It is worth while to listen to Spenser’s _gratulation_, while chuckling himself with the idea of his fancied discovery: “This observation of yours,” he says to himself, “is very _good_ and _delightful_, far beyond the _blind conceits_ of some, who upon the same word Farragh have made a very _blunt_ conjecture.” _Oh patria! Oh mores!_ how little is known of Ireland! But I am not surprised at _foreigners_, when the very _natives_, the descendants of the _actors_ in those glorious scenes, are ignorant of its history! Take up any document, purporting to give an account of this country, and you will find it to be composed, either of absurd and nauseous _exaggerations_ on the one hand, or of gross and calumnious _detractions_ on the other. But though the _wildness_ of the _former_ cannot fail to generate, in the intellectual amongst all readers, an _unfavourable impression_; and in those of a different nation, already prejudiced, or mayhap incapable of separating the gold from the baser metal, _incredulity_ and _contempt_; yet the _true Irish searcher_, versed in the antiquities, not only of his own dear “father-land,” but of the kindred East, which maintained in the old world a religious and incessant communication with this “Sacred Isle,” will glean in the distortion of those _maniac effusions_, the _glimmerings_ of that _truth_ whence they originally emanated--while the _injustice_ of the _calumniator’s_ must, _of itself_ bring dismay, with the whole train of confusion and dishonour, upon the mercenary instruments of those foul abuses, as well as upon the heartless abettors who could have enlisted their vassalage! Truth, notwithstanding, obliges me to say that the blame should not altogether be laid upon the historians. They did as much as, under the circumstances, could be expected at their hands. Two successive invasions having passed over, and swept away, in the whirlwind of their desolating fury, all those monuments of learning to which the world had bowed just before--one from _innate antipathy_ to the _thing_ itself; the other from _apprehension_ that the contents of those memorials, acting upon the sensibilities of a high-hearted and proud race, should stimulate their ardour to the recovery of their lost rights, and the consequent ejectment of the party who had usurped them[164]--the patriot had little more to guide him in supplying the deficiencies thus created, than the rude imagining of his own brain, or the oral traditions of the village schoolmaster and genealogist.