In reference to the name “Freeman,” Mr. Nicholson adds: “No one was more intensely ‘English’ in his sympathies than the great historian of that name, and probably no one would have more strenuously resisted the suggestion that he might be of Welsh descent; yet I have met his close physical counterpart in a Welsh farmer (named Evans) living within a few minutes of Pwllheli.”
He speaks of “Nyrax, a Celtic city,” and “Massalia [Marseilles], a city of Liguria in the land of the Celts” (“Fragmenta Hist. Græc.”).
In his “Premiers Habitants de l'Europe,” vol. ii.
“Cæesar's Conquest of Gaul,” pp. 251-327.
The ancients were not very close observers of physical characteristics. They describe the Celts in almost exactly the same terms as those which they apply to the Germanic races. Dr. Rice Holmes is of opinion that the real difference, physically, lay in the fact that the fairness of the Germans was blond, and that of the Celts red. In an interesting passage of the work already quoted (p. 315) he observes that, “Making every allowance for the admixture of other blood, which must have considerably modified the type of the original Celtic or Gallic invaders of these islands, we are struck by the fact that among all our Celtic-speaking fellow subjects there are to be found numerous specimens of a type which also exists in those parts of Brittany which were colonised by British invaders, and in those parts of Gaul in which the Gallic invaders appear to have settled most thickly, as well as in Northern Italy, where the Celtic invaders were once dominant; and also by the fact that this type, even among the more blond representatives of it, is strikingly different, to the casual as well as to the scientific observer, from that of the purest representatives of the ancient Germans. The well-known picture of Sir David Wilkie, ‘Reading of the Waterloo Gazette,’ illustrates, as Daniel Wilson remarked, the difference between the two types. Put a Perthshire Highlander side by side with a Sussex farmer. Both will be fair; but the red hair and beard of the Scot will be in marked contrast with the fair hair of the Englishman, and their features will differ still more markedly. I remember teeing two gamekeepers in a railway carriage running from Inverness to Lairey. They were tall, athletic, fair men, evidently belonging to the Scandinavian type, which, as Dr. Beddoe says, is so common in the extreme north of Scotland; but both in colouring and in general aspect they were utterly different from the tall, fair Highlanders whom I had seen in Perthshire. There was not a trace of red in their hair, their long beards being absolutely yellow. The prevalence of red among the Celtic-speaking people is, it seems to me, a most striking characteristic. Not only do we find eleven men in every hundred whose hair is absolutely red, but underlying the blacks and the dark browns the lame tint is to be discovered.”
See the map of comparative nigrescence given in Ripley's “Races of Europe,” p. 318. In France, however, the Bretons are not a dark race relatively to the rest of the population. They are composed partly of the ancient Gallic peoples and partly of settlers from Wales who were driven out by the Saxon invasion.
See for these names Holder's “Altceltischer Sprachschatz.”
Vergil might possibly mean “the very-bright” or illustrious one, a natural form for a proper name. Ver in Gallic names (Vercingetorix, Vercassivellasimus, &c.) is often an intensive prefix, like the modern Irish fior. The name of the village where Vergil was born, Andes (now Pietola), is Celtic. His love of nature, his mysticism, and his strong feeling for a certain decorative quality in language and rhythm are markedly Celtic qualities. Tennyson's phrases for him, “landscape-lover, lord of language,” are suggestive in this connexion.
Ptolemy, a friend, and probably, indeed, half-brother, of Alexander, was doubtless present when this incident took place. His work has not survived, but is quoted by Arrian and other historians.
One is reminded of the folk-tale about Henny Penny, who went to tell the king that the sky was falling.