26 
tant from each other, so tribal wars were prolonged, and the 
unity of the country hindered. Ina similar way Professor Free- 
man says we may account for the isolation of the small states 
- which occupied the Grecian peninsula. It was the absence of 
such massive and forbidding barriers in England which laid it 
more open to invasion, and to be more readily occupied, as the 
invaders were driven further west by new arrivals, and which 
~ afterwards made it more easy to reduce the whole country to 
obedience to one government—a task which was not really accom- 
plished in Scotland until the close of the last century. I need not 
dwell on the obvious commercial advantages possessed by Great 
Britain im consequence of its severance from, and proximity to 
Europe,—the two ‘‘ together, yet apart.’’ Let me for a moment 
call your attention to the great advantage possessed by Ireland in 
early times in consequence of its isolation and sheltered position. 
Ireland was separated first, yet not before it had received 
human inhabitants; this was long before Britain was free from the 
continent; and the latter when it became an island, saved the 
former for many years from the evils which afflicted itself. While 
Saxon and Dane were harrying and conquering England along its 
eastern and southern shores, Ireland, protected as by a gigantic - 
breakwater or line of defence, formed the home of religion and the 
resort of learning for all Hurope; the asylum of persecuted monks 
and ardent students. Even earlier still, Mr. Justin H. McCarthy 
tells us, Ireland had made considerable progress in civilization, and 
was fairly prosperous, rearing sheep, cattle, pigs, and horses, and 
exporting metallic ore and slaves to the Mediterranean, being appa- 
rently in advance of the contemporary Britons. Christianity 
appears to have spread rapidly, and for a long time all Christendom 
looked upon Ireland as the favourite home of religion and wisdom.” 
But such could not have been the case had Ireland preserved its 
land connection with Great Britain; it was all owing to geological 
action giving it its sheltered situation. Similar advantages were 
possessed by the small island of Iona off the west of Scotland. 
But the vigorous onward progress of those terrible Norsemen 
brought them round to Ireland at last. In the eighth century they 
effected a settlement, murdered the clergy, and ‘ drove out the 
Trish scholars to carry their culture and their philosophy” else- 
where. And these Norsemen, and this misfortune to Ireland, were 
the result of the effects of the physical geography of another coun- 
try which had developed a race of such intrepid seamen and pirates. 
The dependence of early English history on the nature of the 
country is well and clearly worked out by the late Mr. Green in his 
buok on ‘ The Making of England,” and is the best example I 
know of the interweaving of the two subjects. 
All the lowland districts of England at the time of the Roman 
