nculcated chastity (see p. 257; vol. i.), an
allusion taken from the "youthful adventures of Cuculain," Leabhar na
Huidhre.

The following ancient rann contains the four qualifications of a bard:--

"Purity of hand, bright, without wounding,
Purity of mouth, without poisonous satire,
Purity of learning, without reproach,
Purity, as a husband, in wedlock."

Moreover, through all this literature sounds a high clear note of
chivalry, in this contrasting favourably with the Iliad, where no man
foregoes an advantage. Cuculain having slain the sons of Neara, "thought
it unworthy of him to take possession of their chariot and horses."
[Note: P. 155; vol. i.] Goll Mac Morna, in the Fenian or Ossianic cycle,
declares to Conn Cedcathah [Note: Conn of the hundred battles.] that
from his youth up he never attacked an enemy by night or under any
disadvantage, and many times we read of heroes preferring to die rather
than outrage their geisa. [Note: Certain vows taken with their arms on
being knighted.]

A noble literature indeed it is, having too this strange interest,
that though mainly characterised by a great plainness and simplicity of
thought, and, in the earlier stages, of expression, we feel, oftentimes,
a sudden weirdness, a strange glamour shoots across the poem when the
tale seems to open for a moment into mysterious depths, druidic secrets
veiled by time, unsunned caves of thought, indicating a still deeper
range of feeling, a still lower and wider reach of imagination. A youth
came once to the Fianna Eireen encamped at Locha Lein [Note: The Lakes
of Killarney.], leading a hound dazzling white, like snow. It was the
same, the bard simply states, that was once a yew tree, flourishing
fifty summers in the woods of Ioroway. Elsewhere, he is said to have
been more terrible than the sun upon his flaming wheels. What meant this
yew tree and the hound? Stray allusions I have met, but no history.
The spirit of Coelte, visiting one far removed in time from the great
captain of the Fianna, with a different name and different history,
cries:--

"I was with thee, with Finn"--

giving no explanation.

To MacPherson, however, I will do this justice, that he had the merit
to perceive, even in the debased and floating ballads of the highlands,
traces of some past greatness and sublimity of thought, and to
understand, he, for the first time, how much more they meant than what
met the ear. But he