The soul’s peregrinations after death are also the favourite theme of the most ancient Armorican poetry.  Among the features by which the Celtic races most impressed the Romans were the precision of their ideas upon the future life, their inclination to suicide, and the loans and contracts which they signed with the other world in view.  The more frivolous peoples of the South saw with awe in this assurance the fact of a mysterious race, having an understanding of the future and the secret of death.  Through the whole of classical antiquity runs the tradition of an Isle of Shadows, situated on the confines of Brittany, and of a folk devoted to the passage of souls, which lives upon the neighbouring coast.  In the night they hear dead men prowling about their cabin, and knocking at the door.  Then they rise up; their craft is laden with invisible beings; on their return it is lighter.  Several of these features reproduced by Plutarch, Claudian, Procopius, [Footnote:  A Byzantine historian of the fifth and sixth centuries.] and Tzetzes [Footnote:  A Greek poet and grammarian of the twelfth century.] would incline one to believe that the renown of the Irish myths made its way into classical antiquity about the first or second century.  Plutarch, for example, relates, concerning the Cronian Sea, fables identical with those which fill the legend of St. Malo.  Procopius, describing the sacred Island of Brittia, which consists of two parts separated by the sea, one delightful, the other given over to evil spirits, seems to have read in advance the description of the Purgatory of St. Patrick, which Giraldus Cambrensis was to give seven centuries later.  It cannot be doubted for a moment, after the able researches of Messrs. Ozanam, Labitte, and Wright, that to the number of poetical themes which Europe owes to the genius of the Celts, is to be added the framework of the Divine Comedy.

One can understand how greatly this invincible attraction to fables must have discredited the Celtic race in the eyes of nationalities that believed themselves to be more serious.  It is in truth a strange thing, that the whole of the mediaeval epoch, whilst submitting to the influence of the Celtic imagination, and borrowing from Brittany and Ireland at least half of its poetical subjects, believed itself obliged, for the saving of its own honour, to slight and satirise the people to which it owed them.  Even Chretien de Troyes, for example, who passed his life in exploiting the Breton romances for his own purposes, originated the saying—­

    “Les Gallois sont tous par nature
     Plus sots que betes de pature.”