The following papers are the substance of a lecture delivered in English to the students of the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, in April, 1906, and afterwards expanded into a series of three lectures in Irish delivered before the Ard-Chraobh this year. I desire at the outset to express my obligations to Dr. P. W. Joyce, whose two noble volumes, ‘A Social History of Ancient Ireland,’ have been my most valuable mine of information.
