Though the subject of this volume seems light and frivolous enough, it might be preceded, and accompanied, and concluded by grave and tiresome dissertations; and if our hopes were limited to its perusal by readers of an archaeological turn, we would freely exhaust all the philosophy of fiction in our possession upon them. But from our early youth we have felt the deepest interest in the stories and legends which are peculiar to the Irish, or which they possess in common with all the Indo-European races, and our dearest wish is that their memory should not fade from the minds of the people. They have existed in one form or other from long before the Christian era, and have been mainly preserved by oral tradition among the unlettered.<br><br>Taking into consideration the diminishing of our population by want and emigration, and the general diffusion of book-learning, such as it is, and the growing taste for the rubbishy tales of the penny and halfpenny journals, we have in these latter times been haunted with the horrid thought that the memory of the tales heard in boyhood would be irrecoverably lost.