Who midst moon-shielded swart Belerians rides

Is Decit....

Halts swart Belerian king, lo, on his spear...

Therefore have swart Belerians crowned his brow

With holy misselden.

This is odd in one to whom the Celts were a tall, fair-skinned, god-like people, and who, worshipping their memory, abhors and hurls curses at all the nations and races of the earth that were at enmity with them, from the conquering Romans back even to the little fierce, shrill, brown-skinned Iberians, "greedy as hawks," who had the temerity to oppose them even as in our own day the little yellow Japanese opposed the white and god-like Muscovites.

[Original]

For to his mind the events he relates are true, and the mighty men he brings before us, from Brennus to Caractacus, as real as any Beduin he hobnobbed with in Arabia Deserta. Perhaps it is even odder, with regard to this epic, which is undoubtedly the greatest piece of literature the young century has produced, that it should be the work of an Irishman, and from beginning to end a glorification of the Celts, yet wholly and intensely Saxon in its character, with no trace of that special quality which distinguishes the Celtic imagination.