I.

If the excellence of races is to be appreciated by the purity of their blood and the inviolability of their national character, it must needs be admitted that none can vie in nobility with the still surviving remains of the Celtic race. [Footnote:  To avoid all misunderstanding, I ought to point out that by the word Celtic I designate here, not the whole of the great race which, at a remote epoch, formed the population of nearly the whole of Western Europe, but simply the four groups which, in our days, still merit this name, as opposed to the Teutons and to the Neo-Latin peoples.  These four groups are:  (i) The inhabitants of Wales or Cambria, and the peninsula of Cornwall, bearing even now the ancient name of Cymry; (2) the Bretons bretonnants, or dwellers in French Brittany speaking Bas-Breton, who represent an emigration of the Cymry from Wales; (3) the Gaels of the North of Scotland speaking Gaelic; (4) the Irish, although a very profound line of demarcation separates Ireland from the rest of the Celtic family. [It is also necessary to point out that Renan in this essay applies the name Breton both to the Bretons proper, i. e. the inhabitants of Brittany, and to the British members of the Celtic race.—­Translator’s Note.]]

Never has a human family lived more apart from the world, and been purer from all alien admixture.  Confined by conquest within forgotten islands and peninsulas, it has reared an impassable barrier against external influences; it has drawn all from itself; it has lived solely on its own capital.  From this ersues that powerful individuality, that hatred of the foreigner, which even in our own days has formed the essential feature of the Celtic peoples.  Roman civilisation scarcely reached them, and left among them but few traces.  The Teutonic invasion drove them back, but did not penetrate them.  At the present hour they are still constant in resistance to an invasion dangerous in an altogether different way,- -that of modern civilisation, destructive as it is of local variations and national types.  Ireland in particular (and herein we perhaps have the secret of her irremediable weakness) is the only country in Europe where the native can produce the titles of his descent, and designate with certainty, even in the darkness of prehistoric ages, the race from which he has sprung.

It is in this secluded life, in this defiance of all that comes from without, that we must search for the explanation of the chief features of the Celtic character.  It has all the failings, and all the good qualities, of the solitary man; at once proud and timid, strong in feeling and feeble in action, at home free and unreserved, to the outside world awkward and embarrassed.  It distrusts the foreigner, because it sees in him a being more refined than itself, who abuses its simplicity.  Indifferent to the admiration of others, it asks only one thing, that it should be left to itself.  It