centuries before Christ under the leadership of three brothers, and at once gave battle to the then possessors of the island, the firbolgs or celts, near Lake Masgin, in the county of Mayo, defeating them so utterly that the latter were compelled to seek a hiding place in some island in "the north." In this action, Nuada Airgiod-lamh, or Nuada-of-the-silver-hand, the general of the persians, lost his hand, and was obliged afterwards to wear one of silver. This account was long looked upon as a tale; but the invaluable relic it seems has been recovered, and is now in the museum of the Society of Antiquaries, who, Mr. O'Brien says, when it was shown to them, "knew nothing about it" (!) and but for this gentleman's restless industry, its use and origin might long have remained a secret. A fac-simile of the legend engraved on it is given in Mr. O'Brien's translation of Villanueva's Phoenician Ireland.

The people whom these Tuath-de-danaans conquered and drove to their northern fastnesses are spoken of as the firbolgs or celts; no other people are mentioned as having at that time shared the dominion of Erin with them. If they were the forefathers of the present celts of Ireland, they must have then been in small number, or the Tuath-de-danaans must have possessed a great superiority of arms and discipline, unless indeed there was some treachery at work; for my confidence in the prowess of the irish is such, that I believe were equal numbers of them turned loose, unarmed, against a mere predatory horde of armed persian infantry, they would just charge them as the wild highlanders did the disciplined english at Culloden, wrest their weapons from them, and either

worst them, or give battle in the most desperate style.

However, it seems they never made any successful attempt to recover their country, and from this time. till the days of the scythians the invaders remained. lords of some of the fairest portions of old Erin. It was they who founded the famous milesian dynasty of which the irish are so justly proud, and the heads of which are still represented by the noble family of Thomond. They gave the country the name of Iran, or the Sacred Isle, the charms of which were sung of by Orpheus, the swan of Thrace, and doubted of by Diodorus as too good for man.

It was the phoenicians who brought them hither. They were already settled here in small numbers; the grasping, unsated, insatiable phoenicians, ever on the wing, carrying friend or foe so long as they were paid, ready to sail to any climate under heaven if they could only make money by the venture; the jews of the high seas, and just as sanguinary, mean, and inexorable, with a dash of the yankee slave-owning skipper in their character.

These Tuath-de-danaans, says Mr. O'Brien, were the people who built the round towers in honour of Budha, where the purest worship of ancient days, the very counterpart of Christianity, was solemnized. They were a humane and gentle people, and never practised the bloody rites of those wretches the phoenicians. From this time till long after the beginning of the Christian era, Ireland was very far in advance of any part of western Europe. The arts were cultivated, cities were built, the people lived under a mild and wise government, and learning took

so deep a root that it required ages of intestine feuds and barbaric invasion to destroy it. Ptolemy speaks of several illustrious cities as existing in Ireland in his time, a hundred and thirty years after Christ, and many, many centuries later, Spenser could still remark with justice upon their great and early superiority. "For where you say," he observes, "the Irish have always bin without letters, you are therein much deceived; for it is certaine that Ireland hath had the use of letters very aunciently, and long before England." Another proof of Ireland's great superiority is the beauty of her music, if it be true that her exquisite airs are so very old, and that the welsh borrowed so much of their music from the irish as Sir John Carr and Selden say they did. Selden says the welsh music came out of Ireland as early as King Stephen's time.

These people beyond all doubt passed into Scotland, and sent a colony there who built the round towers of Abernethy and Brechin, ascribed on such very insufficient grounds to the builders of the monkish times. I visited both Brechin and Abernethy on purpose to examine these towers thoroughly, and having carefully inspected a tolerable number of the so-called gothic buildings in several different countries, over a tract of quite sixteen hundred miles, I have no hesitation in expressing my belief that they are not of gothic origin at all.

The extraordinary suggestions made by many learned men as to the use of those round towers, as given by Mr. O'Brien, and the versatility which which his opponents suggested a new theory so soon as ever he had demolished an old one, are among the most

curious instances on record of an unalterable resolution not to admit any proof of having made a mistake.

Over the door of one at Donoghmore in Ireland and another at Brechin in Scotland is the bas relief of a crucifix, which was at once accepted as proof that these towers had been built by monkish architects. This was too much for Mr. O'Brien, he called the whole thing a superstructure of historical imposture, and promised them that it should soon crumble about their ears "before the indignant effulgence of regenerated veracity." What was more to the purpose, he shewed that Budha also suffered death by crucifixion, and gave an effigy of the god in the attitude of this punishment, along with two others representing different stages of the incarnation, dug up from the bogs of Ireland. Mr. Petrie sought to prove that the crucifixion was an image of Christ, and Mr. O'Brien retorted that this was nothing but rank blasphemy and ignorance. Mr. O'Brien's enthusiasm may be considered amusing, but at any rate it springs from a high motive, which is more than can be said of culpable neglect or coldness in respect to such matters as decaying relics of former ages.

When the Jesuits settled on the coasts of Guinea, Madagascar, Socotra," and the countries thereabout," (!) they found all the natives wearing crosses, and celebrating their divine service in chaldee, which Mr. O'Brien says is "a dialect of our native irish,” meaning, I suppose, of the language from which the old irish sprang. As this utterly mystified them, they could not deny that Budhism existed in those distant parts; but they said this religion

was an adaptation of Christianity, which was rather a mistake, as it was certainly taught ages before Christ.

Many of my readers must have seen the famous stone brought by Edward the First from Scone to Westminster Abbey, where this able and merciless sovereign thought to complete his task of breaking the noble spirit of the scotch by destroying and carrying off all their monuments and archives. It is well known that this stone was used for the crowning of the scotch kings, and was first fastened in a wooden chair by King Kenneth, but Ware says it was brought by those very Tuath-de-danaans to Ireland, and that it groaned when their kings were seated in it to be crowned-not a very cheerful omen certainly. Perhaps this lugubrious disposition was what procured it the name of Liafail, or fatal stone.

The Tuath-de-danaans were in their turn defeated by the scythians, who came thither from Spain, and after subjugating them, founded the scytho-milesian dynasty. The struggle seems to have been short enough, as the first battle is said to have decided the campaign; probably the Tuath-de-danaans were dying out. That they came from Spain seems quite agreed upon, but Mr. O'Brien asserts that they only touched at that country on their way to Ireland. Villanueva, however, in opposition to Mr. O'Brien, tells us that they were carthaginians, and that they founded the milesian dynasty. This is much more probable than that this dynasty sprang either from the scythians, described by some authors as light-haired, blue-eyed, and of large frame, or from the small, wiry, lithe, dark-eyed swarthy race then numerous in western