The question is to be tried by external and by internal evidence; the
language and the physical type of our race afford certain data for
trying it, and other data are afforded by our literature, genius, and
spiritual production generally. Data of this second kind belong to
the province of the literary critic; data of the first kind to the
province of the philologist and of the physiologist.
The province of the philologist and of the physiologist is not mine;
but this whole question as to the mixture of Celt with Saxon in us
has been so little explored, people have been so prone to settle it
off-hand according to their prepossessions, that even on the
philological and physiological side of it I must say a few words in
passing. Surely it must strike with surprise any one who thinks of
it, to find that without any immense inpouring of a whole people,
that by mere expeditions of invaders having to come over the sea, and
in no greater numbers than the Saxons, so far as we can make out,
actually came, the old occupants of this island, the Celtic Britons,
should have been completely annihilated, or even so completely
absorbed that it is vain to seek after Celtic elements in the
existing English race. Of deliberate wholesale extermination of the
Celtic race, all of them who could not fly to Wales or Scotland, we
hear nothing; and without some such extermination one would suppose
that a great mass of them must have remained in the country, their
lot the obscure and, so to speak, underground lot of a subject race,
but yet insensibly getting mixed with their conquerors, and their
blood entering into the composition of a new people, in which the
stock of the conquerors counts for most, but the stock of the
conquered, too, counts for something.
Pages:
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95