Irish critics, to be sure, tell us that Allingham’s fairies are English fairies, and that he had no Gaelic, though he knew and loved his Irish countryside.  He was a Protestant and a loyalist, and lived in close association with the English Pre-Raphaelites—­with Rossetti especially, who made the illustration for “The Maids of Elfin-Mere” in Allingham’s volume “The Music Master” (1855).  The Irish fairies, it is said, are beings of a darker and more malignant breed than Shakspere’s elves.  Yet in Allingham’s poem they stole little Bridget and kept her seven years, till she died of sorrow and lies asleep on the lake bottom; even as in Ferguson’s weird ballad, “The Fairy Thorn,” the good people carry off fair Anna Grace from the midst of her three companions, who “pined away and died within the year and day.”

To the latter half of the century belongs the so-called Celtic revival, which connects itself with the Nationalist movement in politics and is partly literary and partly patriotic.  It may be doubted whether, for practical purposes, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use.  But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win back its ancient, wellnigh forgotten speech is a most interesting social phenomenon.  At all events, both by direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and by original work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through English ballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of romance has been recovered and a bright green thread of Celtic poetry runs through the British anthology of the century.  The names of the pioneers and leading contributors to this movement are significant of the varied strains of blood which compose Irish nationality.  James Clarence Mangan was a Celt of the Celts; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Aubrey de Vere were of Norman-Irish stock, and the former was the son of a dean of the Established Church, and himself the editor of a Tory newspaper; Sir Samuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant of Scotch descent; Dr. George Sigerson is of Norse blood; Whitley Stokes, the eminent Celtic scholar, and Dr. John Todhunter, author of “Three Bardic Tales” (1896), bear Anglo-Saxon surnames; the latter is the son of Quaker parents and was educated at English Quaker schools.

Mangan’s paraphrases from the Gaelic, “Poets and Poetry of Munster,” appeared posthumously in 1850.  They include a number of lyrics, wildly and mournfully beautiful, inspired by the sorrows of Ireland:  “Dark Rosaleen,” “Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tir-Connell,” “O’Hussey’s Ode to the Maguire,” etc.  The ballad form was not practised by the ancient Gaelic epic poets.  In choosing it as the vehicle for their renderings from vernacular narrative poetry, the modern Irish poets have departed widely from the English and Scottish model, employing a variety of metres and not seeking to conform their diction to the manner of the ballads in the “Reliques” or the “Border Minstrelsy.”  Ferguson’s