It is probable, however, that the little minikin fineries of life were not then in fashion--that our loaves were not baked in tin shapes, as at present, nor our carriages constructed in so many different varieties of form, excluding altogether those worked by steam; that our gunlocks were not prepared with percussion caps, nor our sofas furnished with air-blown cushions; that the routine of etiquette was differently negotiated, and that twenty, or more, several hands were not employed in the finish of a common pin, before it could be dignified with the honour of acting a useful part in adjusting the habiliments of a modern dandy:--but in all the grand essentials of life--in all its solid refinements and elegant utilities,--the scholar will confess that those who have gone before us have been fully our equals; and traces, too, are not wanting to countenance the belief that even those knick-knack frivolities on which we so pique ourselves in the present day, have not been at some period without a prototype,--so that the majority of those boasted patents for what are considered _discoveries_ or inventions of something new, should more properly be for _recoveries_, or unfoldings of something old, and illustrative of the adage, as remarkable as it is correct, “that there is nothing new under the sun.”[459] CHAPTER XXVIII. You ask me for the proofs of this early grandeur? I point you to the gold crowns, the gold and silver ingots, the double-headed pateræ or censers, the anklets, lunettes, bracelets, fibulæ, necklaces, etc., which have been repeatedly found throughout all parts of Ireland, evidently the relics of that “Sacred” colony who gave their name to this island, and who, to the refined _taste_ which such possessions imply, united also the science which appears in their workmanship.[460] But these are scanty and insufficient memorials? Pray, what greater can you produce of ancient Egypt? Her Pyramids? Our Round Towers are as _old_; are likely to be as _permanent_; and are really more _beautiful_. What are the vestiges of ancient Etruria? of Assyria? Troy? Chaldea? nay, of Babylon the Great, the queen of the world? A few consolidations of stone and mortar--disjointed rubbish--and incrusted pottery. All these _we_ retain, in addition to the thousand other evidences which crowd upon the historian. And, while Britain can adduce no single vestige of the Romans--who subjugated that country at their highest period of civilisation--but what, in the words of my adversaries themselves, are “only monuments of barbarism,” I answer--_no wonder_--for the Romans were never to be compared to the Iranian Budhists, who brought all the splendour of the East to the concentrated locality of this Hyperborean Island.