But if the advocates of modernism have cause to be annoyed at my depriving them of this specimen of “the Fine Arts in Ireland,” which they thought they had appropriated to the prejudice of truth, how much greater must not be their chagrin at my wrenching from their grasp another “exceedingly curious” and “richly-ornamented” “ecclesiastic?”[170] Ecclesiastic, indeed! Yes; but reverenced and revered, by many a beating heart, as the head of all ecclesiastics, for centuries upon centuries, before the name of monachism, as connected with Christianity, was ever articulated! [Illustration] This, Sir, is no less a personage than Mr. Budha himself, or rather the personified abstract, in the possession of one of the last queens of the Tuath-de-danaans, at the moment of the inundation of the Scythian dynasty. I hope that, after so long an obscuration, and the uncourtly treatment he has received during the humiliating interval of revolving centuries, you will--now that he chooses to reveal his proper character, avow his delegation, and acknowledge the supremacy of that power by which his empire had been overthrown--treat him as an _Irishman_, with generous cordiality, and impute not to him a crime which belonged only to his followers. But his dress is like a Christian. So much the better, man: we ought to like him the more for that. But to be serious,--although, as my friend Horace formerly told me, “what hinders one laughing from speaking truth?”--all our ecclesiastical ritual, as well of _ceremony_ as of _costume_, has been borrowed from the Jewish, and that again from the Pagans, with such alterations only as the allwise Jehovah thought necessary to recommend. Besides, we have the authority of Dr. Buchanan for stating that “_Samona_ is a title bestowed on the priests of Godama (Budha), and is likewise applied to the _images_ of the _divinity_, when _represented, as he commonly is_, in the _priestly habit_.”[171] CHAPTER XI. _Pharaoh_,[172] the titular appellation of the monarchs of Egypt, being but the _local modification_ of this our Irish _Phearagh_, the mind is instinctively directed towards that great storehouse of bygone consequence. And as the best authority that we can command in gaining any insight into its reverses is through the medium of its own historians, let us hear what Manetho, a priest of the country, thus transmits:--