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Having described a number of the inmates of the fairy king- 

 dom, their appearance and peculiarities, the lecturer proceeded 

 to say that the study of this subject had two great utilities — 

 one old, the other new. One was a scientific utility. By com- 

 paring fairies and the folk-lore tales from all parts of the world 

 they might learn much not only of the ways of primeval men 

 and women, but also of their mythology and religion. They 

 must not expect any great clearness of outline or uniformity in 

 fairy belief. The other great utility of this study was very old : 

 it had been going on since the days of Homer, nay longer still, 

 since the days of the maker of the Mahabaratta. It was not 

 scientific, but literary, and was really more important. He did 

 not think there was a great poet in the world who had not 

 borrowed from folk-lore. If they remembered that mythology 

 was but folk-lore, organised and dignified, they would under- 

 stand him when he said that Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Shaks- 

 pere, Dante, Goethe, and poets like Keats, Shelley, and Rossetti, 

 were little more than folk-lorists |with musical tongues. The 

 story of Odysseus in the days of the cyclops was told in sub- 

 stance by the peasants of England, Ireland, and Lapland to this 

 day. They could not measure how great was the influence that 

 folk-lore — the gossip of the poor and the ignorant — exercised 

 upon their thoughts and their feelings. He had often doubted 

 if ever there had been any power in the world more mighty 

 than these old tales. They had enabled the poets to give to the 

 floating soul of philosophy a beautiful and alluring body. They 

 could not tell who made them, but the storytellers who first 

 fashioned them had been well nigh the most potent of the sons 

 of men. With a few tales — for the root-tales of the lore were 

 but few, a little over seventy for the whole of Europe — with a 

 little bundle of romances, these men fashioned the minds of 

 generations beyond reckoning. When he (Mr. Yeats) was a 

 child he was told that there was a submerged city at the bottom 

 of the Sligo lake, and that from its tower came up sometimes at 

 evening a far off murmur of fairy bells. Once when eight 

 years old he gazed upon that lake, and he imagined, so much 



