Blair Collection > History of the Celtic language

PREFACE.
If any person take up the History of the Celtic
Language, as about to be submitted, and expect
to get through it as through a song, for that person
the author has not written : " Intelligibilia non in-
tellectum adfero."
At the commencement of the present order of
material things, the first sun indicated day by a
faint but perceptible heraldic emanation in the East,
gradually waxing stronger and stronger, till now,
behold ! the king of day himself gilding the summit
of the mountains with the splendour of his counte-
nance, and now gradually mounting, and diffusing
stronger light — stronger intelligence — till he arrives
at the goal of noon. This appears to the author
no inapt emblem of the commencement of the order
of things in the moral world. If we would contem-
plate the human family in its infant state, we must