The Topography of Ireland is divided into three books or Distinctiones as they are specifically termed. The first of these sets out to give the geography and natural history of the island; the second, the wonders of nature that are found in it, and the miraculous events that had taken or were still taking place. there; and the third is devoted to a brief account of the inhabitants from the time of the arrival of Cæsara, a grand-daughter of. Noah, shortly before the flood, down to the invasion under Henry II. The work is throughout a curious mixture of fact and fiction, in which the former, however, plays, on the whole, a pretty inconspicuous and contemptible part. The first book which treats of the topography and productions of the island is naturally far the most valuable; though even in this the modern reader is struck by nothing so much as wonder that a man could spend so long a time in a country and manage to see so little. Still in this, when he tells us what he has personally witnessed, Giraldus condescends to impart some knowledge. Like many other men, however, he never learned the desirability of stopping when he had finished. He could not be satisfied with simply stating the information he had collected. In the conventional style prevalent in his day, he felt himself under the necessity of drawing moral lessons from it; and the spiritual reflections so exceed in number and space the facts upon which they are founded, that in the complete form which the work finally assumed, one seems to be reading a treatise for the edification of the soul rather than the instruction of the mind. Everything is emblematic. For instance, the cranes, he tells us, are birds of such wary habits that they take turns in keeping watch; and those assigned this duty stand on one foot and hold a stone in the other, so that if by chance they fall asleep the dropping of the stone may awaken them to renewed attention. These birds are a type of the bishops of the church, who are to be kept eternally vigilant by holding in their mind some sacred care like a suspended stone. This is a short specimen, given merely as an illustration of what makes up the greatest portion of the work. The analogies, to be sure, in all these cases never run upon four legs, rarely upon three, and frequently find difficulty in hobbling along upon one; but the goodness of the motive was in such cases regarded as an ample

apology for the poorness of the performance. Throughout this whole book, indeed, Giraldus followed the practice of his predecessors who wrote on natural history only for the sake of "improving" it, in the technical language of homiletics, and he goes constantly out of his way to insert long sermons which are tacked to the main matter he is discussing by the flimsiest of fastenings. The controversial arguments he occasionally employs are likewise curiously characteristic of methods of reasoning prevalent in his time. He repeats, for instance, the story universally accepted in the middle ages, of the geese which spring from barnacles attached to wood in the sea; and he adds a remark which is historically of some value as showing the desire on the part of many to evade the restriction which forbade, at particular times, the use of meat. In certain parts of Ireland, he tells us that the flesh of the barnacle-goose was eaten on fast-days by bishops and by religious men generally. It was looked upon by them as being a sort of allowable food, on such occasions, because though it was itself flesh, it was not born of flesh. Giraldus was too determined a stickler for the observances of the church to be led away by any such argument. He never thinks, to be sure, of doubting the fact, from which these lax observers of the ecclesiastical law had drawn their inference that this kind of food was permissible. But for all that he has no hesitation in asserting that they are entirely in error. "If any one had eaten the thigh of our first parent," he says triumphantly, "as being flesh not born of flesh, could he look upon himself as being free from the guilt of eating flesh?" To this argument he felt that it would be in vain for them to attempt a reply.

Along with some facts derived from acute personal observation, this first book contains many marvellous statements, such as, to be sure, are common in nearly all the writers of that age. Still as in his learning Giraldus surpassed most of his contemporaries, so he did in his capacity for swallowing the impossible. Little limit apparently existed to his credulity; and, educated man as he was, there was nothing too monstrous or miraculous for him to disbelieve. He is not simply content with stating that no venomous reptiles are to be found in Ireland; he goes on to assure us, though upon the authority of

others, that serpents shipped to that country die as soon as they come under the influence of its air; that poison loses there all its mortal qualities; that toads accidentally transported to that island in vessels and thrown upon the shore immediately recognized the situation, and paid a proper respect to the virtue of the climate by throwing themselves upon their backs in the presence of admiring spectators, and then bursting in two. As if this was not enough, he farther assures us that the soil of Ireland carried to other lands and sprinkled upon any place is sufficient to drive away any venomous reptiles. In fact this characteristic quality was used to decide the question whether the isle of Man belonged to England or to Ireland. Poisonous serpents were taken thither. They survived; and there was a general agreement that this fact settled all disputes as to ownership.

But it was in the second book that Giraldus gave free rein to his faith in the marvellous. The wonders he there recounted were, indeed, so extraordinary, that in the preface to this portion of his work he felt it necessary to defend himself from the charge of undue credulity. He recognizes the fact that some of the things which he is about to mention might seem to the reader either impossible or ridiculous; but he asserts with the utmost positiveness that nothing could be found in the book which he himself had not seen with his own eyes, or had learned with great care from the evidence of men of the most trustworthy character, familiar with the facts of which they had given him information. Some of them are worth mentioning as specimens of the facts which men of high reputation for veracity were then in the habit of communicating to strangers possessed of an inquiring turn of mind. In Munster, Giraldus tells us, there is a lake containing two islands; in the larger one no woman, or no animal of the female sex could enter without immediately dying; even the female bird would not accompany its mate thither. In the smaller island nobody ever died by a natural death; and the unfortunate man who was groaning under the burden of years had to be rowed to the main land in order to pass away from a life which had become too painful to endure. In like manner he tells us stories of islands which float; of fish with golden teeth; of

a mill that will not run on Sunday, nor grind stolen grain; of a bell that has a perverse habit of going every night from the church in which it is hung to the church from which it had been taken, unless solemnly enjoined by its keeper to stay at home; and of fountains with peculiar qualities, one turning the hair gray, another keeping it from turning gray. No small portion of the book is taken up with a choice collection of miracles performed by the saints of the Irish Church. Giraldus, indeed, is forced to admit that the saints of the island were apt to display a very vindictive temper, a characteristic. which he notices elsewhere as belonging also to those of Wales. He is rather puzzled to account for the exhibition of this quality on the part of these men in their heavenly home. But he gives an explanation which is eminently satisfactory. Both in Ireland and in Wales the country abounded in robbers, and lacked places of refuge; and fugitives, accordingly, were largely in the habit of seeking safety, not in castles or fortified towns, but in the various ecclesiastical establishments. It became necessary, therefore, for its own protection, that the church should inflict severe punishment upon all who sought to violate its sanctuary. Enemies of this kind were doubtless The saints, in consequence, got into a bad habit, during their mortal life, of laying the rod upon the back of those who offended them with an unsparing hand. This disposition they carried with them to the other world; and the result was that their punishment of evil-doers often seemed to be almost of a revengeful kind.

numerous.

The third book, which treats of the inhabitants of Ireland, begins with an account of its earliest settlement. This was by Cæsara, the grand-daughter of Noah. She had heard that there was to be a deluge, and accordingly set out to seek an uninhabited island in some remote part of the world; hoping that a place wherein sin had not been committed would be spared from the punishment of sin. But she might better have stayed at home. All the ships were lost except the one in which she herself sailed. Though she landed on the island, though the very mound which marked her burial-place was still visible, she was not able to escape the common fate that overtook the children of a fallen race. At this point Giraldus is

fairly perplexed. No survivor of the ruined world had been left to tell the tale that befell the Irish colonists. If every one perished in the deluge, how could the memory of this event be handed down? Still his resources are equal to every emergency; indeed, out of this difficulty he gets very easily. To wrestle with problems such as these is something that he does not feel himself called upon to do. The event it is his duty to narrate; to discuss the truth of it, to explain the unexplainable, is a matter out of his province. "Let those who first write history see to that," he says. My business is to state facts, not to call them in question." This is a broad and comfortable basis upon which to stand in writing history; and it yields frequently as satisfactory results as the modern practice of devising a theory to account for what is unaccountable.

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Still Giraldus in the composition of this work hit pretty accurately the taste of the times; and the number of manuscripts of it still extant show that it was by no means an unpopular production, though he often complained subsequently that neither this nor his other works had brought him either remuneration or preferment. Nor did it escape some strictures. Reviewing, to be sure, was not then carried on, at least on any organized scale. Nevertheless it existed; for the critical faculty has never been lacking at any period in the history of the human race, no matter in what condition may have been the creative. As in the case of many greater writers, however, we should never have known of the attack, had it not been for the pains that the author himself took to notice and thereby preserve it. In his preface to the history of the Conquest of Ireland he takes the opportunity to put the wretched scribbler who had assailed him into a pillory where he was forever to remain as an object at which time could point its unmoving finger of scorn. In this preface he tells us in his own grand style that envy had been striving hard to gnaw at and to mangle his treatise on the Topography of Ireland, a work, he adds parenthetically, by no means to be looked upon with contempt. All scholars, he asserts, were in perfect agreement as to the peculiar elegance of its style. Malice itself, personified in the reviewer, was ashamed or afraid to rail at the surpassing excellence of the first and third books. But the evil