Page:Ireland and England in the past and at present.djvu/25

Rh triotic desire than painstaking interpretation of the texts. On the other hand, it must be remembered that until recently few investigators outside of Ireland have taken interest in Irish antiquities, and English writers either had scant respect for Ireland or based their accounts upon testimony of those who wrote of Irishmen as degraded savages or regarded them as inferior and wretched. It has been the arduous task of a new school of historians to study the culture of Ireland in early times and estimate it more truly, as well as to discover how far this culture was handed down in the following ages. In controversies of recent years there has been one party declaring that the excellence of early Irish things and the inheritance from those times give to Irishmen a character which renders them, perhaps, the wisest, the liveliest, and the best in the British Empire, and that before the Irish people lies a mission to develop their type of civilization and give it to the modern world.

"The Gael is not like other men; the spade and the loom and the sword are not for him. But a destiny more glorious than that of Rome, more glorious than that of Britain, awaits him: to become the saviour of idealism in modern intellectual and social life, the regenerator and rejuvenator of the literature of the world, the instructor of the nations, the preacher of the gospel of nature-worship, hero-worship, God-worship such is the destiny of the Gael."

Somewhere I have seen the statement of a writer,