These important changes in the Celtic world are not effected without many venerable regrets being uttered by sentimentalists both in Ireland and Scotland. If we look across the channel we find that the Irish Gael indulges in the same unpractical wail over an irrevocable past, that we find so prevalent with his brother of Albin. The cry of the sentimentalist there is even more intense, more persistent. The unpromising present of the Gael there appears to attract like a magnet all the revolutionary sympathies of the usually stolid Teutonic heart, after a little contact of the races. Just as in their political difficulties the Irish have always looked for help from Spain, France, or America, so unless the gods somehow interfere to preserve their native tongue, all they can or will do, waiting for external or divine deliverance, is to take up the refrain—“It is dying.” This is how an Irish poet, the Rev. M. Mullin, Clonfert, sings with incomparable sadness:— “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 footsteps on the shore, Where the Barrow, and the Erne, and Lough 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 Erin, 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 voice of Freedom in annal and in song Is surely, fastly sinking into silent death at last, To live but in the memories and relics of the Past!”