rds, 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
cent