is likely, from the old
"Saints' Lives," but to which he has given a ring of authenticity that
makes them seem descended from an antiquity as remote as that of
folk-tale or hero-tale. "The Flight of the Culdees" brings before you
with vividness what must have been the life of the Celtic missionaries
in the days when the men out of Lochlin began to seek the Summer Isles;
and "The Annir Choile" and "The Woman with the Net," what was the fate
they meted out to those among themselves who slipped back into the
pleasant old ways of paganism. These are written out of his own
revisualization of the past. More immediately sprung of the old legends
are "The Three Marvels of Hy," which tells of the inner life of Columba
and his brethren on Iona, and "Muime Chriosd," which utilizes folk-lore
as old or older than the legends collected by Mr. Alexander Carmichael
in his pursuit of the stories of St. Bride among the peasantry of the
Outer Isles. "The Song of the Sword" and "Mircath" have in them the
battle-madness of the Viking, whetted to its keenest intensity as he
meets the hard resistance of the Hebrideans; and "The Laughter of
Scathach" and "The Sad Queen," that more terrible fury of the Amazon who
ruled in Skye. Than this last-named story Sharp has done no starker
writing, but it is so evidently from a man's point of view that it
confirmed many in the belief that "Fiona Macleod" could not be a woman.

"The Washer of the Ford" has its roots in folk-lore, but it is so
remoulded in the mind of the writer that it is rather a re-creation of
the old belief than a restoration of it. There are those who would
rather have had Sharp follow the tales as they are told by Campbell of
Islay, Cameron of Brodick, and Carmichael of South Uist, but to me,
unless the tale is one familiar to many readers, such a remoulding, if
done with power, is surely a prerogative of the artist. But when he
takes a well-known legendary character, as well known among the Gaels as
Achilles among English school-boys, and changes his hair from black to
golden and his stature from short to tall, utterly transforming not only
our picture of him, but the significance of his deeds, then I object, as
I would object if he had made the fair-haired and great-statured
Achilles into such "a little dark man" as the Red Branch legends record
Cuchullin to have been. Nor would I quarrel even with his changing of
the spirit of the old tales if he had always, as he has almost alway