middle life, has already affected our common notions about the Celtic
race; and this change, too, shows how science, the knowing things as
they are, may even have salutary practical consequences. I remember,
when I was young, I was taught to think of Celt as separated by an
impassable gulf from Teuton; {14} my father, in particular, was never
weary of contrasting them; he insisted much oftener on the separation
between us and them than on the separation between us and any other
race in the world; in the same way Lord Lyndhurst, in words long
famous, called the Irish 'aliens in speech, in religion, in blood.'
This naturally created a profound sense of estrangement; it doubled
the estrangement which political and religious differences already
made between us and the Irish: it seemed to make this estrangement
immense, incurable, fatal. It begot a strange reluctance, as any one
may see by reading the preface to the great text-book for Welsh
poetry, the Myvyrian Archaeology, published at the beginning of this
century, to further,--nay, allow,--even among quiet, peaceable people
like the Welsh, the publication of the documents of their ancient
literature, the monuments of the Cymric genius; such was the sense of
repulsion, the sense of incompatibilty, of radical antagonism, making
it seem dangerous to us to let such opposites to ourselves have
speech and utterance. Certainly the Jew,--the Jew of ancient times,
at least,--then seemed a thousand degrees nearer than the Celt to us.
Puritanism had so assimilated Bible ideas and phraseology; names like
Ebenezer, and notions like that of hewing Agag in pieces, came so
natural to us, that the sense of affinity between the Teutonic and
the Hebrew nature was quite strong; a steady, middleclass Anglo-Saxon
much more imagined himself Ehud's cousin than Ossian's. But
meanwhile, the pregnant and striking ideas of the ethnologists about
the true natural grouping of the human race, the doctrine of a great
Indo-European unity, comprising Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins,