Mr.Prendergast is an able, honest, and frank writer; yet there is something amusingly Celtic in the flourish with which he excuses the style of palaces in which the Irish princes delighted to dwell.

'Unlike England,' he says, 'then covered with castles on the heights, where the French gentlemen secured themselves and their families against the hatred of the churls and villains, as the English peasantry were called, the dwellings of the Irish chiefs were of wattles or clay.

It is for robbers and foreigners to take to rocks and precipices for security; for native rulers, there is no such fortress _as justice and humanity_.' This is very fine, but surely Mr.Prendergast cannot mean that the Irish chiefs were distinguished by their justice and humanity.

The following touch is still grander:--'The Irish, like the wealthiest and highest of the present day, loved detached houses surrounded by fields and woods.

Towns and their walls they looked upon as tombs or sepulchres, &c.' As to fields, there were none, because the Irish never made fences, their patches of cultivated land being divided by narrow strips of green sod.