An unmasculine art, it may be said; and enormous laborious skill spent upon tribial creation.  But once again, the age was pralaya; all Europe was passing into, or quite sunk in, pralaya.  The Host of Souls was not then holding the western world; there was but a glint and flicker of their wings over Ireland as they passed elsewhere; there was no thorough entering in to take possession.  But the island (perhaps) is the Western Lay-center, and a critical spot; the veils of matter there are not very thick; and that mere glint and flicker was enough to call forth all this wonderful manifestation of beauty.  If I emphasize over-much, it is because all this talk about ’inferior races,’—­and because Ireland has come in for so much opprobrium, one way and another, on that score.  But people do not know, and they will not think, that those races are superior in which the Crest-Wave is rearing itself; and that their superiority cannot last:  the Crest-Wave passes from one to another, and in the nature of things can never remain in any one for longer than its due season.  It is as certain that it will pass sometime from the regions it fills with strength and glory now, as that it will sometime thrill into life and splendor the lands that are now forlorn and helpless; and for my part, seeing what the feeble dying away of it, or the far foam flung,—­no more than that,—­raised up in Ireland once, I am anxious to see the central glory of it rise there; I am keen to know what will happen then.  It will rise there, some time; and perhaps that time may not be far off.—­Oh if men could only look at these national questions with calm scientific vision, understanding the laws that govern national and racial life!  There would be none of these idiotic jealousies then; no heart-burnings or contempt or hatred as between the nations; there would be none of this cock-a-doodling arrogance that sometimes makes nations in their heyday a laughing-stock for the Gods.  Instead we should see one single race, Humanity; poured now into one national mold, now into another; but always with the same duality:  half divine, half devilish-idiotic; —­and while making the utmost best of each mold as they came to inhabit it, the strong would find it their supreme business to help the weak, and not exploit or contemn them.  But it will need the sound sense of Theosophy,—­knowledge of Reincarnation, the conviction of Human Brotherhood,—­to work this change in mankind.

Well; now to the things that brought Ireland down.  In 795 the Norwegians began their ravages, and they seem to have had a peculiar spite against the monastery-colleges.  That at Armagh was sacked nine times in the ninth, and six times in the tenth century.  In the same period Glendalough was plundered seven times; Clonard four times; Clonmacnois five times betnveen 838 and 845, and often afterwards.  These are only samples:  there were scores of the institutions, and they were all sacked, burnt, plundered, and ravaged, again and