CHAPTER III.

OF THE CELTIC RACE.

SECTION I.-General Survey.-Extension of the Celtic Race-Celtic Dialects.

THE Celtic race, termed Celti, or Keλroì, and Galatæ * by the Greeks, and by Roman writers Celtæ and Galli, or Gauls, was in former ages of the world as widely spread, and acted as conspicuous a part on the theatre of the European nations as the German or Teutonic people have performed in later times. To that race, according to the testimony of ancient writers, belonged at one period not only the whole country reaching in Gaul from the Mediterranean and the Garonne to the Rhine, but likewise many other parts of Europe and Asia. Of Spain, as we have already seen, they appear to have possessed a considerable part, comprehending, not only the central provinces,

By most Greek writers the terms Keλroi and Faλáraι, which may be considered as corresponding with the Celte and Galli of Latin authors, are used as interchangeable. Diodorus, however, attempted to distinguish their application. He says that the Kελroì, Celti, were properly the inhabitants of the inland country above Marseilles and the districts near the Alps and the Pyrenees, thus making the limits of Celtica Proper nearly those of the Roman province. This we shall see was the opinion of some geographers, including Strabo. "The people of the northern parts of Gaul towards the Ocean and the Hercynian forest, and the country reaching thence eastward, towards Scythia,"-meaning evidently the southern parts of Germany," are called by the Greeks 'Taλárai.'-The Romans, however, included all these nations under the last name, as a general appellation." Diodorus means the name of Galli or Gauls, which the Romans used generally for all the natives of Gaul. It is plain that this distinction laid down by Diodorus is founded on no ethnographical limitation. All that we learn from it, is the original local application of the name Celti. See Diodor. Sic. lib. v. cap. 32.

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but also extensive territories in both of the western corners of the peninsula, where a population either wholly or partly of Celtic descent remained at the period of the Roman conquest. The British isles are generally supposed to have derived their original population from the Celts. In Italy, at an early period after the building of Rome, the Celtæ dispossessed the Etruscans and the Umbrians of the northern parts of their respective countries, which thenceforward obtained the name of Cisalpine Gaul. In Germany, it is difficult to conjecture the extent of their dominions. Helvetia and the Hercynian forest are said to have afforded a path to numerous hordes emigrating from Gaul towards the north and the east ; and Bohemia and Bavaria still bear names which they derived from the tribes of Celtic Boii, who formerly inhabited them. From Bohemia there is reason to believe that some bodies of the Celtic race almost reached the banks of the Vistula. It has been disputed, whether the Cimbri in Denmark were of the Celtic or German family, but there are strong grounds, as we shall find, for believing them to have been a branch of the former race. The countries on the Danube, Noricum and Pannonia were the seats of powerful Celtic communities. Thrace was long in the possession of the Celta. Under a second Brennus they followed the footsteps of Xerxes into Greece, and like the Persian despot attempted to plunder the temple of Delphi. Lastly, Asia Minor was long under their sway: from the high countries in the interior, which were the abode of a Celtic population, they exacted tribute from the surrounding states, after dividing them by lot under their several clans.

Such was the extension of the Celtic race, before their power became broken in their contest with the Roman arms, whose ascendency prepared them for a final subjugation under the Teutonic conquerors of Europe. The earlier history of the Celtic people is a subject of great interest but of difficult investigation. Were they the aborigines of Gaul or of Germany? According to all the testimony of history, or rather of ancient tradition collected by the writers of the Roman empire, the migrations of the Gauls were always from west to east; the Celtic nations in Germany as well as in Italy and in the East were supposed to have been colonies from Gaul, and the Celtæ

have been considered as the immemorial inhabitants of western Europe. But the remains of the Celtic language prove them to have been a branch of the Indo-European stock; they came therefore from the East, and as we find so many parts of Germany overspread by them in early times, whence they were afterwards expelled by German tribes, a strong suspicion forces itself upon our minds, that a part of the Celtic population may have always remained to the eastward of the Rhine, which perhaps received accessions from tribes of the same race returning in a later age from Gaul. The Cimbri appear to have remained in the North until the period of their celebrated expedition, and for the Boii who were so widely spread in Germany, no exact position or primitive seat can be discovered among the proper inhabitants of Gaul.*

It is impossible to determine with certainty, whether the west of Europe was wholly uninhabited at the era when the Celtæ first occupied it. If, as it is probable, they preceded the Teutonic tribes in the north of Germany, they must have come, on the shores of the Baltic, into contact with the Jotuns or Finns, whom the Teutonic people afterwards found in possession of Scandinavia. Whether the same people, or any other race foreign to the Indo-European family, was expelled from Gaul and Britain by the Celts, or conquered and amalgamated with themselves, are as yet matters of conjecture; and the only resources for elucidating such an inquiry are by a comparison of the vocabularies of the Celtic dialects with those of the Finnish and Lapponic nations.+

Paragraph 2.

Of the language of the ancient Celts there exists no undoubted relic on the continent of Europe, except the numerous

From the name of their leader Boiorix, we might conjecture the Cimbri to have been connected with the Boii. Boiorix seems to mean supreme over the Boii. Mannert supposes the original seat of the Boii to have been in Pannonia.-See Mannert's Geographie der Griechen und Römer.

By Arndt and some other writers, it has been supposed that the Celtæ are in part a Finnish race. There is no resemblance whatever in the grammatical structure of their respective languages, and I believe that the vocabularies will be found to contain very few common or analogous words.

words preserved in topographical names. It is, indeed, not improbable that the dialect of the Bretons may be, in part, a relic of the idiom of the Armorican Gauls, but there is a degree of uncertainty connected with that supposition which prevents our assuming it as a matter of fact. We have indeed reason to believe, that the native language continued to be spoken in some parts of Gaul nearly to the end of the Roman domination, but we are not sure that this was the case in Britanny. On the other hand, there is historical evidence that Armorica received a colony from Britain about the period of the Saxon invasion of this island. By the older historians of France, the Bretons are described as a particular and distinct people, under the name of Britanni: they claimed a descent from the insular Britons. It cannot be proved that the Celtic language had not entirely ceased to be spoken in the districts which they occupied, and that the dialect which has long prevailed there was not introduced anew, on the arrival of this colony. It is, therefore, in the British isles that we must look for the genuine remains of the Celtic language, preserved by an unbroken succession from early times. In the British isles we have two extant languages, handed down from the earliest ages, each possessing a peculiar literature; these are the respective languages of Britain and of Ireland. Under each of these divisions we may class three cognate dialects—the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Armorican belong to the former; -the Irish, the Manx, and the Scottish Gaelic, which last is supposed to have been spread from Ireland into Scotland some centuries after the Christian era, belong to the second division. The Irish and British languages cannot with propriety be termed dialects of one speech, since each is unintelligible to persons who have learnt only the other. They are sister languages, and perhaps resemble each other as nearly as the English and German: but the difference between them is far too great and too fundamentally interwoven with their grammatical structure, to have arisen since the era of the Roman conquest of Gaul. That either of these languages is a cognate dialect with that of the old Celtic Gauls, is an assertion which requires proof, and perhaps such proof may be furnished, but • Gregory of Tours, Fredegarius Scholasticus and Eginhardt.

it is evident that this character can belong to only one of the two languages. Both however claim it. There is a host of writers who take it for certain that the Celtic idiom is preserved in or represented by the British or Welsh language, and there are fully as many who advance the same claim in favour of the Erse or Gaelic. Whatever conclusion may be adopted as to the question agitated between these parties, it will be found to involve consequences which are very important in their bearings on the history of the western nations of Europe. We cannot therefore proceed in the ethnology of the Celtic race without discussing it. But, in the first place, it will be necessary to form a correct idea of some subordinate inquiries which connect themselves with this controversy, and of some results which follow the admission of either of the two suppositions.

If we conclude that the Erse or Gaelic is to be considered as the true descendant and representative of the Celtic, or of the idiom of the people of Gallia Celtica, who then were the Britons? They were not originally a colony of Celtic Gauls. Whence came they, and with what people on the continent were they connected? Again, who were the Belgæ, the people of northern Gaul, who, according to Cæsar, had a language of their own, different from the Celtic? These and other inquiries have received different replies from writers, who maintain the same hypothesis as to the Celtic language, and agree in identifying it with the Erse.

With respect to the Belgæ, many English writers have adopted the opinion of Mr. Pinkerton, which they maintain on the authority of a well-known passage in Cæsar's Commentaries. They consider the Belga to have been a Teutonic or German race, and altogether separate from the Celtic stock, and suppose that a German dialect was prevalent through the north of Gaul and even on the southern coast of Britain, which the Belgæ from the opposite shore had in some places colonised before the conquest of Gaul by the Romans. The Britons are imagined hy these writers to have emigrated, not from Gaul, with the inhabitants of which they had no immediate connexion, but from Denmark or the north of Germany. The principal argument adduced in proof is the