wrote it down as modern novelists do their stories. But this does not invalidate my surmise, or prove that Conall Gulban, and forty or fifty of the same kind, had their origin in a written manuscript; it only proves that in the eighteenth century the old order was giving place to the new, and that the professional bards and story-tellers were now a thing of the past, they having fallen with the Gaelic nobility who were their patrons. It would be exceedingly interesting to know whether any traces of these modern stories that had their rise in written manuscripts, are to be found amongst the peasantry as folk-lore. I, certainly, have found no remnant of any such; but this proves nothing. If Ireland had a few individual workers scattered over the provinces we would know more on the subject; but, unfortunately, we have hardly any such people, and what is worse, the present current of political thought, and the tone of our Irish educational establishments are not likely to produce them. Until something has been done by us to collect Irish folk-lore in as thorough a manner as Highland tales have already been collected, no deductions can be made with certainty upon the subject of the relationship between Highland and Irish folk-tales, and the relation of both to the Irish MSS.
Irish folk-stories may roughly be divided into two classes, those which I believe never had any conscious genesis inside the shores of Ireland, and those which
