musical tongue than that which is represented by the uncouth consonantal syllables.  It is not a little striking too that between the Cymric race and the Magyar race there are many points of likeness; one of these is the intense love of music displayed by the two, another is the blending of poetic imagination with practical sagacity.  The Magyars have been called a race of lawyers, but their love of law-points and litigation is not greater than that of the Welsh, and yet how poetical is each race to the core!

With regard to languages—to survive will in the present century mean to spread.  Languages that do not spread will be crushed out.  People who talk glibly about the vast expansion of the English language all over the world do not seem to realize that it is not the excellence of a tongue which makes it survive and causes it to spread over the earth, but the energy, military or commercial, of the people who speak it.  It is not the excellence of the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton that has carried it all round the globe, but the busy energy of the commonplace people who migrated for the most commonplace ends imaginable, and took the language with them, and then increased and multiplied, building up new English-speaking communities.  It is for this reason that the English language seems destined to become, if not the “universal language,” at least the lingua franca of the world.  And nothing is more pathetic than to observe the dread among Continental nations that this will be the case in the future; and nothing is more humorous than the passionate attempts to invent artificial languages, Volapük, Esperanto and what not, to do the work that the English language is already doing all over the sea, and will, apparently, soon be doing all over the land.

I dwell here upon this interesting subject in order to say that if Welsh does not survive it will not be because it is not a fine language, but simply because Destiny has decreed that it shall share the fate of many another language spoken at present much more widely than Welsh.

III
IS NOT “WILD WALES” WRITTEN BY A CELT AND NOT BY AN ANGLO-SAXON?

In speaking of any one of Borrow’s books it is always necessary to say a good deal about Borrow as a man.  Besides being the very child of Nature’s fantasy, he was the prince of literary egotists.  Everything in human life and everything in nature upon which he looked was enveloped in a coloured atmosphere shed by the eccentric ego.  That his love of Wales was genuine there can be no doubt whatever.  For this there was perhaps a very special reason—a reason quite unrecognized by himself.  I have somewhere—but I forget where—remarked upon a curious and common mistake in regard to Borrow—I mean the mistake of speaking of him as an East Anglian.  Very gratifying was this mistake to Borrow himself.  When walking with me in Richmond Park, or elsewhere, he would frequently stop, look round and murmur, “Beautiful England!” and then begin to declare eloquently that there was not in the world a country to be compared with it, and that the race which lived in this beloved land was equally incomparable in most things, especially in what he valued so much—athleticism in all its forms.  This was merely because England was his place of birth.  Born in East Anglia he was, to be sure; but Dr. Johnson long ago held to the opinion that a man born in a stable need not necessarily be described as a horse.  When a man’s father is pure Cornish (Celtic) and when his mother is mainly French, the fact of his having been born in Norfolk is not enough to make him an East Anglian.  By an accident the regiment to which his father belonged was located in Norfolk at the time of his birth, just as by an accident it might have been located in Ireland or Scotland.  In either of these cases he would have been George Borrow the Celt, or rather, George Borrow the Unique, but not a Scotsman—not an Irishman.  It is the blood in a man’s veins, it is not the spot in which he is born, that decides the question of his race.  Does one call the daughters of the Irishman, Patrick Bronte, who were Celtic to the marrow, Yorkshire girls because they were born at Thornton?  Does one call Mr. Swinburne a Londoner because he, a Northumbrian by a long line of ancestors, chanced to be born within a stone’s-throw of Belgrave Square?  Does one call the Rossettis Londoners, because it was in London, and not in Italy, that they were born?  To imagine any man more Celtic than Borrow is impossible.  Not a single East Anglian characteristic exhibited by him do I remember—except perhaps his Norfolk accent, and his very worthy and exemplary passion for “boiled leg of mutton with turnips and caper sauce,” which he pronounced to be “food for the gods.”  It was his own way of writing and talking about himself, however, that fostered if it did not originate the conception that Borrow was an East Anglian.  There is no more unreasonable, as there is no more winsome, trait in human nature than the form of egotism which I will call provincial patriotism—a quality of which Borrow was so full.  No matter what unlovely spot in any country had given Borrow birth, it would have become in his eyes sanctified because of the all-important fact that it gave birth to George Borrow, the “word-master.”  Rest assured that had he been a fenman he would have been as proud of his treeless, black-earthed fen as he would have been proud of the Swiss mountains had his birthplace chanced to be Switzerland.  Rest assured that had he been born upon the barren soil of Damaraland he would have been proud of his desert, as proud as he would have been of any hilly district that had chanced to have the honour of giving him birth.  But being born in East Anglia, to feel that he was the typical Anglo-Saxon of all Anglo-Saxons around him, gave him a mighty joy.  At “The Bald-faced Stag” his eloquent addresses, to me and the little band of friends who loved him, about Norfolk ale were inspired by the same cause.  Compared to that East Anglian nectar all other nectars were “swipes.”  I know East Anglia well; few men know it better—few men love it better.  I say emphatically that a man more out of sympathy with the East Anglian temperament never lived than he who wished to be taken, and was taken, as the representative East Anglian.  Moreover, one very potent reason why he was such a failure in Norfolk—one very potent reason why he was such a failure in his contact with the Anglo-Saxon race generally—was this: he was a Celtic duckling hatched at Dereham, who took himself for a veritable Norfolk chicken.  It is no wonder, therefore, that, without knowing it, his sympathy with the Celt, especially the Cymric Celt, which he himself fully believed to be philological, was racial.

The scenery of Wales had a very especial appeal for him, and no wonder; for there is nothing like it in the world.  Although I am familiar with the Alps and the other mountain ranges of Europe in their wildest and most beautiful recesses, it is with me as it was with Borrow: no hill scenery has the peculiar witchery of that around Eryri.  It is unique in the scenery of Europe.  Grander scenery there is on the Continent, no doubt—much grander—and scenery more soft and lovely; but none in which grandeur and loveliness meet and mingle in so fascinating a way as in Wales.  Moreover, to Borrow, as to all lovers of Wild Wales, beautiful as its scenery is, it is the romantic associations of that scenery which form so large a portion of its charm.  For what race in Europe has a story so poetic, so romantic, so pathetic as the Welsh?  Over every inch of the Principality hovers that great Spirit who walks the earth hand in hand with his brother, the Spirit of