an inferior number to vanquish a vast host of the barbarians.  Besides, they were but ill equipped.  Few of them wore any armour; their narrow shields, which were of the same height with their bodies, were weak and clumsy; they rushed upon their enemies with broad thin battle-swords of bad steel, which the first blow upon iron often notched and rendered useless.  Like true savages, they destroyed the inhabitants, the towns, and the agriculture of the countries they conquered.  They cut off the heads of the slain, and tied them by the hair to the manes of their horses.  If a skull belonged to a person of rank, they nailed it up in their houses and preserved it as an heirloom for their posterity, as the nobles in rude ages do stag-horns.  Towns were rare amongst them; the houses and the villages, which were very numerous, were mean, the furniture wretched—­a heap of straw covered with skins served both for a bed and a seat.  They did not cultivate corn save for a very limited consumption, for the main part of their food was the milk and the flesh of their cattle.  These formed their wealth.  Gold, too, they had in abundance, derived partly from the sandy beds of their rivers, partly from some mines which these had led them to discover.  It was worn in ornaments by every Gaul of rank.  In battle he bore gold chains on his arms and heavy gold collars round his neck, even when the upper part of his body was in other respects quite naked.  For they often threw off their parti-coloured chequered cloaks, which shone with all the hues of the rainbow, like the picturesque dress of their kinspeople the Highlanders, who have laid aside the trousers of the ancient Gauls.  Their duels and gross revels are an image of the rudest part of the middle ages.  Their debauches were mostly committed with beer and mead; for vines and all the plants of southern regions were as yet total strangers to the north of the Alps, where the climate in those ages was extremely severe; so that wine was rare, though of all the commodities imported it was the most greedily bought up.

Ulster was known in ancient times as one of the five Irish ‘kingdoms,’ and remained unconquered by the English till the reign of James I., when the last prince of the great house of O’Neill, then Earl of Tyrone, fled to the Continent in company with O’Donel, Earl of Tyrconnel, head of another very ancient sept.  Up to that period the men of Ulster proudly regarded themselves as ’Irish of the Irish and Catholic of the Catholics.’  The inhabitants were of mixed blood, but, as in the other provinces of the island, the great mass of the people, as well as the ruling classes, were of Celtic origin.  Those whom ethnologists still recognise as aborigines, in parts of Connaught and in some mountainous regions, an inferior race, are said to be the descendants of the Firbolgs, or Belgae, who formed the third immigration.  They were followed and subdued by the Tuatha de Danans—­men famed for their gigantic power and supernatural skill—­a