Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/374

 336 he revived the well-nigh vanished traditions of Aldus, Elzevir, Stephens, and Plantin. And, because his heart often got the better of his head, there was, not infrequently, a debit balance against books on folklore, for which, as for most serious literature nowadays (perhaps it has been so always), the demand is small. So, like the showman who lost on the roundabouts, but more than made it up on the swings, it was only in other branches of his business which his skill and energy developed, that he could recoup the losses that the publication of his own works and those of fellow folklorists involved.

As the great-grandson of one publisher,—William Miller, whose business John Murray acquired,—and the son of another, there were inherited bookish traditions whose influence shaped his career. It was his misfortune to lose his father, David Nutt (whose name the firm retains), in 1863, when he was but seven, but this did not disturb the plans for his education, which was carried on in England and France, and followed by three years' business training in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris. At the age of twenty-two he became the head of his late father's firm, remaining so till his death, and leaving to his widow and their eldest son the conduct of a business which plays a leading part in the distribution of high-class continental literature in this country.

The last words of the letter to Miss Burne, which are quoted above, give the key to his favourite pursuit, the study of Celtic mythology. He was happy in his choice, because, save in Germany, whence largely came his impulse thereto, that branch of mythology had received but scant attention. So far as mythology entered into the education of those of us who are well-on in life, it was restricted to that of Rome and Greece, chiefly as given in the arid pages of Lemprière and Dr. William Smith. As late as 1867, Matthew Arnold, in his Study of Celtic Literature, "labouring to show that in the spiritual frame of us English ourselves, a Celtic fibre, little as we may have ever thought of tracing it, lives and works," added, "and yet in the great and rich universities of this great and rich country there is no chair of Celtic; there is no study or teaching of Celtic matters, those who want them must go abroad for them. So I am inclined to beseech Oxford, instead of expiating her over-addiction to the Ilissus by