t knowledge of fact. It cannot
be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a
"revoke"--the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you
must not play with a man--is speaking of authors and books which he
has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you
ignorant of his ignorance. _This_ Mr Arnold never committed, and
could never have committed. But short of it, and while escaping its
penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he
confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less
discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even
less of the _originals_ than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here
guilty.

Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand,
I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very
closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not
seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very
few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in
translation, he seems to have consulted: he never, I think, names
Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets;
and in the main his citations are derived either from _Ossian_
("this do seem going far," as an American poetess observes), or else
from the _Mabinogion_, where some of the articles are positively
known to be late translations of French-English originals, and the
others are very uncertain. You really cannot found any safe literary
generalisations on so very small a basis of such very shaky matter. In
fact, Mr Arnold's argument for the presence of "Celtic magic," &c., in
Celtic poetry comes to something like this. "There is a quality of
magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c.; this magic must be Celtic: therefore
it must be in Celtic poetry." Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I
am not going to endeavour to do so. I shall only say that two
sentences give the key-note of the book as argument. "Rhyme itself,
all the weight of evidence tends to show, came into our poetry from
the Celts." Now to some of us all the weight of evidence tends to show
that it came from the Latins. "Our only first-rate body of
contemporary poetry is the German." Now at the time (1867), for more
than thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of the first or
the second class except Heine, who, as Mr Arnold himself very truly
says, was not a German but a Jew.

But once more, what we go to Mr Matt