Both parties are, however, now appreciated as they ought; and though Vallancey, certainly, did not understand the purport of our Round Towers, his view of them, after all, was not far from being correct; and the laborious industry with which he prosecuted his inquiries, and the disinterested warmth with which he ushered them into light, should shield his memory from every ill-natured sneer, and make every child of Iran feel his grateful debtor. Having given Milner a little while ago the opportunity of tolling the death-knell of the belfry hypothesis, I think I could not do better now than give Ledwich, in return, a triumph, by demolishing the symmetry of the anchorite vagary. “It must require a warm imagination,” says this writer,--after quoting the account given by Evagrius of Simeon Stylites’ pillar, upon which Richardson, Harris, and Milner after them had founded the anchorite vagary,--“to point out the similarity between this pillar and our ‘tower’: the one was solid, and the other hollow--the one square, and the other circular: the ascetic _there_ was placed without _on_ the pillar; with _us_ enclosed _in_ the tower. He adds, these habitations of anchorites were called _inclusoria_, or _arcti inclusorii ergastula_, but these were very different from our round towers; for he mistakes Raderus, on whom he depends, and who says, ‘The house of the recluse ought to be of stone, the length and breadth twelve feet, with three windows, one facing the choir, the other opposite, through which food is conveyed to him, and the third for the admission of light--the latter to be always covered with glass or horn.’ “Harris, speaking of Donchad O’Brien, Abbot of Clonmacnois, who shut himself up in one of these cells, adds, ‘I will not take upon me to affirm that it was in one of these towers of Clonmacnois he was enclosed.’ It must have been the strangest perversion of words and ideas to have attempted it. Is it not astonishing that a reverie thus destitute of truth, and founded on wilful mistakes of the plainest passages, should have been attended to, and even be, for some time, believed?” Thus have I allowed him to retaliate in his own words; but in order to render his victory complete, by involving a greater number within his closing denunciation, he should have waited until he had seen a note appended to the fourteenth of Dr. Milner’s _Letters_, which, unquestionably, would deserve a similar rebuke for its gross perversion of a “cell” into a “tower.” It is this: “We learn from St. Bernard, that St. Malachy, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, in the twelfth century, applied for religious instruction, when a youth, to a holy solitary by name Imarus, who was shut up in a ‘cell,’ near the cathedral of the said city, _probably in a Round Tower_.” Risum teneatis?