What the French call the science des origines, the
science of origins,--a science which is at the bottom of all real
knowledge of the actual world, and which is every day growing in
interest and importance--is very incomplete without a thorough
critical account of the Celts, and their genius, language, and
literature. This science has still great progress to make, but its
progress, made even within the recollection of those of us who are in
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.
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