the world, not looking to wild and desert countries, but to large centres of population in the English colonies, we shall be able to convince ourselves that they still present the same characteristic. If they do not bear arms in their hands, it is owing to altered circumstances; but their actual expansion bears a close resemblance to that of ancient times, and the similarity of effect shows the similarity of character.

We pass now to a new feature in the race, which has not, to our knowledge, been sufficiently dwelt upon. All their migrations in old times were across continents; and if, occasionally, they crossed the Mediterranean Sea, they did so always in foreign vessels.

The Celtic race, as we have seen, occupied the whole of Western Europe. They had, therefore, numerous harbors on the Atlantic, and some excellent ones on the Mediterranean. Many passed the greater portion of their lives on the sea, supporting themselves by fishing; yet they never thought of constructing and arming large fleets; they never fought at sea in vessels of their own, with the single exception of the naval battle between Julius Cæsar and the Veneti, off the coast of Armorica, where, in one day, the Roman general destroyed the only maritime armament which the Celts ever possessed.

And even this fact is not an exception to the general rule; for M. de Penhouet, the greatest antiquarian, perhaps, in Celtic lore in Brittany, has proved that the Veneti of Western Gaul were not really Celts, but rather a colony of Carthaginians, the only one probably remaining, in the time of Cæsar, of those once numerous foreign colonies of the old enemies of Rome.

Still this strange anomaly, an anomaly which is observable in no other people living on an extensive coast, was not produced by ignorance of the uses and importance of large fleets. From the first they held constant intercourse with the great navigators of antiquity. The Celtic harbors teemed with the craft of hardy seamen, who came from Phoenicia, Carthage, and finally from Rome. Heeren, in his researches on the Phoenicians, proves it for that very early age, and mentions the strange fact that the name of Ireland with them was the "Holy Isle." For several centuries, the Carthaginians, in particular, used the harbors of Spain, of Gaul, even of Erin and Britain, as their own. Celtic inhabitants of those countries allowed them to settle peaceably among them, to trade with them, to use their cities as emporiums, to call them, in fact, Carthaginian harbors, although that African nation never really colonized the country, does not appear to have made war on the inhabitants in order to occupy it, except in a few instances, when thwarted, probably, in their commercial enterprises; but they always lived on peaceful terms with the aborigines, whom they benefited by their trade, and,

The

doubtless, enlightened by the narrative of their expeditions in distant lands.

Is it not a strikingly strange fact that, under such circumstances, the Celts should never have thought of possessing vessels of their own, if not to push the enterprises of an extensive commerce, for which they never showed the slightest inclination, at least for the purpose of shipping their colonies abroad, and crossing directly to Greece from Celtiberia, for instance, or from their Italian colony of the Veneti, replaced in modern times by maritime Venice? Yet so it was; and the great classic scholar, Heeren, in his learned researches on the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, remarks it with surprise. The chief reason which he assigns for the success of those southern navigators from Carthage in establishing their colonies everywhere, is the fact of no people in Spain, Gaul, or the British Isles, possessing at the time a navy of their own; and, finding it so surprising, he does not attempt to explain it, as indeed it really remains without any possible explanation, save the lack of inclination springing from the natural promptings of the race.

What renders it more surprising still is, that individually they had no aversion to a seafaring life; not only many of them subsisted by fishing, but their curraghs covered the sea all along their extensive coasts. They could pass from island to island in their small craft. Thus the Celts of Erin frequently crossed over to Scotland, to the Hebrides, from rock to rock, and in Christian times they went as far as the Faroe group, even as far as Iceland, which some of them appear to have attempted to colonize long before the Norwegian outlaws went there; and some even say that from Erin came the first Europeans who landed on frozen Greenland years before the Icelandic Northmen planted establishments in that dreary country. The Celts, therefore, and those of Erin chiefly, were a seafaring race.

But to construct a fleet, to provision and arm it, to fill it with the flower of their youth, and send them over the ocean to plunder and slay the inhabitants for the purpose of colonizing the countries they had previously devastated, such was never the character of the Celts. They never engaged extensively in trade, or what is often synonymous, piracy. Before becoming christianized, the Celts of Ireland crossed over the narrow channel which divided them from Britain, and frequently carried home slaves; they also passed occasionally to Armorica, and their annals speak of warlike expeditions to that country; but their efforts at navigation were always on an extremely limited scale, in spite of the many inducements offered by their geographical position. The fact is striking when we compare them in that particular with the Scandinavian free-rovers of the Northern Ocean.

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It is, therefore, very remarkable that, whenever they got on board a boat, it was always a single and open vessel. They did pagan times, when the largest portion of Western Europe was theirs; they continued to do so after they became Christians. The race has always appeared opposed to the operations of an extensive commerce, and to the spreading of their power by large fleets.

The ancient annals of Ireland speak, indeed, of naval expeditions; but these expeditions were always undertaken by a few persons in one, two, or, at most, three boats, as that of the sons of Ua Corra; and such facts consequently strengthen our view. The only fact which seems contradictory is supposed to have occurred during the Danish wars, when Callaghan, King of Cashel, is said to have been caught in an ambush, and conveyed a captive by the Danes, first to Dublin, then to Armagh, and finally to Dundalk.

The troops of Kennedy, son of Lorcan, are said to have been supported by a fleet of fifty sail, commanded by Falvey Finn, a Kerry chieftain. We need not repeat the story so well known to all readers of Irish history. But this fact is found only in the work of Keating, and the best critics accept it merely as an historical romance, which Keating thought proper to insert in his history. Still, even supposing the truth of the story, all that we may conclude from it is that the seafaring Danes, at the end of their long wars, had taught the Irish to use the sea as a battlefield, to the extent of undertaking a small expedition in order to liberate a beloved chieftain.

It is very remarkable, also, that according to the annals of Ireland, the naval expeditions nearly always bore a religious character, never one of trade or barter, with the exception of the tale of Brescan, who was swallowed up with his fifty curraghs, in which he traded between Ireland and Scotland.

Nearly all the other maritime excursions are voyages undertaken with a Christian or Godlike object. Thus our holy religion was carried over to Scotland and the Hebrides by Columbkill and his brother monks, who evangelized those numerous groups of small islands. Crossing in their skiffs, and planting the cross on some far-seen rock or promontory, they perched their monastic cells on the bold bluffs overlooking the

ocean.

No more was the warrior on carnage bent to be seen on the seaboards of Ulster or the western coast of Albania, as Scotland was then called; only unarmed men dressed in humble monastic garb trod those wave-beaten shores. At early morning they left the cove of their convent; they spread their single sail, and plied their well-worn oars, crossing from Colombsay to Iona, or from the harbor of Bangor to the nearest shore of the Isle of Man.

At noon they inay have met a brother in the middle of the strait in his shell of a boat, bouncing over the water toward the point they had left. And the holy sign of the cross passed from one monk to the other, and the word of benison was carried through the air, forward and back, and the heaven above was propitious, and the wave below was obedient, while the hearts of the two brothers were softened by holy feelings; and nothing in the air around, on the dimly-visible shores, on the surface of the heaving waves, was seen or heard save what might raise the soul to heaven and the heart to God.

In concluding this portion of our subject, we will merely refer to the fact that neither the Celts of Gaul or Britain, nor those of Ireland, ever opposed an organized fleet to the numerous hostile naval armaments by which their country was invaded. When the Roman fleet, commanded by Cæsar, landed in Great Britain, when the innumerable Danish expeditions attacked Ireland, whenever the Anglo-Normans arrived in the island during the four hundred years of the colony of the Pale,. we never hear of a Celtic fleet opposed to the invaders. Italian, Spanish, and French fleets came in oftentimes to the help of the Irish; yet never do we read that the island had a single vessel to join the friendly expedition. We may safely conclude, then, that the race has never felt any inclination for sending large expeditions to sea, whether for extensive trading, or for political and warlike purposes. They have always used the vessels of other nations, and it is no surprise, therefore, to find them now crowding English ships in their migrations to colonize other countries. It is one of the propensities of the race.

A third feature of Celtic character and mind now attracts our attention, namely, a peculiar literature, art, music, and poetry, wherein their very soul is portrayed, and which belongs exclusively to them. Some very interesting considerations will naturally flow from this short investigation. It is the study of the constitution of the Celtic mind.

In Celtic countries literature was the perfect expression of the social state of the people. Literature must naturally be so everywhere, but it was most emphatically so among the Celts. With them it became a state institution, totally unknown to other nations. Literature and art sprang naturally from the clan system, and consequently adopted a form not to be found. elsewhere. Being, moreover, of an entirely traditional cast, those pursuits imparted to their minds a steady, conservative, traditional spirit, which has resulted in the happiest consequences for the race, preserving it from theoretical vagaries, and holding it aloof, even in our days, from the aberrations which all men now deplore in other European nations, and whose effects we behold in the anarchy of thought. This last consid

eration adds to this portion of our subject a peculiar and ab sorbing interest.

The knowledge which Julius Cæsar possessed of the Druids and of their literary system was very incomplete; yet he presents to his readers a truly grand spectacle, when he speaks of their numerous schools, frequented by an immense number of the youths of the country, so different from those of Rome, in which his own mind had been trained-" Ad has magnus adolescentium numerus disciplinæ causâ concurrit:" when he mentions the political and civil subjects submitted to the judgment of literary men-" de omnibus controversiis publicis privatisque constituunt. . . . Si de hereditate, si de finibus controversia est, iidem decernunt:" when he states the length of their studies"annos nonnulli vicenos in disciplinâ permanent:" when he finally draws a short sketch of their course of instruction-" multa de sideribus atque eorum motu, de mundi ac terrarum magnitudine,. . . . disputant juventutique tradunt."

But, unfortunately, the great author of the "Commentaries" had not sufficiently studied the social state of the Celts in Gaul and Britain; he never mentions the clan institution, even when he speaks of the feuds-factiones-which invariably split their septs-civitates-into hostile parties. In his eleventh chapter, when describing the contentions which were constantly rife in the cities, villages, even single houses, when remarking the continual shifting of the supreme authority from the Edui to the Sequani, and reciprocally, he seems to be giving in a few phrases the long history of the Irish Celts; yet he does not appear to be aware of the cause of this universal agitation, namely, the clan system, of which he does not say a single world. How could he have perceived the effect of that system on their literature and art?

To understand it at once it suffices to describe in a few words the various branches of studies pursued by their learned men; and, as we are best acquainted with that portion of the subject which concerns Ireland, we will confine ourselves to it. There is no doubt the other agglomerations of Celtic tribes, the Gauls chiefly, enjoyed institutions very similar, if not perfectly alike.

The highest generic name for a learned man or doctor was "ollamh." These ollamhs formed a kind of order in the race, and the privileges bestowed on them were most extensive. "Each one of them was allowed a standing income of twentyone cows and their grasses," in the chieftain's territory, besides ample refections for himself and his attendants, to the number of twenty-four, including his subordinate tutors, his advanced pupils, and his retinue of servants. He was entitled to have two hounds and six horses, . . . and the privilege of conferring a temporary sanctuary from injury or arrest by carrying his