been altogether neglected.  It has been used to furnish themes on which
modern poems can be written; ancient authority has been found in it for
what is essentially modern thought: modern English and Irish poets have
claimed the old Irish romances as inspirers, but the romances
themselves have been left to the scholars and the antiquarians. 

This is not the position that Irish literature ought to fill.  It does
undoubtedly tell us much of the most ancient legends of modern Europe
which could not have been known without it; but this is not its sole,
or even its chief claim to be heard.  It is itself the connecting-link
between the Old World and the New, written, so far as can be
ascertained, at the time when the literary energies of the ancient
world were dead, when the literatures of modern Europe had not been
born,[FN#1] in a country that had no share in the ancient civilisation
of Rome, among a people which still retained many legends and possibly
a rudimentary literature drawn from ancient Celtic sources, and was
producing the men who were the earliest classical scholars of the
modern world. 

[FN#1] The only possible exceptions to this, assuming the latest