f you heard of literary savages? Of wild men of the
woods, your true prognathous primitives, that in a bare couple of
generations, and upon no contact with civilized races, rose from
their native pithecanthropism to be the wonderful beacon of the
West or East? You have not, and cannot imagine it; nor could it
ever be. A great literary habit is only acquired in long ages of
settled civilization; and there were long ages of settled
civilization behind Ireland;--and when, about thirteen decades
after Patrick's coming, she flamed up into cultural creation, she
was but returning to what was proper to her soul; in the midst
of her dissolution, she was but groping after an olden self.
That olden self, very likely, she had even by that time more than
half forgotten; and we now can only see it refracted, as it
were, through the lens of those first Christian centuries, and
with the eyes of those Christian monks and bards. How would they
have seen them?--There was that spirit of euhemerization: of
making ancient things conform to new Christian ideas. They had
the Kilkenny Catterwauling in their ears daily; would they have
allowed to any Pagan times a quieter less dissonant music? Could
they have imagined it, indeed?--I doubt. Kilkennyism would have
appeared to them the natural state of things. Were you to look
back into Paganism for your Christian millennium, to come not
till Christ came again? Were you to search there for peace on
earth and mercy mild?--there in the long past, when all the near
past was war?--Besides, there was that ancientest of Mariners,
Noah, but a few thousand years back; and you had to make things
fit.

So I find nothing in it conclusive, if the legends tell of no
conditions different from those Patrick found: Kilkenny Cattery
in politics, intensive culture in the things of the spirit; and
I see no difficulty in the co-existence of the two. The cultured
habit had grown in forgotten civilized ages; the Cattery was the
result of national or racial pralaya; of the break-up of the old
civilization, and the cyclic necessary night-time between it and
the birth of another. Let us remember that during the Thirty
Years War, in mid-manvantara, Europeans sunk into cannibalism;
let us remember the lessons of our own day, which show what a
very few years of war, so it be intense enough, can do toward
reducing civilized to the levels of savage consciousness. So
when we find Ireland, in this fourth century