It still haunts the imagination, like Mordecai at
Haman's gate, a cause of continual annoyance and vexation. An
Irishman can no more release himself from his history than he can
absolve himself from social and domestic duties. He may outrage it,
but he cannot placidly ignore. Hence the uneasy, impatient feeling
with which the subject is generally regarded.
I think that I do not exaggerate when I say that the majority of
educated Irishmen would feel grateful to the man who informed them
that the history of their country was valueless and unworthy of
study, that the pre-Christian history was a myth, the post-Christian
mere annals, the mediaeval a scuffling of kites and crows, and the
modern alone deserving of some slight consideration. That writer
will be in Ireland most praised who sets latest the commencement
of our history. Without study he will be pronounced sober and
rational before the critic opens the book. So anxious is the Irish
mind to see that effaced which it is conscious of having neglected.
There are two compositions which affect an interest comparable to
that which Ireland claims for her bardic literature, One is the
Ossian of MacPherson, the other the Nibelungen Lied.
If we are to suppose Macpherson faithfully to have written down,
printed, and published the floating disconnected poems which he
found lingering in the Scotch highlands, how small, comparatively,
would be their value as indications of antique thought and feeling,
reduced then for the first time to writing, sixteen hundred years
after the time of Ossian and his heroes, in a country not the home
of those heroes, and destitute of the regular bardic organisation.
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