At various points of my narrative I have touched on certain of our
eccentric Manx "characters." But perhaps more interesting than any such
whom I have myself met with are some whom I have known only by repute.
These children of Nature are after all the truest touchstones of a
nation's genius. Crooked, distorted, deformed, they nevertheless, and
perhaps therefore, show clearly the bent of their race. If you are
without brake or curb you may be blind, but you must know when you are
going down hill. The curb of education, and the brake of common-sense
are the surest checks on a people's individuality. And these poor
halfwits of the Manx race, wiser withal than many of the Malvolios who
smile on them so demurely, exhibit the two great racial qualities of
the Manx people--the Celtic and the Norse--in vivid companionship and
contrast. It is an amusing fact that in some wild way the bardic spirit
breaks out in all of them. They are all singers, either of their own
songs, or the songs of others. That surely is the Celtic strain in them.
But their songs are never of the joys of earth or of love, or yet of
war; never, like the rustic poetry of the Scotch, full of pawky humour;
never cynical, never sarcastic; only concerned with the terrors of
judgment and damnation and the place of torment. That, also, may be a
fierce and dark development of the Celtic strain, but I see more of the
Norse spirit in it. When my ancient bard in Glen Rushen took down his
thumb-marked, greasy, discoloured poems from the "lath" against the
open-timbered ceiling, and read them aloud to me in his broad Manx
dialect, with a sing-song of voice and a swinging motion of body, while
the loud hailstorm pelted the window pane and the wind whistled round
the house, I found they were all startling and almost ghastly appeals to
the sinner to shun his evil courses. One of them ran like this: