aken and threatened to remove the Warden's house--that fine stone
chronicle of Galway heroism.

How our children will despise us all for this! Why shall we seek for
histories, why make museums, why study the manners of the dead, when we
foully neglect or barbarously spoil their homes, their castles, their
temples, their colleges, their courts, their graves? He who tramples on
the past does not create for the future. The same ignorant and vagabond
spirit which made him a destructive prohibits him from creating for
posterity.

Does not a man, by examining a few castles and arms, know more of the
peaceful and warrior life of the dead nobles and gentry of our island
than from a library of books; and yet a man is stamped as unlettered
and rude if he does not know and value such knowledge. Ware's
_Antiquities_, and Archdall, speak not half so clearly the taste, the
habits, the everyday customs of the monks, as Adare Monastery,[33] for
the fine preservation of which we owe so much to Lord Dunraven.

The state of civilisation among our Scotic or Milesian, or Norman, or
Danish sires, is better seen from the Museum of the Irish Academy, and
from a few raths, keeps, and old coast towns, than from all the prints
and historical novels we have. An old castle in Kilkenny, a house in
Galway give us a peep at the arts, the intercourse, the creed, the
indoor and some of the outdoor ways of the gentry of the one, and of
the merchants of the other, clearer than Scott could, were he to write,
or Cattermole were he to paint, for forty years.

We cannot expect Government to do anything so honourable and liberal as
to imitate the example of France, and pay men to describe and save
these remains of dead ages. But we do ask it of the clergy, Protestant,
Catholic, and Dissenting, if they would secure the character of men of
education and taste--we call upon the gentry, if they have any pride of
blood, and on the people, if they reverence Old Ireland, to spare and
guard every remnant of antiquity. We ask them to find other quarries
than churches, abbeys, castles and cairns--to bring rusted arms to a
collector and coins to a museum, and not to iron or goldsmiths, and to
take care that others do the like. We talk much of Old Ireland, and
plunder and ruin all that remains of it--we neglect its language,
fiddle with its ruins, and spoil its monuments.[34]

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[32] Mellifont, fou