Although the "Aryan Origin of the Celtic Races and Language" is all the title on the cover, inside the book, the title is much more comprehensive, consisting, as it does, altogether of 27 lines. But even this large and comprehensive title-page does not give anything like an adequate idea of the extent and variety of the contents of the book. Taking it up with the expectation of finding a learned treatise on the Aryan origin of the Celtic race and Celtic languages one will be disappointed; but no one will be disappointed with the work as a whole, for though its contents do not bear throughout on the above subject, they are all thoroughly Celtic; and as a collection of Celtic gleanings, will well repay a perusal. It is, indeed, a sort of Celtic repository--the writer's Celtic reading for many years being apparently thrown into a crucible, and having undergone a certain process there, are forged out into the handsome and bulky volume before us. It has, however, all the appearance of having been very hastily got up. Indeed, in the preface, which is dated, "Feast of the Nativity of the B.V.M., 1875," we are told that a mere accident has given the first impulse to the composition of the work, and that accident appears to have been that at a social meeting of Irish clergymen in 1874 the subject of conversation turned on the language and antiquities of Ireland. After doing justice to the "Four Masters," of whom Irishmen are, with good reason, so very proud, the decay of the Gaelic language in Ireland is alluded to, and the cause of that decay described at some length, and it is pointed out that, in consequence of this neglect, when an Irish patriot appeals to the sentiment of his race, the appeal must be made, not in the language of old Ireland, but in the language of the conquering Saxon. Father Mullens in his lament for the Celtic language of his countrymen "must wail his plaint in Saxon words and Saxon idiom, lest his lamentation should fall meaningless on the ears of Ireland." And this decay Father Mullens pathetically describes:-- It is fading! it is fading! like the leaves upon the trees, It is dying! it is dying! like the Western Ocean breeze, It is fastly disappearing as the footsteps on the shore, Where the Barrow and the Erne, and Loch Swilly's waters roar; Where the parting sunbeam kisses the Corrib in the west, And the ocean like a mother clasps the Shannon to its breast: The language of old Eire, of her history and name, Of her monarchs and her heroes, of her glory and her fame; The sacred shrine where rested through her sunshine and her gloom The spirit of her martyrs as their bodies in the tomb! The time-wrought shell, where murmured through centuries of wrong The secret shrine of freedom in annal and in song, Is surely fastly sinking into silent death at last, To live but in the memory and relics of the past!