history there remains, demanding treatment, that other immense mass of
literature of an imaginative nature, illuminating with anecdote and tale
the events and personages mentioned simply and without comment by
the chronicler. It is this poetic literature which constitutes the
stumbling-block, as it constitutes also the glory, of early Irish
history, for it cannot be rejected and it cannot be retained. It cannot
be rejected, because it contains historical matter which is consonant
with and illuminates the dry lists of the chronologist, and it cannot
be retained, for popular poetry is not history; and the task of
distinguishing In such literature the fact from the fiction--where there
is certainly fact and certainly fiction--is one of the most difficult to
which the intellect can apply itself. That this difficulty has not been
hitherto surmounted by Irish writers is no just reproach. For the last
century, intellects of the highest attainments, trained and educated
to the last degree, have been vainly endeavouring to solve a similar
question in the far less copious and less varied heroic literature of
Greece. Yet the labours of Wolfe, Grote, Mahaffy, Geddes, and Gladstone,
have not been sufficient to set at rest the small question, whether it
was one man or two or many who composed the Iliad and Odyssey, while the
reality of the achievements of Achilles and even his existence might be
denied or asserted by a scholar without general reproach. When this is
the case with regard to the great heroes of the Iliad, I fancy it will
be some time before the same problem will have been solved for the minor
characters, and as it affects Thersites, or that eminent artist who
dwelt at home in Hyla, being by far the most excellent of leather
cutters. When, therefore, Greek still meets Greek in an interminable and
apparently bloodless contest over the disputed body of the Iliad, and
still no end appears, surely it would be madness for any one to sit down
and gaily distinguish true from false in the immense and complex mass
of the Irish bardic literature, having in his ears this century-lasting
struggle over a single Greek poem and a single small phase of the
pre-historic life of Hellas.

In the Irish heroic literature, the presence or absence of the
marvellous supplies _no test whatsoever_ as to the general truth or
falsehood of the tale in which they appear. The marvellous is supplied
with greater abundance in the account of the battle