rant of vast tracts of land
for the supply of provisions for these houses of hospitality. The
private hospitality of the chiefs was equally marked; nor was it quite
rude. Ceremony was united with great freedom of intercourse, age, and
learning, and rank, and virtue were respected, and these men, whose
cookery was probably as coarse as that of Homer's heroes, had around
their board harpers and bards who sang poetry as gallant and fiery,
though not so grand, as the Homeric ballad-singers, and flung off a
music which Greece never rivalled.

Shall a people, pious, hospitable, and brave, faithful observers of
family ties, cultivators of learning, music, and poetry, be called less
than civilised because mechanical arts were rude and "comfort" despised
by them?

Scattered through the country in MS. are hundreds of books wherein the
laws and achievements, the genealogies and possessions, the creeds and
manners and poetry of these our predecessors in Ireland are set down.
Their music lives in the traditional airs of every valley.

Yet _mechanical civilisation_, more cruel than time, is trying to
exterminate them, and, therefore, it becomes us all who do not wish to
lose the heritage of centuries, nor to feel ourselves living among
nameless ruins, when we might have an ancestral home--it becomes all
who love learning, poetry, or music, or are curious of human progress,
to aid in or originate a series of efforts to save all that remains of
the past.

It becomes them to lose no opportunity of instilling into the minds of
their neighbours, whether they be corporators or peasants, that it is a
brutal, mean, and sacrilegious thing to turn a castle, a church, a
tomb, or a mound into a quarry or a gravel pit, or to break the least
morsel of sculpture, or to take any old coin or ornament they may find
to a jeweller, so long as there is an Irish Academy in Dublin to pay
for it or accept it.

Before the year is out we hope to see A SOCIETY FOR THE PRESERVATION OF
IRISH MUSIC established in Dublin, under the joint patronage of the
leading men of all politics, with branches in the provincial towns for
the collection and diffusion of Irish airs.[31]

An effort--a great and decided one--must be made to have the Irish
Academy so endowed out of the revenues of Ireland that it may be A
NATIONAL SCHOOL OF IRISH HISTORY AND LITERATURE AND A MUSEUM OF IRISH
ANTIQUITIES on the largest scale. In fact, the Academy should be a
secular Irish Coll