The Celtic element enters largely into the population of the United Kingdom. Just as Celtic dialects were spoken at one time throughout the whole of the British Islands, so to the present day a powerful Celtic element pervades the people of Great Britain and Ireland from the lowest to the highest classes. John Knox and Robert Burns, two representative Scotchmen, were more Celtic than Teutonic. The national perfervid spirit and genius are so still. The name of the great Reformer is from the Gaelic _Cnoc_. Ireland can produce many Anglo-Celtic names, among which we find that of the Duke of Wellington. The mothers of the greatest epic poet and the greatest general that England ever produced were Celts. Sarah Caston, the mother of Milton, was the daughter of a Welsh gentleman; and Elizabeth Steward, the mother of Cromwell, was the daughter of William Steward, in Ely, a descendant of the Celtic Stewards of Scotland. Professor H. Morley says:—“The main current of English literature cannot be disconnected from the lively Celtic wit in which it has one of its sources. The Celts do not form an utterly distinct part of our mixed population. But for early, frequent, and various contact with the race that, in its half-barbarous days, invented Ossian’s dialogues with St. Patrick, and that quickened afterwards the Northerner’s blood in France. Germanic England would not have produced a Shakespeare.” It is only the other year that a Cambrian Celt disappeared from our midst—one of the greatest names in English literature—Mary A. Evans, better known by her assumed name of George Eliot. This other quotation from Professor Morley’s “Library of English Literature” is as true as it is suggestive:—“The Celts are by nature artists. Mr Ferguson has felt this in his own art, and said in his ‘History of Architecture:’—‘The true glory of the Celt in Europe is his artistic eminence. It is, perhaps, not too much to assert that without his intervention we should not have possessed in modern times a Church worthy of admiration or a picture or a statue we could look at without shame.’ It would be far too much to assert this of books; but certainly Teutonic England could not have risen to the full grandeur and beauty of that expression of all her life in all her literature ... without a wholesome blending of Teutonic with Celtic blood. The Celts are a vital part of our country, and theirs were the first songs in the land.”