called Brehon laws, which a commission is now publishing, were not as
yet completely transcribed when O'Curry wrote; but what had even then
been transcribed was sufficient, he says, to fill nearly 8,000 of Dr.
O'Donovan's pages. Here are, at any rate, materials enough with a
vengeance. These materials fall, of course, into several divisions.
The most literary of these divisions, the Tales, consisting of
Historic Tales and Imaginative Tales, distributes the contents of its
Historic Tales as follows:- Battles, voyages, sieges, tragedies, cow-
spoils, courtships, adventures, land-expeditions, sea-expeditions,
banquets, elopements, loves, lake-irruptions, colonisations, visions.
Of what a treasure-house of resources for the history of Celtic life
and the Celtic genius does that bare list, even by itself, call up
the image! The Annals of the Four Masters give 'the years of
foundations and destructions of churches and castles, the obituaries
of remarkable persons, the inaugurations of kings, the battles of
chiefs, the contests of clans, the ages of bards, abbots, bishops,
&c.' {25} Through other divisions of this mass of materials,--the
books of pedigrees and genealogies, the martyrologies and
festologies, such as the Felire of Angus the Culdee, the
topographical tracts, such as the Dinnsenchas,--we touch 'the most
ancient traditions of the Irish, traditions which were committed to
writing at a period when the ancient customs of the people were
unbroken.' We touch 'the early history of Ireland, civil and
ecclesiastical.' We get 'the origin and history of the countless
monuments of Ireland, of the ruined church and tower, the sculptured
cross, the holy well, and the commemorative name of almost every
townland and parish in the whole island.' We get, in short, 'the
most detailed information upon almost every part of ancient Gaelic
life, a vast quantity of valuable details of life and manners.' {26}