tismal creed, who have been nursed, and cradled, and matured in this atmosphere of religious fiction, lest, when we pluck up the tares, we pluck up the wheat also. But deliberately to load Christianity again with all the lies of which it has gradually disburthened itself, appears to us the worst kind of infidelity both in its origin and in its consequences; infidelity as implying total mistrust in the plain Christianity of the Bible; infidelity as shaking the belief in all religious truth. It may be well to have the tenderest compassion for those who have been taught to worship relics, or to kneel in supplication before the image of the Virgin; but to attempt to force back, especially on an unimaginative people, an antiquated superstition, is assuredly one of the most debasing offices to which high talents, that greatest and most perilous gift of God, can degrade themselves. If mankind has no alternative between the full, unquestioning, all-embracing, allworshipping faith of the middle ages, and no faith at all, what must be the result with the reasoning and reflecting part of it? To this question we await an answer; but let this question be answered by those only who have considered it calmly, under no preconceived system, in all its bearings on the temporal and on the eternal interests of mankind.

ART. II.-The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, anterior to the Anglo-Norman Invasion; comprising an Essay on the Origin and Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland. By George Petrie, V.P.R.I.A. (Being Vol. XX. of The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy.) Dublin. 4to. 1845.

WE have taken up this beautiful work of Mr. Petrie's with the

interest due to one of the most curious of antiquarian researches, and laid it down with no little gratitude for the temporary relief and respite which it offers to those dreary, cheerless contemplations with which the present and past history of Ireland is so thickly beset. A man without family pride, and a nation whose present life seems full of poverty, turbulence, sedition, and bloodshed, while its past records present at first sight little but a blank of barbarism, are destitute of one of the most ennobling incentives to reformation or improvement. And to an ignorance of the past history of Ireland must be attributed much of that indifference, amounting even to false shame, with which Irishmen in English society sometimes venture to depreciate, and even disown their country. While to a remembrance of the same history, however vague and obscure, and overlaid with legends and super

stitions,

stitions, we may trace many of those high and even holy instincts which redeem the other faults of the Irish peasantry.

And to the same ignorance may be attributed much of that weariness and hopelessness (stronger words need not be used) with which the prospects of Ireland are too often regarded even by educated Englishmen. Before us, behind us, all around us, on every side, to superficial eyes there seems to open a wilderness of untilled ground; whose very luxuriance vents itself only in the rankness of its weeds. In the past worldliness and impotency of a Church whose present zeal is little understood-in the extravagance and extortions of a race of landlords which now has all but past away, though the sons are reaping the whirlwind which the fathers have sown-in the religious distractions of age after age and in the petty marauding vexatious series of burnings, and massacres, and plunderings, and perjuries, which constitute the wars of Ireland from the beginning of the English Invasion to the final subjugation of the whole island, there is scarcely a single feature which can interest or attract. The whole scene is dark and dismal.

And yet there was a time when Ireland was the light of the world. In the same ages in which knowledge and philosophy and art were dying away over the whole surface of the known globe, under the ravages of barbarians, the neglect of emperors, the schism and heresies of Christians, and the disorganisation of a corrupted and crumbling empire, Ireland offered a refuge and a school, in which the light was kept burning, and from thence spread once more over the greater part of Europe. 'Sola Britannia,' says Brucker (Hist. Philos., vol. iii. p. 575), ' literarum cultu felix insula exules Musas patentibus ulnis amplexa, profugam cum reliquis literis philosophiam cultu squaloreque deformem vixque dignoscendam recepit, et in amplexus admisit suos. Id imprimis, et jure quodam suo ad Hiberniam pertinet, quò hoc seculo Angli literarum addiscendarum causâ adhuc proficisci solebant.'

I have long wished,' said Dr. Johnson, that the Irish literature were cultivated. Ireland is known by tradition to have been once the seat of piety and learning; and surely it would be very acceptable to all those who are curious either in the original of nations, or the affinities of languages, to be fully informed of the revolution of a people so ancient and once so illustrious.' (Boswell, vol. ii. p. 77.) In Mexico and Peru,' says Sir William Temple (Of Ancient and Modern Learning), before the least use or mention of letters, there was remaining among them the knowledge of what had passed in those mighty nations and governments for many ages. Whereas in Ireland, that is said to have flourished in books and learning before they had made much

progress

progress in Gaul or Britany, there are now hardly any traces left of what passed there before the conquest made of that country by the English in Henry II.'s time.'

If it is asked how the records of this period have been so lost or hidden the answer is, first by the ravages of the Danes-then by the internal quarrels and predatory incursions of the numerous petty princes, between whom Ireland was divided-then by the English Invasion-then by the plunder and ravages of the Reformation-then by the outrages of the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell-then by the neglect, and indifference, and ignorance of the Anglo-Irish, who succeeded to the confiscated properties— and, lastly, by the mistaken prejudice and ill-directed zeal which latterly has endeavoured to unite Ireland to England rather by effacing the vestiges and affections of Irish nationality, than by consecrating and developing them as a grand portion of the common treasure of the British empire.

And yet, notwithstanding these various forms of destruction, a vast number of most interesting relics exist in Ireland, some already brought to light, and others still capable of recovery, which bring us at once into contact with the sixth and seventh centuries, with a degree of reality and evidence surpassing perhaps that of any ecclesiastical remains of antiquity in the world.

Of the architectural portions of these relics Mr. Petrie has given a minute and detailed account in his present volume; and we propose to mention a few others, principally from information supplied by his own researches, in the hope of drawing more general attention to a subject little studied even in Ireland, but one full of interest and importance.

Its interest lies chiefly in the fact that in the sixth and seventh centuries Ireland, beyond a doubt, became an extraordinary instrument for the preservation and diffusion of the Truth. Though comparatively little has been done in extracting from the Irish manuscripts still in existence the information which they contain on this subject, the following facts are undoubted:-1. Notwithstanding the unsettled condition of civil society in Ireland at that period, the Christian Church did make an extraordinary progress, and produce an immense number of holy men and devoted missionaries, the memory of whom is still preserved in the popular name of Ireland,-Insula Sanctorum-the Isle of Saints. 2. It was the resort of Christians for the purpose both of instruction and religious discipline from England, from Wales, from France, from Italy, from Germany, as Athens or Alexandria were the schools of a preceding age. 3. These students were gathered in vast bodies, who in many instances were not only taught but supported and fed at the ex

pense

pense of religious communities: as at Armagh, Clonard, Mungret near Limerick, Clonmacnoise, Bangor, and many other places.* 4. Missionaries were sent out from it, under the followers of Columba and others, to Wales, to Scotland, to England, to France, to Germany, to Italy, and to Iceland, who founded celebrated monasteries, and brought with them a variety of arts connected with the offices of religion. 5. It is clear that Ireland in those times was, like the rest of Christendom, not yet subjugated to Rome, nor to any considerable degree infected with religious errors. Whatever trace of these is found in the later records of this period disappear in the older annals: and the progress of invention and falsification may easily be traced; and thus this portion of Irish history offers a wide and peaceful field, in which lovers of their country and of its ancient glory may expatiate without collision or jealousy.

These facts are proved, not by legendary lives of saints or the exaggerations of a national poetry, but by the concurrent testimony of foreign and independent witnesses. And the question still to be solved is this,-by what means was this great work achieved under circumstances apparently so unfavourable?

Four of these means may be seen faintly indicated in the brief annals of the times which have hitherto been examined. In the first place, Columba and his followers seem uniformly to have acted on the principle derived from their predecessors, of gathering their clergy, both secular and regular, into organised collegiate bodies. In the second place, a close connexion appears to have been established between these bodies and the episcopal order of the Church-a connexion indeed very different from the relation which would exist between collegiate bodies formed in the present day and the bishops of the dioceses in which they may be placed -since bishops were often at the head of them, and still oftener were inferior members of the body subject to their abbot, as in the well-known instance of the abbot of Iona; or as a bishop holding a prebendal stall in his own cathedral is subject as a prebendary to his dean, while his dean as a priest is subject to himself as a bishop. Thirdly, these collegiate bodies, or monasteries, improperly so called, were for the most part formed upon a plan essentially different from either the solitary retirements of Eastern monks, or the ascetic system of the Benedictines. They were great schools, of which education was the chief object; and those who have ever practically examined the working of monasticism will comprehend the importance of this distinction. Fourthly, as far as we can judge, classical literature, and especially the

* There were 7000 at Armagh. Compare the numbers at Oxford: e. g. 30,000.

Greek

Greek language, formed an integral part of the course of instruction pursued in these seminaries; and that, at a period, when from the rest of Europe the traces of Greek literature were rapidly vanishing. The importance of this fact will be best understood by an historical examination of the progress both of society and of the human mind, wherever Greek literature has been profoundly and generally studied, and of the influence which the same study has exercised in stimulating and developing the intellectual powers.

It is, however, no part of our intention at present to enter into a fuller discussion of these facts, which can only be extracted and confirmed from a minute induction of particulars scattered over a wide range of records, many of them unedited. Our present business is with the architectural remains of that period; and of these the most interesting and prominent specimens are the Round Towers which have proved the occasion of Mr. Petrie's disquisition. It must be unnecessary to say that these structures have for centuries formed the stumbling-block of antiquarians. Tall, slender, cylindrical, cone-topped piles, too small for habitations, too simple for ornament, too vast for mere appendages to the little buildings with which they seem to have been connected-too uniform in construction to be accidental caprices of taste, and yet too varied to be all reduced under one age-rising up, as they often do, among the bleakest mountains, by a gloomy lake, or on some desolate island, or even from a group of ruins clustered round them by ages later than their own, as on the rock of Cashel, they produce a singular effect of mysterious ghostlike grandeur-far beyond any composition of the most elaborate architecture.

And their effect upon the understandings of the beholders has been scarcely less surprising than upon their imaginations and feelings. It is impossible to enter on Mr. Petrie's own theory of the Round Towers, without adverting to the severe yet merciful ingenuity with which he has anatomised the theories of too many of his predecessors. We have all heard of Aristotle's logic. Some of us may have read of a new system of ladies' logic which has been recently propounded in a popular though not very grave publication. But there is also, it would appear, an antiquarian logic, very different from either, which has been largely employed in the present discussion, before Mr. Petrie thought it necessary to recur to the dry and more painful process of investigating facts. A long and not useless treatise might be devoted to this subject, which might embrace many other antiquarian researches besides the present, and be illustrated by the practice of not a few well-known writers. But two or three heads of syllogisms may be sufficient for our purpose.

One