But the empire of the Celtic Kings was already far fallen, before it was confined to Gaul, Britain, and perhaps Ireland.  When first we see this people they were winning a name for fickleness of purpose:  making conquests and throwing them away; which things are the marks of a race declining from a high eminence it had won of old through hard work and sound policy.  We shall come to see that personal or outward characteristics can never be posited as inherent in any race.  Such things belong to ages and stages in the race’s growth.  Whatever you can say of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, now, has been totally untrue of them at some other period.  We think of the Italians as passionate, subtle of intellect, above all things artistic and beauty-loving.  Now look at them as they were three centuries B.C.:  plodding, self-contained and self-mastered, square-dealing and unsubtle, above all things contemning beauty, wholly inartistic.  But a race may retain the same traits for a very long time, if it remains in a back-water, and is unaffected by the currents of evolution.

So we may safely say of the Celts that the fickleness for which they were famed in Roman times was not a racial, but a temporal or epochal defect.  They were not fickle when they held out (in Wales) for eight centuries against the barbarian onslaughts which brought the rest of the Roman empire down in two or three; or when they resisted for two hundred years those Normans who had conquered the Anglo-Saxons in a decade.  This very quality, in old Welsh literature, is more than once given as a characteristic of extreme age; “I am old, bent double; I am fickly rash.” says Llywarch Hen.  I think that gives the clew to the whole position.  The race was at the end of its manvantaric period; the Race Soul had lost control of the forces that bound its organism together; centrifugalism had taken the place of the centripetal impulse that marks the cycles of youth and growth.  It had eaten into individual character; whence the tendency to fly off at tangents.  We see the same thing in any decadent people; by which I mean, any people at the end of one of its manvantaras, and on the verge of a pralaya.  And remember that a pralaya, like a night’s rest or the Devachanic sleep between two lives, is simply a means for restoring strength and youth.

How great the Celtic nations had been in their day, and what settled and civilized centuries lay behind them, one may gather from two not much noticed facts.  First:  Caesar, conqueror of the Roman world and of Pompey, the greatest Roman general of the day, landed twice in Britain, and spent a few weeks there without accomplishing anything in particular.  But it was the central seat and last stronghold of the Celts; and his greatest triumph was accorded him for this feat; and he was prouder of it than anything else he ever did.  He set it above his victories over Pompey.  Second:  the Gauls, in the first century B.C., were able to put in the field