PREFACE.
These Lectures were delivered in London and here, in the months of May and June, 1886; and it was intended that they should appear in the book market soon after. So I take this opportunity of publicly thanking the Hibbert Trustees for their forbearance, and of explaining the causes of the delay. The first and foremost was my ignorance, above all as to the magnitude of the task I was undertaking; and this ignorance pursued me into the arrangement of the Lectures, so that it had to be seriously modified more than once in the course of the work. Among other things, I found it necessary to make some sort of survey of the whole ground, and, in a word, to circumnavigate the whole subject before committing to type my ideas about any part of it. This led to my studying much that could not be included in this volume; I was, however, allowed to deliver two lectures besides the six agreed upon. Those two, as I could not expect the Hibbert Trustees to have them printed, are to form part of a volume on the Arthurian Legend, which I hope soon to publish; not to mention that I contemplate devoting a separate volume some day to the Dark Divinities of the Celts. It was necessary to go carefully into the questions raised by these and kindred subjects, and it all required time. But I may plead that the history of religion had never before been comprehensively studied from the Celtic point of view. Scarcely
