and more abiding stigma upon a man than blame from any other
lips. If they, "the bards," says an Elizabethan writer, "say ought in
dispraise, the gentleman, especially the meere Irish, stand in
great awe."

It is easy, I think, to see this is merely the survival of some far more
potent power wielded in earlier times. In pre-Christian days especially,
the penalty attaching to the curse of a Bard was understood to carry
with it a sort of natural anathema, not unlike the priestly anathema of
later times. Indeed there was one singular, and, as far as I am aware,
unique power possessed by the Irish Bards, which goes beyond any
priestly or papal anathema, and which was known as the _Clann Dichin_, a
truly awful malediction, by means of which the Ollamh, if offended or
injured, could pronounce a spell against the very land of his injurer;
which spell once pronounced that land would produce no crop of any kind,
neither could living creature graze upon it, neither was it possible
even to walk over it without peril, and so it continued until the wrong,
whatever it was, had been repented, and the curse of the Ollamh was
lifted off from the land again.

Is it to be wondered at that men, endowed with such powers of blessing
or banning, possessed of such mystic communion with the then utterly
unknown powers of nature, should have exercised an all but unlimited
influence over the minds of their countrymen, especially at a time when
the powers of evil were still supposed to stalk the earth in all their
native malignity, and no light of any revelation had broken through the
thick dim roof overhead?

Few races of which the world has ever heard are as imaginative as that
of the Celt, and at this time the imagination of every Celt must have
been largely exercised in the direction of the malevolent and the
terrible. Even now, after fourteen hundred years of Christianity, the
Connaught or Kerry peasant still hears the shriek of his early gods in
the sob of the waves or the howling of the autumn storms. Fish demons
gleam out of the sides of the mountains, and the black bog-holes are the
haunts of slimy monsters of inconceivable horror. Even the less directly
baneful spirits such as Finvarragh, king of the fairies, who haunts the
stony slopes of Knockmaa, and all the endless variety of _dii minores_,
the cluricans, banshees, fetches who peopled the primitive forests, and
still hop and mow about their ruined homes, were far more likely to
in