He is sensual, as I have said, or at least
sensuous; loves bright colours, company, and pleasure; and here he is
like the Greek and Latin races; but compare the talent the Greek and
Latin (or Latinised) races have shown for gratifying their senses,
for procuring an outward life, rich, luxurious, splendid, with the
Celt's failure to reach any material civilisation sound and
satisfying, and not out at elbows, poor, slovenly, and half-
barbarous. The sensuousness of the Greek made Sybaris and Corinth,
the sensuousness of the Latin made Rome and Baiae, the sensuousness
of the Latinised Frenchman makes Paris; the sensuousness of the Celt
proper has made Ireland. Even in his ideal heroic times, his gay and
sensuous nature cannot carry him, in the appliances of his favourite
life of sociability and pleasure, beyond the gross and creeping Saxon
whom he despises; the regent Breas, we are told in the Battle of
Moytura of the Fomorians, became unpopular because 'the knives of his
people were not greased at his table, nor did their breath smell of
ale at the banquet.' In its grossness and barbarousness is not that
Saxon, as Saxon as it can be? just what the Latinised Norman,
sensuous and sociable like the Celt, but with the talent to make this
bent of his serve to a practical embellishment of his mode of living,
found so disgusting in the Saxon.
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