No narrative, dramatic, didactic, or epic poetry of any importance arose, and many questions and answers might be made concerning this curious restriction of development.

The most probable solution of this problem is that there was never enough peace in Ireland or continuity of national existence or unity, to allow of a continuous development of any one of the arts into all its forms.

Irish poetry never advanced beyond the lyric.

In that form it lasted all through the centuries; it lasts still at the present day, and Douglas Hyde has proved how much charm belongs to it in his book on the _Love Songs of Connacht_.
It has had a long, long history; it has passed through many phases; it has sung of love and sorrow, of national wars and hopes, of Ireland herself as the Queen of Sorrow, of exile regrets from alien shores, of rebellion, of hatred of England, of political strife, in ballads sung in the streets, of a thousand issues of daily life and death--but of world-wide affairs, of great passions and duties and fates evolving in epic or clashing in drama, of continuous human lives in narrative (except in prose), of the social life of cities or of philosophic thought enshrined in stately verse, it has not sung.

What it may do in the future, if Irish again becomes a tongue of literature in lofty poetry, lies on the knees of the gods.