Tall, blue-eyed, with fair or red hair, they overpowered in every way the diminutive Iberians, and their tattooing, while it gave them a name which has often been mistaken for a national designation (Picts, or painted men), made them dreadful to their enemies in battle, and ferocious-looking even in time of peace. Their civilisation was of a much higher type than that of the Iberians; their weapons, their war-chariots, their mode of life and their treatment of women, are all so closely similar to that of the Greeks of Homer that a theory has been advanced and ably defended, that the Homeric Greeks were really invading Celts--Gaelic or Gaulish tribes from the north of Europe. If it indeed be so, we owe to the Celts a debt of imperishable culture and civilisation. To them belongs more especially, in our national amalgam, the passion for the past, the ardent patriotism, the longing for spiritual beauty, which raises and relieves the Saxon materialism. "Though fallen the state of Erin and changed the Scottish land, Though small the power of Mona, though unwaked Llewellyn's band, Though Ambrose Merlin's prophecies are held as idle tales, Though Iona's ruined cloisters are swept by northern gales, One in name and in fame Are the sea-divided Gaels. "In Northern Spain and Italy our brethren also dwell, And brave are the traditions of their fathers that they tell; The Eagle or the Crescent in the dawn of history pales Before the advancing banners of the great Rome-conquering Gaels: One in name and in fame Are the sea-divided Gaels."[8] It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of the Celtic contribution to our national literature and character: the race that gave us Ossian, and Finn, and Cuchulain, that sang of the sorrowful love and doom of Deirdre, that told of the pursuit of Diarmit and Grania, till every dolmen and cromlech in Ireland was associated with these lovers; the race that preserved for us "That grey king whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still,"[9] the King Arthur whose Arthur's Seat overhangs Edinburgh, whose presence haunts the Lakes, and Wales, and Cornwall, and the forests of Brittany; the race that held up for us the image of the Holy Grail--that race can claim no small share in the moulding of the modern Briton.