“Infant colonies, forsooth, do not carry a knowledge of the ‘Fine Arts’ along with them; they are only to be found where wealth, luxury, and power have fixed their abode.”[461] Most sapient remark! but unluckily out of place; for the authors of our Round Towers were not “an infant colony” at all; but the very _heads_ and _principals_ of the most polished and refined people on the bosom of the habitable earth--the Budhists of Iran. And, accordingly, in their train not only did “wealth, luxury, and power” abound, but they seemed _exclusively_ to have taken up their abode amongst them.[462] Analogous to the above was the rhodomontade of another pillar of the same order. “I, nevertheless,” says Montmorency, “am disinclined to believe that those same persons, had they to choose a residence between Syria and Ireland, would have taken the _wintry_ and _uncultivated wilds_ of _Fidh-Inis_, in preference to the sunny plains which gave them birth.”[463] In both those cases, of which the former is but the _echo_, in all opinions, of the latter, our eastern extraction is only objected to, _considered as Phœnician_; and there, I admit that the Colonel and his pupil may get an easy triumph over their adversaries. For had the _Phœnicians_ been the erectors of those Round Towers, _what was to prevent their raising similar structures in Cornwall_? where it is indisputable that they had trafficked for tin. In Spain we are certain that they had established _a home_; and _why does this appear as free from every evidence of columnar architecture as does the former place_? The same may be said of other countries whither this people resorted, Citium, Crete, Cadiz, and all the islands in the Mediterranean. _In no one of them is there to be found a single edifice approaching, either in design or form, the idea of a Round Tower!_[464] The Phœnicians, therefore, can have no pretensions to the honour of those memorials; nor, indeed, can their connection with Ireland be at all recognised, further than that, as having been, at one time, masters of the sea, _it is merely possible_ that the Tuath-de-danaans may have availed themselves of their geographical information, and even consigned themselves to their pilotage for a secure retreat, aloof from the persecution of intolerance. But as we see from the stanza quoted at page 396, that the Tuath-de-danaans were themselves possessed of a navy; and as it is indisputable that, long before the Phœnicians, the dynasty of the Persians had swept the ocean in its widest breadth, there is no need for our giving the Phœnicians credit even _for this service_, which it now appears could be dispensed with.