them are left to us, either in the later idioms of the Latin or in fragments of writings, inscriptions, and coins, that it is still a matter of doubt and question among Celtic scholars to which of the known divisions of Celtic speech, the Gadhelic or the Cymric, they belonged, or whether they did not constitute a third division, coördinate with these. Aside from the exceedingly scanty and obscure Gallic epigraphical monuments, and the few single words preserved in classic authors, the earliest records, both of Irish and Welsh speech, are glosses, or interlinear and marginal versions and comments, written by Celtic scholars upon manuscripts which they were studying, in old times when Wales and Ireland, especially the latter, were centres of a lively literary and Christian activity. Of these glosses, the Irish are by far the most abundant, and afford a tolerably distinct idea of what the language was at about the end of the eighth century. There is also an independent literary work, a life of Saint Patrick, which is supposed to belong to the beginning of the ninth century. The other principal Gadhelic dialect, the Scotch Gaelic, presents us a few songs that claim to be of the sixteenth century. The Ossianic poems, which excited such attention a hundred years ago, and whose genuineness and value have been the subject of so lively discussion, are probably built upon only a narrow foundation of real Gaelic tradition.
In the Cymric division, the Welsh glosses, just referred to, are the oldest monuments of definite date. Though hardly, if at all, less ancient than the Irish, coming down from somewhere between the eighth and the tenth centuries, they are very much more scanty in amount, hardly sufficient to do more than disprove the supposed antiquity of the earliest monuments of the language that possess a proper literary character. For long centuries past, the Welsh bards have sung in spirit-stirring strains the glories and the woes of their race; and it is claimed that during much more than a thousand years, or ever since the sixth century, the era of Saxon invasion and conquest, some of their songs have been handed down from generation to generation, by a careful and uninterrupted tradition. And the claim is probably well
