Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/107

 obtained of the mind and spirit of England is illustrated by the fact that Malory's Death of Arthur was one of the first books issued out of Caxton's press, and it is not without significance that these legends are the inspiration of the best poetry of the poet laureate of our day. Milton even had designed his epic on the Arthurian legend, and it was only the great Puritan revolution which turned his genius to Hebrew instead of to Celtic sources for inspiration. The Celtic strain runs all through English literature. Shakespere, "the highest type of the race, the one Englishman who has combined in the largest measure the mobility and fancy of the Celt with the depth and energy of the Teutonic temper " (John Richard Green), the star and glory of the Elizabethan age, and George Eliot, of the Victorian age, were born in the forest of Arden, on the Welsh borderland. George Eliot, horn within sight of Shakesperc's home, moreover, was Welsh in blood and Celtic in temperament. Byron, Keats, and Shelley, who wrote under the spell of that great Celtic upheaval, the French Revolution, have throughout their