In proof of the Danes having been the people with whom this early intercourse was maintained, the authority of a number of modern historians has been adduced, according to whose accounts it would seem that, from a period preceding the birth of Christ, a succession of invasions of this island from Denmark had been commenced; and that, for some centuries after, a course of alternate hostility and friendship marked the relations between the two countries. Imposing, however, as is the array of northern authorities for this statement, the entire value of their united evidence may be reduced to that of the single testimony of that of Saxo Grammaticus, from whose pages they have all copied; and it is well known, for all the earlier portion of this eloquent writer’s history, the foundation is as unsound and unreal as Scaldic fable and fallacious chronology could make it. The only circumstance that lends any semblance of credit to the accounts given by northern histotorians of the early fortunes of Ireland, is the known fact that the chief materials of their own history were derived from records preserved in Iceland: to which island inaccessible as it might seem to have been to the rude navigation of those days, it is certain that a number of Irish missionaries of the seventh and eighth centuries contrived to find their way. We learn, from more than one authentic source, that, when the Norwegians first arrived in Iceland, they found there traces of its having been previously inhabited by a Christian people; and the Irish books, bells, and holy staves, left behind by the former dwellers, sufficiently denoted the religious island from whence they had migrated. The title of Papas, which it appears was borne by them, has led to the conclusion that they must have been Irish priests who had adventurously fixed themselves in this desolate region; and, under the same name, they were found in the Orkneys when the Norwegians conquered those islands. Unless we were to suppose, however, that among the books left by those missionaries in Iceland, there were any relating to Irish history of which the chroniclers consulted by Saxo might have availed themselves, the incident, though curious and well attested, affords but slight grounds for placing reliance on these early northern annals, whose sources of information are known to have been spurious, and to whose general character for extravagant fiction, the few brief notices which they contain respecting Irish affairs, can hardly be expected to furnish an exception. Nor is any more serious credit due to them when they represent Dublin to have been in possession of the Danes a short time before the birth of Christ, than when they assert that London was built by these northern people about the very same period.