And yet why should I call it remote? if, as I have
been labouring to show, in the spiritual frame of us English
ourselves, a Celtic fibre, little as we may have ever thought of
tracing it, lives and works. ALIENS IN SPEECH, IN RELIGION, IN
BLOOD! said Lord Lyndhurst; the philologists have set him right about
the speech, the physiologists about the blood; and perhaps, taking
religion in the wide but true sense of our whole spiritual activity,
those who have followed what I have been saying here will think that
the Celt is not so wholly alien to us in religion. But, at any rate,
let us consider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this
great primitive race, all, with one insignificant exception, belongs
to the English empire; only Brittany is not ours; we have Ireland,
the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall. They are a
part of ourselves, we are deeply interested in knowing them, they are
deeply interested in being known by us; and yet in the great and rich
universities of this great and rich country there is no chair of
Celtic, there is no study or teaching of Celtic matters; those who
want them must go abroad for them. It is neither right nor
reasonable that this should be so. Ireland has had in the last half
century a band of Celtic students,--a band with which death, alas!
has of late been busy,--from whence Oxford or Cambridge might have
taken an admirable professor of Celtic; and with the authority of a
university chair, a great Celtic scholar, on a subject little known,
and where all would have readily deferred to him, might have by this
time doubled our facilities for knowing the Celt, by procuring for
this country Celtic documents which were inaccessible here, and
preventing the dispersion of others which were accessible.
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