Page:Rude Stone Monuments.djvu/262

236 these authors wrote in ignorance of the state of the country, for Ptolemy's description of the coasts and of the interior, of the cities and tribes shows an intimate acquaintance with the island which could only be derived from observation. Their own annals do not, it is true, repeat these scandals; but nothing we now have can be said to have been reduced to writing in anything like the form in which we now possess it before the time of St. Patrick; and even that has passed through edition after edition at the hands of patriotic Irishmen before it assumed the form in which we now find it. Even these tell of nothing but fighting and assassination, and of crimes of every sort and kind. Even the highest title of one of their greatest kings, Conn "of a hundred battles," is sufficiently indicative of the life which he led, and the state of the country he governed. As we have every reason to believe that the progress of Ireland was steadily and equably progressive, it is evident that if it was so, a very short time prior to what we find in the early centuries of Christianity would take us back to the present state of the natives of Australia, and we should find a condition of society when any combined effort was impossible. So evident is this, not only from history, but from every inference that can be gathered from the state of Ireland in subsequent ages, that the wonder really is how such a people could have erected such monuments as those we find on the banks of the Boyne in the early centuries of our epoch. The answer is, of course, that the idleness of savages is capable of wonderful efforts. A nation of men who have no higher ambition than to provide for their daily wants, and who are willing to submit to any tyrant who will undertake to supply these in order to gratify his own pride or ambition, may effect wonders. The pyramids of Egypt and the temples of southern India are examples of what may be done by similar means. But to effect such things, the people must be sufficiently organised to combine, and sufficiently disciplined to submit; and we have no reason to suppose that in Ireland they were either before the Christian era, and it is even very difficult to understand how they came to be so far advanced even in the time