For two long days did the bonfires blaze

On the top of every hill,

And barrels of beer their hearts did cheer,

And the boys all drank their fill.

Abduction is a crime that always excites Hibernian sympathy; and young men who carry off young women against their will to marry them are almost as popular as Parnellite patriots. Their praises are therefore sung by the street singers. A ballad of this character called "Mary Neill," was vastly popular in the North of Ireland a few years since, and may still be heard there. The lover tells his own story:

I'm a bold undaunted Irishman, my name is John McCann,

I'm a native of sweet Donegal, convenient to Strabane ;

For the stealing of an heiress, I lie in Lifford jail

And her father swears he will me hang for his daughter Mary Neill.

But the culprit was not hanged. The lady took compassion on him and, instead of swearing his life away, swore him scathless out of prison, by avowing that she herself was an accomplice in her lover's offence. The stern parent too relented. The lovers got married and took shipping for America. In a storm the bride was washed overboard, but the "bold undaunted" bridegroom was equal to the occasion:

Her yellow locks I soon espied as they floated on the gale,

I jumped into the raging deep, and saved my Mary Neill.

It need hardly be said that the extracts here quoted are merely meant to show the decadence of Irish poetry, not merely in literary merit and mechanism, but in the spirit which pervades it. No attempt whatever is made to touch even the fringe of so comprehensive and absorbing a subject as that of the study of Celtic literature in prose and verse.

RICHARD PIGOTT.

MAN AND MYTHS.

O greater stride in intellectual knowledge has been made in this generation than that associated with the word Folklore. We have learned that, apart from books altogether, the history of ran s written in his thoughts, his sayings, and his customs. From fitur to son, from son to grandson for centuries uncountable, has leen transmitted the knowledge of things and of men which used to 'e ad correctly no doubt, but vaguely, tradition. The earth Ces not more certainly contain in her rocks and drifts the history of her many changes, than does man's mind contain the evidence of the growth and development of the mental faculties.

In a day when many things change their names, we have to remember that the phraseology of even this new science of Folklore is cried and certain. The word Folklore itself is an example of this. It was oined by Mr. Thoms, the veteran founder of "Notes and sand when he used it first he made it comprehend the scraps Srols of curious superstitious sayings which he found current in ways of England With the progress of time, however, Folk

e to mean much more than this. Its derivative meaning the test sense, and we say that Folklore, the knowledge org at the peenle, comprehends far more than vulgar superes 200ut "maggies and maypoles," as Mr. Andrew Lang tersely

at a that it covers and embraces every kind of knowledge and den varea of babit and custom, known or practised by the working * ed women of the world in every country and of every race, so krowledge and those habits and customs are not booksad, but the genuine reflection in the mirror-like surface of the

Puset dar life of the great world-tree which flourishes de kadom of the Past. It is obvious that when once the -- a of markind is grasped, and still more the continuity of 100 40+ god, then this study of mental anthropology becomes

the most important and one of the most difficult dest can undertake to deal. There is no people Sing may not be learned; and there are few from

whom we do not in fact learn a great deal. Human life has been so long, so diverse, and so complicated, that it is not until we have very full notes that we can begin to write a guide-book. A few years ago, one attraction of Folklore to a youthful student, eager like his elders to form a specialist's library, was that, to begin with, the books in the department were not very numerous, and were all obtainable with moderate trouble. We have changed all that, and it is now impossible to keep pace with the issue and re-issue of books on folklore subjects. Grimm's "Deutsche Mythologie," the great treasure-house of Teutonic mythology and folklore, has been excellently translated in great part (though not completely), and when a translator has been found for that most serious work, I do not wonder that the folklore of all other nations has also been rummaged.

But we must not only have collections of facts. They are very important and very dry. They have also the disadvantage-taken by themselves-of affording material for eccentric surmise and unprofitable dissertation. If you have any theory on the origin of the world or of mutton-cutlets, you can obtain some evidence for your theory somewhere in the omnium gatherum of the world's folklore; and if you know nothing about the development of folklore in general, you will find yourself engaged in a very diverting amusement, much resembling the harmless lunacy of the amateur philologist, and alas! we have not yet a Rhadamanthine professor to deal with guessing folklorists, as does Mr. Skeat with guessing word-tracers. We require evidence in this science like other sciences; and although Mr. Herbert Spencer has presented us with one key to all folklore, and Sir George Cox with another, we may be better with guides not quite so comprehensive. Religion began with the worship of ghosts, says Mr. Spencer, and ghosts arose from the recollection of dreams, and dreams were due to hunger or repletion. Primitive history or what calls itself so, says Sir George Cox, is chiefly a description of the victory of the light over the dark, or vice versâ, and Greek tale he finds a in every solar myth," just as Dr. Goldziher finds Jephthah to be the sun-god killing at midday the dawn his own offspring; the twelve sons of Jacob to be the signs of the Zodiac; and Hagar to be the Night, "flying before the inconstant sun and the jealous moon." Both Mr. Spencer and Sir George Cox have done excellent work in this department of the study of culture; but the majority of those who have attempted to grapple with the difficulties of the situation are satisfied that the door which secures the secret of man's earliest religion and history has more locks than two. Ghosts and sun-myths are two excellent keys; but more are needed.

Mr. Clodd, whose name is well known as the author of two or three books of singular simplicity of language and directness of meaning, has added another book to the growing literature-" Myths and Dreams"; a charming title, which might describe a three-volume novel or a poem for summer weather. His book is, indeed, as interesting as the one, and far more useful than the other. His object is described in the first words of his preface as "to present in compendious form the evidence which myths and dreams supply as to primitive man's interpretation of his own nature and of the external world, and more especially to indicate how such evidence carries within itself the history of the origin and growth of beliefs in the supernatural.” «Myths and Dreams" aptly describe the characteristics of the Solar theories and the Spencerian theories, and we shall take the myths first of all.

The word myth must be understood, to begin with. I have turned to the dictionary nearest my hand as I write, and I find myth described as “a fable; a fabulous story." Now myth in this sense is not what we are inquiring about here. It is something very different, and an illustration from art may help us. When a child attempts to take the portrait of his playmate, he produces a representation more or less recognisable of a human face, but not much more. There is a nose, two eyes, mouth, ears-but no portrait. Nevertheless the child himself feels he has got near to the result he aimed at ; he has, that is to say, given by his own hand some account of what his mate seems to his eyes to be. Let an elder child take the sketch in hand; he has the outline; he does not trouble to revert to the original, but he develops a better picture; not a better portrait save by accident, but better in this that the elder child knows how to distinguish between the grotesque and the pleasing. If after all, an experienced painter were to take the blurred drawing in hand, he would, out of the mass of hasty and meaningless strokes, produce a lovely child face, for which indeed the original model may be said to have served as suggestion, but which bore no more real resemblance to her than did the outline of the first sketcher.

Now a myth is the first attempt of man, in his simple childlike nature, to reproduce in words a description of the wonders of nature. The sun makes a journey over heaven. The next teller of the tale has got the foundation; if the sun goes a journey, he must come from somewhere and be going somewhere. Then, too, if “he” or “she,” what is his or her history. And so the tale grows until we have the glorious Phoebus Apollo and his chariot. Now this is a myth, but, like the child's portrait, it owes its being to an attempt to reproduce the

real. A myth, then, in its simplest form is an inadequate attempt to indicate certain chief features with which the myth-maker has been struck; in its most elaborate form it is a poetical romance, but the romance is not altogether void of truth, for in its essentials it preserves the outlines of the original myth, which was itself intended to be a photograph of truth. The myth, like slightly wavy water, shows the mast crooked and the ship misshapen, but all the same it does not consciously misrepresent them.

Now we may willingly concede to the solar mythologists that when once the meaning of a word mythically (ie. only half-truthfully) descriptive of a phase of nature was, either in part or wholly, forgotten, the creation of a new personality under that name would be possible (Sir George Cox uses the word "inevitable"). "A thousand phrases would be used to describe the action of a beneficent or consuming sun, of the gentle or awful night, of the playful or furious wind; and every word or phrase became the germ of a new story as soon as the mind lost its hold on the original force of the name. . . . Henceforth the words which had denoted the sun and moon would denote not merely living things but living persons," and so on. No one would deny that there are many legends or fables, to use the word in an old sense, which may be solar myths, but there are few who will willingly allow that there is a shadow of evidence for the assertion that "the siege of Troy is a repetition of the daily siege of the east by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their highest treasures in the west;" or that Arthur, legendary hero though he may be, is, with his knights of the Table Round, a myth pure and simple, a legend of winter and spring, a variant of Sigurd and Perseus. The solar mythologists have, as Mr. Clodd points out, done splendid work in the field of philological research, but they must not ignore the place of history. Man-even primitive man-(and for that mysterious individual's thoughts we have all our own standard) was not always thinking about the stars, and the moon, and the milk-dropping clouds. He and his started most of our myths, but his successors, although they embellished his pictures, and recut and reset his jewels, were not themselves, any more than he, the slaves of an astronomical or astrological almanack. They were the richer by the history they created; and in the tales told round the fire, or floating down the lonely river, they would tell as much of the deeds of their braves, of the beauty of their women, of the prowess of their gens, as of the man who the Bushmen say shed light from his body, but only for a short distance, until some children threw him into the sky while he slept, and thus he became the sun-or as of the Hurakan of the Quiches