【正文】 s consort as though he were anabdicated German prince, amusing themselves by imitating the wayhe was said to lisp English, and greeting him exuberantly with acabbage stalk just at the moment when he set foot on Irish soil. The Irish attitude and the Irish character were antipathetic tothe queen, who was fed on the aristocratic and imperialistictheories of Benjamin Disraeli, her favourite minister, and showedlittle or no interest in the lot of the Irish people, except fordisparaging remarks, to which they naturally responded in alively way. Once, it is true, when there was a horrible disasterin county Kerry which left most of the county without food orshelter, the queen, who held on tightly to her millions, sent therelief mittee, which had already collected thousands of poundsfrom benefactors of all social classes, a royal grant in thetotal amount of ten pounds. As soon as the mittee noticed thearrival of such a gift, they put it in an envelope and sent itback to the donor by return mail, together with their card ofthanks. From these little incidents, it would appear that therewas little love lost between Victoria and her Irish subjects, andif she decided to visit them in the twilight of her years, such avisit was most certainly motivated by politics. The truth is that she did not e。Holy Isle39。s see at Strasbourg for five years until,feeling that he was near his end (according to his Dauphin) hewent to live in a hut at the place where criminals were put todeath and where later the great cathedral of the city was built.St. Verus became champion of the cult of the Virgin Mary inFrance, and Disibod, bishop of Dublin, travelled here and therethrough all of Germany for more than forty years, and finallyfounded a Benedictine monastery named Mount Disibod, now calledDisenberg. Rumold became bishop of Mechlin in France, and themartyr Albinus, with Charlemagne39。 and whenthe carriage passed, they followed it with ambiguous glances.This time there were no bombs or cabbage stalks, but the oldQueen of England entered the Irish capital in the midst of asilent people. The reasons for this difference in temperament, which has nowbee a monplace of the phrasemakers of Fleet Street, are inpart racial and in part historical. Our civilization is a vastfabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in whichnordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeoisconventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are reconciled.In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that mayhave remained pure and virgin without having undergone theinfluence of a neighbouring thread. What race, or what language(if we except the few whom a playful will seems to have preservedin ice, like the people of Iceland) can boast of being puretoday? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than therace now living in Ireland. Nationality (if it really is not aconvenient fiction like so many others to which the scalpels ofpresentday scientists have given the coup de grace) must findits reason for being rooted in something that surpasses andtranscends and informs changing things like blood and the humanword. The mystic theologian who assumed the pseudonym ofDionysius, the pseudoAreopagite, says somewhere, 39。Joannes de Sacrobosco, who was the last great supporter of thegeographical and astronomical theories of Ptolemy, and PetrusHibernus, the theologian who had the supreme task of educatingthe mind of the author of the scholastic apology Summa contraGentiles, St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the keenest and most lucidmind known to human history. But while these last stars still reminded the European nationsof Ireland39。Ireland, Island of Saints and SagesJames Joyce Nations have their ego, just like individuals. The case of apeople who like to attribute to themselves qualities and gloriesforeign to other people has not been entirely unknown in history,from the time of our ancestors, who called themselves Aryans andnobles, or that of the Greeks, w ho called all those who livedoutside the sacrosanct land of Hellas barbarians. The Irish, witha pride that is perhaps less easy to explain, love to refer totheir country as the island of saints and sages. This exalted title was not invented yesterday or the daybefore. It goes back to the most ancient times, when the islandwas a true focus cf sanctity and intellect, spreading throughoutthe continent a culture and a vitalizing energy. It would be easyto make a list of the Irishmen who carried the torch of knowledgefrom country to country as pilgrims and hermits, as scholars andwisemen. Their traces are still seen today in abandoned altars,in traditions and legends where even the name of the hero isscarcely recognizable, or in poetic allusions, such as thepassage in Dante39。 although, if the good Alfred, who found anabundance of laymen and priests in Ireland at that time, weretogo there now, he would find more of the latter than the former. Anyone who reads the history of the three centuries that precede the ing of the English must have a strong stomach,because the internecine strife, and the conflicts with the Danesand the Norwegians, the black foreigners and the whiteforeigners, as they were called, follow each other socontinuously and ferociously that they make this entire era averitable slaughterhouse. The Danes occupied all the principalports on the east coast of the island and established a kingdomat Dublin, now the capital of Ireland, which has been a greatcity for about twenty centuries. Then the native kings killedeach other off, taking wellearned rests from time to time ingames of chess. Finally, the bloody victory of the usurper BrianBoru over the nordic hordes on the sand dunes outside the wallsof Dublin put an end to the Scandinavian raids. TheScandinavians, however, di