The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 15. Patrick Kennedy
Patrick Kennedy was, indeed, a genuine writer of Irish folk-tales. His Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celt and Fire-side Stories of Ireland, Bardic Stories of Ireland, Evenings in the Duffrey and Banks of the Boro’ were put on paper much as he heard them when a boy in his native county Wexford, when they had already passed, with little change in the telling, from Gaelic into the peculiar Anglo-Irish local dialect which is distinctly west-Saxon in its character. Kennedy is a true story-teller, animated and humorous, but not extravagantly so, like Carleton and Lover at times; indeed, his artistic restraint is remarkable.