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Excerpt from The Quarterly Review, Vol. 93: Published in June and September, 1853 Admitting the comparative recency and obvious untruth of such tales, an important class of questions will remain, which as yet it would be remature to solve - namely, whether they be (in the main) mere figments to fill up the blank space of unknown ages - or whether, and to what extent, and in what modes, they were steganogmphical expressions of things very di'erent and really occurring in very different times. Ingenious minds cannot be too strongly cautioned to move cireuma y in that direction. Meanwhile it may he, and it is, justy deplomd, that the Government of a great empire should furnish no means for publishing the many treasures which now lie buried in manu script and in daily hazard of destruction. Honest Geoffrey Keating's rich and valuable compilation remains to this day nu published, and (unless incompletely, or in a way discreditable to literature) untranslated into English; while the manuscri t Latin version of the learned Lynch is sharing the fate of the text. The old English version of the Annals of Clonmacnois, made by Connell mcgeoghegan, being all that remains of that celebrated history, is in the like predicament. Manus o'donnell's voluminous memoirs of his own immediate fellow-countryman, St. Columkille, lie unprinted and untranslated. The same may be said of the Annals of Kilronan, the Book of Leinster, the Dinnseanchus, the Book of Conquests, the antiquarian writings of o'duvegan and macfirhis, and numerous historical or legendary works in prose and verse preserved at Trinity College, or lately dispersed from Stowe; the reliques of those far ampler stores which a barbarous and illiterate policy has already suffered or caused to perish. If these remarks are other wise wasted, they serve at least liberare animam nostram. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This