196 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
that ought to pervade the composition, affords but a slender handle 
for orderly investigation. On the other hand, we have an almost 
equal amount of annalistic matter, exact, certain, and reliable, but 
concerned in events too minute and disconnected to afford enlarged 
historic generalizations. Such as it is, however, in the hands of a 
philosophic observer there can be no doubt of its capacity for yielding 
a general prospect that even now might be entertaining and not unin- 
structive. 
For the post-Plantagenet times great accessions have been con- 
tributed by the Record Publications of the Master of the Rolls in 
England, by the Record Office here, and by the Historic Manuscripts 
Commission. We will, I think, deceive ourselves if we imagine any 
very great store of high historic material for this period to remain 
unpublished. Copious essays might now be written, in addition to 
those we already have, on the chief epochs and turning-points of the 
Trish post-Conquest story. The times of the Hiberno-Norman lords 
Palatine, with their several semi-regal Chanceries, Courts, and Esta- 
blishments, would supply one fruitful subject; the invasion of Bruce 
and its Hibernicising effects, another; the reaction of the Ulster and 
other Plantations, a third: but, to combine in one consistent prospect 
the overthrow, the recuperation, and the ultimate fusion, or counter 
process of absorption, as the case may be, of the old Ivish race, in- 
volves, I think, the necessity of waiting through an indefinite time, 
till some one permanent result shall give the historian a definite base 
for his survey. 
From the contributions, however, which we can make to general 
Polite Literature, we may expect something in the nearer future. We 
can contribute a material barbaric, it is true, but as magnificent and 
as fresh as was the story of the house of Atreus when it first came 
into the hands of the Greek poets and tragedians. Older and ruder, 
though in one sense less coarse, than the Niebelungen Lay, it may 
effect for the literature of our day what the Lay and its associate 
school of song has done for Germany. The highest geniuses—epic, 
dramatic, musical—have always sought for something from earlier 
sources on which to hang their first conceptions. Such aids, at the 
present day, are hard to be found among the much-triturated elements 
of English literature. We are notin a position to despise any acces- 
sions of that kind from any quarter, and, after having collected all 
that can be gathered from abroad, ought to rejoice at the prospect of 
being able to turn with unexpected relish to something capable of 
being supplied at home. It is no answer to say, these offerings con- 
tain much that is intrinsically jejune, or ugly, or barbarous. The 
origins of the best Classic literature lie among matter as crude—I 
might even say as revolting—as anything in old Irish or old Welsh 
story. Mere raw material, however, to be converted to the uses of cul- 
tivated genius, is not all we may reasonably hope for from such sources. 
There are ways of looking at things, and even of expressing thought, 
in these deposits of old experience not to be lightly rejected by a 
