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Ailill's white-horned Bull heard the "three bellowing calls" of "the Brown" as he approached Cruachan, and rushed out to meet him. The two fought. Cormac, looking on, said:

"No wonderful lasting treasure was this precious prize for us, that cannot defend himself against a stirk of his own age." The Brown Bull of Cualnge heard this for he had human understanding -and he turned upon the White-horned

and after a furious fight killed him, and carried the dead Bull's remains away on his horns, dropping them bit by bit, as he went across Ireland, home.

...

..

He turned his face northwards then, and went on thence to the summit of Sliab Breg, and he saw the peaks and knew the land of Cualnge, and a great agitation came over him at the sight of his own land and country, and he went his way towards it. In that place were women and youths and children lamenting the Brown Bull of Cualnge. They saw the Brown of Cualnge's forehead approaching them. "The forehead of a Bull cometh towards us!" they shouted. Then he went to Cuib, where he was wont to be with the yeld cow of Dare, and he tore up the earth there. Then turned the Brown of Cualnge on the women and youths and children of the land of Cualnge, and with the greatness of his fury and rage he effected a great slaughter amongst them. He turned his back to the hill then and his heart broke in his breast, even as a nut breaks, and he belched out his heart like a black stone of dark blood. He went then and died between Ulster and Ui Echach1 at Druim Tairb.

So Ailill's declaration long before

"I swear by the god by whom my people swear the man that scoffs at Cuchulain here I will make two halves of "

was justified; and Fedelm's prophecy

came true.

"Brave Cuchulain, Sualtaim's son !

All your host he'll smite in twain
Till he works your utter ruin "-

In the ancient tale we find all those elements which have been interwoven, through twenty centuries, to make the Irish national Tragedy. Fate on her loom

1 In County Down.

has spun for this little country a tapestry whose threads were fierceness, unconquerable valour, love of all beauty and especially of colour, a passion for daring adventure, energy, wistful dream-wonder, some unscrupulousness, and heart-wringing pathos; all burning itself away for a far-off goal, which always seemed to recede as the victors fancied they were nearing it.

At best, extracts can only give a faint idea of this great story, which has been called "the wildest and most fascinating saga-tale, not only of the entire Celtic world, but even of all Western Europe." Anyone who wishes to appreciate this description must read the whole tale.

Beowulf and the Táin are both racial epics. The only other one which can be dealt with in this book was written centuries later, after the tumult of the Civil War, after the Puritan rule, during the years which followed the Cavalier restoration of the Stuart line. It dealt not with a national, but with a world-wide theme, not with the present, but with a far-off past. It is not difficult to sympathise with Milton's choice of a subject when he wrote Paradise Lost. His life had been passed amidst strife and evil deeds not confined to one party or set of men. He definitely chose not a party, not a national, but a human matter, lifted away from earthly life on to the level of Eternity. Here English men and women may see, set forth sublimely, that ceaseless struggle between Good and Evil which, after all, underlay the story of Beowulf itself. Beneath the barbaric ways, the riotous feasting, the personal enmities which lie on the surface of our Early English Epic, there remained, however rough the way and dark the fate of men might seem, an undying care for and belief in the final victory of Right. With Milton, the war between Man helped by God, and the Powers of Evil fills the whole poem.

The human race, represented by Adam and Eve, is the "hero" of this great Epic. The archangels and all the rest of the Heavenly Powers are Man's allies; Satan, Lucifer, son of the Morning"; the Rebel Archangel is Man's foe. High above all, God reigns, Ruler and Judge of the tremendous conflict.

The story can be told briefly.

Satan in his pride conspired, in Heaven, with other Spirits to overthrow the throne of God, and was cast, with them, out of Heaven, to a bottomless place, there for ever to have his home:

Th' infernal Serpent, he it was whose guile
Stirr'd up with envy and revenge, deceiv'd
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his host
Of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equall'd the most High,
If he oppos'd; and with ambitious aims
Against the throne and monarchy of God
Rais'd impious war in Heav'n, and battle proud
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.
Nine times the space that measures day and night
To mortal men, he with his horrid crew
Lay vanquisht, rolling in the fiery gulf,
Confounded though immortal.

When these lost legions began to recover from the shock of their utter defeat, Satan attempted to rally them to a fresh fight. A vast palace rose, their future home, which served them, then and there, as a Council Hall. They discussed and rejected all suggestion of a fresh attack on Heaven, but Satan went forth alone to discover whether the rumour were true that God was about to create a fresh world, inhabited by new creatures "a little lower than the angels." After a long and difficult journey he approached this new world. Milton described the beautiful spectacle which lay before the fallen Archangel, when having, so hardly, escaped from a terrible region of confusion he was

at leisure to behold
Far off th' empyreal Heav'n, extended wide
In circuit, undetermin'd square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorn'd
Of living sapphire, once his native seat;
And fast by hanging in a golden chain
This pendent world, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.

That is the gleaming, transparent sight of Heaven, with our Earth hanging from it, like a star in space, which met the troubled eyes of Satan, clouded still by the lurid splendour of his palace, Pandemonium, risen so strangely from the bottomless deep.

Milton developed his story by describing a scene in High Heaven. The Eternal Father, having seen Satan flying to this new world, told His Son that the lost Spirit would overcome the free wills of the newly created man and woman, and persuade them to the sin of disobedience. Whereupon, the Son offered Himself as a ransom for the ruined world, and was accepted by the Father, who decreed the Human Birth of our Lord, whereby he should unite in one Person God and Man by taking the Manhood into God.

Milton, after this interlude, returned to his story. Satan alighted on the outside rim of the world, and presently made his way to Eden, and found Adam and Eve. By eavesdropping, he learned that they were forbidden by God to eat of one particular tree, thus discovering a way of bringing them to ruin by decoying them into disobedience.

Milton added many details to the story as it is told in the Book Genesis, such, for example, as the measures taken for man's safety by the Archangels Uriel and Gabriel, including the actual forewarning of Adam by Gabriel. He also described a battle between the Angels, led by S. Michael, leader of the Heavenly Armies, and the rebel angels, which was only won when our Lord Himself had come to the Angels' help.

The seventh and eighth books add nothing to the progress of the story; they are filled with the Archangel Raphael's conversation with Adam about the Creation of the World, and the heavens in which it was placed, and Adam's story of finding Eve and marrying her.

Satan's plot, successfully worked out, filled the ninth book; the story of Eve's temptation, and of Adam's part in it, is familiar from Genesis. In the tenth book, Milton again added to the Bible story when in a wonderful picture, he described the resolution of Sin and Death, who had hitherto sat "within the gates of Hell," to leave it for the Earth, and to live there henceforth among the men, over whose parents Satan had just won so great a victory. On his way to Pandemonium to tell his hosts of this success, Satan met them.

As, on his arrival, he was addressing his followers, the curse which God had pronounced fell, and he and all his host were changed to serpents, and, fancying they saw before them the forbidden fruit of Eden, they seized it, only to bite upon the prophesied " dust."

In the remaining books of the poem, Milton set forth the misery of Adam and Eve after their sin, the repentance to which they eventually brought themselves, aided as they were all the time by the Archangel Michael; and their expulsion from Eden, which latter was rendered bearable to them by God's promise of the world's ransom by our Lord, of the establishment in the world of the Church of God, and of man's final restoration.

In his earliest youth Milton, on leaving Christ's College, had resolved to devote himself to a scholar's life. He had spent seven years at Cambridge; he retired for five more to his father's country house, a few miles from London, where he devoted himself to the Classics. His object he explained in these words, declaring that

"an inward prompting grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study, joined with the strong propensity of Nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let die."

Milton had already written L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas, when the Civil War broke in. Eventually

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