to the Scottish ballads by the Norse element, and the constant wars in which the Vikings and the Gaels encountered time after time lend some of their finest episodes to this poetry. If we turn from the ballads to the prose tales and romances, we find the same strong resemblances and the same significant differences. The Irish have always the more fluent and eloquent a faculty in prose and verse. Their adjectival energy is greater; they are more given to extravagances of style, both in point of sentiment and of humor. The Scotch are on the other hand more simple and more terse, and they touch the deeper notes of pathos and of mystery more often. Nothing more instructive can be devised for the Celtic student than to take the volumes in verse and prose representing the three Celtic lands, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and to compare their style, method, and literary idiosyncrasies. For this comparison Mr. Campbell's wonderful 'Tales of the West Highlands,' in prose, and in verse his 'Leabhar na Féinne,' may be cited, with works of Dr. Hyde, Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady, Dr. Joyce, in Irish; and in Welsh, the 'Mabinogion' in Lady Guest's exquisite English version, or the 'Myvyrian Archæology.' In the fourteenth century, which gave Dafydd ap Gwilym to Wales, we find Gaelic becoming more definitely a conscious literary language. But the Dafydd of Scotland came more than a century earlier, being born at the end of the twelfth century. This was the famous Muireadach Albannach (Murdoch the Scot), several of whose poems figure in the Dean of Lismore's book, and whose effect on succeeding bards was only less powerful than Dafydd's on his Welsh successors. The Dean's book has poems, too, by two woman poets: Efric, wife of the last of the famous MacNeills of Castle Sween, and Isabel, Countess of Argyle. Efric's lament for her husband contains some touching lines; _e. g._:-- "There's no heart among our women; At the sport, no men are seen; Like the sky when windless, silent Is the music of Dun Sween!"