a most valuable addition to the literature, and we have to lament the
gap in it owing to the loss of a column in that part of the Leabhar na
h-Uidhri manuscript which has been preserved.

The last piece to be mentioned is the extract from the "Tain be
Cuailnge" known as the "Combat at the Ford." This seems to me the
finest specimen of old Irish work that has been preserved for us; the
brilliance of its descriptions, the appropriate changes in its metres,
the chivalry of its sentiments, and the rapidity of its action should,
even if there were nothing to stand beside it in Irish literature, give
that literature a claim to be heard: as an account of a struggle
between two friends, it is probably the finest in any literature. It
has been stated recently, no doubt upon sound authority, that the
grammatical forms of this episode show it to be late, possibly dating
only to the eleventh century. The manuscript in which it appears,
however, is of the earlier part of the twelfth century; no literary
modem work other than Irish can precede it in time; and if it is the
work of an eleventh-century author, it does seem strange that his name
or the name of some one of that date who could have written it has not
been recorded, as MacLiag's name has been as the traditional author of
the eleventh-century "Wars of the Gaedhill and the Gaill," for the
names of several Irish authors of that period axe well known, and the
Early Middle Irish texts of that period are markedly of inferior
quality. Compare for example the Boromaean Tribute which Stokes
considers to take high rank among texts of that period (Revue Celtique,
xiii. p. 32). One would certainly like to believe that this episode of
the "Combat at the Ford" belongs to the best literary period, with
which upon literary grounds it seems to be most closely connected.

But, whether this comparative lateness of the "Combat at the Ford" be