t had received from
its first founders. The love of letters, too, sprang up with the
religion of a book, and the copying of manuscripts became a passion.

[Illustration: WEST CROSS OF MONASTERBOICE, CO. LOUTH.]

As in Italy and elsewhere, so too in Ireland, the monks were the
painters, the illuminators, the architects, carvers, gilders, and
book-binders of their time. While outside the monastery walls the
fighters were making their neighbours' lives a burden to them, and
beyond the Irish Sea the whole world as then known was being shaken to
pieces and reconstructed, the monk sat placidly inside at his work,
producing chalices, crosiers, gold and silver vessels for the churches,
carving crosses, inditing manuscripts filled with the most marvellously
dexterous ornament; works, which, in spite of the havoc wrought by an
almost unbroken series of devastations which have poured over the doomed
island, still survive to form the treasure of its people. We can have
very little human sympathy, very little love for what is noble and
admirable, if--whatever our creeds or our politics--we fail, as we look
back across that weary waste which separates us from them, to extend our
sympathy and admiration to these early workers--pioneers in a truly
national undertaking which has found only too few imitators since.

[Illustion]

VII.

THE NORTHERN SCOURGE.

While from the fifth to the eighth century the work of the Irish Church
was thus yearly increasing, spreading its net wider and wider, and
numbering its converts by thousands, not much good can be reported of
the secular history of Ireland during the same period. It is for the
most part a confused chronicle of small feuds, jealousies, raids,
skirmishes, retaliations, hardly amounting to the dignity of war, but
certainly as distinctly the antipodes of peace.

The tribal system, which in its earlier stages has been already
explained, had to some degree begun to change its character. The
struggles between the different septs or clans had grown into a struggle
between a number of great chieftains, under whose rule the lesser ones
had come to range themselves upon all important occasions.

As early as the introduction of Christianity Ireland was already divided
into four such aggregations of tribes--kingdoms they are commonly
called--answering pretty nearly to the present four provinces, with the
addition of Meath, which was the appanage of the house of Ulster, and
included W