both our faith in the general accuracy of Roman observation, and our impression of the value for ethnological purposes of the Irish stories themselves. The correspondence is the more important and striking, because the records of classical writers contain the impressions made upon a nation engaged in subduing the peoples whose appearance and acts they set out to record; peoples with whom they were in conflict, and whom they looked upon as barbarians. Moreover, they are the observations of a nation already entering upon that final stage of over-civilisation which precedes decay, upon races not yet emerged from that kind of life which we, perhaps arrogantly, call barbarism.
It shows us, too, and this is of importance, that while differences, not yet sufficiently recognised, seem to have existed between Ireland and Britain or Gaul with regard to religious belief and worship, the Irish being (so far as we know) in an earlier pre-sacrificial stage at a time when the Britons and Gauls were noted for their frequent and bloody sacrifices, often of human beings; those more tenacious matters of a people’s social life, their ordinary ways of living and habit, which are everywhere, but especially in isolated and primitive races, so slow to change, evince a remarkable similarity with those of Gaul and Britain, showing a homogeneity between the different branches of the Celtic peoples which is very interesting.
The value of these romances is not lessened, but, from the historic standpoint, rather increased, by the fact that they come to us, as it were, in the rough, with all the wild and primitive flavour of their ancient origin upon them. With a few exceptions, and allowing for a few easily detachable passages added or improved upon by the Christian transcribers, the Northern cycle of Irish romance, from which we draw our examples, is purely pagan. Moreover, with the exception of a very few adaptations to the customs of a later age, such as the occasional substitution of horse-riding for the chariot, we seem to be actually witnessing the ways of life, in these stories, of the period to which they profess to belong. For we are not
