r
daughter Hilda, and to woo her for their King, Hettel of Denmark, came a
number of daring champions, disguised as merchants. The wooing with music,
which captures the Irish maiden's heart, the flight, pursuit, marriage and
reconcilement, are told with animation. Gudrun, the daughter of Hettel's
Irish wife, is the second heroine of the tale. In the Arthurian Romance of
Tristan and Isolde (as in some others) there are Irish scenes and Irish
characters. Isolde herself has bequeathed Dublin her name in Isolde's
Tower and Chapel-isod. I need but remind you that the Arthurian Romances
gave origin to Tennyson's "Idylls of the King."

The kindred peoples of France and of Spain were naturally not less
influenced than the Teutonic races. The Romans did not give them rhyme;
their own literature had perished; consequently they borrowed from the
islands to which, in Caesar's time, the continental Druids were sent for
training. Assonant rhyme, found in some Anglo-Norman poems, was common in
the Romance of Oc and all related dialects. "It is clearly the Irish
_Comharda_" (correspondence), writes an English authority, Mr. Guest,
"though not submitted in the Romance dialects to the nice rules which
regulate its assonances in the Gaelic."

Irish literature has received gifts in return: in the old Anglo-Saxon
Mystery Play, found in the Record Office, in the Anglo-Norman Rhyme of
Ross, in the Song of Dermott, and in others unfortunately still
unpublished. Michael of Kildare is supposed to be our first poet in
English, and he is the pioneer-poet of satire in that language.

This postern, which he opened into what has since become the vast empire
of literature in English, gave entrance to many. Spenser came to us,
through it, and, caught by the glamour of the Gael, gave us the "Faerie
Queene," wherein he immortalises some of our scenery and pays tribute to
the ancient renown of our nation:

"Whilome when Ireland flourished in fame
Of wealth and goodness far above the rest
Of all that bear the British Islands name."

It is noteworthy that the great poem, which marked the revival of English
letters after Chaucer, was composed in Ireland. Granting that Spenser
found models in Ariosto and Tasso, yet, if he had remained in London, he
might never have risen above the standard of the Palace-poets. Shakespeare
in London was saved by the drama demanding an environment of popular life.
Probably nothing saved Spenser but his immersion in I