delightfulness.

Finally, the manner in which these tales grew into form must be remembered when we read them. At first, they were not written down, but recited in hall and with a harp's accompaniment by the various bardic story-tellers who were attached to the court of the chieftain, or wandered singing and reciting from court to court. Each bard, if he was a creator, filled up the original framework of the tale with ornaments of his own, or added new events or personages to the tale, or mixed it up with other related tales, or made new tales altogether attached to the main personages of the original tale—episodes in their lives into which the bardic fancy wandered. If these new forms of the tales or episodes were imaginatively true to the characters round which they were conceived and to the atmosphere of the time, they were taken up by other bards and became often separate tales, or if a great number attached themselves to one hero, they finally formed themselves into one heroic story, such as that which is gathered round Cuchulain, which, as it stands, is only narrative, but might in time have become epical. Indeed, the Tàin approaches, though at some distance, an epic. In this way that mingling of elements out of the three cycles into a single Saga took place.

Then when Christianity came, the Irish who always, Christians or not, loved their race and its stories, would not let them go. They took them and suffused them with a Christian tenderness, even a Christian forgiveness. Or they inserted Christian endings, while they left the rest of the stories as pagan as before. Later on, while the stories were still learned by the bards and recited, they were written down, and somewhat spoiled by a luxurious use of ornamental adjectives, and by the weak, roving and uninventive fancy of men and monks aspiring to literature but incapable of reaching it.

However, in spite of all this intermingling and of the different forms of the same story, it is possible for an intelligent and sensitive criticism, well informed in comparative mythology and folklore, to isolate what is very old in these tales from that which is less old, and that in turn from that which is still less old, and that from what is partly historical, medieval or modern. This has been done, with endless controversy, by those excellent German, French, and Irish scholars who have, with a thirsty pleasure, recreated the ancient literature of Ireland, and given her once more a literary name among the nations—a name which, having risen again, will not lose but increase its brightness.

As to the stories themselves, they have certain well-marked characteristics, and in dwelling on these, I shall chiefly refer, for illustration, to the stories in this book. Some of these characteristic elements belong to almost all mythological tales, and arise from human imagination, in separated lands, working in the same or in a similar way on the doings of Nature, and impersonating them. The form, however, in which these original ideas are cast is, in each people, modified and varied by the animal life, the climate, the configuration of the country, the nearness of mountain ranges and of the sea, the existence of wide forests or vast plains, of swift rivers and great inland waters.

The earliest tales of Ireland are crowded with the sea that wrapt the island in its arms; and on the west and north the sea was the mighty and mysterious Ocean, in whose far infinities lay for the Irish the land of Immortal Youth. Between its shining shores and Ireland, strange islands—dwelt in by dreadful or by fair and gracious creatures, whose wonders Maeldun and Brendan visited—lay like jewels on the green and sapphire waters. Out of this vast ocean emerged also their fiercest enemies. Thither, beyond these islands into the Unknown, over the waves on a fairy steed, went Oisín with Niam; thither, in after years, sailed St Brendan, till it seemed he touched America. In the ocean depths were fair cities and well-grassed lands and cattle, which voyagers saw through water thin and clear. There, too, Brian, one of the sons of Turenn, descended in his water-dress and his crystal helmet, and found high-bosomed maidens weaving in a shining hall. Into the land beneath the wave, Mananan, the proud god of the sea brought Dermot and Finn and the Fianna to help him in his wars, as is told in the story of the Gilla Dacar. On these western seas, near the land, Lir's daughters, singing and floating, passed three hundred years. On other seas, in the storm and in the freezing sleet that trouble the dark waves of Moyle, between Antrim and the Scottish isles, they spent another three centuries. Half the story of the Sons of Usnach has to do with the crossing of seas and with the coast. Even Cuchulain, who is a land hero, in one of the versions of his death, dies fighting the sea-waves. The sound, the restlessness, the calm, the savour and the infinite of the sea, live in a host of these stories; and to cap all, the sea itself and Mananan its god sympathise with the fates of Erin. When great trouble threatens Ireland, or one of her heroes is near death, there are three huge waves which, at three different points, rise, roaring, out of the ocean, and roll, flooding every creek and bay and cave and river round the whole coast with tidings of sorrow and doom. Later on, in the Fenian tales, the sea is not so prominent. Finn and his clan are more concerned with the land. Their work, their hunting and adventures carry them over the mountains and plains, through the forests, and by the lakes and rivers. In the stories there is scarcely any part of Ireland which is not linked, almost geographically, with its scenery. Even the ancient gods have retired from the coast to live in the pleasant green hills or by the wooded shores of the great lakes or in hearing of the soft murmur of the rivers. This business of the sea, this varied aspect of the land, crept into the imagination of the Irish, and were used by them to embroider and adorn their poems and tales. They do not care as much for the doings of the sky. There does not seem to be any supreme god of the heaven in their mythology. Neither the sun nor the moon are specially worshipped. There are sun-heroes like Lugh, but no isolated sun-god. The great beauty of the cloud-tragedies of storm, the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, so dramatic in Ireland, or the magnificence of the starry heavens, are scarcely celebrated. But the Irish folk have heard the sound of the wind in the tree-tops and marked its cold swiftness over the moor, and watched with fear or love the mists of ocean and the bewilderment of the storm-driven snow and the sweet falling of the dew. These are fully celebrated.

These great and small aspects of Nature are not only celebrated, they are loved. One cannot read the stories in this book without feeling that the people who conceived and made them observed Nature and her ways with a careful affection, which seems to be more developed in the Celtic folk than elsewhere in modern Europe. There is nothing which resembles it in Teutonic story-telling. In the story of The Children of Lir, though there is no set description of scenery, we feel the spirit of the landscape by the lake where Lir listened for three hundred years to the sweet songs of his children. And, as we read of their future fate, we are filled with the solitude and mystery, the ruthlessness and beauty of the ocean. Even its gentleness on quiet days enters from the tale into our imagination. Then, too, the mountain-glory and the mountain-gloom are again and again imaginatively described and loved. The windings and recesses, the darkness and brightness of the woods and the glades therein, enchant the Fenians even when they are in mortal danger. And the waters of the great lakes, the deep pools of the rivers, the rippling shallows, the green banks, the brown rushing of the torrents, are all alive in the prose and song of Ireland. How deep was the Irish love of these delightful things is plain from their belief that "the place of the revealing of