are evidences of a spirit which requires alteration, if the condition of the people is to be permanently elevated. On the other hand, the Welsh have many excellent qualifications which tend to counteract their innate weaknesses, and afford promise of much future good: their intellectual acuteness, their natural kindliness of heart, their constitutional poetry and religious enthusiasm, their indomitable love of country--which they share with all mountain tribes--all these good qualities form a counterbalance to their failings, and tend to rectify their national course. Take a Welshman out of Wales, place him in London or Liverpool, send him to the East Indies or to North America, and he becomes a banker of fabulous wealth, a merchant of illimitable resources, a great captain of his country's hosts, or an eminent traveller and philosopher; but leave him in his native valley, and he walks about with his hands in his pockets, angles for trout, and goes to chapel with hopeless pertinacity. Such was the Highlander once; but his shrewd good sense has got the better of his indolence, and he has come out of his fastnesses, conquering and to conquer. Not such, but far, far worse is the Irishman; and such will he be till he loses his national existence. St Andrew is a better saint than St David, and St David than St Patrick; but they all had the same faults once, and it is only by external circumstances that any amelioration has been produced. It is a fact of ethnology, that while a tribe of men, kept to itself and free from foreign admixture, preserves its natural good qualities in undiminished excellence through numerous ages, all its natural vices become increased in intensity and vitality by the same circumstances of isolation. Look at the miserable Irish, always standing in their own light; look at the Spaniards, keeping to themselves, and stifling all their noble qualities by the permanence of their national vices; look at the tribes of Asia, doomed to perpetual subjection while they remain unmixed in blood. Had the Saxons remained with uncrossed blood, they had still been stolid, heavy, dreaming, impracticable Germans, though they had peopled the plains of England; but, when mixed with the Celts and the Danes, they formed the Lowland Scots, the most industrious and canniest chields in the wide world: fused with the Dane and Norman, and subsequently mixed with all people, they became Englishmen--_rerum Domini_--like the Romans of old. It may be mortifying enough to national pride, but the fact is, nevertheless, patent and certain, that extensive admixture of blood commonly benefits a nation more than all its geographical advantages.