" in Allingham's
volume "The Music Master" (1855). The Irish fairies, it is said, are
beings of a darker and more malignant breed than Shakspere's elves. Yet
in Allingham's poem they stole little Bridget and kept her seven years,
till she died of sorrow and lies asleep on the lake bottom; even as in
Ferguson's weird ballad, "The Fairy Thorn," the good people carry off
fair Anna Grace from the midst of her three companions, who "pined away
and died within the year and day."

To the latter half of the century belongs the so-called Celtic revival,
which connects itself with the Nationalist movement in politics and is
partly literary and partly patriotic. It may be doubted whether, for
practical purposes, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use.
But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win back its ancient,
wellnigh forgotten speech is a most interesting social phenomenon. At
all events, both by direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and by
original work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through English
ballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of romance has been
recovered and a bright green thread of Celtic poetry runs through the
British anthology of the century. The names of the pioneers and leading
contributors to this movement are significant of the varied strains of
blood which compose Irish nationality. James Clarence Mangan was a Celt
of the Celts; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Aubrey de Vere were of
Norman-Irish stock, and the former was the son of a dean of the
Established Church, and himself the editor of a Tory newspaper; Sir
Samuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant of Scotch descent; Dr. George
Sigerson is of Norse blood; Whitley Stokes, the eminent Celtic scholar,
and Dr. John Todhunter, author of "Three Bardic Tales" (1896), bear
Anglo-Saxon surnames; the latter is the son of Quaker parents and was
educated at English Quaker schools.

Mangan's paraphrases from the Gaelic, "Poets and Poetry of Munster,"
appeared posthumously in 1850. They include a number of lyrics, wildly
and mournfully beautiful, inspired by the sorrows of Ireland: "Dark
Rosaleen," "Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tir-Connell,"
"O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire," etc. The ballad form was not practised
by the ancient Gaelic epic poets. In choosing it as the vehicle for
their renderings from vernacular narrative poetry, the modern Irish poets
have departed widely from the English and Scottish model