The Celts in primitive Europe—Advent in British Isles—Two branches—Observations of Cæsar and Tacitus—Main facts of Celtic progress on the Continent—A vast empire—Interview with Alexander the Great—Colony in Galatia—Cup of conquest full—Disintegration—The scattered remnants—Recent statistics—The ancient Celts as seen through Greek and Roman eyes—Literary awakening—Ogam writings—First men of letters—Earliest written Gaelic now extant—Modern linguistic discovery—The place of Celtic in the Aryan group.

Emerson, looking forth from the new time on the nations of Europe, gave pen to the reflection, “The Celts are of the oldest blood in the world. Some peoples are deciduous or transitory. Where are the Greeks? Where the Etrurians? Where the Romans? But the Celts are an old family of whose beginning there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still more remote in the future, for they have endurance and productiveness—a hidden and precarious genius.”

A sweeping statement withal, yet the thoughtful finding of an eminently studious and dispassionate mind.

When the curtain lifts over primitive Europe, and authentic history first begins, the Celts are already there, and loom formidable in the heart of the Continent. Not the earliest inhabitants by any means; archæology points to anterior races. These the ethnologists designate according to the shape of their heads and supposed colour of their hair. Their remains have been found in caves, and in what are known to science as the Neolithic or Stone Age barrows. And they present types of humanity widely differing from the succeeding so-called Aryans.^[1] But beyond their material survivals, and the people who were supposed to have been descended from them, there is absolutely no record of these vanished races. They belong to prehistoric times.

So do the Celts in great part, but unlike their predecessors they have emerged in history, and projected themselves on its pages to this day. They have stepped out of the impenetrable haze, and appear at the opening of the written drama of Europe.

History finds them for the first time located about the upper reaches of the Danube, in the lands corresponding to modern Bavaria, Wurtemburg, Baden, and the country drained by the Maine to the east of the Rhine. The idea of an ingress from Asia has lately been abandoned. Research seems to have effectively exploded it.^[2]

They were barbarians from our point of view, not savages; not civilised, but apparently a good stage onward from earlier types. It was they who gave names to many of the rivers and mountains of Europe—“names which are poems,” says Matthew Arnold, “and which imitate the pure voices of nature.”

Hyperboreans they seemed to have been called by the original Greeks, but since the time of Hecatæus and Herodotus, that is, from about 500 B.C., they came to be known to the classic writers as κελται or κελτοι—a name which at that early period the Greeks applied indiscriminately to all the people of north and west Europe who were not Iberians.

To them, as well as to the Romans, all that stretch of the Continent appeared to be occupied mainly by κελτοι. And though the Germans lived from time immemorial beyond them in the north, not till the first century B.C. did the Romans discover that they were a different people. Cæsar himself was one of the earliest to observe and chronicle the fact.

But there were reasons for this apparent ubiquity of the Celts. Apart from their chronic unrest and frequent migrations, we can well understand why the Germans appeared merged in them. The Germans were early deprived of their independence, and held in slavish subordination till they recovered their freedom about 300 B.C. For centuries before that date, conqueror and conquered apparently lived under a common regime, obeying the same chiefs, and fighting in the same armies, though generally in the relation of dominant masters and subject slaves. In this way they even came to have many words in common, as their respective languages show.

At what time the Celts entered Gaul, Britain, and Ireland is a question unhappily beyond the knowledge of man. The seventh century B.C., or even the tenth as the Irish tradition maintains, is given as an approximate date. But of this there is no authentic record. Nor yet of a second immigration assumed to have followed in the third century B.C.

That there were two such invasions of Britain with a considerable interval between them is one of the pet theories of philology. For two branches of an originally parent stock may be traced, known as the Gadelic and the Brittonic, or more recently as the Q and P groups. The one includes the Irish, Manx, and Gaelic-speaking peoples, and was the earlier to arrive; the other embraces the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, who came later.

This linguistic fact might be represented tabularly, thus:—

The main difference between those two branches is, that in Gadelic the original guttural of the Aryan tongue came gradually to be c with the sound k, ogam qu, and that in Brittonic it became p. So we say:—

Such a distinction points to a great change from the common speech of earlier Celtic times. It existed prior to the Christian era, and is still strikingly in evidence. Edward Lhuyd, the illustrious Welsh antiquary, writing in the early part of the eighteenth century, noted that there were scarcely any words in the Irish that began with p, beyond what were borrowed from Latin or some other language. So much was this the case, that in an ancient alphabetical vocabulary which he had beside him, the letter p was entirely omitted. Other instances might be given. For example, in O’Reilly’s Irish Dictionary, out of upwards of 700 pages, only twelve are occupied with that letter; and when we come to examine the most recent Gaelic collection of words—the etymological dictionary of Dr. Macbain—we find about 270 beginning with p out of a total of well over 7000; and even of these, the majority are derived or borrowed from Norse or English. There is a MS. of the eighteenth century in the Laing collection of Edinburgh University, which puts the case succinctly, when in the sections of what promised to be a good Gaelic grammar, it observes that of old no word, except exotic words, began in Gaelic with a p. Fastening on so characteristic a distinction Professor Rhys, some years ago, decided to call the Brittonic the P, and the Gadelic the Q group, as the more simple and fundamental classification.

Thus far philology helps to differentiate between the two branches, and points to a remote advent of the Gael in Britain.

But when we turn to history we find there is nothing definite on this most attractive subject till Cæsar arrives and makes personal observation. Speaking of the south—for he had not penetrated the northern parts—he tells us that he found two races in possession: one in the interior, which considered itself indigenous; the other on the sea-coast, roving adventurers from the Continent who arrived later. Tacitus, writing nearly a century and a half after Cæsar, namely, about 82 A.D., practically confirms Cæsar’s report of a double occupation, and adds the further interesting details, that the one race was dark complexioned and had curly hair, while the other, resembling the Gauls, had red hair and were tall of stature. In the eighth century A.D. we know, on the authority of Bede, that there were in these islands five written languages, viz. those of the Angles, the Brythons, the Scottis, the Picts, and the Latins, the first four^[3] of which were spoken. It is the ever-puzzling yet fascinating work of philology and ethnology to trace the origin and exact racial connection of these—a work which hitherto has proved as elusive as the finding of the North Pole. Who are the dark complexioned race of the South? and who the Picts of the North? are questions of perennial interest to the experts.

But though early British and German history is so elusive, we are on sure ground with the main facts of Celtic progress on the Continent from the fifth century B.C. Authentic history then opens with the advent of the classical writers just at the time when the Celts were entering upon a series of conquests which for the next 200 years made them the dominant race in Europe.^[4] It is needless to follow their various migrations, even if it were possible. As their territories became congested on the Danube, they sent forth horde after horde of conquering tribes who surged every way. Now westward for the most part, till, in the graphic language of Galgacus, uttered centuries after, “there was now no nation beyond—nothing save the waves and the rocks” (Nulla jam gens ultra; nihil nisi fluctus et saxa), then, like the back-rushing tides, they receded eastwards.

“Tumults,” the Romans called these irrepressible outbursts, and most felicitously too, for they were the terror of Europe.

A cursory glance at some of the more famous of their invasions suffices to show the restless energy of the Celts and their far-reaching conquests.

From Gaul, where they appear to have established themselves north of the Garonne and about the Seine and Loire, the hungry tribes made a dash for Spain, shortly before 500 B.C., and wrested the peninsula from the hands of the Phœnicians. One hundred and twenty years later North Italy shared the same fate. Surging through the passes of the Alps they overthrew the Etruscans on their own ground in the great battle of Allia, 390 B.C., and annexed their territory. Flushed with the victory they pressed forward, and within three days stormed and sacked the town of Rome itself. Indeed, it is with this momentous incursion that authentic Roman history begins.

One more mighty invasion of the East, and the Illyrians along the Danube are vanquished, thus rendering the conquerors masters of a vast territory extending from that river and the Adriatic to the Atlantic, and bounded on the north by the Rhine and Mid-Germany, and on the south by Mid-Italy and Mid-Spain, and including the British Isles—a magnificent empire rivalling that of Alexander or of Cæsar in their palmy days. Goldsmith’s lines might well apply to them—

So formidable, indeed, were the Celts during the period of their ascendency that it served the purpose of the classic nations—Greeks and Romans—to keep the peace with them as best they could, and even to play them off against their own hereditary foes. And so the expansive tribes were for the most part on friendly terms with both, especially with the Greeks. We have an account in Strabo of an interview which Alexander the Great had with their ambassadors. It is given on the authority of Ptolemy, his general. The young potentate knew well the advantage of cultivating good fellowship with his powerful neighbours, and when the tribes of the Adriatic sent delegates he received them with all due courtesy and respect.

While they were drinking, says the general, Alexander asked them what was the object of their greatest fear, thinking they would say himself. But the imaginative Celts had quite other views. They feared no man. One thing only alarmed them, they replied, and that was lest the heavens should one day fall and crush them. Still, they added, that they valued the friendship of such a man as he was above everything.

“How vainglorious these Celts are!” muttered the young autocrat to his courtiers, a little piqued, perhaps, at their rejoinder. Yet, if such were really the object of their superstitious dread, the promise they made was not without its own grim cogency. “If we fulfil not our engagement,” they said, “may the sky falling upon us crush us, may the earth opening swallow us, may the sea overflowing its borders drown us.”

With Alexander they kept their pledge, but in 280 B.C., when another king ruled Macedonia, they over-ran his territories, slew him in battle, and pillaged the temple of Delphi itself—an act of vandalism so shocking to the Greeks that it roused their patriotism to such a pitch that they were able to repulse the enemy in the neighbouring gorges.

Thus compelled to evacuate Greece, the Celts invaded Asia Minor in 278 B.C., and established there the well-known colony of Galatia. It was to their descendants that St. Paul addressed his trenchant epistle, and the words, “O foolish Galatians, who hath druided you?”

For six centuries after they continued to speak their language there, so that St. Paul must have heard one dialect at least of the ancient tongue.

It may surprise students of the classics to learn that the Celts claim Hercules as one of their own potentates. In an old Gaelic MS. in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, we find the renowned hero figuring thus: “Ercoill mac Amphitrionis, mhic Antestis, mhic Andlis, mhic Mitonis, mhic Festime, mhic Athol, mhic Gregais, mhic Gomer, mhic Jafed, mhic Noe”—a truly wonderful genealogy, tracing him up to Noah through the Cymric Gomer.

The Greek version of the myth is interesting. It tells how Hercules, on his expedition against Geryon, turned aside into Gaul and married there a handsome Gaulish lady, by whom he had a son, Galates. This Galates, surpassing all his countrymen in strength and prowess, led the way to conquest, and exercising a wide sway, his territory and subjects eventually came to be named after him—the one Galatia, the other Galatæ.

In whatever way the classic story originated, it is matter of history that after the Celtic invasion of Greece, Galatæ became the popular Greek name for the people hitherto known as κελτοι, even as Galli was the favourite Roman one.

But already, before the Greek repulse, the Celtic cup of conquest was full, and their vast empire began to crumble and disintegrate. The first great shock was given by the revolt of their born thralls, the Germans, about 300 B.C. In the struggle for independence these recovered their liberty and big stretches of territory. Besides falling out with the Greeks, the flurried tribes in that wild consternation of defeat came to blows with the Romans also, who in two different battles got the victory over them. Forced to ally themselves with former foes, now with the Etruscans, again with the Carthaginians, the Celts still fought desperately, but all in vain. Their dominion was doomed. And as if to hasten the swift debacle, the various sections of the same great people attacked and dispossessed each other. It was probably in the pressure of those times that the Brittonic invaders surged into Britain and elbowed their Gaelic kinsmen into more straitened circumstances; for all the continental Celts were simultaneously in the throes of a lamentable dispersion. Reverse followed reverse with singular fatality. Every attempt to redeem their desperate fortunes seemed to fail. “They went to the war, but they always fell,” said their own sad bard afterwards, summing up in one terse antithesis the history of their collapse.

The failure was crushing and irretrievable. They lost Spain, they lost the north of Italy, they lost Gaul, and subsequently Britain.

The story of Cæsar’s conquests needs no rehearsal. By 80 A.D. all Britain south of the Firth of Forth figured as a Roman province.

Meantime the Celtic dialects of Gaul and Spain were gradually being superseded by the Latin, and even the laws, habits, and civil administration of the people were becoming Roman, until in the third century of our era scarcely a vestige of the ancient régime remained outside of the British Isles and Brittany, except to the south of the latter, where the influence of the discarded dialect on the adopted Latin might be traced.^[5]

In Britain the Romanising process was suddenly arrested by the hasty departure of the conqueror; and in the helpless abandonment that ensued the Saxons found an open door. The same fate that they had themselves formerly inflicted on their kinsmen now overtook the Britons, who were hustled in great numbers into the wilds of Cornwall, of Wales, and Strathclyde. And the last stage of the driving west remained to be accomplished in the case of the Irish, when the Anglo-Celts arrived in the twelfth century.

Since the great debacle of their race the Celtic remnants have continued to speak one or other of the dialects bequeathed from their ancestors. Five of these are living tongues. Apart from the number that speak them abroad, it is estimated there are upwards of 3,000,000 people in Brittany and the British Isles whose mother tongue is Celtic. The distribution and proportion, according to the latest available statistics,^[6] are full of interest, in view of the long struggle for existence of the language and people, and the extraordinary vitality they have evinced in defying the tooth of time. These facts may be crisply tabulated thus:—

A sadly dwindling minority are these fag-ends of once so mighty a race. There can be no doubt that we see the isolated parts gradually expiring on the horizon, and with more accelerated speed within the last few decades than for centuries before. Modern industrialism now woos them away from the strongholds of their own characteristic life, and the separate units get absorbed in the common national life and the common civilisation. Numbers of them—of the Irish especially—are still seeking a home, following the hereditary instincts of their ancestors, and hiving westwards to America, only to lose their distinctive Celtic existence and to be merged in the larger life of that great nation.

The facts are sufficiently patent, but to show the rapidity with which the disintegration is going on it may be mentioned that since 1851, 3,925,133 persons have emigrated from Ireland alone—a number larger than that of all the remaining Celtic-speaking population in Europe. In 1899 the number was 43,760; in 1900, 47,107; in 1901, 39,870, the vast majority of whom were from the western Irish-speaking provinces; and, as in the depopulation of the Highlands, it is largely a drain of the best blood, the land being left in the hands of the old and the feeble.

There are those who still write and dream of laying the foundations of a new Celtic civilisation, but in view of the present subtle and swift dissolution it is hard to know what they mean, unless indeed it be a leavening of the existing civilisation by a recrudescence of the Celtic spirit and Celtic aspirations.

In the main the race has already become fused with the population of Europe, disappearing as Gallo-Grecians in the east, as Celt-Iberians in Spain, as Gallo-Franks and Anglo-Celts in the north-west—all but the Celtic fringes that are shedding their past.

Thus far the history, and from what we have said it will appear that the Celts first emerge in literature in the fifth century B.C., from which time the classical writers make frequent, though generally short and meagre allusions to them. Dr. W. Z. Ripley,^[8] one of the latest authorities on ethnology, would discount their evidence as of little value for the purposes of modern scientific research into race origins and affinities, yet, nevertheless, so far as it goes, it is highly interesting and important.

The earliest of all the Greek authors to mention the Celts, if we except the geographer Hecatæus (520 B.C.), is Herodotus (484–425?), who twice refers to them in his history as dwelling at the sources of the Danube and bordering on the Kunesii, the westermost inhabitants of Europe. Xenophon, at a later period (390), speaking of them as mercenaries with Dionysius of Syracuse in 368 B.C., remarks that “the ships brought Keltoi and Iberes.” Plato, Ephorus, Pytheas, and Scylax all furnish hints in the same century. Aristotle also knew about this extraordinary people, who, he was told, feared “neither earthquake nor floods,” living in a country so cold that even the ass did not thrive there, yet putting little clothing on their children. It appears he had also heard that they had sacked Rome. Timæus popularised the new name Galatæ in bringing into notice Galatia, which, he avers, is named after “Galates, son of Cyclops and Galatia.”

From this time onward we get fuller details of the Celtic character, manners, and customs. And to show the number and variety of authorities from which information may be gleaned, the following may be selected: Polybius, a Greek writer of the second century B.C., and Posidonius of the first. Julius Cæsar and his contemporary Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, a geographer of the early part of the first century A.D., Virgil, Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, Dion Cassius, Pliny, Ptolemy, and Ammianus Marcellinus, the latter bringing the list down towards the end of the fourth century, when the Roman Empire in its own turn began to break up, and the Gaels were at length prepared to enter the arena of literature and speak for themselves.

It is outwith the scope of this chapter to go into many of the interesting details which these various authors furnish, but a few of those which astonished the writers may be noted in passing, such as, the Celts’ intellectual cleverness; their numbers and great size; the magnificence of their funerals, and their belief in the immortality of the soul. Their cities were forests, and though otherwise cleanly in their eating, lion-like, they were wont to take up huge joints and gnaw at them. Other features of striking peculiarity were their figurative, exaggerated language; the functions of bards and druids; their chariots and excellent horsemanship; the fierceness and noise of their first onset in battle; their readiness to be disheartened by reverse; their astounding clothes,—dyed tunics, flowered with various colours, flaming and fantastic, striped cloaks buckled on their shoulders, and breeches. Their chiefs generally appeared with a retinue of followers. Of old, the Celts devoted themselves to plundering other people’s countries. The heads of their fallen enemies they cut off and hung to their horses’ manes; they were warlike, passionate, and always ready for fighting; otherwise simple, frank, hospitable to strangers, but vain, quarrelsome, fickle, and ever prone to waste their strength on personal feuds and factions. Such were some of the curious traits and customs of our Celtic progenitors as seen through Greek and Roman eyes.

Scarcely had the Romans finally abandoned Britain than the Celts enter upon a new rôle. They annex the Roman script, the Roman language for literary work, and the Roman art of writing. And thus equipped, they proceed to produce a literature of their own in Latin and Gaelic. The wonder is that with their natural quickness and thirst for knowledge they did not achieve a record in this direction before.

When we reflect on the other great nations of antiquity, we find that they generally had a literature of some kind, written down, if not in books, then on skins or slabs and in temples. The Egyptians had their “Book of the Dead,” the Indians their “Rig-veda,” the Persians their “Zend-avesta,” the Chinese and Hebrews their “Sacred Books,” the Greeks and Romans their classics, and we naturally ask, “What had the Celts in the zenith of their power?” say between 500 and 300 B.C. No writing at all that we know of. At this day only a few inscriptions remain in the Gaulish language of Cæsar’s time and later, but nothing earlier. These nomadic warrior populations may have had their bardic compositions and tales floating by oral tradition, but we have no evidence that they developed a literature, though some of them may have known Greek letters.

It is to the insular Gaels, to those of Ireland and Scotland in the fifth and sixth centuries of our era, that we have to look for the early beginnings of Celtic literature. The Irish first showed signs of a rude awakening to activity in this direction. They invented a system of writing peculiar to themselves, simple and ingenious, and good enough for rough inscriptions on stones, but too cumbrous for the needs of literature.

Their earliest records are to be found in this Ogam script, which consists of a number of short lines drawn straight or slanting, either above, below, or through a long stem-line. Thus—

represents the letters h, d, t, c, qu, being the first letters of the first five numerals in Gaelic, h’aon, dha, tri, ceithir, coig; the last in Manx is queig; in Irish cuig; and in Latin quinque.

The vowels are similarly represented, broad vowels, a, o, u; small vowels, e, i—

Over two hundred stones have been found inscribed with Ogam writing, most of them in the south-west of Ireland, from twenty to thirty in Wales and Devonshire, and ten in Scotland. The Book of Ballymote, a MS. of the fourteenth century, fortunately contains a key to some of these inscriptions, so that many of them have been read, though not all.

Who introduced this peculiar mode of writing? and when? are questions that have never yet been determined. Brash, who made personal inspection of most of the stones, was of opinion that they are of pre-Christian origin, whereas Dr. Graves has attempted to prove that they belong to a period between the fifth and seventh centuries A.D.

References to Ogam inscriptions are frequently met with in the earliest Celtic literature, and some examined contain grammatical forms alleged to be older than those of the most ancient MSS., and corresponding even with the archaic forms of the antique Gaulish monuments.

The Ogam used to be written on wood and stone, and it is not improbable that many of the genealogies and bits of legendary lore may have been handed down from generation to generation in this way, as well as by oral tradition.

It is with the great wave of Christian evangelisation that passed over Ireland and Scotland successively, through the labours of St. Patrick and St. Columba, that the use of the Roman script became widely general, and we trace the dawn of letters. Round the names of these two men there shines a lustre which the lapse of ages has failed to dim. They not only kindled the torch of a higher faith and purer life among their Celtic brethren, but they lighted also the lamp of literature, which has continued to burn with more or less radiance for 1500 years.

St. Patrick, as the earlier of the two, is really the Cædmon of Gaelic literature. Born in Scotland, probably, as the later critics think, at Old Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, he was, while yet a youth of sixteen, carried captive to Hiberio, and though he escaped after six years from his hard fate as his master’s thrall and feeder of cattle, his missionary zeal, new kindled, urged him to return as evangelist to the land of his former oppression. The visions of his early captivity, as he lay down to rest of nights near the cattle, remind us of Cædmon’s vision in the stable at Whitby, upwards of two hundred years after—a vision which issued in the birth of English literature, as did those of St Patrick in that of Gaelic.

And so the unassuming herd emerges as the first known writer of the ancient Celtic people, the first of whom we have any definite authentic knowledge.

Three literary compositions stand in his name, namely, his “Confession,” written in rugged Latin, his “Epistle to Coroticus,” in similar language and style, and the “Deer’s Cry,” a lorica or prayer in Gaelic. This hymn has always been regarded, and rightly too, as a gem of sacred song.

The religious and literary dawn that lit up Ireland in the fifth century reached Scotland in the sixth through the advent of the heroic Columba. He too, by unhappy circumstances driven over sea, lived an exile in “the land of his adoption tried,” and with even more brilliance and learning did for Scotland what St. Patrick did for Ireland. So that the school of Iona became for centuries after his death a centre of light and leading in religion and letters, not only for Scotland and Ireland, but also for many parts of Europe.

His own special contributions to literature include several beautiful poems in Gaelic and Latin, and many transcripts in Latin of parts of books of Scripture, such as the Cathrach, a copy of the Psalter believed to have been made while he was yet a student, and perhaps also the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells—two wonderful specimens of penmanship and early Celtic art. If these latter are not exactly the work of his own hands they belong at least to the Columban period, an era of great literary activity, which produced, among other well-known works, the Amra Choluimcille of Dallan Forgaill, Adamnan’s Life of Columba, and the Book of Deer.

It will thus be seen that the earliest written MSS. of the Celtic people are essentially a Christian literature, which ignored almost entirely the pagan traditions of the race in its effort to supersede them. But the atmosphere was heavy with these, and apparently from pre-Christian times there had come floating down by oral transmission a great mass of heroic saga which at length found written expression in the seventh or eighth century A.D. So that now to the purely Christian literature there was added the purely pagan, which much more faithfully reflected the characteristic flavour of the race, its strength, and its weakness, its facts, its fancies, and its foibles. Professing to go back to a remote antiquity, it is significant that the setting of this ancient saga is confined exclusively to these islands. None of the stories belong to Europe or the doings of the parent stock in its palmy days. As compared with the Christian, this pagan contribution is by far the more important from a literary point of view. Yet it must be borne in mind that though there are still extant in Ireland Celtic Latin MSS. which reach up to the time of St. Patrick and St. Columba, there is none existing which contains actual Gaelic writing prior to the eighth century.

Almost the only specimen of continuous prose written by the end of the eighth century now known to exist is a portion of a Gaelic sermon on temperance and self-denial from the text, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” This curious relic is in the town library of Cambray, in a MS. containing the canons of an Irish council held in 684. The MS., however, bears direct evidence that it was not written until about a century afterwards.

The earliest written Gaelic is contained in MSS. on the Continent, such as those at Milan, Cambray, Vienna, St. Gall, and other places. And even these are not books of saga, but generally Latin books with some Gaelic poems jotted on the leaf margins, or glosses, and other explanatory writing. There are a few such literary monuments also in the British Isles, containing ancient Gaelic. The Book of Armagh, for example, dates from 807, and in addition to vernacular notes, preserves the Latin “Confessions” of St. Patrick, copied, it is believed, from the apostle’s own autograph MS. The Book of Deer, almost equally venerable, with a Gaelic colophon, belongs to the same century. To its original contents were added in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Gaelic entries which are of uncommon philological and historical interest and value.

But setting aside these Latin books in which the Gaelic jottings are purely incidental and secondary, we need to come down as far as the eleventh century to reach the existing sources of the earliest written compositions in the native tongue. It is in such MSS. as the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, the Book of Hymns, and the other great MiddleAge gleanings of after days that we find the Patrician and Columban literature as well as the ancient sagas.

Till within very recent times the Celt had no idea that he was heir to such a vast literary inheritance as really exists. As in the olden times men sometimes buried their wealth to save it from the hands of ruthless foes, and, dying themselves or falling in the fray, lived not to indicate to others the site of their hid treasures, so it has happened in the case of Gaelic literature. Much of it perished at the hands of the enemy and the avenger. What was saved from the wreck of the more stormy and turbulent periods of our history owes its existence to-day very largely to concealment and neglect. And as the plough or the spade occasionally turns up an old stone cist, or a casket of ancient coins, or a canoe of primitive man, so the casual researches of antiquarians and scholars have brought to light a hidden mass of ancient writings which appear to have been scattered broadcast over Europe and the British Isles. These Gaelic relics are now jealously preserved in various countries, and within the last century have been made the subject of the most interested scrutiny by leading Continental and British philologists, with the result that they have thrown a welcome light on some of the darker problems of history, philology, and ethnology. For example, as late as the first quarter of last century few people had any idea that the Celtic populations were allied with the southern nations of Europe, or that their language had any connection whatever with the Romance and Teutonic tongues. One solitary scholar,^[9] indeed, threw out the hint as early as 1786, but offered no proof; and it remained a visionary hypothesis until the long list of documents reappearing one by one enabled scholars to establish the point beyond question, that linguistically the Celtic people are a branch of the great Aryan family, and thus closely allied with the Teutonic, and still more nearly with the Greek and the Latin peoples. Roughly, this relationship may be represented as under. The table is not meant to indicate race affinities, which it is very far indeed from doing, but simply to exhibit the affinities of language which modern philological studies have traced:—

It is this important and surprising discovery, that we are a part of a vast Indo-European family spread to the east over a great part of Asia, and to the west over the most of Europe including Russia, that has given such impetus to Celtic studies within recent years. The Gaelic has been found to have roots which go far down towards the parent stock. And its literature, therefore, is of the utmost value to all who seek to read the riddle of the past and to push back the horizons of knowledge beyond the age even of Herodotus, “the father of history.”

There is a fascination and refining influence in the study of the Greek and Roman classics, but for the man of large outlook and broad human sympathies there is much also to interest and attract in the literature of the Gael—so old, so weird, so fanciful.

Wordsworth, as he listened to the song of the Highland maid in the harvest field, felt the pathos of the past in that moving Gaelic product, and would fain learn its story. Hence his reverie—

That is just what they do; dealing with much brighter things too. For the spirit of the race is enshrined in these old writings, and the fortunes of the race in their history.

In the census of 1901 the schedule restricts the entries in the Gaelic column to persons over three years of age. According to the previous census the number of persons under three years of age amounted to 7½ per cent of the whole population. This must be taken into account in order to institute a fair comparison between the returns of the Gaelic-speaking population in 1891 and 1901.