"'I know them, but I cannot describe them. Their counsel is foolish, they are forgetful of love, most headstrong in their desires, fond of folly, prone to enter rashly into engagements, given to swearing, proud to be asked in marriage, tenacious of enmity, cheerless at the banquet, rejectors of reconciliation, prone to strife, of much garrulity. Until evil be good, until hell be heaven, until the sun hide his light, until the stars of heaven fall, women will remain as we have stated. Woe to him, my son, who desires or serves a bad woman, woe to every one who has got a bad wife'"! This Christian allusion to heaven and hell, and some others of the same sort, show that despite a considerable pagan flavouring the tract cannot be entirely the work of King Cormac, though it may very well be the embodiment and extension of an ancient pagan discourse, for, as we have seen, after Christianity had succeeded in getting the upper hand over paganism, a kind of tacit compromise was arrived at, by means of which the bards and _fĭlès_ and other representatives of the old pagan learning, were allowed to continue to propagate their stories, tales, poems, and genealogies, at the price of incorporating with them a small share of Christian alloy, or, to use a different simile, just as the vessels of some feudatory nations are compelled to fly at the mast-head the flag of the suzerain power. But so badly has the dovetailing of the Christian and the pagan parts been managed in most of the older romances, that the pieces come away quite separate in the hands of even the least skilled analyser, and the pagan substratum stands forth entirely distinct from the Christian accretion. [1] O'Clery notices, in his Féilĭrè na Naomh, the lives of thirty-one saints written in Irish, all extant in his time, not to speak of Latin ones. I fancy most of them still survive. Stokes printed nine from the Book of Lismore; Standish Hayes O'Grady four more from various sources. [2] _See_ Cormac's glossary _sub voce._ [3] _See_ "Irische Texte," Dritte Serie, 1 Heft, pp. 187 and 204. [4] Agallamh an da Suadh. [5] "Irische Texte," Dritte serie, Heft i. [6] _See_ above, p. 84. [7] See O'Curry's "Manners and Customs," vol. ii. p. 217, and "Irische Texte," Dritte serie, Heft. i. pp. 96 and 125. [8] It is curious to thus make the steed rank apparently next to the king himself, and above the wife and son, for the _anrad_ who curses the steed ranks next to the _ollamh._ [9] Thurneysen expresses some doubt about the antiquity of the last citation.