been forgotten. It was the golden time to which men looked wistfully
back when growing trouble and discord, attack from without, and
dissension from within, had torn in pieces the unhappy island which had
shone like a beacon through Europe only to become its byword. The
Norsemen had not yet struck prow on Irish strand, and the period between
the Synod of Whitby and their appearance seems to have been really one
of steady moral and intellectual growth. Heathenism no doubt still
lurked in obscure places; indeed traces of it may with no great
difficulty still be discovered in Ireland, but it did not hinder the
light from spreading fast under the stimulus which it had received from
its first founders. The love of letters, too, sprang up with the
religion of a book, and the copying of manuscripts became a passion.

[Illustration: WEST CROSS OF MONASTERBOICE, CO. LOUTH.]

As in Italy and elsewhere, so too in Ireland, the monks were the
painters, the illuminators, the architects, carvers, gilders, and
book-binders of their time. While outside the monastery walls the
fighters were making their neighbours' lives a burden to them, and
beyond the Irish Sea the whole world as then known was being shaken to
pieces and reconstructed, the monk sat placidly inside at his work,
producing chalices, crosiers, gold and silver vessels for the churches,
carving crosses, inditing manuscripts filled with the most marvellously
dexterous ornament; works, which, in spite of the havoc wrought by an
almost unbroken series of devastations which have poured over the doomed
island, still survive to form the treasure of its people. We can have
very little human sympathy, very little love for what is noble and
admirable, if--whatever our creeds or our politics--we fail, as we look
back across that weary waste which separates us from them, to extend our
sympathy and admiration to these early workers--pioneers in a truly