Page:Irish essays; literary and historical.pdf/16

 house, and became the religious centre of all Tirconnell, although Abbey Assaroe still survived in almost undiminished splendour on the banks of the Erne. The despoiling edicts of Henry VIII. did not run in Tirhugh. Hence we find that when Sir Henry Sydney, the deputy, visited Donegal, in 1566, he described the abbey as "then unspoiled or unhurt," and, with a soldier’s eye, he perceived that it was, "with small cost fortifiable, much accommodated, too, with the nearness of the water, and with fine groves, orchards, and gardens, which are about the same.” Close at hand there was a landing-place, so that when the tide was in, foreign barques, freighted with the wines of Spain and silks of France, might land their cargoes at the convent walls, and carry away in exchange Irish hides, fleeces, flax, linen, and cloth. So we are expressly told by Father Mooney, who must have often seen the foreign ships when he was a boy, and who tells us also that in the year 1600 there were forty religious in the community, and forty suits of vestments of silk and cloth of gold in the sacristy, with sixteen chalices and two ciboriums. But in that very year the traitor Nial Garve O’Donnell seized on the abbey, in the absence of his chief, and held it for the English. By some accident, however, the magazine blew up on Saturday, the 20th of September, at early dawn, and the beautiful fabric was almost entirely destroyed. After the battle of Kinsale and the flight of the Earls it passed into Protestant hands, and was partially restored, so that Montgomery, the King’s Bishop of Raphoe, proposed to make it a college for the education and perversion of the young men of the north who could not afford to go to Trinity College. This benevolent proposal was not adopted by King James; but about the beginning of the reign of King Charles, when some measure of toleration was granted to the Catholics, the building, probably then derelict, seems to have again been occupied by the Franciscans. This I infer from the express statement of Brother Michael O’Clery himself, as well as from that of the, superiors of the convent, who declare that the Annals of the Four Masters "were begun on the 22nd day of the month of January, 1632, in their convent of Donegal;" and that "they were finished in the same convent of Donegal on the 10th day of August,  1636, the eleventh of the reign of King Charles." Colgan also distinctly asserts that they "were completed in our convent of Donegal."