Let us reunite ourselves with our better mind
and with the world through science; and let it be one of our angelic
revenges on the Philistines, who among their other sins are the
guilty authors of Fenianism, to found at Oxford a chair of Celtic,
and to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of
peace to Ireland.
Footnotes:-
{0a} See p. 28 of the following essay. [Starts with "It is not
difficult for the other side . . . "--DP.]
{0b} See particularly pp. 9, 10, 11, of the following essay.
{4} Lord Strangford remarks on this passage:- 'Your Gomer and your
Cimmerians are of course only lay figures, to be accepted in the
rhetorical and subjective sense. As such I accept them, but I enter
a protest against the "genuine tongue of his ancestors." Modern
Celtic tongues are to the old Celtic heard by Julius Caesar, broadly
speaking, what the modern Romanic tongues are to Caesar's own Latin.
Welsh, in fact, is a detritus; a language in the category of modern
French, or, to speak less roughly and with a closer approximation, of
old Provencal, not in the category of Lithuanian, much less in the
category of Basque. By true inductive research, based on an accurate
comparison of such forms of Celtic speech, oral and recorded, as we
now possess, modern philology has, in so far as was possible,
succeeded in restoring certain forms of the parent speech, and in so
doing has achieved not the least striking of its many triumphs; for
those very forms thus restored have since been verified past all
cavil by their actual discovery in the old Gaulish inscriptions
recently come to light.
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