The Celtic languages must, therefore, be divided into two great branches, one of which comprises the Irish, the Gaelic, and the Manks, and the other, the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Armorican. The Irish and Gaelic have a very close resemblance, and in fact, their separation from each other appears to have been remarkably recent. The book that is generally cited as the earliest printed in Gaelic, is a translationTof John Knox's ' Liturgy, or Forms of Prayer,' by John Carsewell, Bishop of the Isles, which was issued at Edinburgh in 1567, four years before anything whatever in Irish was printed in Ireland. The Rev. Thomas Maclauchlan, a Gaelic scholar, in his Celtic Glean ings,' a course of lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1857, informs us that " the dialect of Gaelic used by Carsewell Is that commonly known as the Irish, but which was common to the writers of both countries. It is manifest," he adds, " that Carsewell (lid not acquire this dialect in Ireland, for we have no reason to believe that ho ever visited Ireland, and his saying that he knew nothing of the dialect but what was current in the country, shows that the possession of this dialect was not in itself an evidence of very high scholarship, but was somewhat common among the people." The close resemblance of Irish and Gaelic for some time after is shown by the circumstance that about 1690, three thousand copies of Bishop Bedell's Irish version of the Bible were printed for the benefit of the Scottish Highlanders, and Mr. Maclauchlan states, that a gentleman who was living about 1807, remembered hearing the Irish Bible used in the services at the parish church of Kirkhill, near Inverness. It was not till about 1760, soon after the appearance of Macpherson's first' Specimens of Erso poetry,' that the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge in Scotland, resolved on encouraging a translation of the Scriptures into Scottish Gaelic, and it was not till 1801, that a complete version existed in print. It would appear, therefore, that while in the reign of Queen Eliza beth, the Lowlands of Scotland spoke a language distinct from English as evidenced in the printed works of Knox, the Highlands spoke a lan guage identical with Irish, as evidenced by the translation of Knox'a Liturgy, and that while the language of the Lowlands has gradually assimilated to that of England, the language of the Highlands has gradually separated from that of Ireland. A similar process of disin tegration appears, to be still going on with the Irish language in Ire land itself—a separate version of the Now Testament in the dialect of 3lunater was issued in 1858, and it is not improbable, therefore, that in the 20th century, there may be a larger number of Celtic languages stated to be in existence than in the 19th. The dialects of Irish vary so much, that it is said that Irishmen from different provinces who are acquainted even imperfectly with English, often make use of English in conversation with each other. An Irish clergyman, who had been a missionary to Shang Ha 6, informed us that he had been a witness to the use of English as the most convenient medium of intercourse by the natives of different provinces in Ireland, and the natives of different provinces in China. Campion, an English writer of the year 1571, says, that " the true Irish indeede ditfereth so much from that they commonly speaks, that scarce one among five-score can either write, read, or understand it." The Gaelic is now itself divided into two dialects, which seem to have a tendency to diverge more and more. Forms of speech which are frequent in the version of the Scriptures printed in 1801, are not found in the curious collection of Gaelic stories taken down from the lips of Highland narrators, and published by Mr. Campbell of Islay in 1861, one of the most careful records of oral language in existence. The so-called Menke language is a kind of corrupted Gaelic, more different to the eye than the ear, from being written in a less artificial system of spelling. The system of "orthography " of Irish and Gaelic is so excessively complex and difficult, that those who speak them are often unable to read them even when they have learned to read English.
The three forms of the Gaelic branch of the Celtic family of languages are thus intelligible with a little trouble to any person who is a thorough master of one; but this is not the case with the three forms of the other branch. The affinity between Welsh and Bas-Breton is much less than has been sometimes asserted. The best evidence on this point is that of the Rev. Thomas Price, a distinguished Welsh scholar, who made a tour through Brittany in the summer of 1829. "I may," he says (` Cam brian Quarterly 3lagazine; voL ii. p. 197), "be asked a question which I should myself have proposed to another upon a similar occasion, had I never viaited Brittany, and that is, if the Welsh and Breton languages bear so near a resemblance to each other as is generally understood, where was the necessity of having recourse to the French as a medium of communication f Why not converse with the Bretons in the Welsh at once f To this I answer that, notwithstanding the many assertions which have been made respecting the natives of Wales and Brittany being mutually intelligible through the medium of their respective languages, I do not hesitate to say that the thing is utterly impossible; single words in either language will frequently be found to have corre sponding terms of a similar sound in the other, and occasionally a short sentence deliberately pronounced may be partially intelligible, but as to holding a conversation, that is totally out of the question." One of the earliest and most valuable books of research and infor mation on the Celtic languages in general is the Archreologia Britannica, giving some account additional to what has been hitherto published of the languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great Britain, from collections and observations in travels through Wales, Cornwall, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland, and Scotland, by Edward Lhuyd, M.A., of Jesus College, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.'
The first volume, a closely printed folio on Glossography ' appeared in 1707, and was never followed by a second, the continuation of the work being prevented by the death of the author in 1709. Lhuyd had travelled in all the Celtic countries to collect materials, and was only driven from Brittany by the outbreak of Marlborough's war. lie unfortunately adopted a peculiar system of orthography for the Welsh, and took a singular whim of displaying his knowledge of Irish and Cornish, by writing prefaces in Irish and Cornish to parts of his book ; the first of which is censured by Irish scholars as full of sole cisms, and the second was a sealed book,' till portions of it were lately translated into English by Mr. Edwin Norris. But his work com prises a valuable comparative collection of vocabularies, and a large body of miscellaneous infonnation on the manuscript literature of the Celtic languages, similar to the information on the northern languages which was brought together by his friend Dr. Ilickes in 1705, in the celebrated Linguarum Septentrionalium Thesaurus.' Lhuyd left behind him a large collection of manuscript materials for the con tinuation of his work, which have unfortunately perished—by three separate accidental fires in London and Wales. The next student of Celtic on an equally extensive scale appears to have been the famous and infamous Eugene Anon, who refers to the subject in an auto biographical letter written in 1759, while he was in confinement in York Castle, not long before his trial and execution. " I investigated the Celtic," says Aram, "ea far am possible in all its dialects; begun collec tions, and made comparisons between that, the English, the Latin, the Greek, and even the Hebrew. 1 had made notes and compared above three thousand of these together, and found such a surprising affinity, even beyond my expectation or conception, that I was determined to proceed through the whole of all these languages and form a coin Enrative lexicon, which I hoped would account for numberless vocables in use with us, the Latina, and Greek's before concealed and unobserved. This, or something like it, was the design of a clergyman of great erudition in Scotland, but it must prove abortive, for lie died before lie executed It, and most of my books and papers are now scattered and lost." This laurel was not destined for a British head. Nearly a hundred years later, in 1853, appeared at Leipsie the most important contribution yet made to Celtic philology, the Grammatica of Professor Johann Caspar 7euss of lizonberg, who had devoted thirteen years to the necessary preliminary studies. The book, which extends to two volumes, comprising more than eleven hundred pages, embraces a grammar of the Celtic languages in a mass, the Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Armorican, and ancient Gaulish, constructed on an unusual plan. The author takes the parts of speech separately, and the languages one after the other, treating, for instance, the article in Irish, in Welsh, in Cornish, &c., before lie proceeds to examine the substantive in any one of those languages. As in some other German works on philology, the method of treatment is laborious and Aunt. tractive, wanting iu generalisation, and calculated to repel all but the determined student. The author adopted the medium of Latin as the general language of the learned, hut his Latin is unfortunately the reverse of elegant. The valve of the work, which is great, consists in the minute and careful scrutiny to which Zeuss has subjected the manuscript materials for a knowledge of the early state of the Celtic languages, which are scattered in the libraries of England and the continent, and which he for the first time brought together. These materials mostly consist of Glosses,' or translations of single words or passages in the margins, or between the lines of old Latin copies of the classics. Specimens of interlineary Welsh of this kind are to be found in a manuscript of Eutychius and Ovid in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, of the conclusion of the 8th or commencement of the 9th century, while the Black Book of Caernarvon,' and the ' Red Book of liergest,' the oldest manuscripts of unbroken Welsh, are ascribed by the best judges to the 12th and the 14th centuries, and are thus later in date by no less than four and six hundred years. A steady light was also thrown by Zeuss on the ancient Irish from study of the Glosses ' in manuscript, which lay unnoticed in the libraries of Germany and Italy ; in some cases, as in the library of St. Gall in Switzerland, founded by the Irish monks who converted the Swiss to Christianity, buried and forgotten for a thousand years. The suggestion which lie threw out that a minute examination of the manuscripts in English and Irish libraries might probably lead to the discovery of further stores of the same kind has already borne its fruits in the discoveries made by Stokes at Dublin, and Bradshaw at Cambridge, and in all probability much still remains to be dug out. Zeuss himself was unfortunately lost to science by his premature death in 1856, at the age of fifty. In an interesting biographical sketch of him by his learned countryman, Dr. Siegfried, now of Dublin, in the Ulster Journal of Arehaaology,' for 1859, his illness is ascribed to over study.