Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

54 STANDISH O GRADY
example, there is a great deal more in the Trojan war and
the derivation of early Greek civilization from Egypt
and Phoenicia, than a mere tradition of something that
actually took place.
In the bardic history of Ireland the work of this spirit
is apparent on every page. The limits of their sea-
surrounded home did not supply to our ancestors
sufficient scope for the play of imagination and of the
sympathies. To gratify this imperative desire, the old
narrow traditions are expanded into a sort of world-
wide significance, and the old beliefs outraged or distorted
when they oppose the working of this generous principle.
To be a portion of the human family, and bear a part in
the general progress of man and of the world, those bards,
ethnic or Christian, who eflFected the last redaction of our
mythical history, regarded as the duty and natural func-
tion of the island and the race. Thus England, Wales,
and Scotland, Germany, France, and Norway, Spain,
Italy, Greece, Scythia, Egypt, and Asia Minor have all,
more or less, affected the purer though narrower stream of
insular tradition and local belief, producing results gro-
tesque, indeed, but from which we cannot withhold
our sympathies, when we remember the spirit which
prompted those distortions of the ancient historic or
literary monuments. Nor need the scientific inquirer
affect any considerable wrath upon the subject, for all
those portions of the bardic history which were added,
through the operation of Classical and Christian ideas,
are as easily separable from the remainder as incrustations
of earth from a piece of solid ore.