in 820, the raiders had found their way to the
+southernmost extremity of the island; to Cape Clear, off the coast of
+Cork. This once again brings to our notice the position of so many of
+the early religious settlements,--on rocky islands off the coasts, well
+out of the turmoil of tribal strife which raged uninterrupted on the
+mainland. St. Patrick's Island and Lambay on the east, Clear Island on
+the south, and Inismurray on the northwest, so well protected by the sea
+from disturbance at home, were, by that very isolation, terribly exposed
+to these foreign raiders from the sea. Howth, Moville and Bangor, all on
+peninsulas, all by the seashore, enjoyed a like immunity and were open
+to a like danger. Therefore we are not surprised to find that, two years
+later, Bangor was "plundered by the Gentiles."
+
+It will be remembered that St. Patrick's first church was built on land
+given him by Dicu, chieftain of the district round Downpatrick, a name
+which commemorates the presence of the Messenger. Two sons of this same
+Dicu had been held as hostages by Laogaire the king, and their marvelous
+escape from durance was recorded in the name, Dun-da-lath-glas, the
+Dwelling of the Two Broken Fetters, given to Downpatrick. The place was
+of old renown. Known to Ptolemy as Dunum, it was, during Concobar's sway
+at Emain of Maca, the fortress of the strong chief, Celtcar, whose huge
+embattled hill of earth still rises formidable over the Quoyle River. In
+the year 823, we read, Dundalathglas was plundered by the Gentiles; but
+the story does not stop here, for we are further told that these same
+Gentiles were beaten by the Ulad armies not far from the great fort of
+Celtcar. This is the first entry of this tenor. Hitherto, the Northmen
+seem to have fallen only on outlying religious communities, in remote
+islands or on the seashore; but this last raid brought them to one of
+the very few church-schools which had been built close to a strong
+fortress, with the result that the Northmen were beaten and driven back
+into their ships.
+
+Three years later the Gentiles plundered Lusk on the mainland opposite
+Lambay, but in that same year they were twice defeated in battle, once
+by Cairbre son of Catal, and once by the king of Ulad. The raids of the
+Norse warriors grow more frequent and determined from this time; in
+itself a testimony to the wealth and prosperity of the country, the
+abundance of gold and of accumulated riches, whether cattle or corn,
+ornaments or richly dyed stuffs, red and purple and blue. Word seems to
+have been carried to the wild hills and fiords of frozen Scandinavia
+that here was booty in abundance, and the pirate hordes came down
+in swarms.
+
+Thus we read that Armagh, the center of St. Patrick's work, and the
+chief home of learning, was thrice plundered in 830, the raiders sailing
+up Carlingford Lough and then making a dash of some fifteen miles across
+the undulating country separating them from the city of churches. This
+is the first time they ventured out of sight of their boats. Two years
+later they plundered Clondalkin, nine miles inland from the Dublin
+coast, where the Round Tower still marks the site of the old church and
+school. To the growing frequency of these raids, it would seem, the
+building of Round Towers is to be attributed; they were at once belfries
+and places of refuge. We find, therefore, that the door is almost always
+many feet above the ground, being reached by a ladder afterwards drawn
+up by those inside. The number of these Round Towers all over the
+country, and the perfect preservation of many of them, show how
+universal this precaution was, and how effective were the refugees thus
+provided. It is instructive to read under this same year, 832, that "a
+great number of the family of Clonmacnoise were slain by Feidlimid king
+of Cashel, all their land being burned by him up to the door of the
+church." Thus the progress of tribal struggle was uninterrupted by the
+Gentile raids.
+
+Four years later, a fleet of sixty Norse fighting galleys sailed up the
+Boyne. Sixty long ships entered the Liffey in the same year, and a year
+later they captured the fortress of the Ford of the Hurdles,
+At-Cliat,--the old name of Dublin. Three years later we find the king of
+Munster plundering Meath and West Meath, showing that no sense of common
+danger disturbed the native kings. This strengthens the view we have
+already taken: that the attacks of the Norse sea-kings were only an
+interlude in the incessant contests between the tribes of province and
+province; contests perfectly natural and normal to the development of
+the land, and through which every country has at some period passed.
+
+[Illustration: Round Tower, Antrim.]
+
+It would seem that the Northmen who captured the Ford of the Hurdles
+departed from their former usage. Fortifying themselves, or
+strengthening the existent fortress, they determined to pass the winter
+in Ireland, instead of returning, as they had always done up to this
+time, before the autumn storms made dangerous the navigation of the wild
+northern seas. Their presence in this fort gave the native powers a
+center upon which to concentrate their attack, and as a result the year
+846 was marked by a signal victory over the Northmen, twelve hundred of
+those at At-Cliat being slain. Four other successful contests with the
+raiders are recorded for the same year, and we can thoroughly trust the
+Annalists who, up to this time, have so faithfully recorded the
+disasters of their own race.
+
+About the same time the Northmen gained a second point of vantage by
+seizing and fortifying a strong position where the town of Cork now
+stands. Indeed their instinct of seamanship, their knowledge of good
+harbors and the conditions which make them, led them to fix their first
+entrenchments at Dublin, Cork and Limerick,--which remained for
+centuries after the great ports of the country on the east, south and
+west; and the Norse flavor still lingers in the names of Carlingford,
+Wexford and Waterford, the Fiords of Cairlinn, Weis and Vadre. A
+wonderful side-light on the whole epoch is shed by this entry for 847:
+"In this year sevenscore ships of the Gentiles from abroad fought
+against the Gentiles in Ireland." It would seem that the earlier comers,
+who had drawn up their long ships on the beach, and thrown up earthworks
+round their camp, instantly resented the attempt of later arrivals to
+poach on their preserves, and that a fierce fight was the result. During
+the whole of the following century we find signs of like rivalry between
+different bands of raiders, and it becomes evident that they were as
+much divided amongst themselves as were the native tribes they
+fought against.
+
+Two years later a further light is shed on this mutual strife when we
+are told that "Dark Gentiles came to At-Cliat and slaughtered the Fair
+Gentiles, plundering their fort and carrying away both people and
+property." The next year saw a new struggle between the Dark Gentiles
+and the Fair Gentiles, with much mutual slaughter. This leads us to
+realize that these raiders, vaguely grouped by modern writers under the
+single name of Danes, really belonged to several different races, and
+doubtless came from many parts of the Baltic coasts, as well as from the
+fiords of the great Scandinavian peninsula. The Dark Foreigners are
+without doubt some of that same race of southern origin which we saw,
+ages earlier, migrating northwards along the Atlantic seaboard,--a race
+full of the spirit of the sea, and never happier than when the waves
+were curling and breaking under their prows. They found their way, we
+saw, as far northwards as the coast of Scotland, the Western Isles, and
+distant Norway over the foam, where the long fiords and rugged
+precipices gave them a congenial home. We find them hovering over the
+shores of Ireland at the very dawn of her history; and, in later but
+still remote ages, their power waned before the De Danaan tribes. This
+same dark race returning now from Norway, swooped hawk-like upon the
+rich shrines of the Irish island sanctuaries, only to come into hostile
+contact once more with sons of that golden-haired race which scattered
+the dark Fomorians at Mag Tuiread of the North. For the Fair Gentiles of
+our mediaeval Chronicle are no other than the golden-haired
+Scandinavians; the yellow-locked Baltic race that gave conquerors and a
+new ideal of beauty to the whole modern world. And this Baltic race, as
+we saw in an earlier epoch, was the source and mother of the old De
+Danaans, whose hair was like new-smelted gold or the yellow flag-lilies
+of our lakes and rivers. Thus after long ages the struggle of Fomor and
+De Danaan was renewed at the Ford of the Hurdles between the Dark and
+Fair Strangers, rivals for the plunder of the Irish religious schools.
+
+Though the personalities of this age do not stand forth with the high
+relief of Cuculain and Concobar, though we can hardly quote poems to
+equal the songs of Find son of Cumal and Ossin of the golden tongue, yet
+genuine inspiration never failed in the hearts of the warriors and on
+the lips of the bards. Thus in 860 did a poet lament the death of
+a king:
+
+     "Mournfully is spread her veil of grief over Erin
+     Since Maelseaclain, chieftain of our race has perished,--
+     Maelseaclain of the flowing Shannon.
+     Many a moan resounds in every place;
+     It is mournful news among the Gael.
+
+     Red wine has been spilled into the valley:
+     Erin's monarch has died.
+       Though he was wont to ride a white charger.
+     Though he had many steeds,
+     His car this day is drawn by a yoke of oxen.
+     The king of Erin is dead."
+
+Four years afterwards the contest between the raiders and the chieftains
+grew keener, more centered, more like organized war. "A complete muster
+of the North was made by Aed Finnliat, so that he plundered the
+fortresses of the foreigners, wherever they were in the north; and he
+carried off their cattle and accoutrements, their goods and chattels.
+The foreigners of the province came together at Lough Foyle. After Aed
+king of Ireland had heard that this gathering of strangers was on the
+borders of his country, he was not negligent in attending to them. For
+he marched towards them with all his forces, and a battle was fought
+fiercely and spiritedly between them. The victory was gained over the
+foreigners, and a slaughter was made of them. Their heads were collected
+to one place, in the presence of the king, and twelve-score heads were
+reckoned before him, which was the number slain in that battle, besides
+the numbers of those who were wounded and carried off by him in the
+agonies of death, and who died of their wounds some time afterwards."
+
+A renewal of tribal warfare in the second year after this, when this
+same Aed the king was attacked by Flann the lord of Breag in Meath,
+called forth certain battle-verses full of the fire and fervor of
+the time.
+
+A poet sang:
+
+     "At Kiladerry this day the ravens shall taste sips of blood:
+     A victory shall be gained over the magic host of the Gentiles
+        and over Flann."
+
+The mother of Flann sang:
+
+     "Happiness! Woe! Good news! Bad news! The gaining of a great
+         triumphant battle.
+
+     Happy the king whom it makes victorious; unhappy the king who
+         was defeated.
+
+     Unhappy the host of Leat Cuin, to have fallen by the sprites
+         of Slain;
+
+     Happy the reign of great Aed, and unhappy the loss of Flann."
+
+Aed the victorious king sang:
+
+     "The troops of Leinster are with him, with the added men of
+         swift Boyne;
+
+     This shows the treachery of Flann: the concord of Gentiles
+         at his side."
+
+After ten years, a bard thus sings the dirge of Aed:
+
+     "Long is the wintry night, with rough gusts of wind;
+     Under pressing grief we meet it, since the red-speared king
+        of the noble house lives not.
+     It is fearful to watch how the waves heave from the bottom;
+     To them may be compared all those who with us lament him.
+     A generous, wise, staid man, of whose renown the populous
+        Tara was full.
+     A shielded oak that sheltered the palace of Milid's sons.
+     Master of the games of the fair hilled Taillten,
+     King of Tara of a hundred conflicts;
+     Chief of Fodla the noble, Aed of Oileac who died too soon.
+     Popular, not forgotten, he departed from this world,
+     A yew without any blemish upon him was he of the long-flowing
+        hair."
+
+Nor must it be thought that these repeated raids which we have recorded
+in any way checked the full spiritual life of the nation. It is true
+that there was not that quiet serenity from which came the perfect
+beauty and art of the old Book of Kells, but a keenness and fire kindled
+the breasts of those who learned the New Way and the Ancient Learning.
+The schools sent forth a host of eminent men who over all western Europe
+laid the intellectual basis of the modern world. This view of Ireland's
+history might well be expanded almost without limit or possibility of
+exaggeration. Receiving, as we saw, the learning and traditions of Rome
+while Rome was yet mighty and a name of old imperial renown, Ireland
+kept and cherished the classical wisdom and learning, not less than the
+lore of Palestine. Then the northern garrisons of Rome were beaten back,
+and Britain and Gaul alike were devastated by hordes from beyond the
+Rhine. The first wild deluge of these fierce invaders was now over, and
+during the lull of the storm teachers went forth from Ireland to
+Scotland, as we have seen; they went also to Britain; to Belgium; to
+northern, central and southern Gaul; and to countries beyond the Rhine
+and in the south; to Switzerland and Austria, where one Irishman gave
+his name to the Canton of St. Gall, while another founded the famous see
+of Salzburg, a rallying-point through all the Middle Ages. It was not
+only for pure spiritual zeal and high inspiration that these teachers
+were famed. They had not less renown for all refined learning and
+culture. The famous universities of Oxford, Paris and Pavia count among
+the great spirits at their inception men who were worthy pupils of the
+schools of Devenish and Durrow, of Bangor and Moville.
+
+We have recorded the tribute paid by Alfred the Saxon king to the
+Ireland of his day. Let us add to it the testimony of a great divine of
+France. Elias, Bishop of Angouleme, who died in 875, wrote thus: "What
+need to speak of Ireland; setting at nought, as it does, the
+difficulties of the sea, and coming almost in a body to our shores, with
+its crowd of philosophers, the most intelligent of whom are subjecting
+themselves to a voluntary exile."
+
+We have traced the raids of the Northmen for nearly a century. They
+continued for a century and a quarter longer. Through all this time the
+course of the nation's life was as we have described it: a raid from the
+sea, or from one of their seaboard fortresses by the Dark Gentiles or
+the Fair; an assembling of the hosts of the native chieftains against
+them; a fierce and spirited battle against the pirates in their
+mail-coats and armed with great battle-axes. Sometimes the chosen people
+prevailed, and sometimes the Gentiles; but in either case the heads of
+the slain were heaped up at the feet of the victor, many cattle were
+driven away as spoil, and young men and maidens were taken into
+captivity. It would seem that at no time was there any union between the
+foreigners of one and another seaboard fortress, any more than there was
+unity among the tribes whom they raided and who defeated them in their
+turn. It was a strife of warring units, without fusion; small groups
+round chosen leaders, and these merging for awhile in greater groups.
+Thus the life of the times, in its warlike aspect. Its spiritual vigor
+we have sufficiently shown, not less in the inspirations of the saints
+than in the fiery songs of the bards, called forth by battles and the
+death of kings. Everywhere there was fierce force and seething energy,
+bringing forth fruit of piety or prowess.
+
+The raiders slowly lost their grasp of the fortresses they had seized.
+Newcomers ceased to fill their thinning ranks. Their force was finally
+shattered at the battle of Clontarf, which the Annalist thus records:
+"1013: The Foreigners of the west of Europe assembled against Brian and
+Maelseaclain, and they took with them a thousand men with coats of mail.
+A spirited, fierce, violent, vengeful and furious battle was fought
+between them, the likeness of which was not to be found in that time, at
+Cluain-tarb, the Lawn of the Bulls. In this battle was slain Brian son
+of Ceinneidig, monarch of Ireland, who was the Augustus of all the west
+of Europe, in the eighty-eighth year of his age."
+
+The scene of this famous conflict is on the coast, between Dublin and
+the Hill of Howth. A wide strand of boulders is laid bare by the
+receding tide, with green sea-grass carpeting the stones. At the very
+verge of the farthest tide are two huge sand-banks, where the waves roar
+and rumble with a sound like the bellowing of bulls, and this tumultuous
+roaring is preserved in the name of the place unto this day.
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+THE PASSING OF THE NORSEMEN.
+
+A.D. 1013-1250.
+
+There was, as we have seen, no "Danish Conquest" of Ireland, nor
+anything approaching a conquest. What really happened during the ninth
+and tenth centuries was this: Raiders from the shores of the Northern
+seas, from the Scandinavian peninsula and the Western Isles of Scotland,
+sailed in their long ships among the islands of the Irish coast, looking
+for opportunities to plunder the treasuries of the religious schools,
+and carrying off the gold and silver reliquaries and manuscript cases,
+far more valuable to these heathen seamen than the Latin or Gaelic
+manuscripts they contained.
+
+These raids had little connection with each other; they were the outcome
+of individual daring, mere boat's-crews from one or another of the
+Northern fiords. A few of the more persistent gradually grew reluctant
+to retreat with their booty to the frozen north, and tried to gain a
+footing on the shores of the fertile and wealthy island they had
+discovered. They made temporary camps on the beach, always beside the
+best harbors, and threw up earthworks round them, or perhaps more
+lasting forts of stone. Thus they established a secondary base for raids
+inland, and a place of refuge whither they might carry the cattle, corn
+and captives which these raids brought them from the territories of the
+native clans. These camps on the shore were the germ of a chain of
+sea-ports at Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.
+
+From these points raiding went on, and battles were fought in which the
+raiders were as often vanquished as victorious. There was little union
+between the various Norse forts, and indeed we sometimes find them
+fighting valiantly among themselves. Meanwhile, the old tribal contest
+went on everywhere throughout the island. The south invaded the north
+and was presently invaded in return. The east and the west sent
+expeditions against each other. Clan went forth against clan, chief
+against chief, and cattle and captives many times changed hands. These
+captives, it would seem, became the agricultural class in each clan,
+being made to work as the penalty for unsuccessful fighting. The old
+tribal life went on unbroken during the whole of this period; nor did
+it subsequently yield to pressure from without, but rather passed
+away, during succeeding centuries, as the result of inward growth.
+Meanwhile the religious schools continued their work, studying Latin and
+Greek as well as the old Gaelic, and copying manuscripts as before; and
+one fruit of their work we see in the gradual conversion of the heathen
+Norsemen, who were baptized and admitted to the native church. The old
+bardic schools likewise continued, so that we have a wealth of native
+manuscripts belonging to this time, embodying the finest tradition and
+literature of the earlier pagan ages.
+
+[Illustration: Giant Head and Dunluce Castle, Co. Antrim.]
+
+If the Danes and Northern raiders never conquered Ireland, on the other
+hand they never were expelled. Through the cessation of the original
+impulse of unrest which brought them, they gradually ceased to receive
+accessions from the North, and at the same time the forces of
+amalgamation were slowly merging them into the national and tribal life
+of their new home. Their separate influence grew less and less, but
+their race continued, and continues to this day in the sea-ports we
+have named.
+
+We shall presently have to record another series of Norse inroads, this
+time not directly from the North, but mediately, through France and
+Britain, and we shall find that much of our subsequent history was
+influenced by the new elements and principles then added. We shall do
+well, therefore, to linger for a moment before this new transition, to
+gain a clear view of the tendencies of the epoch then closed, the wider
+significance of that chapter of our nation's life.
+
+The culture of Ireland, during the period before the Northern raids,
+bridged over the abyss between the classical and the mediaeval world.
+During the whole of that period the rest of Europe was hidden under the
+clouds of the Dark Ages. Ireland stood alone as the one cultured nation.
+Receiving the classical learning from Roman Gaul and Britain and Italy,
+while the old world was still alive, Ireland carried that culture onward
+when Rome and the Roman Empire fell, crushed under the hordes of
+Northern barbarians: the Franks in Gaul; the Lombards, Goths and Vandals
+in Spain and Italy; the Angles, Saxons and Danes in Britain; and the
+Picts and Northmen in the Scottish lowlands. Austria was meanwhile
+overrun by Asian nomads, the Huns and Magyars; Russia and Germany, with
+the Scandinavian lands, were still pagan.
+
+Thus all Europe was submerged under a deluge of heathenism, and the old
+Latin culture was swept away. The tradition of ancient Greece still
+lingered at Constantinople behind the wall of the Balkans, but it had no
+influence at all on the northern nations beyond the wall. Ireland was
+thus the one exception, the ark of safety for the old wisdom and beauty
+of classical days. And from Ireland, when the tide of heathen invasion
+slackened, the light of classical times and the spirit of the New Way
+went forth to all the nascent nations, the great pagan tribes that were
+to form the modern world. Thus Ireland was the bridge over the Dark
+Ages, the first of modern nations, keeping the old and blending it
+with the new.
+
+Yet another view of Ireland's significance must not be forgotten. Of the
+original life of the great pagan world which swept over the Roman Empire
+we know almost nothing. How much do we realize of the thought and genius
+of Aleman, Frank and Vandal, of Angle and Lombard and Burgundian?
+
+Nothing at all. The darkness that shrouds them is complete. But what a
+contrast when we come to Ireland! If we leave out the basin of the
+Mediterranean, with its Asian and African traditions, Ireland is the one
+European nation which has clear records of its pagan history. And how
+excellent that history was, how full of humanity and the rich wine of
+life, the stories of Fergus and Concobar and Cuculain, of Find and Ossin
+and Gael, of Meave and Deirdre and Crede bear sufficient witness. The
+tide of Irish life to which they belong, and which brought them forth,
+flowed on without break to a time so recent that their whole tradition
+has come down to us, practically at first hand, from the heralds and
+bards themselves. Ireland is, therefore, our one doorway to the history
+of northern Europe through the long era of pagan times.
+
+That history was everywhere a fierce tale of tribal warfare. Its heroes
+are valiant fighters, keen leaders of forays, champion swordsmen and
+defenders of forts. The air throbs to the battle-drum, rings to the call
+of the war-trumpet. Every tribe, every clan, is in turn victor and
+vanquished, raider and victim of raids. Everywhere are struggle and
+unrest, tales of captivity and slaughter.
+
+We fall into vain lamenting over this red rapine and wrath, until we
+divine the genius and secret purpose of that wonderful epoch, so wholly
+different in inspiration from our own. The life of races, like the life
+of men, has its ordered stages, and none can ripen out of season. That
+was the epoch of dawning individual consciousness, when men were coming
+to a keen and vivid realization of themselves and their powers. Keen
+consciousness and strong personal will could be developed only through
+struggle--through long ages of individual and independent fighting,
+where the best man led, and often fought for his right to lead with the
+best of his followers. Innumerable centers of initiative and force were
+needed, and these the old tribal life abundantly gave. The territory of
+a chief hardly stretched farther than he could ride in a day, so that
+every part of it had a real place in his heart. Nor was he the owner of
+that territory. He was simply the chosen leader of the men who lived
+there, perhaps the strongest among many brothers who shared it equally
+between them. If another thought himself the better man, the matter was
+forthwith decided by fighting.
+
+The purpose of all this was not the "survival of the fittest" in the
+material sense, but a harvest purely spiritual: the ripening of keen
+personal consciousness and will in all the combatants, to the full
+measure of their powers. The chiefs were the strongest men who set the
+standard and served as models for the rest, but that standard held the
+minds of all, the model of perfect valor was in the hearts of all. Thus
+was personal consciousness gained and perfected.
+
+If we keep this in mind as the keynote of the whole pagan epoch, we
+shall be better able to comprehend the new forces which were added to
+that epoch, and which gradually transformed it. The greatest was the
+Message of the New Way. Deeds are stronger than words, and in the deeds
+of the first Messengers we can see the new spirit bearing fruit. The
+slave of Slemish mountain returned breathing not vengeance for his
+captivity but pity and generous kindness towards his captors. Colum the
+exile did not seek to enlist the Picts against his native land, but
+sought rather to give the message of that land to the wild Pictish
+warriors, and to spread humane and generous feeling among them. Thus was
+laid the foundation of a wide and universal consciousness; a bridge was
+built between soul and soul.
+
+From the waning of the Norsemen to the first coming of the Normans is a
+period of about a hundred and fifty years. We shall best gain an insight
+into the national and religious life of that time by gleaning from the
+Annals the vivid and living pictures they never fail to give,--pictures
+which are the records of eye-witnesses. The strictly contemporary
+character of the records is vouched for by the correct entry of
+eclipses: for instance, "on the day before the calends of September, in
+the year 1030, there was a darkening of the sun."
+
+We see the genius of the Norsemen suffering a like eclipse the year
+before: "1029: Olaf son of Sitric, lord of the Foreigners, was taken
+prisoner by Matgamain Ua Riagain lord of Breag, who exacted twelve
+hundred cows as his ransom, together with seven score British horses,
+three score ounces of gold, the sword of Carlus, the Irish hostages,
+sixty ounces of white silver as the ransom of his fetters, eighty cows
+for word and supplication, and four hostages to Ua Riagain as a security
+of peace."
+
+Two generations later we read: "1088: Tigearnac Ua Briain, chief
+successor of Ciaran and Coman, died. He was a paragon of learning and
+history." The work of the paragon Tigearnac, a history of Ireland, is
+extant and writ in choice Latin, a monument at once of the classical
+learning of our schools and of the historical spirit carried down from
+the days of the pagan heralds and bards. Tigearnac quotes abundantly
+from Greek and Latin authors, fortifying his conclusions with passages
+from Eusebius, Orosius, Julius Africanus, Josephus, Jerome and Bede.
+
+A half-century later we get a quaint and vivid glimpse into the
+religious life of the time: "1145: A lime-kiln which was sixty feet
+every way was erected opposite Emain Maca by Gilla Mac Liag, the
+successor of Patrick, and Patrick's clergy in general." Here is the glow
+of that devotion through work which gave us the great mediaeval
+cathedrals, the fervor and artistic power, which in former times adorned
+the Gospels of the Book of Kells, now working out its way in lasting
+stone. The date of this lime-kiln lies indeed just half-way between the
+consecration of Cormac's Chapel at Cashel in 1134 and the foundation of
+the beautiful cathedral beside it by the lord of Tuaid-Muma or Thomond
+in 1152. Cormac's Chapel is a very pure example of native style,
+untouched by foreign or continental influence.
+
+[Illustration: Rock of Cashel, Ruins of Old Cathedral, King Cormac's
+Chapel and Round Tower,]
+
+We can divine the figure of one of the great men of the religious world
+in the records for the year 1148: "A synod was convened at Saint
+Patrick's Isle by Maelmaedog, called also Malachias, successor of
+Patrick, at which were present fifteen bishops and two hundred priests,
+to establish rules and morals for all. Maelmaedog by the advice of the
+synod went a second time to Rome, to confer with the successor of
+Peter." A few months later we read this record of his death: "Malachias,
+that is, Maelmaedog Ua Morgair, Archbishop of the chair of Patrick,
+chief head of the piety of the West of Europe, legate of the successor
+of Peter, the only head whom the Irish and the Foreigners obeyed, chief
+paragon of wisdom and piety, a brilliant lamp which illumined
+territories and churches by preaching and good works, faithful shepherd
+of the church in general,--after having ordained bishops and priests and
+persons of every degree; after having consecrated many churches and
+cemeteries; after having performed every ecclesiastical work throughout
+Ireland; after having bestowed jewels and food upon the mighty and the
+needy; after having founded churches and monasteries, for by him was
+repaired in Ireland every church which had been consigned to decay and
+neglect, and they had been neglected from times remote;--after leaving
+every rule and every good moral in the churches of Ireland in general;
+after having been the second time in the legateship; after having been
+fourteen years in the primacy; and after the fifty-fourth year of his
+age, resigned his spirit to heaven on the second day of November, and
+was buried in the monastery of Saint Bernard at Claravallis in France."
+
+This is the same worthy under whose influence was built the great
+lime-kiln over against the fort of Emain, where Concobar once ruled.
+Even from the scant notices which we have quoted he stands forth clear
+and strong, full of spiritual and moral vigor, a great man in every
+sense, and one in whom we divine a lovable and admirable spirit. At that
+time there were four archbishoprics in Ireland, at Armagh, Cashel,
+Dublin and Tuam; the primacy belonging to the first, as the seat of the
+Damliag Mor or Great Stone Church, built by Saint Patrick himself. A
+sentence in the Annals shows how the revenues were raised: "A horse from
+every chieftain, a sheep from every hearth." A few passages like these
+are enough to light up whole epochs of that mediaeval time, and to show
+us how sympathetic, strong and pure that life was, in so many ways.
+
+We find, meanwhile, that the tribal struggle continued as of old: "1154:
+Toirdealbac Ua Concobar brought a fleet round Ireland northwards, and
+plundered Tir-Conaill and Inis Eogain. The Cinel Eogain sent to hire the
+fleets of the Hebrides, Arran, Cantyre and Man, and the borders of Alba
+in general, and they fell in with the other fleet and a naval battle
+was fiercely and spiritedly fought between them. They continued the
+conflict from, the beginning of the day till evening, but the foreign
+fleet was defeated." This records perhaps the only lesson learned from
+the Norsemen, the art of naval warfare. We may regret that the new
+knowledge was not turned to a more national end.
+
+Four years later, "a wicker bridge was made by Ruaidri Ua Concobar at
+Athlone, for the purpose of making incursions into Meath. There was a
+pacific meeting between Ruaidri Ua Concobar and Tigearnan, and they made
+peace, and took mutual oaths before sureties and relics." This is our
+first meeting with a king as remarkable in his way as the great
+archbishop his contemporary. Ruaidri descendant of Concobar was king of
+Connacht, holding the land from the western ocean up to the great
+frontier of the river Shannon. Eager to plunder his neighbors and bring
+back "a countless number of cows," he undertook this wonderful work, a
+pile bridge across the river, seemingly the first of its kind to be
+built there, and in structure very like the famous bridge which Caesar
+built across the Rhine,--or like many of the wooden bridges across the
+upper streams of the Danube at the present day. We shall record a few
+more of this enterprising and large-minded prince's undertakings,
+following the course of the years.
+
+In parenthesis, we find a clue to the standard of value of the time in
+this record: "1161: The visitation of Osraige was made by Flaitbeartac,
+successor of Colum Kill; the tribute due to him was seven score oxen,
+but he selected, as a substitute for these, four hundred and twenty
+ounces of pure silver." The price of an ox was, therefore, three ounces
+of silver. The old-time barter, an echo of which still lingers in the
+word "pecuniary" from the Latin name for "cattle," was evidently
+yielding to the more convenient form of exchange through the medium of
+the metals, which are easily carried and divided, and suffer no
+detriment from the passage of time. With the wicker bridge and the
+lime-kiln, this change from a tribute in cattle to a payment in silver
+may remind us that we are on the threshold of the modern world.
+
+In 1162 we find the king of Connacht in a new adventure: "An army was
+led by Muirceartac Ua Lochlain, accompanied by the people of the north
+of Ireland, the men of Meath, and a battalion of the Connacht men, to
+At-Cliat, to lay siege to the Foreigners and the Irish; but Ua Lochlain
+retired without battle or hostages after having plundered the Fair
+Strangers. A peace was afterwards concluded between the Foreigners and
+the Gaels; and six score ounces of gold were given by the Foreigners to
+Ua Lochlain, and five score ounces of gold were paid by Diarmaid Ua
+Maelseaclain to Ruaidri Ua Concobar for West Meath." Here again we see
+the "countless cows" giving place to counted gold in the levying of
+tribute. We note also, in the following year, that "a lime-kiln
+measuring seventy feet every way was made by the successor of Colum Kill
+and the clergy of Colum Kill in twenty days," in evident emulation of
+the work of the Armagh see.
+
+The synod already recorded as having been held in the little island of
+Saint Patrick off the Dublin coast, gives us a general view of the
+church at that time, the number of sees and parishes, and the spirit
+animating them. We gain a like view of the civil state in the record of
+a great assembly convened in 1167 by the energetic and enterprising
+Connacht king: "A great meeting was called together by Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar and the chiefs of Leat Cuin, both lay and ecclesiastic, and the
+chiefs of At-boy,--the Yellow Ford across one of the streams of the
+Boyne in Meath. To it came the successor of Patrick, the archbishop of
+Connacht, the archbishop of Leinster, the lord of Breifne, the lord of
+Oirgialla, the king of Ulster, the king of Tara, and Ragnall son of
+Ragnall, lord of the Foreigners. The whole of their gathering and
+assemblage was 19,000 horsemen, of which 6000 were Connachtmen, 4000
+with the lord of Breifne, 2000 with the king of Tara, 4000 with the lord
+of Oirgialla and the king of Ulster, 2000 with the chief of Ui-Failge,
+and 1000 with the Foreigners of At-Cliat. They passed many good
+resolutions at this meeting, respecting veneration for churches and
+clerics, and control of tribes and territories, so that women used to
+traverse Ireland alone; and a restoration of his prey was made by the
+chief of the Ui-Failge at the hands of the kings aforesaid. They
+afterwards separated in peace and amity, without battle or controversy,
+or without anyone complaining of another at that meeting, in consequence
+of the prosperousness of the king, who had assembled these chiefs with
+their forces at one place."
+
+Here is a foreshadowing of the representative assemblies of our modern
+times, and the same wise spirit is shown in another event of the same
+year, thus recorded: "A hosting and a mustering of the men of Ireland,
+with their chieftains, by Ruaidri Ua Concobar; thither came the lord of
+Deas-muma, the lord of Tuaid-muma, the king of Meath, the lord of
+Oirgialla and all the chieftains of Leinster. They arrived in
+Tir-Eogain, and allotted the part of it north of Slieve Gullion,--now
+the eastern part of Derry,--to Nial Ua Lochlain for two hostages, and
+allotted the part of the country of the clan to the south of the
+mountain to Aed Ua Neill for two other hostages. Then the men of Ireland
+returned back southwards over Slieve Fuaid, through Tir-Eogain and
+Tir-Connaill, and over Assaroe--the Cataract of the Erne--and Ruaidri Ua
+Concobar escorted the lord of Deas-muma with his forces southwards
+through Tuaid-muma as far as Cnoc-Aine--in Limerick--and the lord of
+Deas-muma departed with gifts of many jewels and riches."
+
+While the Norse foreigners were a power at Dublin, Waterford, Cork and
+Limerick, there were not wanting occasions when one of the native tribes
+called on them for aid against another tribe, sharing with them the joys
+of victory or the sorrow of defeat, and, where fortune favored, dividing
+with them the "countless cows" taken in a raid. In like manner the
+Cinel Eogain, as we saw, hired the fleet of the Norsemen of the Western
+Isles of Scotland to help them to resist a raid of the Connachtmen. The
+example thus set was followed repeatedly in the coming years, and we
+find mention of Flemings, Welshmen and Saxons brought over to take one
+side or other in the tribal wars.
+
+In the same year that saw the two assemblings of the chieftains under
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar, another chieftain, Diarmaid son of Murcad brought
+in from "the land of the Saxons," as it was called, one of these bands
+of foreign mercenaries, for the most part Welsh descendants of the old
+Gaelic Britons, to aid him in his contest for "the kingdom of the sons
+of Ceinnsealaig." Two years later, Ruaidri Ua Concobar "granted ten cows
+every year from himself and from every king that should follow him for
+ever, to the Lector of Ard Maca, in honor of Patrick, to instruct the
+youths of Ireland and Alba in Literature."
+
+For the next year, 1170, we find this record: "Robert Mac Stepni and
+Ricard Mac Gillebert--Iarl Strangbow--came from Saxonland into Erin with
+a numerous force, and many knights and archers, in the army of the son
+of Murcad, to contest Leinster for him, and to disturb the Gaels of
+Erin in general; and the son of Murcad gave his daughter to Iarl
+Strangbow for coming into his army. They took Loch Garman--Wexford--and
+Port Lairge--Waterford--by force; and they took Gillemaire the officer
+of the fortress and Ua Faelain lord of the Deisi and his son, and they
+killed seven hundred persons there. Domnall Breagac with numbers of the
+men of Breag fell by the Leinstermen on that occasion. An army was led
+by Ruaidri Ua Concobar with the lord of Breifne and the lord of
+Oirgialla against Leinster and the Foreigners aforesaid, and there was a
+challenge of battle between them for the space of three days." This
+contest was indecisive. The most noteworthy event of the battle was the
+plundering and slaughter of the Danes of At-Cliat by the newcomers under
+Iarl Strangbow. The Danes had long before this given up their old pagan
+faith, converted by their captives and their Gaelic neighbors. Christ
+Church Cathedral in At-Cliat or Dublin was founded early in the
+preceding century by Sitric son of Olaf, king of the Danes of Dublin,
+and Donatus the first Danish bishop; but the oldest part of the present
+structure belongs to the time we are now speaking of: the close of the
+twelfth century. The transepts with their chevron mouldings and the
+principal doorway are of that period, and we may regard them as an
+offering in expiation of the early heathen raids on Lambay, Saint
+Patrick's Isle, and the early schools of the church.
+
+The ambitious Diarmaid Mac Murcad died shortly after the last battle we
+have recorded, "perishing without sacrament, of a loathsome disease;" a
+manifest judgment, in the eyes of the Chronicler, for the crime of
+bringing the Normans to Ireland. In the year that saw his death, "Henry
+the Second, king of the Saxons and duke of the Normans, came to Ireland
+with two hundred and forty ships." He established a footing in the land,
+as one of many contesting powers, but the immediate results of his
+coming were slight. This we can judge from the record of three years
+later: "A brave battle was fought by the Foreigners under Iarl Strangbow
+and the Gaels under Ruaidri Ua Concobar at Thurles, in which the
+Foreigners were finally defeated by dint of fighting. Seventeen hundred
+of the Foreigners were slain in the battle, and only a few of them
+survived with the Iarl, who proceeded in sorrow to his home at Port
+Lairge--Waterford." Iarl Strangbow died two years later at Dublin.
+
+Norman warriors continue to appear during the succeeding years,
+fighting against the native chieftains and against each other, while the
+native chieftains continue their own quarrels, just as in the days of
+the first Norse raids. Thus in the year of Iarl Strangbow's death, Kells
+was laid waste by the Foreigners in alliance with the native Ui-Briain,
+while later in the same year the Foreigners were driven from Limerick by
+Domnall Ua-Briain, who laid siege to them and forced them to surrender.
+
+Two years later, four hundred and fifty of the followers of De Courcy,
+another great Norman warrior, were defeated at Maghera Conall in Louth,
+some being drowned in the river, while others were slain on the
+battlefield. In the same year De Courcy was again defeated with great
+slaughter in Down, and escaped severely wounded to Dublin. For At-Cliat,
+from being a fortress of the Danes and Norsemen, was gradually becoming
+a Norman town. The doorway of Christ Church Cathedral, which dates from
+about this time, is of pure Norman style.
+
+In 1186 we find a son of the great Ruaidri Ua Concobar paying a band of
+these same Foreigners three thousand cows as "wages," for joining him in
+some plundering expedition against his neighbors. The genius of strife
+reigned supreme, and the newcomers were as completely under its sway as
+the old clansmen. Just as we saw the Dark Norsemen of the ninth century
+coming in their long ships to plunder the Fair Norsemen of At-Cliat, and
+the Fair Norsemen not less vigorously retaliating, so now we find wars
+breaking out among the Normans who followed in the steps of the
+Norsemen. In 1205 the Norman chieftain who held a part of Meath under
+his armed sway, and who had already built a strong castle at Kells, was
+at war with the De Bermingham family, who at that time held the old
+Danish stronghold of Limerick. Two years later another contest broke out
+between the De Berminghams and William Marescal, and yet another
+struggle between Hugo de Lacy and De Bermingham, very disastrous to the
+retainers of the latter, for the Chronicler tells us that "nearly all
+his people were ruined."
+
+Thus the old life of tribal struggle went on. The country was wealthy,
+full of cattle and herds, silver and gold, stored corn and fruit, rich
+dyed stuffs and ornaments. The chieftains and provincial kings lived in
+state within their forts, with their loyal warriors around them,
+feasting and making merry, and the bards and heralds recited for their
+delight the great deeds of the men of old, their forefathers; the
+harpers charmed or saddened them with the world-old melodies that
+Deirdre had played for Naisi, that Meave had listened to, that Crede
+sang for her poet lover.
+
+The life of the church was not less vigorous and vital. There are many
+churches and cathedrals of that period of transition, as of the epoch
+before the first Norman came, which show the same fervor and devotion,
+the same faith made manifest by works of beauty. In truth no country in
+the world has so full and rich a record in lasting stone, beginning with
+the dwellings of the early saints who had seen the first Messenger face
+to face, and passing down through age after age, showing the life and
+growth of the faith from generation to generation.
+
+The schools, as we saw, carried on the old classical tradition, bringing
+forth monuments like the Annals of Tigearnac; and there was the same
+vigor and vital force in every part of the nation's life. The coming of
+the Normans changed this in no essential regard. There was something
+added in architecture, the Norman modifying the old native style; the
+castle and keep gradually taking the place of the earthwork and stone
+fort. And in the tenure of land certain new principles were introduced.
+But the sum of national life went on unbroken, less modified, probably,
+than it had been by the old Norse raids.
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+THE NORMANS.
+
+A.D. 1250-1603.
+
+When summing up each epoch of Irish history, we may find both interest
+and profit in considering what the future of the land and the people
+might have been had certain new elements not been added. Thus we may try
+to picture to ourselves what would have been our history had our life
+moved forward from the times of Cuculain and Concobar, of Find and
+Cormac son of Art, without that transforming power which the fifth
+century brought. We may imagine the tribal strife and stress growing
+keener and fiercer, till the whole life and strength of the people was
+fruitlessly consumed in plundering and destroying.
+
+Or we may imagine an unbroken continuance of the epoch of saintly
+aspiration, the building of churches, the illumination of holy books, so
+dividing the religious from the secular community as almost to make two
+nations in one, a nation altogether absorbed in the present life, with
+another nation living in its midst, but dwelling wholly in the thought
+of the other world. Religion would have grown to superstition, ecstasy
+would have ruled in the hearts of the religious devotees, weakening
+their hold on the real, and wafting them away into misty regions of
+paradise. We should have had every exaggeration of ascetic practice,
+hermitages multiplying among the rocks and islands of the sea, men and
+women torturing their bodies for the saving of their souls.
+
+The raids of the Norsemen turned the strong aspirations of the religious
+schools into better channels, bringing them to a sense of their identity
+with the rest of the people, compelling them to bear their part of the
+burden of calamity and strife. The two nations which might have wandered
+farther and farther apart were thus welded into one, so that the spirit
+of religion became what it has ever since remained, something essential
+and inherent in the life of the whole people.
+
+After the waning of the Norsemen, a period opened full of great national
+promise in many ways. We see the church strengthened and confirmed,
+putting forth its power in admirable works of art, churches and
+cathedrals full of the fire and fervor of devotion, and conceived in a
+style truly national, with a sense of beauty altogether its own. Good
+morals and generous feeling mark the whole life of the church through
+this period, and the great archbishop whose figure we have drawn in
+outline is only one of many fine and vigorous souls among his
+contemporaries.
+
+[Illustration: Dunluce Castle.]
+
+The civil life of the nation, too, shows signs of singular promise at
+the same time, a promise embodied in the person of the king of Connacht,
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar, some of whose deeds we have recorded. There was a
+clearer sense of national feeling and national unity than ever before, a
+recognition of the method of conciliation and mutual understanding,
+rather than the old appeal to armed force, as under the genius of tribal
+strife. We see Ruaidri convoking the kings, chieftains and warriors to a
+solemn assembly, presided over by the king and the archbishops of the
+realm, and "passing good resolutions" for the settlement of religious
+and civil matters, and the better ordering of territories and tribes.
+That assembly was convened a half-century before the famous meeting
+between King John and his barons, at Runnymead among the Windsor
+meadows; and the seed then sown might have brought forth fruit as full
+of promise and potency for the future as the Great Charter itself. The
+contrast between these two historic assemblies is instructive. In the
+one case, we have a provincial king from the rich and beautiful country
+beyond the Shannon, gradually gaining such influence over the kings of
+the provinces and the chieftains of the tribes that he had come to be
+regarded as in a sense the overlord of the whole land, not through
+inherent sovreignty or divine right, but first as the chosen chief of
+his own tribe, and then as the elect of the whole body of chieftains,
+first among his peers. In this character we see Ruaidri settling
+disputes between two sections of the great Northern clan, and fixing a
+boundary between them; giving presents to the chieftains of the south
+for their support in this difficult decision, and exercising a
+beneficent influence over the whole people, a moral sway rather than a
+sovereign and despotic authority. It is pleasant to find the same king
+establishing a college foundation for the instruction of the youth of
+Ireland and Scotland in literature.
+
+This is what we have on the one hand. On the other, we have the Norman
+king surrounded by his barons, over whom he claimed, but could not
+exercise, despotic authority; and the Norman barons taking advantage of
+his necessity to extort promises and privileges for their own order
+rather than for the whole people. For we must remember that the Angles
+and Saxons had been reduced by conquest to a servile condition, from
+which they never wholly recovered. The ruling classes of Britain at the
+present day are at least nominal descendants of those same Norman
+barons; and between them and the mass of the people--the sons of the
+Saxons and Angles--there is still a great gulf fixed. It is quite
+impossible for one of the tillers of the soil to stand on a footing of
+equality with the old baronial class, and the gulf has widened, rather
+than closed, since the battle of Hastings and the final overthrow of the
+Saxon power.
+
+We see here the full contrast between the ideal of kingship in Ireland
+and that which grew up among the Norman conquerors of the Saxons. The
+Irish king was always in theory and often in fact a real representative,
+duly elected by the free suffrage of his tribesmen; he was not owner of
+the tribal land, as the duke of the Normans was; he was rather the
+leader of the tribe, chosen to guard their common possessions. The
+communal system of Ireland stands here face to face with the feudal
+system of the Normans.
+
+It would be a study of great interest to consider what form of national
+life might have resulted in Ireland from the free growth of this
+principle of communal chieftainship. There are many analogies in other
+lands, all of which point to the likelihood of a slow emergence of the
+hereditary principle; a single family finally overtopping the whole
+nation. Had this free development taken place, we might have had a
+strong and vigorous national evolution, an abundant flowering of all our
+energies and powers through the Middle Ages, a rich and vigorous
+production of art and literature, equal to the wonderful blossoming of
+genius in the Val d'Arno and Venice and Rome; but we should have missed
+something much greater than all these; something towards which events
+and destiny have been leading us, through the whole of the Middle Ages
+and modern times.
+
+From this point forward we shall have to trace the working of that
+destiny, not manifested in a free blossoming and harvesting of our
+national life, but rather in the suppression and involution of our
+powers; in a development arrested by pressure from without and kept thus
+suspended until the field was ready for its real work. Had our fate been
+otherwise, we might now be looking back to a great mediaeval past, as
+Spain and Austria look back; it is fated that we shall look not back but
+forwards, brought as we are by destiny into the midst of the modern
+world, a people with energy unimpaired, full of vigorous vital force,
+uncorrupted by the weakening influence of wealth, taught by our own
+history the measureless evil of oppression, and therefore cured once for
+all of the desire to dominate others. Finally, the intense inner life
+towards which we have been led by the checking of our outward energies
+has opened to us secrets of the invisible world which are of untold
+value, of measureless promise for all future time.
+
+We have, therefore, to trace the gradual involution of our national
+life; the checking and restraining of that free development which would
+assuredly have been ours, had our national life grown forward unimpeded
+and uninfluenced from without, from the days when the Norse power waned.
+The first great check to that free development came from the feudal
+system, the principle of which was brought over by Robert FitzStephen,
+Richard FitzGilbert, the De Courcys, the De Lacys, the De Berminghams
+and their peers, whose coming we have recorded. They added new elements
+to the old struggle of district against district, tribe against tribe,
+but they added something more enduring--an idea and principle destined
+almost wholly to supplant the old communal tenure which was the genius
+of the native polity. The outward and visible sign of that new principle
+was manifested in the rapid growth of feudal castles, with their strong
+keeps, at every point of vantage gained by the Norman lords. They were
+lords of the land, not leaders of the tribe, and their lordship was
+fitly symbolized in the great gloomy towers of stone that everywhere
+bear witness to their strength, almost untouched as they are by the
+hand of time.
+
+When the duke of the Normans overthrew the Saxon king at Hastings, he
+became real owner of the soil of England. His barons and lords held
+their estates from him, in return for services to be rendered to him
+direct. To reward them for supporting him, first in that decisive
+battle, and then in whatever contests he might engage in, they were
+granted the right to tax certain tracts of country, baronies, earldoms,
+or counties, according to the title they bore. This tax was exacted
+first in service, then in produce, and finally in coin. It was the
+penalty of conquest, the tribute of the subject Saxons and Angles.
+There was no pretence of a free contract; no pretence that the baron
+returned to the farmer or laborer an equal value for the tax thus
+exacted. It was tribute pure and simple, with no claim to be anything
+else. That system of tribute has been consecrated in the land tenure of
+England, and the class enriched by that tribute, and still bearing the
+territorial titles which are its hall-mark, has always been, as it is
+to-day, the dominant class alike in political and social life. In other
+words, the Norman subjugation of Saxon and Angle is thoroughly effective
+at this moment.
+
+This principle of private taxation, as a right granted by the sovereign,
+came over to Ireland with the De Courcys and De Lacys and their like.
+But it by no means overspread Ireland in a single tide, as in England,
+after Hastings was lost and won. Its progress was slow; so slow, indeed,
+that the old communal system lingers here and there at the present day.
+The communal chiefs lived their lives side by side with the Norman
+barons, fighting now with the barons, now with each other; and the same
+generous rivalry, as we have seen, led to abundant fighting among the
+barons also. The principle of feudal ownership was working its way,
+however. We shall see later how great was its ultimate influence,--not
+so much by direct action, as in the quite modern reaction which its
+abuse provoked--a reaction from which have been evolved certain
+principles of value to the whole world.
+
+Leaving this force to work its way through the centuries, we may turn
+now to the life of the times as it appeared to the men and women who
+lived in them, and as they themselves have recorded it. We shall find
+fewer great personalities; nor should we expect this to be otherwise, if
+we are right in thinking that the age of struggle, with its
+efflorescence of great persons, had done its work, and was already
+giving way before the modern spirit, with its genius for the universal
+rather than the personal. We shall have contests to chronicle during the
+following centuries, whether engendered within or forced upon us from
+without; but they are no longer the substance of our history. They are
+only the last clouds of a departing storm; the mists before the dawn of
+the modern world.
+
+The most noteworthy of these contests in the early Norman age was the
+invasion under Edward Bruce, brother of the Scottish king, who brought a
+great fleet and army to Larne, then as now the Irish port nearest to the
+northern kingdom. The first sufferers by this invasion were the Normans
+of Heath, and we presently find these same Normans allied with Feidlimid
+son of Aed Ua Concobar and the Connachtmen, fighting side by side
+against the common foe. This was in 1315; two years later Robert Bruce
+joined his brother, and it was not till 1319 that Edward Bruce finally
+fell at Dundalk, "and no achievement had been performed in Ireland for a
+long time before," the Chronicler tells us, "from which greater benefit
+had accrued to the country than from this; for during the three and a
+half years that Edward had spent in it, a universal famine prevailed to
+such a degree that men were wont to devour one another."
+
+A ray of light is thus shed on the intellectual and moral life of the
+time: "1398: Garrett Earl of Desmond--or Deas-muma--a cheerful and
+courteous man, who excelled all the Normans and many of the Irish in the
+knowledge of the Irish language, poetry, history and other learning,
+died after the victory of peace." We see that the Normans are already
+fallen under the same influence of assimilation which had transformed
+the Danes two hundred years before.
+
+A half-century later, we get a vigorous and lurid picture of the
+survival of the old tribal strife: "1454: Donell O'Donell was installed
+in the lordship of Tyrconnell, in opposition to Rury O'Donell. Not long
+after this, Donell was treacherously taken captive and imprisoned in the
+castle of Inis--an island in Lough Swilly. As soon as Rury received
+tidings of this, he mustered an army thither, and proceeded to demolish
+the castle in which Donell was imprisoned with a few men to guard him.
+Rury and his army burned the great door of the castle, and set the
+stairs on fire; whereupon Donell, thinking that his life would be taken
+as soon as the army should reach the castle,--it being his dying
+request, as he thought--that he might be loosed from his fetters, as he
+deemed it a disgrace to be killed while imprisoned and fettered. His
+request was granted, and he was loosed from his fetters; after which he
+ascended to the battlements of the castle, to view the motions of the
+invading army. And he saw Rury beneath, with eyes flashing enmity, and
+waiting until the fire should subside, that he might enter and kill him.
+Donell then, finding a large stone by his side, hurled it directly down
+upon Rury, so that it fell on the crest of his helmet, on the top of his
+head, and crushed it, so that he instantly died. The invading forces
+were afterwards defeated, and by this throw Donell saved his own life
+and acquired the lordship of Tyrconnell."
+
+There is a whole historical romance in that single picture; the passage
+could not easily be surpassed for direct and forcible narrative. A few
+years later, we come on one of the most amusing things in the whole
+series of annals, a perfect contrast to the grim ferocity of the feud of
+the O'Donells. In 1472 "a wonderful animal was sent to Ireland by the
+king of England. She resembled a mare, and was of a yellow color, with
+the hoofs of a cow, a long neck, a very large head, a large tail, which
+was ugly and scant of hair. She had a saddle of her own. Wheat and salt
+were her usual food. She used to draw the largest sled-burden behind
+her. She used to kneel when passing under any doorway, however high, and
+also to let her rider mount." It is evident that the Gaelic language in
+the fifteenth century lacked a name for the camel. The same year, we are
+told, "the young earl of Desmond was set at liberty by the MacCarthys;
+he disabled Garrett, son of the earl of Kildare."
+
+Here is another passage which vies in vividness and force with the story
+of the death of Rury O'Donell: "1557: Two spies, Donough and Maurice by
+name, entered the camp of John O'Neill by Lough Swilly, and mingled with
+the troop without being noticed; for in consequence of the number and
+variety of the troops who were there, it was not easy for them to
+discriminate between one another, even if it were day, except by
+recognizing their chieftains alone. The two persons aforesaid proceeded
+from one fire to another, until they came to the great central fire,
+which was at the entrance of the son of O'Neill's tent; and a huge
+torch, thicker than a man's body, was continually flaming at a short
+distance from the fire, and sixty grim and redoubtable warriors with
+sharp, keen axes, terrible and ready for action, and sixty stern and
+terrific Scots, with massive, broad and heavy striking swords in their
+hands, ready to strike and parry, were guarding the son of O'Neill. When
+the time came for the troops to dine, and food was divided and
+distributed among them, the two spies whom we have mentioned stretched
+out their hands to the distributor like the rest, and that which fell to
+their share was a measure of meal, and a suitable complement of butter.
+With this testimony of their adventure they returned to their
+own people."
+
+Here again, what a picture of the camp-life of the age; the darkness of
+night, the great central fire with the sixty grim and redoubtable
+warriors armed with keen axes, terrible and ready for action, and the
+sixty stern and terrific Scots with their massive swords. The admirable
+manner of the narrative is as striking as the fierce vigor of the life
+portrayed. So we might go on, adding red pages of martial records, but
+in reality adding nothing to our understanding of the times. The life of
+the land was as full and abundant as of old, and one outcome of that
+life we may touch on rather more at length.
+
+We have said much of the old religious schools of Ireland, with their
+fine and vigorous intellectual life, which did so much to carry forward
+the torch of culture to our modern world. For nearly seven hundred years
+these great schools seem to have developed wholly along indigenous
+lines, once they had accepted the body of classical culture from the
+Roman Empire, then tottering to its fall. The full history of that
+remarkable chapter in the world's spiritual life has yet to be written;
+but this we can foretell, that when written, it will abound with rich
+material and ample evidence of a sound and generous culture, inspired
+throughout with the fervor of true faith.
+
+About the time when the Norman warriors began to mingle with the
+fighting chieftains of the old native tribes, a change came over the
+religious history of the country. After sending forth men of power and
+light to the awakening lands of modern Europe, Ireland began to receive
+a returning tide, to reap a harvest from these same lands, in the friars
+and abbots of the great Continental orders founded by men like Saint
+Bernard, Saint Dominick and Saint Francis of Assisi. A change in the
+church architecture of the period visibly records this spiritual change;
+continental forms appear, beginning with the rounded arches of the
+Normans, and passing gradually into the various forms of pointed arches
+which we know as Gothic. Very beautiful Abbeys belonging to this epoch
+remain everywhere throughout the island, making once more evident--what
+strikes us at every point of our study--that no country in the world is
+so rich in these lasting records of every step of our national life,
+whether in pagan or Christian times.
+
+We have said much of the archaic cromlechs. We have recorded the great
+Pyramids by the Boyne telling us of the genius of the De Danaans. The
+Milesian epoch is even now revealed to us in the great earthworks of
+Tara and Emain and Cruacan. We can, if we wish, climb the mound of
+heaped-up earth where was the fortress of Cuculain, or look over the
+green plains from the hill of Find.
+
+[Illustration: Mellifont Abbey, Co. Louth.]
+
+In like manner, there is an unbroken series of monuments through the
+early Christian epoch, beginning with the oratories of the sixth
+century, continuing through the early churches of Killiney, Moville,
+Dalkey, Glendalough and Monasterboice, from before the Norse inroads;
+followed by the epoch of Round Towers, or protected belfries, with their
+churches, nearly three score of these Round Towers remaining in fair
+preservation, while many are perfect from base to apex; and culminating
+in Cormac's chapel and the beautiful group of buildings on Cashel Rock.
+For the next period, the age of transition after the waning of the
+Norsemen and the coming of the first Normans, we have many monuments in
+the Norman style, like the door of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin,
+with its romance of Danish conversion and Norse religious fervor.
+
+Finally, we come to the age whose progress we have just recorded, which
+covers the whole of the Middle Ages. For this period, which was for
+Ireland an epoch of foreign influence much more than of foreign rule, we
+have many beautiful Abbeys, built for those foreign orders whose coming
+was in a sense a return tide, a backward flow of the old missionary
+spirit which went forth from Ireland over nascent modern Europe. The
+life of these abbeys was full of rich imaginative and religious power;
+it abounded in urbanity and ripe culture of a somewhat selfish and
+exclusive type. Yet we cannot but feel a limitless affection and
+sympathy for the abbots and friars of the days of old who have left us
+such a rich heritage of beauty and grace.
+
+All these abbeys seem to have been formed on a single plan: a cruciform
+church symbolized the source of all their inspiration, its choir
+extending towards the east, whence the Light had come; the nave, or main
+body of the church, was entered by the great western door, and the arms
+of the cross, the transepts, extended to the north and south. Here is a
+very beautiful symbol, a true embodiment of the whole spirit and
+inspiration of the monastic orders. From one of the transepts a side
+door generally led to the domestic buildings, the dormitory, the
+refectory, the chapter house, where the friars assembled in conclave
+under the presidency of the abbot. There were lesser buildings,
+store-rooms, granaries, work-rooms, but these were the kernel of the
+establishment. The church was the center of all things, and under its
+floor the friars were at last laid to rest, while brother friars carved
+tombs for them and epitaphs, adding a new richness of decoration to the
+already beautiful church.
+
+We may record a few of these old foundations, showing at the same time
+the present state of the old abbey buildings. At Newtown on the northern
+bank of the Boyne, about a mile below Trim, Simon Rochfort founded an
+abbey for the Augustinian Canons in 1206, dedicating it to Saint Peter
+and Saint Paul. The capitals of the pillars in the church, the vaulting
+of the roof and the shafts of the arches which supported the tower are
+full of singular grace and beauty, even now when the abbey is roofless
+and in part destroyed, while the corbels and mouldings round the
+lancet-shaped windows are full of luxuriant fancy and charm. We can
+divine from them the full and rich spiritual life which brought forth
+such exquisite flowers of beauty; we can imagine the fine aroma of
+fervor and saintly peace which brooded over these consecrated aisles.
+
+A few miles below Trim, and an equal distance from the old royal palace
+of Tara, Bective Abbey stands on the northern bank of the Boyne, with a
+square, battlemented tower overshadowing its cloistered quadrangle. The
+cinque-foil cloister arches, the fillets that bind the clustered shafts
+of the pillars, the leaf ornaments of the plinths at their base all
+speak of a luxuriant sense of beauty and grace, of a spirit of pure and
+admirable artistic work. This rich creative power thus breaking forth in
+lovely handiwork is only the outward sign of a full inner life, kindled
+by the fire of aspiration, and glowing with the warm ardor of devotion.
+Bective Abbey dates from about 1150. We are told that the king of Meath
+who founded it for the Cistercian order "endowed it with two hundred and
+forty-five acres of land, a fishing-weir and a mill." From this meager
+outline we can almost restore the picture of the life, altogether
+idyllic and full of quiet delight, that the old Friars lived among the
+meadows of the Boyne.
+
+Grey Abbey was founded a little later, in 1193, for the same Cistercian
+order, where the promontory of the Ards divides Strangford Lough from
+the eastern sea. Over the waters of the lough, the red sandstone hills
+of north Down make a frame for the green of the meadows, as the tide
+laps and murmurs close to the old monastic church. Grey Abbey owes its
+foundation to the piety of a princess of the Isle of Man, wedded to De
+Courcy, the Norman warrior whose victories and defeats we have recorded.
+The great beauty of its church is due to the soaring loftiness of the
+eastern window, and the graceful daring of the arches which in former
+days upheld the central tower.
+
+Other Cistercian foundations are commemorated in the names of
+Abbey-leix in Queen's county, and Abbey-dorney and Abbey-feale in Kerry;
+all three dating from after the reformation of the order by Saint
+Bernard the Younger, though the work of that ardent missionary did not
+apparently extend its influence to Ireland until a later date. This
+reformer of the Cistercians must not be confused with the elder Saint
+Bernard, whose hospice guards the pass of the Alps which bears his name.
+Saint Bernard of the Alps died in 1008, while Saint Bernard the reformer
+was born in 1093, dying sixty years later as abbot of Clara vallis or
+Clairvaux, on the bank of the Aube in northern France. It was at this
+Abbey of the Bright Vale, or Clara vallis, that Archbishop Maelmaedog
+resigned his spirit to heaven, five years before the death of the
+younger Saint Bernard, then abbot there. This is a link between the old
+indigenous church and the continental orders of the Friars.
+
+Killmallock Abbey, in Limerick, belonged to the order of the Dominicans,
+founded by the scion of the Guzmans, the ardent apostle of Old Castile,
+known to history as Saint Dominick. Here again we have a beautiful abbey
+church with a square central tower, upborne on soaring and graceful
+arches from the point where the nave joined the choir. There is only one
+transept--on the south--so that the church is not fully cruciform, a
+peculiarity shared by several other Dominican buildings. The eastern
+window and the window of this transept are full of delicate grace and
+beauty, each containing five lights, and marked by the singularly
+charming manner in which the mullions are interlaced above. Enough
+remains of the cloister and the domestic buildings for us to bring back
+to life the picture of the old monastic days, when the good Friars
+worked and prayed there, with the sunlight falling on them through the
+delicate network of the windows.
+
+Holycross Abbey, near Thurles in Tipperary, was another of the
+Cistercian foundations, its charter, dating from 1182, being still in
+existence. Its church is cruciform; the nave is separated from the north
+aisle by round arches, and from the south aisle by pointed arches, which
+gives it a singular and unusual beauty. The great western window of the
+nave, with its six lights, is also very wonderful. Two chapels are
+attached to the north transept, with a passage between them, its roof
+supported by a double row of pointed arches upheld by twisted pillars.
+The roof is delicately groined, as is the roof of the choir, and the
+whole abbey breathes a luxuriant richness of imagination, bearing
+everywhere the signs of high creative genius. The same lavish
+imagination is shown everywhere in the interlaced tracery, the black
+limestone giving the artist an admirable vehicle for his work. Though
+the charter dates from the twelfth century, some of the work is about
+two centuries later, showing finely the continuity of life and spiritual
+power in the old monastic days.
+
+[Illustration: Holy Cross Abbey, Co. Tipperary.]
+
+The Friars of Saint Augustine, who were in possession of the abbey at
+Newtown on the Boyne, had another foundation not far from West port in
+Mayo, in the Abbey of Ballintober, founded in 1216 by a son of the great
+Ruaidri Ua Concobar. Here also we have the cruciform church, with four
+splendid arches rising from the intersection of nave and choir, and once
+supporting the tower. The Norman windows over the altar, with their
+dog-tooth mouldings, are very perfect. In a chapel on the south of the
+choir are figures of the old abbots carved in stone.
+
+One of the Ui-Briain founded a Franciscan Abbey at Ennis in Clare about
+1240, which is more perfectly preserved than any of those we have
+described. The tower still stands, rising over the junction of nave and
+choir; the refectory, chapter house, and some other buildings still
+remain, while the figure of the patron, Saint Francis of Assisi, still
+stands beside the altar at the north pier of the nave.
+
+Clare Abbey, a mile from Ennis, was founded for the Augustine Friars in
+1195, and here also the tower still stands, dominating the surrounding
+plain. Three miles further south, on the shore of Killone Lake, was yet
+another abbey of the same period, while twenty miles to the north, at
+Corcomroe on the shore of Galway Bay, the Cistercians had yet
+another home.
+
+We might continue the list indefinitely. Some of the most beautiful of
+our abbeys still remain to be recorded, but we can do no more than give
+their names: Bonamargy was built for the Franciscans in Antrim in the
+fifteenth century; the Dominican priory at Roscommon dates from 1257;
+the Cistercian Abbey of Jerpoint in Kilkenny was begun in 1180; Molana
+Abbey, in Waterford, was built for the Augustinians on the site of a
+very old church; and finally Knockmoy Abbey in Galway, famous for its
+fourteenth century frescoes, was begun in 1189. We must remember that
+every one of these represents, and by its variations of style indicates,
+an unbroken life through several centuries. The death-knell of the old
+life of the abbeys and priories, in Ireland as in England, was struck in
+the year 1537 by the law which declared their lands forfeited to the
+crown; as the result of the religious controversies of the beginning of
+the sixteenth century.
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.
+
+A.D. 1603-1660.
+
+The confiscation of the abbey lands, as the result of religious
+controversy, closed an epoch of ecclesiastical life in Ireland, which we
+cannot look back on without great regret for the noble and beautiful
+qualities it brought forth in such abundance. There is a perennial charm
+and fascination in the quiet life of the old religious houses--in the
+world, yet not of the world--which appeals to aesthetic and moral
+elements in our minds in equal degree. From their lovely churches and
+chapter-houses the spirits of the old monks invite us to join them in an
+unworldly peace on earth, a renewal of the golden age, a life full of
+aspiration and self-forgetfulness, with all the burdens of egotism
+laid aside.
+
+Yet after all is said, we can hardly fail to see that out of the
+spoliation and scattering of the religious orders much good came. There
+was a danger that, like the older indigenous schools which they
+supplanted, these later foundations might divide the nation in two, all
+things within their consecrated walls being deemed holy, while all
+without was unregenerate, given up to wrath. A barrier of feelings and
+hopes thus springing up, tends to harden from year to year, till at last
+we have a religious caste grown proud and arrogant, and losing all trace
+of the spiritual fervor which is its sole reason for being.
+
+The evils which surround a wealthy church are great and easily to be
+understood, nor need we lay stress on them. There is, indeed, cause for
+wonder in the spectacle of the followers of him "who had not where to
+lay his head" become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest owners of land in
+Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses without number might
+and did often arise from this very fact. Ambition, the desire of wealth,
+the mere love of ease, led many to profess a religious life who had
+never passed through that transformation of will and understanding which
+is the essence of religion. The very purpose of religion was forgotten,
+or allowed to be hidden away under things excellent in themselves, yet
+not essential; and difference of view about these unessential things led
+to fierce and bitter controversy, and later to open strife and war.
+
+We take religion, in its human aspect, to mean the growth of a new and
+wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive consciousness of the
+individual; a superseding of the personal by the humane; a change from
+egotism to a more universal understanding; so that each shall act, not
+in order to gain an advantage over others, but rather to attain the
+greatest good for himself and others equally; that one shall not
+dominate another for his own profit, but shall rather seek to draw forth
+in that other whatever is best and truest, so that both may find their
+finest growth. Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one's
+neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul, the
+common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse from the
+beginning. Individual consciousness is in no way effaced; something new,
+wider and more humane, something universal, is added to it from above;
+something consciously common to all souls. And through the inspiration
+of that larger soul, the individual life for the first time comes to its
+true power--a power which is held by all pure souls in common.
+
+We can see that something like this was the original inspiration of the
+religious orders. Their very name of Friars or Brothers speaks of the
+ideal of a common life above egotism. They sought a new birth through
+the death of selfishness, through self-sacrifice and renunciation. All
+their life in common was a symbol of the single soul inspiring them, the
+very form of their churches bearing testimony to their devotion. More
+than that, the beauty and inspiration which still radiate from the old
+abbey buildings show how often and in how large a degree that ideal was
+actually attained.
+
+Nevertheless we can very well see how the possession of large wealth and
+costly offerings might be a hindrance to that spirit, fanning back to
+life the smouldering fires of desire. We can see even more clearly that
+the division between the secular and the religious life would tend to
+raise a moral barrier, hardening that very sense of separation which the
+humane and universal consciousness seeks to kill. Finally, we should see
+what the world has often seen: the disciples of the Nazarene dwelling in
+palaces, and vying with princes in the splendor of their retinues. This
+is hardly the way to make real the teaching of "the kingdom not of this
+world." This world, in the meaning of that saying, is the old world of
+egotism, of self-assertion, of selfish rivalry, of the sense of
+separation. The kingdom is that very realm of humane and universal
+consciousness added from above, the sense of the one soul common to all
+men and working through all men, whether they know it or not.
+
+We can, therefore, see that the confiscation of the monasteries, and
+even the persecution of the religious orders, might be the cause of
+lasting spiritual good; it was like the opening of granaries and the
+scattering of grain abroad over the fields. The religious force, instead
+of drawing men out of the world, thenceforth was compelled to work among
+all men, not creating beautiful abbeys but transforming common lives.
+Persecution was the safeguard of sincerity, the fire of purification,
+from which men's spirits came forth pure gold. Among all nations of the
+world, Ireland has long held the first place for pure morals, especially
+in the relations of sex; and this is increasingly true of those
+provinces where the old indigenous element is most firmly established.
+We may affirm that the spiritualizing of religious feeling through
+persecution has had its share in bringing this admirable result,
+working, as it did, on a race which has ever held a high ideal
+of purity.
+
+Thus out of evil comes good; out of oppression, rapacity and
+confiscation grow pure unselfishness, an unworldly ideal, a sense of the
+invisible realm. We shall presently see the same forces of rapacity and
+avarice sowing the seeds for a not less excellent harvest in the world
+of civil life.
+
+The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first Norman
+adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal recognition over
+the whole country until the seventeenth. The old communal tenure of the
+Brehon law was gradually superseded, so that, instead of innumerable
+tribal territories with elected chiefs, there grew up a system of
+estates, where the land was owned by one man and tilled by others. The
+germ of this tenure was the right of private taxation over certain
+districts, granted by the Norman duke to his barons and warriors as the
+reward for their help in battle. Feudal land tenure never was, and never
+pretended to be, a contract between cultivator and landowner for their
+mutual benefit. It was rather the right to prey on the farmer, assigned
+to the landowner by the king, and paid for in past or present services
+to the king. In other words, the head of the Norman army invited his
+officers to help themselves to a share of the cattle and crops over
+certain districts of England, and promised to aid them in securing their
+plunder, in case the Saxon cultivator was rash enough to resist. The
+baronial order presently ceased to render any real service to their
+duke, beyond upholding him that he might uphold them. But there was no
+such surcease for the Saxon cultivator. The share of his cattle and
+crops which he was compelled to give up to the Norman baron became more
+rigidly defined, more strictly exacted, with every succeeding century,
+and the whole civil state of England was built up on this principle.
+
+The baronial order assembled at Runnymead to force the hand of the king.
+From that time forward their power increased, while the king's power
+waned. But there was no Runnymead for the Saxon cultivator. He
+continued, as to this day he continues, to pay the share of his cattle
+and crops to the Norman baron or his successor, in return for
+services--no longer rendered--to the king. The whole civil state of
+England, therefore, depends on the principle of private taxation; the
+Norman barons and their successors receiving a share of the cattle and
+crops of the whole country, year after year, generation after
+generation, century after century, as payment for services long become
+purely imaginary, and even in the beginning rendered not to the
+cultivator who was taxed, but to the head of the armed invaders, who
+stood ready to enforce the payment. The Constitution of England embodies
+this very principle even now, in the twentieth century. Two of the three
+Estates,--King, Lords and Commons,--in whom the law-making power is
+vested, represent the Norman conquest, while even the third, still
+called the Lower House, boasts of being "an assembly of gentlemen," that
+is, of those who possess the right of private taxation of land, the
+right to claim a share of the cattle and crops of the whole country
+without giving anything at all in return.
+
+This is the system which English influence slowly introduced into
+Ireland, and with the reign of the first Stuarts the change was
+practically complete, guaranteed by law, and enforced by armed power.
+The tribesmen were now tenants of their former elected chief, in whom
+the ownership of the tribal land was invested; the right of privately
+taxing the tribesmen was guaranteed to the chief by law, and a share of
+all cattle and crops was his by legal right, not as head of the tribe,
+but as owner of the land, with power to dispossess the tribesmen if they
+failed to pay his tax.
+
+But very many districts had long before this come under the dominion of
+Norman adventurers, like the De Courcys, the De Lacys, and the rest, of
+whose coming we have told. They also enjoyed the right of private
+taxation over the districts under their dominion, and, naturally, had
+power to assign this right to others,--not only to their heirs, but to
+their creditors,--or even simply to sell the right of taxing a certain
+district to the highest bidder in open market.
+
+The tribal warfare of the Middle Ages had brought many of the old chiefs
+and Norman lords into open strife with the central power, with the
+result that the possessions of unsuccessful chiefs and lords were
+continually assigned by the law-courts to those who stood on the side of
+the central power, the right to tax certain districts thus changing
+hands indefinitely. The law-courts thus came into possession of a very
+potent weapon, whether for rewarding the friends or punishing the
+enemies of the central power, or simply for the payment of personal and
+partisan favors.
+
+During the reign of the first Stuarts the full significance of this
+weapon seems to have been grasped. We see an unlimited traffic in the
+right to tax; estates confiscated and assigned to time-serving
+officials, and endless abuses arising from the corruption of the courts,
+the judges being appointed by the very persons who were presently to
+invoke the law to their own profit. The tribal system was submerged,
+and the time of uncertainty was taken advantage of to introduce
+unlimited abuses, to assign to adventurers a fat share of other men's
+goods, to create a class legally owning the land, and entitled, in
+virtue of that ownership, to a share of the cattle and crops which they
+had done nothing to produce.
+
+The Stuarts were at this very time sowing the seeds of civil war in
+England by the introduction of like abuses, the story of which has been
+repeatedly told; and we are all familiar with the history of the great
+uprising which was thereby provoked, to the temporary eclipse of the
+power of the crown. The story of the like uprising at the same epoch,
+and from kindred causes, in Ireland, is much more obscure, but equally
+worth recording, and to this uprising we may now turn.
+
+Its moral causes we have already spoken of. There was, first, the
+confiscation of the abbey lands, and the transfer of church revenues and
+buildings to Anglican clergy--clergy, that is, who recognized the
+sovreign of England as the head of the church. This double confiscation
+touched the well-springs of intense animosity, the dispossessed abbots
+using all the influences of their order in foreign lands to bring about
+their re-installation, while the controversy as to the headship of the
+church aroused all the fierce and warring passions that had been raging
+on the Continent since the beginning of the sixteenth century.
+
+There were, besides, the griefs of the dispossessed chieftains, whose
+tribal lands had been given to others. Chief among these was the famous
+house of O'Neill, the descendants of Nial, the old pagan monarch whose
+wars are thought to have brought the captive of Slemish Mountain to
+Ireland. The O'Neills, like their neighbors the O'Donnells, descendants
+of Domnall, had been one of the great forces of tribal strife for eighty
+generations, and they now saw their lands confiscated and given over to
+strangers. But they were only representatives of a feeling which was
+universal; an indignant opposition to arbitrary and tyrannous
+expropriation.
+
+The head of the O'Neills had made his peace with the Tudors on the very
+day Queen Elizabeth died, and the tribal lands had been guaranteed to
+him in perpetuity. But within four years plots were set on foot by the
+central authorities, possibly acting in good faith, to dispossess him
+and the chief of the O'Donnells on a charge of treason; and in 1607
+both fled to the Continent. Their example was followed by numberless
+others, and the more restless and combative spirits among the tribesmen,
+who preferred fighting to the tilling of their fields, entered the
+continental armies in large numbers.
+
+When the chiefs of the north fled to the Continent, their lands were
+held to have reverted to the crown; and not only was the right to tax
+the produce of these lands assigned to adherents of the central power,
+but numbers of farmers from the Scottish lowlands, and in lesser degree
+from England, were brought over and settled on the old tribal territory.
+The tribesmen, with their cattle, were driven to less fertile districts,
+and the valleys were tilled by the transplanted farmers of Scotland.
+This was the Plantation of Ulster, of 1611,--four years after the flight
+of O'Neill and O'Donnell. The religious controversies of Scotland were
+thereby introduced into Ireland, so that there were three parties now in
+conflict--the old indigenous church, dispossessed of revenues and
+buildings, and even of civil rights; the Anglicans who had received
+these revenues and buildings, and, lastly, the Dissenters--Presbyterians
+and Puritans--equally opposed to both the former.
+
+The struggle between the king and Parliament of England now found an
+echo in Ireland, the Anglican party representing the king, while the
+Scottish and English newcomers sympathized with the Parliament. A
+cross-fire of interests and animosities was thus aroused, which greatly
+complicated the first elements of strife. The Parliament at Dublin was
+in the hands of the Puritan party, and was in no sense representative of
+the other elements of the country. There was a Puritan army of about ten
+thousand, as a garrison of defence for the Puritan newcomers in Ulster,
+and there were abundant materials of an opposing national army in the
+tribal warriors both at home and on the Continent.
+
+These national materials were presently drawn together by the head of
+the O'Neills, known to history as Owen Roe, an admirable leader and a
+most accomplished man, who wrote and spoke Latin, Spanish, French and
+English, as well as his mother-tongue. Owen Roe O'Neill had won renown
+on many continental battlefields, and was admirably fitted by genius and
+training to lead a national party, not only in council but in the field.
+The nucleus of his army he established in Tyrone, gaining numbers of
+recruits whom he rapidly turned into excellent soldiers.
+
+This took place at the end of 1641 and the beginning of 1642, and the
+other forces of the country were organized about the same time. The
+lines of difference between the Anglican and Catholic parties were at
+this time very lightly drawn, and the Norman lords found themselves able
+to co-operate with the Catholic bishops in forming a General Assembly at
+Kells, which straightway set itself to frame a Constitution for
+the country.
+
+The Norman lords had meanwhile assembled and organized their retainers,
+so that there were now three armies in Ireland: the garrison of the
+Scottish settlers under Monroe, strongly in sympathy with the Puritans;
+the tribal army under Owen Roe O'Neill; and the army of the Norman
+lords. The General Assembly outlined a system of parliamentary
+representation in which the Lords and Commons were to form a single
+House, the latter, two hundred and twenty-six in number, representing
+all the important cities and towns. A supreme Cabinet was to be formed,
+composed of six members for each of the four provinces, twenty-four in
+all, who might be lords spiritual or temporal, or commoners, according
+to the choice of the Parliament. This Cabinet, thus selected from the
+whole Parliament, was the responsible executive of the country; and
+under the Supreme Council a series of Provincial Councils and County
+Councils were to be formed along the same lines.
+
+[Illustration: Donegal Castle.]
+
+This plan was adopted at a general meeting of all the influential forces
+of the country, which assembled in May at Kilkenny, where many
+Parliaments had sat during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Writs
+were issued for elections under the new Constitution, and the date of
+the first assembly of the new Parliament was fixed for October. The new
+national body enjoyed abundant revenues, and no small state marked its
+deliberations in Kilkenny. We read of an endless series of
+illuminations, receptions, banquets and balls,--the whole of the Norman
+nobility of Leinster lavishing their great wealth in magnificent
+display. The Supreme Council journeyed in state from Kilkenny to
+Wexford, from Wexford to Waterford, from Waterford to Limerick and
+Galway, surrounded by hundreds of horsemen with drawn swords, and
+accompanied by an army of officials. We hear of "civil and military
+representations of comedies and stage plays, feasts and banquets, and
+palate-enticing dishes."
+
+The General Assembly, duly elected, finally met on October 23, 1642, at
+Kilkenny. On the same day was fought the battle of Edgehill, between
+the king of England and the forces of the English Parliament. This
+battle was the signal for division of counsels in the new Assembly. The
+Norman lords of Leinster, who stood on the ground of feudalism, and
+lived under the shadow of royal authority, were strongly drawn to take
+the side of the king against the English Parliament, and overtures of
+negotiation were made, which came near gaining a recognition and
+legalization of the General Assembly by the English Crown.
+
+While the leaders at Kilkenny were being drawn towards the royalists of
+England, Owen Roe O'Neill was successfully holding Ulster against the
+Puritan forces under Monroe and Leslie, with their headquarters at
+Carrickfergus. Thus matters went on till the autumn of 1643, when we
+find him inflicting a serious defeat on the English army under Monk and
+Moore at Portlester in Meath, in which Moore was killed and his forces
+driven back within the walls of Drogheda.
+
+The General Assembly continued to exercise sovreign authority at
+Kilkenny, collecting revenues, maintaining courts of justice in the
+provinces, and keeping several armies in the field, most effective of
+which was undoubtedly that of Owen Roe O'Neill. We find matters still in
+this condition three years later, in May, 1646, when Monroe and the
+Scottish forces prepared to inaugurate an offensive campaign from their
+base at Carrickfergus. General Robert Monroe had about seven thousand
+men at Carrickfergus; his brother George had five hundred at Coleraine;
+while there was a Scottish army at Derry, numbering about two thousand
+men. It was decided to converge these three forces on Clones, in
+Monaghan, and thence to proceed southwards against the government of the
+General Assembly, then centered at Limerick. Clones was sixty miles from
+Derry, and rather more from Coleraine and Carrickfergus, the two other
+points of departure.
+
+Owen Roe O'Neill was then at Cavan, fourteen miles south of Clones, with
+five thousand foot and five hundred horse, all "good, hopeful men," to
+use his own words. General Robert Monroe, starting from Carrickfergus,
+and marching by Lisburn and Armagh, expected to reach Glasslough, some
+sixteen miles from Clones, on June 5th. By a forced march from Cavan,
+Owen Roe O'Neill reached Glasslough a day earlier, and marching along
+the northern Blackwater, pitched his camp on the north bank of the
+river. Here he was directly in the line between the two Monroes, who
+could only join their forces after dislodging him; and Robert Monroe,
+who by that time had reached Armagh, saw that it would be necessary to
+give battle without delay if the much smaller forces from the north were
+not to be cut off.
+
+Robert Monroe began a movement northwards towards Owen Roe's position at
+dawn on June 5th, and presently reached the Blackwater, to find himself
+face to face with Owen Roe's army across the river. The two forces kept
+parallel with each other for some time, till Robert Monroe finally
+forded the Blackwater at Caledon, Owen Roe then retiring in the
+direction of the current, which here flows north. Owen Roe, in his
+movement of withdrawal, brought his army through a narrow pass, which he
+left in charge of one of his best infantry regiments, with orders to
+hold it only so long as the enemy could be safely harassed, meanwhile
+carrying his main body back to the hill of Knocknacloy, the position he
+had chosen from the first for the battle, and to gain which he had up to
+this time been manoeuvering.
+
+At Knocknacloy he had the center of his army protected by the hill, the
+right by a marsh, and the left by the river, so that, a flanking
+movement on Monroe's part being impossible, the Scottish general was
+forced to make a frontal attack. Under cover of the rearguard action at
+the pass, which caused both delay and confusion to Monroe's army, Owen
+Roe formed his men in order of battle. His first line was of four
+columns, with considerable spaces between them; his cavalry was on the
+right and left wings, behind this first line; while three columns more
+were drawn up some distance farther back, behind the openings in the
+front line, and forming the reserve. We should remember that not only
+was Owen Roe's army outnumbered by Monroe's, but also that Owen Roe had
+no artillery, while Monroe was well supplied with guns.
+
+Meanwhile Monroe's army came into touch with Owen Roe's force, and the
+Scottish general opened fire with guns and muskets, to which the muskets
+of Owen Roe as vigorously replied. The Scottish artillery was planted on
+a hillock a quarter-mile from Owen Roe's center, and under cover of its
+fire an infantry charge was attempted, which was brilliantly repulsed by
+the pikemen of Owen Roe's army. A second attack was made by the Scottish
+cavalry, who tried to ford the river, and thus turn the left flank of
+the Irish army, but they were met and routed by the Irish horse. This
+was about six in the evening, and the sun, hanging low in the sky, fell
+full in the faces of the Scottish troops. Owen Roe promptly followed up
+the rout of the Scottish horse by an advance, making a sweeping movement
+from right to left, and thereby forcing Monroe towards the junction of
+two streams, where he had no space to move. At this point Owen Roe's
+army received a notable accession of strength in the form of four
+squadrons of cavalry, sent earlier in the day to guard against the
+possible approach of George Monroe from Coleraine.
+
+At a signal from Owen Roe, his army advanced upon Monroe's force, to be
+met by a charge of the Scottish cavalry, instantly replied to by a
+charge of the Irish cavalry through the three open spaces in the front
+infantry line of Owen Roe's army. Monroe's first line was broken, and
+the Irish pikemen, the equivalent of a bayonet charge, steadily forced
+him backwards. It was a fierce struggle, hand to hand, eye to eye, and
+blade to blade. The order of Owen Roe's advance was admirably preserved,
+while the Scottish and English forces were in confusion, already broken
+and crowded into a narrow and constricted space between the two rivers.
+Finally the advancing Irish army reached and stormed the hillock where
+Monroe's artillery was placed, and victory was palpably won. The defeat
+of the Scottish and English army became an utter rout, and when the sun
+set more than three thousand of them lay dead on the field.
+
+It is almost incredible that the Irish losses were only seventy, yet
+such is the number recorded, while not only was the opposing army
+utterly defeated and dispersed, but Monroe's whole artillery, his tents
+and baggage, fifteen hundred horses, twenty stand of colors, two months'
+provisions and numbers of prisoners of war fell into the hands of Owen
+Roe; while, as a result of the battle, the two auxiliary forces were
+forced to retreat and take refuge in Coleraine and Derry, General Robert
+Monroe escaping meanwhile to Carrickfergus. It is only just to him to
+say that our best accounts of the battle come from officers in Monroe's
+army, Owen Roe contenting himself with the merest outline of the result
+gained, but saying nothing of the consummate generalship that gained it.
+
+For the next two years we see Owen Roe O'Neill holding the great central
+plain, the west and most of the north of Ireland against the armies of
+the English Parliamentarians and Royalists alike, and gaining victory
+after victory, generally against superior numbers, better armed and
+better equipped. We find him time after time almost betrayed by the
+Supreme Council, in which the Norman lords of Leinster, perpetually
+anxious for their own feudal estates, were ready to treat with whichever
+of the English parties was for the moment victorious, hoping that,
+whatever might be the outcome of the great English struggle, they
+themselves might be gainers. At this time they were in possession of
+many of the abbey lands, and there was perpetual friction between them
+and the ecclesiastics, their co-religionists, who had been driven from
+these same lands, so that the Norman landowners were the element of
+fatal weakness throughout this whole movement, willing to wound, and yet
+afraid to strike. While praying for the final defeat of the English
+parliamentary forces, they dreaded to see this defeat brought about by
+Owen Roe O'Neill, in whom they saw the representative of the old tribal
+ownership of Gaelic times, a return to which would mean their own
+extinction.
+
+Matters went so far that the Supreme Council, representing chiefly these
+Norman lords, had practically betrayed its trust to the Royalist party
+in England, and would have completed that betrayal had not the
+beheading of King Charles signalized the triumph of the
+Parliamentarians. Even then the Norman lords hoped for the Restoration,
+and strove in every way to undermine the authority of their own general,
+Owen Roe O'Neill, who was almost forced to enter into an alliance with
+the Puritans by the treachery of the Norman lords. It is of the greatest
+interest to find Monroe writing thus to Owen Roe in August, 1649: "By my
+own extraction, I have an interest in the Irish nation. I know how your
+lands have been taken, and your people made hewers of wood and drawers
+of water. If an Irishman can be a scourge to his own nation, the English
+will give him fair words but keep him from all trust, that they may
+destroy him when they have served themselves by him."
+
+On November 6, 1649, this great general died after a brief illness,
+having for seven years led his armies to constant victory, while the
+Norman lords, who were in name his allies, were secretly plotting
+against him for their own profit. Yet so strong and dominant was his
+genius that he overcame not only the forces of his foes but the
+treacheries of his friends, and his last days saw him at one with the
+Normans, while the forces of the Parliamentarians in Ireland were
+calling on him for help.
+
+We sea, therefore, that for full eight years, from the beginning of 1642
+to the close of 1649, Ireland had an independent national government,
+with a regularly elected Representative Assembly, and a central
+authority, the Supreme Council, appointed by that Assembly, with judges
+going circuit and holding their courts regularly, while the Supreme
+Council held a state of almost regal magnificence, and kept several
+armies continuously in the field. While Owen Roe O'Neill lived, that
+part of the army under his command was able not only to secure an
+unbroken series of victories for itself, but also to retrieve the
+defeats suffered by less competent commanders, so that at his death he
+was at the summit of power and fame. If regret were ever profitable, we
+might well regret that he did not follow the example of the great
+English commander, his contemporary, and declare himself Lord Protector
+of Ireland, with despotic power.
+
+After his death, the work he had done so well was all undone again, in
+part by treachery, in part by the victories of Oliver Cromwell. Yet ten
+years after the Lord Protector's arrival in Ireland, his own work was
+undone not less completely, and the Restoration saw once more enthroned
+every principle against which Cromwell had so stubbornly contended.
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+THE JACOBITE WARS.
+
+A.D. 1660-1750.
+
+The Restoration saw Cromwell's work completely undone; nor did the class
+which helped him to his victories again rise above the surface. The
+genius of the Stuarts was already sowing the seeds of new revolutions;
+but the struggle was presently to be fought out, not between the king
+and the people, but between the king and the more liberal or more
+ambitious elements of the baronial class, who saw in the despotic
+aspirations of the Stuarts a menace to their own power.
+
+These liberal elements in England selected as their champion Prince
+William of Nassau, before whose coming the English king found it
+expedient to fly to France, seeking and finding a friend in that apostle
+of absolutism, Louis XIV. We have already seen how the interests of the
+feudal lords of Ireland, with the old Norman families as their core,
+drew them towards the Stuarts. The divine right of the landowner
+depended, as we saw, on the divine right of kings; so that they
+naturally gravitated towards the Stuarts, and drew their tenants and
+retainers after them. Thus a considerable part of Ireland was enlisted
+on the side of James II, and shared the misfortunes which presently
+overtook him--or in truth did not overtake him, as the valiant gentleman
+outran them and escaped. Nothing is more firmly fixed in the memories of
+the whole Irish people than a good-natured contempt for this runaway
+English king, whose cause they were induced by the feudal lords to
+espouse. We shall follow the account of an officer in the Jacobite army
+in narrating the events of the campaigns that ensued.
+
+James, having gained courage and funds from his sojourn at the court of
+Louis XIV, presently made his appearance in Ireland, relying on the
+support of the feudal lords. He landed at Kinsale, in Cork, on March 12,
+1688, according to the Old Style, and reached Dublin twelve days later,
+warmly welcomed by Lord and Lady Tyrconnell. The only place in the
+country which strongly declared for William was the walled city of
+Derry, whence we have seen the Puritan forces issuing during the wars of
+the preceding generation. James, this officer says, went north to Derry,
+in spite of the bitterness of the season, "in order to preserve his
+Protestant subjects there from the ill-treatment which he apprehended
+they might receive from the Irish," and was mightily surprised when the
+gates were shut in his face and the citizens opened fire upon him from
+the walls.
+
+[Illustration: Tullymore Park, Co. Down.]
+
+James withdrew immediately to Dublin, assembled a Parliament there, and
+spent several months in vain discussions, not even finding courage to
+repeal the penal laws which Queen Elizabeth had passed against all who
+refused to recognize her as the head of the church. James was already
+embarked on a career of duplicity, professing great love for Ireland,
+yet fearing to carry out his professions lest he might arouse animosity
+in England, and so close the door against his hoped-for return.
+
+Enniskillen, on an island in Lough Erne, dominated by a strong castle,
+was, like Derry, a settlement of Scottish and English colonists brought
+over by the first of the Stuarts. These colonists were up in arms
+against the grandson of their first patron, and had successfully
+attacked his forces which were besieging Derry. James, therefore, sent a
+small body of troops against them; but the expedition ended in an
+ignominious rout rather than a battle, for the Jacobite army seems
+hardly to have struck a blow. The Irish leader, Lord Mountcashel, who
+manfully stood his ground in the general panic, was wounded and
+taken prisoner.
+
+The armies of James, meanwhile, made no headway against the courageous
+and determined defenders of Derry, where the siege was degenerating into
+a blockade, the scanty rations and sickness of the besieged being a far
+more formidable danger than the attacks of the besiegers. James even
+weakened the attacking forces by withdrawing a part of the troops to
+Dublin, being resolved at all risks to protect himself.
+
+So devoid of resolution and foresight was James that we only find him
+taking means to raise an army when Schomberg, the able lieutenant of
+William, was about to invade the north of Ireland. Schomberg landed at
+Bangor in Down in August, 1689, and marched south towards Drogheda, but
+finding that James was there before him, he withdrew and established a
+strongly fortified camp near Dundalk. James advanced to a point about
+seven miles from Schomberg, and there entrenched himself in turn, and so
+the two armies remained; as one of Schomberg's officers says, "our
+General would not risk anything, nor King James venture anything." The
+long delay was very fatal to Schomberg's army, his losses by sickness
+and disease being more than six thousand men.
+
+Early in November, as winter was already making itself felt, James
+decided to withdraw to Dublin; as our narrator says, "the young
+commanders were in some haste to return to the capital, where the ladies
+expected them with great impatience; so that King James, being once more
+persuaded to disband the new levies and raising his camp a little of the
+soonest, dispersed his men too early into winter quarters, having spent
+that campaign without any advantage, vainly expecting that his
+Protestant subjects of England who were in the camp of Schomberg would
+come over to him. And now the winter season, which should be employed in
+serious consultations, and making the necessary preparations for the
+ensuing campaign, was idly spent in revels, in gaming, and other
+debauches unfit for a Catholic court. But warlike Schomberg, who, after
+the retreat of James, had leisure to remove his sickly soldiers, to bury
+the dead, and put the few men that remained alive and were healthy into
+winter quarters of refreshment, took the field early in spring, before
+Tyrconnell was awake, and reduced the castle of Charlemont, the only
+place that held for James in Ulster, which was lost for want of
+provisions; and the concerns of the unfortunate James were ill-managed
+by those whom he entrusted with the administration of public affairs."
+
+We come thus to the spring of 1690. Derry was still holding out
+valiantly against the horrors of famine and sickness, the blockade being
+maintained, though nothing like a determined storm was attempted. A
+little of the courage shown by the apprentices of Derry, had he
+possessed it, might have revived the drooping fortunes of the fugitive
+English king. It seems, however, that even Schomberg's withdrawal to
+Carrickfergus failed to arouse him to more vigorous and valiant
+measures. It is clear that he was ready to abandon his Irish allies,
+hoping by their betrayal to gain favor with his "subjects in England,"
+whom he confidently expected to recall him, as they had recalled his
+brother Charles thirty years before. James found an able lieutenant in
+Tyrconnell, who thoroughly entered into his master's schemes of
+duplicity; and it is fairly clear that these two worthies, had occasion
+offered, would have betrayed each other with a perfectly good grace.
+
+Thus matters dragged on quite indecisively until June, 1690, when King
+William landed at Carrickfergus with a mixed force of English, Scottish,
+Dutch, Danish, Swedish and German troops, and joined his forces to the
+remnant of Schomberg's army. James, as we saw, had disbanded his army on
+breaking up his camp in the previous autumn, and had made no effective
+effort to get a new army together. Nor could he have used a strong army,
+had he possessed one. Nevertheless James marched north with such troops
+as were available, leaving Dublin on June 16th. He took up a strong
+position on the borders of Ulster and Leinster, thus blocking William's
+way south to the capital, only to abandon it again on the news of
+William's approach, when he retired to Drogheda and encamped there. He
+thus gave the whole advantage of initiative into the hands of his
+opponent, a brave man and a skillful general.
+
+James seems to have hoped that William's army would be mowed down by
+disease, as Schomberg's had been in the preceding campaign. And there is
+reason to believe that Tyrconnell, foreseeing the defeat of James,
+wished to avoid any serious fighting, which would be an obstacle in his
+way when he sought to patch up a peace with the victor and make terms
+for himself. But his opponent was inspired by a very different temper,
+and William's army advanced steadily southwards, to find James encamped
+on the southern bank of the Boyne.
+
+There were several fords by which William's army would have to cross on
+its way south. But James was such an incapable general that he did not
+even throw up trenches to defend the fords. William's army arrived and
+encamped on the north bank of the river, and the next day, June 30th,
+was employed in an artillery duel between the two armies, when
+considerable injury was inflicted on William's forces, although he was
+far stronger in artillery than his opponent. During that night, James,
+already certain of defeat, sent away most of his artillery to Dublin,
+leaving only six guns with his army on the Boyne.
+
+It seems tolerably certain that, when the battle began again next day,
+William's army numbered between forty-five and fifty thousand, with the
+usual proportion of cavalry,--probably a tenth of the whole. James, on
+the other hand, had from twenty to twenty-five thousand men, about a
+tenth of them, probably, being mounted; he had, by his own fault, only
+six guns against about fifty in William's batteries. William's line of
+battle was formed, as usual, with the infantry in the center and the
+cavalry on the wings. He gave the elder Schomberg command of the center,
+while Schomberg's son, with the cavalry of the right wing, was sent four
+or five miles up the river to Slane, to cross there and turn the left
+flank of the opposing army. William himself led the cavalry on the left
+wing, and later on in the battle, descending the river, crossed at a
+lower ford. He could thus attack the right flank of his opponent; the
+infantry composing the center of his army advancing, meanwhile, under
+cover of a heavy artillery fire, and forcing the fords of the Boyne.
+
+The river is shallow here, and in the middle of summer the water is
+nowhere too deep for wading, so that it was a very slight protection to
+the army of James. A better general would at least have chosen a
+stronger position, and one which would have given him some manifest
+advantage. Such positions were to be found all along the road by which
+William had advanced from Carrickfergus. The country on both sides of
+the Boyne is flat; rolling meadows with the shallow river dividing
+them--a country giving every opportunity to cavalry.
+
+William's right, under the younger Schomberg, made several unsuccessful
+attempts to cross the river at Slane, being repeatedly beaten back by
+Arthur O'Neill's horse. Finally, however, the way was cleared for him by
+a vigorous cannonade, to which O'Neill, having no cannon, was unable to
+reply, and William's right wing thus forced the passage of the Boyne.
+
+William's center now advanced, and began the passage of the river, under
+cover of a heavy artillery fire. Every foot of the advance was
+stubbornly contested, and such headway was made by the Irish troops that
+Schomberg's bodyguard was scattered or cut to pieces, and he himself was
+slain. The center of William's army was undoubtedly being beaten back,
+when, crossing lower down with eighteen squadrons of cavalry, he
+fiercely attacked the right flank of the Irish army and thus turned the
+possibility of defeat into certain victory. That the Irish troops,
+although outnumbered two to one and led by a coward, fought valiantly,
+is admitted on all sides. They charged and re-charged ten times in
+succession, and only gave way at last under pressure of greatly superior
+numbers. The retreat of the Irish army was orderly,--the more so,
+doubtless, because the former king of England was no longer among them,
+having most valiantly fled to Dublin, and thence to Kinsale, where he
+took ship for France, leaving behind him a reputation quite singular in
+the annals of Ireland.
+
+Within a week after the battle, the Irish army, which had preserved
+order and discipline even in the face of the flight of James, occupied
+Limerick, and made preparations to hold that strong position, with the
+untouched resources of the western province behind them, and the hope,
+unshaken by their rude experience, that the runaway king might reinforce
+them by sea. Through all the events that followed, presently to be
+narrated, it must be understood that Tyrconnell was steadily seeking to
+undermine the resolution of the Irish army, hoping the sooner to make
+his peace with King William, to secure his Irish estates, and, very
+possibly, be appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, under the new king.
+
+William meanwhile brought his army southwards, being welcomed to Dublin
+by the large English element there, and presently continued his march to
+Waterford, which was surrendered to him, as was alleged, by Tyrconnell's
+orders. He also reduced Kilkenny, to which Tyrconnell had failed to
+send reinforcements, though repeatedly appealed to by its commander.
+About this time, on July 28th or a day or two later, the brave garrison
+of Derry was relieved by some of William's ships, which broke the line
+of blockade across the river and brought abundant provisions to the
+emaciated defenders.
+
+A section of William's army under Douglas was sent to take Athlone, the
+strong fortress which guarded the ford, and later the bridge across the
+Shannon--the high road from Leinster to the western province of
+Connacht, beyond the river. Douglas, after a fierce attack lasting seven
+days, was compelled to retreat again to the main army encamped at
+Waterford. The French auxiliaries under Lauzun, who had not hitherto
+greatly distinguished themselves for valor, losing less than a score of
+men at the Boyne, now deserted Limerick and retreated to Galway, taking
+with them, if the fugitive king may be credited, a great quantity of
+ammunition from the fortress of Limerick.
+
+[Illustration: Thormond Bridge, Limerick.]
+
+Finally, on August 9th, William's army appeared before Limerick, and the
+famous siege began. Tyrconnell signalized himself by deserting the fords
+over the Shannon and departing to Galway, declaring that the town would
+certainly surrender within a week. The city, however, was of a
+different opinion. The garrison, under Sarsfield, made vigorous
+preparation for a defence, and a party under Sarsfield himself cut off
+one of William's convoys from Dublin, destroying the siege-train which
+was being brought for the attack on the city. William's cavalry, taking
+advantage of Tyrconnell's retreat, crossed the ford of the Shannon to
+complete the investment of the city on that side, but they presently
+returned, having done nothing effective.
+
+We hear of more attempts by Tyrconnell to undermine the resolution of
+the army, and of attacks by William's force, which gave him possession
+of the outworks, so that he was able presently to begin cannonading the
+walls, to make a breach for an assault. The officer in the Irish army
+whom we have already quoted, gives this account of the siege: "Never was
+a town better attacked and better defended than the city of Limerick.
+William left nothing unattempted that the art of war, the skill of a
+great captain and the valor of veteran soldiers could put in execution
+to gain the place; and the Irish omitted nothing that courage and
+constancy could practice to defend it. The continual assaults of the one
+and the frequent sallies of the other consumed a great many brave men
+both of the army and the garrison. On the nineteenth day, William, after
+fighting for every inch of ground he gained, having made a large breach
+in the wall, gave a general assault which lasted for three hours; and
+though his men mounted the breach, and some even entered the town, they
+were gallantly repulsed and forced to retire with considerable loss.
+William, resolving to renew the assault next day, could not persuade his
+men to advance, though he offered to lead them in person. Whereupon, all
+in a rage, he left the camp, and never stopped till he came to
+Waterford, where he took shipping for England; his army in the meantime
+retiring by night from Limerick."
+
+During this first siege of Limerick the garrison numbered some twenty
+thousand, by no means well armed. William's besieging army was about
+forty thousand, with forty cannon and mortars. His loss was between
+three and four thousand, while the loss of the defenders was about half
+that number.
+
+William, presently arriving in England, sent reinforcements to his
+generals in Ireland, under Lord Churchill, afterwards famous as the Duke
+of Marlborough. Tyrconnell had meantime followed his runaway king to
+France, as was involved in a maze of contradictory designs, the one
+clear principle of which was the future advantage of Tyrconnell. Louis
+XIV, who had reasons of his own for wishing to keep the armies of
+William locked up in Ireland, was altogether willing to advise and help
+a continuance of hostilities in that country. James seems to have
+recognized his incapacity too clearly to attempt anything definite, or,
+what is more probable, was too irresolute by nature even to determine to
+give up the fight. Tyrconnell himself sincerely wished to make his peace
+with William, so that he might once more enjoy the revenues of his
+estates. The Irish army was thoroughly determined to hold out to
+the end.
+
+With these conflicting desires and designs, no single-hearted and
+resolute action was possible. Matters seem to have drifted till about
+January, 1691, when Tyrconnell returned; "but he brought with him no
+soldiers, very few arms, little provision and no money." A month later a
+messenger came direct to Sarsfield, then with the army at Galway, from
+Louis XIV, promising reinforcements under the renowned soldier Saint
+Ruth. This letter to a great extent revealed the double part Tyrconnell
+had been playing at the French court, and did much to undermine his
+credit with the better elements in the Irish army.
+
+The French fleet finally arrived at Limerick in May, 1691, under Saint
+Ruth, bringing a considerable quantity of provisions for the Irish army;
+but it is doubtful whether this arrival added any real element of
+strength to the army. The Irish army, soon after this, was assembled at
+Athlone, to defend the passage of the Shannon. Much vigorous fighting
+took place, but Ginkell, William's general, finally captured that
+important fortress in June. The road to Galway was now open, and
+Ginkell's army prepared to march on that important city, the strongest
+place in Connacht. Saint Ruth prepared to resist their approach, fixing
+his camp at Aughrim, The Hill of the Horses, some eighteen miles from
+Athlone and thirty-five from Galway. We may once more tell the story in
+the words of an eye-witness:
+
+"Aughrim was then a ruined town, and the castle was not much better,
+situated in a bottom on the north side of the hill, where the Irish army
+encamped. The direct way from Ballinasloe was close by the castle, but
+there was another way about, on the south-east side of the hill. The
+rest of the ground fronting the camp was a marsh, passable only for
+foot. The army of Ginkell appeared in sight of Aughrim on July 12th. The
+Irish army, composed of about ten thousand foot, two thousand
+men-at-arms, and as many light horse, was soon drawn up by Saint Ruth in
+two lines; the cavalry on both wings flanking the foot; and having
+placed Chevalier de Tesse on the right wing of the horse, and Sarsfield
+on the left, and giving their several posts to the rest of the chief
+commanders, Saint Ruth obliged himself to no certain place, but rode
+constantly from one side to another to give the necessary orders where
+he saw occasion. Ginkell being now come up at so near a distance that
+his guns and other battering engines might do execution, he ordered them
+to be discharged, and as he had a vast number of them he made them play
+incessantly on the Irish army, hoping by that means to force them from
+the hill, which was of great advantage. But the Irish, encouraged by the
+presence and conduct of Saint Ruth, kept their ground and beat the
+English as often as they advanced towards them. The fight continued from
+noon till sunset, the Irish foot having still the better of the enemy;
+and Saint Ruth, observing the advantage of his side, and that the
+enemy's foot were much disordered, was resolved, by advancing with the
+cavalry, to make the victory complete, when an unlucky shot from one of
+the terrible new engines, hitting him in the head, made an end of his
+life, and took away the courage of his army. For Ginkell, observing the
+Irish to be in some disorder, gave a notable conjecture that the general
+was either killed or wounded, whereupon he commanded his army to
+advance. The Irish cavalry, discouraged by the death of Saint Ruth, and
+none of the general officers coming to head them in his place, gave
+back, and quitted the field. The foot who were engaged with the enemy,
+knowing nothing of the general's death or the retreat of the cavalry,
+continued fighting till they were surrounded by the whole English army;
+so that the most of them were cut off, and no quarter given but to a
+very few; the rest, by favor of the night then approaching, for Saint
+Ruth was killed about sunset, made their escape."
+
+To this we may add the testimony of the runaway monarch: "The Irish
+behaved with great spirit. They convinced the English they had to do
+with men no less resolute than themselves. Never assault was made with
+greater fury nor sustained with greater obstinacy. The Irish foot
+repulsed the enemy several times, particularly in the center. They even
+looked upon the victory as certain.... The Irish lost four thousand
+men. The loss of the English was not much inferior."
+
+The army of Ginkell, thus in possession of the key of Connacht, advanced
+upon its most important city, arriving before Galway a few days after
+the battle of Aughrim. Galway, however, was full of divided counsels,
+and speedily surrendered, so that Limerick alone remained. Limerick was
+greatly weakened, now that Galway, and with Galway the whole of Connacht
+to which alone Limerick could look for supplies, was in the hands of the
+enemy. Ginkell turned all his efforts in the direction of Limerick,
+appearing before the city and pitching his camp there on August 25,
+1691. Beginning with the next day, our narrator tells us, "he placed his
+cannon and other battering engines, which played furiously night and day
+without intermission, reducing that famous city almost to ashes. No
+memorable action, however, happened till the night between September 15
+and 16, when he made a bridge of boats over the Shannon, which being
+ready by break of day, he passed over with a considerable body of horse
+and foot on the Connacht side of the river, without any opposition. This
+so alarmed Sheldon, who commanded the cavalry at that time, that without
+staying for orders, he immediately retired to a mountain a good
+distance from Limerick, and marched with such precipitation and
+disorder, that if a hundred of the enemy's horse had charged him in the
+rear, they would in all likelihood have defeated his whole party, though
+he had near upon four thousand men-at-arms and light horse; for the man,
+if he was faithful, wanted either courage or conduct, and the party were
+altogether discouraged to be under his command. But Ginkell did not
+advance far, and after showing himself on that side of the bridge,
+returned back into his camp the same day. Yet Sheldon never rested till
+he came, about midnight, fifteen miles from the Shannon, and encamped in
+a fallow field where there was not a bit of grass to be had: as if he
+had designed to harass the horses by day and starve them by night....
+Ginkell, understanding that the Irish horse was removed to such a
+distance, passed the river on the twenty-third day with the greatest
+part of his cavalry, and a considerable body of foot, and encamped
+half-way between Limerick and the Irish horse camp, whereby he hindered
+all communication between them and the town. On the twenty-fourth, the
+captains within Limerick sent out a trumpet, desiring a parley," and as
+a result of this parley, a treaty was ultimately signed between the two
+parties, Limerick was evacuated, and the war came to an end. This was
+early in October, 1691.
+
+The war had, therefore, lasted nearly four years, a sufficient testimony
+to the military qualities of the Irish, seeing that throughout the whole
+period they had matched against them greatly superior numbers of the
+finest troops in Europe, veterans trained in continental wars, and at
+all points better armed and equipped than their adversaries.
+
+What moves our unbounded admiration, however, is to see the troops
+displaying these qualities of valor not only without good leadership,
+but in face of the cowardice of the English king, and of duplicity
+amounting to treachery on the part of his chief adherents. Foremost
+among these time-servers was Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, whose name
+shows him to have sprung from one of the Norman families, and we see
+here the recurrence of a principle which had worked much harm in the
+eight years' war of the preceding generation. The Duke of Ormond, sprung
+from the Norman Butlers, was then the chief representative of the policy
+of intrigue, and many of the reverses of both these wars are to be
+attributed to the same race.
+
+It is tragical to find the descendants of the old Norman barons, who at
+any rate were valiant fighters, descending thus to practices quite
+unworthy; yet we can easily understand how the fundamental injustice of
+the feudal principle on which they stood, not less than the boundless
+abuse of that already bad principle under the first Stuarts, could not
+fail to undermine their sense of honor and justice, preparing them at
+length for a policy of mere self-seeking, carried on by methods always
+doubtful, and often openly treacherous.
+
+The old tribal chieftains lived to fight, and went down fighting into
+the night of time. Owen Roe O'Neill, last great son of a heroic race,
+splendidly upheld their high tradition and ideal. No nobler figure, and
+few more gifted captains, can be found in the annals of those warlike
+centuries. The valor of Cuculain, the wisdom of Concobar, the chivalry
+of Fergus--all were his, and with them a gentle and tolerant spirit in
+all things concerning religion, very admirable in an age when so many
+men, in other things not lacking in elements of nobility, were full of
+bitter animosity, and zealous to persecute all those who differed from
+them concerning things shrouded in mystery.
+
+It may be said, indeed, that Owen Roe is in this only a type of all his
+countrymen, who, though they suffered centuries of persecution for a
+religious principle, never persecuted in return. Their conduct
+throughout the epoch of religious war and persecution was always
+tolerant and full of the sense of justice, contrasting in this, and
+contrasting to their honor, with the conduct of nearly every other
+nation in Christendom.
+
+The history of Ireland, for the half century which followed this war,
+offers few salient features for description. The Catholics during all
+this time were under the ban of penal laws. The old tribal chiefs were
+gone. The Norman lords were also gone. The life of the land hardly went
+beyond the tilling of the fields and the gathering of the harvests. And
+even here, men only labored for others to enter into their labor. The
+right of private taxation, confirmed by law, and now forfeited by the
+feudal lords, was given as a reward to the adherents of the dominant
+party in England, and their yearly exactions were enforced by an armed
+garrison. The more vigorous and restless elements of our race, unable to
+accept these conditions of life, sailed in great numbers to the
+continent, and entered the armies of many European powers. It is
+estimated that, during the half century after the Treaty of Limerick,
+fully half a million Irishmen fell in the service of France alone.
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+A.D. 1750-1901.
+
+The Treaty of Limerick, signed when the army of Sarsfield came to terms
+with the besiegers, guaranteed equal liberty to all Ireland, without
+regard to difference of religion. There is no doubt that William of
+Nassau, scion of a race which had done much for liberty, a house that
+had felt the bitterness of oppression, would willingly have carried this
+treaty out in a spirit of fidelity and honor. But he was, helpless. The
+dominant powers in England and Ireland were too strong for him, and
+within the next few years the treaty was violated in letter and spirit,
+and the indigenous population of Ireland was disarmed, deprived of civil
+rights, reduced to servitude.
+
+It is best, wherever possible, to secure the word of witnesses who
+cannot be suspected of prejudice or favor. We shall do this, therefore,
+in describing the condition of Ireland during the eighteenth century. We
+find the Lord Chancellor of England declaring, during the first half of
+that period, that "in the eye of the law no Catholic existed in
+Ireland." The Lord Chief Justice affirms the same doctrine: "It appears
+plain that the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish
+Roman Catholic." The law, therefore, as created by England for Ireland,
+deprived of all civil, religious, intellectual and moral rights
+four-fifths of the whole population, and gave them over as a lawful prey
+to the remaining fifth: a band of colonists and adventurers, who favored
+the policy of the party then dominant in England. This was the condition
+of the law. We shall see, presently, what was its result on the life of
+the nation. It should be a warning, for all time, of the dangers which
+arise when one nation undertakes to govern another. For it must be
+clearly understood that the Sovreign and Parliament of England believed
+that in this they stood for honor and righteousness, and had a true
+insight into the spirit and will of the Most High. It was, indeed, on
+this superior knowledge of the divine will that they based their whole
+policy; for what else is the meaning of legal discrimination against the
+holders of a certain form of faith?
+
+[Illustration: Salmon Fishery, Galway.]
+
+In the second half of the eighteenth century, in 1775, the Congress of
+the United States sent its sympathy in these words to the people of
+Ireland: "We know that you are not without your grievances; we
+sympathize with you in your distress, and we are pleased to find that
+the design of subjugating us has persuaded the administration to
+dispense to Ireland some vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. Even the
+tender mercies of the government have long been cruel to you. In the
+rich pastures of Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong
+to labor for her destruction."
+
+Three years later, in 1778, Benjamin Franklin wrote thus to the Irish
+people: "The misery and distress which your ill-fated country has been
+so frequently exposed to, and has so often experienced, by such a
+combination of rapine, treachery and violence as would have disgraced
+the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the world, has
+most sincerely affected your friends in America, and has engaged the
+most serious attention of Congress."
+
+It must be assumed that the men who drew up the Declaration of
+Independence knew the value of words, and that when they spoke of misery
+and cruelty, of rapine, treachery and distress, they meant what they
+said. Franklin's letter brings us to the eve of the Volunteer Movement,
+of which much has been said in a spirit of warm praise, but which seems
+to have wrought evil rather than good. This Movement, at first initiated
+wholly by the Scottish and English colonists and their adherents, was
+later widened so as to include a certain number of the indigenous
+population; and an armed force was thus formed, which was able to gain
+certain legislative favors from England, with the result that a
+Parliament sitting in Dublin from 1782 to 1799 passed laws with
+something more resembling justice than Ireland was accustomed to.
+
+But this Parliament was in no sense national or representative. It was
+wholly composed of the Scottish and English colonists and their friends,
+and the indigenous population had no voice in its deliberations. It is,
+therefore, the more honor to Henry Grattan that we find him addressing
+that Parliament thus: "I will never claim freedom for six hundred
+thousand of my countrymen while I leave two million or more of them in
+chains. Give the Catholics of Ireland their civil rights and their
+franchise; give them the power to return members to the Irish
+Parliament, and let the nation be represented." At this time, therefore,
+four-fifths of the nation had neither civil rights nor
+franchise,--because they differed from the dominant party in England as
+to the precedence of the disciples of Jesus.
+
+It may be supposed, however, that, even without civil or religious
+rights, the fate of the people of Ireland was tolerable; that a certain
+measure of happiness and well-being was theirs, if not by law, at least
+by grace. The answer to this we shall presently see. The Volunteer
+Movement, as we saw, included certain elements of the indigenous
+population. The dominant party in England professed to see in this a
+grave danger, and determined to ward off that danger by sending an army
+to Ireland, and quartering troops on the peasants of all suspected
+districts. We must remember that the peasants, on whom a hostile
+soldiery was thus quartered, had no civil rights as a safeguard; that
+the authorities were everywhere bitterly hostile, full of cowardly
+animosity towards them.
+
+The result we may best describe in the words of the English generals at
+the head of this army. We find Sir Ralph Abercrombie speaking thus: "The
+very disgraceful frequency of great crimes and cruelties, and the many
+complaints of the conduct of the troops in this kingdom--Ireland--has
+too unfortunately proved the army to be in a state of licentiousness
+that renders it formidable to everyone except the enemy." Sir Ralph
+Abercrombie declared himself so frightened and disgusted at the conduct
+of the soldiers that he threw up his commission, and refused the command
+of the army.
+
+General Lake, who was sent to take his place, speaks thus: "The state of
+the country, and its occupation previous to the insurrection, is not to
+be imagined, except by those who witnessed the atrocities of every
+description committed by the military,"--and he gives a list of
+hangings, burnings and murders.
+
+Finally, we have the testimony of another English soldier, Sir William
+Napier, speaking some years later: "What manner of soldiers were these
+fellows who were let loose upon the wretched districts, killing, burning
+and confiscating every man's property? ... We ourselves were young at
+the time; yet, being connected with the army, we were continually among
+the soldiers, listening with boyish eagerness to their experiences: and
+well remember, with horror, to this day, the tales of lust, of bloodshed
+and pillage, and the recital of their foul actions against the miserable
+peasantry, which they used to relate."
+
+The insurrection against this misery and violence, which began in May,
+1798, and its repression, we may pass over, coming to their political
+consequences. It is admitted on all hands that the morality and religion
+of England reached their lowest ebb at this very time; we are,
+therefore, ready to learn that the Act of Union between England and
+Ireland, which followed on the heels of this insurrection, was carried
+by unlimited bribery and corruption. The Parliament of Ireland, as we
+know, was solely composed of Protestants, the Catholics having neither
+the right to sit nor the right to vote; so that the ignominy of this
+universal corruption must be borne by the class of English and Scottish
+settlers alone.
+
+The curious may read lists of the various bribes paid to secure the
+passage of the Act of Union in 1800, the total being about six million
+dollars--a much more considerable sum then than now. And it must be
+remembered that this entire sum was drawn from the revenues of Ireland,
+besides the whole cost of an army numbering 125,000 men, which England
+maintained in Ireland at the time the Act was passed. What the amenities
+of the last three years of the eighteenth century cost Ireland we may
+judge from these figures: in 1797, while the hangings, burnings and
+torturings which brought about the insurrection of the following year
+were in an early stage, the national debt of Ireland was under
+$20,000,000; three years later that debt amounted to over $130,000,000.
+It is profitless to pursue the subject further. We may close it by
+saying that hardly can we find in history a story more discreditable to
+our common humanity than the conduct of England towards Ireland during
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
+
+The French Revolution wrought a salutary change of heart in the
+governing class in England, for it must in justice be added that the
+tyranny of this class was as keenly felt by the "lower orders" in
+England as in Ireland itself. It is fairly certain that only the Reform
+Bill and the change of sovreigns which shortly followed prevented an
+insurrection of the peasants and servile classes in England which would
+have outdone in horrors the French Revolution itself. The Reform Bill
+was the final surrender of the baronial class in England; a surrender
+rather apparent than real, however, since most of the political and all
+the social power in the land still remains in the hands of the
+same class.
+
+[Illustration: O'Connell's Statue, Dublin.]
+
+Through the salutary fear which was inspired by the horrors of the
+French Revolution, and perhaps through a certain moral awakening, the
+governing classes in England came to a less vicious mind in their
+dealings with Ireland. They were, therefore, the more ready to respond
+to the great national movement headed by Daniel O'Connell, with his
+demand that Irishmen might all equally enjoy civil and political rights,
+regardless of their form of faith. In 1829, as the result of this great
+movement, the Catholics were finally relieved of the burden of penal
+laws which, originally laid on them by the Tudors, were rendered even
+more irksome and more unjust by Cromwell and William of Nassau,--men in
+other things esteemed enlightened and lovers of liberty.
+
+Thus the burden of persecution was finally taken away. To those who
+imposed it, the system of Penal Laws will remain a deep dishonor. But to
+those who bore that burden it has proved a safeguard of spiritual purity
+and faith. The religion of the indigenous race in Ireland was saved from
+the degeneration and corruption which ever besets a wealthy and
+prosperous church, and which never fails to engender hypocrisy, avarice
+and ambition. In England, the followers of the Apostles exercise the
+right to levy a second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second
+burden imposed upon the conquered Saxons. As a result, the leaders of
+the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part of their
+congregation; have sunk into practical atheism. In France, the reaction
+against a like state of things brought the church to the verge of
+destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and materialism. The
+result to the moral life of the people is too well known to need remark.
+Not less evil consequences have flowed from the enriching of the church
+in other lands. That wealth has always carried with it the curse, so
+prophetically pronounced, against those who trust in riches. For the
+ministers of religion, in a supreme degree, the love of money has been
+the root of evil.
+
+We may, therefore, see in the spirituality and unworldliness of the
+native church in Ireland a result of all the evil and persecution the
+church suffered during almost three hundred years. From this
+purification by fire it comes that the people of Ireland are almost
+singular throughout Christendom in believing sincerely in the religion
+of gentleness and mercy--the kingdom which is not of this world.
+
+In 1829 the Catholics were at last freed from the galling burdens which
+had weighed on them since 1537, when they failed to recognize Henry VIII
+as the representative of God on earth. They were still, however, under
+the shadow of a grave injustice, which continued to rest on them for
+many years. When their church lands were confiscated and their faith
+proscribed by law under the Tudors, a new clergy was overlaid on the
+country, a clergy which consented to recognize the Tudors and their
+successors as their spiritual head. As a reward, these new ministers of
+religion were allowed to levy a second tax on land, exactly as in
+England; and this tax they continued to collect until their privilege
+was finally taken away by Gladstone and the English Liberals. Needless
+to say that through three centuries and more four-fifths of this tax was
+levied on the indigenous Catholics, in support of what was to them an
+alien, and for most of the time a persecuting church.
+
+One heavy disability still lay on the whole land. With its partial
+removal a principle has emerged of such world-wide importance in the
+present, and even more in the future, that we may well trace its history
+in detail.
+
+The Normans, as we saw, paid themselves for conquering the Saxons and
+Angles by assuming a perpetual right to tax their produce; a right still
+in full force, and forming the very foundation of the ruling class in
+England. The land tenure thus created was, under the Tudors and the
+first Stuarts, bodily transferred to Ireland. In Ireland the land had
+ever been owned by the people, each tribe, as representing a single
+family, holding a certain area by communal tenure, and electing a chief
+to protect its territory from aggression. For this elective
+chieftainship the English law-courts substituted something wholly
+different: a tenure modeled on the feudal servitude of England. This new
+principle made the land of the country the property not of the whole
+people but of a limited and privileged class: the favorites of the
+ruling power--"hungry parasites" as the Congress of 1775 called them.
+This "landed" class continued to hold absolute sway until quite
+recently, and it was this class which succumbed to bribery in 1800, and
+passed the Act of Legislative Union with England. The clergy of the
+Established church were little more than the private chaplains of the
+"landed" class, the two alien bodies supporting each other.
+
+Folly, however, was the child of injustice; for so shortsighted were
+these hungry parasites that they developed a system of land-laws so bad
+as to cause universal poverty, and bring a reaction which is steadily
+sweeping the "landed" class of Ireland to extinction and oblivion. The
+fundamental principle of these bad land-laws was this: the tenant was
+compelled to renew his lease from year to year; and whenever, during the
+year, he had in any way improved the land in his possession,--by
+draining marshes, by reclaiming waste areas, by adding farm-buildings,
+the "owner" of the land could demand an enhanced rent, as the condition
+of renewing the lease. The tenant had to submit to a continually
+ascending scale of extortion, sanctioned by law and exacted by armed
+force; or, as an alternative, he had to give up the fruit of his
+industry without compensation and without redress.
+
+Anything more certain to destroy energy, to cut at the roots of thrift,
+to undermine all the best qualities of manhood, it would be impossible
+to imagine. The slave on the plantation could in time purchase his
+freedom. The tiller of the soil in Ireland found, on the contrary, that
+the greater his industry, the greater was the sum he had to pay for the
+right to exercise it. We saw that there never was any pretence of free
+contract in the feudal land-tenure of England; that there never was any
+pretence of an honest bargain between farmer and landlord, for their
+mutual benefit. The tenant paid the landlord for services rendered, not
+to him, but to his Norman conqueror. So it was, in an even greater
+degree, in Ireland. There was no pretence at all that tenant and
+landlord entered into a free contract for their mutual benefit. Nor did
+either law, custom, religion or opinion require the landlord to make any
+return to his tenants for the share of the fruit of their toil he
+annually carried away.
+
+The tiller of the soil, therefore, labored from year to year, through
+droughts and rains, through heat and cold, facing bad seasons with good.
+At the end of the year, after hard toil had gathered in the fruit of the
+harvest, he saw the best part of that fruit legally confiscated by an
+alien, who would have been speechless with wonder, had it been suggested
+to him that anything was due from him in return. Nor was that all. This
+alien was empowered, and by the force of public opinion incited, to
+exact the greatest possible share of the tiller's produce, and, as we
+saw, he was entitled to the whole benefit of whatever improvements the
+tiller of the soil had made; and could--and constantly did--expel the
+cultivator who was unable or unwilling to pay a higher tax, as the
+penalty for improving the land.
+
+It may be said that bad as this all was, it was not without a remedy;
+that the cultivator had the choice of other occupations, and might let
+the land lie fallow, while its "owner" starved. But this only brings to
+mind the fact that during the eighteenth century England had legislated
+with the deliberate intention of destroying the manufactures and
+shipping of Ireland, and had legislated with success. It should be added
+that this one measure affected all residents in Ireland equally,
+whatever faith or race. There was practically no alternative before the
+cultivator. He had the choice between robbery and starvation.
+
+It would be more than miraculous if this condition of things had not
+borne its fruit. The result was this: it ceased to be the interest of
+the cultivator of the land to till it effectively, or to make any
+improvement whatever, whether by drainage, reclaiming waste land, or
+building, or by adopting better agricultural methods. In every case, his
+increase of labor, of foresight and energy, would have met with but one
+reward: when the time came to renew the lease, he would have been told
+that his land had doubled in value during the year, and that he must,
+therefore, pay twice as much for the privilege of tilling it. If he
+refused, he at once forfeited every claim to the fruit of his own work,
+the whole of his improvements becoming the property of the land owner.
+
+The cultivators, as an inevitable consequence, lost every incentive to
+labor, energy, foresight and the moral qualities which are fostered by
+honestly rewarded work. They worked as little as possible on their
+farms, and the standard of cultivation steadily declined, while the mode
+of living grew perpetually worse. If it were intended to reduce a whole
+population to hopeless poverty, no better or more certain way could
+be imagined.
+
+The steady lowering of the arts of cultivation, the restriction of
+crops, the tendency to keep as close as possible to the margin of
+sustenance, thus zealously fostered, opened the way for the disastrous
+famine of 1846 and 1847, which marks the beginning of a rapid decline in
+population,--a decrease which has never since been checked. The
+inhabitants of Ireland shortly before the famine numbered considerably
+over eight millions. Since that time, there has been a decrease of about
+four millions--a thing without parallel in Christendom.
+
+The amendment of the land-laws, which were directly responsible for
+these evil results, was by no means initiated in consequence of the
+famine. It was due wholly to a great national agitation, carried out
+under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, which led to the
+land-acts of 1881 and 1887. These new laws at last guaranteed to the
+cultivator the fruit of his toil, and guarded him against arbitrary
+increase of the tax levied on him by the "owner" of the land. But they
+did not stop here; they initiated a principle which will finally make
+the cultivator absolute owner of his land, and abolish the feudal class
+with their rights of private taxation. This cannot fail to react on
+England, so that the burdens of the Angles and Saxons will at last be
+lifted from their shoulders, as a result of the example set them by the
+Gaels, for generations working persistently, and persistently advancing
+towards their goal. Nor will the tide thus set in motion spread only to
+Saxon and Angle; its influence will be felt wherever those who work are
+deprived unjustly of the fruit of their toil, whether by law or without
+law. The evils suffered by Ireland will thus be not unavailing; they
+will rather bring the best of all rewards: a reward to others, of
+whatever race and in whatever land, who are victims of a like injustice.
+
+The story of Ireland, through many centuries, has thus been told. The
+rest belongs to the future. We have seen the strong life of the prime
+bringing forth the virtues of war and peace; we have seen valor and
+beauty and wisdom come to perfect ripeness in the old pagan world. We
+have seen that old pagan world transformed by the new teaching of
+gentleness and mercy, a consciousness, wider, more humane and universal,
+added from above to the old genius of individual life. With the new
+teaching came the culture of Rome, and something of the lore of Hellas
+and Palestine, of Egypt and Chaldea, warmly welcomed and ardently
+cherished in Ireland at a time when Europe was submerged under barbarian
+inroads and laid waste by heathen hordes. We have seen the faith and
+culture thus preserved among our western seas generously shared with the
+nascent nations who emerged from the pagan invasions; the seeds of
+intellectual and spiritual life, sown with faith and fervor as far as
+the Alps and the Danube, springing up with God-given increase, and
+ripening to an abundant harvest.
+
+To that bright epoch of our story succeeded centuries of growing
+darkness and gathering storm. The forces of our national life, which
+until then had found such rich expression and flowered in such abundant
+beauty, were now checked, driven backward and inward, through war,
+oppression and devastation, until a point was reached when the whole
+indigenous population had no vestige of religious or civil rights; when
+they ceased even to exist in the eyes of the law.
+
+The tide of life, thus forced inward, gained a firm possession of the
+invisible world, with the eternal realities indwelling there. Thus fixed
+and founded in the real, that tide turned once again, flowing outwards
+and sweeping before it all the barriers in its way. The population of
+Ireland is diminishing in numbers; but the race to which they belong
+increases steadily: a race of clean life, of unimpaired vital power,
+unspoiled by wealth or luxury, the most virile force in the New World.
+
+It happens very rarely, under those mysterious laws which rule the life
+of all humanity, the laws which work their majestic will through the
+ages, using as their ministers the ambitions and passions of men--it
+happens rarely that a race keeps its unbroken life through thirty
+centuries, transformed time after time by new spiritual forces, yet in
+genius remaining ever the same. It may be doubted whether even once
+before throughout all history a race thus long-lived has altogether
+escaped the taint of corruption and degeneration. Never before, we may
+confidently say, has a single people emerged from such varied
+vicissitudes, stronger at the end in genius, in spiritual and moral
+power, than at the beginning, richer in vital force, clearer in
+understanding, in every way more mature and humane.
+
+For this is the real fruit of so much evil valiantly endured: a deep
+love of freedom, a hatred of oppression, a knowledge that the wish to
+dominate is a fruitful source of wrong. The new age now dawning before
+us carries many promises of good for all humanity; not less, it has its
+dangers, grave and full of menace; threatening, if left to work
+unchecked, to bring lasting evil to our life. Never before, it is true,
+have there been so wide opportunities for material well-being; but, on
+the other hand, never before have there been such universal temptations
+toward a low and sensual ideal. Our very mastery over natural forces and
+material energies entices us away from our real goal, hides from our
+eyes the human and divine powers of the soul, with which we are
+enduringly concerned. Our skill in handling nature's lower powers may be
+a means of great good; not less may it bring forth unexampled evil. The
+opportunities of well-being are increased; the opportunities of
+exclusive luxury are increased in equal measure; exclusion may bring
+resentment; resentment may call forth oppression, armed with new
+weapons, guided by wider understanding, but prompted by the same corrupt
+spirit as of old.
+
+In the choice which our new age must make between these two ways, very
+much may be done for the enduring well-being of mankind by a race full
+of clean vigor, a race taught by stern experience the evil of tyranny
+and oppression, a race profoundly believing the religion of gentleness
+and mercy, a race full of the sense of the invisible world, the world of
+our immortality.
+
+We see in Ireland a land with a wonderful past, rich in tradition and
+varied lore; a land where the memorials of the ages, built in enduring
+stone, would in themselves enable us to trace the life and progress of
+human history; we see in Ireland a land full of a singular fascination
+and beauty, where even the hills and rivers speak not of themselves but
+of the spirit which builds the worlds; a beauty, whether in brightness
+or gloom, finding its exact likeness in no other land; we see all this,
+but we see much more: not a memory of the past, but a promise of the
+future; no offering of earthly wealth, but rather a gift to the soul of
+man; not for Ireland only, but for all mankind.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+Abbey-Dorney, 303
+Abbey-feale, 303
+Abbey-leix, 303
+Abbey of Ballintober, 305
+Abbey-quarter, 29
+Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, words of, 369, 370
+Achill Island, 30
+Act of Union, 371
+Aed Allan, 225, 231
+Aed Finnliat, 247
+Aed Roin, 225
+Aed, son of Colgan, 226
+Ailill, 130, 131, 132, 141, 142, 146, 147, 152
+Aiterni, 150
+Alfred, king of the Northumbrian Saxons, 232
+Alfred, king, ode of to the country he visited, 232, 233
+Alny, 120, 129
+Amargin, 150
+Ambigatos, 103
+Ancient seats of learning, 221
+Ancient seats of learning, studies therein, 221, 222
+Anglicans, 322
+Angus, the Young, 92, 95, 96, 173
+"Annals," history of the times as recorded in the, 235, 252
+"Annals," quotations from, 224, 244, 264, 277, 293
+Antrim, 5, 196
+Archaic Darkness, 11
+Archaic Dawn, 12
+Ardan, 120, 129
+Ard-Maca, 200
+Armagh, 200, 208, 232, 241
+At-Cliat, 242, 243, 275
+Athlone, 140, 350, 354
+Ath-uince, 163
+Aughrim, 354, 355
+
+Ballinasloe, 354
+Ballysadare, 27, 87, 90
+Balor of the Evil Eye, 90, 91, 93
+Bangor, 221, 239, 240, 250, 342
+Bann, 146
+Bantry Bay, 104
+Barrow, valley of the, 42
+Battle of Kinvarra, 162
+Battle of the Headland of the Kings, 13
+Battle-verses, 248, 249
+Bay of Murbolg, 143
+Bay of Sligo, 29
+Bective Abbey, 301
+Bede, Venerable, 218
+Belgadan, 85
+Beltane, festival of, 47
+Beltaney, 47
+Black Lion Cromlech, 46
+Blackwater, 39, 82
+Bonamargy Abbey, 306
+Book of Kells, 209, 249
+Boyne, the, 5, 150, 242, 350
+Brandon Hill, 42
+Breagho, 34
+Breas, 83, 84, 99, 91, 105
+Breg, 149
+Brehon Laws, the, 206
+Brehon Laws, changes of, effected by St. Patrick, 207, 316
+Bruce, Edward, invasion by, 292
+Bruce, Edward, death of, 293
+Brugh, on the Boyne, 93, 95
+Bundoran, 29
+
+Cael, 163, 165, 194, 262
+Cael, poem of, 164, 165
+Caher, 161
+Caherconree, 32
+Cailte, 162, 166
+Cairbre, 89, 167, 168, 173, 241
+Cairpre Nia Fer, 146, 147, 132
+Callan River, 199
+Calpurn, 182
+Cantyre, 119, 123, 143
+Carlingford Lough, 241
+Carlingford Mountains, 44
+Carrickfergus, 331, 344, 345, 347
+Carrowmore, 27, 29
+Cataract of the Oaks, 87, 90, 91
+Catbad, 141, 142, 150
+Cavan, 46
+Cavancarragh, 35, 66
+Cealleac, 224
+Charlemont, castle of, 343
+Chevalier de Tesse, 355
+Chiefs of Tara, 82
+Chieftain of the Silver Arm, 91
+Chronicler's record of battles fought, 210, 211, 212, 217, 218
+Chronicles of Ulster, 218
+Church architecture, 298
+Ciar, 104
+Cistercian Abbey, 306
+Clare, 31, 62
+Clare Abbey, 306
+Clidna, 166
+Clocar, 161
+Clondalkin, 241
+Clonmacnoise, 208
+Cluain Bronaig, 226
+Coleraine, 331
+Colum Kill, 208, 212
+Colum Kill, death of, 215
+Colum Kill, verses written by, 213, 214
+Colum of the Churches, 223, 237
+Conall Cernac, 149, 151
+Concobar, 13, 113, 114, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 141,
+142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 177, 194, 246, 258,
+262, 360
+Conditions existing in early years, 219, 220, 221, 222
+Congus the Abbot, 225
+Connacht, 5, 88, 133, 140, 144, 350, 357
+Connemara, 85
+Conn, lord of Connacht, 162
+Conn of the Five-Score Battles, 88, 162
+Copyright decision, an early, 213
+Cork, 5
+Cormac, 167, 171, 172
+Cormac, precepts of, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171
+Coroticus, 195
+Corrib, 85
+Crede of the Yellow Hair, 163, 178, 194, 262
+Crimtan of the Yellow Hair, 162
+Cromlech-builders, the, 51, 68
+Cromlech of Howth, 43
+Cromlech of Lisbellaw. 47
+Cromlech of Lough Rea, 46
+Cromlechs, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52. 53,
+54, 55, 56, 57, 58
+Cromwell, 334, 339
+Croom, 161
+Cruacan, 131, 141, 146
+Cryptic Designs on cromlechs, 47
+Cuailgne, 132
+Cuigead Sreing, 88
+Culdaff, 47
+Cumal, 162
+Curlew hills, 37, 131
+Cuculain, 13, 14, 15, 16, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144,
+145, 152, 155, 181, 194, 246, 262, 360
+
+DAGDA Mor, 96, 148
+Dagda, the Mighty, 92, 95
+Daire, 132, 133, 200, 262
+Danes, conversion of the, 275
+Danish Pyramid of Uby, 97
+Dark Ages, the, 260, 261, 262
+Day of Spirits, 140
+De Danaans, the, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96,
+97, 98, 99, 103, 105, 106, 112, 132, 148
+De Courcey, 277
+De Courceys, the, 319
+Deer-park, 29
+Deirdre, 13, 14, 15, 115, 123, 124, 129, 130, 178, 262
+Deirdre, the fate of, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122
+Deirdre, the Lament of, 125
+De Lacys, the, 319
+Deny, 331, 341, 342, 344, 350
+Devenish, 250
+Devenish Island, 221
+Diarmuid, 171, 172, 173
+Dicu, 240
+Dingle Bay, 104
+Dinn-Rig by the Barrow, 146
+Dissenters, 322
+Domnall, 211, 231
+Donaghpatrick, 208
+Doncad, 231, 232
+Donegal, 29, 47
+Donegal Highlands, 26
+Donegal ranges, 5
+Douglas, 350
+Douin Cain, 81
+Down, 5, 46
+Downpatrick, 198, 240
+Drogheda, 342, 345
+Druids, 140
+Druim Dean, 162
+Drumbo, 46
+Dublin, 5, 252, 340, 345
+Dublin Parliament, 368
+Duke of Ormond, 359
+Dundalathglas, 240
+Dundalk, 342
+Dundelga, 143
+Dundrum, 146
+Dundrum Bay, 44, 45
+Durrow, 221, 250
+
+Early churches, 208
+Early schools of learning, tongues first studied in, 208
+Eclipses of the sun and moon, record of, 218
+Edgehill, battle of, 326
+Elias, Bishop of Angouleme, France, testimony of, 250, 251
+Elizabeth, Queen, 321, 341
+Emain, Banquet-hall of, 111
+Emain of Maca, 13, 110, 112, 115, 122, 123, 129, 131, 140
+Engineering skill ten thousand years ago, 43
+Enniskillen, 34, 35, 341
+Eocaid, son of Erc, 81, 84, 86, 87
+Eocu, 146
+Erin, 141, 144
+Established Church, clergy of the, 376
+Etan, 89
+Evangel of Galilee, the, 16
+
+Factna, son of Cass, 113
+Fair Head, 143
+Feidlimid, 242
+Ferdiad, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140
+Fergus mac Roeg, 13, 15, 16, 113, 114, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130,
+131, 133
+Fergus the Eloquent, 166, 177, 262, 360
+Fermanagh, 33
+Feudal system, the, 289
+Feudal ownership, 291
+Find, ode to Spring of, 156
+Find, son of Cumal, 14, 16, 155, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 171, 172,
+173, 177, 194, 246, 262
+Find, son of Ros, 146, 147, 152
+Finian, school of learning and religion founded by, 212
+Finvoy, 46
+Firbolgs, 60, 61, 69. 70, 77, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 105, 106
+Flann, 248
+Fomorians, 69, 70, 77, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 106, 246
+Ford of Ferdiad, Ath-Fhirdia, 140
+Ford of Luan, 140
+Ford of Seannait, 226
+Ford of the Hurdles, 242, 243, 246
+Ford of the river, 14
+Franklin, Benjamin, letter of to Irish people, 367
+French Revolution, the, 372
+
+Gairec, 140
+Galian of Lagin, 144
+Galtee Mountains, 161
+Galway, 5, 62, 350, 357
+Galway Bay, 31, 162
+Galway Lakes, 31
+Gauls, the, 103
+Giant Stones, 30
+Ginkell, 354, 355, 357, 358
+Gladstone, 375
+Glanworth, 39
+Glendalough, 208, 221
+Glen Druid, 42
+Gold Mines River, 109
+Golden Vale, 161
+Goll Mac Norna, 162
+Grania, 15, 171, 172, 173, 178
+Grattan, Henry, address of, to Dublin Parliament, 368
+Gray Lake, 37
+Grey Abbey, 302
+
+Headland of the Kings, 148
+Hill of Barnec, 162
+Hill of Howth, 239, 252
+Hill of Luchra, 146
+Hill of Rudraige, 44
+Hill of Tara, 155
+Hill of the Willows, 200
+Hill of Ward, 140
+Holycross Abbey, 304
+House of Delga, 143
+House of Mead, 199
+Howth, 239
+Howth Head, 43
+Hyperboreans, 60, 61, 62, 64, 69
+
+Iarl Strangbow, 275
+Indec, son of De Domnand, 90, 91
+Inis Fail, the Isle of Destiny, 21
+Inismurray, 237, 238, 239
+Iona, 215
+Ireland, art of working gold in, 108, 178
+Ireland, causes of uprising in, 320
+Ireland, condition of, in the eighteenth century, 365, 366, 367
+Ireland, English influence in, 318
+Ireland, life in, two thousand years ago, 177, 178, 179, 180
+Ireland, national debt of, 372
+Ireland, sympathy of U. S. Congress for people of, 366, 367
+Ireland, traditions of, 110
+Ireland, the Insurrection of, 370, 371, 372
+Ireland, visible and invisible, 3
+Irgalac, 149
+Iriel, 149
+Irish writing, earliest forms of, 177
+Islay, 143
+Islay Hills, 119
+
+James II., 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 353
+Jura, 119, 123, 143
+
+Kenmare, 39
+Kenmare Kiver, 39, 104
+Kerry, 5, 62
+Kildare, 210, 221, 232
+Kilkenny, 42, 325, 326, 349
+Killarney, 36, 39, 163
+Killee, 34
+Killmallock Abbey, 303
+Killteran Village, 43
+Kinsale, 340, 349
+King Gorm's Stone, 97
+King William, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 352, 365
+Knock-Mealdown Hills, 161
+Knockmoy Abbey, 306
+Knocknarea, 30
+
+Lake, General, statement of, 370
+Lake of Killarney, 161
+Lakes of Erne, 81
+Lambay, 236, 239, 241
+Land of the Cromlech-builders, 57
+Land of the Ever Young, 95, 96
+Land tenure, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380
+Laogaire, 199, 240
+Lame, 143
+Lauzun, 350
+Legamaddy, 45
+Leinster, 5, 162, 225, 226, 232, 345, 350
+Leitrim, 81
+Leitrim Hills, 26
+Lennan in Monaghan, 46
+Life of the Cromlech-builders, 68
+Liffey, the, 242
+Limerick, 349, 350, 351, 354, 357
+Leinstermen, 232, 238
+Loing Seac, 224
+Lough Erne, 341
+Loch Etive, 119, 121
+Lough Foyle, 247
+Lough Garra, 37
+Lough Gill, 29
+Lough Gur, 38, 39
+Lough Key, 37
+Lough Leane, 161, 163
+Lough Mask, 85
+Lough Neagh, 110, 200
+Lough Ree, 140
+Loughcrew Hills, 43
+Louis XIV, 337, 340, 353
+Lug, surnamed Lamfada, the Long-Armed, 92, 93
+Lusk, 241
+
+Maca, Queen, 110
+Maelbridge, 217
+Mag Breag, 223
+Mag Rein, 81
+Mag Tuiread, 85, 87, 246
+Mangerton, 162
+Marlborough, Duke of, 352
+Mask, 85
+Mayo, 5, 62
+Mayo Cliffs, 26
+Meave, Queen of Connacht, 13, 14, 15, 25, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134,
+136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 178, 262
+Meath, 155, 242
+Men of Oluemacht, 144
+Message of the New Way, 264
+Messenger of the Tidings, 182
+Mide, 149
+Miocene Age, the, 58
+Modern form of old Irish names, 234
+Monasterboice, 221
+Monk, 326
+Molana Abbey, 306
+Molaise, 237
+Monasteries and religious schools, 221
+Monroe, 324, 326, 327, 323, 329, 330, 331, 333
+Monument of Pillared Stones, 30
+Moore, 326
+Mount Venus Cromlech, 42
+Mountcashel, Lord, 342
+Mountains of Mourne, 44, 94, 146, 193, 231
+Mountains of Storms, 26, 87
+Moville, 221, 239, 262
+Moytura, 31, 85
+Munster, 5
+Munstermen of Great Muma, 144
+Murcad, 238
+
+Naisi, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 129, 130
+Napier, Sir William, testimony of, 370
+Nectain's Shield, 232
+Nemed's sons, 87
+Nessa, 15, 113
+Norsemen, waning of the, 284
+Northern Cromlech Region, 54
+Northmen, 234, 235, 236, 243, 251
+Nuada, the De Danaan king, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93
+
+O'Connell, Daniel, 373
+O'Donnell, 321, 322
+O'Neill, Owen Roe, 321, 322, 323, 324, 332, 333, 334, 338
+O'Neill, death of, 333
+O'Neill, defeat of English army by, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 360
+Ogma, of the Sunlike Face, 92, 95, 96
+Oscar, son of Ossin, 14
+Oscur, 155, 171
+Ossin, son of Find, 14, 15, 16, 155, 161, 162, 167, 171, 172, 177, 181,
+194, 246, 262
+Ox Mountains, 87
+
+Parliament at Dublin, 323
+Parliament of Ireland, 371
+Parnell, Charles Stewart, 380
+Patricius, 182
+Patricius, appeal of, to fellow-Christians of Coroticus, 195, 196
+Patricius, birthplace of, 182
+Patricius, letter of, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191,
+192, 193
+Patrick, 17
+Patrick, his first victory commemorated, 198
+Patrick, the dwelling of, 198
+Peat, age of, 34, 36
+Peat, rate of growth of, 33, 35, 66, 67
+Penal Laws, the system of, 373
+Plain of Nia, 85
+Plain of the Headland, 82
+Plain of the Pillars, 85
+Plain of Tirerril, 91
+Plantation of Ulster, 322
+Poem of Ossin, 156
+Potitus, 182
+Prince William of Nassau, 339, 340, 342
+Private taxation, 291
+Pyramids of stone, 93, 94
+
+Quoyle River, 198, 240
+
+Ragallac, 217
+Raid of the Northmen, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243
+Raids on islands of Irish coast, 257, 258, 259
+Raphoe, 47
+Rathcool, 162
+Rath-Laogaire, 199
+Rath of Badamar, 161
+Red Hills of Leinster, 162
+Reform Bill, the, 372
+Restoration, the, 339
+Roderick O'Conor, 61
+Ros Ruad, 152
+Ros, son of Rudraige, 112
+Rudraige, 44, 112
+Rudraige, hill of, 44, 231
+Runnymead, 317
+
+Saint Adamnan, 223, 224
+Saint Bernard, 298
+Saint Brigid, 210
+Saint Camin's "Commentary on the Psalms," 222
+"Saint Colum of the Churches," 212
+Saint Dominick, 298
+Saint Francis of Assisi, 298
+Saint Mansuy, 60
+Saint Patrick, body of laid at rest, 201
+Saint Patrick, delivery of message by, to King Laogaire, 199
+Saint Patrick, visit of to kings of Leinster and Munster, 200
+Saint Patrick, work of, 199, 205
+Saint Ruth, 354, 355
+Saint Ruth, death of, 356
+Saint Samtain, 226
+Saint Samtain, epitaph of the saintly virgin, 226, 227
+Sarsfield, 351, 353, 355
+Saul, 208, 221
+Schomberg, 342, 343, 344, 345, 347, 348
+Second Epoch, 13
+Senca, 144
+Shannon, the, 5, 32, 37, 130, 141, 146, 350, 354, 357
+Sheldon, 357, 358
+Slane, 347, 348
+Slieve Callan, 31, 39
+Slieve League, 26, 90
+Slieve Mish, 104, 132, 196
+Slievemore Mountain, 30
+Slieve na Calliagh, 95, 97
+Slieve-na-griddle, 45, 46
+Sligo, 25, 29, 90, 91
+Sligo Hills, 26
+Sons of Milid, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 112, 132
+Sound of Jura, 119, 123
+Southern Cromlech Province, 53
+Sreng, 82, 83, 84, 91, 93, 105
+Stone Circles, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 42, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52,
+53, 55, 72
+Stone Circles, clue to their building, 40
+Stone Circles, measure of their years, 40
+Strand of Tralee, 161
+Strangford, 45
+Strangford Lough, 198
+Stuarts, the, 339
+Sualtam, 13
+Succat, 182
+Suir, 161
+Sullane River, 39
+Summit of Prospects, 146
+
+Tailten, 106, 132
+Talbott, Earl of Tyrconnell, 359
+Tara, 81, 84, 106, 146, 147, 198
+Tara, Banquet-hall of, 112
+"The Church of the Oak-woods," 210
+The Gravestones of the Sons of Nemed, 87
+Thenay Relics, the, 58
+Third Epoch, 14
+Three Waves of Erin, the, 146
+Tigearnac, 265
+Toppid Mountain, 35, 36
+Traig Eotaile, 87
+Tralee, 32
+Treaty of Limerick, 361, 365
+Tuata De Danaan, 79, 84
+Twelve Peaks of Connemara, 31
+Tyrconnell, Lady, 340
+Tyrconnell, Lord, 340, 343, 344, 345, 349, 351, 352, 353
+
+Uince, 162
+Ui-Neill, the, 225, 232
+Ulad, 113, 130, 131, 133, 141, 151
+Ulaid, 113, 145, 150, 152
+Ulaid, Councils of the, 113
+Ulaid, men of the, 130
+Ulster, 5, 345
+Upper Erne, 32
+Usnae, 115
+
+Venice of Lough Rea, 37
+Volunteer Movement, the, 367, 369
+
+Waterford, 349, 350, 352
+Water of Luachan, 146
+Wave of Clidna, the, 146, 151
+Wave of Rudraige, the, 146, 151
+Wave of Tuag Inbir, the, 146, 151
+Waves of Erin, the three, 146, 151
+Weight of Cromlech-stones, 56
+Wexford Harbor, 42
+Wicklow, 5
+Wicklow Gold-mines, the, 108, 109
+
+Yellow Ford of Athboy, 140
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ireland, Historic and Picturesque
+by Charles Johnston
+
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author	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-15 04:38:52 -0700
committer	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-15 04:38:52 -0700
commit	2f1fb68b61c6581570a3febe9b941e9be83680e4 (patch)
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