them to posterity truly and candidly; so that even at this day
(though our nation lost estate and all almost) there is not an ancient
name of Ireland, of the blood-royal thereof descended, but we can bring,
from father to father, from the present man in being to Adam--and I,
Thaddy O'Roddy, who wrote this, have written all the families of the
Milesian race from this present age to Adam."[80]

[Footnote 80: Miscel. of Irish Arch. Soc., i. 120.]

To all this preposterous, and now scarcely credible extravagance of
fiction, there attaches a melancholy political moral. Poor Ireland,
trodden by a dominant party whose hand was strengthened by her potent
neighbour, sought relief from the gloom of the present, by looking far
back into the fabulous glories of the past--and it seemed the last drop
in her cup of bitterness when this pleasant vista was also to be closed
by the hard utilitarian hand of the unsympathising Saxon.

After "this sort of thing" it was naturally difficult to get sensible
men to listen to proposals for opening valuable new sources of early
history in Ireland. In fact, down to the time when Moore wrote his
History in 1835, no one could venture to look another in the face when
speaking of the early Irish annals, and the consequence was that that
accomplished author wilfully shut his eyes to the rich supply of
historical materials in which he might have worked to brilliant effect.

Yet, upon the general face of history, it must on examination have been
fairly seen that Ireland is the natural place where a great proportion
of whatever is to be known about the primitive Church in the British
Islands was to be found. Indeed, in the history of Christianity, not the
least wonderful chapter contains the episode of the repose in the West,
where a portion of the Church, having settled down, grew up in calm
obscurity, protected by distance from the desolating contest which was
breaking up the empire of the world, and raged more or less wherever the
Roman sway had penetrated. Of the southern Britons it could no longer be
said, as in the days of Augustus, that they were cut off from all the
world. England was an integral part of the empire, where, if the
proconsul or legionary commander had not the hot sun and blue sky of
Italy, there were partial compensations in the bracing air which renewed
his wasted strength, the new and peculiar luxuries in the shape of
shellfish and wildfowl that enriched his table, and the faci