platitudes will not alter the laws of Nature, which have to be fulfilled under ever-increasing penalties, of which some are being paid by Ireland at the present moment. Compare Ulster with Munster, or Leinster with Connaught, and you will begin to understand what effective conquest and colonisation, even at a comparatively late period in European history, might have done for "old Ireland" as our Hibernian friends so fondly phrase it. But if you would know the full loss of Ireland in not partaking of Roman civilisation and Teutonic colonisation, simultaneously and proportionately with the remainder of the Celtic area, you must compare "old Ireland" with England, or the lowlands of Scotland, or the north of France. "Ireland for the Irish" is no doubt a splendid war cry, and carries with it a semblance of justice and a sound of patriotism, but in sober truth it is precisely where Ireland is most Irish that it is most poverty stricken, and where it has been most colonised, that it is most prosperous.

Such, then, are the facts. Now what do they imply? The application of our nostrums, say the à priori legislators. We will administer any number of "Acts of Parliament" to Ireland, till she is well! She has been injudiciously treated-that is all. We will give her just laws and amended institutions, and await the result. Ah, my friends, you told us the same story about Mexico and the South American republics-and what have you made of them? Miserable failures all, the old Indian blood proving too strong for you and your paper constitutions. No doubt Ireland has been misgoverned, as France and England, Spain and Italy once were, when the iron-heel of the Goth was stamping out their ancient institutions, and his sword was implanting the germs of those which were to succeed them. The pity is that these things were not done for Ireland at an earlier date, and then perhaps a Scandinavian colonisation might have rendered an English conquest unnecessary-and so impossible, as happened in Scotland. Again, we know that these are very unpleasant utterances, quite unsuited to any platform-even that of "the house"--but supposing that they are true, will unanimity in their condemnation render them false, or the consequences which they imply, nugatory?

And do we then despair of Ireland? By no means. On the contrary, we think that she is now in the very crisis of her racial regeneration. Hence her grief. Two hundred thousand patriotic Milesians are not wafted over the Atlantic annually by purely Favonian breezes. No such exodus ever did take place save under a certain measure of compulsion. We would not undervalue the suffering which this implies. Our consolation arises from the perception that it is not a perennial but epochal phenomenon, due to a

combination of special, and, in a sense, exceptional circumstances, recurrent only at rare periods of ethnic commotion. Such an exodus implies much, not only to the country of its reception, but also of its ejection. To the States it is the counterpoise of the German element. To Ireland it is the preparation for a more effective Teutonic-Celtic development, akin to that which has been already accomplished throughout a large portion of Britain. To both it must prove ultimately beneficial, if only as a fulfilment of the law of Nature, who abhors lengthened periods of isolation and stagnation, and generally supplements these by succeeding periods of emigration and racial regeneration.

We have said that Ireland was not conquered and colonised at the right time; we meant for its present peace and well-being. Contemplated from the mundane stand-point, this, like all other great racial movements and historic events, resolves itself into the manifestation of a law, whose operation is unerring, and whose ultimate results cannot fail to prove beneficent. It would seem that most social baptisms are partial, and what we would call imperfect; thus in the case of the great Teutonic colonisation of the old Celtic area, we find that in Britain, the Highlands of Scotland, the mountains of Wales, and the Peninsula of Cornwall, were reserved, in a measure, as Celtic preserves, to react, at various periods, with considerable force, on the more Teutonised area of the central and eastern provinces of the island. The heptarchy reaped the first result of this reservation, in the predominance of Wessex; and Britain probably will not have gathered in the final harvest from this arrangement, till the close of the present cycle of European civilisation, when, once more effete and exhausted, she will again await her renewal at the hands of a ruder and less gifted but more muscular type than the then overwrought and effeminate remnants of her imperial greatness and her refined culture. We see the same phenomenon of reservation, as respects France, in Brittany and largely throughout the south; we see it again, as to Spain, in the two extremes of Biscay and Andalusia. Similar remarks might be made in the classic area, where, for example, Magna Græcia remains but imperfectly Latinised and still more imperfectly Teutonised to this hour. The purpose of this reservation appears to be the more effective preservation, and ultimate resurrection, of the temporarily submerged type; now, thus contemplated, Ireland is but the extreme west of the Celtic area of Europe, the last and best preserved retreat of a refined, sensitive, and intellectual race, already, through its better baptised divisions, in the van of civilisation, and apparently preparing for the resumption of imperial supremacy, as the concluding act of the great drama of European civilisation.

This brings us to the mission of Ireland and her place, not merely in British history, but in the great scheme of humanitarian development. No man capable of estimating the forces which have carried civilisation and empire on their north-western course for the last five thousand years, can doubt their inevitable culmination at the terminus of their stupendous march. Rome-whether we contemplate her geographically as a Mediterranean not an oceanic power, or as a heathen not a Christian empire, was obviously not the terminus of the imperial movement, nor the closing scene of the European drama, whose fifth act is only now commencing. In some previous papers we have shown that this must be performed not on a classic but in a Celtic area, not in Greece or Italy but in France or Britain, and preferably in the latter; hence the inordinate growth of London, so ludicrously disproportioned to the merely metropolitan demands of Britain, but perfectly in accordance with its present position, as the exchange of the world, and its impending greatness as the capital of civilisation. But this implies the exercise of a mundane power on the part of the British people, of which we have the faint promise and dim foreshadowment in their present mercantile influence and colonial extension, and perhaps also in the extent to which their institutional example has already modified most of the once despotic governments of Christendom; but true imperial leadership implies far more than this, especially when that leadership is to be based on a Celtic area, and to be exercised by a classically and Teutonically baptised but nevertheless radically Celtic population. For this implies-in addition to the mercantile enterprise, manufacturing industry and mechanical ingenuity by which Britain is now so especially distinguished, nay, in addition to their respect for law and their consequent capacity for the enjoyment of a well regulated liberty, by which her people are so happily characterised-an æsthetic culture second, if second, only to that of Greece, together with a refinement and delicacy of thought and feeling, a sensibility to emotion and a profound sympathy with nature, never reflected in the literature of either a Classic or a Semitic people, and awaiting its full and effective expression at the hands of those who have already produced a Shakespeare and a Shelley in poetry, and who, despite philistinism and the all-pervading worship of mammon, still prevail to speak of literature in the words of Matthew Arnold, and of art in those of John Ruskin.

Now we are fully aware that if there is to be a Celtic as there was a classic empire, it must, like its predecessor, be dual, and that in this division France enacts the part of Greece and Britain that of Rome, but, we would add, of Rome spiritual as well as temporal. Now it is her Celtic elements that can alone qualify her for the former function, and hence, perhaps, the distinct preservation of the Welsh, Gaelic,

and Erse speaking peoples, within the narrow compass of these highly civilised British isles to the present hour. They are so much latent force that cannot be discounted for ever, and must tell on the tone of the national mind, when the exaggerated practicality and vulgar materialism of the present shall yield, in due time, to the nobler aspirations and grander purposes of the future. Now the special quality of the Irish, as contradistinguished from the British Celt, whether southern Loegrian or northern Gael, is not strength but delicacy, not force but refinement, not vigour but spirituality-the very qualities that we want imported into our literature, our art, and, we may add, our religion. But why then, it may be said, have the Irish not manifested these rare gifts more frequently and in richer profusion during their connection with England, and notably in the literature and art of the last two or three centuries. This brings us back to the history, and so to the misfortunes, of their unhappy country.

As we have already seen, the speciality of Ireland is the imperfection of its ethnic baptisms and the consequent postponement of its racial regeneration; so that while France and Britain have been passing through a great cycle of Teutono-Celtic development, under which their national life has attained to vigorous manifestation both in thought and action, the comparatively isolated land of Erin has been struggling in the throes of a belated conquest and colonisation. Combined with this it has also been subjected to anotheir speciality, that of continued dependency, which has only of late ripened into complete incorporation. To the eye of an Anthropologist these latter specialities were but a natural result of the former, and both were due primarily to geographical isolation, which has now happily ceased. As already remarked, from the mundane standpoint the seeming loss of these many centuries of national life is doubtless a small matter; nor can we doubt but the coming ages have an ample compensation in store, both for humanity as a whole and also for the suffering people in particular. But, nevertheless, as seen from the immediate proximity of Britain, and yet more as felt by a sensitive and cultured Irishman, few spectacles are more melancholy than that of the intellectual desolation of the sister isle, whose richly gifted sons should have furnished some of the foremost names in the annals of European culture, but for whom we look in vain when we would seek the compeers of Dante and Shakespeare, of Raphael and Michael Angelo, of Bacon and Newton, of Voltaire and Goethe. Italy, as we have seen, furnishes nothing similar; for though subdued in arms she still remained supreme in intellect. To find a parallel we must go to Greece, exhausted by her many centuries of classic civilisation, and then writhing under the iron heel of Turkish barbarism.

VOL. VII.-NO. XXIV.

F

Would we then be understood to imply that either individuals or nations were responsible for this? By no means. It was the terrible inevitability of circumstances. As the last province of the Celtic area to be baptised, Ireland is naturally the last to be regenerated. is late in receiving the morning rays of modern civilisation, it was also late in losing the vesper glory of Celtic culture. When Gaul and South Britain were Roman provinces, Ireland still retained her Celtic language and institutions untouched, so that when the Christian missionary landed on her shores the literary dialect of the national tongue was spoken at her courts, the Druid with his sacred traditions unbroken, still officiated at her altars, and the Bard with his epic and amatory poetry in perfect preservation, still sung his inspiring strains as he had done in the days of Oisin, and for a thousand years before. And, although Norwegian kings had reigned for centuries at Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick, Erse still remained the mother tongue when Brian Boroime won the battle of Clontarf, and gave the Irish their last chance of founding an independent and Celtic nationality, which, here, if anywhere, might have been expected to survive in its integrity. And, perhaps, sentimentally, we may be permitted to regret that it did not-if only for the sake of the commonwealth of letters, which has thus lost, if not a language, then a literature, unique in character and abounding in mythology, poetry, and tradition from ages now virtually prehistoric. The day for fully appreciating our loss in this matter, however, has not yet arrived. Classical pedantry and Saxon philistinism can still afford to despise Celtic as they once did Oriental studies; but the lettered or unlettered barbarism that would neglect the roots of the indigenous civilisation of half Europe cannot last for ever. And so a day for the profound and earnest study of Celtic history and literature will doubtless yet dawn, and when it does, Ireland will not be wanting with another O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry to assist in the process, nor will her contributions to the common stock of this peculiar scholarship be accounted wholly unworthy of attention.

But, to return to our more immediate subject. The true Pagan culture of Ireland, like that of all Europe, whether Classic, Celtic, or Teutonic, sank into dim eclipse before the triumphant diffusion of Christianity. This is a matter for whose honest and searching investigation the age is not yet prepared. Suffice it, then, that it was not the Norsemen nor the Anglo-Normans, but the Christian priests and their zealous converts who made the first and most destructive attack on the venerable edifice of Druidic learning. They exterminated the entire priesthood, and with it, the scholarship of Celtic heathenism, leaving only the Bards to sing in martial strains of the heroic deeds of an age and faith for ever gone. Ireland is rather valuable as an illus