in,—­and the people do not perish:  their woods and mountains are still full of a gay or mournful, a wailing or a singing, but always a beautiful, life.  Patrick was a great man; but he never could drive out the Danaan Gods, who had gone into the hills when the Milesians came.  He drove out the serpents, they say; and a serpent was a name for a Druid Adept:  Taliesin says, in one of his poems, ’Wyf dryw, wyf sarff,’ ‘I am a druid, I am a serpent’; and we know from H.P.  Blavatsky how universal this symbol was, with the meaning of an Initiate of the Secret Wisdom.  So perhaps Patrick did evict his Betters from that land of evictions; it may be so;—­but not the God-life in the mountains.  But I judge from the clean and easy sweep he made of things that Druidism was at a low pass in Ireland when he came.  It had survived there five centuries since its vital center and link with the Lodge had been destroyed at Bibracte by Caesar; and, I suppose, thus cut off, and faced with no opposition to keep it pure and alert, might well, and would naturally have declined.  Its central light no longer burning, political supremacy itself would have hastened its decay; fostering arrogance for spirituality, and worldliness for true Wisdom.  How then about the theory that some life and light remained or was revivable in it in Britain?  Why claim that for Britain, which one would incline to deny to Ireland and Gaul?—­ Well; we know that Druidism did survive in Gaul a long time after the Romans had proscribed it.  But Gaul became very thoroughly Romanized.  The Romans and their civilization were everywhere; the Celtic language quite died out; (Breton was brought in by emigrants from Britain;)—­and where the Celtic language had died, unlikely that Celtic thought would survive.  But in Britain, as we have seen, while the Romans and their proscription were near enough to provide a salutary opposition and constant peril, there were many places in which the survivors of Suetonius’ massacre in Mona might have taken refuge.  I take it that in Ireland it suffered through lack of opposition; in Gaul, it died of too effective opposition; but in Britain there were midway conditions that may well have allowed it to live on.

Beyond Christianizing the country, it does not appear that Patrick did much for it.  It is not clear that Ireland made any progress in material civilization then,—­or for that matter, at any time since.  We should know by this time that these things are a matter of law.  Patrick found her essentially in pralaya, essentially under the influence of centrifugalism; and you cannot turn the ebbing tide, and make it flow before its time.  There was a queer mixture of intensive culture and ruthless barbarism:  an extreme passion on the one hand for poetry and the things of the spirit,—­and on the other, such savagery as continual warfare always brings in its train.  The literary class was so strong that in the little kingdom of Tir Conall in Donegal