Nay, in all Denmark and Scandinavia, the original residence of the Ostmen and Danes, there is not a single parallel to be found to those columnar edifices! Ireland, on the contrary, exhibits them in every quarter; in districts and baronies where Danish authority was never felt; and surely our forefathers were not so much in love with the usages and habits of their barbarian intruders, as to multiply the number of those stately piles, solely in imitation of such detested taskmasters. But what renders it _demonstrative_ that those professional pirates had no manner of connection with the Irish Round Towers, is the glaring fact, that in the two cities of Wexford and Waterford--where their power was absolute, their influence uncontrolled--there is not a solitary structure that could possibly be ascribed to the class of those which we now discuss! In Scotland alone, of all European countries besides Ireland, do we meet with two of them,--one at Brechin, and the other at Abernethy;--but they are smaller than the Irish, and, with other characteristics, seem to have been built, after their model, at a comparatively recent period, by a colony from this country, “as if marking the fact,” to use Dalton’s _accidentally_[46] appropriate phrase, “of that colonisation having taken place when the rites, for which the Round Towers were erected, in the mother-country, were on the decline.” But, forsooth, they are called “cloghachd” by the peasantry, and that, without further dispute, fixes their destination as belfries! Oh! seri studiorum quîne difficile putetis? That some of them had been appropriated in latter times, nay, and still are, to this purpose, I very readily concede; but, “toto cœlo,” I deny that such had ever entered into the contemplation of their constructors, as I do, also, the universality of the very name, which I myself know, by popular converse, to be but partial in its adoption, extending only to such as had been converted by the moderns to the purpose described, or such as may, originally, have had a clogh, or bell, of which I admit there were some, as part of their apparatus. The first bells of which we have any mention are those described by Moses, as attached to the garments of the high-priest. From these, the Gentiles, as they affected to rival the Israelites in all their ceremonies, borrowed the idea, and introduced its exercise into the celebration of their own ritual. By “Israelites,” however, I deem it necessary to explain that I do not understand those who, in strictness of speech, are so denominated as the descendants of Israel, _i.e._ Jacob, who, in fact, were a comparatively modern people; but I particularise that old stock of patriarchal believers which existed from the Creation, and upon which the Israelites, rigidly so called, were afterwards engrafted.