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.