'HE English language is essentially a branch | after fourteen centuries, their language, enriched spoken by the inhabitants of Central Europe before speech of fifty millions of people, to be found in the dawn of history. The earliest inhabitants of the all quarters of the globe. May we not assume British Islands were a Celtic race, one of the most that the national character, like the national lanimportant of the Aryan family of nations, and the guage, has been moulded and enriched by this Celtic language is still spoken, divided into two combination of races ? The Celtic imagination sections. One of these is the Gaelic of Ireland, and impulsive ardour, the Saxon solidity, the old the Scottish Highlands, and the Isle of Man. The Norse maritime spirit and love of adventure, the other is the Cymric of Wales and of the French later Norman chivalry and keen sense of enjoyprovince of Brittany, the ancient Armorica. A ment; these have been the elements, slowly comCeltie dialect lingered in Cornwall until past the bined under northern skies, and interfused by a middle of the last century. It has been calculated pure ennobling religion, that have gone forth in that, if the English language were divided into a literature and in life, the moral pioneers and hundred parts, sixty would be Saxon. Mr Sharon teachers of the world. Turner, the historian of the Anglo-Saxons, and The Celts were not without a native literature. Archbishop Trench concur in this estimate, and The Welsh had their Triads and their romantic it is said to be verified by the vocabulary of our fables of King Arthur and his Knights of the English Bible and by the dramas of Shakspeare. Round Table. The real Arthur of history appears But on the other hand, a high linguistic authority, to have been the ruler of the ancient Britons F. Max-Müller, states that the Norman elements in the beginning of the sixth century, and was in English have a decided preponderance; and slain by Modred in 542. He makes no great he cites M. Thommerel, who had counted every figure in history, where he has only a twilight sort word in our dictionaries, and established the fact of existence. His true realm is romance, and that the number of Teutonic or Saxon words in there he sits enthroned in poetic splendour' surEnglish amounts to 13,230, whereas there are rounded by his circle of invincible knights. He 29,853 traceable to a Latin source. This disparity could not subdue the Anglo-Saxons, but the Welsh arises from the philologist looking at the words bards invested him with all kinds of supernatural apart from the stem or grammar of the language. perfections. He forms, with his court, the subject The great influx of Neo-Latin and other vocables of a whole library of heroic lays and legends. Čenin the course of the nation's progress is undoubted, turies after his death, Arthur reappeared in the but, as F. Max-Müller admits, "languages, though tales of the Norman and French minstrels as the mixed in their dictionary, can never be mixed in ideal of a perfect knight and the mirror of chivtheir grammar,' and in a scientific classification alry. The great chiefs of English song-Spenser, the English must be ranked as Saxon. The great Milton, Dryden, and Gray-'prolonged the legendbulk of our laws and social institutions, the gram- ary tales,' as related by Sir Walter Scott, himself matical structure of our language, our most famil- an enthusiastic devotee; and in our own day they iar and habitual expressions in common life, are have been revived by a poet not unworthy of derived from our rude northern invaders; and now, being named along with that illustrious band.' It