Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/389

Rh and his cup, 57.—Fionn’s return, 58-62.—Fionn’s hunting, 63-65.—Fionn’s first battles, 66-73.—Fionn’s wooing, 74.”

It will be seen by this that Campbell had carried out his intention of re-telling the Finn saga in consecutive form to a very slight extent, not more, I should say, than to one-fifth of the projected work. What he has done deserves reprinting in a specialist periodical in these pages, for instance, or in the Transactions of the Inverness Gaelic Society. Students would find it a distinct advantage to have before them even a small portion of the frame-work fashioned by one who had his Fenian tradition so thoroughly at his fingers’ ends as had Campbell. But I may be excused if I say I think it would be very undesirable for anyone else to attempt to deal with his documents in the same way. The unrivalled combination of knowledge, critical power, and instinctive racial sympathy which gave to its owner his unique position in the study of folk-lore can hardly be expected from any other man. For us, the followers of Campbell, it is safer to keep to the beaten track of faithful collection than to essay a personal synthesis of tradition.

Some among the readers of may, it is hoped, be able to do the work I have sketched in the foregoing pages, the work of rendering accessible to fellow-students the rich stores of folk-fancy, and of learning so full of life and penetration, as almost to deserve the name of genius, at present hidden away in the MSS. of Campbell of Islay.

In conclusion, I would fain express my grateful sense of the ready courtesy of the Chief Librarian and of the Officials of the Advocates’ Library.

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