an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret.  Again, his sensibility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of nature and the life of nature; here, too, he seems in a special way attracted by the secret before him, the secret of natural beauty and natural magic, and to be close to it, to half-divine it.  In the productions of the Celtic genius, nothing, perhaps, is so interesting as the evidences of this power:  I shall have occasion to give specimens of them by-and-by.  The same sensibility made the Celts full of reverence and enthusiasm for genius, learning, and the things of the mind; to be A bard, Freed A man,—­that is a characteristic stroke of this generous and ennobling ardour of theirs, which no race has ever shown more strongly.  Even the extravagance and exaggeration of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something romantic and attractive about it, something which has a sort of smack of misdirected good.  The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving himself body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising political temperament, it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence; but it is a temperament for which one has a kind of sympathy notwithstanding.  And very often, for the gay defiant reaction against fact of the lively Celtic nature one has more than sympathy; one feels, in spite of the extravagance, in spite of good sense disapproving, magnetised and exhilarated by it.  The Gauls had a rule inflicting a fine on every warrior who, when he appeared on parade, was found to stick out too much in front,—­to be corpulent, in short.  Such a rule is surely the maddest article of war ever framed, and to people to whom nature has assigned a large volume of intestines, must appear, no doubt, horrible; but yet has it not an audacious, sparkling, immaterial manner with it, which lifts one out of routine, and sets one’s spirits in a glow?

All tendencies of human nature are in themselves vital and profitable; when they are blamed, they are only to be blamed relatively, not absolutely.  This holds true of the Saxon’s phlegm as well as of the Celt’s sentiment.  Out of the steady humdrum habit of the creeping Saxon, as the Celt calls him,—­out of his way of going near the ground,—­has come, no doubt, Philistinism, that plant of essentially Germanic growth, flourishing with its genuine marks only in the German fatherland, Great Britain and her colonies, and the United States of America; but what a soul of goodness there is in Philistinism itself! and this soul of goodness I, who am often supposed to be Philistinism’s mortal enemy merely because I do not wish it to have things all its own way, cherish as much as anybody.  This steady-going habit leads at last, as I have said, up to science, up to the