of its conversion, they have been accounted mere 'Dii Minores,' powerful though cast down from their high estate, and holding a doubtful place between the angels of the kingdom of light and the demons who stood not in their integrity. This very thing, however, had, according to the chroniclers, come to pass more than once in the Irish annals. The fairy chiefs never quite represented, to popular imagination, the great gods reigning formerly in the sky, and comparable to the Zeus and Apollo of the Greek State religion. They belonged to a much older dynasty; and they lived on while the Mercury, Mars, and Dispater commemorated in Cæsar's Gallic Pantheon have vanished in their true shape from the fireside and bardic stories. Whether, by careful searching, they may still be found, though no longer as divine, but with human attributes, in the flesh and blood of heroes like Cuchulainn, Cormac, Ossian, Finn, and their peers, is a question still to be considered. Meanwhile, the fairy race, which ruled in Erinn long before these alleged mortals did their astounding feats, survived when the Druids had fallen; and the Land of Promise,' or of Youth, into which the enchanted paths opened, or which lay beneath the waves, admitted the vanquished within it, as the common home of all who were fleeing from the new faith into the unseen.

6

Two worlds, accordingly-the visible and the invisiblemust be recognized in the philosophy which lies at the root of these beliefs; but the second is not a world of Platonic ideals, seated in the heavens. On the contrary, its place is underground, or behind the water'; it is the kingdom of Pluto and the chthonian deities,-Hades, Sheol, or Tir fa Tonn,-where the dead live, and the past is still the present. As there is a

mythic geography of Hellas and Sicily, with many an entrance into the world below, so in ancient Erinn, the fairy palaces, like the Brugh of the Boyne, stand as designations for a whole subterranean realm. Every great battle-field, such as still bears token of the slaughter done upon it at Southern Moytura, near Lough Corrib, is a gate through which the fairy hosts pass up into the light, and inside which a mortal, now and again, has been caught in their toils. The association of the grave with a kingdom of the souls, or the Manes, is to be found everywhere; but in many Irish legends it appears rather as a door into Elysium than into the gloomy Tartarus. All the chief ones of the earth dwell there as in a glorious home. When Teig, the son of Cian, sails to the enchanted islands, he comes at last to a lovely land and a fruitful, where delicate woods with empurpled tree-tops are fringing the delightful streams. Nor, in spite of strain upon their strength, of foul weather

and

and of tempest, do his men, after reaching that coast, feel any craving for meat or fire-the perfume of that region's fragrant crimson branches being by way of meat all sufficient for them. Birds brilliant and beautiful feast on the grapes of the summer-land, fowls they were of an unwonted kind, white, with scarlet heads and golden beaks.' And in three great fortalices, surrounded by ramparts of marble or gold,-jocund houses, in which the walls gemmed with crystal and carbuncle shine by day and night,-the kings and other noble persons, who have come from the dark unquiet land of Erinn,' have their abode. All are there, in their several dwellings, from Heremon, son of Milesius, to Conn of the Hundred Battles, who was the last to arrive. Such is 'Red Lough Island,'a late invention as to its details, but merely heightening the colour which, somewhat more subdued, is characteristic of the most ancient Irish fairies and their underworld. For the mysterious people known as the Tuatha De Danann are said to have retired, after their defeat by the Milesians at Tailte in Meath, to a land out of sight, abounding in precious things, as gold, silver, and magic cauldrons, the materials of rich banquets, and the charm of music and melody. In this fine poetic way do the Gaels of Erinn furnish us with a gloss upon Cæsar's text, which was long a puzzle to the classical interpreter, Galli se omnes ab Dite patre prognatos prædicant, idque a Druidibus proditum dicunt.' The god has disappeared from Irish story, but his world and its treasures, with the succession of conquered dynasties passing down thither, remain as the fairyland where all good things may be had, not indeed for the asking, but for the stealing, whenever a Prometheus, or human hero, can make his way inside its defences. In this quite early creed, the Earth is likewise Heaven, and all good things come from its immeasurable depths.

It is at first sight perplexing that the mythology of Ireland has been given us, in all good faith, as sober history, and that, not only by men like Geoffrey Keating, the Irish Herodotus (a scholar to whom we owe a deep debt of gratitude), but even by such accomplished modern students as the late Eugene O'Curry. How long is it, nevertheless, since, on the broad highroad of Greek and Roman records, our wisest men were taking the genealogies of the Hellenic tribes, and the hero-tales of Livy, in earnest? The misguiding principle of Euhemerus offered itself, as far back as Tertullian, to the Christian apologist, as a handy weapon in his assault upon the throned gods; if they were shown to be men, there was an end of their divinity. The Celtic system underwent a similar fate,—how

early

early the documents will not enable us to determine. It was early enough, however, to make the transformation complete, save as regarded the monstrous sub-human races of the Fomorians, Firbolgs, and other earth-born apparitions, which, from the shapes they put on, could not well be classed with the sons of Adam. Even the Tuatha De Danann keep in the story their mythic attributes, and are confessedly gods mingled with men devas and adevas, to quote Professor Rhys's brilliant comparison. But the Milesians have lost their godlike form: they are mortals who have wrested the island from its magic rulers, and who carry on, thenceforward, wars among themselves, and rise in their Fenian knighthood to the crown of prowess and chivalrous daring. Always they are described as human, though gigantic and every way excelling the generations which sung of their amazing deeds. They correspond to the heroic race that warred against Troy, as we see them idealized in the poem of Hesiod. It is, however, on this battle-field that the scientific student of folk-lore must contend with stubborn antagonists, who will grant neither to philology nor to comparative religion that these worshipped heroes are solar myths, spirits of vegetation, Celtic parallels to Hercules, Indra, and Woden, or to Achilles and his companions, whose exploits signify nothing but atmospheric changes, the succession of the seasons, and the gradual progress of our ancestors from a state of predatory warfare to the pursuits of agriculture and of civilization.

Time was, not so long ago, when the saying of a French philologist, Tous les dieux, nous savons, sont le soleil,' might have been written on the golden key which was to unlock all doors into the great human temple of religion. The dawn and the dusk, the march of the sun through the zodiac, seemed to explain primitive thought and leave no remainder. But we are now coming to understand that one key, though golden, will not suffice; we shall want a bunch of keys, so to speak, and then we may be a long time learning to use them. Primitive thought was so little formed, so slow to bind things under single terms, so childish in the dazed look it cast around, that we can compare it to nothing else than a disordered, broken dream, where the end does not correspond to the beginning, and extraordinary powers are assumed because the trained reason which might test them is asleep. Professor Frazer, in his delightful Golden Bough,' has led many of us along a path into which we had stumbled unawares, perhaps when some unusual feature in an Irish, or a Mexican, or a Maori folk-tale, had taught us to suspect the too facile solar myth. Phoebus Apollo, standing in

the

the chariot of the sun, and scattering on every side a radiance that lights up the mind as well as the world of nature, is no god for dim-eyed cave-dwellers, clad in skins, and doubtful whether the divine animal, which they see hunting across the sky to-day, is the same that yesterday plunged into the dark and was swallowed up therein. The pedigree of Apollo is a very long one, with humble beginnings, not in the heavens, as it would appear, but in the heart of the flint from which a spark might be kindled, or in the oak which stored up hidden fire. His obscure namesake, Ogma Grianenech, or of the Shining Countenance, who explains why Gryneus happened to be an epithet of the sun-god in far-away Grynion, among the Asiatic Æolians, did not himself, probably, win to a place in the sky until he had burst forth from the high oak which, as we learn from Maximus Tyrius, afforded to the Celts an image of Zeus. To barbarians of low degree, the sun is not an everliving god, but a series or group of gods, and they would understand Catullus literally when he whispers in his tender way, 'Soles occidere et redire possunt.' For there were many suns, and all mortal, subject to disease and even doomed to die, unless help were given to the stricken deity by magician, or heroic warrior, capable of striking down his dark enemies. It was a daily exploit with Indra to bring back the sun. Mexico, a whole genealogy of suns was believed in, and hideous rites poured new blood into their dying veins. Among the Welsh Professor Rhys discerns a group of sun-gods; in Irish, the solar heroes belong to cycles far separated; and, as Hesiod pulls down one supreme power to make way for his son,-thus setting the new heavenly order above the old, and degrading Uranus and Cronos to the lower regions where they abide with the Titans or rule the dead, so, in Irish story, the Daghda, who was, while his dynasty prevailed, a good god, falls, at their defeat, into the under-world, and is there imprisoned.

In

The gods themselves, therefore, die like men, before Euhemerus touches them; nor have they, at first, a distinct name, or a clear and rounded personality. In the confused crowd of his impressions, the savage perceives chiefly that he is beset on every side. He feels the blows dealt him by the invisible. sees ghosts in the visions of the night. Slain animals no less than slaughtered men inhabit the places to which his spirit wanders during sleep. It does not, for a long while, occur to him that these multitudes of influences may be summed up in a few grand poetical abstractions, any more than it occurs to a child nowadays to strike out a theology for himself. The most ancient idols are without shape, not human nor even bestial;

and

and such, too, are the conceptions they body forth. Men worshipped the fire in the tree, which their own hands had kindled, ages before they rose to the idea of a supreme, allseeing Sun-god. They adored the animals, tame or wild, in their neighbourhood, by no means symbolically, but with a deep reverence for the wisdom, strength, and power of evil possessed by these other-shaped mortals who disputed the world with them. In vegetation they recognized gods many and lords many, born with the spring, dying at harvest, and needing to be helped by the solemn magic ritual which made things flourish or turned aside mischief. The animal, the tree, and the god were all bound up together, incarnate in king and priest, liable to injury and even to death, so that a continual succession must be provided lest their life should fail. Of all these things and their close relation, Mr. Frazer has found a well-known but most striking instance in the priest of Aricia, whose significance he has brought out with an admirable wealth of illustration. But, on turning to the 'Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne,' what is our amazement to meet this same story of Virbius, in its essential points! No one will pretend that the legend of the Arician grove has travelled as far as the Lakes of Killarney, or that the Irish saga copies the few obscure allusions to the ghastly priest,' which occur in Strabo, Suetonius, and Ovid. Yet the resemblance is unmistakable. It is, indeed, an episode in a tale, not a public institution; but no stress can be laid on this, where the philosophy rather than the fact is our object. To tell the story in few words, it is as follows:

Some of the magic race, known as the Tuatha De Danann, had been playing hurley with the heroic Fenians near the Lake of Lein, now called Killarney. During the contest, and in their journey home, these divine beings lived on 'crimson nuts, arbutus apples, and scarlet quicken-berries,' which they had brought from the Land of Promise. Careful as were the Tuatha lest any of these marvellous fruits should touch the soil of Erinn, it came to pass that a quicken-berry fell from them in Dubhros (the Dark Wood) and a tree sprang up in consequence. Such were its virtues, that every one of its berries had in it the exhilaration of wine, and the satisfying of old mead; while, whoever ate three of them would, though he had completed his hundredth year, return to the age of thirty. But no sooner did the fairy-people know that the tree had sprung up, than they sent to guard it a champion, Searbhann of Lochlann, who is described as a giant of the race of Cain, hideous and vast, with a single broad fiery eye in the centre of his forehead. He was armed with a mighty club, chained to his body; and the power

of