His fourth premise is, that “wherever we chance to light upon a cromleach, we seldom fail to find near it one of those miserable caves”—and which he has described before as “surpassing in dreariness everything in the imagination of man”;—whereas in the vicinity of the Pillar Tower no such thing is seen, unless some natural or accidental excavation may happen to exist unaccountably in that direction. His inference from which is, that “although the cromleach and the cave do claim, the first a Celtic, the second a Phœnician origin, and happen here to be united, the Pillar Tower, nevertheless, disavows even the most distant connection with either of them.”
His fifth is a continuation of the foregoing, with an erroneous parallelism, viz. “at Bael Heremon, in India, not far from Mount Lebanon, there stood a temple dedicated to Bael, near to which were many caves, of which one was roomy enough to admit into it four thousand persons.” “The size of those temples,” he adds, “was regulated according to the extent or amount of the local population, being spacious and magnificent in large cities, and small and simple in the inferior towns and villages; but nowhere, nor in any case, do we meet an example of a lofty spiral tower, internally too confined to admit into it at once a dozen bulky persons, denominated a temple.”
“An edifice,” he resumes, “like the Pillar Tower, might easily serve for a belfry; and there are instances where it has been converted, in modern times, to that use; on the other hand, a temple, properly speaking, gives an idea of a spacious edifice, or of one calculated to accommodate, withinside its walls, a certain congregation of devout people, met to pray. Should the building, to answer any partial or private use, be constructed upon a diminutive scale, like the little round temple at Athens,[49] called Demosthenes’, the edifice,” he continues, “in that case, obtains its appropriate shape, yet differing in plan, size, and elevation from the Irish Pillar Tower, to which it cannot, in any one respect, be assimilated.”
“Moreover,” he says, “the ancients had hardly any round temples. Vitruvius barely speaks of two kinds, neither of which bears the slightest resemblance to a tower. Upon the whole,” concludes he, “if we will but bestow a moment’s reflection on the geographical and political condition of primitive Ireland, and the avowed tardy progress towards civilisation and an acquaintance with the fine arts then common to those nations not conveniently placed within the enlightened and enlivening pale of Attic and Roman instruction, it will be impossible not to pronounce Vallancey’s conjectures respecting the Pillar Towers as receptacles for the sacred fire altogether chimerical and fabulous.”
Before I proceed to demolish, seriatim, this tissue of cobwebs, I wish it to be emphatically laid down that I do not tread in General Vallancey’s footsteps. To his undoubted services, when temperately guarded, I have already paid the tribute of my national gratitude; but, pitying his mistakes, while sick of his contradictions, I have taken the liberty to chalk out my own road.
Now for Montmorency. As to the first, then, of those objections against the antiquity of our Round Towers, it is readily repelled by explaining that, in the early ages of the world, masonic edifices, of architectural precision, were exclusively appropriated, as a mark of deferential homage, to the worship of the Great Architect of the universe; and with this view it was that the science was, at first, studied as a sort of religious mystery, of which there can be required no greater possible corroboration than the circumstance of that ancient and mysterious society who date the existence of their institution from Noah himself—and it is incomparably older—still retaining, amid the thousand changes which the world has since undergone, and the thousand attempts that have been made to explore and explode their secrets, the mystic denominational ligature of “Free and Accepted Masons.”[50]
The absence, therefore, of any vestiges of other coeval structures, for private abode or public exhibition, should excite in us no surprise; more especially when we recollect that in the East also—whence all our early customs have been derived—their mud-built houses present the greatest possible contrast between the simplicity of their domestic residences and the magnificence and grandeur of their religious conventicles—Verum illi delubra deorum pietate, domos sua gloria decorabant.[51]
But though this my reply is triumphantly subversive of the Colonel’s first position, I shall dwell upon it a little longer, to hold forth, with merited retaliation, either his disingenuousness or his forgetfulness; because the same inference which he deduced from the non-appearance of coeval architecture of any other class, would apply as well to the period which he wishes to establish as the era of the erection of the Towers,—and of which era, he admits, no other architectural monuments do remain,—as to that which I shall incontrovertibly prove was their proper epoch.
Then, without having recourse to the impossibility—of which all travellers complain—to ascertain even the situation of those gigantic cities which in other parts of the globe, at equally remote periods of time, were cried up as the wonders of the age—the masterpieces of human genius, making their domes almost kiss the stars; without betaking myself, I say, to those, the only memorials of which are now to be found in that of the echo, which, to your affrighted fancy, asking inquisitively and incredulously, “Where are they?” only repeats responsively, “Where are they?”—passing over this, I tell him that, more highly favoured than other countries, we possess, in Ireland, ample evidences of those remnants which he so vauntingly challenges. Traverse the isle in its inviting richness, over its romantic mountains and its fertile valleys, and there is scarcely an old wall you meet, or an old hedge you encounter, that you will not find, embedded among the mass, some solitary specimens of chiselled execution, which, in their proud, aristocratic bearing, afford ocular and eloquent demonstration of their having once occupied a more respectable post.
Not less futile than the foregoing is his second objection, arising from what he represents as the silence of “the busy and fantastic bard.” Doubtless he reckoned upon this as his most impregnable battery; and I readily believe that most of his readers anticipate the same result: but this little book will soon shiver the fallacy of such calculations, and adduce, in its proper place, from the very head and principal of the bardic order—no less a personage than Amergin himself—its towering refutation; as well as the final, incontrovertible appropriation of those structures to their actual founders.