a description which has been generally considered quite unsuited to the Irish and more naturally reserved for Englishmen. The merchant princes won for their province the name of “Munster of the great riches.” But the signs of foreign trade, chains and massive links of silver, and brooches of Scandinavia and the eastern world, are found all over Ireland--Belfast, Navan, Monaghan, Limerick, Galway, Cavan, King’s and Queen’s Counties--the patterns wholly unlike Irish work. There were enamelled glass beads, and silks and satins and stores of silver, oriental goods from the Caspian and East Mediterranean, which had been carried across Russia to Swedish and Danish lands and so to Ireland. “What is best for a king?” asked an Irish poet of the tenth century. “Fish in river-mouths. Earth fruitful. Inviting barks into harbour Importing treasures from over-sea. Silken raiment. Abundance of wine and mead. Let him foster every science.” Thus it was that the Irish wrested some advantage out of the Danish wars. They profited by the material skill and knowledge of the invaders. They were willing to absorb the foreigners, to marry with them, and even at times to share their wars. They learned from them to build ships, organise naval forces, advance in trade, and live in towns; they used Scandinavian words for the parts of a ship and the streets of a town. The Irish gave proof of a real national vigour. In outward and material civilization they accepted modern Norse methods, just as in our days the Japanese accepted modern Western inventions. But in what the Germans call Culture--in the ordering of society and law, of life and thought, the Irish like the Japanese never for a moment abandoned their national loyalty to their own country. During two centuries of Danish wars they did not loosen hold of their old civilization. “Concealing ancient lore, to hold any new thing fair,” they said face to face with the new Scandinavian system, “this is the way of folly.” They maintained their schools, their art and literature. They preserved their church. Writers of the ninth century describe the duty of an Irish king: he had to journey over the land and bring each chief under law: “let him enslave criminals”: “let him perfect the proper due of every man of whatever is his on sea or land.” On their side the tribes were to have for their protection not only “a lawful lord,” but “a meeting of nobles”; “frequent assemblies”; “an assembly according to rules”; “a lawful synod.” We read of yet larger Assemblies for the whole country “to make concord between the men of Ireland.” If the chief places of the people were captured, they went out into the bog-lands to elect their kings according to their law. Thus when Cashel was held by the Danes the seventeen tribes of Munster gathered in a marshy glen, where the nobles sat in assembly on a mound, and decided to choose one Cennedig as king. But the queen, Cellachan’s mother,