The Irish were further reminded of their essential unity by the great genealogical compilations in which every element of the population, Celtic and aboriginal, free and unfree, were traced to a common ancestry. Pride in the country which they possessed was maintained by the _Dinnsenchus_ or collection of topographical legends dealing with hundreds of places, mountains, rivers, earthworks, roads, strands, venerable trees, in every nook and corner of Ireland—none elsewhere—all evidently things of interest to the whole people. The dignity of their race and history was recalled to them in the semi-legendary history of pagan Ireland—which is really a great epic in prose and verse, in two main sections, the Book of Invasions and the Irish Book of Kings. The subject of this work is simply Ireland. It has no other connecting motive than to satisfy the desire of the Irish to possess a complete and brilliant picture of Ireland from all antiquity. The charge was a solemn one, and carried out by generations of scholars with exact fidelity. There is no parallel elsewhere to the writing down of the great pagan epics five hundred years after Christianity, with no more direct influence of Christianity on them than we might find in the Odyssey or the Iliad. Nor was their language the least of the spiritual possessions of the Gaelic people—that language which, following their people over Scotland, Lowlands and Highlands and the Isles, remained for some fourteen centuries the symbol of immemorial unity of their race. The pride of the race in their language was beyond that of any other people in Europe outside of the Greeks and Romans. Grammars of Irish were written in the eighth or ninth centuries, perhaps earlier, full of elaborate declensions and minute rules, accounts of obsolete words and forms and esoteric literary jargons, treatises on the Ogham alphabet, dictionaries of celebrated men and women of Ireland from remote antiquity, numerous festilogies of the national saints in prose and verse, with their pedigrees and legends. What mediæval language in Europe had a school of grammarians, and at what date? It may seem strange to Englishmen that this affection should have stirred the hearts of pastoral and agricultural people; but no Irish man was far removed from the immaterial and spiritual life of his country. The famous works in verse and prose, the stories, the hymns, and the songs of heroes old and new, were known by heart, and handed down faithfully for centuries in thousands of cabins; and the Irish tiller of the ground in remote places has even in our own day a rich vocabulary of six or seven thousand words. The pleasure and pride of art, so widely diffused among the mass of the people by the Irish scheme of life and education, became a natural part of the Irishman’s thoughts. Their main concern in the Danish devastations was the threatened destruction of an ancient order of civilization. Before the “flood of outlanders,” says the “Colloquy of the