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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. --------------------------------------------------------------- [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
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