pleasure
you have opened to me. I knew nothing of this, and life is
quite enlarged. But now, I want to see all the originals. Where
can I get them?"

I have only spoken of prose writing above. But in poetry (and in
Poetry well fitted to the tales), this work had already been done
nobly, and with a fine Celtic splendour of feeling and expression, by
Sir Samuel Ferguson.

Since then, a number of writers have translated into literary English
a host of the Irish tales, and have done this with a just reverence
for their originals. Being, in nearly every case, Irish themselves,
they have tried, with varying success, to make their readers realize
the wild scenery of Ireland, her vital union with the sea and the
great ocean to the West, those changing dramatic skies, that mystic
weather, the wizard woods and streams which form the constant
background of these stories; nor have they failed to allure their
listeners to breathe the spiritual air of Ireland, to feel its
pathetic, heroic, imaginative thrill.

They have largely succeeded in their effort. The Irish bardic tales
have now become a part of English literature and belong not only to
grown up persons interested in early poetry, in mythology and
folk-customs, but to the children of Ireland and England. Our new
imaginative stories are now told in nurseries, listened to at evening
when the children assemble in the fire-light to hear tales from their
parents, and eagerly read by boys at school. A fresh world of
story-telling has been opened to the imagination of the young.

This could not have been done in the right way if it had not been for
the previous work of Celtic scholars in Ireland, and particularly on
the Continent, in France and Germany. Having mastered medieval Irish,
they have translated with careful accuracy many of the ancient tales,
omitting and changing nothing; they have edited them critically,
collating and comparing them with one another, and with other forms of
the same stories. We have now in English, French, and German the exact
representation of the originals with exhaustive commentaries.

When this necessary work was finished--and it was absolutely
necessary--it had two important results on all work of the kind Mr
Rolleston has performed in this book--on the imaginative recasting and
modernizing of the ancient tales. First, it made it lawful and easy
for the modern artist--in sculpture, painting, poetry, or imaginative
prose--to use the