ege, with professors of our old language, literature,
history, antiquities, and topography; with suitable schools,
lecture-rooms, and museums.

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[31] Like many of the suggestions of Thomas Davis this has borne
fruit. In our own day the Irish Folk Song Society (20 Hanover
Square, London, W.) as well as the Feis Ceoil and the Gaelic League
have done invaluable work in the direction indicated.--[Ed.]

HISTORICAL MONUMENTS OF IRELAND.

We were a little struck the other day in taking up a new book by
Merimee to see after his name the title of "Inspector-General of the
Historical Monuments of France." So then France, with the feeding,
clothing, protecting, and humouring of thirty-six million people to
attend to, has leisure to employ a Board and Inspector, and money to
pay them for looking after the Historical Monuments of France, lest the
Bayeux tapestry, which chronicles the conquest of England, or the
Amphitheatre of Nimes, which marks the sojourn of the Romans, suffer
any detriment.

And has Ireland no monuments of her history to guard; has she no tables
of stone, no pictures, no temples, no weapons? Are there no Brehon's
chairs on her hills to tell more clearly than Vallancey or Davies how
justice was administered here? Do not you meet the Druid's altar and
the Gueber's tower in every barony almost, and the Ogham stones in many
a sequestered spot, and shall we spend time and money to see, to guard,
or to decipher Indian topes, and Tuscan graves, and Egyptian
hieroglyphics, and shall every nation in Europe shelter and study the
remains of what it once was, even as one guards the tomb of a parent,
and shall Ireland let all go to ruin?

We have seen pigs housed in the piled friezes of a broken church, cows
stabled in the palaces of the Desmonds, and corn threshed on the floor
of abbeys, and the sheep and the tearing wind tenant the corridors of
Aileach.

Daily are more and more of our crosses broken, of our tombs effaced, of
our abbeys shattered, of our castles torn down, of our cairns
sacrilegiously pierced, of our urns broken up, and of our coins melted
down. All classes, creeds and politics are to blame in this. The
peasant lugs down a pillar for his sty, the farmer for his gate, the
priest for his chapel, the minister for his glebe. A mill-stream runs
through Lord Moore's Castle,[32] and the Commissioners of Galway have
sh