any skill in description or narration, any remarkable pictures of
character, manners, and local traditions; and it seems that in many
points they show themselves masters of this beautiful art.

Thus they had stories of battles, of voyages, of invasions, of
destructions, of slaughters, of sieges, of tragedies and deaths, of
courtships, of military expeditions; and all this strictly historical.
For we do not here speak of their "imaginative tales," which give
still freer scope to fancy; such as the Fenian and Ossianic poems,
which are also founded on facts, but can no more claim the title of
history than the novels of Scott or Cooper.

The number of those books was so great that the authentic list of
them far surpasses in length what has been preserved of the old
Greek and Latin writers. It is true that they have all been saved
and transmitted to us by Christian Irishmen of the centuries
intervening between the sixth and sixteenth; but it is also
perfectly true that whatever was handed down to us by Irish monks
and friars came to them from the genuine source, the primitive
authors, as our own monks of the West have preserved to us all
we know of Greek and Latin authors.

So that the question so long decided in the negative, whether
the Irish knew handwriting prior to the Christian era and the
coming of St. Patrick, is no longer a question, now that so much
is known of their early literature. St. Patrick and his brother
monks brought with them the Roman characters and the knowledge of
numerous Christian writers who had preceded him; but he could not
teach them what had happened in the country before his time, events
which form the subject-matter of their annals, historical and