, which may happen in one place as well as
another, and in which the names might be disarrayed without changing
the character and consistency of the tale, and its relations, in time or
otherwise, with other tales.

Foreigners are surprised to find the Irish claim for their own country
an antiquity and a history prior to that of the neighbouring countries.
Herein lie the proof and the explanation. The traditions and history of
the mound-raising period have in other countries passed away. Foreign
conquest, or less intrinsic force of imagination, and pious sentiment
have suffered them to fall into oblivion; but in Ireland they have been
all preserved in their original fulness and vigour, hardly a hue has
faded, hardly a minute circumstance or articulation been suffered to
decay.

The enthusiasm with which the Irish intellect seized upon the grand
moral life of Christianity, and ideals so different from, and so hostile
to, those of the heroic age, did not consume the traditions or destroy
the pious and reverent spirit in which men still looked back upon those
monuments of their own pagan teachers and kings, and the deep spirit
of patriotism and affection with which the mind still clung to the
old heroic age, whose types were warlike prowess, physical beauty,
generosity, hospitality, love of family and nation, and all those noble
attributes which constituted the heroic character as distinguished from
the saintly. The Danish conquest, with its profound modification of
Irish society, and consequent disruption of old habits and conditions
of life, did not dissipate it; nor the more dangerous conquest of the
Normans, with their own innate nobility of character, chivalrous daring,
and continental grace and civilisation; nor the Elizabethan convulsions
and systematic repression and destruction of all native phases of
thought and feeling. Through all these storms, which successively
assailed the heroic literature of ancient Ireland, it still held itself
undestroyed. There were still found generous minds to shelter and shield
the old tales and ballads, to feel the nobleness of that life of which
they were the outcome, and to resolve that the soil of Ireland should
not, so far as they had the power to prevent it, be denuded of its
raiment of history and historic romance, or reduced again to primeval
nakedness. The fruit of this persistency and unquenched love of country
and its ancient traditions, is left to be enjoyed by us. There