ish; but he has cut off more of it:
the _d_ of the stem, as well as the ending. He has altered both
his vowels, and one of his three remaining consonants; and
appears as _esgyn,_ to walk the pages undetected for an alien by
that vigilant police, the Celtic sense of euphony. He is typical
of a thousand others. Wherefore the difference?--The English
were a new people in process of formation, and besides with a
whole heap of Latin blood in them from the Roman province; their
mold was faintly formed, or only forming; but the Celts had
formed theirs rigidly in ancient times.

Again: when in the ninth century Hywel Dda king of Wales
codified the laws of his country, the result was a Celtic code
without, I think, any relation to Roman law; though Roman law
had prevailed in Roman Britain for three centuries or so. What
strong Celtic molds must have persisted, to cause this! Roman
law imposed itself on nearly all Europe, including many peoples
that never were under Roman rule; and yet here was this people,
that had been all that time under the Romans, oblivious of Roman
law, uninfluenced by it, practically speaking;--and returning at
the first opportunity to the kind of laws they had had before the
Romans were born or thought of.

Druidism had been proscribed, as a practice, during Roman times.
The worship of the Celtic Gods had continued; but they had been
assimilated to those of the empire;--which would be a much more
difficult thing to do were the Gods, as your modern learned
suppose, mere fictions of the superstitious, and not the symbols
of, or the Powers behind, the forces of Nature. So Celtic
religion outwardly was submerged in Roman religion; and then
later. Christianity came in. But the science, the institutions,
and the philosophy of the Druids had been part and parcel of the
inner life of the race perhaps as long as their laws and language
had; and your Celt runs by nature to religion, or even to
religiosity,--ultra-religion. Is it likely that, while he kept
his laws and language, he let his religion go? And when it was
not an arbitrary farrago of dogmas, like some we might mention;
but a philosophy of the soul so vivid that he counted death
little more to fuss about than going to sleep?

When should those old ideas have reappeared,--when should the
racial astral molds have been brought out and furbished up with
new strength to make them endure? Why, when the Roman dominion
came to an end; when the p