CELTS.

UNDER the appellation of Celts we include the inhabitants of Ireland, the Highlands of Scotland, Man, Wales, and Brittany. It is not, however, by any means meant to be asserted that there is in any of these places to be found a purely Celtic population. The more powerful Gothic race has, every where that they have encountered them, beaten the Celts, and intermingled with them, influencing their manners, language, and religion.

Our knowledge of the original religion of the Celts is very limited, chiefly confined to what the Roman writers have transmitted to us, and the remaining poems of the Welsh bards. Its character seems to have been massive, simple, and sublime, and less given to personification than those of the more eastern nations. The wild and the plastic powers of nature never seem in it to have assumed the semblance of huge giants and ingenious dwarfs.

Yet in the popular creed of all these tribes, we meet at the present day beings exactly corre

sponding to the Dwarfs and Fairies of the Gothic nations. Of these beings there is no mention in any works-such as the Welsh Poems, and Mabinogion, the Poems of Ossian, or the different Irish poems and romances-laying claim to an antiquity anterior to the conquests of the Northmen. Is it not then a reasonable supposition that the Picts, Saxons, and other sons of the North, brought with them their Dwarfs and Kobolds, and communicated the knowledge of, and belief in, them to their Celtic subjects and neighbours? Proceeding on this theory, we have placed the Celts next to and after the Gothic nations, though they are perhaps their precursors in Europe.

IRELAND.

Like him, the Sprite,

Whom maids by night

Oft meet in glen that's haunted.

MOORE.

WE have already contributed, in the form of tales* and notes, to the Irish Fairy Legends almost every thing we know respecting the Fairy lore of this country. As we will suppose our readers familiar with that work, we shall here confine ourselves to a few observations, and a few additional traits of Irish Fairies.

* The Young Piper, Seeing is Believing, the Harvest Dinner, &c. In real worth, as a display of character and modes of thinking, there is, in our opinion, nothing in the Fairy Legends to equal "The Confessions of Tom Bourke." They who sneer at popular legends, and those who present them to the public, would perhaps abate their censure if they were acquainted with the cultivated and philosophical mind of the amiable writer of that tale, and knew the rapid progress he is making towards eminence in an arduous and honourable profession. His Macarthy Banshee and Crookened Back are also both admirable. The latter, in the manner in which character, incident, and scenery are blended, quite comes up to our ideal of legendary writing.

VOL. II.

N

The Fairies* of green Erin present few points of dissimilarity to those of England and Scotland. They are of diminutive stature, but do not appear to have any fixed standard of height; perhaps eighteen inches might with tolerable safety be assigned as their average altitude. A woman from the county of Kerry lately told us that she saw the Fairies when she was a little girl. She said she and some other children were one day returning from school, and they saw the Fairies scudding like the wind over a big field on the road-side, and tumbling head over heels into a hollow at the end of it, where they disappeared. Some of them were as high as castles, others were little dony things, not half so big as the children themselves.

In the north of Ireland the proportions of the Fairies are very minute, approaching to those of Titania's "small elves," as will appear from the following established mode of the Fairies of that part of Ireland, making their stolen entrance into the houses of mortals. A Fairy, the Diavolo Antonio we may suppose of the party, is selected, who contrives to ascend to the keyhole of the door,

* The Irish name for Fairy is Sia (Sheea), and Siabhra (Sheefra). We know not the original meaning of Sia. Sigh (Shee) is also given by O'Reilly, and as it signifies Spirit, and, adjectively, Spiritual, it is probably the true word.