cumstances which gave to all their history a unique symbolic value. Ireland, at all events, is not the nation to make a martyr of itself.
Quite independently of its experiences as an oppressed nationality, however, mediaeval Ireland, or more correctly Gaeldom, did conceive one fruitful idea which might have led, if not to a sacred book, at least to the formulation in imaginative literature of a permanent human problem. This was the idea—which arose apparently by accident in the popular mind—of impersonating the spirit of paganism and the spirit of Christianity in the figures of Oisin and Saint Patrick, and of engaging them in dramatic dialogue. If Ireland, later on, had admitted the spirit of the Renaissance, we can hardly doubt that some literary or dramatic elaboration of this theme would have been attempted: it is one which might have attracted Marlowe or Calderon if they had heard of it. Or dare we compare the setting of this dialogue—which contains the rudiments of a profound philosophical inquiry—amid the wild adventures of the Fenians, with that of the sacred episode of the Mahābhārata, in which Arjuna and Krishna hold converse in the space between the hosts drawn up for battle? A. E. always insists that there is a likeness between the Hindu and the Irish mythologies, but I am afraid the Irish temperament was always "out for fun," and one shrinks from trying to conceive what would have become of the theme of the Bhagavad Gita in the world of Gaelic imagination. What could Krishna himself have thought of by way of reply to the old Gaelic hero?—
"O Patrick of the crooked crozier, who makest me that impertinent answer, thy crozier would be in atoms were Oscar present.
"Were my son Oscar and God hand to hand on Knock na-veen, if I saw my son down, it is then I would say that God was a strong man.
"How could it be that God and his clerics could be better men than Finn, the chief king of the Fenians, the generous one who was without blemish?"
In these dramatic dialogues it was clearly Oisin who had the good will of the Irish auditors, and the poets of the Celtic Renaissance are now even disposed to make Saint Patrick the burlesque figure. Probably the most notable attempt to treat the subject in
