eral. At this Christmas season persons who are still unacquainted with Dr. Dasent's work cannot do better than procure it. If they should desire a fit companion to it-a book closely similar in its kind of interest, and contributing a rich fund of new materials in the same direction of inquiry-it is at hand in Mr. J. F. Campbell's Popular Tales of the West Highlands, recently published by the same firm.1

Whether considered by itself or in relation to Dr. Dasent's, Mr. Campbell's work is one deserving more than ordinary recognition. The manner in which it has been prepared would alone distinguish it from most contemporary books. Reading Dr. Dasent's volume at the time of its first publication, Mr. Campbell, who is a Highland gentleman of the family of the Campbells of Islay, bethought him of old Gaelic tales, not unlike those Norse importations of Dr. Dasent, which he had heard in his boyhood from pipers and others about his father's house; and he resolved, if it were possible, to make a search through the West Highlands to see whether such tales still lingered anywhere in the memory of his Gaelic countrymen and country women so as to be recoverable. To any one else than a Highland gentleman, himself speaking Gaelic, the task would have been fruitless. The Highlanders are unusually shy in their communications on such matters, and evade them with a kind of shame as if the Druidic reluctance to yield up their mysteries to writing still remained among them, and were all the stronger from an accompanying feeling that such things were now heathen, unedifying, and not approved of by the minister. Before Mr. Campbell's opportunities and perseverance, however, this difficulty vanished. By himself, or by his agents, he was able to discover, chiefly in the remote islands and promontories of the Scottish west, many persons who rcollected Gaelic tales, which they had heard in their youth,

1 Popular Tales of the West Highlands, orally collected; with a Translation. By J. F. Campbell. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston and

and were still in the habit of tellinghere an old fisherman, there a blind fiddler; here a drover, there a travelling tinker; with occasionally an old woman, who had never left her native spot, or an old female servant in some Highland household. From the lips of such persons, sometimes in rude native huts, sometimes in village inns, sometimes by the wayside, and sometimes in boats on Highland lochs, Mr. Campbell and his fellow-collectors heard the tales they had in store-frequently obtaining different versions of the same tale from narrators far separated from each other. Effective means were taken to secure the repetition of the tales so often, and in such a way, as to permit them to be set down in writing faithfully and exactly in the Gaelic in which they were told. It is of a selection of these talesall thus orally collected since the beginning of 1859-that the present work consists. There are about sixty tales in all, longer or shorter. Each tale is scrupulously authenticated by the name of the teller, or some corresponding indication, the date when it was told, the name of the place where it was told, and the name of the collector who heard it and wrote it out. Of each tale Mr. Campbell gives us an English translation, which he vouches for as being not one of those abominable things known as "free versions," " versions giving the spirit of the original," &c., but a rendering as close and literal as he was able to make it; and to each he then appends the original Gaelic, together with a few notes explanatory and illustrative. To the whole is prefixed an Introduction of considerable length, in which Dr. Dasent's views and other doctrines of recent ethnology are applied to the Celtic races of these islands and their legends;. and in the course of which there are many shrewd and suggestive remarks, and evidences of a rather singular genius and humour-whether of the native Highland chieftain, ill-repressed under his guise as an English author, or only of an educated mind tuned somewhat to strangeness by long dwelling in a strange

is a genuine and even remarkable one, possessing both a learned and a popular interest. Some consciousness of this breaks through the modest half-apologetic terms in which the author speaks of it.

"Practical men may despise the tales, earnest men condemn them as lies, some even consider them wicked; one refused to write any more for a whole estate; my best friend says they are all 'blethers.' But one man's rubbish may be another's treasure, and what is the standard of value in such a pursuit as this?

"And what are you going to do with them stories, Mr. Camal?' said a friend of mine, as he stood amongst the brown sea-weed, at the end of a pier, on a fine summer's evening, and watched my departure in a tiny boat. Print them, man, to be sure.' My friend is famous for his good stories, though they are of another kind, and he uses tobacco; he eyed me steadily for a moment, and then he disposed of the whole matter monosyllabically, but forcibly, 'Huch!!' It seemed to come from his heart.

"Said a Highland coachman to me one day, 'The luggage is very heavy; I will not believe but there is stones in the portmanteaus! They will be pickin' them off the road and takin' them away with them; I have seen them my. self.' And then, having disposed of geology, he took a sapient pinch of snuff. So, a benighted Englishman, years ago in Australia, took up his quarters in a settler's hut, as he told me. Other travellers came in, and one had found a stone in a dry river-course, which he maintained to be partly gold. The rest jeered at him till he threw away his prize in a pet; and then they all devoured mutton chops and damper, and slept like sensible men. So these tales may be gold or dross, according to taste. Many will despise them, but some may take an interest in the pastime of their humble countrymen ; some may be amused; those who would learn Gaelic will find the language of the people who told the stories; and those who could compare popular tales of different races may rest assured that I have altered nothing, that these really are what they purport to be-stories orally collected in the West Highlands since the beginning of 1859.' I have but carried drift rubbish from the place where I found it to a place where it may be seen and studied by those who care to take the trouble."

Mr. Campbell's work is calculated to give a fillip to scholarly curiosity in this country respecting the Celtic race in general, and the Gaelic branch of it in particular. There can be no doubt that of late the Celt has been at too great a discount in our literature. In virtue of the constant tendency of opinion on

very absolute and emphatic propositions, which become blocks of established be lief, the speculations in ethnology which have been going on for so many years have led, in this country at least, to a standing affirmation in certain quarters of the intellectual and historical worthlessness of the Celt. The wild hysterics of the Celt, his restlessness, his want of veracity, his want of the power of solid and persevering labour, his howling enthusiasm about nothings and his neglect of all that is substantial, the perpetual necessity of some stern alien discipline to keep him in order-these are everyday themes in our talk and our literature. On the other hand, the Saxon figures as the tip-top of present creation; and, by a farther generalization so as to include the whole of his kin, all that has been good in the world since the fall of the Roman empire is represented as Gothic. Positively the thing has gone so far that it is not respectable any longer in certain quarters to be a Celt, and any one who is in that unfortunate predicament has to go back in his pedigree for some Teutonic grandmother, or other female progenitor, through whom he may plead his blood as at least decent half-and-half. So, also, when the Scottish Highlanders are talked of, it is the habit to assert that, while the people are Celtic, all the chiefs are of Teutonic or Norman descent. Now the superiority of certain breeds of men to others is a fact which no one who has his eyes about him, or who knows any thing of history, can deny; nor, whether for speculative or for practical purposes, is there a more useful fact to carry about with one. Further, the historical superiority of the Gothic race, on the whole, to the Celtic-its more vast, more original, more profound, and more enduring influence on the history of the world— is a fact which even Celtic patriotism would find it difficult to contest. Further still, many of the current descriptions of the Celtic character and temperament, in contrast with the Saxon, or, more generally, with the Germanic, are sufficiently accurate, and are verified by con

Celt has a right to complain of the way in which, by too crude an application of certain ethnological views, the claims of his race have been lately dealt with. That doctrine of the intellectual and historical worthlessness of the Celt (for by many it is pushed even to this extreme) which he resents with the instinctive anger of his whole insulted being, which writhes his features to their darkest scowl, and to which, mouthed out too rudely in his presence, it might chance that the answer would be his dirk, this very doctrine the candid Saxon himself ought to declare false, and disprove by his research. Most affirmations of this emphatic kind, after they have served a year or so in literature, lose whatever virtue they had, and require to be re-edited; and, while the doctrine of the worthlessness of the Celt will still be clung to by those who must have something to say and can't change their phrases, it is perhaps time that those who think for themselves should be trying to substitute for it a more exact appreciation of the Celtic influence in history. Materials for such an appreciation are not wanting, and Mr. Campbell's work may help as a stimulus to it.

Passing over the vague traditions of the primeval or very ancient migrations of the Celts, of their dashings hither and thither against the more consolidated populations of Southern Europe, and finally of their descent into Italy in that terrible hour when infant Rome was at their mercy, one may point out, as pertinent to the present inquiry, that the chance of the Celt in history preceded that of the Goth, and fell upon a time when the conditions were different from those which the Goth experienced. It was not the fate of the Celt to enter on the stage of history as a dominant or conquering race, carrying forward its own institutions and its own traditions, intact out of the past. When the Celtic populations and their religion of Druidism first fairly present themselves to the historic student, they are already absorbed, all but a few outlying bits,

and are struggling, with fainter and fainter efforts, in the meshes of the Roman system. The Latin tongue, the Latin laws, and Latin habits overspread them; and Celtic druidism dies out, leaving no such native record of itself, as has remained of the Scandinavian mythology of the sons of Odin. For three or four centuries, whatever of Celtic activity, whatever manifestation of Celtic genius, was possible, whether in Gaul or in Britain, was necessarily such as might consist with the state of these countries as part and parcel of the Roman empire. In such circumstances how did the Celtic mind acquit itself? By no means ill. Not to speak of those men and women, named and nameless, who died in doing what all account it creditable in a race to have had men and women capable of doing-those Gaulish and British chiefs and chieftainesses who resisted Cæsar and Agricola-is it not a fact, known to scholars, that, when the Gauls were once fairly subjects of Rome, they learnt so fast, and took so cleverly to the new tongue and the new civilization, that many of the eminent soldiers, rhetoricians, actors, and even writers who figure in the lists of the later Empire under the general name of Romans, were in reality Cisalpine or Transalpine Celts? Even from Britain itself was there not some similar small contribution of native talent to the general stock of the Empire of which it was a province ? At all events, when Christianity possessed the Empire, and there was added everywhere to the exercises of mind and of heart which had been formerly possible for the provincials, the new exercise afforded by theology and ecclesiastical business, Britain, as well as Gaul, performed a competent part. Names here abound; but pre-eminent among them, as that of at least one British-born Celt whose influence ran round the margin of the Mediterranean and agitated the Roman empire, while as yet the Empire survived, is the name of the heresiarch Pelagius. In that “ In that "British heresy," concerning freewill and necessity, which roused in

thodoxy of Africa, and the continuation of which may be traced throughout the subsequent theology of Europe, till even in our own day the charges of Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism are bandied about, the Celtic genius signalled first, as it has exhibited so often since, its capacity for systematic speculation.

But anon the scene changes. The Roman empire is no more. The inbreaking Goth, split into a thousand streams, disintegrates by his advances the fabric of Roman society; and over Western Europe new rudimentary states are rising on its ruins. Is the Celtic influence then extinct? Can no strokes and results of important action then be discerned which are indubitably Celtic? Not so. Allowing to the full for the Frankish and other Teutonic effects on Gaul, do we not discern in modern France, and in all that France has been among the nations, the re-assertion-nay, to some extent, the dominance-of the Latino-Celtic genius? Shall we, when we want to satirize the French-to express our dislike of their restlessness, their mobility, their alternate phrenzies of revolution and subjections to military despotism-account for it all by naming them Celts off-hand; and yet, when we are in another mood with them, and think more of all that France has done that is spirit-stirring and splendid, shall we recant the name, or forget that we used it? It does not seem fair. analysis backward of French activity into the ingredients severally derived from the races that compose the French population, might indeed be a difficult problem; but, on any analysis, the career of France-and that certainly is no little thing in the history of the world-would have to be admitted as, in great part, a Celtic phenomenon.

An

But turn we to our own Celts of Britain and Ireland. Let the struggles of the Romanized Britons in the south, of the Picts and Scots in the north, against the invading Angles, Saxons, and Norsemen, pass as things inconsequential in history, mere footingground for poetic myths; let the bulk

Angles, Saxons, and Norsemen, as by the right of might and fitness its proper lords; let it be to them, and not to the Celts, that we look back with pride as our ancestors, as the founders of our national system-still, all this supposed, is our quest of farther Celtic influence a mere beggarly search of empty boxes, a fool's errand through dirt and turbulence and mist? Unless we shut our eyes, by no means so! What, for example, of the Celtic missionaries from Wales, from Scotland, from Ireland, who co-operated in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons? What of the struggles of these missionaries to maintain for the whole island a purer faith, and a more free ecclesiastical system, than Augustine and the agents of Rome brought with them across the Channel? There is a period in our national history-that between the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the full establishment of the Anglo-Saxon power-during which the educated Celtic mind, in the persons of Irish and Scoto-Irish saints and ecclesiastics, exerted itself to an extent, and in a manner, not yet sufficiently recognised. Nay, more, when we pass beyond this period, and draw out a list of the more eminent intellectual natives of this land during the Anglo-Saxon period properly so called-those, at all events, who distinguished themselves as writers in the then universal Latin-it will be found that at least as many were, certainly or presumably, of the subject Celtic race as of the dominant AngloSaxon. It is worthy of remark, too, that, if these Celtic writers are compared with their Anglo-Saxon contemporaries in respect of the nature of their works, the aptitude for systematic thought, rather than for mere historic compilation or mere ethical and practical discourse, will be found to have been still characteristic

of the Celtic intellect. If the AngloSaxons can adduce as perhaps all in all their foremost literary name in this period that of the Venerable Bede, and if it is disputed whether Alcuin, the famous intellectual vizier of Charlemagne, was a British Celt or a British Saxon, the

own the most illustrious European thinker of his period, the forerunner and father of the schoolmen-Joannes Scotus Erigena.

We talk fondly of the Anglo-Saxons as the fathers of all that is good and stalwart in us; but it is very questionable whether this country would ever have been one tithe of what it has been in the world, politically or intellectually, but for the Norman Conquest. No one can study English History before and after that event without perceiving the immense change which it wrought, the extraordinary stimulus which it communicated. It is like the infusion of a new supply of the most electric nerve into what had formerly been a somewhat sluggish body of large thew and bone. Now, there is fair room for an investigation whether and to what extent, in that process which transmuted the Scandinavian colony of Norsemen into the Frenchspeaking Normans as they came among us-light and yet strong, flashing and yet persevering-the combination of Celtic blood with Norse may have contributed. But, let the Normans be voted, as is usually done, pure Norsemen who had but changed their language, is the recognisable Celtic element of the mixed population of which they became masters of no farther account in the land during the period of their mastery-the so-called Anglo-Norman period? In answer to this, if the realm of literature is still chiefly attended to, it would be possible not only to pick out, in the list of those writers of the Anglo-Norman period who used the common Latin, Celts intermingled with Normans and AngloSaxons, and exhibiting the Celtic tendency to speculation qualifying the mainly ethical tendency of the Saxon mind and the mainly narrative tendency of the Norman, but also, extending our view beyond the common Latin to the three vernacular tongues which then divided with it the total literature of these islands, to produce Celtic authors-Irish annalists, Welsh poets, and the like not unworthy of note by the side of the Anglo-Norman trouvères and the first

one might point to that extraordinary body of Welsh and Armorican legendembracing in its totality the mythical foreworld of these islands from Brut the Trojan to Arthur and his knights inclusive-which, conveyed into general circulation through Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin, and elaborated and shaped by early Norman and English minstrels, has been a permanent inheritance in our own and in all European Literature, an inspiration and exhaustless magazine of subjects for our Spensers, our Shakespeares, our Miltons, and our Tennysons. Through much of our greatest poetry, when the melody is listened for through the harmony, there is heard the strain of the old British harp.

In pursuing the inquiry down to our own times, it divides itself more obviously into two branches-the investigation of Celtic influence as operating more latently in the mixed populations of these islands, known as English and Scotch; and the investigation of the same influence as exerted in or from the portions of the country where the purest remains of the Celtic race are shut upWales, the Scottish Highlands, and Erse-speaking Ireland.

The difficulties of the former investigation are so great that it is never made. As no one can tell who among us of the mixed populations is more Celt and who more Saxon-as we meet every day the most sturdy Saxon-looking and Saxon-thinking fellows, who have Celtic names, and, vice versa, dark little Celtic-looking men, who have Norse or Saxon names-so, in the general sea of English and Scottish thought and doings during the last three or four hundred years, it is impossible to discriminate what may have been Celtic. The Celt surely exists among us, though submerged. For the credit of our AngloSaxon forefathers it is to be assumed that they did not murder out all the Celts in England and the Scottish Lowlands, when they took possession-at least, not the women, though they may have sent their spouses packing to the hills. Now, is nothing to go to the credit