and not by oral tradition. On the other hand it is incorrect to derive Puck from Irish puca, as the latter is undoubtedly borrowed from some torm of Teutonic speech.

So all embracing a mind as that of the greatest English dramatist could not fail to be interested in the gossip that must have been current in London at the time of the wars in Ulster. References to kerns and gallowglasses are fairly frequent. He had evidently heard of the marvellous powers with which the Irish bards were credited, for, in As You Like It, Rosalind exclaims:

"I was never so be-rhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember."

Similarly, in King Richard III, mention is made of the prophetic utterance of an Irish bard, a trait which does not appear in the poet's source. Any statements as to Irish influence in Shakespeare that go, beyond this belong to the realm of conjecture. Professor Kittredge has attempted to show that in Syr Orfeo, upon which the poet drew for portions of the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Irish story of Etain and Mider was fused with the medieval form of the classical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Direct influence is entirely wanting, and it is difficult to see how it could have been otherwise.

Even in the case of the Elizabethan poet who spent many years in the south of Ireland, there is no trace of Hibernian lore or legend. Spenser, indeed, tells us himself that he had caused some of the native poetry to be translated to him, and had found that it "savoured of sweet wit and good invention." But Ireland plays an infinitesimal part in the Faerie Queene. The scenery round Kilcolman Castle forms the background of much of the incident in Book V. "Marble far from Ireland brought" is mentioned in a simile in the second Book, where we also read:

As when a swarme of gnats at eventide
Out of the fennes of Allan do arise.

But Ireland supplied no further inspiration.

The various plantations of the seventeenth century produced an Anglo-Irish stock which soon asserted itself in literature. As a typical example, we may take the author of The

Vicar of Wakefield. At his first school at Lissoy, Oliver Goldsmith came under Thomas Byrne, a regular shanachie, possessed of all the traditional lore, with a remarkable gift for versifying. It was under this man that the boy made his first attempts at verse, and his memory is celebrated in The Deserted Village:

There, in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule,
The village master taught his little school.
A man severe he was, and stern to view.

Unfortunately Goldsmith was removed to Elphin at the age of nine, and although he retained an affection for Irish music all his life, his intimate connection with Irish Ireland apparently ceased at this point. "Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain" is doubtless full of reminiscences of the poet's early years in Westmeath, but the sentiments, the rhythm, and the language are entirely cast in an English mould. We may mention, in passing, that it has been suggested that Swift derived the idea of the kingdom of Lilliput from the Irish story of the Adventures of Fergus macLeide amongst the leprechauns. All that can be said is that this derivation is not impossible, though the fact that the tale is preserved only in a single manuscript rather points to the conclusion that the story did not enjoy great popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

We have seen that Goldsmith was removed from an Irish atmosphere at a tender age, and this is not the only instance of the frowning of fortune upon the native literature. When the fame of the ancient bards of the Gael was noised from end to end of Europe, it was through the medium of Macpherson's forgeries. Fingal caught the fleeting fancy of the moment in a manner never achieved by the true Ossianic lays of Ireland. The Reliques of Irish Poetry, published by Miss Brooke by subscription in Dublin in 1789 to vindicate the antiquity of the literature of Erin, never went into a second edition. And although some of the pieces contained in that volume have been reprinted in such undertakings of a learned character as the volumes of the Dublin Ossianic Society, J. F. Campbell's Leabhar na Feinne, and Cameron's Reliquiae Celticae, they

have aroused little interest amongst those ignorant of the Irish tongue.

During the nineteenth century, the number of poets who drew upon Ireland's past for their themes increased considerably. The most popular of all is unquestionably the author of the Irish Melodies. But, here again, the poet owes little or nothing to vernacular poetry, the mould is English, the sentiments are those of the poet's age. Moore's acquaintance with the native language can have been but of the slightest, and in the case of Mangan we are told that he had to rely upon literal versions of Irish pieces furnished him by O'Donovan or O'Curry. Of the numerous attempts to reproduce the overelaboration of rhyme to which Irish verse has ever been prone, Father Prout's Bells of Shandon is perhaps the only one that is at all widely known. When the legendary lore of Ireland became accessible to men of letters, owing to the labors of O'Curry, O'Donovan, and Hennessy, and the publication of various ancient texts by the Irish Archæological Society, it was to be expected that an attempt would be made by some poet of Erin to do for his native land what the Wizard of the North had accomplished for Scotland. The task was undertaken by Sir Samuel Ferguson, who met with conspicuous success, His most ambitious effort, Congal, deals in epic fashion with the story of the battle of Moyra. Others in similar strain treat the story of Conaire Mór and Deirdre, whilst others such as the Tain-Quest are more in the nature of ballads. Ferguson did more to introduce the English reading public to Irish story than would have been accomplished by any number of bald translations. His diction is little affected by the originals, and he sometimes treats his materials with great freedom, but his achievement was a notable one, and he has not infrequently been acclaimed as the national poet.

Is it perhaps invidious to single out any living author for special mention, but this brief survey cannot close without noticing the dramatic poems of W. B. Yeats, the latest poet who attempts to present the old stories in an English dress. His plays On Baile's Strand, Deirdre, and others, have become familiar to English audiences through the excellent acting of the members of the Abbey Theatre Company. The original

texts are now much better known than they were in Ferguson's day, and Mr. Yeats consequently cannot permit himself the same liberties. Similarly, it is only during the last twentyfive years that the language of Irish poetry has been carefully studied, and Mr. Yeats has this advantage over his predecessors that on occasion, e. g., in certain passages in The King's Threshold, he is able to introduce with great effect reminiscences of the characteristic epithets and imagery which formed so large a part of the stock-in-trade of the medieval bard.

REFERENCES:

Friedel and Meyer: La Vision de Tondale (Paris, 1907); Boswell: An Irish Precursor of Dante (London, 1908); Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. I, chaps. xii and xvi; Windisch: Das Keltische Brittannien (Leipzig, 1912), more especially chap. xxxvij ; Dictionary of National Biography; Gwynn: Thos. Moore ("English Men of Letters" Series, London, 1905).

A

IRISH FOLKLORE

BY ALFRED PERCEVAL Graves.

MONG savage peoples there is at first no distinction of a definite kind between good and bad spirits, and when a distinction has been reached, a great advance in a spiritual direction has been made. For the key to the religion of savages is fear, and until such terror has been counteracted by belief in beneficent powers, civilization will not follow. But the elimination of the fear of the unseen is a slow process: indeed, it will exist side by side with the belief in Christianity itself, after a modification through various stages of better pagan belief.

Ireland still presents, in its more out-of-the-way districts, evidence of that strong persistence in the belief in maleficent or malicious influences of the pre-Christian powers of the air, which it seems difficult to eradicate from the Celtic imagination. In the celebrated poem entitled The Breastplate of St. Patrick, there is much the same attitude on the part of Patrick towards the Druids and their powers of concealing and changing, of paralyzing and cursing, as was shown by Moses towards the magicians of Egypt. Indeed, in Patrick's time a belief in a world of fairies existed even in the king's household, for "when the two daughters of King Leary of Ireland, Ethnea the fair and Fedelma the ruddy, came early one morning to the well of Clebach to wash, they found there a synod of holy bishops with Patrick. And they knew not whence they came, or in what form, or from what people, or from what country; but they supposed them to be Duine Sidh, or gods of the earth, or a phantasm."

Colgan explains the term Duine Sidh thus: "Fantastical spirits," he writes, "are by the Irish called men of the Sidh, because they are seen, as it were, to come out of the beautiful hills to infest men, and hence the vulgar belief that they reside in certain subterranean habitations: and sometimes the hills. themselves are called, by the Irish, Sidhe or Siodha."

No doubt, when the princesses spoke of the gods of the earth, reference was made to such pagan deities as Beal;