Chapter II

This chivalrous son of Mars, more conversant, I should hope, with tactics than with literary disquisitions, has started with a position which he is himself, shortly after, the most industrious to contradict; namely, “that the gods, to punish so much vanity and presumption, had consigned to everlasting oblivion the founders, names, dates, periods, and all records relating to them.”[48]

Surely, if they were intended for the despicable _dungeons_ which the Colonel would persuade us was their origin, there existed neither “vanity” nor “presumption” in _that humble design_; and when to this we add the _nature_ of that security, which he tells us they were to establish, one would think that _this_ should be a ground for the perpetuity of their registration, rather than for consigning their history to “everlasting oblivion.”

But secure in the consciousness of the whole history of those structures, and satisfied that _truth_ will never suffer anything by condescending to investigation, I will, to put the reader in full possession of _this_ adversary’s statement, here capitulate his arguments with all the fidelity of an honourable rival.

His object, then, being to affix the Round Towers to the Christian era, he begins by insisting that, as “the architects of those buildings were consummate masters in masonic art,” it follows, that “a people so admirably skilled in masonry never could have experienced any impediments in building substantial dwellings, strong castles, palaces, or any other structures of public or private conveniency, some fragments of which, however partial and insignificant, would still be likely to appear, in despite of the corroding breath of time or the torch of devastation.”

His next argument is, “that the _busy_ and _fantastic bard_, whose occupation led him to interfere in private and public concerns,--who, in truth (he adds) is our oldest and most circumstantial annalist,--on the subject of the Pillar Tower is dumb and silent as the dead”; whence he infers the “non-existence of those Towers during the remote ages of bardic influence,”--“and of their being utterly unknown to them, and to our ancestors, anterior to the reception of the Christian faith.”

His third proposition is, that as “Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Solinus, Diodorus Siculus, and other writers of antiquity, have represented the condition of Ireland and its inhabitants to be barbarous in _their_ days,--in common with their neighbours the Britons, Gauls, and Germans, to whom the art systematically to manufacture stone had been unknown,--_ergo_, those _barbarians_ could not be set up as the authors of the Pillar Tower.”

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.

In the interim, I must not let the opportunity pass of vindicating our ancient bards from the false imputations of “busy and fantastic.”

If pride of descent be a weakness of Irishmen, it is one in which they are countenanced by all the nations of the globe who have had anything like pretensions to support the claim; and I fearlessly affirm that the more sensitive a people prove themselves of their national renown, their hereditary honour, and ancestral splendour, the more tenacious will they show themselves, in support of that repute,--whether as individuals or a community,--in every cause involving the far higher interests of moral rectitude, of virtue, and of religion. In the legitimate indulgence of this honourable emotion the Irish have ever stood conspicuously high. No nation ever attended with more religious zeal to their acts and genealogies, their wars, alliances, and migrations, than they did; and while no people ever excelled them in enterprise or heroism, or the wisdom and administration of their legislative code, so were they surpassed by none in the number and capability of those who could delineate such events, and impart to reality the _additional charm_ of imagery and verse.

The bards were a set of men exclusively devoted, like the tribe of Levi amongst the Israelites, to the superintendence of those subjects. Their agency in this department was a legitimately recognised and graduate faculty; and, in accuracy of speech, the only one which merited the designation of _learned_, being attainable only after the most severe novitiate of preliminary study and rigid exercise of all the mental powers.

The industry and patience bestowed on such a course were not, however, without their reward. In a classical point of view _this_ exhibited itself in the high estimation in which they were held--both amongst foreigners and natives--as poets, as prophets, and as philosophers; while the dignity and emolument attached to their situation, and the distinguished rank assigned them, at the general triennial assemblies of the state at Tara--with the endowments conferred upon them by the monarch and the several provincial kings--were sure to render it, at all times, an object of ambition and pursuit to members of the noblest families throughout the various parts of the realm.

The moral deportment and personal correctness of those literary sages contributed still further to add to their esteem; and, probably, I could not succeed better, in depicting the almost _sanctity_ of their general behaviour, than by transcribing a stanza descriptive of the qualities which won to them, as a society, the mingled sentiments of veneration and of awe. It is taken from a very ancient Irish poem, and runs thus--

“Iod na laimh lith gan ghuin,
Iod na beorl gan ean neamhuib,
Iod na foghlama gan ean ghes,
Is iod na lanamh nas.”

That is--

“Theirs were the hands free from violence,
Theirs the mouths free from calumny,
Theirs the learning without pride,
And theirs the love free from venery.”

In later times I admit there was a lamentable degeneracy in the bardic class,--or rather the innumerable pretenders to the assumption of the name; and the “fescennine licentiousness” with which they violated the sanctity of domestic seclusion, in exposing the objects of their private spleen, tended not a little to bring their body into disrepute, and subject them additionally to the salutary restrictions of legislative severity. They were not less extravagant in the lavishment of their fulsome commendations; so that one can hardly avoid drawing a parallel between them and those poetasters, formerly, of Italy, whom Horace so happily describes in those remarkable hexameters, viz.:--

“Fescinnina per hunc invecta licentia morem,
Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit,
... quin etiam lex
Pœnaque lata malo quæ mallet carmine quenquam,
Describi.”[52]

You would imagine the Roman poet was speaking of the Irish bards in the _night_ of their decline; but the description by no means applies to the original institution, whose object it was to perpetuate the history and records of the nation, and preserve its history from the intrusions of barbarism. To this end it was that they met for revision at the senatorial synod; and the importance of this trust it was that procured to their body the many dignities before described, giving them precedence above the aggregate of the community at large, and investing them with an authority little short of royalty.

Rhyme was the vehicle in which their lucubrations were presented; verse the medium selected for their thoughts. To gain perfection in this accomplishment their fancies were ever on the stretch; while the varieties of metre which they invented for the purpose, and the facility with which they bent them to each application and use, were not the least astonishing part of their arduous avocations, and leave the catalogue of modern measures far away in the shade.

Music is the sister of poetry, and it is natural to suppose that they went hand in hand _here_. In all countries, the voice was the original organ of musical sounds. With this they accompanied their extemporaneous hymns; with this they chanted the honours of their heroes. The battle-shout and the solemnity of the hour of sacrifice were the usual scenes for the concerts of our ancestors. Singing the glory of former warriors, the combatant was _himself_ inspired; and while the victim expired on the altar of immolation, the priest sang the praise of the deity he invoked.

The introduction of the Christian truths gave a new and elevated scope to the genius of the bards. A new enthusiasm kindled up their ardour--a new vitality invigorated their frames; and they who, but the moment before, were most conspicuous in upholding the dogmas of the pagan creed, became now the most distinguished in proclaiming the blessings of the Christian dispensation. Fiech, Amergin, Columba, Finan, etc., are glorious examples of this transmuted zeal.

About the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, however, a change burst forth for the destinies of this order. Verse ceased to be used in their historical announcements. Prose succeeded, as a more simple narrative; and from that moment the respectability of the bards progressively evaporated.

The jealousy of the English Government at the martial feeling excited by their effusions, and the intrepid acts of heroism inculcated by their example, if not the actual cause of this national declension, preponderated very largely amongst its component ingredients.

In the height of the battle, when the war-cry was most loud, and the carnage most severe, those poetic enthusiasts would fling themselves amongst the ranks of the enraged contenders, and determine the victory to whatever party they chose to befriend.

When, too, under the pressure of an untoward fate, and the disheartening yoke of--what they deemed--a treacherous subjugation, the nobles would seem dispirited at the aspect of circumstances, and all but subscribe to the thraldom of slavery, the bards would rouse the energies of their slumbering patriotism, and, as Tyrtæus used the Spartans, enkindle in their bosoms a passion for war. We must not be surprised, therefore, to find in the preamble to some of the acts passed in those times for the suppression of this body of men, the following harsh and deprecating allusions, viz.:--“That those rymors do, by their ditties and rymes made to divers lords and gentlemen in Ireland, in the commendacyon and high praise of extortion, rebellyon, rape, raven, and outhere injustice, encourage those lords and gentlemen rather to follow those vices than to leave them.”

For two centuries after the invasion of Henry II., the voice of the Muse was but faintly heard in Ireland. The arms of Cromwell and William III. completely swept away her feudal reminiscences. As it was their country’s lustre that inspired the enthusiasm of the bards, so, on the tarnishing of _its_ honour, did they become mute and spiritless. They fell with its fall; and, like the captive Israelites, hanging their untuned harps on the willows, they may be supposed to exclaim in all the vehemence of the royal psalmist--

“Now while our harps were hanged soe,
The men whose captives there we lay
Did on our griefs insulting goe,
And more to grieve us thus did say:
You that of musique make such show,
Come, sing us now a Zion lay.--
Oh no! we have nor voice nor hand
For such a song in such a land.”

Montmorency’s _third_ objection against the antiquity of the Round Towers--founded on the statements of those Greek and Latin writers above named, respecting the “barbarous” condition of the _then_ Irish,--I thus dissipate into thin air.

The inhabitants of Ireland, at the time in which those authors flourished, had nothing to do with the erection of the Round Towers. Those edifices were hoary with antiquity at that moment. They belonged to an era and to a dynasty, not only of a more ancient but of a more exalted character in every sense of the word, and whose religious ceremonials, for the celebration of which the Round Towers were constructed, the _then_ inhabitants did not only abhor, but did all in their power to efface and obliterate. Nor was it the religion alone of this inoffensive and sacred tribe that this new and devastating race of militants laboured to extirpate; but, what was far more to be deplored, they, for a season, extinguished their literature also; until at length, fired by the moral ether which the lessons of their now slaves had inspired, their souls got attuned to the sublimity of such studies, and they sat themselves down accordingly to emulate their instructors.

As to the puny detractions, therefore, of either Greece or Rome, they might well have been spared, as they knew _less_ than _nothing_ of our real history. When they were lowly and obscure, and immersed in the darkness of circumambient benightment, our high careering name, _synonymous_ with civilisation, was wafted by the four winds of heaven to all the quarters of the world which that heaven irradiates. The commerce of the whole East pressed tumultuously to our shores--the courts of the polished universe (not including Greece or Rome amongst the number) sent us embassies of congratulation; while the indomitable ardour and public-spirited zeal of the “islanders” themselves launched them abroad over the bosom of the wide watery circumference; exploring in every region the gradations of civil institutes, as well as the master productions of Nature herself; civilising life with the results of their discoveries, and garnishing their houses, like so many museums, with the fruits of their research, for the benefit, at once, and entertainment of their less favoured, though not less ambitious brethren at home.

Think you that the testimony of Festus Avienus, who wrote before the Christian light, and who avowedly only compiled his treatise from other more ancient authorities--think you, I say, that _his_ designation of this island as “sacred”--and which he says was the appropriate denomination by which the still greater ancients used to call it--was an idle sobriquet or an arbitrary adjective? Amongst the many discoveries which will develop themselves in succession, before I shall have done with this little book, I pledge myself to the public incontrovertibly to prove that the word “_Hibernian_”--so grossly abused and so malignantly vilified, and which Avienus has recorded as the name of the _islanders_ at the period in which he wrote, as it is still to this day--signifies, in its _component essence_, and according to the nicest scrutiny of etymological analysis, independently _altogether_ of historical corroboration, _an inhabitant of the sacred isle_; and has _nothing_ on earth to do with _Heber_ or Heremon; or _hiar_, the west; or _iberin_, extremes; or any other such outlandish nonsense!

Now comes the Colonel’s _fifth_ and _last_ objection; viz. that because there existed at Baal Heremon, in India, a temple sacred to Baal, the capacity of which was sufficient to accommodate four thousand persons, therefore the Round Towers, which are “internally too confined to admit into them, at once, a dozen bulky persons, could not be denominated a temple.”

Does not the Colonel know that there existed a plurality of those Baals? that, in fact, they were as innumerable as the stars in the firmament, resolving themselves--according to the character of every distinct country, and of every minor subdivision and canton in that country--into the specific and gentile classifications of Baal Shamaim, Baal Pheor or Phearagh, Baal Meon, Baal Zephon, Baal Hemon, etc.; while under the _veil_ of all, the learned ever understood to have been solely personated the sun and moon. “Howbeit every nation made gods of their own, and the men of Babylon made Succoth-Benoth.”[53]

In accordance with the _different_ views under which each people considered the _bounties_ of those luminaries, so did their temples assume a corresponding shape; and it shall be my lot, in the progress of this litigated research, to show why the followers of one of those Baals, namely, Baal Phearagh, gave their temples this _erect_, _narrow_, and _elevated roundness_.

I have thus annihilated those visionary ramparts which my opponent had flattered himself he had raised against the intrusion of long-suppressed truth; and by the help of which, as a military bastion, he had fondly hoped he might link together the Church and the sword in one _cemented_ bond of anachronism. Let us see, however, how he would bring about the match, with the articles of intermarriage, and so forth.

His assumption is, that “the founders of those Towers were primitive Cœnobites and Bishops, _munificently_ supported in the undertaking by the newly-converted kings and toparchs; the builders and architects being those monks and pilgrims who, from Greece and Rome, either preceded or accompanied our early missionaries in the fifth and sixth centuries”; which he pretends to substantiate in the following manner.

Having discovered, by a most miraculous effort of penetration, that one hundred and fifty Greek and Roman religionists had accompanied St. Abhan on his return from imperial Rome,--whither he had gone to complete his theological studies, towards the end of the fifth century,--and not knowing how to occupy those strangers in this _then pagan_ land, the Colonel, with his industrious habits, well aware that “idleness is the mother of mischief,” sets them, at once, about building the Towers.

But as it would be too lavish a display of knight-errantry to waste their time and strength without some ostensible purpose, he must, of course, find out for them a pretext, at least, for such; and so, in the eagerness of his milito-monastic zeal, he flies off, at a tangent, to the top of Mount Colzoum, near the desert of Gebel,--“a short day’s journey from the Red Sea,”--where he thinks he has got, in the monasteries of the Egyptian monks, a direct, immediate, and indubitable prototype.

Reader, you shall be the judge. Here is his own translation of Bonnani’s description of the place, viz.:

“There are three churches, of which St. Anthony’s, which is small and very old, is the most distinguished; the second is dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul; and the third church is raised in honour of St. Macaire, who has been a lay brother in this convent. All the cells stand separately from each other; they are _ill built_, the walls being composed of clay, covered in with flat roofs and diminutive windows only one foot square. Close to the refectory, which is dark and dirty, the monks have added a rather decent apartment, in their wonted hospitality, destined to the reception of visitors.

“Within the central courtyard, an isolated _square tower_ of masonry, which is approached by a drawbridge, holds a formidable station. Here the Cophtes preserve whatever wealth or precious objects they possess; and if assailed by the plundering Arabs, defend themselves with stones. There are four more celebrated monasteries in the desert of St. Macaire, distant about three days’ journey from Grand Cairo. The first is the convent of St. Macaire, which is ancient and in a ruinous state--the bones of the founder are enshrined in a stone coffin, placed behind an iron gate, enveloped in a chafe or pluvial (a sort of church ornament), formed into a canopy. A _square tower_ of stone, which you enter by a drawbridge, is the only solid building belonging to the Abbey that remains. The friars store their books and their provisions, and obstinately defend themselves in this _hold_, whenever the wild Arabs come to pay them a predatory visit.

“There are _similar_ (square) towers attached to the three other monasteries in the desert, the doors of which, and of the convent of St. Macaire, are alike covered with iron plates,” etc.

To the candid and dispassionate reader,--who has gone through this extract, and who is told that _this_ is the _basis_ upon which Colonel de Montmorency builds his superstructure of monastic appropriation,--to such I fearlessly appeal whether he will not scout the indignity with _intellectual_ scorn.

Here are edifices spread, _in numbers_, over our island, in unity of design and elegance of execution, admitted by this writer himself as “the most imposing objects of antiquity in all Christendom,” and “placed by an almost supernatural power to brave the stormy winds and the wrath of time”; yet, in the same breath, made the counterparts of a _few trumpery_, _temporary_, and _crazy_ old piles, which were originally erected as military stations, totally distinct from religion or religious uses--similar to those erected by Helena, mother to Constantine the Great, on the coast of Syria, against piratical incursions, and analogous to what we find in India, viz. a whole fortress converted into a conventual establishment. The thing is absurd,--it is revolting to _common sense_,--and bears on its forehead its own discomfiture.