tempest, it rather stimulated them to quit themselves as heroes. The English conscience speaks in such lines as these:

"This is best laud from the living

In last words spoken about him :
He worked ere he went his way,

When on earth, against wiles of the foe,

With brave deeds overcoming the devil.”*

In these early English we recognize those great traits of mind and character which have continued to animate the race; traits which in the centuries to come were to take shape in the deeds of heroes and the songs of poets. In these half-savage pirate tribes, with their deep northern melancholy, is the germ of that masterful and aggressive nation which was to put a girdle of English round the world. Of their blood are the sea-dogs who chased the towering galleons of the Spanish Armada, the six hundred who charged to death at Balaclava, or those other English, our own forefathers, who declared and maintained their inheritance of freedom. The spirit of this older England, enriched by time, is alive, too, in the words of Shakespeare, of Milton, and of Browning, as it is in the deeds of Raleigh, of Chatham, and of Gordon.

When the English began to settle in Britain, about the middle of the fifth century, the island was occupied by tribes of a people called Celts. The Celts. In early times this race held a great part of Western Europe as well as the British Isles,

"The Seafarer." Morley's translation, English Writers, vol. ii. p. 24.

until conquered or pushed aside by the Teutonic races, the group to which the English belong. Scotland and Ireland were occupied by one great division of the Celts, the Gaels, and what is now England by another, the Cymri, or, as we commonly call them, the Britons. The Celts were a very different race from the Teutons, and the Britons were as thoroughly Celtic in their disposition as the English were Teutonic. For more than fourteen hundred years Celt and Teuton have dwelt together in England, for while the Britons were driven westward by the English, they were far from being exterminated, and in certain sections these two races have blended into one. This mixture of the races has been greatest in the north and west; for instance, in such counties as Devon, Somerset, Warwick, and Cumberland. From the mixed race thus formed, a race which combined the genius of two dissimilar and gifted peoples, many of the greatest poets of England have sprung. Indeed it may be truly said, that English literature is the expression and outcome, not of the English race and character alone, but of that character modi. fied and enriched by the Celt. Not only has the Celtic blood thus mingled with the English. Celtic poetry and legend have furnished subject and inspiration to English writers down to our own day. It is, therefore, important for us to gain some notion of the Celtic as well as of the early English spirit, for in the literature of England we recognize the presence of both.

The Britons, like the English, were a huge and powerful race; they had fierce gray or bluish eyes,

and light or reddish hair. Wild as they seemed before they lost their native vigor under

The Britons.

the Roman rule, they had a natural vein of poetry and sentiment more pathetic and delicate than the somewhat prosaic and stolid English. They were quick-witted, unstable, lacking the English capacity for dogged and persistent effort, easily depressed and easily exalted, quickly sensitive to romance, to beauty, to sadness. Beside the stern and massive literature of the early English, with its dark background of storm and forest, with its resolution and its fatalism, with the icy solitude of its northern ocean, stands that of the Celt, bright as fairy-land with gorgeous colors and the gleam of gold and precious stones, astir with the quick play of fancy, enlivened by an un-English vivacity and humor, and touched by an exquisite pathos. Here is the description from one of the Celtic romances of a young knight going out to seek his fortune:

“And the youth pricked forth upon a steed with head dappled gray, of four winters old, firm of limb, with shell-formed hoofs, having a bridle of linked gold on his head, and on him a saddle of costly gold. And in the youth's hand were two spears of silver, sharp, well-tempered, headed with steel, three ells in length, of an edge to wound the wind and cause blood to flow, and swifter than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at the heaviest. A gold-hilted sword was upon his thigh, the blade of which was of gold, bearing a cross of inlaid gold of the hue of the lightning of heaven; his war horn was of ivory. Before him were two brindled, white-breasted greyhounds, having strong collars of rubies about their necks, reaching from the shoulder to the ear. And the one that was

on the left side bounded across to the right side, and the one on the right to the left, and like two sea swallows sported round him.

And the blade of grass bent not beneath him, so light was his step as he journeyed toward the gate of Arthur's palace."*

The familiar figure of the young man going forth to conquer the world in the strength of his youth, is here emblazoned with all the glowing colors, the delicate fancy of the Celtic genius.

Or take the following as an illustration of the Celtic sentiment and Celtic love of nature:

"The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-colored silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds and rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the three-mewed falcon, was not brighter than hers. Whoso beheld her was filled with her love; four white trefoils sprung up where'er she trod.” †

And finally, as an example of the Celtic humor, add the picture of another maiden as a study of the grotesque :

"And thereupon they saw a black curly-headed maiden enter, riding upon a yellow mule, with jagged thongs in her hand to urge it on, and having a rough and hideous aspect. Blacker were her face and her hands than the blackest iron covered with pitch, and her hue was not more frightful than * "Kilhwch and Olwen," Guest's Mabinogion, p. 219. † Ibid., p. 233.

her form. High cheeks had she and a face lengthened down ward and a short nose with distended nostrils. And one eye was of a piercing mottled gray, and the other was black as jet, deep sunk in her head. And her teeth were long and yellow, more yellow were they than the flower of the and her figure was very thin and spare except

broom

her feet, which were of huge size."*

While the early English had certain great traits of character which were lacking in the Celt-the genius for governing, steadfastness, earnestness-the Celt was strong where the English were deficient. The mingling of these races, therefore, during the long period before the outburst of literature in the fourteenth century, was an important element in the unconscious preparation for the latter time. We can better understand this by remembering that William Shakespeare, the greatest genius of the modern world, was born in a district where the mixture of these two races was especially great, and that by inheritance, as by the quality of his genius, we may think of him as the highest example of this union of Celt and Teuton. "It is not without significance that the highest type of the race, the one Englishman who has combined in the largest measure the mobility and fancy of the Celt with the depth and energy of the Teutonic temper, was born on the old Welsh and English border-land in the forest of Arden." t

*"Story of Peredur,” Mabinogion, Guest's edition, 114. fJ. R. Green, quoted in article on Shakespeare," Encyclopædia Britannica, ninth edition, by Prof. T. Spencer Baynes, which consult on this subject.