e famine combined,
burst their bubble. Their work had the dash as well as the
shallowness of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is touched
everywhere with beauty--a gentle Arcadian beauty. Carleton, a peasant
born, has in many of his stories, . . . more especially in his ghost
stories, a much more serious way with him, for all his humour.
Kennedy, an old bookseller in Dublin, who seems to have had a
something of genuine belief in the fairies, comes next in time. He
has far less literary faculty, but is wonderfully accurate, giving
often the very words the stories were told in. But the best book
since Croker is Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends. The humour has all
given way to pathos and tenderness. We have here the innermost heart
of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love through years of
persecution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams, and hearing
fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on the soul and on the dead.
Here is the Celt, only it is the Celt dreaming.

Into a volume of very moderate dimensions, and of extremely moderate
price, Mr. Yeats has collected together the most characteristic of our
Irish folklore stories, grouping them together according to subject.
First come The Trooping Fairies. The peasants say that these are 'fallen
angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost';
but the Irish antiquarians see in them 'the gods of pagan Ireland,' who,
'when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the
popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.' Their chief
occupations are feasting, fighting, making love, and playing the most
beautiful music. 'They have only one industrious person amongst them,
the lepra-caun--the shoemaker.' It is his duty to repair their shoes
when they wear them out with dancing. Mr. Yeats tells us that 'near the
village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven
years. When she came home she had no toes--she had danced them off.' On
May Eve, every seventh year, they fight for the harvest, for the best
ears of grain belong to them. An old man informed Mr. Yeats that he saw
them fight once, and that they tore the thatch off a house. 'Had any one
else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling
everything into the air as it passed.' When the wind drives the leaves
and straws before it, 'that is the fairies, and the peasants tak