a stream slipping lightly by and hurrying to lose itself in the ground, always with a well or spring brimming freshly over--an object still of reverence to the neighbouring peasants. Thanks to the innate stability of their material, thanks, too, to the super-abundance of stone in these regions, which makes them no temptation to the despoiler, they remain, roofless but otherwise pretty much as they were. We can look back across a dozen centuries with hardly the change of a detail.
In these little western monasteries each cell stood as a rule by itself, containing--one would say very tightly containing--a single inmate. In other places, large buildings, however, were erected, and great numbers of monks lived together. Some of these larger communities are stated to have actually contained several thousand brethren, and though this sounds like an exaggeration, there can be no doubt that they were enormously populous. The native mode of existence lent itself, in fact, very readily to the arrangement. It was merely the clan or sept re-organized upon a religious footing. "Les premières grands monastères de l'Irelande," says M. de Montalembert in his "Moines d'Occident," "ne furent done autre chose à vrai dire qui des clans, reorganisés sous une forme religieuse." New clans, that is to say, cut out of the old ones, their fealty simply transferred from a chief to an abbot, who was almost invariably in the first instance of chieftain blood. "Le prince, en se faisant moine, devenait naturellement abbé, et restait ainsi dans la vie monastique, ce qu'il avait èté dans la vie sèculière le chef de sa race et de son clan."
There was thus nothing to jar with that sense of continuity, that inborn love of the past, of old ways, old habits, old modes of thought which made and still makes an Irishman--be he never so pronounced a republican--the deepest at heart of Conservatives. Whereas every later change of faith which has been endeavoured to be forced upon the country has met with a steady and undeviating resistance, Christianity, the greatest change of all, seems to have brought with it from the first no sense of dislocation. It assimilated itself quietly, and as it were naturally, with what it found. Under the prudent guidance of its first propagators, it simply gathered to itself all the earlier objects of belief, and with merely the change of a name, sanctified and turned them to its own uses.
ST. KEVIN'S CHURCH.