These were all topical
heroes, founders of nations, and believed, by the tribes and tribal
confederacies which they founded, to have been in their day the
chief kings of Ireland. The point fixed upon by the accurate and
sceptical Tiherna as the starting-point of trustworthy Irish
history, was one long subsequent to the floruerunt of the gods; and
the age of Concobar Mac Nessa and his knights was more than two
centuries later than that of Kimbay and the foundation of Emain
Macha. The floruit of Cuculain, therefore, falls completely within
the historical penumbra, and the more carefully the enormous, and
in the main mutually consistent and self-supporting, historical
remains dealing with this period are studied, the more will this be
believed. The minuteness, accuracy, extent, and verisimilitude of
the literature, chronicles, pedigrees, &c., relating to this
period, will cause the student to wonder more and more as he
examines and collates, seeing the marvellous self-consistency and
consentaneity of such a mass of varied recorded matter. The age,
indeed, breathes sublimity, and abounds with the marvellous, the
romantic, and the grotesque. But as I have already stated, the
presence or absence of these qualities has no crucial significance.
Love and reverence and the poetic imagination always effect such
changes in the object of their passion. They are the essential
condition of the transference of the real into the world of art.
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