disinterested, positive, and constructive criticism is needed.
Neither his friends nor his enemies have yet given us much of this.
His friends have given us materials for criticism, and for these we
ought to be grateful; his enemies have given us negative criticism,
and for this, too, up to a certain point, we may be grateful; but the
criticism we really want neither of them has yet given us.

Philology, however, that science which in our time has had so many
successes, has not been abandoned by her good fortune in touching the
Celt; philology has brought, almost for the first time in their
lives, the Celt and sound criticism together. The Celtic grammar of
Zeuss, whose death is so grievous a loss to science, offers a
splendid specimen of that patient, disinterested way of treating
objects of knowledge, which is the best and most attractive
characteristic of Germany. Zeuss proceeds neither as a Celt-lover
nor as a Celt-hater; not the slightest trace of a wish to glorify
Teutonism or to abase Celtism, appears in his book. The only desire
apparent there, is the desire to know his object, the language of the
Celtic peoples, as it really is. In this he stands as a model to
Celtic students; and it has been given to him, as a reward for his
sound method, to establish certain points which are henceforth
cardinal points, landmarks, in all the discussion of Celtic matters,
and which no one had so established before. People talked at random
of Celtic writings of this or that age; Zeuss has definitely fixed
the age of what we actually have of these writings. To take the
Cymric group of languages: our earliest Cornish document is a
vocabulary of the thirteenth century; our earliest Breton document is
a short description of an estate in a deed of the ninth century; our
earliest Welsh documents are Welsh glosses of the eighth century to
Eutychus, the grammarian, and Ovid's Art of Love, and the verses