Excerpt from The Dreamers: A Play in Three Acts There is fact in this play and there is fancy, and only the student of those dreaming days will know where the one merges with the other. He is scarcely likely to approve of this attempt to recapture the emotion of an historical episode by means that are very often unhistorical; to his trained mind any study of Robert Emmet's insurrection which ignores Owen Kirwan, Anne Devlin and many another is unworthy of serious consideration. But selection and rejection of incidents and characters is the beginning and end of all playmaking; even in plays dealing with imaginary people there must always remain the country on the dark side of the moon unknown to the audience but as vivid to the playwright as the side that shines on the stage, how much more crowded must that dark side be in an historical play when into a few acts must be crushed the emotions and actions of hundreds of people during several months? That is the only defence I can offer to his just criticism on the omissions in the play. He will also, probably, quarrel with the title of the play and say that Robert Emmet was practical in all his qualities, a soldier, a tactician, a most able organiser. I agree. But all these things were fused together for one purpose by the most practical quality of all - his dream. Dreams are the only permanent things in life, the only heritage that can be hoarded or spent and yet handed down intact from generation to generation. Robert Emmet's dream came down to him through - how many? - generations. He passed it on undimmed. It is being dreamed to-day, as vivid as ever and - they say - as unpractical. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This 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.