It must be very consoling to give one’s grief utterance in this highly poetical fashion; it is a question whether the poetry loses or gains in force, when it is remembered that the singer perhaps never put forth any effort to preserve the life of that ancient tongue which he is harping into her grave. Perhaps he does not know the language at all. He may be among those who first spurned and then starved her scholars; of the sentimentalists who, after learned devotees gave to the world in books the results of a life’s labour, on the publication of which they had expended more than all their own means, might borrow but would not buy a copy. The accomplished Archbishop MacHale of Tuam, found out to his cost the full meaning of this remark. Few were the copies of his excellent Græco Irish Homer that were sold; and here we have an illustration of the extent of the encouragement that real Irish scholarship receives. At the same time it must be admitted that the writers of Celtic books are frequently much to blame. They bury their productions in expensive volumes which can never obtain general circulation, or they do not furnish the precise thing required; or if they do, it is not always in a saleable popular fashion. Thus we have to regret the evil results of contemptuous neglect on the one hand, and extravagant claims and impracticable theories on the other, as well as an imaginary sense of loss and wrong, on the part of those who ought to give a more practical direction to the people’s sentiments. But the Celt is neither dead nor dying. He is still an important factor in the making of the world’s history. Apart from the very large Celtic element that has been absorbed in the Anglo-Celtic intermingling of races under the supremacy of Teutonic rule in these islands we find some four or five millions of people talking one or other of the Celtic dialects. The number of Gaelic speaking Highlanders is not much under half a million. There will be about 300,000 of a Gaelic-speaking population within the geographical limits of the Highlands, the area of which is upwards of three-fifths of Scotland. There is a larger Gaelic population in Glasgow than the whole population of Greenock. The Gaelic bard of to-day has thus as large an audience to sing his lays to as the great Ossian himself had in ancient Albin.