of their vigour. The ascetic, Puritan attitude to life was hardly understood, was certainly despised by him. His was no wild hot-blooded revolt of youth like that of some other Gaelic poets of the time, but the deliberate, reasoned, convinced attitude of the mature man. He wrote the "Cúirt" at the age of thirty-three; and his philosophic detachment is shown by the fact that he himself did not marry till he was forty! Poets should be judged by their profession rather than their practice.
XI.
It is easy to dilate on the merits of the "Cúirt"—its splendid opening, the wonderful speed and directness with which the story of the "vision" is introduced, the swift march of the narrative, the close grip kept on the argument, and. most of all, the way in which the dream works up to a splendid climax, full of fun and excitement, and ends suddenly but not abruptly.
One could say much of the abundant humour of the vision, and that supreme joke of making the poet himself the first victim of the angry spinsters. Few poets, few satirists even, could be induced to make so merry at the expense of their own appearance. The damsel discusses his swarthiness, his stoop, his clumsy build with painful frankness. There is no weak vanity about Brian.
The picture of the angry feeble old man leaping up in the court with shaking limbs and wheezy breath to pour forth bitter invective and narrate his sad experience is wonderfully vivid and dramatic. His fierce indignation bursting out again and again in the course of his story is irresistibly comic. The maiden's retort that he has paid the
