Page:The courtship of Ferb (Leahy).djvu/16

 form are nearly nine hundred years old, and have recently been translated into French, German, and English. From the modern poems some knowledge of the subjects of the Irish stories has been widely diffused, but the poems are really adaptations, coloured by modern ideas and by the poetic fancy of the writers, so that they seldom give a correct representation of the literature from which the subjects are drawn. Literal translations, chiefly foreign, such as that of the present tale by Professor Windisch, have now been made of nearly all the leading romances, but many of these are not readily accessible to the general reader, being published in the transactions of learned societies, or in specialist periodicals; and they do not seem to have attracted sufficient attention among the literary public, if one may judge from the lack of interest in Irish literature, except in that part of it which has been treated in the more attractive poetic form of the modern works.

A remarkable instance of this lack of interest appears in a note on Mr. Andrew Lang's edition of Aucassin and Nicolete, where he discusses examples found in other countries of the cante fable, or interwoven song and story, in which this French romance of the twelfth or thirteenth century is written. Swahili and Arab parallels are noticed, others from Norse and from modern Scottish folk-lore; but he never mentions that many of the Irish