The same sensibility made the Celts
full of reverence and enthusiasm for genius, learning, and the things
of the mind; TO BE A BARD, FREED A MAN,--that is a characteristic
stroke of this generous and ennobling ardour of theirs, which no race
has ever shown more strongly. Even the extravagance and exaggeration
of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something romantic and
attractive about it, something which has a sort of smack of
misdirected good. The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchical, and
turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving
himself body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising
political temperament, it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon
temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain
limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-
dependence; but it is a temperament for which one has a kind of
sympathy notwithstanding. And very often, for the gay defiant
reaction against fact of the lively Celtic nature one has more than
sympathy; one feels, in spite of the extravagance, in spite of good
sense disapproving, magnetised and exhilarated by it. The Gauls had
a rule inflicting a fine on every warrior who, when he appeared on
parade, was found to stick out too much in front,--to be corpulent,
in short.
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