islands and on the Continent. Dr. Bruce, in his _History of the Roman Wall_, speaking of these pipes, asks: ‘Shall we enumerate smoking-pipes amongst the articles belonging to the Roman period? Some of them have, indeed, a medieval aspect; but the fact of their being frequently found in Roman stations along with pottery and other remains, undoubtedly Roman, should not be overlooked.’ The Abbé Cocket had found similar clay pipes in the Roman Necropolis near Dieppe, and in his work on subterranean Normandy he says they must surely have belonged to the seventeenth century. But, on subsequently hearing of Doctor Bruce’s discovery of similar pipes in his exploration of the Roman Wall, he reverted to his first opinion, that those he had himself found were indeed Roman. Since then Baron de Bonstetten has investigated the subject; and in his work entitled _Recueil des Antiquités_ he gives drawings of these pipes, and declares his opinion to be that they are fair specimens of European smoking-instruments in use before the days of Columbus, and possibly before those of Julius Cæsar. That smoking-pipes have been found among authentic Roman remains is beyond question. What use the Romans made of them we have already learned from Pliny; and doubtless the Roman soldier, on outpost duty in this fog-begirt island, would often have need of whatever little comfort he could get out of his small pipeful of coltsfoot. Both in Ireland and Scotland somewhat similar pipes have been picked up in remote places, and have been attributed by imaginative country folk to the fairies and elves, to the Celts and to the Danes. Raleigh’s sowing the seeds of Ireland’s first tobacco-plant in his garden at Youghal is lost sight of in a desire to yield to antiquity the credit due to modern enterprise. About a century ago (to be exact, in the year 1784), the fine Milesian imagination was afforded an opportunity of soaring into the glorious region of an indefinable past, when the headman of every village was indeed a king. In an ancient tomb—far too old to bear the vulgar indication of a date—which had been opened at Bannockstown in Kildare, there was found firmly held between the teeth of the silent occupant a tobacco-pipe, small, but perfectly formed. Here, then, was positive proof of the antiquity of smoking in Ireland, ages, possibly, before the Saxon or Danish barbarian had invaded her shores. This important discovery naturally created a commotion among the learned of the Emerald Isle, which soon found mellifluent expression in the _Journal of Anthologia Hibernica_. Visions of a revivified Celtic history, clothed in the poetic vestments which properly belong to a venerable, half-forgotten past, rose to cheer young Ireland’s aspirations; and now could be sung with renewed fervour,— Let fate do her worst, there are relics of joy, Bright beams of the past, which she cannot destroy.