The same distinction may surely be drawn in the case of Dr. Lynch. Davies was a man of English and Latin learning, Lynch a man of Irish and Latin learning. The historical criticism of their day was not perfect in either country, and as Davies leant to the English side of prejudice, Lynch leant to the Irish. But Lynch, like Davies, was I believe a just reporter of what he had himself seen or had heard from firsthand witnesses. And I have therefore quoted him, as I have Davies, for what had come within the range of his personal knowledge, not for matters of historical research. His testimony is of extraordinary and pathetic interest. Born in Galway in the last years of Elizabeth, when the city still preserved its old culture and the remnants of its old wealth, Lynch was one of the last scholars who ever saw and knew the Anglo-Irish civilisation. It is not any single picture that he gives that is important; it is the host of scattered and chance allusions, as to things well known to every Irishman in his day, which reveal to us the society in which he had been brought up. It is touching to remember that he was the last to say a good word for the medieval civilisation. After his death a darkness and silence of hundreds of years fell over that story, and it is across nearly three centuries that Irishmen will now have to take hands with Lynch and carry on his justification of the Ireland which was being gradually built up by the work of Gaels, Danes, Normans, and English in their common country. This, however, is just what Mr. Dunlop denies. He “begs leave to doubt” that the “native Irish” in the fifteenth century developed the resources of the country. By omitting all contemporary references to timber, to leather, and to salmon, of course it can be said there was no medieval trade in these. The plan seems unsatisfactory, and I have not followed it. Mr. Dunlop, for example, blames me for not quoting an English poem (no pure moonshine here--perhaps a farthing dip) which does not mention leather, as proof that there was no leather trade. I have quoted the _Libel_ elsewhere, but on this point I preferred the direct evidence of the records of the Bruges Staple; and I have since added notices in the _Hansisches Urkundenbuch_ for leather sent in 1304, 1327, 1453 to Bruges, Dinant, and Portugal. I would ask which is the historical method: to close the question once for all with the negative silence of an anonymous English writer “whom we think,” says Mr. Dunlop, in one of his easy moods about evidence, “had a pretty accurate notion of what constituted Irish commerce”; or to pursue enquiry in business records of the ports and seek to ascertain the exact facts.