"Feasts with the great feasts of Temair,
Fairs with the fairs of Emania,
Annals there are verified."

In the existing literature we see two great divisions. On the one hand
the epical, a realm of the most riotous activity of thought; on the
other, the annalistic and genealogical, bald and bare to the last
degree, a mere skeleton. They represent the two great hemispheres of
the bardic mind, the latter controlling the former. Hence the orderly
sequence of the cyclic literature; hence the strong confining banks
between which the torrent of song rolls down through those centuries in
which the bardic imagination reached its height. The consentaneity
of the annals and the literature furnishes a trustworthy guide to the
general course of history, until its guidance is barred by _a priori_
considerations of a weightier nature, or by the statements of writers,
having sources of information not open to us. For instance, the
stream of Irish history must, for philosophical reasons, be no further
traceable than to that point at which it issues from the enchanted land
of the Tuatha De Danan. At the limit at which the gods appear, men
and history must disappear; while on the other hand, the statement of
Tiherna, that the foundation of Emain Alacha by Kimbay is the first
certain date in Irish history, renders it undesirable to attach more
historical reality of characters, adorning the ages prior to B.C. 299,
than we could to such characters as Romulus in Roman, or Theseus in
Athenian history.

I desire here to record my complete and emphatic dissent from the
opinions advanced by a writer in Hermathena on the subject of the Ogham
inscriptions, and the introduction into this country of the art of
writing. A cypher, i.e., an alphabet derived from a pre-existing
alphabet, the Ogham may or may not have been. I advance no opinion upon
that, but an invention of the Christian time it most assuredly was not.
No sympathetic and careful student of the Irish bardic literature can
possibly come to such a conclusion. The bardic poems relating to
the heroes of the ethnic times are filled with allusions to Ogham
inscriptions on stone, and contain some references to books of timber;
but in my own reading I have not met with a single passage in that
literature alluding to books of parchment and to rounded letters.

If the Ogham was derived from the Roman characters introduced by
Christian missionaries, then these characters would b