Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/377

Rh lectures on Chicago, to give us an expounder for a still more remote-looking object than the Ilissus—Celtic languages and literature" (pp. 148-9, 1891 ed.).

Ten years passed before Oxford founded a Celtic professorship, her choice of an "expounder" falling on Sir John Rhŷs, the one man most competent to fill the chair, and, happily, still its occupant. That the book giving the impetus to this tardy recognition of the importance of studies which, for us British, should take precedence of classical mythology, has been annotated by Alfred Nutt, and, as we are glad to know, left by him in so forward a state as to warrant its issue, thus enriched, is perhaps the happiest legacy that so eminent a Celtic scholar and apostle of the Celtic revival could have bequeathed.

Here there is no need to set down the titles of the eleven books which stand against his name in the British Museum Catalogue, the more so as they indicate only a portion of his ceaseless activity in separate papers contributed by him not only to our Society's Journal,—these including his Presidential Addresses delivered in 1897-8,—but to those of the Irish Texts and Cymmrodorion Societies, in the foundation of both of which he took a prominent part. Added to these are his pamphlets in the series of Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance and Folk-lore, which are designed to make clear to the "man in the street" the significance of folklore as embodying, in far greater degree than that simple term implies, the serious beliefs of the past, and the rites and customs which are their outward and visible signs.

If, as Montaigne says,—and who can question it?—"the profit of life consists not in the space, but in the use," then in the career of Alfred Nutt there has been to his fellows gain "more precious than rubies" to the world's intellectual wealth; a "profit of life" with which no length of listless days can compare. If, in the unfulfilled promise of addition thereto from his well-stored mind and active pen, they mourn his premature death, there will for him be echo of the lines in Adonais:

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