A great and striking merit of Zeuss's laborious work, and one which makes its publication an epoch in Celtic studies issthat it presents a total contrast in its tone and spirit to that which had too long prevailed in this branch of investigation. The students who follow the track opened in the Gisimmatica Celtica' have no pleasant path before them—it leads amid " Glosaes," and other such literature as only the severest philologists can tolerate and none can relish—but their footing is on firm dry ground. Zeuss is not indeed averse to speculation any more than his German colleagues in general, one of his views being that Irish and Welsh were identical not long before the invasion of Cesar, as Irish and Gaelic were identical a few hundred years ago. But there is a wide difference between ench views as these, open to discussion as they are, and the wild hallucinations to which Celtic scholars have been too often subject. Pezron, the Breton in vestigator, maintained in 1703, in perfect good faith, that Welsh and Breton, which he considered the same language, had been " the lan guage of the Titans, that is, the language of Saturn, Jupiter, and the other principal gods of heathen antiquity." The Rev. Joseph Ilarris, a respectable Baptist minister of Swansea, editor of the 'Seren Ginner,' observed in 1814, very gravely, that " it is supposed by some, and no one can disprove it, that Welsh was the language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise ; and if so, what can be more natural than to suppose that it will be the language of the celestial Paradise where all the nations of the earth shall be of one tongue." Unluckily for the force of his observation, not only has the honour of being the language of Paradise been positively claimed for other languages—for Basque by several authors, for Dutch by Goropius Becanus, for Gaelic by Mr.
Maclean, author of a ' I listory of the Celtic Language,' in 1840—but there is a Welsh tradition, unknown to Mr. Ilarris, which expressly states that Welsh was nut the language of Paradise, but the first language spoken out of it. The Bev. John Williams ab libel, editor of the Cambrian Journal' for die Cambrian Institute, in his preface to an ancient grammar of Edeyrn, which he edited in 1856 for the Welsh Manuscript Society, speaks in a tone of assent of the assertion that there are only three languages of divine origin, that of Adam, that of Moses, and the Welsh; and also of an assertion grounded on bardic tradition respecting the word by which the world was created, and it embodiment in the first letter of the ancient Welsh alphabet. Passage; like these, which are but too common in the works of some Celtic scholars, have had the effect of disgusting many with the study 01 Celtic antiquities.
Some of the more important conclusions to which Zeuss's researche: conduct, are embodied by Mr. Edwin Norris, of the Foreign Office in the valuable observations on the Cornish language, appended to hie edition of the remains of the Ancient Cornish Drama,' printed at the University Press at Oxford in 1859. " The superior antiquity of the Irish over the British language is now," says Mr. Norris, "scarcely doubted ; it is seen as well in their grammatical as in their glossarial relations. The declension of the Irish noun is even yet in existence, and it is shown with much probability to have been closely allied to that of the oldest Indo-European forms at an early period ; of the British, the only remnant left is a Cornish genitive, and a scarcely discernible trace in Welsh." He then produces several instances in which, as in teagh and ti, Irish and Welsh for "a house," and nochd and nos, Irish and Welsh for " night," letters are dropped in Welsh that remain in Irish, and argues for the greater antiquity of the fuller form. " It may look like the partiality of an editor," he continues, " to ascribe a greater antiquity to Cornish than to Welsh, in the face of the universally adverse opinion, but the writer confesses that he is inclined to consider the Cornish the older of the two ;" and he gives his grounds for so doing, principally founded on the fact that it is shown by the glosses produced by Zeuss, that "in the 8th century Welsh had Cornish forms and words which were lost or altered in the 12th." From these
premises Mr. Norris infers that "Cornish is the representative of a language once current over South Britain at least." If these views be correct, the Welsh will lose their claim to the honour they have so long retained of being considered the representatives of the "Ancient Britons." A good comparative dictionary of the CeltiC languages would be an acquisition to philology, and is much required. The Rev. Robert Williams, of Llangadwaladr, author of the Lives of Eminent Welsh men,' announced in 1860 that he had completed a labour of the kind, the publication of which would be commenced as soon as a sufficient number of subscribers could be obtained. One of the publications of Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte supplies material for a comparison of the different dialects not otherwise attainable. It is entitled The Celtic Hexapla ' (London, 1858, 4to), and comprises the Song of Solo mon in eight languages, which are all presented to view at the opening of any page—French and English, Irish and Welsh, Gaelic and Manx, Breton of the ordinary form, and Breton of the dialect of Vannes. The two latter translations were first printed in this volume; the others are taken from the authorised versions.
The degree of prevalence of the ancient Celtic element in Europe,— the area over which the various dialects were spoken, and the remains of them which may be still traced out,—is a subject upon which much has been written, but which still awaits its Zeuss. It is however an antiquarian subject alone ; it is certain that no Celtic language is now spoken ou the continent beyond the limits of Brittany. The Basque of the Pyrenees, so often asserted to belong to the Celtic family, is as distinct, both in words and construction, as can well be imagined. The notion of Dr. Owen Pughe that the Wendish of Lusatia was a language akin to Welsh, is as wide of the mark as the strange notion which found its way by a series of blunders into Adolung's Mithridates,' that a Celtic dialect was spoken at Malden in Essex. The small value of Dr. Owen's statements on such a subject is shown by his declara tion in the preface to the edition of Llywarch Hen, published in 1792, that he had "a collection of evidence sufficient to convince as great sceptics as any that will see this" that "the Nadowesscs, a people west of the Mississippi in America, known to the Indian traders by the name of the civilised Indians and the Welsh Indians, do now actually speak the Welsh language." "These people," he confidently added, " are the descendants of the emigration under the conduct of Madog ab Owain Gwynedd in the year 1170." The remains of the extinct Celtic languages of the continent are singularly scanty. A few scattered words are all that is preserved of the speech of ancient Gaul—the language that prevailed in France at the time that Cicero wrote in Italy. These words bear so close a resemblance to those of the same meaning in Welsh, as to justify the assumption that there was little distinction between the dialects of Franco and England at the earliest dawn of history. Whether we ought to believe that the " Celts" who are mentioned by different writers of antiquity in different parts of Europe were all closely connected with one another, or all even rightly named, is a perplexing question. The most reliable evidence now attainable on the subject appears to be that of the names of places, and these must be very cautiously sifted. Dr. It. G. Latham reminds philologists that there is no connection beyond a mere resem blance in name between Gallicia in Spain and Galicia in Poland. A large collection of materials of this kind has been amassed by Dicffenbach in his Celtica,' and a work on the subject by Contzen, ' Die Wanderung der Kelton,' which received a prize from the Academy of Munich in 1856, has (in 1861) just issued from the press.