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
eyes. That the Irish kings and heroes should succeed one another,
surrounded by a blaze of bardic light, in which both themselves and
all those who were contemporaneous with them are seen clearly and
distinctly, was natural in a country where in each little realm or
sub-kingdom the ard-ollav was equal in dignity to the king, which
is proved by the equivalence of their cries. The dawn of English
history is in the seventh century--a late dawn, dark and sombre,
without a ray of cheerful sunshine; that of Ireland dates reliably
from a point before the commencement of the Christian era luminous
with that light which never was on sea or land--thronged with
heroic forms of men and women--terrible with the presence of the
supernatural and its over-arching power.
Educated Irishmen are ignorant of, and indifferent to, their
history; yet from the hold of that history they cannot shake
themselves free.
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