ient brutality to be found in the host of romantic
stories which gather round the chivalry of the Fenians.

There are other characteristics of these old tales on which I must
dwell. The first is the extra-ordinary love of colour. This is not a
characteristic of the early German, English or Scandinavian poems and
tales. Its remarkable presence in Scottish poetry, at a time when it
is scarcely to be found in English literature, I have traced elsewhere
to the large admixture of Celtic blood in the Lowlands of Scotland. In
early Irish work it is to be found everywhere. In descriptions of
Nature, which chiefly appear in the Fenian Cycle and in Christian
times, colour is not as much dwelt on as we should expect, for nowhere
that I have seen is it more delicate and varied than under the Irish
atmosphere. Yet, again and again, the amber colour of the streams as
they come from the boglands, and the crimson and gold of the
sunsetting, and the changing green of the trees, and the blue as it
varies and settles down on the mountains when they go to their rest,
and the green crystal of the sea in calm and the dark purple of it in
storm, and the white foam of the waves when they grow black in the
squall, and the brown of the moors, and the yellow and rose and
crimson of the flowers, and many another interchanging of colour, are
seen and spoken of as if it were a common thing always to dwell on
colour. This literary custom I do not find in any other Western
literature. It is even more remarkable in the descriptions of the
dress and weapons of the warriors and kings. They blaze with colour;
and as gold was plentiful in Ireland in those far-off days, yellow and
red are continually flashing in and out of the blue and green and rich
purple of their dress. The women are dressed in as rich colours as the
men. When Eochy met Etain by the spring of pure water, as told in this
book, she must have flashed in the sunlight like a great jewel. Then,
the halls where they met and the houses of the kings are represented
as glorious with colour, painted in rich patterns, hung with woven
cloths dyed deep with crimson and blue and green and yellow. The
common things in use, eating and drinking implements, the bags they
carry, the bed-clothing, the chess-men, the tables, are embroidered or
chased or set with red carbuncles or white stones or with interlacing
of gold. Colour is everywhere and everywhere loved. And where colour
is loved the arts flourish, a