knowing the Celt, by procuring for this country Celtic documents which were inaccessible here, and preventing the dispersion of others which were accessible. It is not much that the English Government does for science or literature; but if Eugene O’Curry, from a chair of Celtic at Oxford, had appealed to the Government to get him copies or the originals of the Celtic treasures in the Burgundian Library at Brussels, or in the library of St. Isidore’s College at Rome, even the English Government could not well have refused him. The invaluable Irish manuscripts in the Stowe Library the late Sir Robert Peel proposed, in 1849, to buy for the British Museum; Lord Macaulay, one of the trustees of the Museum, declared, with the confident shallowness which makes him so admired by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable to all searchers for truth, that he saw nothing in the whole collection worth purchasing for the Museum, except the correspondence of Lord Melville on the American war. That is to say, this correspondence of Lord Melville’s was the only thing in the collection about which Lord Macaulay himself knew or cared. Perhaps an Oxford or Cambridge professor of Celtic might have been allowed to make his voice heard, on a matter of Celtic manuscripts, even against Lord Macaulay. The manuscripts were bought by Lord Ashburnham, who keeps them shut up, and will let no one consult them (at least up to the date when O’Curry published his _Lectures_ he did so), ‘for fear an actual acquaintance with their contents should decrease their value as matter of curiosity at some future transfer or sale.’ Who knows? Perhaps an Oxford professor of Celtic might have touched the flinty heart of Lord Ashburnham.