But if there is really humour in the ancient Celtic literature it is entirely unconscious. Many passages tickle our risible faculties now, and we smile as we read some of the narratives, such as the fight between Queen Meve’s bull and his opponent in the old saga, but this is because of the very wealth of the Gaelic imagination and the mendacity of its exaggerations. It is questionable if the original Gael, the slave of such a powerful fancy, saw anything in his own extravagant descriptions to laugh at. More likely he perpetrated these fictions quite as unconsciously as his Irish descendant of to-day perpetrates his bulls. All the same it is quite conceivable that from this early tendency to be carried off the ground by flights of fancy, the Scottish sense of humour, conspicuous in the poets from pre-Reformation times, may have developed. That Celtic literature revelled from a remote antiquity in nature and love of colour is very manifest from the earliest Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton tales. Take, for instance, the following description of Olwen from the Welsh:— The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds and rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the three-mewed falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses. Whoso beheld her was filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprang up wherever she trod. The old sagas and romances are full of this sort of vision. It was impossible that such Celtic compositions could exist without imparting some of their charm, their brilliant colouring, their observation, and delight in nature and the unknown, to English literature. Naturally, Scottish poetry first felt this influence. But the wonder is that English literature as a whole was so late in being permeated therewith. When it did enter, it effected a mighty change both in the style and subject matter. Beyond rhyme, love of nature, love of colour, and a certain type of humour, which we have just glanced at, Matthew Arnold recognised three elements which are in a manner distinct from these. “If I were asked,” he says, “where English poetry got these three things—its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and vivid way—I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.”...