THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 146

THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD

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The other elements of the population were scarcely less worthy of a high state of civilisation. The workers in gold were a more numerous body than they are to-day. The artists who fashioned the Cross of Cong would see no human handiwork so fine if they could visit the Chicago Exhibition. The royal cemeteries along the Boyne are, in their simple way, as kingly as those of Heliopolis. The population of each barony formed one family, who chose their own chief and pastured their lands in common. The first tenancies that began to be formed were rather freer tenancies than those of the nineteenth century, before the Act of 1881 was passed. The people's houses were of precisely the same pattern that the tourist still sees in tens of thousands along the Western seaboard, after seven centuries of English domination. The Church formed a beneficent Third Estate, checking the rich, feeding the poor, investing every portion of the island with consecrated associations, and sending forth over distracted Europe as many gentle saints as Scythia and Germany sent Attilas and Alarics. Civil wars during those centuries were not frequent, and not at all grave. A tribal war meant chiefly the transfer of a cattle-prey from one valley to a neighbouring one. The deaths were principally the deaths of chiefs and knights, who went out to the encounter with the full-blooded appetite with which modern sportsmen hunt lions and tigers, and did not much oftener meet with serious mishaps. The five united States, into which the island was divided, were loosely and pleasantly held together by national feasts, fairs, pilgrimages, genealogies, and (occasional) parliaments. In a general way the strongest of the five kings ruled, and the weak went to the wall. So they did elsewhere; so, unhappily, they do still. … continue reading »

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