PREFACE.
To many, perhaps to most, of those enlightened people for whose hands more immediately this volume is destined and to whom it owes its existence, both style and subject-matter will be altogether strange; here and there too it may be held that a promulgator of such wares is bound to justify his action. Now, under favour, to attempt this would be to invert the right order. Not only is 'justification' (whether in or out of theology) a strong word, and as such repugnant to the modesty of the Gael; but the thing itself falls into divers lands, of all which one only variety can be valid here: that which is not antecedent but subsequent, not verbal but practical, and which emanates neither from publisher nor from published, but from the public. This phenomenon of ours may, however, very well be simply accounted for.
Silva Gadelica, then, is in the nature of a straw tossed up to see how the wind blows; in other words, to test the judgment of some who from time to time and from widely differing motives have strenuously urged that at this present some such effort had a chance of being well received. The effort, as you see, has been made; the reception has to come: with the receiving community it lies now to show whether or not the aforesaid weatherwise (enormously eminent men one or two of them) prophesied more than they knew, and thereby to pronounce those concerned in making the experiment either guilty or not guilty of over-confidence in their skill as caterers.
The work is far from being exclusively or even primarily designed for the omniscient impeccable leviathans of science that headlong sound the linguistic ocean to its most horrid depths, and (in the intervals of ramming each other) ply their flukes on such audacious small fry as even on the mere surface will venture within their danger.[1] Rather is it adapted to the use of those
- ↑ Thackeray warns Bob Brown the younger that, since the days of Æsop, a desire to cope with bulls is known to be fatal to frogs. As yet no Gadelic
