figure into the Irish ideal of all that was chivalrous, tender, heroic,
and magnanimous, and it would have been a star to youth, and the thought
of it a staff to the very noblest. Even as Cuchulain alone at the ford
held it against a host, so the ideal would have upheld the national soul
in its darkest hours, and stood in many a lonely place in the heart.
The national soul in a theocratic State is a god; in an aristocratic
age it assumes the character of a hero; and in a democracy it becomes a
multitudinous being, definite in character if the democracy is a real
social organism. But where the democracy is only loosely held together
by the social order, the national being is vague in character, is a mood
too feeble to inspire large masses of men to high policies in times of
peace, and in times of war it communicates frenzy, panic, and delirium.

None of our modern States create in us such an impression of being
spiritually oversouled by an ideal as the great States of the ancient
world. The leaders of nations too have lost that divine air that many
leaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor them
as divine incarnations. It is difficult to know to what to attribute
this degeneration. Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame.
In ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about great
kings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalry
and generosity, creating in the popular mind an ideal of what a great
man was like; and men were influenced by the ideal created, and strove
to win the praise of the bards and to be recrowned by them a second time
in great poetry. So we had Cuchulain and Oscar in Ireland; Hector of
Troy, Theseus in Greece; Yudisthira, Rama, and Arjuna in India, all
bard-created heroes molding the minds of men to their image. It is the
great defect of our modern literature that it creates few such types.
How hardly could one of our modern public men be made the hero of an
epic. It would be difficult to find one who could be the subject of a