and energy, and an
element of fine and healthy optimism, which is strangely at variance
with the popular conception of the melancholy of Irish literature,
and which, wherever they are known, make them the fountain-head of a
fresh creative inspiration. This stimulating of the imagination is
perhaps the best gift that a revived interest in the old native
romance of Ireland has to bestow.

REFERENCES:

The originals of many of the Tales of the Cuchulainn cycle of
romances will be found, usually accompanied by English or German
translations, in the volumes of _Irische Texte; Revue Celtique;
Zeitschrift fuer Celt. Phil.; Eriu_; Irish Texts Society, vol. II;
_Atlantis_; Proceed. of the R. Irish Academy (Irish MSS. Series and
Todd Lecture Series). English translations: of the Tain Bo Cualnge
(LU. and Y.B.L. versions), by Miss Winifred Faraday (1904); (LL.
version with conflate readings), by Joseph Dunn (1914); of various
stories: E. Hull, The Cuchulain Saga in Irish Literature (1898); A.
H. Leahy, Heroic Romances of Ireland (1905-6), the Courtship of Ferb
(1902). French translations in Arbois de Jubainville's _Epopee
celtique en Irlande_; German translations in Thurneysen's _Sagen aus
dem alien Irland_ (1901); free rendering by S. O'Grady in The Coming
of Cuchullain (1904), and in his History of Ireland, the Heroic
Period (1878). For full bibliography, see R. I. Best's Bibliography
of Irish Philology and Printed Literature (1913), and Joseph Dunn's
_Tain Bo Cualnge_, pp. xxxii-xxxvi (1914).

IRISH PRECURSORS OF DANTE

By SIDNEY GUNN, M.A.

One of the supreme creations of the human mind is the _Divine Comedy_
of Dante, and undoubtedly one of its chief sources is the literature
of ancient Ireland. Dante himself was a native of Florence, Italy,
and lived from 1265 to 1321. Like many great men, he incurred the
hatred of his countrymen, and he spent, as a result, the last twenty
years of his life in exile with a price on his head. He had been
falsely accused of theft and treachery, and his indignation at the
wrong thus done him and at the evil conduct of his contemporaries led
him to write his poem, in which he visits Hell, Purgatory, and
Paradise, and learns how God punishes bad actions, and how He rewards
those who do His will.

To the writing of his poem Dante brought all the learning of his
time, all its science, and an art that has never been surpassed,
perhaps never equalled. Of course, he did not know any I