he
provinces. But although sometimes one provincial king was powerful
enough to keep the others in subjection, old Celtic Ireland never was a
kingdom, properly speaking, for it never had a nationality. Some people
maintain, not without reason, that the facility with which a nationality
resolves itself into existence depends much, not only on race, but on
geological conditions. The Celtic Irish seem to have always been too
busy with local feuds and rivalries to achieve any broad nationality.
And the nature of their country--a vast plain intersected by morasses
and rivers, and here and there edged with mountain ranges--is
unfavourable to the growth of a nationality, since it presents no
general centre of defence against a foreign enemy, like that great
central range of mountains in Scotland, which Columba's biographers call
the Dorsum Britanniae--the Backbone of Britain. Ireland, indeed, seems to
have had no conception of a nationality until such a thing was suggested
by the Normans and the Saxons, after they had been long enough there to
feel patriotic. And so it has generally happened that any alarming
outbreaks against the imperial government have been led by people of
Norman or Saxon descent.

Still there is no doubt, difficult as it may be to realise the idea,
that at the times with which we are dealing, Ireland enjoyed a kind of
civilisation, which enabled its princes and its priests to look down on
Pictland, and even on Saxon England, as barbarian. The Roman dominion
had not penetrated among them, but the very remoteness which kept the
island beyond the boundaries of the Empire, also kept it beyond the
range of the destroyers of the Empire, and made it in reality the
repository of the vestiges of imperial civilisation in the north.
Perhaps the difference between the two grades of civilisation might be
about the same as we could have found ten years ago between Tahiti and
New Zealand.

An extensive and minute genealogical ramification, when it is authentic,
is a condition of a pretty far advanced state of civilisation.
Abandoning the old fabulous genealogies which went back among the
Biblical patriarchs, the rigid antiquaries of Ireland find their way
through authentic sources to genealogical connections of a truly
marvellous extent. Such illustrious men as the saints can, of course, be
easily traced, as all were proud to establish connection with them;
while Columba himself and several others were men of royal de