“An edifice,” he resumes, “like the Pillar Tower, might easily serve for a belfry; and there are instances where it has been converted, in modern times, to that use; on the other hand, a temple, properly speaking, gives an idea of a spacious edifice, or of one calculated to accommodate, withinside its walls, a certain congregation of devout people, met to pray. Should the building, to answer any partial or private use, be constructed upon a diminutive scale, like the little round temple at Athens,[49] called Demosthenes’, the edifice,” he continues, “in that case, obtains its appropriate shape, yet differing in plan, size, and elevation from the Irish Pillar Tower, to which it cannot, in any one respect, be assimilated.” “Moreover,” he says, “the ancients had _hardly_ any round temples. Vitruvius barely speaks of two kinds, neither of which bears the slightest resemblance to a tower. Upon the whole,” concludes he, “if we will but bestow a moment’s reflection on the geographical and political condition of primitive Ireland, and the avowed _tardy_ progress towards civilisation and an acquaintance with the fine arts then common to those nations not _conveniently_ placed within the enlightened and enlivening pale of Attic and Roman instruction, it will be impossible not to pronounce Vallancey’s conjectures respecting the Pillar Towers as receptacles for the sacred fire altogether chimerical and fabulous.” Before I proceed to demolish, _seriatim_, this tissue of cobwebs, I wish it to be emphatically laid down that _I_ do not tread in General Vallancey’s footsteps. To his undoubted services, when temperately guarded, I have already paid the tribute of my national gratitude; but, pitying his mistakes, while sick of his contradictions, I have taken the liberty to _chalk out my own road_. Now for Montmorency. As to the first, then, of those objections against the antiquity of our Round Towers, it is readily repelled by explaining that, in the early ages of the world, masonic edifices, of architectural precision, were exclusively appropriated, as a mark of deferential homage, to the worship of the _Great Architect_ of the universe; and with this view it was that the science was, at _first_, studied as a sort of religious mystery, of which there can be required no greater possible corroboration than the circumstance of that _ancient_ and _mysterious_ society who date the existence of their institution from Noah himself--and it is incomparably older--still retaining, amid the thousand changes which the world has since undergone, and the thousand attempts that have been made to explore and explode their secrets, the mystic denominational ligature of “_Free and Accepted Masons_.”[50]