Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/410



are some persons whose vitality and enthusiasm seem actually to increase with years; at however ripe an age death may step in and claim them, we should still feel that they had died young. Such a figure was that of Dr. Whitley Stokes, the great scholar whose death on April 13th of this year, at the age of 79, deprived Celtic learning of its chief and head.

His very presence seemed to infuse intellectual energy into the atmosphere around him. In his neighbourhood the most unlearned began to feel that there must reside some secret, unsuspected magic even in such recondite studies as mediaeval Irish or Breton glosses. For, prodigious worker as he was, and abstruse as were the matters which had most attraction to his mind, his manner of attack upon them was as far removed as is possible from that of the pedant. He combined to a quite exceptional degree the laborious erudition of the trained philologist with the cultivated instinct of the man of letters. The same enthusiasm which led him, in younger days, to turn for relief and refreshment to the editing of Cornish plays and Irish tales and glossaries when immersed in the dry details of compiling commentaries on Hindu Law Books and old Indian statutes, or in what he himself liked to point to as the greatest undertaking of his life, the codifying of the Anglo-Indian Statutes, made him in later years an editor whose instinct was almost infallible for the best and most important specimens of Irish literature, whether from a philological or a literary point of view. It is curious to remember that Dr. Stokes' Celtic studies, which are those with which his name will always be