Again:  when in the ninth century Hywel Dda king of Wales codified the laws of his country, the result was a Celtic code without, I think, any relation to Roman law; though Roman law had prevailed in Roman Britain for three centuries or so.  What strong Celtic molds must have persisted, to cause this!  Roman law imposed itself on nearly all Europe, including many peoples that never were under Roman rule; and yet here was this people, that had been all that time under the Romans, oblivious of Roman law, uninfluenced by it, practically speaking;—­and returning at the first opportunity to the kind of laws they had had before the Romans were born or thought of.

Druidism had been proscribed, as a practice, during Roman times.  The worship of the Celtic Gods had continued; but they had been assimilated to those of the empire;—­which would be a much more difficult thing to do were the Gods, as your modern learned suppose, mere fictions of the superstitious, and not the symbols of, or the Powers behind, the forces of Nature.  So Celtic religion outwardly was submerged in Roman religion; and then later.  Christianity came in.  But the science, the institutions, and the philosophy of the Druids had been part and parcel of the inner life of the race perhaps as long as their laws and language had; and your Celt runs by nature to religion, or even to religiosity,—­ultra-religion.  Is it likely that, while he kept his laws and language, he let his religion go?  And when it was not an arbitrary farrago of dogmas, like some we might mention; but a philosophy of the soul so vivid that he counted death little more to fuss about than going to sleep?

When should those old ideas have reappeared,—­when should the racial astral molds have been brought out and furbished up with new strength to make them endure?  Why, when the Roman dominion came to an end; when the people were turning for inspiration to their own things, and away from Latin things; when they were forgoing Latin for Celtic; reviving Celtic laws and customs; trying to forget they had been subjected to foreigners, and to remember and resurrect the old Monarchy of Britain.  Christianity would not give them all the difference from Romanism that they wanted,—­that the most ardent among them wanted:  the Romans were Christians too;—­but there was that other ancient thing which the Romans had proscribed.  It still existed, in Ireland for example; and for that matter, there were plenty of places in Britain where the Roman arm could never have reached it.  Matthew Arnold saw these things in his day, and argued for the Neo-druidism of the sixth century.  He was a man accustomed to deal in ideas.  You may easily train your mind to an acuteness and sagacity in dealing with grammatical roots, and forms, that will not help you in dealing with ideas.