But those monks spread themselves, in shoals, over England also; and we know that that country was even more infested than our own with both Northmen and Danes. Is it not astonishing, therefore, that the English convents were not protected against the sacrilege of those savages by telescopic steeples of Babylonish cement?
This, it may be said, is applying a steam-engine to crush a flapwing; yet, as that flapwing has been somewhat troublesome, and has contrived to blindfold some searchers after antiquarian truth, I may be excused if, to frustrate any efforts at impotent revivals, I shall continue decapitating the hydra, until he disappears in his own sinuosities.
He tells us, then, with all the calculation of an engineer and the gravity of a physician, that a stone let fall from the top of one of those towers would crush the “barbarian” to atoms. True, it would, and the civilian also. A little pebble let fall from an eagle’s beak, as he cuts his aërial passage through the cloudy regions, or soars aloft into the empyreal of interminable space, would have a similar effect; but it would puzzle the shrewdest engineer in Christendom to place a ballast-man, with a big stone on his lap, on either the top or the sloping sides of the conical “caubeen” which graces the summit of our careering cylinders. This, to use the Colonel’s own words, “will be admitted to be contrary to all that is admissible in the rules of architectural proportions.”
DEVENISH.
Next remark that the Colonel keeps those 150 “volunteers” at work upon the Round Towers in the midst of a raging war;—after he had before affirmed that they could only be erected in a season of profound peace—for a complete century. During this whole time they must, of course, have availed themselves of the assistance of the inhabitants; and is it not marvellous that, during that long time “the ancient Irishman”—and “Pat’s nae stupid fellow,” as the Colonel himself avows—should not have been able to pick up a single insight into the arcana of the masonic art?—but that soon as ever the dear externs expired,—who at the period of their arrival must have been, at least, over twenty years of age each, and who, to accomplish Montmorency’s miracle, must have every one of them lived just one hundred years more, and then died, all in one day!—is it not petrifying, I say, that soon as ever this appalling catastrophe occurred, every vestige of those “fairy” masons should have vanished along with them?—and the country, in a paralysis, have forgotten to associate them with the Towers, as if stupefied with the incantation of a wizard or a talisman!
And yet this was not the greatest injustice of which the poor Cœnobites got reason to complain; but it is that, when the people had recovered from the delirium of their late trance, and began to look abroad for some “authors” on whom to father those edifices, they unanimously, though unaccountably, agreed to lay them at the door of the “O’Rorkes” and the “MacCarthy Mores”!
It so happens that the last of the MacCarthy Mores was my own maternal grandfather; and he, venerable and venerated old gentleman, apt as he was, in the evening of his faded life, to revert to the mutability of worldly possessions, never for a moment bestowed a solitary thought upon the alienation of the property of those columnar masonries. Often used he to mention the Castles of Palace and of Blarney: Castlemain and Glenflesk used still oftener to grace his talk; but oftener still, and with more apparent delectation, would he dilate on the Castle of Macroom and the Abbey of Mucruss,—all, as the creation of immediate or collateral branches of his family; but never, in the catalogue of his patrimonial spoliations did he enumerate a Round Tower, or lay a shadow of claim to their construction.
To the point, however.—The great miracle after all is, that after the decease of those “fairy” masters, no one of their native helpmates could be found able to join together with mechanical skill two pieces of hewn stone with the intermediate amalgam of adhesive mortar! The thing is so absurd as to make the Colonel himself in his honesty to exclaim, “Is this simple process that mighty piece of necromancy which, according to some authors” (forgetting that he was one of those himself), “that lively people were unable to comprehend?” It is amusing to see how encomiastic and commendatory he is of the “Hibernians” when it answers his views; and how vituperative and condemnatory when it is equally to his purpose.
The last assumption of this writer, and which I have purposely reserved until now is an affected parallel of the Irish Culdees with the Egyptian Cophtes. “Their great piety, austerity, and hospitality announce,” he says, “the existence of one kind of discipline and of kindred religions between the Cophtes and the Irish Cœnobites.” That is, because they are both pious, austere, and hospitable, they must both necessarily correspond in religious opinions and in Church forms! The Indian Brahmins, say I, are also pious, austere, and hospitable; and why are they not incorporated in this holy identification? No, Colonel, it will not do; I see what you are at. You want to insinuate our obligation to the Greeks for the blessings of the Gospel. A false zeal for mental emancipation—subsequent to the dislodgment of spiritual encroachment—has forced into mushroom existence this spurious abortion. Aloof from the thraldom of Roman or other yoke, the Irish, within themselves, cultivated the principles of the Christian verity; but it is, in the extreme, erroneous to say that they derived their faith in that verity through emissaries of the Grecian Church, from whom they differed as substantially as light does from darkness.