acquisitions.

So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better.
It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense
which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we
cannot write all that nonsense off his account. In particular, he set
an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely
followed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact. It cannot
be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a
"revoke"--the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you
must not play with a man--is speaking of authors and books which he
has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you
ignorant of his ignorance. _This_ Mr Arnold never committed, and
could never have committed. But short of it, and while escaping its
penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he
confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less
discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even
less of the _originals_ than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here
guilty.

Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand,
I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very
closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not
seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very
few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in
translation, he seems to have consulted: he never, I think, names
Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets;
and in the main his citations are derived either from _Ossian_
("this do seem going far," as an American poetess observes), or else
from the _Mabinogion_, where some of the articles are positively