And now, it will perhaps be asked, what is one in sober seriousness to say to all this?  All that one can say is that these tales are not to be taken as history in any rigid sense of the word, but must for the most part be regarded as mere hints, caught from chaos, and coming down through a hundred broken mediums; scraps of adventures told around camp fires; oral traditions; rude songs handed from father to son, and altering more or less with each new teller.  The early history of Ireland is in this respect much like the early history of all other countries.  We have the same semi-mythical aggregations, grown up around some small kernel of reality, but so changed, swollen, distorted, that it is difficult to distinguish the true from the false; becoming vaguer and vaguer too as the mists of time and sentiment gather more and more thickly around them, until at last we seem to be swimming dimly in a “moony vapour,” which allows no dull peaks of reality to pierce through it at all.  “There were giants in those days,” is a continually recurring assertion, characteristic of all ancient annals, and of these with the rest.

[Illustration:  Cromlech on Howth.]

II.

The legends and the legend makers.

Better far than such historic shams—­cardboard castles with little or no substance behind them—­are the real legends.  These put forward no obtrusive pretensions to accuracy, and for that very reason are far truer in that larger sense in which all the genuine and spontaneous outgrowth of a country form part and parcel of its history.  Some of the best of these have been excellently translated by Mr. Joyce, whose “Celtic Romances” ought to be in the hands of every one, from the boy of twelve upwards, who aspires to know anything of the inner history of Ireland; to understand, that is to say, that curiously recurrent note of poetry and pathos which breaks continually through all the dull hard prose of the surface.  A note often lost in unmitigated din and discord, yet none the less re-emerging, age after age, and century after century, and always when it does so lending its own charm to a record, which, without some such alleviations, would be almost too grim and disheartening in its unrelieved and unresulting misery to be voluntarily approached at all.

Although as they now stand none appear to be of earlier date than the ninth or tenth century, these stories all breathe the very breath of a primitive world.  An air of remote pagan antiquity hangs over them, and as we read we seem gradually to realize an Ireland as unlike the one we know now as if, like the magic island of Buz, it had sunk under the waves and been lost.  Take, for instance—­for space will not allow of more than a sample—­the story of “The Pursuit of Gilla Backer and his Horse,” not by any means one of the best, yet characteristic enough.  In it we learn that from