himself who, with that charming
humour of his, deprecated the attitude of certain _a priori_ historians
who, said he, if they were writing the Gospel story would, in their
anxiety to please the Pope, probably suppress the denial of Peter.
These things which might have happened anywhere did, in fact, happen in
Ireland. Out of the footprints of the invaders there sprang up a legion
of fictionists, professional cooks of history. Beginning with Giraldus
Cambrensis they ought to have ended, but, as we shall see, did not end
with Froude. The significance of these mercenaries of literature can
hardly be exaggerated; it is not too much to say that they found Ireland
a nation, and left her a question. It is not at all that they put on
record the thing that was not as regards the events of their own period.
That might be and has been amended by the labours of impartial
scholarship. The real crime of the fabulists lies in this, that their
tainted testimony constituted for honest Englishmen the only information
about Ireland easily obtainable. The average Englishman (that is to say,
the forty millions of him who do not read learned books of any kind)
comes to the consideration of contemporary Ireland with a vision
distorted almost beyond hope of cure.
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