warning upon things that die but will be fighters in the spirit
against immortal powers, and, as before, the acts will be sometimes
noble and sometimes base. They cannot be stayed from their deeds,
for they are still in the strength of a youth which is ever renewing
itself. Not for all the wrong which may be done should they be
restrained. Mr. O'Grady would now have the tales kept from the
crowd to be the poetic luxury of a few. Yet would we, for all the
martyrs who perished in the fires of the Middle Ages, counsel the
placing of the Gospels on the list of books to be read only by a
few esoteric worshippers?

The literature which should be unpublished is that which holds the
secret of the magical powers. The legends of Ireland are not of
this kind. They have no special message to the aristocrat more
than to the man of the people. The men who made the literature
of Ireland were by no means nobly born, and it was the bards who
placed the heroes, each in his rank, and crowned them for after
ages, and gave them their famous names. They have placed on the
brow of others a crown which belonged to themselves, and all the
heroic literature of the world was made by the sacrifice of the
nameless kings of men who have given a sceptre to others they never
wielded while living, and who bestowed the powers, of beauty and
pity on women who perhaps had never uplifted a heart in their day,
and who now sway us from the grave with a grace only imagined in
the dreaming soul of the poet. Mr. O'Grady has been the bardic
champion of the ancient Irish aristocracy. He has thrown on them
the sunrise colors of his own brilliant spirit, and now would
restrain others from the use of their names lest a new kingship
should be established over them, and another law than that of his
own will, lest the poets of the democracy looking back on the