206 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [ Vou. POE. 
CELE hROSODY: 
By NEIL. MACNISH, BID. EL. D. 
(Read April 16th, 1592.) 
Though Celtic grammarians, such as O’Donovan in his excellent Irish 
Grammar, have devoted a section or chapter to the versification of the 
language with which they are dealing, it is very much to be regretted that, 
so far as I know, no separate or convenient or exhaustive book or treatise 
on Celtic Prosody has hitherto appeared. The Celts are serzus docté in 
more respects than one. As so much praiseworthy attention has been 
directed in recent years to Celtic Literature, and as several Celtic Chairs 
have been founded, it is to be hoped that some Celtic professor, who can 
command sufficient leisure, will prepare, for the benefit of all lovers of 
Celtic lore, a Celtic Classical Dictionary, wherein will be lucidly arranged 
and detailed all that can be gathered from the ancient poetry of Scotland 
and Ireland and Man, and from the annals of Wales and Cornwall and 
Armorica, respecting those heroes whose names occur in the more 
ancient Celtic poems as well as respecting the places and customs of 
which frequent mention is made in those poems. It is to be fondly 
hoped that among our Celtic scholars there will soon appear a Lempriere, 
or a William Smith, who will prepare a Classical Dictionary of Celtic 
Biography, Mythology and Geography; and also that a Hermann, ora 
Bentley, ora Ramsay, will speedily appear who will prepare, for the benefit 
of Celtic scholars and.all lovers of Celtic poetry, a full and lucid treatise on 
Celtic prosody. To the construction of Celtic poetry Zeuss has devoted 
a Caput Alterum, in which he exhibits his well-known learning and 
thorough acquaintance with even the oldest and most obscure fragments 
of Celtic poetry. He writes strongly in praise of Celtic prosody, for he 
thus terminates his examination of it: “By the oldest as well as the most 
recent examples that have been adduced, it appears that the form of 
Celtic poetry is more adorned than the poetic form of any nation, and 
that the ornamentation is greater in the older poems themselves than in 
the more recent. In consequence of that greater adornment it has doubt- 
less come to pass, that even from those times at which the Roman Empire 
was rushing to destruction, the Celtic form, at first in its entirety, and 
subsequently in part, was taken over not only into the Latin poems 
but also into the poems of other languages and remained in them.” 
Matthew Arnold whose fame as a literary critic is great, has these warm 
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