generation. For this loss of the Grecian mythology, and this
substitution of Nox and Chaos for the remote ancestors of the Olympians,
we have to thank the early Greek philosophers, and the general diffusion
of a rude scientific knowledge, imparting a physical complexion to the
mythological memory of the Greeks.

In the theogony of the ancient inhabitants of this country, we have an
example of a slowly-growing, slowly-changing mythology, such as no other
nation in the world can supply. The ancestry of the Irish gods is not
bounded by a single generation or by twenty. The Tuatha De Danan of the
ancient Irish are the final outcome and last development of a mythology
which we can see advancing step by step, one divine tribe pushing out
another, one family of gods swallowing up another, or perishing under
the hands of time and change, to make room for another. From Angus
Og, the god of youth and love and beauty, whose fit home was the woody
slopes of the Boyne, where it winds around Rosnaree, we count fourteen
generations to Nemedh and four to Partholan, and Partholan is not the
earliest. As the bards recorded with a zeal and minuteness, so far as I
can see, without parallel, the histories of the families to which they
were adscript, so also they recorded with equal patience and care the
far-extending pedigrees of those other families--invisible indeed, but
to them more real and more awe-inspiring--who dwelt by the sacred lakes
and rivers, and in the folds of the fairy hills, and the great raths and
cairns reared for them by pious hands.

The extent, diversity, and populousness of the Irish mythological
cycles, the history of the Irish gods, and the gradual growth of that
mythology of which the Tuatha De Danan, i.e., the gods of the historic
period, were the final development, can only be rightly apprehended by
one who reads the bardic literature as it deals with this subject. That
literature, however, so far from having been printed and published, has
not even been translated, but still moulders in the public libraries of
Europe, those who, like myself, are not professed Irish scholars, being
obliged to collect their information piece-meal from quotations and
allusions of those who have written upon the subject in the English or
Latin language. For to read the originals aright needs many years
of labour, the Irish tongue presenting at different epochs the
characteristics of distinct languages, while the peculiarities of