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Study of Celtic Literature (Irish History & Culture)
Study of Celtic Literature - Irish History & Culture Author:Matthew Arnold Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: —a. science which is at the bottom of all real knowledge of the actual world, and which is every day growing in interest and importance—is very incomplete withou... more »t a thorough critical account of the Celts and their genius, language, and literature. This science has still great progress to make, but its progress, made even within the recollection of those of us who are in middle life, has already affected our common notions about the Celtic race; and this change, too, shows how science, the knowing things as they are, may even have salutary practical consequences. I remember, when I was young, I was taught to think of Celt as separated by an impassable gulf from Teuton ;' my father,in particular, was never weary of contrasting them; he insisted much oftener on the separation between us and them than on the separation between us and any other race in the world; in the same way Lord Lyndhurst, in words long famous, called the Irish ' aliens in speech, in religion, in blood.' This naturally created a profound sense of estrangement ; it doubled the estrangement which political and religious differences already made between us and the Irish : itseemed to make this estrangement immense, incurable, fatal. It begot a strange reluctance, as any one may see by reading the preface to the great text-book for Welsh poetry, the Myvyrian Arckaology, published at the beginning of this century, to further,—nay, allow,—even among quiet, peaceable people like the Welsh, the publication of the documents ot their ancient literature, the monuments of the Cymric genius; such was the sense of repulsion, the sense of incompatibilty, of radical antagonism, making it seem dangerous to us to let such opposites to ourselves have speech and utterance. Certainly the Jew,—the Jew of ancient times, at least,— then ...« less
ISBN-13: 9780804605984 ISBN-10: 080460598X Pages:171 Edition:Facsimile of 1905 ed Rating: