ably, to the idea that the sooner these barren regions, half redeemed from the primeval waters, could be disembowelled of all human population, and left in the undisturbed possession of sea-gulls and stags and salmon, so much the better. The troops of Saxon tourists who spread themselves annually into the glens and over the Bens of old Caledonia, had, of course, nothing to do with the results of economical mismanagement, stowed far away, if registered at all, in dry statistical tables and unapproachable Blue-books; it was mountains they came to see, not men; and the sheep upon a thousand hills without a single human dwelling in view, would, to their holiday associations, more readily have suggested a sonnet of Arcadian blessedness than a pamphlet of agrarian dissatisfaction. Nor were the Highlanders themselves altogether dissatisfied, those of them at least who had begun to live like the Swiss, by making a show of their mountains and hanging on the skirts of the rich English Nimrods who, at certain seasons of the year, came to represent their old chiefs. Meanwhile the real life-blood of the people was being drained away; halls once resonant with rich social merriment, and reverberant with the traditions of a chivalrous and high-souled manhood, were dumb as death, or replaced by more pretentious edifices, which were Celtic in nothing but the ground on which they stood; the language and the music, which even till now had stirred the stoutest hearts and raised the most effective war-cry in our great British battle-fields, was treated everywhere with contempt, and deemed worthy of culture by only the more discerning few of those who naturally spoke it; everything Celtic was looked upon as destined to a hasty extinction, most worthily treated when either kicked violently out of the world, or painted all over with such a thick coat of Saxon whitewash that its distinctive features could no longer be

recognised; and it was generally agreed, in influential quarters, that the only euthanasia for the fragment of the Celt that yet remained in the country was to get the Teut on his back, and be ridden out of his identity, as the Poles are by the Russians.

But the Highlanders, though they may have received sometimes treatment from the lords of the soil not a whit better than the Poles have done when sent to Siberia, were not exactly in the position of that misfortuned people; nay, not even as the poor Irish, whom the insolence of the vulgar English mind delighted to stigmatise as "aliens in blood, in language, and in religion," and treated them accordingly. The unfortunate political skits of a misguided loyalty in 1715 and 1745 had long been forgotten, and so many mighty captains of Celtic name had since then, from the rising to the setting sun, defended the boundaries of our broad empire in moments of peril, that the general feeling towards the Gaels remained that of kindliness and of admiration. Such a feeling never existed in Ireland towards the Irish. At the very

moment when the sons and grandsons of the brave men who fought at Badajos and Waterloo were being shovelled in shoals from their native glens to leave a parish without a people, and gratify the selfish ambition of some scheming factor or the fancies of some doctrinaire economist, Highland colours were still seen flaunting in our regiments and at periodical aristocratic gatherings, Highland bagpipes sounded the pibroch of the clan through the old familiar glens, and feats of Celtic strength and agility were performed before groups of elegantly-dressed English ladies with admiration and applause; and though this, of course, was only a shadowy, soulless mimicry of the old life, and rather a playing at Highlanders than being honestly Highland, still even this superficial recognition of a noble but

unfortunate nationality sprung from a germ of kindly sentiment that might, in some happy moment, shape itself into a deed. Here and there also there were found in the hills genuine heads of the old stock, who, like the Macpherson of Cluny, were Highlanders in their core as well as in their kilt, and not only on a gala-day, but every day of the week, and every hour of the day; and when one was lucky enough to come shoulder to shoulder with such men, there shot an electric influence from their presence with a fervour and a freshness that might melt, for the moment, the impenetrable mail of the most dogmatic economist. These things were signs of lusty life amid the general decrepitude into which the Highlands had been allowed to fall by its natural protectors. Then there was one goad of a decidedly practical character, that at length came to prick the flesh of the lords of the glen, and induce them to think that they had proceeded somewhat thoughtlessly with their cheap remedy of expatriation. All lairds have not exclusively sheep-farms, and such lairds required labourers; but the labourers were not to be found: they had retired in troops to America, where they hoped to be treated, and generally were treated, with more consideration than they had been at home. This affected the pocket, which is the grand avenue by which the hearts of a certain class of human beings in this couutry can be reached. But there was another influence also,—an influence of an intellectual character, that now began to act in favour of the Highlanders. Partly by the natural "process of the ages," partly by a stirring contagion from the continental world, with which England since the peace in 1816 was always drifting into closer connection, a change came over the spirit of John Bull's speculative faculty; and from a narrow traditional conservatism of all kinds of respectable prejudice, he bolted right out into the large field of broad historical sympathy, after

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