cannot carry him, in the appliances of his favourite life of sociability and pleasure, beyond the gross and creeping Saxon whom he despises; the regent Breas, we are told in the Battle of Moytura of the Fomorians, became unpopular because ’the knives of his people were not greased at his table, nor did their breath smell of ale at the banquet.’  In its grossness and barbarousness is not that Saxon, as Saxon as it can be? just what the Latinised Norman, sensuous and sociable like the Celt, but with the talent to make this bent of his serve to a practical embellishment of his mode of living, found so disgusting in the Saxon.

And as in material civilisation he has been ineffectual, so has the Celt been ineffectual in politics.  This colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer, the Titan of the early world, who in primitive times fills so large a place on earth’s scene, dwindles and dwindles as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to what we now see him.  For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping, ever more and more out of the Celt’s grasp.  ‘They went forth to the war,’ Ossian says most truly, ‘but they always fell.’

And yet, if one sets about constituting an ideal genius, what a great deal of the Celt does one find oneself drawn to put into it!  Of an ideal genius one does not want the elements, any of them, to be in a state of weakness; on the contrary, one wants all of them to be in the highest state of power; but with a law of measure, of harmony, presiding over the whole.  So the sensibility of the Celt, if everything else were not sacrificed to it, is a beautiful and admirable force.  For sensibility, the power of quick and strong perception and emotion, is one of the very prime constituents of genius, perhaps its most positive constituent; it is to the soul what good senses are to the body, the grand natural condition of successful activity.  Sensibility gives genius its materials; one cannot have too much of it, if one can but keep its master and not be its slave.  Do not let us wish that the Celt had had less sensibility, but that he had been more master of it.  Even as it is, if his sensibility has been a source of weakness to him, it has been a source of power too, and a source of happiness.  Some people have found in the Celtic nature and its sensibility the main root out of which chivalry and romance and the glorification of a feminine ideal spring; this is a great question, with which I cannot deal here.  Let me notice in passing, however, that there is, in truth, a Celtic air about the extravagance of chivalry, its reaction against the despotism of fact, its straining human nature further than it will stand.  But putting all this question of chivalry and its origin on one side, no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has