Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/15

Rh is, alas! too often his own original. There lies his weak point, and there, too, is the defect of all who have followed him. The form in which the stories are told is, of course, Croker's own; but no one who knows anything of fairy lore will suppose, that his manipulation of the originals is confined to the form merely. The fact is that he learned the ground-work of his tales from conversations with the Southern peasantry, whom he knew well, and then elaborated this over the midnight oil with great skill and delicacy of touch, in order to give a saleable book, thus spiced, to the English public.

Setting aside the novelists Carleton and Lover, who only published some incidental and largely-manipulated Irish stories, the next person to collect Irish folk-lore in a volume was Patrick Kennedy, a native of the County Wexford, who published "Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts," and in 1870 a good book, entitled, "The Fireside Stories of Ireland," which he had himself heard in Wexford when a boy. Many of the stories which he gives appear to be the detritus of genuine Gaelic folk-stories, filtered through an English idiom and much impaired and stunted in the process. He appears, however, not to have adulterated them very much. Two of the best stories in the book, "Jack, the Cunning Thief," and "Shawn an Omadawn," I heard myself in the adjoining county Wicklow, and the versions of them that I heard did not differ very widely from Kennedy's. It