race of demigods, who still live in the national superstitions.  The last of the ancient invasions was by the Gael or Celt, known as the Milesians and Scoti.  The institutions and customs of this people were established over the whole island, and were so deeply rooted in the soil that their remnants to this day present the greatest obstacles to the settlement of the land question according to the English model, and on the principles of political economy, which run directly counter to Irish instincts.  It is truly wonderful how distinctly the present descendants of this race preserve the leading features of their primitive character.  In France and England the Celtic character was moulded by the power and discipline of the Roman Empire.  To Ireland this modifying influence never extended; and we find the Ulster chiefs who fought for their territories with English viceroys 280 years ago very little different from the men who followed Brennus to the sack of Home, and encountered the legions of Julius Caesar on the plains of Gaul.

Mr. Prendergast observes, in the introduction to his ’Cromwellian Settlement’ that when the companions of Strongbow landed in the reign of Henry II. they found a country such as Caesar had found in Gaul 1200 years before.  A thousand years had passed over the island without producing the slightest social progress—­’the inhabitants divided into tribes on the system of the clansmen and chiefs, without a common Government, suddenly confederating, suddenly dissolving, with Brehons, Shaunahs, minstrels, bards, and harpers, in all unchanged, except that for their ancient Druids they had got Christian priests.  Had the Irish remained honest pagans, Ireland perhaps had remained unconquered still.  Round the coast strangers had built seaport towns, either traders from the Carthaginian settlements in Spain, or outcasts from their own country, like the Greeks that built Marseilles.  At the time of the arrival of the French and Flemish adventurers from Wales, they were occupied by a mixed Danish and French population, who supplied the Irish with groceries, including the wines of Poitou, the latter in such abundance that they had no need of vineyards.’

If vineyards had been needed, we may be sure they would not have been planted, for the Irish Celts planted nothing.  Neither did they build, except in the simplest and rudest way, improving their architecture from age to age no more than the beaver or the bee.  Mr. Prendergast is an able, honest, and frank writer; yet there is something amusingly Celtic in the flourish with which he excuses the style of palaces in which the Irish princes delighted to dwell.  ‘Unlike England,’ he says, ’then covered with castles on the heights, where the French gentlemen secured themselves and their families against the hatred of the churls and villains, as the English peasantry were called, the dwellings of the Irish chiefs were of wattles or clay.  It is for robbers and foreigners