ned wood, by proper treatment, will
be as dense as ever; but the ancient mound, once carted away, can never
be replaced any more. When the study of the Irish literary records is
revived, as it certainly will be revived, the old history of each of
these raths and cromlechs will be brought again into the light, and
one new interest of a beautiful and edifying nature attached to the
landscape, and affecting wholly for good the minds of our people.

Irishmen are often taunted with the fact that their history is yet
unwritten, but that the Irish, as a nation, have been careless of their
past is refuted by the facts which I have mentioned. A people who alone
in Europe preserved, not in dry chronicles alone, but illuminated and
adorned with all that fancy could suggest in ballad, and tale, and rude
epic, the history of the mound-raising period, are not justly liable
to this taunt. Until very modern times, history was the one absorbing
pursuit of the Irish secular intellect, the delight of the noble, and
the solace of the vile.

At present, indeed, the apathy on this subject is, I believe, without
parallel in the world. It would seem as if the Irish, extreme in all
things, at one time thought of nothing but their history, and, at
another, thought of everything but it. Unlike those who write on
other subjects, the author of a work on Irish history has to labour
simultaneously at a two-fold task--he has to create the interest to
which he intends to address himself.

The pre-Christian period of Irish history presents difficulties from
which the corresponding period in the histories of other countries is
free. The surrounding nations escape the difficulty by having nothing to
record. The Irish historian is immersed in perplexity on account of the
mass of material ready to his hand. The English have lost utterly all
record of those centuries before which the Irish historian stands with
dismay and hesitation, not through deficiency of materials, but through
their excess. Had nought but the chronicles been preserved the task
would have been simple. We would then have had merely to determine
approximately the date of the introduction of letters, and allowing a
margin on account of the bardic system and the commission of family and
national history to the keeping of rhymed and alliterated verse, fix
upon some reasonable point, and set down in order, the old successions
of kings and the battles and other remarkable events. But in Irish