302 The Library. suggested the incidence of the rate might be made almost imperceptible. When we come to the large towns, I am by no means sure that Galway or Sligo, for example, presents a hopeful field for the advocates of municipal expenditure for intellectual purposes. Even Edinburgh could not be induced to rate itself until it received very substantial consideration from the munificence of an enterprising Scotchman, who had made a fortune abroad. I hope Irishmen will not wait for such windfalls, but will consider the serious injury which the country is receiving from being outside the main current of British civilisation. This remark, I well know, has no application to the city where I now am, or to the North of Ireland in general, but it is impossible to be elsewhere in the country without becoming sensible of an estrangement from the higher culture. Some consciousness of this fact seems to be evinced in the efforts recently made to cultivate a peculiar type of literature in Ireland, which, so far as they merely contemplate the recognition and conservation of the peculiarly Celtic aspects of our literature, have my warmest approval. I subscribe to every word that Matthew Arnold has said of " Celtic magic " and its happy influence as an element in English literature. But whatever it may have been when a Celtic language was its vehicle, it is now not a literature, but a literary element. The only Irish literature now is British literature, adorned, ennobled, spiri- tualised by this Celtic factor, but still British, and the need of the Irishman is that this rich possession should be made his own, not that an artificial literature should be manufactured for him. Literature follows language, even if the language be dead, much more when it is a living and growing organism, daily expanding more and more to the airs of heaven above, and striking deeper and deeper root into the soil of national life below. Let us there- fore realise that the choice for the Irishman lies between his heritage in the national literature of the United Kingdom and no national literature ; and let us, by bringing that literature to as many Irish homes as possible, provide lest a people naturally as little inclined to provincialism as any in the world, should be provincialised by estrangement from the best produc- tions of the language in which they themselves think and speak and write. We must remember that " Irish " and " Milesian " are not convertible expressions. Passing from the reflections naturally suggested by our Irish visit to the affairs of our Association, I have to express my
