ers; and at a million years' distance, the
doings and changes, the empires and dynasties of a hundred
centuries, look to the eyes of racial memory like the contents of
a single spring. So it is the history and wisdom of remote
multiplied ages that come down to us in these tales.

But with the Heroic Cycle we seem to be entering a near manvantara.
This is the noon-period of Irish literature, the Shakespeare-Milton
time; where the other was the dawn or Chaucer period. Or the
Mythological Cycle is the Vedic, and the Heroic, the Epic,
period, to take an Indian analogy; and this fits it better,
because the Irish, like the Indian, dawn-period is immensely
ancient and of immense duration. But when you come to the
Heroic time, with the stories of the high king Conary Mor,
and of the Red Branch Warriors, with for _piece de resistance_
the epic _Tann Bo Cuailgne,_ you seem (as you do in the
_Mahabharata_) to be standing upon actual memories, as much
historical as symbolic. Here all the figures, though titanic,
are at least half human, with a definite character assigned to
all of importance. They revel in huge dramatic action; move in
an heroic mistless sunlight. You can take part in the daily life
of the Red Branch champions as you can in that of the Greeks
before Troy; they seem real and clear-cut; you can almost
remember Deirdre's beauty and the sorrow of the doom of the
Children of Usna; you have a shrewd notion what Cuculain looked
like, and what Conall Carnach; you are familiar with the fire
trailed from the chariot wheels, the sods kicked up by the
horses' hoofs; you believe in them all, as you do in Odysseus
and Ajax, in Bhishma and Arjuna, in Hamlet and Falstaff;--as I
for my part never found it possible to believe in Malory's and
Tennyson's well-groomed gentlemen of the Table Round.

And then, after long lapse, came another age, and the Cycle of
the Fenians. It too is full of excellent tales, but all less
titanic and clearly-defined: almost, you might say, standing to
the Red Branch as Wordsworth and Keats to Shakespeare and Milton.
The atmosphere is on the whole dimmer, the figures are weaker;
there is not the same dynamic urge of creation. You come away
with an impression of the beauty of the forest through which the
Fenians wandered and camped, and less with an impression of the
personalities of the Fenians themselves. There is abundant
Natural Magic, but not the old Grand Manner; and you would not
reco