The Crest-Wave rolled in to her; the spiritual forces descended far enough to create a cultural illumination, but not far enough to create political stability.  We have seen before that they touch the artistic creative planes, in their descent, before they reach the more material planes.  So her position is perfectly comprehensible.  The old European manvantara was dying; elsewhere it was dead.  Its forces, when they passed away through Ireland, were nearly exhausted; in no condition whatever to penetrate to the material plane and make political greatnesses and strengths.  But they found in her very soil and atmosphere a spiritual something which enabled them to produce a splendor of literary creation that perhaps had had no parallel in Europe since Periclean days:  Yes, surely Ireland was much more creative than Augustan Rome.

Have any of you heard of literary savages?  Of wild men of the woods, your true prognathous primitives, that in a bare couple of generations, and upon no contact with civilized races, rose from their native pithecanthropism to be the wonderful beacon of the West or East?  You have not, and cannot imagine it; nor could it ever be.  A great literary habit is only acquired in long ages of settled civilization; and there were long ages of settled civilization behind Ireland;—­and when, about thirteen decades after Patrick’s coming, she flamed up into cultural creation, she was but returning to what was proper to her soul; in the midst of her dissolution, she was but groping after an olden self.  That olden self, very likely, she had even by that time more than half forgotten; and we now can only see it refracted, as it were, through the lens of those first Christian centuries, and with the eyes of those Christian monks and bards.  How would they have seen them?—­There was that spirit of euhemerization:  of making ancient things conform to new Christian ideas.  They had the Kilkenny Catterwauling in their ears daily; would they have allowed to any Pagan times a quieter less dissonant music?  Could they have imagined it, indeed?—­I doubt.  Kilkennyism would have appeared to them the natural state of things.  Were you to look back into Paganism for your Christian millennium, to come not till Christ came again?  Were you to search there for peace on earth and mercy mild?—­there in the long past, when all the near past was war?—­Besides, there was that ancientest of Mariners, Noah, but a few thousand years back; and you had to make things fit.

So I find nothing in it conclusive, if the legends tell of no conditions different from those Patrick found:  Kilkenny Cattery in politics, intensive culture in the things of the spirit; and I see no difficulty in the co-existence of the two.  The cultured habit had grown in forgotten civilized ages; the Cattery was the result of national or racial pralaya; of the break-up of the old civilization, and the cyclic necessary night-time between it and the birth of another.