style, a style too flamboyant when there is in what he is writing a large opportunity for description of landscape or exhibition of great emotion in his characters. Another reason is, perhaps, that his tendency to introduce the supernatural is more in harmony with the subject material got out of antiquity than of the subject material got out of to-day. We can accept magic in these old tales, even to the incantations of Bobaran the White that swayed the waves of the sea so that Gaer, the son of Deirdre, was saved from the men of Lochlin. That is as it should be in druidic times. It is impossible, of course, that Bobaran had power over the waves, but in such a story such an episode seems more probable than the possible hypnotic suggestion of Gloom Achanna's pipe-playing that sent Manus MacOdrum to his death among the fighting seals, because to-day we do not often come upon such things. It is even less easy to accept the piping to madness of Alasdair in "Alasdair the Proud." Hypnotic suggestion may drive to death in the sea a man half fey because of sorrow long endured and the superstition that he is descended from seals, but pipe-playing cannot believably in modern tales drive a man insane, whatever it may do in the famous old "Pied Piper of Hamelin" or other folk-tale.
So, too, in the verse of Sharp, whether lyric or dramatic, it is the Celt that inspires him to his best work. Nowhere does his verse win so much of beauty and glamour as when his thought turns to the four cities of Murias and Finias and Falias and Glorias, or when it breaks into a chant on the lips of Etain, in "The Immortal Hour."
