tual historic fact seen
through an imaginative medium. Such is the history of Concobar Mac Nessa
and his knights--historic fact seen through the eyes of a loving wonder.

Indeed, I must confess that the blaze of bardic light which illuminates
those centuries at first so dazzled the eye and disturbed the judgment,
that I saw only the literature, only the epic and dramatic interest, and
did not see as I should the distinctly historical character of the age
around which that literature revolves, wrongly deeming that a literature
so noble, and dealing with events so remote, must have originated
mainly or altogether in the imagination. All the borders of the epic
representation at which, in the first volume, I have aimed, seem to
melt, and wander away vaguely on every side into space and time. I have
now taken care to remedy that defect, supplying to the unset picture the
clear historical frame to which it is entitled. I will also request the
reader, when the two volumes may diverge in tone or statement, to
attach greater importance to the second, as the result of wider and more
careful reading and more matured reflection.

A great English poet, himself a severe student, pronounced the early
history of his own country to be a mere scuffling of kites and crows, as
indeed are all wars which lack the sacred bard, and the sacred bard is
absent where the kites and crows pick out his eyes. That the Irish kings
and heroes should succeed one another, surrounded by a blaze of bardic
light, in which both themselves and all those who were contemporaneous
with them are seen clearly and distinctly, was natural in a country
where in each little realm or sub-kingdom the ard-ollav was equal in
dignity to the king, which is proved by the equivalence of their cries.
The dawn of English history is in the seventh century--a late dawn, dark
and sombre, without a ray of cheerful sunshine; that of Ireland dates
reliably from a point before the commencement of the Christian era
luminous with that light which never was on sea or land--thronged
with heroic forms of men and women--terrible with the presence of the
supernatural and its over-arching power.

Educated Irishmen are ignorant of, and indifferent to, their history;
yet from the hold of that history they cannot shake themselves free. It
still haunts the imagination, like Mordecai at Haman's gate, a cause
of continual annoyance and vexation. An Irishman can no more release
himself from his hi