Here again, what a picture of the camp-life of the age; the darkness of night, the great central fire with the sixty grim and redoubtable warriors armed with keen axes, terrible and ready for action, and the sixty stern and terrific Scots with their massive swords.  The admirable manner of the narrative is as striking as the fierce vigor of the life portrayed.  So we might go on, adding red pages of martial records, but in reality adding nothing to our understanding of the times.  The life of the land was as full and abundant as of old, and one outcome of that life we may touch on rather more at length.

We have said much of the old religious schools of Ireland, with their fine and vigorous intellectual life, which did so much to carry forward the torch of culture to our modern world.  For nearly seven hundred years these great schools seem to have developed wholly along indigenous lines, once they had accepted the body of classical culture from the Roman Empire, then tottering to its fall.  The full history of that remarkable chapter in the world’s spiritual life has yet to be written; but this we can foretell, that when written, it will abound with rich material and ample evidence of a sound and generous culture, inspired throughout with the fervor of true faith.

About the time when the Norman warriors began to mingle with the fighting chieftains of the old native tribes, a change came over the religious history of the country.  After sending forth men of power and light to the awakening lands of modern Europe, Ireland began to receive a returning tide, to reap a harvest from these same lands, in the friars and abbots of the great Continental orders founded by men like Saint Bernard, Saint Dominick and Saint Francis of Assisi.  A change in the church architecture of the period visibly records this spiritual change; continental forms appear, beginning with the rounded arches of the Normans, and passing gradually into the various forms of pointed arches which we know as Gothic.  Very beautiful Abbeys belonging to this epoch remain everywhere throughout the island, making once more evident—­what strikes us at every point of our study—­that no country in the world is so rich in these lasting records of every step of our national life, whether in pagan or Christian times.

We have said much of the archaic cromlechs.  We have recorded the great Pyramids by the Boyne telling us of the genius of the De Danaans.  The Milesian epoch is even now revealed to us in the great earthworks of Tara and Emain and Cruacan.  We can, if we wish, climb the mound of heaped-up earth where was the fortress of Cuculain, or look over the green plains from the hill of Find.

[Illustration:  Mellifont Abbey, Co.  Louth.]