past, Celtic speech has been heard. The Cornish, too, has become extinct within the memory of the present generation; the Irish is rapidly on its way to the same fate; the Gaelic will not survive the complete taming and civilization of the Highlands; the French is likely to crowd out the patois of the Breton peasant; and it is greatly to be doubted whether even the Welsh people, passionate as is the attachment with which at present they cling to their peculiar speech, will continue always to refuse the advantages that would accrue to them from its relinquishment, and a more thorough fusion with the greater community of speakers of English to which they form an adjunct. There has never been a homogeneous, independent, and cultivated Celtic state, capable of protecting its idiom from the encroachment of other tongues; and only such protection, now unattainable, can, as it seems, save Celtic speech from utter extinction.
There is no small difficulty in treating satisfactorily the documents which illustrate the history of the Celtic languages, owing to the prevalence of a peculiar and strongly-marked linguistic disease, well known among philologists as "Celtomania," which has been very apt to attack students of the subject—especially such as were of Celtic extraction, but in some degree foreigners also—leading them wildly to exaggerate the antiquity and importance of the Celtic civilization, language, and literature. We have had Celtic set up as the most primitive and uncorrupted of tongues, spoken by generations long anterior to the oldest worthies whom history, sacred or profane, recognizes, and furnishing the only sure foundation to universal etymology; we have had ancient inscriptions and difficult texts, of the most diverse origin and distant locality, explained out of Celtic into high-sounding phrases, of true Ossianic ring; we have had the obscure words of various languages traced to Celtic roots, provided with genealogies from an Irish or Welsh ancestor—and much more of the same sort. Sober and unprejudiced inquiry cuts down these claims to greatly reduced, though still respectable, dimensions.
So completely were the Gaulish dialects of northern Italy, France, and Spain wiped out by the Latin, so few traces of
