Many English and Scotch firms have taken to printing Irish prose and poetry in the English tongue, so that Irish authors are no longer confined, as they were, with a few exceptions, of old, to an insular constituency. Irish literary work of merit, when not strongly patriotic, sells readily in Great Britain to-day. This is due, partly, to a growing appreciation of Irish talent among the more liberal classes of the English people, and still more, perhaps, to the very large Irish population that has developed itself on the soil of “the predominant partner” within the last half of the nineteenth century. There is a strong Chartist, or republican, element in England friendly to the Irish claim of legislative independence, and this element, which we hear comparatively little of in America, for reasons it is not necessary to discuss in this history, is growing more powerful as time rolls by, and some day, not very distant, perhaps, is bound to greatly modify the existing governmental system of the British Empire, and render it more popular. Ireland is very rich in monastic and martial ruins. The round towers which sentinel the island are declared by many antiquaries to antedate the Christian period, and are supposed to have been pagan temples dedicated to the worship of the sun, which, some historians claim, was Ireland’s chief form of the Druidic belief. “The names of their founders have vanished in the gloom, Like the dry branch in the fire, or the body in the tomb, But to-day, in the ray, their shadows still they cast— These temples of forgotten gods, these relics of the past.” The grass-grown circular raths, or “forts,” as the peasantry call them, varying greatly in diameter, are supposed to be remnants of the Danish invasion, but many archæologists place them at a much earlier date, and give them not a Danish but a Danaan origin—the latter tribe being claimed as among the first settlers of Ireland. The largest “fort” or “dun” in the island is that near Downpatrick, which is sixty feet high and three-quarters of a mile in circumference. Much of the stately architecture seen in the ruins of abbeys, churches, and chapels belongs to the Anglo-Norman period, as does also the military architecture, which survives in such types as the keeps of Limerick, Nenagh, and Trim; but the Celtic type of church construction is preserved, after the lapse of more than a thousand years, in its primitive purity, at Glendalough in Wicklow, Clonmacnois in King’s County, and Cong in Galway. [Illustration: (_Click on the map to see a larger version._) ] Three hundred years of warfare with the pagan Danes, and five hundred with the Anglo-Normans and Anglo-Saxons, made Ireland the Island of Ruins, as well as the Island of Saints and Scholars.