before and came after. These pedigrees, as I said before, have no
historical meaning, being pre-Milesian, and therefore absolutely
prehistoric; but as the genealogy of the gods, and as representing
the successive generations of that invisible family, whose history
not one or ten bards, but the whole bardic and druidic organisation
of the island, delighted to record, collate, and verify--those
pedigrees are as reliable as that of any of the regal clans. They
represent accurately the mythological panorama, as it unrolled
itself slowly through the centuries before the imagination and
spirit of our ancestors accurately that divine drama, millennium--
lasting, with its exits and entrances of gods. Millennium-lasting,
and more so, for it is plain that one divine generation represents
on the average a much greater space of time than a generation of
mortal men. The former probably represents the period which would
elapse before a hero would become so divine, that is, so
consecrated in the imagination of the country, as to be received
into the family of the gods. Cuculain died in the era of the
Incarnation, three hundred years, if not more, before the country
even began to be Christianised, yet he is never spoken of as
anything but a great hero, from which one of two things would
follow, either that the apotheosis of heroes needed the lapse of
centuries, or that, during the first, second, third, and fourth
centuries, the historical conscience was so enlightened, and a
positive definite knowledge of the past so universal, that the
translation of heroes into the divine clans could no longer take
place. The latter is indeed the more correct view; but the reader
will, I think, agree with me that the divine generations, taken
generally, represent more than the average space of man's life. To
what remote unimagined distances of time those earlier cycles
extend has been shown by an examination of the tombs of the lower