part be regarded as mere hints, caught from chaos, and coming down
through a hundred broken mediums; scraps of adventures told around camp
fires; oral traditions; rude songs handed from father to son, and
altering more or less with each new teller. The early history of Ireland
is in this respect much like the early history of all other countries.
We have the same semi-mythical aggregations, grown up around some small
kernel of reality, but so changed, swollen, distorted, that it is
difficult to distinguish the true from the false; becoming vaguer and
vaguer too as the mists of time and sentiment gather more and more
thickly around them, until at last we seem to be swimming dimly in a
"moony vapour," which allows no dull peaks of reality to pierce through
it at all. "There were giants in those days," is a continually recurring
assertion, characteristic of all ancient annals, and of these with
the rest.

[Illustration: CROMLECH ON HOWTH.]

II.

THE LEGENDS AND THE LEGEND MAKERS.

Better far than such historic shams--cardboard castles with little or no
substance behind them--are the real legends. These put forward no
obtrusive pretensions to accuracy, and for that very reason are far
truer in that larger sense in which all the genuine and spontaneous
outgrowth of a country form part and parcel of its history. Some of the
best of these have been excellently translated by Mr. Joyce, whose
"Celtic Romances" ought to be in the hands of every one, from the boy of
twelve upwards, who aspires to know anything of the inner history of
Ireland; to understand, that is to say, that curiously recurrent note of
poetry and pathos which breaks continually through all the dull hard
prose of the surface. A note often lost in unmitigated din and discord,
yet none the less re-emerging, age after age, and century after century,
and always when it does so lending its own charm to a record, which,
without some such alleviations, would be almost too grim and
disheartening in its unrelieved and unresulting misery to be voluntarily
approached at all.

Although as they now stand none appear to be of earlier date than the
ninth or tenth century, these stories all breathe the very breath of a
primitive world. An air of remote pagan antiquity hangs over them, and
as we read we seem gradually to realize an Ireland as unlike the one we
know now as if, like the magic island of Buz, it had sunk under the
waves and been lost. Take, for instance-