Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland, fyc. 191 



and so interesting as being raised in honour of the Creator in the simplest, if 

 not the purest, ages of Christianity. 



That the unadorned simplicity and contracted dimensions of the earliest 

 Irish churches were not, at least, altogether the result of poverty and ignorance 

 of the arts in their founders, appears to me extremely probable. Poor those 

 honoured individuals unquestionably were, but that poverty generally, if not in 

 all instances, appears to have been voluntary, as became men walking in the 

 footsteps of the Redeemer, and who obtained their simple food by the labour of 

 their hands : but that they were ignorant of the arts, or insensible to their 

 influence, could scarcely have been possible in men, very many of whom, Ro- 

 mans, Gauls, and Britons, were educated where those arts, though they had 

 become debased, were still cultivated ; and we have not only abundant historical 

 evidence to show, that many of the ecclesiastics in those early times obtained 

 celebrity, as artificers and makers of the sacred implements necessary for the 

 church, and as illuminators of books, but we have also still remaining the most in- 

 disputable evidences of their skill in those arts, in ancient croziers, bells, shrines, 

 &c., and in manuscripts not inferior in splendour to any extant in Europe. It 

 is, indeed, by no means improbable, that the severe simplicity, as well as the 

 uniformity of plan and size, which usually characterizes our early churches, was 

 less the result of the poverty or ignorance of their founders than of choice, 

 originating in the spirit of their faith, or a veneration for some model given to 

 them by their first teachers ; for, that the earliest Christian churches on the 

 continent before the time of Constantine were, like these, small and unadorned, 

 there is no reason to doubt ; and the oldest churches still remaining in Greece 

 are, as I shall hereafter show, exactly similar to those I have described in Ire- 

 land. And even the churches erected in the time of Constantine, as Mr. Hope 

 shows, must have been small, and of little architectural pretension. " And 

 when," says this writer, " Theodosius, after proclaiming Christianity the ruling, 

 the sole legitimate religion of the empire, not only pulled down the churches of 

 Constantine, already become ruinous, but the heathen temples, too small to be 

 converted to sacred uses, in order to employ the materials of many such, however 

 ill-assorted, for each of his larger new churches singly, he still retained in them 

 the shape and the name of the basilica." Hist.Essay on Architecture, vol.i. p. 90. 



Be this, however, as it may, it seems certain from our most ancient historical 



