old Ireland owes its completion and its adornment to the dollars
given by the poor but generous Irish exiles.

And if the zeal of the Irish for religion has thus survived to the
twentieth century, so also in an equally remarkable degree has their
zeal for learning. We have evidence of this in the numerous primary
schools in every parish, filled with eager pupils and presided over
by hard working teachers; in the colleges where the sciences and the
classics are studied with the same energy as in the ancient monastic
schools; and in Maynooth College, which is the foremost
ecclesiastical college in the world. And if there are now new
universities, the National and the Queen's, sturdy and vigorous in
their youth, this does not imply that Trinity College suffers from
the decreptitude of age. For among those whom she sent forth in
recent times are Dowden and Mahaffy and Lecky, to name but three, and
these would do credit to any university in Europe.

It would be difficult to find in any age of Irish history a greater
pulpit orator than the famous Dominican, Father Tom Burke, or a more
delightful essayist than Father Joseph Farrell; and who has depicted
Irish clerical life more faithfully than the late Canon Sheehan,
whose fame as a novelist has crossed continents and oceans? O'Connell
was a great orator as well as a great political leader, and Dr. Doyle
and Archbishop John MacHale were scholars as well as statesmen and
bishops. We have thus an unbroken chain of great names, a series of
Irishmen whom the succeeding ages have brought forth to enlighten and
instruct lesser men; and Ireland, in the twentieth century, is not
less attached to religion and learning than she was when Clonmacnois
flourished and the saintly Carthage ruled at Lismore.