he songs of the Munster and Connacht poets of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries gave to every cottage in the land the ownership
as well as the tale of an heroic ancestry. They linked the Ireland of
yesterday with the Ireland of Finn and Oscar, of Diarmid and Grainne,
of Deirdre and the Sons of Usnech, of Cuchulainn the Hound of Ulster.
A people bred on such soul-stirring tales as these, linked by a
language "the most expressive of any spoken on earth" in thought and
verse and song with the very dawn of their history, wherein there
moved, as familiar figures, men with the attributes of gods--great in
battle, grand in danger, strong in loving, vehement in death--such a
people could never be vulgar, could never be mean, but must repeat,
in their own time and in their own manhood, actions and efforts thus
ascribed as a vital part of their very origin. Hence the inspiration
that gave the name of Fenian, in the late nineteenth century, to a
band of men who sought to achieve by arms the freedom of Ireland. The
law of the Fenian of the days of Marcus Aurelius was the law of the
Fenian in the reign of Victoria--to give all--mind, body, and
strength of purpose--to the defense of his country, "to speak truth
and harbor no greed in his heart."

Some there are who may deny to Finn and his Fenians of the second and
third centuries corporeal existence; yet nothing is surer than that
Ireland claims these ancestral embodiments of an heroic tradition by
a far surer title of native record than gives to the Germans
Arminius, to the Gauls, Ariovistus, to the British, Caractacus. This
conception of a national life, one with the land itself, was very
clear to the ancient Irish, just as it has been and is the foundation
of all later national effort.

"If ever the idea of nationality becomes the subject of a thorough
and honest study, it will be seen that among all the peoples of
antiquity, not excluding the Hellenes and the Hebrews, the Irish held
the clearest and most conscious and constant grasp of that idea; and
that their political divisions, instead of disproving the existence
of the idea, in their case intensely strengthen the proof of its
existence and emphasize its power.

In the same way the remarkable absence of insular exclusiveness,
notwithstanding their geographical position, serves to bring their
sense of nationality into higher relief.

Though pride of race is evident in the dominant Gaelic stock, their
national senti