husbands. Traces of this remarkable legend seem to have survived, thirteen centuries later, in that endmost district of the Britannia of Procopius which still keeps the name of Bretagne. Near Raz, where the narrow promontory stretches westward into the ocean, is the 'Bay of Souls' (boé ann anavo); in the commune of Plouguel the corpse is taken to the churchyard, not by the shorter road by land, but in a boat by the 'Passage de l'Enfer,' across a little arm of the sea; and Breton folk-lore holds fast to the legend of the Curé de Braspar, whose dog leads over to Great Britain the souls of the departed, when the wheels of the soul-car are heard creaking in the air. These are but mutilated fragments, but they seem to piece together with another Keltic myth, told by Macpherson in the last century, the voyage of the boat of heroes to Flath-Innis, Noble Island, the green island home of the departed, which lies calm amid the storms far in the Western Ocean. With full reason, also, Mr. Wright traces to the situation of Ireland in the extreme West its especial association with legends of descents to the land of shades. Claudian placed at the extremity of Gaul the entrance where Ulysses found a way to Hades—
'Est locus extremum qua pandit Gallia litus,
Oceani prætentus aquis, ubi fertur Ulysses,' &c.
No wonder that this spot should have been since identified with St. Patrick's Purgatory, and that some ingenious etymologist should have found in the name of 'Ulster' a corruption of 'Ulyssisterra,' and a commemoration of the hero's visit.[1]
Thirdly, the belief in a subterranean Hades peopled by the ghosts of the dead is quite common among the lower races. The earth is flat, say the Italmen of Kamchatka,
- ↑ Procop. De Bello Goth. iv. 20; Plut. Fragm. Comm. in Hesiod. 2; Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 793; Hersart de Villemarqué, vol. i. p. 136; Souvestre, 'Derniers Bretons,' p. 37; Jas. Macpherson, 'Introd. to Hist, of Great Britain and Ireland,' 2nd ed. London, 1772, p. 180; Wright, 'St. Patrick's Purgatory,' pp. 64, 129.
