Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

INTRODUCTION OF THE BARDIC
HISTORY OF IRELAND
DAWN.
There is not perhaps in existence a product of the
human mind so extraordinary as the Irish annals. From
a time dating for more than three thousand years before
the birth of Christ, the stream of Hibernian history
flows down unintei-rupted, copious and abounding,
between accurately defined banks, with here and there
picturesque meanderings, here and there flowers lolling
on those delusive waters, but never concealed in mists
or lost in a marsh. As the centuries wend their way, king
succeeds king with a regularity most gratifying, and
fights no battle, marries no wife, begets no children,
does no doughty deed of which a contemporaneous note
was not taken, and which has not been incorporated in
the annals of his country. To think that this mighty
fabric of recorded events, so stupendous in its dimensions,
so clean and accurate in its details, so symmetrical and
elegant, should be after all a mirage and delusion, a gor-
geous bubble, whose glowing rotundity, whose rich
hues, azure, purple, amethyst and gold, vanish at a
touch and are gone, leaving a sorry remnant over
which the patriot disillusionized may grieve.
Early Irish history is the creation mainly of the bards. )(
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