371 



patience, and sift the grain from the chaff, the genuine originals from 

 the base impositions that are too frequently ushered into the world ta 

 serve the narrow views of a prejudice, a faction, or a bigotry. 



The materials, which the antiquarian thus collects, the Irish histo- 

 rian must subject to a further castigation ; it will be for him to take 

 from fable its extravagance, to disembarrass truth from the drapery of 

 romance, to raise the telescope to a perspective of ages when tradition 

 held the place of history ; to draw out the concurring testimonies of 

 facts from songs and ballads, to discover the identity of biography in 

 the fleeting tales of the Bards, the adulatory genealogies of the 

 Fileah, and the varying traditions of the Seanachies, all of which it 

 were as unbecoming to receive with implicit credulity, as to reject 

 with uncompromising scepticism. There are those on the one side 

 who will close their eyes, and affirm that the sun does not shine, while 

 on the other there are devotees, who, like the worshippers of the 

 Veiled Prophet, imagine magnificence in every thing that is stu- 

 diously concealed from observation : either extreme must blast the 

 expectation of that grand national work — an Irish History ! 

 -n The late Doctor O'Conor, the venerable Bede of the cause, has 

 done much towards re-uniting the fragments of his country's chronicles 

 in the annals, which, by the princely munificence of his Grace of Buck- 

 ingham and Chandos, he has launched into the world, not only scru- 

 pulously examined and faithfully translated, but also accompanied 

 with such evidences as fix the value and high authority of what was 

 before varying and unstable, and with such remarks and illustrations, 

 as only his combination of genius, research, and learning could supply. 



It is not for me to dilate on the proud importance of the histories 

 thus now for the first time subjected to universal inspection, it is not 

 for me to enter into their defence against Doctor Innes, and the many 

 of his school, who have misdoubted their existence, or blindly dete- 



3 B 2 



