In this sketch I have not proposed to myself to draw nice distinctions between what the Normans precisely did, and what the Irish (or even, following Mr. Dunlop), what Iberians were doing in the sixteenth century in the joint work of commerce and culture, because there is as yet no sufficient material for that discussion; I share this lack of knowledge with many who have pronounced themselves with no uncertain voice. Further, I should have been glad to confine these studies to the cheerful progress of trade and culture; but I was confronted with two possible objections. The suggestion that if there had been any considerable trade it would not have vanished by a freak, could only be answered by indicating how and why the destruction had been wrought. And to meet the argument that historians would not have let a genuine story perish, I gave my opinion on how it was that the truth dropped out of sight. My conclusions conflict with the venerable traditions over which Mr. Dunlop mounts guard. I clearly offend also against the canon of one volume. It is obvious that he must feel for me the sharpest disapproval; and this censure is conveyed with no mitigation of phrase or manner. The charge he elaborates against me is briefly that I have no judgment, and less candour, in the use of documents, and have thus produced a mass of mischievous fiction. I may say in passing that Mr. Dunlop’s severity with regard to authorities comes somewhat oddly from one who has shown himself fairly easy in such matters. In his own writings he gives no references, and in this same article the only authority he quotes independently is Mr. O’Connor’s _Elizabethan Ireland_. When I have to be silenced, “Turn we to Mr. O’Connor!” Now Mr. O’Connor has written a slight sketch of Irish political and social life in some 280 pages. He gives no dates, no indications of place, and no references. But we have Mr. Dunlop’s word for it that it is a “scholarly” work. “Mr. O’Connor” quoted by Mr. Dunlop ends controversy. The tradition is secure. I might envy Mr. Dunlop this freedom from trammels of references, of date, or of place. In such wide and impartial survey any statement about Ireland may appear as true of every place and of all time. Barbarism would seem to be a fixed and unchanging state, a passive monotony, from the time of “Lacustrine habitations” and of “Hesiod and the old poets,” till its characteristic representative in Shane O’Neill. The principle once assumed, any evidence will suffice to show that the Irish had none of the attributes of ordinary white Europeans; while evidence that they made money, traded, built houses, talked Latin, studied medicine and law, or otherwise behaved like other people of the Middle Ages, is probably rhodomontade, moonshine, or historical profligacy. Mr. Dunlop’s summary method with unfamiliar sources appears in his asperity towards what he calls my “trivial references” to Mr. Standish Hayes O’Grady’s _Catalogue of Manuscripts_.