er that the
old Irish Pentarchy was much better than any five chieftainships of the
Sandwich Islands. Even the historians who laud it in most pompous
phrases, like Keatinge, give nothing but details of wars and massacres,
disorders and rebellions without end. Out of one hundred and sixty-eight
kings who by this (of course) half-fabulous story reigned from the
Milesian Conquest to Roderick O'Connor, vanquished by Henry II. in 1172,
no less than seventy-nine are said to have acquired the throne by the
murder of their predecessors. The contests between the five kings for
the supremacy, or for the acquisition of each other's territories, offer
a spectacle which can only be compared to a sanguinary game of
puss-in-the-corner lasting for a thousand years. As to any monuments of
civilization, it would indeed be wonderful if they were found in a
country so circumstanced. Such existing architecture as can be
attributed to a Celtic origin is confined to the simple round towers,
Cormac's Chapel at Cashel, and a few humble little stone-roofed edifices
like the one known as "St. Kevin's Kitchen," and made, with true Irish
magniloquence, to stand wellnigh alone for the "Seven Churches of
Glendalough." For literature, ancient Ireland can show the respectable
"Annals of the Four Masters," and a few minor chronicles in prose and
verse, but not a single work deserving a place in European history.
Literally the fame of a few nomad saints, and a collection of torques
and brooches (of great beauty, but possible Byzantine workmanship) in
the Irish Academy, are the chief grounds on which rest the claims of
Ireland to ancient civilization. Yet not merely civilization, but the
extreme grandeur and magnificence of Ireland in "former times," is the
first postulate of all Irish discontent. It is because England has
dimmed her glory and overthrown her royal state that Irishmen burn with
patriot indignation, and not by any means because she has merely left
barbarism and disunion still barbarous and disunited after seven
centuries, and has checked, instead of encouraging, the industry and
commerce of the land.

Proceeding on this false ground, the Celtic Irishman, with his fervid
imagination, easily builds for himself a whole edifice of local and
personal grievances on the pattern of the supposed national one. Was
Ireland once a rich and splendid country? So was every town and
neighborhood once full of gayety and prosperity, when "the family" lived