been the centuries immediately succeeding the floruerunt of those
characters, is also reliable as history, while the remainder is
true to the times and the state of society which then obtained. The
story seems to progress too much in the air, too little in time and
space, and seems to be more of the nature of legend and romance
than of actual historic fact seen through an imaginative medium.
Such is the history of Concobar Mac Nessa and his knights--historic
fact seen through the eyes of a loving wonder.

Indeed, I must confess that the blaze of bardic light which
illuminates those centuries at first so dazzled the eye and
disturbed the judgment, that I saw only the literature, only the
epic and dramatic interest, and did not see as I should the
distinctly historical character of the age around which that
literature revolves, wrongly deeming that a literature so noble,
and dealing with events so remote, must have originated mainly or
altogether in the imagination. All the borders of the epic
representation at which, in the first volume, I have aimed, seem to
melt, and wander away vaguely on every side into space and time. I
have now taken care to remedy that defect, supplying to the unset
picture the clear historical frame to which it is entitled. I will
also request the reader, when the two volumes may diverge in tone
or statement, to attach greater importance to the second, as the
result of wider and more careful reading and more matured
reflection.

A great English poet, himself a severe student, pronounced the
early history of his own country to be a mere scuffling of kites
and crows, as indeed are all wars which lack the sacred bard, and
the sacred bard is absent where the kites and crows pick out his