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224 allusion contained in the term dé druidechta, 'of the god of druidism,' which doubtless meant the divinity with whom the druids as magicians had to do, and with whose aid they practised their magical arts. We are unfortunately not told the name of the god; but it is natural to suppose that it was the chief of the Goidelic pantheon, and this is practically settled by the kind of miracles which the druids are usually represented as able to perform with most success, in their competition with the early saints engaged in the task of Christianizing Ireland. These miracles may be described as mostly atmospheric, consisting of such feats as bringing on a heavy snow, palpable darkness, or a great storm, such as the one by means of which a druid tried to effect the shipwreck of St. Columba on Loch Ness in Scotland. The reason, I may observe in passing, why the druids are such familiar figures in Irish literature, at any rate as compared with the literatures of Wales and Brittany, is that the Goidel's faith in druidism was never suddenly undermined; for in the saints he only saw more powerful druids than those he had previously known, and Christ took the position in his eyes of the druid. Irish druidism absorbed a certain amount of Christianity; and it would be a problem of considerable difficulty to fix on the point where it ceased to be druidism, and from which onwards it could be said to be Christianity in any restricted sense of that term.

Though druidism is far harder to discover in the oldest literature of the Welsh, it is possible there to recognize