TH];: ROMANCE OF RACE. 515 



crasy depends in the end upon the proportion of each which comes 

 out victor in the formation of our character. 



Take the single kingdom of Scotland alone. Englishmen are 

 carelessly wont to suppose there is such a thing as a Scotch tem- 

 perament. Scotchmen know better. Even if we omit from the 

 reckoning such remoter and more doubtful elements as Black Celts, 

 and so forth, we may say, roughly speaking, that Scotland consists 

 of six distinct nationalities — the English of the Lothians, the Welsh 

 of Strathclyde, the Irish Scots of Argyllshire, the true Gaels of the 

 Highlands, the Picts of the east coast, and the Scandinavians of 

 Orkney, Caithness, and Sutherland. All these, of course, though 

 in some places tolerably pure, are in others inextricably intermingled; 

 while outlying islands of each, such as the Picts of Galloway, are 

 universally recognized. The " Little England beyond Wales " in 

 Pembrokeshire, mainly peopled by Flemings, who are English in 

 speech among a Welsh-speaking population, forms a similar example 

 in the southern half of our island; while, conversely, little outlaw 

 communities of Welsh-speaking Britons are known to have held out 

 in the eyots of the Pens for many generations against the conquering 

 English of East Anglia and Mercia. 



Take a linguistic case again. How strange it would seem to us 

 to-day if there existed, say in Newfoundland, a colony of Anglo- 

 Saxons, sent there by King Alfred, and speaking still the pure old 

 Saxon tongue of King Alfred's Wessex! Yet this would exactly 

 parallel the case of Iceland. While Danes and Swedes have modern- 

 ized the ancient Scandinavian of the Sagas into the Danish and 

 Swedish of the present day, the Icelanders still go on speaking the 

 tongue of their forefathers pretty much as it was spoken by Rolf 

 the Ganger and Harold Hardrada; they read the Sagas in the tongue 

 of the old singers as easily as our children can read Shakespeare and 

 the English Bible. Mr. Steifanson, the learned Icelander, tells me 

 another interesting fact of the same sort. It seems the women in 

 certain parts of Normandy still wear a peasant cap with silver orna- 

 ments identical to this day with the cap commonly worn by Icelandic 

 women. I need hardly add that the names of Norman villages are 

 but Erenchified corruptions of the old pirate nomenclature — Ivo's 

 toft has been shortened to Ivetot, while Hacon's home has declined 

 into Haconville. 



On the other hand, nothing is more fallacious than the old- 

 fashioned argument from language to kinship. It used once to be 

 thought there was a " great Aryan race " because there were many 

 peoples who spoke the Aryan languages. I doubt whether even Pro- 

 fessor Max Miiller himself really believes nowadays in Our Aryan 

 Ancestor; certainly, for the rest of the world, that exploded old 



