Christian. He kept the definite Christian element to the very end, but
he filled the whole with its tender atmosphere.

No Christianity and very little gentleness intrude into the heroic
cycle. The story of Christ once touches it, but he who put it in did
not lose the pagan atmosphere, or the wild fierceness of the manners
of the time. How it was done may be read in this book at the end of
the story of the _Vengeance of Mesgedra_. Very late in the redaction
of these stories a Christian tag was also added to the tale of the
death of Cuchulain, but it was very badly done.

When we come to the Fenian cycle there is a well-defined borderland
between them and Christianity. The bulk of the stories is plainly
pagan; their originals were frankly so. But the temper of their
composers is more civilized than that of those who conceived the tales
of the previous cycles; the manners, as I have already said, of their
personages are gentler, more chivalrous; and their atmosphere is so
much nearer to that of Christianity, that the new Christian elements
would find themselves more at home in them than in the terrible
vengeance of Lugh, the savage brutality of Conor to Deirdré, or the
raging slaughterings of Cuchulain. So much was this the case that a
story was skilfully invented which linked in imagination the Fenian
cycle to a Christianized Ireland. This story--_Oisín in the Land of
Youth_--is contained in this book. Oisín, or Ossian, the son of Finn,
in an enchanted story, lives for 300 years, always young, with his
love in Tir-na-n-Óg, and finds on his return, when he becomes a
withered old man, St Patrick and Christianity in Ireland. He tells to
Patrick many tales of the Fenian wars and loves and glories, and in
the course of them paganism and Christianity are contrasted and
intermingled. A certain sympathy with the pagan ideas of honour and