The historical evidence yielded by the coins of Greece and Rome is abundant, concise, essentially practical, and easily assimilated. Comparison of this evidence with what is provided by other branches of historical research is out of place, and seldom profitable: it is enough to point out the fundamental difference between coin-evidence and that which is furnished, for example, by works of art or inscriptions. A people's artistic or literary achievement is mainly a free expression of individual tendencies: though Phrynichus offended an influential section of public opinion with his play on the Sack of Miletus, and though Pericles was able to yoke Pheidias to his imperialist policy, it is true to say that such achievement was generally the result of free minds working their will. Artistic evidence for history is therefore ‘unofficial’, or informal. It is, of course, all the better for that; yet it must lack the precision which we look for in inscriptions—let us say, in an Athenian list of tribute-payments, or in a municipal charter under the Roman Empire. Inscriptions, indeed, are very often the product of private enterprise—the wish to record family honours, to mourn the dead parent, wife, or child, or to bless the emperor of the day; but they include a large class in which the information given is official in its purpose, and therefore full and accurate.

Few figures in our political history have aroused such affectionate admiration among posterity as Charles James Fox. Not the least attractive feature of his personality is his love of classical literature. He is the supreme example of the scholarly statesman. Some may suspect that the legendary scholarship of our eighteenth-century statesmen did not extend beyond a few tags from Horace and Virgil, relics of a rigorous public school education. Of Fox at any rate this was not true. A study of his notes on the Classics shows him as a true lover of ancient literature and a fine scholar. It is not inappropriate that his bust should stand next to that of Porson in the Upper School at Eton.

The Old Comedy, says Plutarch, is unsuitable for reading to a dinner-party taking their wine; it is ill regulated, violent, and sometimes indecent; moreover, it would require a commentator to explain the personal allusions and we should be in school again. These allusions are perhaps even more obscure to us; yet we read our Aristophanes, and what we have of Menander would not make us agree with Plutarch's decided preference for the New Comedy. And they have an interest of their own in giving us glimpses of some of the prominent figures in Athenian life and of the objects of public mockery or reprobation; for Aristophanes would make sure that his personal references were such as to secure applause, and most of them occur in the other comedians of the time.

The Isle of Man was left untouched by the Romans. It was a stronghold of Celtic culture until in the Dark Ages the Scandinavian sea adventurers made it a naval base. The two races lived side by side and no influence other than theirs showed itself until the seventeenth century, when the English fashions in architecture and social life began to reproduce themselves in the island. Thus the contribution made to the British heritage by those two strains is more easily recognizable here than perhaps in any other part of the British Isles. In this paper I deal only with the Celts, our knowledge of whom (apart from archaeology) is based almost entirely on the records of Greece and Rome. I confine myself to two authors universally read in schools—Caesar, a competent observer at first hand, and Tacitus, a reliable conveyer of borrowed information. All quotations from the former are from the Gallic War, those from Books IV and V referring to Celts in Britain, the others referring to Celts in Gaul. All quotations from Tacitus are from the Agricola. There were really three types of Celts, but their culture was at the time of these writers fairly homogeneous. It is not to be wondered at that illustrations can be found in the Isle of Man for statements made about Celts in Britain and Gaul, for the whole of the Celtic world seems to have enjoyed free intercourse and to have shared the same religious organization.

Isaac vossius, scholar and Canon of Windsor in the seventeenth century, regretted ‘that the whole human race did not banish the plague and confusion of so many tongues and adopt an universal and self-evident system of signs and pantomimic expression’. Imago animi vultus est, says Cicero, and again, vultus … qui sermo quidam tacitus est; and finally, in the de Oratore (iii. 216), ‘every passion of the heart has its appropriate look and tone and gesture, and the whole body of man and his whole countenance and every voice he utters re-echo like the strings of a harp to the touch of every emotion in his soul’.