But until such an interest is
aroused, it is useless to swell the mass of valuable critical
matter, which everyone at present is very well content to leave
unread.
In the first volume, however, I have committed this error, that I
did not permit it to be seen with sufficient clearness that the
characters and chief events of the tale are absolutely historic;
and that much of the colouring, inasmuch as its source must have
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.
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