n Macha. The floruit of
Cuculain, therefore, falls completely within the historical penumbra,
and the more carefully the enormous, and in the main mutually consistent
and self-supporting, historical remains dealing with this period are
studied, the more will this be believed. The minuteness, accuracy,
extent, and verisimilitude of the literature, chronicles, pedigrees,
&c., relating to this period, will cause the student to wonder more and
more as he examines and collates, seeing the marvellous self-consistency
and consentaneity of such a mass of varied recorded matter. The age,
indeed, breathes sublimity, and abounds with the marvellous, the
romantic, and the grotesque. But as I have already stated, the presence
or absence of these qualities has no crucial significance. Love and
reverence and the poetic imagination always effect such changes in
the object of their passion. They are the essential condition of the
transference of the real into the world of art. AEval, of Carriglea, the
fairy queen of Munster, is one of the most important characters in the
history of the battle of Clontarf, the character of which, and of the
events that preceded and followed its occurrence, and the chieftains and
warriors who fought on one side and the other, are identical, whether
described by the bard singing, or by the monkish chronicler jotting down
in plain prose the fasti for the year. The reader of these volumes can
make such deductions as he pleases, on this account, from the bardic
history of the Red Branch, and clip the wings of the tale, so that it
may with him travel pedestrian. I know there are others, like myself,
who will not hesitate for once to let the fancy roam and luxuriate in
the larger spaces and freer airs of ancient song, nor fear that their
sanity will be imperilled by the shouting of semi-divine heroes, and the
sight of Cuculain entering battles with the Tuatha De Danan around him.

I hope on some future occasion to examine more minutely the character
and place in literature of the Irish bardic remains, and put forward
here these general considerations, from which the reader may presume
that the Ultonian cycle, dealing as it does with Cuculain and his
contemporaries, is in the main true to the facts of the time, and that
his history, and that of the other heroes who figure in these volumes,
is, on the whole, and omitting the marvellous, sufficiently reliable.
I would ask the reader, who may be inclined to think th