Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/9



the memory of those truly cultured and unselfish men, the poet-scribes and hedge-schoolmasters of the last century and the beginning of this—men who may well be called the last of the Milesians—I dedicate this effort to preserve even a scrap of that native lore which in their day they loved so passionately, and for the preservation of which they worked so nobly, but in vain