Ernest Renan

Ernest Renan was a Breton trained for the priesthood who lost his faith through philology, wrote a Life of Jesus that treated him as a man and sold like a novel, and became the leading French orientalist and historian of religion, professor at the Collège de France and author of the lecture that defined a nation as a daily plebiscite. The Poetry of the Celtic Races of 1854 is the essay that made the Celts the dreamers and the melancholics of Europe, with the Welsh Mabinogion and the Breton legends as evidence, and it shaped Arnold’s study of Celtic literature and the Irish revival. The Harvard Classics print it with the essays.