when, we say, a man of the world, who afterwards wrote a remarkably moderate and sensible History of Ireland, wrote nonsense like this, he was doubtless well aware he was only by poetic license describing what Irishmen commonly believed about "days of old," and their glorified circumstances. We once saw an Irish schoolmaster, just one of those who mould the ideas of the humbler classes, shown into a room furnished with the usual luxury of a handsome English drawing-room,--books, pictures, flowers, and china, "an earthly paradise of ormolu." The good man looked round with great admiration, and then innocently remarked, "Why, this must be like one of the palaces of our ancient kings!" Here was precisely the popular Irish idea. Her "ancient king"--who actually lived in the _wattled_ walls of Tara, enjoying barbarian feasts of beer and hecatombs of lean kine and sheep--is supposed to have been a refined and splendid prince, dwelling in ideal "halls," (doubtless compounded out of the Dublin Bank and Rotunda,) and enjoying the finest music on a double-action harp. As a fact, there is no evidence whatever that the old Irish Pentarchy was much better than any five chieftainships of the Sandwich Islands. Even the historians who laud it in most pompous phrases, like Keatinge, give nothing but details of wars and massacres, disorders and rebellions without end. Out of one hundred and sixty-eight kings who by this (of course) half-fabulous story reigned from the Milesian Conquest to Roderick O'Connor, vanquished by Henry II. in 1172, no less than seventy-nine are said to have acquired the throne by the murder of their predecessors. The contests between the five kings for the supremacy, or for the acquisition of each other's territories, offer a spectacle which can only be compared to a sanguinary game of puss-in-the-corner lasting for a thousand years. As to any monuments of civilization, it would indeed be wonderful if they were found in a country so circumstanced. Such existing architecture as can be attributed to a Celtic origin is confined to the simple round towers, Cormac's Chapel at Cashel, and a few humble little stone-roofed edifices like the one known as "St. Kevin's Kitchen," and made, with true Irish magniloquence, to stand wellnigh alone for the "Seven Churches of Glendalough." For literature, ancient Ireland can show the respectable "Annals of the Four Masters," and a few minor chronicles in prose and verse, but not a single work deserving a place in European history. Literally the fame of a few nomad saints, and a collection of torques and brooches (of great beauty, but possible Byzantine workmanship) in the Irish Academy, are the chief grounds on which rest the claims of Ireland to ancient civilization. Yet not merely civilization, but the extreme grandeur and magnificence of Ireland in "former times," is the first postulate of all Irish discontent. It is because England has