may be I remember less clearly the homeliness of his "discourse" than its "grand speaking." It is, however, as peasant English, a fitting medium for the telling of the stories of Brigit and St. Patrick in her "Book of Saints and Wonders," for Brigit and Patrick are still household words among all the children of the Gael. But by its very difference from the English of all other artists in words save of a few of her own country and generation, and from such conversational English as I know well, this "Kiltartan English" brings me a foreign quality. I feel that the art of these tale-tellers is an art of another race than the English, just as I feel that the art of the teller of Beowulf is an art of another race than the English. The literature in our ancestral tongue is not to me English until it sloughs off the Germanic sentence-structure of Anglo-Saxon. Here lies, I think, the greatest difficulty in translating Old English literature. And it will not be successfully translated, I think, without the use of the syntax of some dialect that preserves an archaic sentence-structure.
To me, then, it seems singularly fortunate for Lady Gregory to have her "Kiltartan English" to fall back upon to give that foreign flavor that we intuitively feel the need of in a translation. There may be a slight loss of dignity through its use, but there is a great gain in folk atmosphere.
In quoting to show the style of Lady Gregory I should quote description rather than narrative, as the description seems to me better as well as briefer. The three famous tales of Old Irish literature, "The Three Sorrows of Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Child-
