accompanied by his little band of disciples, at some chieftain's house, he was received with signal hospitality and treated to the best his host could afford. While literature was still oral, it is clear that despite the care used in its preservation in the bardic schools, it could not be maintained with the absolute accuracy of a written or a printed text. The remoter the historical matter to be remembered, the less likely was it to be preserved, _literatim et verbatim_, without those little liberties of the imagination which the Celtic word-master of earlier ages was always ready to take. Thus the first cycle of Irish legendary history, dating back many centuries before the Christian era,--the primitive and mythological cycle,--allows full license to the imagination, working upon a basis of semi-barbaric tradition, with a mixture in it of nature-myths and remotest history. Both because of the extent and the extreme difficulty of the materials afforded by this cycle in the study of the pre-Christian religious beliefs of the Celtic races, its stories will always form a great hunting-ground for Celtic students. We learn from it how the Nemedians were overtaken by the Fomorians and fought with them, almost to extermination, on Tory Island, escaping then to the south of Europe, particularly to Greece; and a couple of centuries later returned, under their new name of the Firbolgs. The Nemedians meanwhile supplied similarly a recrudescent race, the Tuatha Dé Danann, of whom came the Dagda,--the all-king, almost the Zeus of ancient Ireland. The same cycle supplies us also with the mythical types correspondent to those of the Greek mythology: _e. g._, Ogmuir, the Irish Heracles; Lug or Lugh, the Apollo; Diancéa, the Esculapius; Manannan, the Neptune; and so forth. We have also Bridget, the Goddess of Poetry, the Gaelic Muse, and the first and foremost of the many illustrious Brians of Gaelic story. Later critics differ ingeniously about the precise origins and significations of many of these prehistoric figures. Our own conjecture is, and it lays claim to no great originality or finality, that we have in this Danann cycle an all-but inextricable commixture of primitive nature-myths and folk-tales brought by the Milesian and pre-Milesian immigrants from the Aryan cradle in the East, together with a certain addition of confused history relating to the earliest adventures of the new-come races upon Irish ground. But such as this traditional cycle was, it provided the background for the much later second cycle, of which we have already spoken, and which bears the Red Branch aloft as a sign. In sight of the Red Branch, the darker part of the journey is over; and the mists of mythology only form the veil shutting out all but the mere human foreground. We have spoken so far of two cycles--the Mythological, whose chronology is a matter for further criticism to decide; the Heroic, or Red Branch, which we place at the beginning of the Christian era.