drawing by M. Stokes (after Sir F.W. Burton_).]

In these little western monasteries each cell stood as a rule by itself,
containing--one would say very tightly containing--a single inmate. In
other places, large buildings, however, were erected, and great numbers
of monks lived together. Some of these larger communities are stated to
have actually contained several thousand brethren, and though this
sounds like an exaggeration, there can be no doubt that they were
enormously populous. The native mode of existence lent itself, in fact,
very readily to the arrangement. It was merely the clan or sept
re-organized upon a religious footing. "Les premières grands monastères
de l'Irelande," says M. de Montalembert in his "Moines d'Occident," "ne
furent done autre chose à vrai dire qui des _clans_, reorganisés sous
une forme religieuse." New clans, that is to say, cut out of the old
ones, their fealty simply transferred from a chief to an abbot, who was
almost invariably in the first instance of chieftain blood. "Le prince,
en se faisant moine, devenait naturellement abbé, et restait ainsi dans
la vie monastique, ce qu'il avait èté dans la vie sèculière le chef de
sa race et de son clan."

There was thus nothing to jar with that sense of continuity, that inborn
love of the past, of old ways, old habits, old modes of thought which
made and still makes an Irishman--be he never so pronounced a
republican--the deepest at heart of Conservatives. Whereas every later
change of faith which has been endeavoured to be forced upon the country
has met with a steady and undeviating resistance, Christianity, the
greatest change of all, seems to have brought with it from the first no
sense of dislocation. It assimilated itself quietly, and as it were
naturally, with what it found. Under the prudent guidance of its first
propagators, it simply gathered to itself all the earlier objects of