DETAILED CONTENTS THE LITTLE MANX NATION THE STORY OF THE MANX KINGS THE STORY OF THE MANX BISHOPS THE STORY OF THE MANX PEOPLE CONCLUSION You see what I send you—my lectures at the Royal Institution in the Spring. In making a little book of them I have thought it best to leave them as they were delivered, with all the colloquialisms that are natural to spoken words frankly exposed to cold print. This does not help them to any particular distinction as literature, but perhaps it lends them an ea

There are just two ideas which are associated in the popular imagination with the first thought of the Isle of Man. The one is that Manxmen have three legs, and the other that Manx cats have no tails. But whatever the popular conception, or misconception, of Man and its people, I shall assume that what you ask from me is that simple knowledge of simple things which has come to me by the accident of my parentage. I must confess to you at the outset that I am not much of a hand at grave history. F

Some years ago, in going down the valley of Foxdale, towards the mouth of Glen Rushen, I lost my way on a rough and unbeaten path under the mountain called Slieu Whallin. There I was met by a typical old Manx farmer, who climbed the hillside some distance to serve as my guide. “Aw, man,” said he, “many a Sunday I’ve crossed these mountains in snow and hail together.” I asked why on Sunday. “You see,” said the old fellow, “I’m one of those men that have been guilty of what St. Paul calls the fool

THE MANX LANGUAGE A friend asked me the other day if there was any reason why I should not deliver these lectures in Manx. I answered that there were just forty good and sufficient reasons. The first was that I did not speak Manx. Like the wise queen in the story of the bells, he then spared me the recital of the remaining nine-and-thirty. But there is at least one of the number that will appeal strongly to most of my hearers. What that is you shall judge for yourselves after I have braved the p

From these ungracious thoughts let me turn again, in a last word, to the old island itself, the true Mannin-veg-Veen of the real Manxman. In these lectures you have seen it only as in flashes from a dark lantern. I am conscious that an historian would have told you so much more of solid fact that you might have carried away tangible ideas. Fact is not my domain, and I shall have to be content if in default of it I have got you close to that less palpable thing, the living heart of Manx-land, sho