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All neighbouring nations have borrowed from each other: but one has given the name of "mother-tongue" to those from which some known idioms are derived. For example, Latin is the mother-tongue in respect of Italian, Spanish and French: but it was itself derived from Tuscan; and Tuscan was derived from Celtic and Greek.

35. -Julia Equestris-, where the last surname is to be taken as in other colonies of Caesar the surnames of sextanorum, decimanorum, etc. It was Celtic or German horsemen of Caesar, who, of course with the bestowal of the Roman or, at any rate, Latin franchise, received land-allotments there.

No system of representation seems ever to have prevailed in Ireland. That idea is, in fact, almost purely Teutonic, and seems never to have sprung up spontaneously amongst any Celtic people. The family was the real root. Every head of a family ruled his own household, and submitted in his turn to the rule of his chief.

It is astonishing, by the way, how you still find in Ireland, after centuries of successive confiscations, the old names in their old tribal lands, mingled in places, as in Lecale, with the Norman names; the two races being now thoroughly amalgamated as distinguished from the case of King James's Planters in Ulster, who, to this day are, as a rule, as distinct from the population amongst whom they live whether of pure Celtic strain or with a Norman admixture as when first they came.

Two Celtic strains mingled in his blood, while American birth and training had not only quickened his intelligence but imparted a quality of wide-eyed shrewdness to a daring initiative. When he and the bluff Steingall worked together the malefactor on whose heels they pressed had a woeful time.

But of his four legions three were stationed far off at Aquileia; although he called out in haste the militia of the Transalpine province, it seemed scarcely possible with so small a force to hinder the innumerable Celtic host from crossing the Rhone, between its exit from the Leman lake at Geneva and the point of its breaking through the mountains, over a distance of more than fourteen miles.

When once Hannibal was in the Celtic territory on the Roman side of the Rhone, he could no longer be prevented from reaching the Alps; but if Scipio had at the first accounts proceeded with his whole army to Italy the Po might have been reached by way of Genoa in seven days and had united with his corps the weak divisions in the valley of the Po, he might have at least prepared a formidable reception for the enemy.

The preoccupation of the Celtic mind with the deities of his scenery, his springs, his rivers, his seas, his forests, his mountains, his lakes, was in thorough keeping with the tenour of his mind, when tuned to its natural surroundings.

In these regions the most powerful nation at that time was the great Celtic people, which according to the native tradition had issued from its settlements on the Western Ocean and poured itself about the same time into the valley of the Po on the south of the main chain of the Alps and into the regions on the Upper Rhine and on the Danube to the north of that chain.

For more than a thousand years different races, different ages, had taken hold of the ancient Celtic legends and spiritualised them after their own manner, and moulded them to their own ideals. There may have been a historical Arthur, Comes Britanniae, after the Roman withdrawal. Ye Amherawdyr Arthur, "the Emperor Arthur," may have lived and fought, and led the Brythons to battle.