The literature of the Celts : its history and romance / by Magnus Maclean.

Magnus MacLean

Date:: 1902

Credit: The literature of the Celts : its history and romance / by Magnus Maclean. Source: Wellcome Collection.

31/424 page 11

$hereditary instincts of their ancestors, and hiving westwards to America, only to lose their distinctive Celtic existence and to be merged in the larger life of that great nation. ... h®. faCt,S are sufficiently patent, but to show the rapidity uith which the disintegration is going on it may be mentioned r ^ SjnCe 18^ 1 ’ 3>925,133 persons have emigrated from reland alone—a number larger than that of all the remain- ing Celtic-speaking population in Europe. In i8qq the number was 43,760; in 1900, 47,107; in 1901, 39,870, the vast majority of whom were from the western Irish- spea ang Provinces ; and, as in the depopulation of the Highlands, it is largely a drain of the best blood, the land being left m the hands of the old and the feeble. There are those who still write and dream of laying the oundations 01 a new Celtic civilisation, but in view of the present subtle and swift dissolution it is hard to know what “ bS 3 leaVenig °f the existing alpirations 7 “ reCrUdeSCence of the Celtic spirit and Celtic In the main the race has already become fused with the eaTaTcdt Th OPe’dlcaPPearing “ Gall°-Grccians in the east as Celt-Ibenans ,n Spain, as Gallo-Franks and An<do- s? M-ln hu n0rth'west_a11 but the Celtic fringes that “are shedding- their past. S Thus far the history, and from what we have said it will appear that the Celts first emerge in literature in he fifth S, BtCh; r WhiCH time the daSSiCal writers mle them br W 7 TT f ShOTt and meagre ausions to nem Dr. \\ Z. Ripley,* one of the latest authorities on thenn moos W°U d ^T'31)114 ‘heir evidenCe as of little value for and PffiPv ° m°dern scientific research into race origins interestin'glnd^hprtlnt61033’ ” ^ “ * g°e$’ * “ hi^ The earliest of all the Greek authors to mention the Celts Itl (ZS g7rapher Hecateus (52° -•), - Het: (4«4-425 ?), Who twice refers to them in his history as 1 Races of Europe.$

The literature of the Celts : its history and romance / by Magnus Maclean.

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