INTRODUCTION.
Many years have passed by since, delivering the Inaugural Lecture of the Irish Literary Society in London, I advocated as one of its chief aims the recasting into modern form and in literary English of the old Irish legends, preserving the atmosphere of the original tales as much as possible, but clearing them from repetitions, redundant expressions, idioms interesting in Irish but repellent in English, and, above all, from absurdities, such as the sensational fancy of the later editors and bards added to the simplicities of the original tales.
Long before I spoke of this, it had been done by P.W.Joyce in his OLD CELTIC ROMANCES, and by Standish O'Grady for the whole story of Cuchulain, but in this case with so large an imitation of the Homeric manner that the Celtic spirit of the story was in danger of being lost.

This was the fault I had to find with that inspiring book,[3] but it was a fault which had its own attraction.
[3] I gave this book--_The History of Ireland_ (HEROIC PERIOD)--to Burne-Jones in order to interest him in Irish myth and legend.

"I'll try and read it," he said.

A week afterwards he came and said--"It is a new world of thought and pleasure you have opened to me.

I knew nothing of this, and life is quite enlarged.