Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

8 STANDISH O'GRADY
of a great enthusiasm. It is significant that Standish
O'Grady should have frequented Ferguson's house
without ever glimpsing in him the precursor of Ireland's
Literary Renaissance with whom Yeats and his
contemporaries identified the author of Lays of the
Western Gael and Congal.
In 1881 was published a History of Ireland : Critical
and Philosophical, which never progressed beyond
the first volume. It is interesting now as a curious
attempt to crush an epic genius in the restraint of the
conventional historian. Having given us two volumes
devoted to the exploits of The Red Branch, re-telling
the Tain-Bo-Cualgne, interspersed here and there
with wonderfully delicate little snatches of legend and
folk-lore, O'Grady seems to have bethought himself
of the need for a more scientific history. He had
written the epic of Cuculain ; he had adumbrated
his passionate theory of bardic literature in a booklet
. which links up the two parts of his History, Early
Bardic Literature, published in 1879, and afterwards-
included in the second volume. Now the Critical
and Philosophical History is, so to speak, an elabora-
tion of that booklet, for many passages have been
incorporated from it, and there is a brave show of
dates and genealogies, with many a learned foot-note,
as if to demonstrate the writer's ability to conform
to the rules of historiography, fortunately, his