Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/411

Rh most closely connected in the minds of European scholars, were pursued during many years while he was living in Madras, far from libraries and manuscripts, and farther still from any fellow-sympathy in such subjects. His Goidelica appeared first in Calcutta in 1866, and his Old-Welsh Glosses on Martianus Capella are dated from the "Screw Steamer 'Surat' between Aden and Bombay, 1872." Born in Dublin in 1830, he qualified as a barrister in 1855, and went out to India in 1862, occupying there a succession of important posts in the High Court and Legislative Council, and becoming law-member of the Council of the Governor-General in 1877. During this period, besides his great legal undertakings, he framed a scheme for collecting and cataloguing the Sanscrit manuscripts of India. But, during all this period, he was devoting large portions of his leisure to the prosecution of works of Celtic scholarship. He turned his attention particularly to those old Irish glosses, on the foundation of which the scientific study of Celtic grammar and philology must rest. The work of his life in this department was fitly crowned by the publication of two monumental works,—in 1894 of the Urkeltischer Sprachschatz in conjunction with Prof. Bezzenberger (being the second volume of Prof. Pick's Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Germanic Language), and in 1901-3 of the Thesaurus Palæohibernicus (containing a complete collection both of the Biblical and non-Biblical glosses and scholia extant on the continent), in conjunction with Prof. Strachan, whose early death Celtic scholarship has been so recently called upon to lament.

But philology was only one of the branches of Celtic research which occupied Dr. Stokes' attention. There is, indeed, hardly any side of the wide field of Celtic studies which has not been illumined and opened up by his labours. Through him, more than through any other single worker, the whole mediaeval literature of Ireland, historical, hagiological, and romantic, has been laid open to the student, and, through his admirable translations, simple, lucid, and idiomatic, to the general reader also. Some of these works appeared separately, while others were contributed to Irische Texte, of which he was joint-editor with Prof. Windisch; to the Revue Celtique, in which his contributions have for many