literature of their time came from a class that did not—­mainly for political reasons—­take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a humorist’s Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew nothing of.  What they did was not wholly false; they merely magnified an irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen, carmen, and gentlemen’s servants, into the type of a whole nation, and created the stage Irishman.  The writers of ’Forty-eight, and the famine combined, burst their bubble.  Their work had the dash as well as the shallowness of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is touched everywhere with beauty—­a gentle Arcadian beauty.  Carleton, a peasant born, has in many of his stories, . . . more especially in his ghost stories, a much more serious way with him, for all his humour.  Kennedy, an old bookseller in Dublin, who seems to have had a something of genuine belief in the fairies, comes next in time.  He has far less literary faculty, but is wonderfully accurate, giving often the very words the stories were told in.  But the best book since Croker is Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends.  The humour has all given way to pathos and tenderness.  We have here the innermost heart of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love through years of persecution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams, and hearing fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on the soul and on the dead.  Here is the Celt, only it is the Celt dreaming.

Into a volume of very moderate dimensions, and of extremely moderate price, Mr. Yeats has collected together the most characteristic of our Irish folklore stories, grouping them together according to subject.  First come The Trooping Fairies.  The peasants say that these are ’fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost’; but the Irish antiquarians see in them ‘the gods of pagan Ireland,’ who, ’when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.’  Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, making love, and playing the most beautiful music.  ’They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun—­the shoemaker.’  It is his duty to repair their shoes when they wear them out with dancing.  Mr. Yeats tells us that ’near the village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven years.  When she came home she had no toes—­she had danced them off.’  On May Eve, every seventh year, they fight for the harvest, for the best ears of grain belong to them.  An old man informed Mr. Yeats that he saw them fight once, and that they tore the thatch off a house.  ’Had any one else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling everything into the air as it passed.’  When the wind drives the leaves and straws before it, ’that is the fairies, and the peasants take off their hats and say “God bless them."’ When they are gay, they sing.  Many of the most beautiful tunes of Ireland ’are only their music, caught up by eavesdroppers.’  No prudent peasant would hum The Pretty Girl Milking the Cow near a fairy rath, ’for they are jealous, and do not like to hear their songs on clumsy mortal lips.’  Blake once saw a fairy’s funeral.  But this, as Mr. Yeats points out, must have been an English fairy, for the Irish fairies never die; they are immortal.