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Fled over Adria to the Hesperian fields, And o'er the Celtic roamed the utmost isles. MILTON
Under the appellation of Celts we include the inhabitants of Ireland, the Highlands of Scotland, Man, Wales, and Brittany. It is not, however, by any means meant to be asserted that there is in any of these places to be found a purely Celtic population. The more powerful Gothic race has, everywhere that they have encountered them, beaten the Celts, and intermingled with them, influencing their manners, language, and religion.
Our knowledge of the original religion of the Celts is very limited, chiefly confined to what the Roman writers have transmitted to us, and the remaining poems of the Welsh bards. Its character seems to have been massive, simple, and sublime, and less given to the personification than those of the more eastern nations. The wild and plastic powers of nature never seem in it to have assumed the semblance of huge giants and ingenious dwarfs.
Yet in the popular creed of all these tribes, we meet at the present day beings exactly corresponding to the Dwarfs and Fairies of the Gothic nations. Of these beings there is no mention in any works--such as the Welsh poems, and Mabinogion, the Poems of Ossian, or the different Irish poems and romances--laying claim to an antiquity anterior to the conquests of the Northmen. Is it not then a reasonable supposition that the Picts, Saxons, and other sons of the North, brought with them their Dwarfs and Kobolds, and communicated the knowledge of, and belief in, them to their Celtic subjects and neighbours? Proceeding on this theory we have placed the Celts next to and after the Gothic nations, though they are perhaps their precursors in Europe.