Earliest contact—Loan-words—Three periods of marked literary influence—Layamon’s “Brut”—A fascinating study for critics—The development of the Arthurian Romance—Sir Thomas Malory—Question as to origin of rhyme—A Celtic claim—Elements in Scottish poetry—in English literature—Gray’s “Bard”—Macpherson’s “Ossian”—Influence on Wordsworth and his contemporaries—Moore’s “Irish Melodies”—Sir Walter Scott—Tennyson—Interesting comparison—Arnold, Shairp, Blackie—Novelists after Scott—Living writers.

Anglo-Saxon or Old English came into contact with Celtic from the year 449 onwards. By the end of that century the latter had the beginnings of a literature, the former had not. Cædmon’s poem dates from nearly 200 years later.

English literature could not, therefore, have been influenced by Celtic for centuries after the first Saxon invasion, as it had not then come into existence. But the English language was so influenced. From the earliest contact it doubtless bore traces of the Celtic in the form of loan-words.

Yet, strange to say, very few such native vernacular words passed over into Old English till the Norman invasion. The reason may have been, as suggested by Sweet, that the Britons were themselves to a large extent Romanised, especially those of the cities, who were for the most part descendants of Roman soldiers.

After the Conquest many more Celtic words found their way into English through the Norman-French, and, as might be expected, it is very difficult to discriminate between the contributions of the earlier and the later period. Names of persons and places, on the other hand, are easily distinguished, because they were generally taken over without change.

Not till the fateful Forty-five had finally broken down the ancient barriers of racial seclusion was there any further great accession of this Celtic element. But owing to the interest awakened then in the Highlands, the freer intercourse established with England and the Lowlands of Scotland, and especially through the writings of historians and travellers, and of great authors like James Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott, a number of new words passed from this time direct from the Highland Gaelic as well as from the Irish into the English language. From the former came the well-known clan, claymore, ghillie, plaid, pibroch, sporran, slogan, whisky, reel; and from the latter, brogue, kern, Tory, shamrock, shillelagh, usquebaugh, bother, and a few others. Words had been dribbling from the Welsh also, as we might expect, from time to time.

The influence on the literature began later, but it has been very marked and continuous down to the present day. Three periods stand out as particularly potent. The first begins from the end of the twelfth century and extends to the Reformation. The second, taking its impetus from the Forty-five and the Ossianic revival, carries us forward to the time of Tennyson. And the third, coeval with the modern Celtic renaissance, reaches from Tennyson to the present time.

Though the different branches of the Celtic people had been producing a literature from the sixth century, that literature does not seem to have affected English authorship, until in the Middle Ages it created the captivating Arthurian romances. Then, like the other Continental literatures, the English for the first time fell under the sway of the Celtic imagination.

The earliest great poem written in the English language after the Norman Conquest owes its inspiration and theme entirely to that source. In the opening passage the author introduces himself thus: “There was a priest in the land, whose name was Layamon; he was son of Lovenath; may the Lord be gracious unto him! He dwelt at Ernley at a noble church on Severn’s bank, good it seemed to him, near Radstone, where he read books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest thought that he would of England tell the noble deeds, what the men were named, and whence they came, who first had English land.”

This Layamon, travelling widely over the land in search of information, found three valuable books on which he based his tale—an English translation of Bede, a Latin book made by St. Albin and the fair Austin, and the French one by Wace.

His own poem he called the “Brut,” after the fabulous Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas, who, according to Welsh writers, became the ancestor of the Kings of Briton. It deals chiefly with the materials of Wace, but it gives the story of Uther Pendragon and his famous son Arthur in much fuller detail. For example, while Wace’s “Brut” contains 15,300 lines, Layamon’s has 32,250, more than double, and the composition is characterised by a somewhat rude attempt at alliteration and rhyme.

There are two MSS. still extant of this interesting work, both of them in the British Museum. The oldest is held to have been written not later than 1205, and the language is so purely English, notwithstanding its source, that less than fifty words of French origin have been found in it by Sir Frederick Madden, who in 1847 first edited these texts.

Almost a hundred years pass after Layamon wrote before another English book of the kind appears. And this time it is the rhyming chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, who goes over some of the ground of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and brings the history down to 1272.

A fascinating study for critics is the wonderful way in which the Arthurian romance seems to have developed from a small beginning. This gradual evolution can in the main be traced.

So far as our modern knowledge goes, the Arthur of real life was a Cornish chief with a following in Wales, who met Cedric of Wessex in the stricken field, but who himself at length fell fighting the Picts, most probably in our own native Scotland. Gildas chronicles a great victory won over the Saxons, but omits to record who was the victorious chief. It is Nennius who first mentions Arthur by name, in the ninth century. His story is vastly amplified by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote about 1154, and by the time it comes from the pen of Robert Wace, some ten years later, there is the splendid addition of the Round Table. Layamon is able to go into details, not hitherto mentioned, of the construction of this famous Board, which obviated quarrels over uppermost seats, since no one could have precedence owing to its shape. Up to this point the legend bore no Christian character. It is saturated with the magic, and slaughter, and revenge of the old Pagan North, rich in stories of giants, dwarfs, serpents, and heathen enchantments, far enough removed from the spirit of medieval Christianity. But by the beginning of the thirteenth century it suddenly underwent a great development, and new incidents were added with which the earlier writers could not have been acquainted.

Thomas Arnold thinks that this transformation is due to the genius of Walter Map (circa 1210), who introduced the religious element with the view of converting the Arthurian legends, and employing them in the service of Christianity.

From this time we have in French the Story of the Holy Grail, the History of Merlin, Sir Launcelot of the Lake, the Quest of the Holy Grail, and the Death of Arthur. The first two have been attributed to Robert Borron, the latter three to Walter Map himself. But the whole subject appears to be wrapped in singular obscurity, and offers a field for considerable divergence of opinion. The latest dissertation on the question is that by Jessie L. Weston in her recent publications. (Nutt: London, 1901.) After the above, five more stories followed, such as Tristram and the history of King Pellinore by other writers. These later series of romances seem to have caught on better in France than in England. For only a few metrical compositions of this class are found in English MSS. prior to the days of Sir Thomas Malory, and these in documents of the fifteenth century. One alliterative tale, indeed, that of Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, first printed by Sir F. Madden in 1839, and re-edited by Dr. Morris, is held by the latter to have been written about 1320. Sir Gawayne was Arthur’s nephew, and figures in the early stories as one of the purest models of knighthood, though very differently represented by the author of Tristram and subsequent writers, including even Malory, who drew from French sources. About the middle of the fifteenth century Henry Lonelich translated into English verse the prose narrative of the sacred Grail, and possibly this may have led Malory, the author of the more famous Morte d’Arthur, to produce, as he did about the year 1470, the remainder of the romances connected with the Holy Grail in English prose. It was one of the earliest books printed by William Caxton (1485), and certainly one of the finest examples of the prose of the pre-Elizabethan period.

Sir Thomas Malory compiled it out of the French versions of “Merlin,” “Launcelot,” “Tristram,” the “Queste du Saint Graal,” and the “Mort Artur.” His own postscript at the end of the book fitly describes its scope in very quaint terms. It runs as follows:—

Heere is the end of the whole booke of King Arthur and of his noble Knights of the round table, that when they were whole together there was ever an hundred and fortie. Also heere is the end of the death of King Arthur. I pray you all, gentlemen and gentlewomen, that read this book of King Arthur and his Knights from the beginning to the ending, pray for me while I am alive, that God send mee good deliverance.

And when I am dead, I pray you all pray for my soule. For this booke was finished the ninth yeare of the raigne of King Edward the Fourth, by Sir Thomas Maleor, Knight, as Jesu help me for his great might, as hee is the servant of Jesu both day and night.

Thus endeth this noble and joyous booke entitled La Mort Darthur, notwithstanding it treateth of the birth, life, and acts of the said King Arthur and of his noble Knights of the round table, and their mervailous enquests and adventures, the achieving of the holy sancgreall, and in the end the dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all.

As literature, this work of Malory is very interesting, and has been frequently edited within the last hundred years.

Beyond the powerful influences exerted by the Celtic romances, there falls to be noticed another way in which the Gaelic genius is believed to have affected and even moulded English poetry in the later Middle Ages. It is well known that down to Chaucer’s time English poetry was characterised chiefly by alliteration. Scarcely any authors attempted rhyme. And those, like Layamon, who tried to combine both, often seem to achieve neither the one nor the other. They failed to produce the real effect of metre. But after Chaucer, rhyme gradually supplanted alliteration. And it is held by various learned authorities that this is due to Celtic influence. The Celts first invented rhyme, they say, and in proof of this it is shown that they used it centuries before the English or any other western nation. “Outside of Wales and Ireland,” says Dr. Hyde, “there probably exists no example in a European vernacular language of rhymed poetry older than the ninth century.”

And Matthew Arnold, in a footnote to his Study of Celtic Literature, asserts that “rhyme,—the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its romantic element,—rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts.” And in this opinion these litterateurs are supported by the earlier testimony of great philologists like Zeuss and Count Nigra.

From the time of John Barbour, too, it is recognised that the bards of Scotland who wrote English poetry have been influenced in various ways not peculiar to their own contemporaries in England, by their connection with and descent from the Celt. Stopford Brooke mentions three elements of Scottish poetry that he regards as distinctly Celtic contributions. These are, first, the love of wild nature for its own sake—the passionate, close, and poetical observation and description of natural scenery, which is not found in the poetry of England till near the end of the eighteenth century; second, the love of colour so characteristic of Gaelic and Cymric authorship; and, third, the wittier, more rollicking humour, which contrasts with the Teutonic humour, which has its root in sadness. The humour of Dunbar is thus as widely different from that of Chaucer as the humour of Burns is from that of Cowper, or of a modern Irishman is from that of a modern Englishman.

But if there is really humour in the ancient Celtic literature it is entirely unconscious. Many passages tickle our risible faculties now, and we smile as we read some of the narratives, such as the fight between Queen Meve’s bull and his opponent in the old saga, but this is because of the very wealth of the Gaelic imagination and the mendacity of its exaggerations. It is questionable if the original Gael, the slave of such a powerful fancy, saw anything in his own extravagant descriptions to laugh at. More likely he perpetrated these fictions quite as unconsciously as his Irish descendant of to-day perpetrates his bulls.

All the same it is quite conceivable that from this early tendency to be carried off the ground by flights of fancy, the Scottish sense of humour, conspicuous in the poets from pre-Reformation times, may have developed.

That Celtic literature revelled from a remote antiquity in nature and love of colour is very manifest from the earliest Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton tales. Take, for instance, the following description of Olwen from the Welsh:—

The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds and rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the three-mewed falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses. Whoso beheld her was filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprang up wherever she trod.

The old sagas and romances are full of this sort of vision. It was impossible that such Celtic compositions could exist without imparting some of their charm, their brilliant colouring, their observation, and delight in nature and the unknown, to English literature. Naturally, Scottish poetry first felt this influence. But the wonder is that English literature as a whole was so late in being permeated therewith. When it did enter, it effected a mighty change both in the style and subject matter.

Beyond rhyme, love of nature, love of colour, and a certain type of humour, which we have just glanced at, Matthew Arnold recognised three elements which are in a manner distinct from these. “If I were asked,” he says, “where English poetry got these three things—its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and vivid way—I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.”...

“The Celt’s quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wildflowers are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature’s own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now, of this delicate magic Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it—the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,—that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,—that the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature—her weird power and her fairy charm.” What better example of this distinction between the magic and beauty of nature might be wished for than the following beautiful conception? “Well,” says Math to Gwydion, “we will seek, I and thou, to form a wife for him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect.”

Shakespeare, in handling nature, while he had the Greek touch, is also credited with sometimes striking the more exquisite and inimitable Celtic note. Thus:—

But we must pass on to the second period, the period after the Forty-five, to see a more abundant entrance of the Celtic elements into English literature as a whole. It might be detected in isolated instances, but during the latter half of the eighteenth century both prose and poetry were influenced by Celtic in a very marked degree.

Collin’s ode on the “Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” was perhaps the first contribution after the memorable Rising to herald the new time. If we except Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” it is almost the earliest inroad by an English poet into the wild and romantic regions beyond the Grampians.

After him came Gray, with a similar interest in Celtic lore. His well-known poem “The Bard” appeared in 1755. This ode is founded on a tradition current in Wales that Edward I., when he completed the conquest of that country, decreed the death of all the bards who should fall into his power. The original argument of this fine production is set down in the author’s commonplace book as follows:—

The army of Edward I., as they march through a deep valley, are suddenly stopped by the appearance of a venerable figure seated on the summit of an inaccessible rock, who, with a voice more than human, reproaches the king with all the misery and desolation which he had brought on his country; foretells the misfortunes of the Norman race, and, with prophetic spirit, declares that all his cruelty shall never extinguish the noble ardour of poetic genius in this island; and that men shall never be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly censure tyranny and oppression. His song ended, he precipitates himself from the mountain, and is swallowed up by the river that rolls at its foot.

Gray deviated a little from this original sketch, but the above is, in the main, the gist of the poem.

In addition to “The Bard,” Gray translated into English verse fragments of the “Gododin” and “The Triumphs of Owen” from Mr. Evans’s Specimens of the Welsh Poetry, published in London in 1764.

After Gray came the renowned Macpherson, representing the very soul of the Celtic genius, and Europe listened surprised as it felt the thrill of the new notes which he struck from the old instrument—the passionate, penetrating regret, the deep melancholy, the sensitiveness to the powers of nature. In his Ossian we are made to feel “the desolation of dusky moors, the solemn brooding of the mists on the mountains, the occasional looking through them of sun by day, of moon and stars by night, the gloom of dark cloudy Bens or cairns, with flashing cataracts, the ocean with its storms.” And when the wind shrieks and the elements do frightful battle, there is the eerie sensation of ghostly presences hovering around the warriors on the hillside or out on the ocean.

And through all the sadness of sorrow and the clang of conflict there break gleams of tender light and soothing reflection, as, for example:—

Come, thou beam that art lonely, from watching in the night! The squally winds are around thee, from all their echoing hills. Red, over my hundred streams, are the light-covered paths of the dead. They rejoice on the eddying winds, in the season of the night. Dwells there no joy in song, white hand of the harps of Lutha? Awake the voice of the string; roll my soul to me. It is a stream that has failed. Malvina, pour the song.

I hear thee from thy darkness in Selma, thou that watchest lonely by night! Why didst thou withhold the song from Ossian’s failing soul? As the falling brook to the ear of the hunter, descending from his storm-covered hill, in a sunbeam rolls the echoing stream, he hears and shakes his dewy locks: such is the voice of Lutha to the friend of the spirits of heroes. My swelling bosom beats high. I look back on the days that are past. Come, thou beam that art lonely, from watching in the night!

No wonder these plaintive notes struck the heart of modern times with overpowering emotion, awakening a sympathy with the past, and opening a new avenue of vision into the life of nature. Englishmen especially, who had hitherto beheld the bleak mountains, the moors, and the naked rocks with feeling almost akin to aversion, began to see a hidden beauty and majesty in these sublime and lonely objects. And a passion for nature gradually crept into English poetry. Thomson had made a beginning in this direction with his Seasons as early as 1726–30, but it cannot be said that he quite struck the notes which afterwards so moved and enchanted the readers of Macpherson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson.

The new Ossian had a wonderful mastery of style, rhythmical flow, pathos, and sometimes even sublimity of language, though it can scarcely be said that he represented the realistic force and vivid exactness of the Gaelic he sought to imitate in his English style. Of his Fragments, when they appeared, the poet Gray wrote: “I was so struck, so extasié with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make a thousand enquiries.” And he adds, “In short, this man is the very demon of poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages.”

English poets and litterateurs from this time found a new well-spring of inspiration in the ancient Celtic fountain thus wondrously and unexpectedly tapped. And so we find men like Pennant, Dr. Johnson, Boswell, and numerous other interested travellers and historians, making pilgrimages through the Highlands, with the view of observing for themselves the old life surviving there, and of gathering up materials for literary work. Each of the above-named, well known in the pages of English literature, have contributed books which are now classic authorities on the social customs and conditions of the Highlands at the time of their visit, and thus helped to carry a stream of Celtic thought and feeling into the prose of the period, which was afterwards more fully developed by the great magician, Sir Walter Scott.

Meanwhile the new elements had entered into the warp and woof of English poetry, and may be traced in all the great masters of the period—Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Byron, and their numerous contemporaries. Blake was so enthusiastic that he is generally regarded as an imitator of Macpherson, and Southey, going even farther back, edited, with introduction, in 1817, the Morte d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory before mentioned.

Yet more characteristically Celtic as a poet than all these, because himself an Irishman, was Thomas Moore, author of Lalla Rookh, an Indian tale; and Irish Melodies. It is with these latter lyrics that we are here most concerned, because they exhibit so much the quality of the Gaelic muse in English verse. Take, for example, the following delightful pieces—euphonious, melancholy, and touching—so full of the Ossianic sadness and Celtic sentiment for the past, and for the dead heroes:—

This one, too, sounds a similar note. It is entitled “After the Battle”:—

From Moore it is but a step to the great master-hand of Celtic romance, the heroic Sir Walter Scott, who has done more than any modern writer to popularise the literature of the Gael, and to make the Gael and his country interesting to Englishmen. With his magic power he threw a halo over the land and the people, and made their past live again in his enchanting pages. What a world of forgotten romance he brought to light alike in his prose and his poetry! In the Lady of the Lake, Tales of a Grandfather, Waverley, and Rob Roy, we have Celtic life and tradition depicted in a way which has vastly influenced and enriched our English literature, besides showing the gate to subsequent authors into a field near at hand, into which English imagination, much less English sympathy and literary art, had hardly as yet found its way. What Wordsworth in England did for the Lake District, Scott in Scotland did for the Highlands, fostering the love for scenery which the English poets had already begun to awaken.

Yet, more than any of his predecessors who cultivated the poetry of natural description, Scott carried into English literature the Celtic imagination and sentiment, the Celtic magic and wistful veneration for the past, which made him the wizard of modern literary romance.

The enthusiasm aroused by Macpherson, and even more by himself, had not died down before another great period of Celtic influence arrived—the last, and, in certain respects, the most potent and extensive of all. As early as 1842, the Morte d’Arthur and some other pieces of Tennyson appeared, but it was in 1859, contemporary with the Celtic renaissance at home and abroad, that he published The Idylls of the King. Founding on the old Arthurian romances, as told in English by Sir Thomas Malory, Tennyson depicts anew the more picturesque characters and incidents, idealising them in his own inimitable poetic style. So we have, in twelve books,—

The charm of these Idylls, which rank among the Poet-Laureate’s best work, may be gathered from the opening passage, describing the coming of Arthur:—

This, surely, puts us back into the old days. But “Arthur heard the call and came; and Guinevere stood by the castle walls to watch him pass.” The Celtic ideal of woman and the Celtic pursuit of the unknown and mysterious, and the delicacy and passion that characterise the early romances, pervade these nineteenth century Idylls throughout.

It is interesting to compare the Passing of Arthur, for example, as recorded by Layamon, with Tennyson’s more elaborate and developed idealisation. According to the former, these were the words of the king’s dying speech to Constantine:—

I will fare to Avalun to the fairest of all maidens, to Arganté the Queen, an elf most fair, and she shall make my wounds all sound; make me all whole with healing draughts. And afterwards I will come again to my kingdom and dwell with the Britons with mickle joy! Even with the words there approached from the sea a little short boat floating with the waves; and two women therein wondrously formed; and they took Arthur anon and bare him quickly and laid him softly down, and forth they gan depart. Then was it accomplished that Merlin whilom said, that mickle care should come of Arthur’s departure. The Britons believe yet that he is alive, and dwelleth in Avalun with the fairest of all elves, and the Britons even yet expect when Arthur shall return.

Compare with this the appearance from the wave of Tennyson’s wondrous barge with its fair occupants, and the famous farewell speech Arthur made before setting out. After the well-known passage beginning, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” he goes on:—

Sir Bedivere was thus the sole survivor of the Knights of the Round Table. In the final battle all that remained of them perished except the king himself and two knights, who escaped wounded. But first one and then the other passed, dying from his hurt. With what a halo of colour and real Celtic enchantment poets and romancers have covered up the last grim tragedy of the wounded knight watching his master, the royal Arthur die, after all the rest were fallen and gone, and the Round Table was from henceforth to be but a memory.

Macaulay must have inherited the Celtic power of pictorial detail and vivid colouring, though he might not willingly acknowledge it. Where did he get that brilliant turn for style and those suggestive tricks of lively fancy if not from his Celtic ancestry?

After him came three Celtic enthusiasts of great literary standing, who put Macaulay’s apathy towards the Gaelic and Cymric tradition to the blush. These were Matthew Arnold; John Campbell Shairp, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and Principal of the United College, St. Andrews; and Professor Blackie of Edinburgh.

Over the first, the apostle of culture, and otherwise dispassionate critic, the Celtic past undoubtedly cast a spell. The finding of its literature seemed to have influenced him in a similar manner as the hoving of a new planet into his ken thrills the eager astronomer. And we have his personal contribution in his well-known Study of Celtic Literature (1867), a book which, like Renan’s French essay, has done much to enhance the reputation and influence of our ancient heritage in modern times. It was through his strenuous advocacy that the Celtic chair which Professor Rhys now occupies in Oxford was established.

Principal Shairp published Kilmahoe: a Highland Pastoral, with other Poems, in 1864; his Poetic Interpretation of Nature in 1877; and Aspects of Poetry in 1881. These books revel in the Celtic sentiment, its melancholy, and love of nature. Their author exhibited the same spirit of admiration for the Gaelic muse that Matthew Arnold did for the Cymric.

In one of his Highland lyrics, entitled, “A Dream of Glen Sallach,” Shairp showed that he could be overpowered by the gloom pervading the land of the heather as much as any Gael:—

And in “The Forest of Sli’-Gaoil” he muses thus of other days:—

Professor Blackie in later life had a similar passionate regard for Celtic literature, and not only did much by poetic renderings into English from the Gaelic, and in other ways, to introduce English readers to the best treasures of the Gaelic past, but also, like Matthew Arnold, was instrumental in founding a Celtic chair, namely, that in Edinburgh University.

Of novelists who, like Sir Walter Scott, have drawn their themes and inspiration from Celtic sources, there has been a splendid succession from the days of Tennyson till now. Among others, besides the veteran Dr. George Macdonald, we may mention William Black, Robert Buchanan, and Robert Louis Stevenson, all three now dead, but recognised in their time as men of considerable literary genius. Black’s descriptions, his scenes and incidents and characters in those graphic stories laid in the West Highlands, are well known, and are as full of nature as Stevenson’s thrilling tales of Kidnapped and Catriona are of Celtic passion and adventure. Buchanan’s Child of Nature is now perhaps not so well known as these others, but the plot is laid in the extreme north-west corner of Sutherlandshire, and interprets Gaelic life and character with wonderful verve and insight. All the three writers seem to have caught the magic glamour of the North, and to have been influenced in their style by the Celtic elements.

Of living novelists to carry on the succession we have still a distinguished contingent. Besides names, less familiar, the following have achieved a wide reputation, namely, Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren), Neil Munro, Fiona Macleod, Katherine Tynan, and W. B. Yeats. These writers are distinctly Celtic in style, idiom, and sentiment. They have all the passion, yearning, imagination, and emotion of the Gael, combined with his wonderful gift of story-telling and of local colour.

There are other writers of distinction, such as Andrew Lang, Dr. Douglas Hyde, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Dr. Sigerson, Dr. Todhunter, Stopford A. Brooke, Edmund Jones, T. W. Rolleston, Miss Eleanor Hull, Miss Jessie L. Weston, Miss Goodrich Frere, and Miss Emily Lawless, who have done much of later years to popularise the Celtic lore and literature, and to extend its sway over English letters.

Through books of history and philology which have been issuing from the press in a steady flow for decades past, the tide of Celtic influence still continues to rise and permeate every department of English literature. So that from that little spring we saw welling up in the fifth century, and which at first yielded but a few words of Celtic import to incipient English, we have been able to trace a continuous stream, gaining in volume and momentum through the centuries, until now it is like a mighty Missouri which mingles its waters with the broader and more potent Mississippi, to be carried to the great ocean of human intercourse, and lose itself in the common good.