Irish Nationality

								

taught us good things," the warriors responded with courteous
dignity. So at all the holy places of Ireland, the pillar-stone of
ancient Usnech, the ruined mounds of Tara, great Rath-Cruachan of
Connacht, the graves of mighty champions, Pagan hero and Christian
saint sat together to make interchange of history and religion, the
teaching of the past and the promise of the future. St. Patrick gave
his blessing to minstrels and story-tellers and to all craftsmen of
Ireland--"and to them that profess it be it all happiness." He mounted
to the high glen to see the Fiana raise their warning signal of heroic
chase and hunting. He saw the heavy tears of the last of the heroes
till his very breast, his chest was wet. He laid in his bosom the head
of the pagan hunter and warrior: "By me to thee," said Patrick, "and
whatsoever be the place in which God shall lay hand on thee, Heaven is
assigned." "For thy sake," said the saint, "be thy lord Finn mac
Cumhall taken out of torment, if it be good in the sight of God."
In no other country did such a fate befall a missionary coming from
strangers--to be taken and clothed upon with the national passion of
a people, shaped after the pattern of their spirit, made the keeper of
the nation's soul, the guardian of its whole tradition. Such legends
show how enthusiasm for the common country ran through every hamlet in
the land, and touched the poorest as it did the most learned. They
show that the social order in Ireland after the Danish settlements was
the triumph of an Irish and not a Danish civilisation. The national
life of the Irish, free, democratic, embracing every emotion of the
whole people, gentle or simple, was powerful enough to gather into it
the strong and freedom-loving rovers of the sea.
On all sides, therefore, we see the growth of a people compacted of
Irish and Danes, bound together under the old Irish law and social
order, with Dublin as a centre of the united races, Armagh a national
university, a single and independent church under an Irish primate of
Armagh and an Irish archbishop of Dublin, a high-king calling the
people together in a succession of national assemblies for the common
good of the country. The new union of Ireland was being slowly worked
out by her political councillors, her great ecclesiastics, her
scholars and philosophers, and by the faith of the common people in
the glory of their national inheritance. "The bodies and minds of the
people were endued with extraordinary abilities of nature," so that
art, learning and commerce prospered in their hands. On this fair hope
of rising civilisation there fell a new and tremendous trial.

CHAPTER VI
THE NORMAN INVASION
1169-1520

After the fall of the Danes the Normans, conquerors of England,
entered on the dominion of the sea--"citizens of the world," they
carried their arms and their cunning from the Tweed to the
Mediterranean, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The spirit of conquest