hideous youth answered for him with marvellous promptitude. The adventure as related by Cormac, partly in Irish and partly in Latin, ends thus:[1] When they came back to Ireland they saw the aforesaid youth before them; and he was a young hero, kingly, radiant, with a long eye in his head, and with his hair of a golden-yellow colour; fairer than the men of the world was he, both in form and in dress. He then went sunwise round Senchán and his suite, 'et nusquam apparuit ex illo tempore: dubium itaque non est quod ille poematis erat spiritus.' O'Donovan's comment, that 'the spirit of poetry is represented as ill-visaged at first, because of the difficulty of the art to a beginner,'[2] fails adequately to explain why the picture should be made disgusting and revoltingly loathsome, as other ways of representing the difficulties of an art would have been more natural and more to the point. The key has to be sought rather in the ancient notion that poetry traced its origin to the world of the dead, whose king was sometimes given the outward appearance and lividness of a corpse; and one has, in fact, only to read the beginning of Cormac's account of Senchán's Spiritus Poematis to see at once that it is in part a description of a corpse in an advanced stage of decomposition. Compare the livid divinity called in a poem in the Book of Taliessin Uthr Ben,[3] or Wondrous Head, who appears in Geoffrey's narrative with his name expanded into Utherpendragon, otherwise Uther Ben-dragon,
