Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/380

 372 greater than that of any other living man, wide familiarity with literature at large, and acquaintance with the methods and results of historical and philological criticism, the welcome is intensified. A work such as Mr. O'Grady's at once takes rank as a classic in its line of study, and the critic best pays his due of admiration and respect when he treats it as a classic to be studied with minute and searching attention. In the remarks that follow I shall take it for granted that the book is in the hands of every serious student of Celtic lore, to whom I shall endeavour to be of use by supplementing the information to be found therein or by challenging statements and conclusions for which there seems to me to be insufficient warrant.

As it is probable that Mr. O'Grady's version will for some time to come be the standard of quotation for nonspecialist students of Celtic matters, it is necessary to say a few words as to the way in which he has dealt with his texts. I do not refer to the Irish original; I must needs, it is true, point out that in the opinion of other Irish scholars Mr. O'Grady has deprived his collection of value to the philological student of Irish by his practice of largely modernising the texts he draws from MSS. ranging in date from the nth to the 18th centuries. He has, in fact, edited his Irish on the system used by Mr. Henry Craik in his recently published English Prose from the 14th to the 16th Century. The system is a defensible one, and as folklorists the matter does not affect us save remotely. But if an editor deliberately discards philological merit for his texts, is it too much to ask that he should also discard the shackles which strict philological accuracy imposes! Of what use is it to print an imperfect iitheentury text when a perfect 14th-century one exists, save as a specimen of 11th-century form of speech? Yet Mr. O'Grady, while refusing to supplement the 11theentury scribe even where the latter can be proved to have skipped a couple of lines in his transcript from an earlier MS., as steadily refuses to give the exact grammatical