Beginning with Giraldus Cambrensis they ought to have ended, but, as we shall see, did not end with Froude.

The significance of these mercenaries of literature can hardly be exaggerated; it is not too much to say that they found Ireland a nation, and left her a question.

It is not at all that they put on record the thing that was not as regards the events of their own period.
That might be and has been amended by the labours of impartial scholarship.

The real crime of the fabulists lies in this, that their tainted testimony constituted for honest Englishmen the only information about Ireland easily obtainable.

The average Englishman (that is to say, the forty millions of him who do not read learned books of any kind) comes to the consideration of contemporary Ireland with a vision distorted almost beyond hope of cure.