an illiterate peasant, in 1890 in Roscommon, verses which had been jotted down in phonetic spelling in Argyleshire by Macgregor, Dean of Lismore, in the year 1512, and which may have been sung for hundreds of years before it struck the fancy of the Highland divine to commit them to paper;[14] and I have again heard verses in which the measure and sense were preserved, but found on comparing them with MSS. that several obsolete words had been altered to others that rhymed with them and were intelligible.[15] For these reasons I should, in many cases, refuse absolutely to reject the authenticity of a poem simply because the language is more modern than that of the bard could have been to whom it is ascribed, and it seems to me equally uncritical either to accept or reject much of our earliest poetry, except what is in highly-developed metre, as a good deal of it may possibly be the actual (but linguistically modified) work of the supposed authors. This modifying process is something akin to but very different in degree from Pope's rewriting of Donne's satires or Dryden's version of Chaucer, inasmuch as it was probably both unconscious and unintentional. To understand better how this modification may have taken place, let us examine a few lines of the thirteenth-century English poem, the "Brut" of Layamon:-- "And swa ich habbe al niht Of mine swevene swithe ithoht, For ich what to iwisse Agan is al my blisse." These lines were, no doubt, intelligible to an ordinary Englishman at the time. Gradually they become a little modernised, thus:-- "And so I have all night Of min-e sweeven swith ythought, For I wat to ywiss Agone is all my bliss." Had these verses been preserved in folk-memory they must have undergone a still further modification as soon as the words sweeven (dream), swith (much), and ywiss (certainty) began to grow obsolete, and we should have the verse modified and mangled, perhaps something in this way:-- "And so I have all the night Of my dream greatly thought, For I wot and I wis That gone is all my bliss." The words "I wot and I wis," in the third line, represent just about as much archaism as the popular memory and taste will stand without rebelling. Some modification in the direction here hinted at may be found in, I should think, more than half the manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy to-day, and just in the same sense as the lines, "For I wot and I wis That gone is my bliss," are Layamon's; so we may suppose, "Dubthach missi mac do Lugaid Laidech lantrait Mé ruc inmbreith etir Loegaire Ocus Patraic,"[16] to be the fifth century O'Lugair's, or "Leathaid folt fada fraich, Forbrid canach fann finn,"[17] to be Finn mac Cúmhail's.