It is doubtful if there is in Ireland--there certainly is not in the province of Connacht--a more interesting ruin than Cong Abbey. Its situation is beautiful, between two great lakes, with a background of some of the wildest and ruggedest mountains in Ireland. It would be hard to conceive of a place more suited for a life of religious meditation than this venerable pile, into which he who is called Ireland's last chief king retired to bewail his sins and lament for the power that his own pusillanimity and carelessness had allowed to pass away from him and his family for ever. If Roderick O'Connor was the last of Ireland's monarchs, he was also one of her worst. History hardly tells of a good act of his except the endowment of the Abbey of Cong; and the greater the light is that is thrown on the history of Ireland by the translation of her ancient annals, the weaker and more imbecile the character of Roderick appears, and the more just and merited that which Moore says of him in his history of Ireland:--"The only feeling the name [of Roderick] awakens is that of pity for the doomed country which at such a crisis of its fortunes, when honour, safety, independence, and national existence were all at stake, was cursed for the crowning of its evil destiny with a ruler and leader so entirely unworthy of his high calling." If the Anglo-French invasion of Ireland had occurred in the reign of his brave and warlike father, Turloch, one of the greatest of those who claimed the chief sovereignty of Ireland, the invaders would almost certainly have been all killed within a month after they landed, and the subsequent history of Ireland would probably be very different from what it has been.