French or German, for the plain and obvious reason that English is a composite language, which already contains French and German as its two principal ingredients; while the peculiar phenomenon of the change of the initial consonant by aspiration-of which anon-naturally adds another difficulty with which the Englishman and the classical scholar must specially grapple. But there is nothing here to shake a man of common pluck out of his composure, any more than in the formidable array of irregular verbs in Greek, or in Hebrew the mystery of the roots. It is imagination here, as in most other cases, that either creates or magnifies the difficulty; and the mother of imagination, as we had before to remark, is ignorance.

The cumulative impression made on an impartial mind by the statement of these objections is, that they are all alike unfounded, proceeding as they do either from the ignorance which assumes where it has never taken the trouble to inquire; or from the insolence of the many delighting in an unkindly way to lord it over the few; or from the prevalence of the vulgar fallacy that things near our feet are unworthy of being looked at, simply because they are near our feet, while things far away ought to be run after and searched into, chiefly because they are far away; or again, from the short-sighted notion common among self-styled practical men, that nothing is worthy of being done or known in the world which does not bring money directly into a man's pocket; or, finally, from that meagreness of soul which delights in the constant repetition of some bald monotony, and to which that rich variety of type in which nature luxuriates, acts as a fretful irritant rather than an elevating stimulus. With such considerations -it is scarcely necessary to observe-neither philosophy nor science, nor poetry nor good policy, has anything in common. Neither in any way is it the character of society,

as it has grown up in Britain, to rejoice in centralised monotony rather than in local diversity of type. And in respect of the general attitude to be maintained towards the unifying advances of so-called modern civilisation, a large-hearted policy would seek rather kindly to cherish what inherited varieties of type we still retain than violently to exterminate them.

Having cleared the ground of this rubbish, let us now proceed to some real business. The Gaelic language is one of the oldest and least mongrel types of the great Aryan family of speech, which has entered so largely into history as the organ of the highest forms of human civilisation, both in the East and West. With the exception, indeed, of the two famous branches of the Semitic family-the Hebrew and the Arabic-the Aryan family contains within itself everything that has notably contributed to human progress from the earliest historical tradition down to the present hour. The people who in prehistoric times used the great mother tongue, at present known only by its various-faced offspring, seem to have swarmed off from the great central tableland of Persia, one half eastward, forming fruitful settlements on the banks of the Indus and the Ganges, known in the bookworld as the creators of the great Sanscrit literature-and the other half westward in various streams, the fountainheads of all European culture, under forms far more rich and various than the less mobile type of society rendered possible in the East. Of these Western streams, the most notable, by far, were the Greek and Roman, to the former of which we trace back the main features of the intellectual, and to the latter the grand outlines of the political and juridical physiognomy of the existing states of Europe. In philological character the languages spoken by the Greeks and Romans bear a strong family likeness; but their fates since the breaking up of the classical world have been

singularly different. While the Greek, by the weight of its rich intellectual traditions, has preserved itself, with a few insignificant changes, as a perfectly pure and indefinitely luxuriant form of living speech, the language of the Romans, crumbling down with the great political fabric which it supported, afforded materials of which new languages of a specifically modern character were created,French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and a few others of minor note, all of which, to borrow a geological phrase, may be fitly designated as Metamorphic Latin. Next in importance to the Greco-Roman branch must be reckoned the Teutonic, raised in the shape of modern German to a grand position in the front rank both of speculation and action. The language spoken by the Germans, though in colloquial usage liberally sprinkled with fragments of Latin, Greek, and French, is in its structure essentially homogeneous, and in its most classical forms borrows none of its beauties from any other variety of human speech. The language spoken by the English, originally, like the German, a pure and uncorrupted Teutonic dialect, in the course of time, by frequent rude shocks of political change, had its natural growth altogether maimed; and instead of growing up into the likeness of a luxuriant and widespreading tree, presented-after a long course of simmering in the pot of Latin, French, and Greek ingredients, mingled in the strangest and most arbitrary fashion-the appearance as of a mottled cake or a porphyritic flag-stone, in which a hasty huddlement of unsymmetrical fragments had produced a sort of motley beauty which the most cunning design would have been inadequate to produce. Less fortunate hitherto in their outward development, though certainly not composed of less capable elements, are the other members of the great Aryan family that are now playing, or have in times not far distant played, a

prominent part in the great drama of public life in Europe. The Russians, with their Slavonian dependants under German dominion, in Bohemia, and other parts of the Austrian empire, have only in the present century dared to throw off that dependence on foreign languages and literatures which marked an imported civilisation; but there can be no doubt that with the reign of the late Emperor Nicholas, the seed was sown of a luxuriant growth of purely national culture, which may at no distant period open to the great Slavonic language a field of successful operation, as wide as ever was spread before the ambition of imperial Rome. For the Celtic languages, on the other hand, it is difficult even for the most sanguine to predict a brilliant future. Untoward political circumstances have combined with remote geographical position to force what remains of the great Celtic stock into the position of mere adjuncts of an essentially Teutonic civilisation. No doubt in France the Celtic genius remains, and has sent out from time to time flashes of vivifying social electricity to which every country in Europe owes much of its present progressive impulses; but France, though inspired with a Celtic soul, speaks a Latin language, and in a philological aspect is at the present moment as much a part of Rome as Cornwall is a part of England. As master of his own peculiar type of Aryan speech, the Celt has maintained himself, and that in rather a sorry fashion, only in Ireland, the north-western half of Scotland, in Brittany, and in Wales; and the literature which he has handed down, whether in the Hibernian, the Gaelic, or the Cymric form, though naturally dear to those who speak it, and of no common significance in reference to the early history of the British Isles, with certain specific attractions also for the eye of the philologer, is neither of sufficient extent nor of intrinsic value enough to exert any sensible influence on the great tidal currents

of European culture. No doubt, it is still on the cards, as one may say, that Wales, or Ireland, or the Scottish Highlands, shall produce a poet of a truly popular character, who may deserve the honours of a world-wide renown, no less than the great Ayrshire ploughman; but the neglect with which the exuberant poetical productions of Alastair M'Donald, Duncan Ban M'Intyre, Rob Donn, and other Celtic bards, have been treated by the general British public, encourages only the faintest hope that even a Celtic Burns, were he to appear to-morrow, would be able to achieve for his works the celebrity which they might deserve. It was the good fortune of Burns that he lived in a district close under the eye of the most progressive and prosperous part of Scotland, while the language which he used, though at first no small obstruction to his fame, was so little different from classical English, that a scholarly Oxonian or Cantab might delight to study it for recreation, just as a learned Greek of Alexandria, in the classical days, might make a philological excursion amongst the boors of Doric Thebes or Syracuse. Had Robert Burns sung in Gaelic instead of Scotch, his works at the present day might have been as little known in Europe, or even in Edinburgh, as the satires of Rob Donn.

These words, no currency is con

In attempting a scientific anatomy of the materials of which any language is composed, the first thing to be done is to discount the foreign or loan words. doubt, in one sense, and so far as general cerned, form part of the language, and it may be not the least prominent part; but to the eye of the philologer they present the appearance of a foreigner, who may have adopted the dress and assumed the manner of the country where he sojourns, but about whom there is always something that, to the practised eye, indicates the want of native blood. But the external marks by which these