dark haired with eyes of gray or brown.  The Milesians appear to have reached Ireland through Spain.  They came swiftly to power, more than a thousand years before our Lord, and divided the country into four provinces or kingdoms, with an ard-ri, or high-king, ruling all in a loose way as to service, taxes, and allegiance.  The economic life was almost entirely pastoral.  Riches were counted in herds of cattle.  “Robustness of frame, vehemence of passion, elevated imagination,” Dr. Leland says, signalized this people.  Robust, they became athletic and vigorous and excelled in the use of deadly weapons; passionate, they easily went from litigation to blows; imaginative, they leaned toward poetry and song and were strong for whatever religion they practised.  The latter was a polytheism brought close to the people through the Druids.  Some stone weapons were doubtless still used; they had also brazen or bronze swords, and spears, axes, and maces of various alloys of copper and tin.  Socially they remained tribal.  Heads of tribes were petty kings, each with his stronghold of a primitive character, each with his tribal warriors, bards, harpers, and druids, and the whole male population more or less ready to take part in war.

The great heroes whose names have come down to us, such as Finn, son of Cumhal, and Cuchulainn, were reared in a school of arms.  Bravery was the sign of true manhood.  A law of chivalry moderated the excess of combat.  A trained militia, the Fianna, gave character to an era; the Knights of the Red Branch were the distinguishing order of chevaliers.  The songs of the bards were songs of battle; the great Irish epic of antiquity was the_ Tain Bo Cualnge_, or Cooley Cattle-raid, and it is full of combats and feats of strength and prowess.  High character meant high pride, always ready to give account of itself and strike for its ideals:  “Irritable and bold”, as one historian has it.  They were jealous and quick to anger, but light-hearted laughter came easily to the lips of the ancient Irish.  They worked cheerfully, prayed fervently to their gods, loved their women and children devotedly, clung passionately to their clan, and fought at the call with alacrity.

Nothing, it will be seen, could be further from the minds of such a people than submission to what they deemed injustice.  The habit of a proud freedom was ingrained.  Their little island of 32,000 square miles in the Atlantic Ocean, the outpost of Europe, lay isolated save for occasional forays to and from the coasts of Scotland and England.  The Roman invasions of western Europe never reached it.  England the Romans overran, but never Scotland or Ireland.  Self-contained, Ireland developed a civilization peculiarly its own, the product of an intense, imaginative, fighting race.  War was not constant among them by any means, and occupied only small portions of the island at a time, but, since the bards’ best work was war songs and war histories,