Excerpt from Ireland: Elements of Her Early Story: From the Coming of Ceasair to the Anglo-Norman Invasion

Davies and every other new alien who has written on Ireland, Inasmuch as it is almost after the manner of the beetle every one of them acts when treating of the Irish, that is, they alight not on any delicate ¿ower that may be in the field or any blossom in the garden, but bustle until they meet with ordure and proceed to roll themselves therein. He continues, in a tone of unaffected resentment There is not a historian of all those who have written on Ireland from that epoch to this, but has persistently sought to cast re proach and blame on the naturalised foreign settlers as on the native race. They write not of their valour, their virtues or their piety, he goes on to complain, their literary assemblies unique in Europe, the privileges they granted the learned, the numberless abbeys they founded, the worship they liberally endowed, the reverence they evinced for church men and prelates, the maintenance they provided for orphans and the poor, the hospitality they extended to guests, so that no people in Europe surpassed them in generosity. No, relatively little is recorded Of them that is not derogatory.

Still resenting the strange perversion of human taste that seeks out and lingers over scattered cesspools while choosing to remain blind to all that adorned an island abounding in milk and honey -as testified by Bede - the historian-priest.

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