at the principal
character is too chivalrous and refined for the age, to peruse for
himself the tale named the "Great Breach of Murthemney." He will there,
and in many other tales and poems besides, see that the noble and
pathetic interest which attaches to his character is substantially the
same as I have represented in these volumes. But unless the student
has read the whole of the Ultonian cycle, he should be cautious in
condemning a departure in my work from any particular version of an
event which he may have himself met. Of many minor events there are more
than one version, and many scenes and assertions which he may think
of importance would yet, by being related, cause inconsistency and
contradiction. Of the nature of the work in which all should be
introduced I have already given my opinion.

For the rest, I have related one or two great events in the life of
Cuculain in such a way as to give a description as clear and correct as
possible of his own character and history as related by the bards, of
those celebrated men and women who were his contemporaries and of his
relations with them, of the gods and supernatural powers in whom the
people then believed, and of the state of civilisation which then
prevailed. If I have done my task well, the reader will have been
supplied, without any intensity of application on his part--a condition
of the public mind upon which no historian of this country should
count--with some knowledge of ancient Irish history, and with an
interest in the subject which may lead him to peruse for himself that
ancient literature, and to read works of a more strictly scientific
nature upon the subject than those which I have yet written. 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 ac