literature the fact from the fiction--where there is certainly fact
and certainly fiction--is one of the most difficult to which the
intellect can apply itself. That this difficulty has not been
hitherto surmounted by Irish writers is no just reproach. For the
last century, intellects of the highest attainments, trained and
educated to the last degree, have been vainly endeavouring to solve
a similar question in the far less copious and less varied heroic
literature of Greece. Yet the labours of Wolfe, Grote, Mahaffy,
Geddes, and Gladstone, have not been sufficient to set at rest the
small question, whether it was one man or two or many who composed
the Iliad and Odyssey, while the reality of the achievements of
Achilles and even his existence might be denied or asserted by a
scholar without general reproach. When this is the case with regard
to the great heroes of the Iliad, I fancy it will be some time
before the same problem will have been solved for the minor
characters, and as it affects Thersites, or that eminent artist
who dwelt at home in Hyla, being by far the most excellent of
leather cutters. When, therefore, Greek still meets Greek in an
interminable and apparently bloodless contest over the disputed
body of the Iliad, and still no end appears, surely it would be
madness for any one to sit down and gaily distinguish true from
false in the immense and complex mass of the Irish bardic
literature, having in his ears this century-lasting struggle over a
single Greek poem and a single small phase of the pre-historic life
of Hellas.

In the Irish heroic literature, the presence or absence of the
marvellous supplies _no test whatsoever_ as to the general truth or
falsehood of the tale in which they appear. The marvellous is
supplied with greater abundance in the account of the battle of