and it is with the friendly or hostile relations
of these two that the Ultonian cycle of tales deals. Ulster, or, more
precisely, the eastern portion of the Province, was the scene of all the
Cattle-raids, and there is a degree of truth in the couplet,--

"Leinster for breeding, And Ulster for reaving;
Munster for reading, And Connacht for thieving."

But there are no indications of a racial clash or war of tribes. With the
exception of the Oghamic writings inscribed on the pillar-stones by
Cuchulain, which seem to require interpretation to the men of Connacht by
Ulstermen, the description of the warriors mustered by the Connacht warrior
queen and those gathered round King Conchobar of Ulster accord quite
closely.

The Tain Bo Cualnge is the work not of any one man but of a corporation of
artists known as _filid_. The author of the Tain in its present state,
whoever he may have been, was a strong partisan of Ulster and never misses
an opportunity of flattering the pride of her chieftains. Later a kind of
reaction against the pre-eminence given to Ulster and the glorification of
its hero sets in, and a group of stories arises in which the war takes a
different end and Cuchulain is shown to disadvantage, finally to fall at
the hands of a Munster champion. It is to this southern province that the
saga-cycle which followed the Cuchulain at an interval of two hundred years
belongs, namely, the Fenian saga,--the saga of Finn son of Cumhall, which
still flourishes among the Gaelic speakers of Ireland and Scotland, while
the Cuchulain stories have almost died out among them. The mingling of the
two sagas is the work of the eighteenth-century Scots Lowlander, James
Macpherson.

The Tain Bo Cualnge is one of the most precious monuments of the world's
literature, both because of the poetic worth it evidences at an early stage
of civilization, and for the light it throws on the life of the people
among whom it originated and that of their ancestors centuries earlier. It
is not less valuable and curious because it shows us the earlier stages of
an epic--an epic in the making--which it does better perhaps than any other
work in literature. Ireland had at hand all the materials for a great
national epic, a wealth of saga-material replete with interesting episodes,
picturesque and dramatic incidents and strongly defined personages, yet she
never found her Homer, a gifted poet to embrace her entire literary wealth,
to piece