c Erin and Alba. It is
because he is the reincarnation of the shanachie of the Dark Ages. When
he thought of reincarnation, however, in relation to himself, he
thought, I have no doubt, of himself as the reincarnation of a druid,
one who had been aware of mysteries; but what he really was, in life,
with his magnificent enthusiasm and bravado,--picturesque raiment after
all and no more for the high-hearted and inherently ailing body of
him,--was this reincarnation of the shanachie, such an one as his own
Oran the Monk turned tale-teller. If you doubt that he was shanachie,
not druid, compare the two legends in "Beyond the Blue Septentrions."
The ordered beauty of the legend that tells of the derivation of the
name of Arthur from Arcturus falls familiarly on our ears. It is
evidently made under a lamp by one who has read many old legends. It is
no druidic revelation. The other, that which ends with the three great
hero-leaps of Fionn from the Arctic Floes to the Pole, from the Pole up
to Arcturus, from Arcturus to the Hill of Heaven itself, is fantastic,
bizarre, extravagant to grotesqueness, with the very flamboyance of old
Irish legend and modern Irish folk-tale. In other words, it is in the
very manner of the shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work was
recorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouth
among the folk. Nor is there anything inconsistent in this wild
imagining with a very different power displayed in "moralities" like his
"Last Supper." I have heard stories as incongruous, one uproarious,
another of cloistral quiet and piety, from the old Irish gardener with
whom I spent a large part of my happier days, the days from seven to
seventeen. Lawrence lost his life doing a "retreat" morning after
morning on the cold stone floor of a Vincentian church, not in any
sudden repentance at fourscore and three for the sins of his youth for
they had been fewer than those of almost all I know, but in the usual
way of his austere life. Yet Lawrence was just as much himself when he
was telling me stories of Dean Swift that were full of malice and
brutality and orgiac ecstasy.

The range of the shanachie is wide, and wide, too, the range of Sharp in
the role of shanachie of barbaric life on both sides of the Moyle. Among
such writings there are few tellings of the order of the folk-tale, more
of the order of the hero saga, many--perhaps the best of them--of an
order all his own that has developed, it