Blair Collection > Vestigia celtica

familiarity with the pecuHarities of the
Gaelic spoken in I slay and Tiree, have
been most useful to me.
But for the serious expense of mate-
rially altering the proof-sheets, I would
have recast and amplified some of the
sentences on pp. 20, 21 ; and I would have
introduced a new paragraph, containing
illustrations from the Old Irish, at p. 25.
As it is, however, I can here but refer the
reader, for further elucidation of the points
there dealt with, to the sixth of Max
Miiller's Lectures on the Science of Lan-
guage, and to Chapter VI. of Windisch's
Kurzgefasste Irische Grammatik.
My mode of Gaelic scription will, I
know, give grave offence to some critics.
I can't help it. For the life of me, I
cannot see that any good end is to be
served by our continuing any longer to
speckle the pages of our Gaelic books all
over with a barbarous garniture of accent
and inverted comma. Like warts and
patches on the face of a court beauty, this
barbarous practice was once regarded as