Mr. Prendergast cannot mean that the Irish
chiefs were distinguished by their justice and humanity. The following
touch is still grander:--'The Irish, like the wealthiest and highest
of the present day, loved detached houses surrounded by fields and
woods. Towns and their walls they looked upon as tombs or sepulchres,
&c.' As to fields, there were none, because the Irish never made
fences, their patches of cultivated land being divided by narrow
strips of green sod. Besides, they lived in villages, which were
certainly surrounded by woods, because the woods were everywhere,
and they furnished the inhabitants with fuel and shelter, as well as
materials for building their huts.

But further on this able author expresses himself much more in
accordance with the truth of history, when he states that the 'Irish
enemy' was no _nation_ in the modern sense of the word, but a race
divided into many nations or tribes, _separately_ defending their
lands from the English barons in the immediate neighbourhood.
There had been no ancient national government displaced, no dynasty
overthrown; the Irish had _no national flag_, nor any capital city as
the metropolis of their common country, nor any common administration
of law.' He might have added that they had no _mint_. There never was
an Irish king who had his face stamped on a coin of his realm. Some
stray pieces of money found their way into the country from abroad,
but up to the close of the sixteenth century the rudest form of barter
prevailed in Ulster, and accounts were paid not in coins but in cows.
Even the mechanical arts which had flourished in the country before
the arrival of the Celts had gradually perished, and had disappeared
at the time of the English invasion. Any handy men could build a house
of mud and wattles. Masons, carpenters, smiths, painters, glaziers,
&c., were not wanted by a people who despised stone buildings as
prisons, and abhorred walled towns as sepulchres. Spinning and weaving
were arts cultivated by the women, each household providing materials
for clothing, which was little used in warm weather, and thrown off
when fighting or any other serious work was to be done.

I should be sorry to disparage the Celtic race, or any other race, by
exaggerating their bad qualities or suppressing any reliable testimony
to their merits. But with me the truth of history is sacred. Both
sides of every case should be fairly stated. Nothing can be gained by
striving