[Footnote 28: Milman, 'Hist., of Christianity,' vol. iii. p. 36.]
23. South of the Thracian mountains you have Thrace herself, and the countries confusedly called Dalmatia and Illyria, forming the coast of the Adriatic, and reaching inwards and eastwards to the mountain watershed. I have never been able to form a clear notion myself of the real character of the people of these districts, in any given period; but they are all to be massed together as northern Greek, having more or less of Greek blood and dialect according to their nearness to Greece proper; though neither sharing in her philosophy, nor submitting to her discipline. But it is of course far more accurate, in broad terms, to speak of these Illyrian, Moesian, and Macedonian districts as all Greek, than with Gibbon or Valentinian to speak of Greece and Macedonia as all Illyrian.[29]
[Footnote 29: I find the same generalization expressed to the modern student under the term 'Balkan Peninsula,' extinguishing every ray and trace of past history at once.]
24. In the same imperial or poetical generalization, we find England massed with France under the term Gaul, and bounded by the "Caledonian rampart." Whereas in our own division, Caledonia, Hibernia, and Wales, are from the first considered as essential parts of Britain,[30] and the link with the continent is to be conceived as formed by the settlement of Britons in Brittany, and not at all by Roman authority beyond the Humber.
[Footnote 30: Gibbon's more deliberate statement its clear enough. "From the coast or the extremity of Caithness and Ulster, the memory of Celtic origin was distinctly preserved in the perpetual resemblance of languages, religion, and manners, and the peculiar character of the British tribes might be naturally ascribed to the influence of accidental and local circumstances." The Lowland Scots, "wheat eaters" or Wanderers, and the Irish, are very positively identified by Gibbon at the time our own history begins. "It is _certain_" (italics his, not mine) "that in the declining age of the Roman Empire, Caledonia, Ireland, and the Isle of Man, were inhabited by the Scots."--Chap. 25, vol. iv., p. 279.
The higher civilization and feebler courage of the Lowland _English_ rendered them either the victims of Scotland, or the grateful subjects of Rome. The mountaineers, Pict among the Grampians, or of their own colour in Cornwall and Wales, have never been either instructed or subdued, and remain to this day the artless and fearless strength of the British race.]