Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/306

 2^8 Some Characteristics of Irish Folklore.

a living man to keep goal for them.^° For the dead never die. Intangibly, but really, they are with us still, and so, -on All Souls' Eve the chair is left empty by the fireside, the pail of water placed handily, for the spirits of lost friends, dead relatives, when, in the silence of the night, they come to revisit the scenes of mortal life. In Ireland the Past never dies.

I began with a laugh — I fear that I end near tears, for, like the sunshine and showers of its climate, smile and sigh are inextricably blended in all things Irish. Sorrow, if not a necessity to wit, would appear to be a good fertiliser of humour. Strained to a certain point human endurance must smile or succumb. So Ireland's distresses, to my thinking, have largely contributed to Irish wit. A pros- perous Ireland may be a duller and more sober affair. It will inevitably be a more prosaic one, and Ireland's plaint — unless radical change can be wrought in Irish nature as well as Irish economics — will be, " 'Twas better to sit in the sun and be free in our dreaming." An unhappy fate has ever dogged the "most distressful country that ever yet was seen," and if you want to be thoroughly depressed I recommend you to study the records of, say, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even if your people were not concerned in those doings — as mine were — it cannot be other than saddening to read history that confirms such horrors as children kept alive for days by feeding on the body of their dead mother.^''' And the Irish have long memories. Two years ago a man from one of the northern counties told my brother-in-law that he was a Nationalist because he remembered his grandmother, who was " starved to death outside the gates of Derry, and she but a child of eleven at the time."

D. H. MouTRAY Read.

^^MacDonagh, Irish Life and Character, p. 377. ^'Lecky, i. 8.