Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by John Sell Cotman, J. M. W. Turner and Frederic Leighton. An argument that the round towers of Ireland are Persian fire-temples and the Irish descended from the Tuath-de-Danaan of the east - a magnificent piece of nineteenth-century wrong-headedness that won a Royal Irish Academy prize and started a quarrel lasting decades. This 59 plates of paintings by Cotman, Turner, Leighton and others, plus twenty-five illustrations restored and coloured, with an introduction, the 1834 preface and an index.