As his reign represents the whole Atlantean period, we might expect it to have begun well enough, and worsened as it went.  This was so; had he shown his colors from the first, it is not to be thought that the Danaans would have tolerated him at all.  But it came to be, as time went on, that he oppressed Ireland abominably; and at last they rose and drove him out.  Nuada, whose missing hand had been replaced with one of silver, was restored in the kingship; henceforth he is called Nuada of the Silver Hand.  Here we have the return or redescent of the Divine Dynasties who came to lead the men of the early Fifth Race against the Atlantean giants.  I shall beg leave now to tell you the story of the Second Battle of Moytura.

Perhaps it was in Ireland that the White Adepts of the Fifth made their first stand against the Atlanteans?  Perhaps thence it first got its epithet, Sacred Ierne?—­Bres, driven out by the Gods, took refuge with his father the Fomorian king beyond the western sea; who gave him an army with which to reconquer his lost dominions.  Now we come to the figure who represents the Fifth Race.  There are in Europe perhaps a dozen cities named after Lugh Lamfada, the Irish (indeed Celtic) Sun-god:  Lyons, the most important of them, was Lug-dunum, the dun or fortress of Lugh.  Lugh was a kind of counterpart to Bres; he was the son of Cian, a Danaan, and a daughter of the Fomorian champion Balor of the Mighty Blows, or of the Evil Eye.  The story of his birth is like that of Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae.  Danae’s son, you remember, was fated to kill his grandfather Acrisius; so Acrisius shut Danae in an inaccessable tower, that no son might be born to her.  The antiquity of the whole legend is suggested by this nearness of the Greek and Irish versions;—­even to the similarity of the names of Dana and Danae:  though Dana was not the mother of Lugh, but of the whole race of the Gods:  Tuatha De Danaan means, the ‘Race of the Gods the Children of Dana.’  So you see it comes from the beginnings of the Fifth Race, a million years ago; but how much better the history of that time is preserved in the Irish than in the Greek version!  As if the Irish took it direct from history and symbolism, and the Greeks from the Irish.  And why not? since in the nature of things Ireland must have been so much nearer the scene of action.

Lugh grew up among his mother’s people, but remembered his divine descent on his father’s side; and when it came to the War of the Fomoroh against Ireland, was for fighting for his father’s people.  So he set out for Tara, where Nuada and the Gods were preparing to meet the invasion; and whoever beheld him as he came, it seemed to them as if they had seen the sun rising on a bright day in summer.—­“Open thou the portal!” said he; but the knife was in the meat and the mead in the horn, and no man might enter but a craftsman bearing his craft.  “Oh then, I am a craftsman,” said Lugh; “I