heroes of the past should overcome them with the ideas of a later
day, and the Atticottic nature find a loftier spirit in those who
felt the unendurable pride of the Fianna and rose against it. Well,
it is only natural he should try to protect the children of his
thought, but they need no later word from him. If writers of a
less noble mind than his deal with these things they will not rob
his heroes of a single power to uplift or inspire. In Greece,
after Eschylus and his stupendous deities, came Sophocles, who
restrained them with a calm wisdom, and Euripides, who made them
human, but still the mysterious Orphic deities remain and stir
us when reading the earlier page. Mr. O'Grady would not have the
Red Branch cycle cast in dramatic form or given to the people.
They are too great to be staged; and he quotes, mistaking the
gigantic for the heroic, a story of Cuculain reeling round Ireland
on his fairy steed the Liath Macha. This may be phantasy or
extravagance, but it is not heroism. Cuculain is often heroic,
but it is a quality of the soul and not of the body; it is shown
by his tears over Ferdiad, in his gentleness to women. A more
grandiose and heroic figure than Cuculain was seen on the Athenian
stage; and no one will say that the Titan Prometheus, chained on
the rock in his age-long suffering for men, is not a nobler figure
than Cuculain in any aspect in which he appears to us in the tales.
Divine traditions, the like of which were listened to with awe by
the Athenians, should not be too lofty for our Christian people,
whose morals Mr. O'Grady, here hardly candid, professes to be
anxious about. What is great in literature is a greatness springing
out of the human heart. Though we fall short today of the bodily
stature of the giants of the prime, the spirit still remains and
can express an equal greatness. I can well understand how a man
of our own day, by the enlargement of his spirit, and the passion