of Usna; you have a shrewd notion what Cuculain looked like, and what Conall Carnach; you are familiar with the fire trailed from the chariot wheels, the sods kicked up by the horses’ hoofs; you believe in them all, as you do in Odysseus and Ajax, in Bhishma and Arjuna, in Hamlet and Falstaff;—­as I for my part never found it possible to believe in Malory’s and Tennyson’s well-groomed gentlemen of the Table Round.

And then, after long lapse, came another age, and the Cycle of the Fenians.  It too is full of excellent tales, but all less titanic and clearly-defined:  almost, you might say, standing to the Red Branch as Wordsworth and Keats to Shakespeare and Milton.  The atmosphere is on the whole dimmer, the figures are weaker; there is not the same dynamic urge of creation.  You come away with an impression of the beauty of the forest through which the Fenians wandered and camped, and less with an impression of the personalities of the Fenians themselves.  There is abundant Natural Magic, but not the old Grand Manner; and you would not recognise Finn or Oisin or Oscar, if you ment them, so easily as you would Cuculain or Fergus MacRoy or Naisi.  Civilization appears to have declined far between the two ages, to have become much less settled,—­as it naturally would, with all that fighting going on.  I take it that all the stories of both cycles relate to ages of the breakup of civilization:  peaceful and civilized times leave less impress on the racial memory.  The Fenians are distinctly further from such civilized times, however, than are the Red Branch:  they are a nomad company, but the Red Branch had their capital at Emain Macha by Armagh in Ulster.  But what mystery, what sparkling magic environs them!  Mr. Rollerstone cites this as an example:  Once three beautiful unknown youths joined Finn’s company; but stipulated that they should camp apart, and be left alone during the nights.  After awhile it fell out what was the reason for this:  one of them died between every dusk and dawn, and the other two had to be watching him.  That is all that is said; but it is enough to keep your imagination at work a long while.

—­And then, the manvantara dies away in a dolphin glory of mystical colors in the many tales of wondrous voyages and islands in the Atlantic:  such as the Voyage of Maelduin, of which Tennyson’s version gives you some taste of the brightness, but none at all of the delicacy and mysterious beauty and grace.

Except the classical, this is the oldest written literature in Europe; and I doubt there is any other that gives us such a wide peep-hole into lost antiquity.  Yes; perhaps it is the best lens extant, west of India.  It is a lens, of course, that distorts:  the long past is shown through a temperament,—­made into poetry and romance; not left bare scientific history.  But perhaps poetry and romance are after all the truest and final form of history.  Perhaps, in looking at recent ages, we are balked