Preface
time to time in the stories; but the supernatural is not, in general, the chief concern of the authors of the stories; their concern is with the deeds and griefs of men and of women. Transmigration or re-birth, that element of Celtic belief which drew the attention of the ancient world, is of frequent occurrence; in some tales this idea is the principal motive of the story, but in tales like The Courtship of Ferb the supernatural is a mere incident, the tone of the story is more Homeric than mystical. This feeling about the ancient stories pervades those poems of Sir Samuel Ferguson which are founded on Irish legends; and here, though many ideas, Christian and other, are by him introduced into the legends, we seem to breathe the spirit of the old literature far better than in the more recent versions of it, where the notion of a specially Celtic craving after magic is for ever present. Former enthusiasts have thought that Celtic held a peculiar place among languages—that Welsh was the language of Eden, that Semitic languages drew their roots from Celtic sources; these ideas have been destroyed by philologists, who have brought Irish into its proper place in the great family of languages. Others have maintained that Irish art and architecture had laws of development of its own, so that it was older than similar art and similar architecture in other countries—these ideas have been upset by antiquarians; and the more recent theory, that love of the supernatural and
