To Deasy's badgering interrogation about the proudest saying
of an Englishman, Stephen reasonably supposes it may be that "the
sun never sets" on his empire. Mr Deasy blurts out, "Ba!...That's
not English. A French Celt said that." He is wrong. The
saying is not unique to the British, but it has no known
association with French Celts.
Thornton remarks that "This has been said, in one form or
another, of every great empire since that of Alexander the
Great." Gifford identifies specific writers: "The germ of the
sun-never-sets image is in Herodotus (Xerxes brags about the
glory of the Persian Empire). Subsequent reworkings of the
phrase can be found in Capt. John Smith, Sir Walter Scott,
Friedrich von Schiller, and Daniel Webster, none of them
'French Celts.'"
Some Brittanic Celts did voice the trope. In 1773, after the
Seven Years War and the concluding Treaty of Paris (1763)
added immense new territories to Britain's empire, the
colonial administrator George Macartney, an Irishman descended
from Scottish forbears who became an earl in England, wrote of
"a vast Empire, on which the sun never sets." Slote cites
Scottish journalist John Wilson (1785-1854), who wrote under
the pen name Christopher North. But Deasy's claim is
preposterous on its face, since no worldwide "French Celt"
empire ever existed. The schoolmaster continues to pile up
egregious misstatements, making his structural analogy to wise old Nestor seem
more and more parodic.
