We find that those old Romans did leave, besides their long, straight, high-roads, and Roman villas, and store of sepulchral vases, a germ of Roman laws, and a little nucleus of Roman words, traceable in the institutions and--to some slight degree--in the language of to-day. We see in the later pages of Green through what forests the rivers ran, and can go round about the great Roman-British towns (Roman first and then adopted by Britons) of London[2] and of York; and that other magnificent one of Cirencester (or Sisister as the English say, with a stout defiance of their alphabet). We can understand how and why the fat meadows of Somersetshire should be coveted by marauders and fought for by Celts; and we behold more clearly and distinctly than ever, under the precise topography of modern investigators, the walls of wood and hills which stayed Saxon pursuit of those Britons who sought shelter in Wales, Cumberland, or the Cornish peninsula. _Celtic Literature._ Naturally, this flight of a nation to its fastnesses was not without clamor and lament; some of which--if we may trust current Cymric traditions--was put into such piercing sound as has come down to our own day in the shape of Welsh war-songs. Dates are uncertain; but without doubt somewhat of this Celtic shrill singing was of earlier utterance than anything of equal literary quality that came from our wrangling Saxon or West-Saxon forefathers in the fertile plains of England. Some of these Celtic war strains have been turned into a music by the poet Gray[3] which our English ears love; Emerson used to find regalement in the strains of another Welsh bard; and the Mabinogion, a pleasant budget of old Cymric fable,[4] has come to a sort of literary resurrection in our day under the hands of the late Sidney Lanier. If you would know more of things Celtic, I would commend to your attention a few lectures read at Oxford in 1864-65 by Matthew Arnold in which he has brought a curious zeal, and his wonted acumen to an investigation of the influences upon English literature of that old Celtic current. It was a wild, turbulent current; it had fret and roar in it; it had passion and splendor in it; and there are those who think that whatever ardor of imagination, or love for brilliant color or music may belong to our English race is due to old interfusion of British blood. Certainly the lively plaids of the Highlander and his bagpipes show love for much color and exuberant gush of sound; and we all understand that the Celtic Irishman has an appetite for a shindy which demonstrates a rather lively emotional nature. _Beginning of English Learning._