The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.
Every place but that in which one is born is equally strange and wondrous. Once beyond the bounds of the city walls, and none knows what may happen. We have stepped forth into the Land of Faerie, but at least we are in the open air.
The truth is, my folk-lore friends and my Saturday Reviewer differ with me on the important problem of the origin of folk-tales. They think that a tale probably originated where it was found.
Obscure as still remains the origin of that 'genre' of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople.
Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.
One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery, properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose voyages was purely scientific curiosity.
