e of Irish poetry has been carefully studied,
and Mr. Yeats has this advantage over his predecessors that on
occasion, e.g., in certain passages in _The King's Threshold_, he is
able to introduce with great effect reminiscences of the
characteristic epithets and imagery which formed so large a part of
the stock-in-trade of the medieval bard.

REFERENCES:

Friedel and Meyer: La Vision de Tondale (Paris, 1907); Boswell: An
Irish Precursor of Dante (London, 1908); Cambridge History of English
Literature, vol. I, chaps, xii and xvi; Windisch: _Das Keltische
Brittannien_ (Leipzig, 1912), more especially chap. xxxvii;
Dictionary of National Biography; Gwynn: Thos. Moore ("English Men of
Letters" Series, London, 1905).

IRISH FOLKLORE

By ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES.

Among savage peoples there is at first no distinction of a definite
kind between good and bad spirits, and when a distinction has been
reached, a great advance in a spiritual direction has been made. For
the key to the religion of savages is fear, and until such terror has
been counteracted by belief in beneficent powers, civilization will
not follow. But the elimination of the fear of the unseen is a slow
process; indeed, it will exist side by side with the belief in
Christianity itself, after a modification through various stages of
better pagan belief.

Ireland still presents, in its more out-of-the-way districts,
evidence of that strong persistence in the belief in maleficent or
malicious influences of the pre-Christian powers of the air, which it
seems difficult to eradicate from the Celtic imagination. In the
celebrated poem entitled _The Breastplate of St. Patrick_, there is
much the same attitude on the part of Patrick towards the Druids and
their powers of concealing and changing, of paralyzing and cursing,
as was shown by Moses towards the magicians of Egypt. Indeed, in
Patrick's time a belief in a world of fairies existed even in the
king's household, for "when the two daughters of King Leary of
Ireland, Ethnea the fair and Fedelma the ruddy, came early one
morning to the well of Clebach to wash, they found there a synod of
holy bishops with Patrick. And they knew not whence they came, or in
what form, or from what people, or from what country; but they
supposed them to be _Duine Sidh_, or gods of the earth, or a
phantasm."

Colgan explains the term _Duine Sidh_ thus: "Fantastical spirits," he
writes, "are by the Irish called men of the _