ng of Fir-bolgs. His temple [Note: Strand near
Ballysadare, Co. Sligo], beside the sea at Iorrus Domnan [Note:
Keating--evidently quoting a bardic historian], became his tomb. Daily
the salt tide embraces the feet of the great tumulus, regal amongst its
smaller comrades, where the last king of Fir-bolgs was worshipped by
his people. "Good [Note: Temple--vide post.] were the years of the
sovereignty of Mac Ere. There was no wet or tempestuous weather
in Ireland, nor was there any unfruitful year." Such were all the
predecessors of the children of Dana--gods which were of old times,
that rest in their tombs; and the days, too, of the Tuatha De Danan were
numbered. They, too, smitten by a more celestial light, vanished from
their hills, like Ossian lamenting over his own heroes; those others
still mightier, might say:--

"Once every step which we took might be heard throughout the
firmament. Now, all have gone, they have melted into the air."

But that divine tree, though it had its branches in fairy-land, had
its roots in the soil of Erin. An unceasing translation of heroes
into Tir-na-n-og went on through time, the fairy-world of the bards,
receiving every century new inhabitants, whose humbler human origin
being forgotten, were supplied there with both wives and children. The
apotheosis of great men went forward, tirelessly; the hero of one epoch
becoming the god of the next, until the formation of the Tuatha De
Danan, who represent the gods of the historic ages. Had the advent of
exact genealogy been delayed, and the creative imagination of the bards
suffered to work on for a couple of centuries longer, unchecked by the
historical conscience, Cuculain's human origin would, perhaps, have been
forgotten, and he would have been numbered amongst the Tuatha De Danan,
probably, as the son of Lu Lamfada and the Moreega, his patron deities.
It was, indeed, a favourite fancy of the bards that not Sualtam, but
Lu Lamfada himself, was his father; this, however, in a spiritual or
supernatural sense, for his age was far removed from that of the Tuatha
De Danan, and falling well within the scope of the historic period.
Even as late as the time of Alexander, the Greeks could believe a great
contemporary warrior to be of divine origin, and the son of Zeus.

When the Irish bards began to elaborate a general history of their
country, they naturally commenced with the enumeration of the elder
gods. I at one time suspected that