der to novel varieties of elf creatures, with outlandish Gaelic names;
the Shefro; the Boggart; the Phooka, or horse-fiend; the Banshee, a
familiar spirit which moans outside the door when a death impends; the
Cluricaune,[16] or cellar goblin; the Fir Darrig (Red Man); the Dullahan,
or Headless Horseman. There are stories of changelings, haunted castles,
buried treasure, the "death coach," the fairy piper, enchanted lakes
which cover sunken cities, and similar matters not unfamiliar in the
folk-lore of other lands, but all with an odd twist to them and set
against a background of the manners and customs of modern Irish
peasantry. The Celtic melancholy is not much in evidence in this
collection. The wild Celtic fancy is present, but in combination with
Irish gaiety and light-heartedness. It was the day of the comedy
Irishman--Lover's and Lever's Irishman--Handy Andy, Rory O'More, Widow
Machree and the like. It took the famine of '49 and the strenuous work
of the Young Ireland Party which gathered about the _Nation_ in 1848, to
displace this traditional figure in favour of a more earnest and tragical
national type. But a single quotation will illustrate the natural magic
of which Arnold speaks: "The Merrow (mermaid) put the comb in her pocket,
and then bent down her head and whispered some words to the water that
was close to the foot of the rock. Dick saw the murmur of the words upon
the top of the sea, going out towards the wide ocean, just like a breath
of wind rippling along, and, says he, in the greatest wonder, 'Is it
speaking you are, my darling, to the salt water?'

"'It's nothing else,' says she, quite carelessly; 'I'm just sending word
home to my father not to be waiting breakfast for me.'" Except for its
lack of "high seriousness," this is the imagination that makes myths.

Catholic Ireland still cherishes popular beliefs which in England, and
even in Scotland, have long been merely antiquarian curiosities. In her
poetry the fairies are never very far away.

"Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men." [17]

Irish critics, to be sure, tell us that Allingham's fairies are English
fairies, and that he had no Gaelic, though he knew and loved his Irish
countryside. He was a Protestant and a loyalist, and lived in close
association with the English Pre-Raphaelites--with Rossetti especially,
who made the illustration for "The Maids of Elfin-Mere