the twelfth century. Be it remembered, that the poem does not
purport to be a collection of the scattered fragments of a cycle,
but an original composition, then actually imagined and written. It
does not even purport to deal with the ethnic times. _Its heroes
are Christian heroes. They attend Mass._ The poem is not true, even
to the leading features of the late period of history in which it
is placed, if it have any habitat in the world of history at all.
Attila, who died A.D. 450, and Theodoric, who did not die until the
succeeding century, meet as coevals.

Turn we now from the sole boast of Germany to one out of a hundred
in the Irish bardic literature. The Tan-bo-Cooalney was transcribed
into the Leabhar na Huidhre in the eleventh century a manuscript
whose date has been established by the consentaneity of Irish,
French, and German scholarship. Mark, it was transcribed, not
composed. The scribe records the fact:--

"Ego qui scripsi hanc historian aut vero fabulam, quibusdam fidem
in hac historia aut fabula non commodo."

The Tan-bo-Cooalney was therefore _transcribed_ by an ancient
penman to the parchment of a still existing manuscript, in the
century before that in which the German epic is presumed, from
style only, and in the opinion of Germans, to have been _composed_.

The same scribe adds this comment with regard to its contents:--

"Qaedam autem poetica figmenta, quaedam ad delectationem
stultorum."