anxiety to please the Pope, probably suppress the denial of Peter.

These things which might have happened anywhere did, in fact, happen in
Ireland. Out of the footprints of the invaders there sprang up a legion
of fictionists, professional cooks of history. Beginning with Giraldus
Cambrensis they ought to have ended, but, as we shall see, did not end
with Froude. The significance of these mercenaries of literature can
hardly be exaggerated; it is not too much to say that they found Ireland
a nation, and left her a question. It is not at all that they put on
record the thing that was not as regards the events of their own period.
That might be and has been amended by the labours of impartial
scholarship. The real crime of the fabulists lies in this, that their
tainted testimony constituted for honest Englishmen the only information
about Ireland easily obtainable. The average Englishman (that is to say,
the forty millions of him who do not read learned books of any kind)
comes to the consideration of contemporary Ireland with a vision
distorted almost beyond hope of cure. The treasured lies of seven
hundred years are in his heart to-day. For time runs against the cause
of truth as well as with it. Once create a Frankenstein of race hatred,
and he will gather strength in going. The chronicler's fable of this
century becomes the accredited historical fact of the next. Give it what
billiard-players call "legs" enough and it will mature into a tradition,
a proverb, a spontaneous instinct. There is a whole department of
research concerned with the growth of myths, stage by stage, from a
little nebulous blotch into a peopled world of illusion. The strange
evolution there set forth finds an exact parallel in the development of
English opinion on Ireland. And, indeed, the more you study "the Irish
Question," as it is envisaged by the ruling mind of Great Britain, the
more conscious are you of moving in the realm not of reason but of
mythology.