founded upon mediaeval attempts to reduce to verisimilitude and
historical probability what was by its nature quite incapable of
such treatment. The mythology of the Irish nation, being relieved
of the marvellous and sublime, was set down with circumstantial
dates as a portion of the country's history by the literary men of
the middle ages. Unable to excide from the national narrative those
mythological beings who filled so great a place in the imagination
of the times, and unable, as Christians, to describe them in their
true character as gods, or, as patriots, in the character which
they believed them to possess, namely, demons, they rationalized
the whole of the mythological period with names, dates, and ordered
generations, putting men for gods, flesh and blood for that
invisible might, till the page bristled with names and dates, thus
formulating, as annals, what was really the theogony and mythology
of their country. The error of the mediaeval historians is shared
by the not wiser moderns. In the generations of the gods we seem to
see prehistoric racial divisions and large branches of the Aryan
family, an error which results from a neglect of the bardic
literature, and a consequently misdirected study of the annals.

As history, the pre-Milesian record contains but a limited supply
of objective truths; but as theogony, and the history of the Irish
gods, these much abused chronicles are as true as the roll of the
kings of England.

These divine nations, with their many successive generations and
dynasties, constitute a single family; they are all inter-connected
and spring from common sources, and where the literature permits
us to see more clearly, the earlier races exhibit a common
character. Like a human clan, the elements of this divine family