story than he can absolve himself from social and
domestic duties. He may outrage it, but he cannot placidly ignore.
Hence the uneasy, impatient feeling with which the subject is generally
regarded.

I think that I do not exaggerate when I say that the majority of
educated Irishmen would feel grateful to the man who informed them that
the history of their country was valueless and unworthy of study, that
the pre-Christian history was a myth, the post-Christian mere annals,
the mediaeval a scuffling of kites and crows, and the modern alone
deserving of some slight consideration. That writer will be in Ireland
most praised who sets latest the commencement of our history. Without
study he will be pronounced sober and rational before the critic opens
the book. So anxious is the Irish mind to see that effaced which it is
conscious of having neglected.

There are two compositions which affect an interest comparable to that
which Ireland claims for her bardic literature, One is the Ossian of
MacPherson, the other the Nibelungen Lied.

If we are to suppose Macpherson faithfully to have written down,
printed, and published the floating disconnected poems which he found
lingering in the Scotch highlands, how small, comparatively, would be
their value as indications of antique thought and feeling, reduced then
for the first time to writing, sixteen hundred years after the time of
Ossian and his heroes, in a country not the home of those heroes, and
destitute of the regular bardic organisation. The Ossianic tales and
poems still told and sung by the Irish peasantry at the present day in
the country of Ossian and Oscar, would be, if collected even now, quite
as valuable, if not more so. Truer to the antique these latter are,
for in them the cycles are not blended. The Red Branch heroes are not
confused with Ossian's Fianna.

But MacPherson's Ossian is not a translation. In the publications of the
Irish Ossianic poetry we see what that poetry really was--rude, homely,
plain-spoken, leagues removed from the nebulous sublimity of MacPherson.

With regard to the other, the Germans, who naturally desire to refer
its composition to as remote a date as possible, and who arguing from
no scientific data, but only style, ascribe the authorship of the
Nibelungen to a poet living in the latter part of the twelfth century.
Be it remembered, that the poem does not purport to be a collection of
the scattered fragments of a cycle, but an origi