O’Curry says, that the great vellum manuscript books belonging to Trinity College, Dublin, and to the Royal Irish Academy,—books with fascinating titles, the _Book of the Dun Cow_, the _Book of Leinster_, the _Book of Ballymote_, the _Speckled Book_, the _Book of Lecain_, the _Yellow Book of Lecain_,—have, between them, matter enough to fill 11,400 of these pages; the other vellum manuscripts in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, have matter enough to fill 8,200 pages more; and the paper manuscripts of Trinity College, and the Royal Irish Academy together, would fill, he says, 30,000 such pages more. The ancient laws of Ireland, the so-called Brehon laws, which a commission is now publishing, were not as yet completely transcribed when O’Curry wrote; but what had even then been transcribed was sufficient, he says, to fill nearly 8,000 of Dr. O’Donovan’s pages. Here are, at any rate, materials enough with a vengeance. These materials fall, of course, into several divisions. The most literary of these divisions, the _Tales_, consisting of _Historic Tales_ and _Imaginative Tales_, distributes the contents of its _Historic Tales_ as follows:—Battles, voyages, sieges, tragedies, cow-spoils, courtships, adventures, land-expeditions, sea-expeditions, banquets, elopements, loves, lake-irruptions, colonisations, visions. Of what a treasure-house of resources for the history of Celtic life and the Celtic genius does that bare list, even by itself, call up the image! The _Annals of the Four Masters_ give ‘the years of foundations and destructions of churches and castles, the obituaries of remarkable persons, the inaugurations of kings, the battles of chiefs, the contests of clans, the ages of bards, abbots, bishops, &c.’ {25} Through other divisions of this mass of materials,—the books of pedigrees and genealogies, the martyrologies and festologies, such as the _Féliré of Angus the Culdee_, the topographical tracts, such as the _Dinnsenchas_,—we touch ‘the most ancient traditions of the Irish, traditions which were committed to writing at a period when the ancient customs of the people were unbroken.’ We touch ‘the early history of Ireland, civil and ecclesiastical.’ We get ‘the origin and history of the countless monuments of Ireland, of the ruined church and tower, the sculptured cross, the holy well, and the commemorative name of almost every townland and parish in the whole island.’ We get, in short, ‘the most detailed information upon almost every part of ancient Gaelic life, a vast quantity of valuable details of life and manners.’ {26} And then, besides, to our knowledge of the Celtic genius, Mr. Norris has brought us from Cornwall, M. de la Villemarqué from Brittany, contributions, insignificant indeed in quantity, if one compares them with the mass of the Irish materials extant, but far from insignificant in value.