on barren points of
rock, or upon sandy wastes which would barely have sufficed, one might
think, to feed a goat. We see their remains still--so tiny, yet so
enduring--in the Isles of Arran; upon a dozen rocky points all round the
bleak edges of Connemara; in the wild mountain glens of the Burren--set
often with an admirable selection of site, in some sloping dell with,
perhaps, a stream slipping lightly by and hurrying to lose itself in the
ground, always with a well or spring brimming freshly over--an object
still of reverence to the neighbouring peasants. Thanks to the innate
stability of their material, thanks, too, to the super-abundance of
stone in these regions, which makes them no temptation to the despoiler,
they remain, roofless but otherwise pretty much as they were. We can
look back across a dozen centuries with hardly the change of a detail.

[Illustration: CROSS IN CEMETERY OF TEMPUL BRECCAIN, ARANMOR. _From a
drawing by M. Stokes (after Sir F.W. Burton_).]

In these little western monasteries each cell stood as a rule by itself,
containing--one would say very tightly containing--a single inmate. In
other places, large buildings, however, were erected, and great numbers
of monks lived together. Some of these larger communities are stated to
have actually contained several thousand brethren, and though this
sounds like an exaggeration, there can be no doubt that they were
enormously populous. The native mode of existence lent itself, in fact,
very readily to the arrangement. It was merely the clan or sept
re-organized upon a religious footing. "Les premieres grands monasteres
de l'Irelande," says M. de Montalembert in his "Moines d'Occident," "ne
furent done autre chose a vrai dire qui des _clans_, reorganises sous
une forme religieuse." New clans, that is to say, cut out of the old
ones, their fealty simply transferred from a chief to an abbot, who was
almost invariably in the first instance of chieftain blood. "Le prince,
en se faisant moine, devenait naturellement abbe, et restait ainsi dans
la vie monastique, ce qu'il avait ete dans la vie seculiere le chef de
sa race et de son clan."

There was thus nothing to jar with that sense of continuity, that inborn
love of the past, of old ways, old habits, old modes of thought which
made and still makes an Irishman--be he never so pronounced a
republican--the deepest at heart of Conservatives. Whereas every later
change of faith which has been endeavoured to