“Balor as old as a forest, his mighty head helpless sunk,
     And an army of men holding open his weary and death-dealing eye,”

—­for wherever his glances fell, there death came.  They fell on Nuada of the Silver Hand, and he died,—­albeit it is well known that he was alive, and worshiped in Britain in Roman times, for a temple to him has been found near the River Severn.—­Then came Lugh to avenge Nuada, and a bolt from his sling tore like the dawn ray, like the meteor of heaven, over Moytura plain, and took the evil eye of Balor in the midst, and drove it into his head; and then the Fomorians were routed.  And this, in truth, like Camlan and Kurukshetra, is the battle that is forever being fought:  Balor comes death-dealing still; and still the sling of Lugh Lamfada is driving its meteor shafts through heaven and defeating him.

As for the defeat of the Gods by the Milesians, and their retirement into the mountains,—­that too is actual history told under a thinnish veil of symbolism:  the Fifth Race having been started, the Sons of Wisdom, its first Gods and Adept Kings, who had sown the seeds of all bright things that were to be in its future civilizations, withdrew into the Unseen.

All this and much more,—­the whole Mythological Cycle,—­ represents what came over into Irish literature from ancient manvantaric periods, and the compression of the records of millions of years.  A century seems a very long time while it is passing; but at two or three millenniums ago, no longer than a few autumns and winters; and at a million years’ distance, the doings and changes, the empires and dynasties of a hundred centuries, look to the eyes of racial memory like the contents of a single spring.  So it is the history and wisdom of remote multiplied ages that come down to us in these tales.

But with the Heroic Cycle we seem to be entering a near manvantara.  This is the noon-period of Irish literature, the Shakespeare-Milton time; where the other was the dawn or Chaucer period.  Or the Mythological Cycle is the Vedic, and the Heroic, the Epic, period, to take an Indian analogy; and this fits it better, because the Irish, like the Indian, dawn-period is immensely ancient and of immense duration.  But when you come to the Heroic time, with the stories of the high king Conary Mor, and of the Red Branch Warriors, with for piece de resistance the epic Tann Bo Cuailgne, you seem (as you do in the Mahabharata) to be standing upon actual memories, as much historical as symbolic.  Here all the figures, though titanic, are at least half human, with a definite character assigned to all of importance.  They revel in huge dramatic action; move in an heroic mistless sunlight.  You can take part in the daily life of the Red Branch champions as you can in that of the Greeks before Troy; they seem real and clear-cut; you can almost remember Deirdre’s beauty and the sorrow of the doom of the Children