Ireland. The same cycle supplies us also
with the mythical types correspondent to those of the Greek mythology:
_e. g._, Ogmuir, the Irish Heracles; Lug or Lugh, the Apollo; Diancea,
the Esculapius; Manannan, the Neptune; and so forth. We have also
Bridget, the Goddess of Poetry, the Gaelic Muse, and the first and
foremost of the many illustrious Brians of Gaelic story. Later critics
differ ingeniously about the precise origins and significations of
many of these prehistoric figures. Our own conjecture is, and it lays
claim to no great originality or finality, that we have in this Danann
cycle an all-but inextricable commixture of primitive nature-myths and
folk-tales brought by the Milesian and pre-Milesian immigrants from
the Aryan cradle in the East, together with a certain addition of
confused history relating to the earliest adventures of the new-come
races upon Irish ground. But such as this traditional cycle was, it
provided the background for the much later second cycle, of which we
have already spoken, and which bears the Red Branch aloft as a sign.
In sight of the Red Branch, the darker part of the journey is over;
and the mists of mythology only form the veil shutting out all but the
mere human foreground.

We have spoken so far of two cycles--the Mythological, whose
chronology is a matter for further criticism to decide; the Heroic, or
Red Branch, which we place at the beginning of the Christian era.

Now we come to a third cycle: the "Fenian" named after Finn Mac Cool,
according to most Irish writers; the "Ossianic" named after Ossian,
Finn's famous son, according to most Scotch. We need only speak of it
here of course on its purely Irish side and from the Fenian aspect, as
the reader will find it fully dealt with under its Ossianic aspect
elsewhere. The heroes of this cycle, if we accept their historical
existence in Ireland, lived from the second to the fourth centuries of
the Christian era. Art, his grandson Cormac, and Cormac's son,
Cairbre; Cool, his son Finn, and King Goll: these, with Owen Mor and
many another, fill the Fenian romances with their fierce and
picturesque pursuit of destiny and death. They only await the hand of
that predestined shaper into final and positive and modernly
intelligible form of the confused romances which treat of their
doings, to add a new epic to the larger literature which has the Old
World for its text and the New World for its interpreter.

These three great cycl