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| GATEWAY, MELLIFONT ABBEY, CO. LOUTH. -The view of the crumbling gateway of Mellifont Abbey suggests the lines of Byron: "There a temple in ruin stands, fashioned by long forgotten hands." Can anything be more typical of the fallen fortunes of Ireland than this mutilated remnant of a once splendid sacred edifice? Mellifont, although now inhabited only by the owl, the bat and the chattering daw, was once the chosen seat of piety and learning. Monarchs, prelates, princes, gallant knights and sturdy esquires once accepted its hospitality or worshipped beneath its rooftree. Now few, beside the scholar and the antiquary, are so poor as to do it passing reverence, and, stone by stone, it is passing into the nothingness of oblivion. How strange it is that the Irish patriots have done so little that is practical to preserve what remains of these, from a historic standpint, priceless ruins! The venerable place where "the Irish Helen"-the false wife of O'Ruarc-sighed out her heart in belated repentance, and where the sword that so long blazed in the Red Right Hand of Hugh O'Neill on the hills of Ulster was sheathed forever, should not be permitted to perish from the earth. |
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