Excerpt from The Ballad Poetry of IrelandThree editions of this collection having been exhausted in less than a month, the publisher has called upon me to prepare a fourth; and with this object I have gone over it carefully, and expunged as many as I could detect of the original sins incident to early editions - errors of the press, of haste, and of carelessness. Something of this kind was done for the Third Edition but there was not leisure to do it carefully. It will now, I trust, be found tolerably free from errors of the class chargeable on an editor.The success of these ballads seems to me to give happy promise of a vigorous and national literature in Ireland. Ballads have been among the first home-grown productions of all countries and their popularity here now is no slight evidence that the national mind is still fresh and earnest, and has the impulses and propensities that belong to a young nation.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.