it rather with another Sanscrit word, avara, occidental, the western land or isle of the west. {69} But, at any rate, who that has been brought up to think the Celts utter aliens from us and our culture, can come without a start of sympathy upon such words as heol (sol), or buaist (fuisti)? or upon such a sentence as this, ‘Peris Duw dui funnaun’ (’God prepared two fountains’)?  Or when Mr. Whitley Stokes, one of the very ablest scholars formed in Zeuss’s school, a born philologist,—­ he now occupies, alas! a post under the Government of India, instead of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think mournfully of Montesquieu’s saying, that had he been an Englishman he should never have produced his great work, but have caught the contagion of practical life, and devoted himself to what is called ’rising in the world,’ when Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his edition of Cormac’s Glossary, holds up the Irish word traith, the sea, and makes us remark that, though the names Triton, Amphitrite, and those of corresponding Indian and Zend divinities, point to the meaning sea, yet it is only Irish which actually supplies the vocable, how delightfully that brings Ireland into the Indo-European concert!  What a wholesome buffet it gives to Lord Lyndhurst’s alienation doctrines!

To go a little further.  Of the two great Celtic divisions of language, the Gaelic and the Cymric, the Gaelic, say the philologists, is more related to the younger, more synthetic, group of languages, Sanscrit, Greek, Zend, Latin and Teutonic; the Cymric to the older, more analytic Turanian group.  Of the more synthetic Aryan group, again, Zend and Teutonic are, in their turn, looser and more analytic than Sanscrit and Greek, more in sympathy with the Turanian group and with Celtic.  What possibilities of affinity and influence are here hinted at; what lines of inquiry, worth exploring, at any rate, suggest themselves to one’s mind.  By the forms of its language a nation expresses its very self.  Our language is the loosest, the most analytic, of all European languages.  And we, then, what are we? what is England?  I will not answer, A vast obscure Cymric basis with a vast visible Teutonic superstructure; but I will say that that answer sometimes suggests itself, at any rate,—­ sometimes knocks at our mind’s door for admission; and we begin to cast about and see whether it is to be let in.

But the forms of its language are not our only key to a people; what it says in its language, its literature, is the great key, and we must get back to literature.  The literature of the Celtic peoples has not yet had its Zeuss, and greatly it wants him.  We need a Zeuss to apply to Celtic literature, to all its vexed questions of dates, authenticity, and significance, the criticism, the sane method, the disinterested endeavour to get at the real facts, which Zeuss has shown in dealing with Celtic language.  Science is good in itself, and therefore Celtic literature,—­the