Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/299

 Some Characteristics of Irish Folklore. 2 7 1

almost passed away. I mean forcible abduction.''^^ Lecky was not a folklorist, or that phrase might have been revised. On a previous page the historian, again giving Young as his authority, refers to the existence of what in a country with so high — and so deservedly high — a moral reputation, one would little expect to find — the recognition and practice of droit de seigneur?'^

But all this would provide material for a paper in itself.

Still more would the local saints. This subject, in fact, is so large, so difficult, in that it demands such special knowledge of not only the people but of Irish history and literature, that, failing any such knowledge, I would gladly omit all but the mere mention of this section, were it not eminently characteristic of Irish folklore. A glance at the weighty volumes of O'Hanlon and other writers on Irish saints discovers the difficulty, while another glance suggests it is almost insuperable. There are indeed saints galore — lashings and leavings of saints — several for every day in the year, and enough over to satiate the appetite of the most greedy of hagiologists. The most important result of this plethora of native claimants is that the observation of fast and festival connected with foreign and better-known saints never made great headway in this country. Roman Catholicism in Ireland was but a palimpsest, Christianity but a seventh- century refurbishing of age-old faiths and customs. The water spirits — though this is not peculiar to Ireland — reappear in the disguise of patron saints, and, according to Colonel Wood Martin, at least one has emerged from saintly trappings and reassumed sway of the erstv/hile "sacred" well at Toberconnell.'^'^

As a rule the observance of saints' days are entirely local, and a minor native saint may oust a greater on their mutual " Day," in the vicinage of places connected by birth

'^^ Hist, of Ireland, vol. i. p. 370. ^^ Young, ii. 126-8; Lecky, i. 286.

^'^ Hist, of Sligo, p. 92.