If one is tired of the modern world and its literary interpretations, its self-conscious fictions and impressionistic poetry, one cannot do better than dive deep into the past, where Queen Meave marches in half-barbaric splendor and beauty across the stage of the ancient Eri, which was approximately contemporaneous with the birth of Christ. That was the time when the Red Branch mustered in the north its heroic array of warriors, descendants of Ir, the son of Milesius; and of the Red Branch came Cuculain the mighty. Connaught, the Ireland west of the Shannon, was Queen Meave's patrimony, where still lived the chief remnant of the prehistoric Firbolgs, the race that once fought with the gods themselves. And we have still to supply the mid-Ireland, with Tara as capital, and Cairbre as king; the Leinster of that day, subject to Finn and Far-Cu; and the Munster, subject to Lok and Eocha, with the children of Conairy Mór the Beautiful, too, ranging the south in their fullness of power. The colors to be got out of this Celtic antiquity, the spirit of life that surges in its romantic annals, the fine fury of its heroes, the beauty and picturesqueness of its women, combine to make a story that only an Ireland of the first century could have inspired, and that only an Ireland of the sixth to the ninth century could have written. Throughout Celtic history, the sixth century is for many reasons a climacteric period. In Irish literature, we reach about the year 575 a first point to which we can refer approximately the more conscious operation of its genius. Then it was that it made its first open claim to something like a national recognition. At the famous conclave of that year, held at Druimceta, it attained an almost academic position and organization. In this conclave, the then king of the Scottish Gaels, the leading King of the Irish, and St. Columcill, assisted at the deliberations which decided the _caste_ and privileges of the _Illuminati_. There seem to have been three grades: the first, a pseudo-Druidic order, the _Gradh Ecna_; the second, one of law-makers and lawyers; the third, the Bardic order, the _Gradh Fili_, the poets being termed _File_ in Irish. Of the many degrees to which the poets or _File_ could attain, the highest (as in the other grades, of _Ecna_, "Wisdom," and of _Fene_, "Law") was the _Ollave_, or Doctor. These doctors of literature, so to call them, were already the continuators of a great tradition, especially in poetry. They had to carry, written only in their heads, an immense body of bardic and religious legendary history and philosophy. And inasmuch as they were the sole depositories of this profound and occult learning, to say nothing of those heroic tales and romances in which the Celtic people so delighted, they received high honor wherever they went. When the chief poet, the ollave, or doctor of poetry, arrived, in his weather-beaten cloak of dark crimson trimmed with white feathers,