ir famous
names. They have placed on the brow of others a crown which belonged to
themselves, and all the heroic literature of the world was made by
the sacrifice of the nameless kings of men who have given a sceptre to
others they never wielded while living, and who bestowed the powers, of
beauty and pity on women who perhaps had never uplifted a heart in their
day, and who now sway us from the grave with a grace only imagined in
the dreaming soul of the poet. Mr. O'Grady has been the bardic champion
of the ancient Irish aristocracy. He has thrown on them the sunrise
colors of his own brilliant spirit, and now would restrain others from
the use of their names lest a new kingship should be established over
them, and another law than that of his own will, lest the poets of the
democracy looking back on the heroes of the past should overcome them
with the ideas of a later day, and the Atticottic nature find a loftier
spirit in those who felt the unendurable pride of the Fianna and rose
against it. Well, it is only natural he should try to protect the
children of his thought, but they need no later word from him. If
writers of a less noble mind than his deal with these things they will
not rob his heroes of a single power to uplift or inspire. In Greece,
after Eschylus and his stupendous deities, came Sophocles, who
restrained them with a calm wisdom, and Euripides, who made them human,
but still the mysterious Orphic deities remain and stir us when reading
the earlier page. Mr. O'Grady would not have the Red Branch cycle
cast in dramatic form or given to the people. They are too great to be
staged; and he quotes, mistaking the gigantic for the heroic, a story of
Cuculain reeling round Ireland on his fairy steed the Liath Macha. This
may be phantasy or extravagance, but it is not heroism. Cuculain is
often heroic, but it is a quality of the soul and not of the body; it
is shown by his tears over Ferdiad, in his gentleness to women. A more
grandiose and heroic figure than Cuculain was seen on the Athenian
stage; and no one will say that the Titan Prometheus, chained on the
rock in his age-long suffering for men, is not a nobler figure than
Cuculain in any aspect in which he appears to us in the tales.
Divine traditions, the like of which were listened to with awe by the
Athenians, should not be too lofty for our Christian people, whose
morals Mr. O'Grady, here hardly candid, professes to be anxious about.
What is great in li