On the other hand, it must be allowed that the opinions which have been generally espoused on the subject of the origin of the Gael by many of the Historians and Scholars of Ireland and of the Highlands of Scotland, can scarcely be said to possess a better claim to the approbation of a calm and dispassionate judgment. Eminently distinguished as the Irish are by Literary genius, there is probably no subject on which their native talent has appeared to less advantage than in the investigation of the early History of their own Country. Fictions the most extravagant, borrowed from the Chronicles of the dark ages, have been credulously adopted by their first Scholars in lieu of those solid truths to which a calm and sober inquiry alone can lead. Thus we find Mr. Moore, at once the Poet and the Historian of Ireland, lending the sanction of his name to the Fable that the Irish are of Spanish origin; and citing, in answer to the more reasonable hypothesis of a British origin, a variety of Irish writers of no mean note, and some Welsh writers also, in favour of the assertions: 1, that the Irish Language is almost totally unlike the Welsh or Ancient British; and 2, that the Welsh is not a Celtic but a Gothic Tongue! There is every reason to conclude that Mr. Moore—unacquainted, probably, with any of the Celtic dialects himself—resorted to those authorities which he might naturally have deemed most deserving of confidence. But this only renders more lamentably conspicuous the credulity, carelessness, and ignorance of those to whose labours he has appealed. The assertions, 1, that the Welsh and Irish are unlike; and 2, that the Welsh is a Gothic dialect, are contradictions of the plainest facts. Influenced by national feelings Gaelic Scholars have also advanced various other theories, calculated to exhibit the antiquity of their language and race in a favorable point of view. The Gaelic has been maintained to be the Parent, at least in part, of the Latin, the Welsh, &c.; while to the first Colonists of Ireland a Carthaginian or Phœnician origin has been assigned.