Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/183

Rh other with an earnest and half-solemn sort of look, the party wended its way carefully down the hill" (pp. 163-1 64). Mr. Walker's paper is made especially useful by careful notes of the measurements of wells he has himself visited, and by many excellent illustrations. He appends an alphabetical list of Holy Wells in Scotland.

RISH traditional and mythological literature has been singularly little studied in this country, where its richness, its antiquity, its fancy and beauty, have won for it few friends. But it cannot be too much insisted upon that the native Irish literature is not only by far the oldest, but is also by far the fullest and most valuable of all our sources of information concerning the beliefs and the customs of those Celtic races which form such an important element of our nationality. As a matter of fact the Irish Celts are, with the Greeks, the only European people of Aryan race of whom a considerable body of pre-Christian national epic poetry has come down to us. With the solitary exception of Beowulf, the Teutonic racial sagas did not assume epic form until the consciousness of the race had been profoundly modified by Christianity, the fragments which have been preserved to us from the heathen stage of development being in their essence dramatic rather than epical. But the Tain bo Cuailgne and its fellows are at once truly epical in character, and almost untouched by Christian thought.

Of the three great cycles of Irish romantic literature—the pseudo-historical pre-Christian annals, the Ulster cycle, of which Cu-Chulaind is the chief hero, and the Ossianic—the first has had the least