e's poetry with his native country.

While, therefore, we at once concede that Vallancey was a bad scholar,
O'Halloran a credulous historian, and Walker a shallow antiquarian, we
claim for them gratitude and attachment, and protest, once for all,
against the indiscriminate abuse of them now going in our educated
circles.

But no one should lie down under the belief that these were the deep
and exact men their contemporaries thought them. They were not patient
nor laborious. They were very graceful, very fanciful, and often very
wrong in their statements and their guesses. How often they avoided
painful research by gay guessing we are only now learning. O'Halloran
and Keatinge have told us bardic romances with the same tone as true
chronicles. Vallancey twisted language, towers, and traditions into his
wicker-work theory of Pagan Ireland; and Walker built great facts and
great blunders, granite blocks and rotten wood, into his antiquarian
edifices. One of the commonest errors, attributing immense antiquity,
oriental origin, and everything noble in Ireland to the Milesians,
originated with these men; or, rather, was transferred from the
adulatory songs of clan-bards to grave stories. Now, it is quite
certain that several races flourished here before the Milesians, and
that everything oriental, and much that was famous in Ireland, belonged
to some of these elder races, and not to the Scoti or Milesians.

Premising this much of warning and defence as to the men who first made
anything of ancient Ireland known to the mixed nation of modern
Ireland, we turn with pure pleasure to their successors, the
antiquarians and historians of our own time.

We liked for awhile bounding from tussuck to tussuck, or resting on a
green esker in the domain of the old academicians of Grattan's time;
but 'tis pleasanter, after all, to tread the firm ground of our own
archaeologists.

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[35] The reader who wishes to know what modern archaeology has to
say of this great tumulus may be referred to Mr. George Coffey's
"Newgrange," published by Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1912. It dates from
about 1,000 years earlier than Davis supposed.

THE ROUND TOWERS OF IRELAND.[36]

Accustomed from boyhood to regard these towers as revelations of a
gorgeous but otherwise undefined antiquity--dazzled by oriental
analogies--finding a refuge in their primeval greatness fro