hat the stark stories he has
to tell of them restrain his style, a style too flamboyant when there
is in what he is writing a large opportunity for description of
landscape or exhibition of great emotion in his characters. Another
reason is, perhaps, that his tendency to introduce the supernatural is
more in harmony with the subject material got out of antiquity than of
the subject material got out of to-day. We can accept magic in these old
tales, even to the incantations of Bobaran the White that swayed the
waves of the sea so that Gaer, the son of Deirdre, was saved from the
men of Lochlin. That is as it should be in druidic times. It is
impossible, of course, that Bobaran had power over the waves, but in
such a story such an episode seems more probable than the possible
hypnotic suggestion of Gloom Achanna's pipe-playing that sent Manus
MacOdrum to his death among the fighting seals, because to-day we do not
often come upon such things. It is even less easy to accept the piping
to madness of Alasdair in "Alasdair the Proud." Hypnotic suggestion may
drive to death in the sea a man half fey because of sorrow long endured
and the superstition that he is descended from seals, but pipe-playing
cannot believably in modern tales drive a man insane, whatever it may do
in the famous old "Pied Piper of Hamelin" or other folk-tale.

So, too, in the verse of Sharp, whether lyric or dramatic, it is the
Celt that inspires him to his best work. Nowhere does his verse win so
much of beauty and glamour as when his thought turns to the four cities
of Murias and Finias and Falias and Glorias, or when it breaks into a
chant on the lips of Etain, in "The Immortal Hour."

Though there is less unevenness of technique, both in the style and in
the unfolding of the story, in these "Seanchas" than elsewhere in his
writing, the technique breaks down at times here, too, more usually
through sins of omission than through sins of commission. Sharp realized
the something wanting that so many find in much of his writing, even in
much that is most beautiful, realized it so keenly that he felt called
upon to explain. He explained not directly, it is true, as if in answer
to criticism, but none the less definitely in thus affirming his
attitude toward legends in the "Sunset of Old Tales": "We owe a debt,
indeed, to the few who are truly fit for the task [the collecting of
tales from oral tradition], but there are some minds which care very
little to