nd gentle scholars and
divines; poets, musicians, craftsmen, architects, theologians. She had a
passion for diffusing knowledge, and for more than a thousand years sent
her missionaries of piety, learning, art, and commerce, far and wide
over Europe. For two hundred years she resisted her first foreign
invaders, the Danes, with desperate tenacity, and seems to have absorbed
into her own civilization and polity those who ultimately retained a
footing on her eastern shores.

With the coming of the Anglo-Normans at the end of the twelfth century
the dark shadow begins to fall, and for the first time the Irish Channel
assumes its tragic significance. England, compounded of Britons,
Teutons, Danes, Scandinavians, Normans, with the indelible impress of
Rome upon the whole, had emerged, under Nature's mysterious alchemy, a
strong State. Ireland had preserved her Gaelic purity, her tribal
organization, her national culture, but at the cost of falling behind in
the march of political and military organization. Sixty miles divided
her from the nearest part of the outlying dominions of feudal England,
150 miles from the dynamic centre of English power. The degree of
distance seems to have been calculated with fatal exactitude, in
correspondence with the degrees of national vitality in the two
countries respectively, to produce for ages to come the worst possible
effects on both. The process was slow. Ireland was near enough to
attract the Anglo-Norman adventurers and colonists, but strong enough
and fair enough for three hundred years to transform them into patriots
"more Irish than the Irish"; always, however, too near and too weak,
even with their aid, to expel the direct representatives of English rule
from the foothold they had obtained on her shores, while at the same
time too far and too formidable to enable that rule to expand into the
complete conquest and subjugation of the realm.

"The English rule," says Mr. Lecky, "as a living reality, was confined
and concentrated within the limits of the Pale. The hostile power
planted in the heart of the nation destroyed all possibility of central
government, while it was itself incapable of fulfilling that function.
Like a spear-point embedded in a living body, it inflamed all around it
and deranged every vital function. It prevented the gradual reduction
of the island by some native Clovis, which would necessarily have taken
place if the Anglo-Normans had not arrived, and instead