Our Irish history abounds with proofs of the “ceol,” and “ceolan,” the bell and the little bell, having been used by the pagan priests in the ministry of their religious ordinances; and to the fictitious sanctity which they attributed to this instrument may we ascribe that superstitious regard which the illiterate and uneducated still continue to entertain for the music of its sound. From the Sabian ceremonial--succeeded by the Druidical--it unquestionably was that the Christian missionaries in Ireland first adopted the use of bells, wishing, wisely, therein to conform as much as possible to the prejudices of the natives, when they did not essentially interfere with the spirit of their divine mission. I shall hereafter relate the astonishment excited in England, at the appearance of one of those bells, brought there in the beginning of the sixth century by Gildas, who had just returned after finishing his education in Ireland; and this, in itself, should satisfy the most incredulous that the Britons, as well pagan as Christian, were ever before strangers to such a sight; and no wonder, for they were strangers also to such things as Round Towers, to which I shall prove those implements properly and exclusively belonged. “Clogad” is the name, and which literally signifies a “pyramid,” that has led people into this “belfry” mistake. To conclude, therefore, this portion of our investigation, I shall observe, in Dr. Milner’s words, “that none of these towers are large enough for a single bell of a moderate size to swing about in it; that, from the whole of their form and dimensions, and from the smallness of the apertures in them, they are rather calculated to stifle than to transmit to a distance any sound that is made _in_ them; lastly, that though possibly a small bell may have been accidentally put up in one or two of them at some late period, yet we constantly find other belfries, or contrivances for hanging bells, in the churches adjoining to them.” I fear greatly I may have bestowed too much pains in dispelling the delusion of this preposterous opinion. But as it had been put forward with so much confidence by a much-celebrated “antiquarian,”--though how he merited the designation I confess myself at a loss to know,--I thought it my duty not to content myself with the mere exposure of the fallacy, without following it up with proofs, which must evermore, I trust, encumber its advocates with _shame_; and the rather, as this great champion of _Danish civilisation_ and proclaimer of his _country’s barbarism_ is at no ordinary trouble to affect ridicule and contempt for a most enlightened and meritorious English officer, who, from the sole suggestion of truth, promoted by observation and antiquarian research, stood forward as the advocate of our ancestral renown, to make amends, as it were, for the aspersions of domestic calumniators.