Another special favourite of the annalists is Cormac O'Conn, whose reign
they place about the year 250, and over whose doings they wax eloquent,
dwelling upon the splendour of his court, the heroism of his warlike
sons, the beauty of his ten fair daughters, the doings of his famous
militia, the Fenni or Fenians, and especially of his illustrious general
Finn, or Fingal, the hero of the legends, and father of the poet
Ossian--a warrior whom we shall meet with again in the next chapter.

And now, it will perhaps be asked, what is one in sober seriousness to
say to all this? All that one can say is that these tales are not to be
taken as history in any rigid sense of the word, but must for the most
part be regarded as mere hints, caught from chaos, and coming down
through a hundred broken mediums; scraps of adventures told around camp
fires; oral traditions; rude songs handed from father to son, and
altering more or less with each new teller. The early history of Ireland
is in this respect much like the early history of all other countries.
We have the same semi-mythical aggregations, grown up around some small
kernel of reality, but so changed, swollen, distorted, that it is
difficult to distinguish the true from the false; becoming vaguer and
vaguer too as the mists of time and sentiment gather more and more
thickly around them, until at last we seem to be swimming dimly in a
"moony vapour," which allows no dull peaks of reality to pierce through
it at all. "There were giants in those days," is a continually recurring
assertion, characteristic of all ancient annals, and of these with
the rest.

[Illustration: CROMLECH ON HOWTH.]