tional literature and character: the race that
gave us Ossian, and Finn, and Cuchulain, that sang of the sorrowful
love and doom of Deirdre, that told of the pursuit of Diarmit and
Grania, till every dolmen and cromlech in Ireland was associated with
these lovers; the race that preserved for us

"That grey king whose name, a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still,"[9]

the King Arthur whose Arthur's Seat overhangs Edinburgh, whose
presence haunts the Lakes, and Wales, and Cornwall, and the forests of
Brittany; the race that held up for us the image of the Holy
Grail--that race can claim no small share in the moulding of the
modern Briton.

The Celt, however, had his day of supremacy and passed: the Roman
crushed his power of initiative and made him helpless and dependent,
and the Teuton, whether as Saxon, Angle, Frisian, or Jute, dwelt in
his homes and ruled as slaves the former owners of the land. These
new-comers were not physically unlike the Celts whom they
dispossessed. Tall and fair, grey-eyed and sinewy, the Teuton was a
hardier, more sturdy warrior than the Celt: he had not spent centuries
of quiet settlement and imitative civilisation under the aegis of
Imperial Rome: he had not learnt to love the arts of peace and he
cultivated none but those of war; he was by choice a warrior and a
sailor, a wanderer to other lands, a plougher of the desolate places
of the "vasty deep," yet withal a lover of home, who trod at times,
with bitter longing for his native land, the thorny paths of exile. To
him physical cowardice was the unforgivable sin, next to treachery to
his lord; for the loyalty of thane to his chieftain was a very deep
and abiding reality to the Anglo-Saxon warrior, and in the early poems
of our English race, love for "his dear lord, his chieftain-friend,"
takes the place of that love of woman which other races felt and
expressed. A quiet death bed was the worst end to a man's life, in the
Anglo-Saxon's creed; it was "a cow's death," to be shunned by every
means in a man's power; while a death in fight, victor or vanquished,
was a worthy finish to a warrior's life. There was no fear of death
itself in the English hero's mind, nor of Fate; the former was the
inevitable,

"Seeing that Death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come,"[10]

and the latter a goddess whose decrees must needs be obeyed with proud
submissio