which for
centuries followed with eager interest the lives of these heroes, beheld
as gigantic what was not so, as romantic and heroic what was neither one
nor the other, still the great fact remains, that it was beside and in
connection with the mounds and cairns that this history was elaborated,
and elaborated concerning them and concerning the heroes to whom they
were sacred.

On the plain of Tara, beside the little stream Nemanna, itself famous
as that which first turned a mill-wheel in Ireland, there lies a barrow,
not itself very conspicuous in the midst of others, all named and
illustrious in the ancient literature of the country. The ancient hero
there interred is to the student of the Irish bardic literature a
figure as familiar and clearly seen as any personage in the Biographia
Britannica. We know the name he bore as a boy and the name he bore as
a man. We know the names of his father and his grandfather, and of the
father of his grandfather, of his mother, and the father and mother of
his mother, and the pedigrees and histories of each of these. We know
the name of his nurse, and of his children, and of his wife, and the
character of his wife, and of the father and mother of his wife, and
where they lived and were buried. We know all the striking events of his
boyhood and manhood, the names of his horses and his weapons, his own
character and his friends, male and female. We know his battles, and the
names of those whom he slew in battle, and how he was himself slain, and
by whose hands. We know his physical and spiritual characteristics,
the device upon his shield, and how that was originated, carved, and
painted, by whom. We know the colour of his hair, the date of his birth
and of his death, and his relations, in time and otherwise, with the
remainder of the princes and warriors with whom, in that mound-raising
period of our history, he was connected, in hostility or friendship; and
all this enshrined in ancient song, the transmitted traditions of the
people who raised that barrow, and who laid within it sorrowing their
brave ruler and, defender. That mound is the tomb of Cuculain, once king
of the district in which Dundalk stands to-day, and the ruins of whose
earthen fortification may still be seen two miles from that town.

This is a single instance, and used merely as an example, but one out
of a multitude almost as striking. There is not a king of Ireland,
described as such in the ancient annals, w