Those who committed to paper our earliest tales wrote down as much of the old poetry as they could recollect or had access to, and wrote the connecting narrative in prose. Hence it soon came to pass that if a story pretended to any antiquity it had to be interspersed with verses, and at last it happened that the Irish taste became so confirmed to this style of writing that authors adopted it, as I have said, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In spite of the mythological and phantastic elements which are undoubtedly mingled with the oldest sagas, "the manners and customs in which the men of the time lived and moved, are depicted," writes Windisch,[12] "with a naïve realism which leaves no room for doubt as to the former actuality of the scenes depicted. In matter of costume and weapons, eating and drinking, building and arrangement of the banqueting-hall, manners observed at the feast, and much more, we find here the most valuable information." "I insist upon it," he says in another place, "that Irish saga is the only richly-flowing source of unbroken Celtism." All the remaining linguistic monuments of Breton, Cornish, and Welsh, "would form," writes M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, "un ensemble bien incomplet et bien obscur sans la lumière que la littérature irlandaise projette sur ces débris. C'est le vieil irlandais qui forme le trait d'union pour ainsi dire entre les dialectes neo-celtiques de la fin du moyen âge ou des temps modernes, et le Gaulois des inscriptions lapidaires, des monnaies, des noms propres conservés par la littérature grecque et la littérature romaine."[13] It may, then, be finally acknowledged that those of the great nations of to-day, whose ancestors were mostly Celts, but whose language, literature, and traditions have completely disappeared, must, if they wish to study their own past, turn themselves first to Ireland. When we find so much of the brief and scanty information given us by the classics, not only borne out, but amply illustrated by old Irish literature, when we find the dry bones of Posidonius and Cæsar rise up again before us with a ruddy covering of flesh and blood, it is not too much to surmise that in other matters also the various Celtic races bore to each other a close resemblance. Much more could be said upon this subject, as that the four Gallo-Roman inscriptions to Brigantia found in Great Britain are really to the Goddess Brigit;[14] that the Brennus who burned Rome 390 years before Christ and the Brennus who stormed Delphi 110 years later were only the god Brian, under whose tutelage the Gauls marched; and that Lugudunum, Lugh's Dún or fortress, is so-called from the god Lugh the Long-handed, to whom two Celtic inscriptions are found, one in Spain and one in Switzerland, as may be seen set forth at length in the volumes of Monsieur d'Arbois de Jubainville.