the manner of the Germans. One fruit of this we recognise in Grote's democratic History of Greece, another in the new estimate of Cromwell and Frederick the Great put into vogue by the master-touch of Carlyle's brawny brush, and a third in the thoughtful soul and genial evangelic significance which Jowett and those who laboured with him engrafted into the barren verbalism which had so long lorded it over the scholarship of Oxford. It was, in the nature of things, scarcely possible that this new habit of looking behind and beyond the curtain of narrow English traditions should fail to affect in some appreciable degree the long-neglected languages and literatures of the Celts in these islands. And accordingly we find the names of Skene, M‘Lauchlan, Clerk, Cameron, Robertson, and others in Scotland, Stokes, Reeves, O'Curry, and O'Sullivan in Ireland, teaching the better class of English readers to give up their cherished habit of looking at our early history only from a Saxon point of view, and to plant themselves dramatically into the centre of Celtic life, whence alone the true character of our mixed civilisation can be understood. With regard to Wales, Nicolas, Stephens, and other Cymric scholars, were not less active; and though Arnold, always happy to poke into the ribs of dogged old Philistinism, failed in his attempt to induce the Oxford authorities to found a Celtic chair in their University, there was more of hope and encouragement in such an application having been made at all in that quarter, than of discouragement in its refusal.1 Specially in the present age a new claimant for the regards of the learned world came upon the stage, which worked powerfully in favour of the long-neglected Celtic element. I'mean Comparative Philology; and this

1 This was written before a formal proposal was made by Jesus College to found a Celtic Chair in the University of Oxford, which I understand from the newspapers has now been realised.

science, though capable of being pursued in a way as thorny and forbidding and purely technical as the most arid specialties of the old classical scholarship, had the good fortune to have its cause pleaded in this country by an accomplished foreigner, who united the extensive reading and accurate research of his country with a cultivated eloquence and a popular power which no native writer on the same subject has rivalled. Philology was now made palatable to the ladies, and nothing the worse for that; for a good pudding deserves a good seasoning, and with the ladies the seasoning is always an indispensable element of the compound. Along with the charms of Max Müller's exposition, the travelling habits of the age soon opened up a new vein of popular research, which drew deep from Celtic sources. I mean in the department of topographical etymology. Taylor in England, Joyce in Ireland, and Robertson in Scotland, following in the tract of Forstemann, Butmann, and other learned Germans, furnished a new sort of intellectual recreation to the more educated class of tourists, in the etymological analysis and historical interpretation of the countries and cities through which they passed. People heard with surprise now for the first time that rivers and mountains and vales, untrodden for many centuries by foot of Celt or Sclav, bore upon their visage the most undeniable evidence of a Celtic or Sclavonian baptism; and an intelligent curiosity was gratified to find that the familiar name of some romantic crag or brook or mountain hollow was a condensed expression of the most striking pictorial features of the scene. The old grey stone on the old brown moor, previously only an old grey stone and nothing more, turned out, when its Celtic designation was wisely deciphered, to be a record of some awful piety, heroic achievement, or rueful scene of human sorrow that our forefathers had enacted there. In short, thoughtful

travellers made the discovery that to travel wisely, even the dead languages once spoken in transmuted homes deserved some kindly regard, much more the living language of a race, stout, fervid, chivalrous, and gallant above their compeers, and whose virtues were not the less real because unhappy circumstances had doomed them to shine in a corner. Nor was it in the direction of topography only that comparative philology opened up to fresh-minded inquirers a new and interesting field of research. Proper names of persons had their etymological history no less than names of places; and a very cursory inspection of the Glasgow Directory raised to a certainty the awakened suspicion that not a few of those who counted themselves Saxons, whose ancestors had spoken English for centuries, and who were accustomed to join with zest in ridiculing the peculiarities of the Highlanders, were themselves, in every syllable of their names, as in every drop of their blood, undeniable Celts. Any shepherd-boy in the glens, however innocent of schooltraining, could tell a Lowland gentleman bearing such a name as Glass, that if he had really been of Lowland descent his name would have been Gray; or if he bore the name of BAIN, that his designation, with a real Lowland pedigree, would have been WHITE; and so forth. Thus may many a modern Greek, if you scrub the Hellenic polish from his skin, be declared to be an Albanian or a Sclavonian. And in the same way the "perfervid genius of the Scots" which burns in the heart of a Chalmers, a Guthrie, and a Macleod, when probed to the bottom, may appear to be really a Celtic fire, while your pure Saxon shall be proved to be a stout and solid but a lumpish creature comparatively. And the result of a scientifically conducted philologico-ethnographical inquiry may be that in the great living machine which we call society in Scotland, it is the Saxon who supplies the iron and the wood; steam comes from the Celt.

The circumstances under which the present writer was led to look into the philological peculiarities of the Gaelic tongue were as follows. Like others of my countrymen, I had been brought up under the traditions of the classical schoolmasters, who directed all our youthful ambition to things far distant in time and space, and never dreamt of hinting that the wild primrose at our feet, peeping up modestly from the base of some oozy slope, might be worth looking at scientifically, as well as the Victoria regia spreading forth its huge broad leaves and unfolding the fragrance of its rich white petals on the sunny breast of some Peruvian lagoon. Our native Scottish music and lyric poetry, second to none in literary history, was never once mentioned as a subject worthy of scholastic recognition; both these things, as nothing conducive to a man's "advancement in the world," were left to the vulgar influences of the street and the fireside. Gaelic, of course, though existing quite in a vivid state a few miles up the country, in the estimation of those nice quoters of Horace and Virgil was a barbarism as little imagined as the Umbrian and Oscan dialects might be to a polished literary gentleman of the Augustan age in Rome. Well, I grew up in ignorance and apathy, like other young men who had received the benefit of a classical education, and made the usual tour through the Highland glens, from Ballater to Blair-Athole and Loch Tay, without taking note that there was any such language as Gaelic in the world. Some ten or fifteen years ago, however, having arrived at man's estate, and learnt better how to use my eyes and ears, upon one of my frequent vagabond flights through the Highland hills, I took up my quarters for some weeks at Kinloch-Ewe, and then and there I picked up my first mustard-seed of the rare old language, somewhat as follows. It seemed only a human thing to speak occasionally

to the men who hang about inns and give tendance to men and horses, and as the weather cannot always be talked about, and even dogs, grouse, and salmon will occasionally fail, I fell upon the device of trying a little philology. So I inquired of the lad who was tightening the belly-band of the Rosinante that was to lend us a cast towards Loch Torridon what was the Gaelic for a horse. "Each," he replied. Here, of course, I recognised one of my oldest acquaintances in the grammar-school-equus, with the tail lopped off, and the original Indo-European k softened down after the favourite fashion of the Caledonian Celts into a ch. So far successful, I then asked what was the Gaelic for a mare, and got for answer capull. Here again was an old college friend, whom I remembered having first seen in the company of that pleasant little pudgy lyrist (lepidus homunculus) of the Augustan age, from whom to quote fluently was considered a valid certificate for the degree of D.D. in the then extant Marischal College of Aberdeen. Encouraged by this first essay, I went on to ask what was the name of that high hill there, pointing to a huge jagged Ben a little to the south, with two sharp points united by a long ridge or spine, indented all along as it were with canine teeth. "That," said the lad, "is Ben Eigh." "And what does Eigh mean?" "A file." Here my Latin was at fault, though I found afterwards that this word also signified ice; and that both the English and the Gaelic could be scientifically deduced from the Greek Tý vμ. Anon, however, the Latin cropped up again; for taking part in the local worship, according to the Presbyterian form, next Sunday, in the school-house (there being no church in that quarter), I determined to notice specially what word would be repeated oftenest in the course of the service this turned out to be AGUS; in which, of course, I immediately recognised the Latin ac, the German auch,