h collections can be found
hand-written books of parchment, illuminated with glowing colors that
time has scarce affected or the years caused to fade. On one page
alone of the Book of Kells, ornament and writing can be seen penned
and painted in lines too numerous even to count. They are there by
the thousand: a magnifying glass is required to reveal even a
fragment of them. Ireland produced these in endless number--every
great library or collection in Europe possesses one or more examples.

As with books, so with reliquaries, crosses, and bells. When the
Island of Saints and Scholars could produce books, it could make
shrines and everything necessary to stimulate and hand down the piety
and the patient skill of a people steeped in art-craft and religious
feeling. What they could do on parchment--like the Books of Kells and
Durrow--what they could produce in bronze and precious metals--like
the Cross of Cong, the Shrine of Saint Patrick's Bell, the Tara
Brooch, and the Chalice of Ardagh--not to write of the numberless
bronze and gold articles of an age centuries long preceding their
production--they could certainly vie with in stone.

Of this earlier work a word must go down. In Ireland still at the
present day, after all the years of plunder she has undergone, more
ancient gold art-treasures remain than in any other country, museum,
or collection, most of them pre-Christian, and what the other
countries do possess are largely Irish or of Celtic origin. We must
have this borne into the minds of every one of Irish birth or origin,
that this great treasure was battered into shape by Irish hands on
Irish anvils, designed in Irish studios, ornamented with Irish skill
for Irish use.

With such workmen, having such instincts and training, what of the
housing and surroundings to contain them and give them a fit and
suitable setting? The earliest stone structures in Ireland still
remaining are the great stone cashels or circular walls enclosing
large spaces--walls of great thickness, unmortared, in which there
are vast quantities of masonry. Around their summits a chariot might
be driven, inside their spaces horse races might be run. As a few
examples, there are Staigue, in Kerry; Dun Angus, in Aran, off
Galway; Aileach, above the walls of Derry. Of the earliest churches,
cyclopean in construction and primitive in character, built of stone,
with thick sloping walls from foundation to ridge, Gallerus still
remains, and the S