the site of that barn where he had first said Mass. He
was buried with national honours in the Church of Armagh,
to which he had given the Primacy over all the churches
of Ireland; and such was the concourse of mourners, and
the number of Masses offered for his eternal repose, that
from the day of his death till the close of the year,
the sun is poetically said never to have set--so brilliant
and so continual was the glare of tapers and torches.




CHAPTER IV.

THE CONSTITUTION, AND HOW THE KINGS KEPT IT.

We have fortunately still existing the main provisions
of that constitution which was prepared under the auspices
of Saint Patrick, and which, though not immediately, nor
simultaneously, was in the end accepted by all Erin as
its supreme law. It is contained in a volume called "the
Book of Rights," and in its printed form (the Dublin
bilingual edition of 1847), fills some 250 octavo pages.
This book may be said to contain the original institutes
of Erin under her Celtic Kings: "the Brehon laws," (which
have likewise been published), bear the same relation to
"the Book of Rights," as the Statutes at large of England,
or the United States, bear to the English Constitution
in the one case, or to the collective Federal and State
Constitutions in the other. Let us endeavour to comprehend