On the other hand, Irishmen are as ready as others to feel an
interest in a human character, having themselves the ordinary
instincts, passions, and curiosities of human nature. If I can
awake an interest in the career of even a single ancient Irish
king, I shall establish a train of thoughts, which will advance
easily from thence to the state of society in which he lived, and
the kings and heroes who surrounded, preceded, or followed him.
Attention and interest once fully aroused, concerning even one
feature of this landscape of ancient history, could be easily
widened and extended in its scope.

Now, if nothing remained of early Irish history save the dry
_fasti_ of the chronicles and the Brehon laws, this would, I think,
be a perfectly legitimate object of ambition, and would be
consonant with my ideal of what the perfect flower of historical
literature should be, to illuminate a tale embodying the former by
hues derived from the Senchus Mor.

But in Irish literature there has been preserved, along with the
_fasti_ and the laws, this immense mass of ancient ballad, tale,
and epic, whose origin is lost in the mists of extreme antiquity,
and in which have been preserved the characters, relationships,
adventures, and achievements of the vast majority of the personages
whose names, in a gaunt nakedness, fill the books of the
chroniclers. Around each of the greater heroes there groups itself
a mass of bardic literature, varying in tone and statement, but
preserving a substantial unity as to the general character and the
more important achievements of the hero, and also, a fact upon
which their general historical accuracy may be based with