ht and Ulster, brought about by the treacherous murder of the
sons of Usnach. The story of their tragic end, and of the melancholy
death of Deirdre, is one of the most moving in all Irish tradition.
But the master-romance of the cycle is not that of Deirdre, but of
Queen Meave and her foray in quest of the famous bull of Louth; a tale
familiar in Irish under its title of 'The Cattle-spoiling of Cooley.'

If one is tired of the modern world and its literary interpretations,
its self-conscious fictions and impressionistic poetry, one cannot do
better than dive deep into the past, where Queen Meave marches in
half-barbaric splendor and beauty across the stage of the ancient
Eri, which was approximately contemporaneous with the birth of
Christ. That was the time when the Red Branch mustered in the north
its heroic array of warriors, descendants of Ir, the son of Milesius;
and of the Red Branch came Cuculain the mighty. Connaught, the Ireland
west of the Shannon, was Queen Meave's patrimony, where still lived
the chief remnant of the prehistoric Firbolgs, the race that once
fought with the gods themselves. And we have still to supply the
mid-Ireland, with Tara as capital, and Cairbre as king; the Leinster
of that day, subject to Finn and Far-Cu; and the Munster, subject to
Lok and Eocha, with the children of Conairy Mor the Beautiful, too,
ranging the south in their fullness of power. The colors to be got out
of this Celtic antiquity, the spirit of life that surges in its
romantic annals, the fine fury of its heroes, the beauty and
picturesqueness of its women, combine to make a story that only an
Ireland of the first century could have inspired, and that only an
Ireland of the sixth to the ninth century could have written.

Throughout Celtic history, the sixth century is for many reasons a
climacteric period. In Irish literature, we reach about the year 575 a
first point to which we can refer approximately the more conscious
operation of its genius. Then it was that it made its first open claim
to something like a national recognition. At the famous conclave of
that year, held at Druimceta, it attained an almost academic position
and organization. In this conclave, the then king of the Scottish
Gaels, the leading King of the Irish, and St. Columcill, assisted at
the deliberations which decided the _caste_ and privileges of the
_Illuminati_. There seem to have been three grades: the first, a
pseudo-Druidic order, the _Gradh