The bards and seanachies—Six men of outstanding literary eminence—The earliest pioneer of the modern philological movement—Representatives of the older scholarship—Those of the new—The brilliant Zeuss—Foreign periodicals dealing with Celtic—Foremost scholars of the various nations—Italian—German—French—Danish—Scandinavian—American—British, including English, Irish, Welsh, Manx, and Scottish—Many literary problems solved—The promise of future harvests 367 INDEX OF NAMES 387 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 397 CHAPTER I THE ARRIVAL OF THE CELT IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE The Celts in primitive Europe—Advent in British Isles—Two branches—Observations of Cæsar and Tacitus—Main facts of Celtic progress on the Continent—A vast empire—Interview with Alexander the Great—Colony in Galatia—Cup of conquest full—Disintegration—The scattered remnants—Recent statistics—The ancient Celts as seen through Greek and Roman eyes—Literary awakening—Ogam writings—First men of letters—Earliest written Gaelic now extant—Modern linguistic discovery—The place of Celtic in the Aryan group. Emerson, looking forth from the new time on the nations of Europe, gave pen to the reflection, “The Celts are of the oldest blood in the world. Some peoples are deciduous or transitory. Where are the Greeks? Where the Etrurians? Where the Romans? But the Celts are an old family of whose beginning there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still more remote in the future, for they have endurance and productiveness—a hidden and precarious genius.” A sweeping statement withal, yet the thoughtful finding of an eminently studious and dispassionate mind. When the curtain lifts over primitive Europe, and authentic history first begins, the Celts are already there, and loom formidable in the heart of the Continent. Not the earliest inhabitants by any means; archæology points to anterior races. These the ethnologists designate according to the shape of their heads and supposed colour of their hair. Their remains have been found in caves, and in what are known to science as the Neolithic or Stone Age barrows. And they present types of humanity widely differing from the succeeding so-called Aryans.[1] But beyond their material survivals, and the people who were supposed to have been descended from them, there is absolutely no record of these vanished races. They belong to prehistoric times. So do the Celts in great part, but unlike their predecessors they have emerged in history, and projected themselves on its pages to this day. They have stepped out of the impenetrable haze, and appear at the opening of the written drama of Europe.