V.

THE FIRST IRISH MONASTERIES.

At home during the same period the chief events were the founding of
monasteries, and the settling down of monastic communities, every such
monastery becoming the protector and teacher of the little Christian
community in its vicinity, educating its own sons, and sending them out
as a bee sends its swarms, to settle upon new ground, and to fertilize
the flowers of distant harvest fields.

At one time, "The Tribes of the Saints" seem to have increased to such
an extent that they threatened to absorb all others. In West Ireland
especially, little hermitages sprung up in companies of dozens and
hundreds, all over the rock-strewn wastes, and along the sad shores of
the Atlantic, dotting themselves like sea gulls upon barren points of
rock, or upon sandy wastes which would barely have sufficed, one might
think, to feed a goat. We see their remains still--so tiny, yet so
enduring--in the Isles of Arran; upon a dozen rocky points all round the
bleak edges of Connemara; in the wild mountain glens of the Burren--set
often with an admirable selection of site, in some sloping dell with,
perhaps, a stream slipping lightly by and hurrying to lose itself in the
ground, always with a well or spring brimming freshly over--an object
still of reverence to the neighbouring peasants. Thanks to the innate
stability of their material, thanks, too, to the super-abundance of
stone in these regions, which makes them no temptation to the despoiler,
they remain, roofless but otherwise pretty much as they were. We can
look back across a dozen centuries with hardly the change of a detail.

[Illustration: CROSS IN CEMETERY OF TEMPUL BRECCAIN, ARANMOR. _From a