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,
Celts, Teutons, Slavonians, on the one hand, and, on the other hand,
of a Semitic unity and of a Mongolian unity, separated by profound
distinguishing marks from the Indo-European unity and from one
another, was slowly acquiring consistency and popularising itself.
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