the imagination, unsatisfied and revolted, shrinks back from all
that he has done. Still we continue to inquire, receiving from him no
adequate response, Who were those ancient chieftains and warriors for
whom an affectionate people raised those strange tombs? What life did
they lead? What deeds perform? How did their personality affect the
minds of their people and posterity? How did our ancestors look upon
those great tombs, certainly not reared to be forgotten, and how did
they--those huge monumental pebbles and swelling raths--enter into and
affect the civilisation or religion of the times?

We see the cromlech with its massive slab and immense supporting
pillars, but we vainly endeavour to imagine for whom it was first
erected, and how that greater than cyclopean house affected the minds
of those who made it, or those who were reared in its neighbourhood
or within reach of its influence. We see the stone cist with its great
smooth flags, the rocky cairn, and huge barrow and massive walled
cathair, but the interest which they invariably excite is only
aroused to subside again unsatisfied. From this department of European
antiquities the historian retires baffled, and the dry savant is alone
master of the field, but a field which, as cultivated by him alone,
remains barren or fertile only in things the reverse of exhilarating. An
antiquarian museum is more melancholy than a tomb.

But there is one country in Europe in which, by virtue of a marvellous
strength and tenacity of the historical intellect, and of filial
devotedness to the memory of their ancestors, there have been preserved
down into the early phases of mediaeval civilisation, and then committed
to the sure guardianship of manuscript, the hymns, ballads, stories, and
chronicles, the names, pedigrees, achievements, and even characters, of
those ancient kings and warriors over whom those massive cromlechs were
erected and great cairns piled. There is not a conspicuous sepulchral
monument in Ireland, the traditional history of which is not recorded
in our ancient literature, and of the heroes in whose honour they were
raised. In the rest of Europe there is not a single barrow, dolmen, or
cist of which the ancient traditional history is recorded; in Ireland
there is hardly one of which it is not. And these histories are in many
cases as rich and circumstantial as that of men of the greatest eminence
who have lived in modern times. Granted that the imagination