which they were written was at a low ebb, and when their immense interest, as repositories of the most ancient native records in Western Europe, had not begun to be recognised. It can hardly yet, owing to the difficulty of the tongue in which they are written and the paucity of scholars possessed at once of the linguistic and ethnological training needed for the task of their elucidation, be said to have been recognised. Yet Ireland contains materials for the history of primitive races which can certainly not be equalled in Europe, and about which, as being so closely connected with the origins of our own race, a special curiosity should be felt. The fact that we have in Ireland alone among European nations a record of manners coeval with the Homeric age should give to the Irish records a peculiar value. As was well said by a recent writer in the Saturday Review, ‘The extent of our information about life in pre-Christian Ireland is quite remarkable; had any such copious sources existed for the study of early Teutonic life, we should never have heard the last of them from the school of Freeman.’
But though, incidentally, the truth of this remark will be borne out by the following pages, it is not from this point of view that we specially desire to examine them here.
The point to which we wish here to give emphasis is that these records are contemporary records, and that they are the only existing contemporary records of importance, for the period from which most of the Roman criticisms of the Celt come down to us. The Roman arms never extended themselves to Ireland, in spite of the longings of Agricola, and his assurances to his son-in-law, Tacitus, that ‘a single legion and a few auxiliaries would be sufficient entirely to conquer the country and bring it into subjection’; a boast often reiterated since Agricola’s day, and destined from age to age to only a partial fulfilment. That Ireland was well-known at this time, and by no means removed from the general current of European affairs, is to be gathered from the Roman general’s own statement, that ‘the concourse of merchants gathered in its ports for the purposes
