Chapter I: Part 1

</pre>

E-text prepared by Marius Masi, Jonathan Ingram, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 36298-h.htm or 36298-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/36298/pg36298-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36298/36298-h.zip)

Transcriber's note:

(1) Characters following a carat (^) were printed
in superscript.

(2) Macrons and breves above letters and dots below
letters are not identified in this text file.

(3) [alpha], [beta], etc. stand for greek letters.

(4) A list of corrections is at the end of this e-book.

London, Frederick Warne & C^o.]

AMENITIES OF LITERATURE,

Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature.

by

ISAAC DISRAELI.

A New Edition,

Edited by His Son,

THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD.

London: Frederick Warne and Co., Bedford Street, Strand.

London: Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., Printers, Whitefriars.

PREFACE.

A history of our vernacular literature has occupied my studies for many years. It was my design not to furnish an arid narrative of books or of authors, but following the steps of the human mind through the wide track of Time, to trace from their beginnings the rise, the progress, and the decline of public opinions, and to illustrate, as the objects presented themselves, the great incidents in our national annals.

In the progress of these researches many topics presented themselves, some of which, from their novelty and curiosity, courted investigation. Literary history, in this enlarged circuit, becomes not merely a philological history of critical erudition, but ascends into a philosophy of books where their subjects, their tendency, and their immediate or gradual influence over the people discover their actual condition.

Authors are the creators or the creatures of opinion; the great form an epoch, the many reflect their age. With them the transient becomes permanent, the suppressed lies open, and they are the truest representatives of their nation for those very passions with which they are themselves infected. The pen of the ready-writer transmits to us the public and the domestic story, and thus books become the intellectual history of a people. As authors are scattered through all the ranks of society, among the governors and the governed, and the objects of their pursuits are usually carried on by their own peculiar idiosyncrasy, we are deeply interested in the secret connexion of the incidents of their lives with their intellectual habits. In the development of that predisposition which is ever working in characters of native force, all their felicities and their failures, and the fortunes which such men have shaped for themselves, and often for the world, we discover what is not found in biographical dictionaries, the history of the mind of the individual--and this constitutes the psychology of genius.

In the midst of my studies I was arrested by the loss of sight; the papers in this collection are a portion of my projected history.

The title prefixed to this work has been adopted to connect it with its brothers, the "Curiosities of Literature," and "Miscellanies of Literature;" but though the form and manner bear a family resemblance, the subject has more unity of design.

The author of the present work is denied the satisfaction of reading a single line of it, yet he flatters himself that he shall not trespass on the indulgence he claims for any slight inadvertences. It has been confided to ONE whose eyes unceasingly pursue the volume for him who can no more read, and whose eager hand traces the thought ere it vanish in the thinking; but it is only a father who can conceive the affectionate patience of filial devotion.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
THE DRUIDICAL INSTITUTION 1

BRITAIN AND THE BRITONS 12

THE NAME OF ENGLAND AND OF THE ENGLISH 24

THE ANGLO-SAXONS 28

CAEDMON AND MILTON 37

BEOWULF; THE HERO-LIFE 51

THE ANGLO-NORMANS 59

THE PAGE, THE BARON, AND THE MINSTREL 70

GOTHIC ROMANCES 81

ORIGIN OF THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGES OF EUROPE 96

ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 111

VICISSITUDES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 128

DIALECTS 142

MANDEVILLE; OUR FIRST TRAVELLER 151

CHAUCER 158

GOWER 177

PIERS PLOUGHMAN 183

OCCLEVE; THE SCHOLAR OF CHAUCER 191

LYDGATE; THE MONK OF BURY 196

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING 203

THE FIRST ENGLISH PRINTER 214

EARLY LIBRARIES 221

HENRY THE SEVENTH 228

FIRST SOURCES OF MODERN HISTORY 234

ARNOLDE'S CHRONICLE 240

THE FIRST PRINTED CHRONICLE 243

HENRY THE EIGHTH; HIS LITERARY CHARACTER 250

BOOKS OF THE PEOPLE 256

THE DIFFICULTIES EXPERIENCED BY A PRIMITIVE AUTHOR 268

SKELTON 276

THE SHIP OF FOOLS 285

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF SIR THOMAS MORE 289

THE EARL OF SURREY AND SIR THOMAS WYATT 303

THE SPOLIATION OF THE MONASTERIES 316

A CRISIS AND A REACTION; ROBERT CROWLEY 322

PRIMITIVE DRAMAS 339

THE REFORMER BISHOP BALE; AND THE ROMANIST JOHN HEYWOOD,
THE COURT JESTER 353

ROGER ASCHAM 359

PUBLIC OPINION 368

ORTHOGRAPHY AND ORTHOEPY 381

THE ANCIENT METRES IN MODERN VERSE 393

ORIGIN OF RHYME 399

RHYMING DICTIONARIES 403

THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE 405

THE DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT 413

THE FIRST JESUITS IN ENGLAND 423

HOOKER 439

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 451

SPENSER 460

THE FAERY QUEEN 475

ALLEGORY 487

THE FIRST TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST COMEDY 502

THE PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE 514

SHAKESPEARE 529

THE "HUMOURS" OF JONSON 578

DRAYTON 584

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF RAWLEIGH 590

THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHER, DR. DEE 617

THE ROSACRUSIAN FLUDD 642

BACON 650

THE FIRST FOUNDER OF A PUBLIC LIBRARY 661

EARLY WRITERS, THEIR DREAD OF THE PRESS,--THE TRANSITION
TO AUTHORS BY PROFESSION 670

THE AGE OF DOCTRINES 681

PAMPHLETS 685

THE OCEANA OF HARRINGTON 692

THE AUTHOR OF "THE GROUNDS AND REASONS OF MONARCHY" 709

COMMONWEALTH 712

THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE 714

DIFFICULTIES OF THE PUBLISHERS OF CONTEMPORARY MEMOIRS 724

THE WAR AGAINST BOOKS 738

AMENITIES OF LITERATURE.

THE DRUIDICAL INSTITUTION.

England, which has given models to Europe of the most masterly productions in every class of learning and every province of genius, so late as within the last three centuries was herself destitute of a national literature. Even enlightened Europe itself amid the revolving ages of time is but of yesterday.

How "that was performed in our tongue, which may be compared or preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,"[1] becomes a tale in the history of the human mind.

In the history of an insular race and in a site so peculiar as our own, a people whom the ocean severed from all nations, where are we to seek for our ABORIGINES? A Welsh triad, and a Welsh is presumed to be a British, has commemorated an epoch when these mighty realms were a region of impenetrable forests and impassable morasses, and their sole tenants were wolves, bears, and beavers, and wild cattle. Who were the first human beings in this lone world?

Every people have had a fabulous age. Priests and poets invented, and traditionists expatiated; we discover gods who seem to have been men, or men who resemble gods; we read in the form of prose what had once been a poem; imaginations so wildly constructed, and afterwards as strangely allegorised, served as the milky food of the children of society, quieting their vague curiosity, and circumscribing the illimitable unknown. The earliest epoch of society is unapproachable to human inquiry. Greece, with all her ambiguous poetry, was called "the mendacious;" credulous Rome rested its faith on five centuries of legends; and our Albion dates from that unhistorical period when, as our earliest historian, the Monk of Monmouth, aiming at probability, affirms, "there were but a few giants in the land,"[2] and these the more melancholy Gildas, to familiarise us with hell itself, accompanied by "a few devils." Every people however long acknowledged, with national pride, beings as fabulous, in those tutelary heroes who bore their own names.

The landing of Brutus with his fugitive Trojans on "the White Island," and here founding a "Troynovant," was one of the results of the immortality of Homer, though it came reflected through his imitator Virgil, whose Latin in the mediaeval ages was read when Greek was unknown. The landing of Aeneas on the shores of Italy, and the pride of the Romans in their Trojan ancestry, as their flattering Epic sanctioned, every modern people, in their jealousy of antiquity, eagerly adopted, and claimed a lineal descent from some of this spurious progeny of Priam. The idle humour of the learned flattered the imaginations of their countrymen; and each, in his own land, raised up a fictitious personage who was declared to have left his name to the people. The excess of their patriotism exposed their forgeries, while every pretended Trojan betrayed a Gothic name. France had its Francion, Ireland its Iberus, the Danes their Danus, and the Saxons their Saxo. The descent of Brutus into Britain is even tenderly touched by so late a writer as our CAMDEN; for while he abstains from affording us either denial or assent, he expends his costly erudition in furnishing every refutation which had been urged against the preposterous existence of these fabulous founders of every European people.

Such is the corruption of the earliest history, either to gratify the idle pride of a people, or to give completeness to inquiries extending beyond human knowledge. Even BUCHANAN, to gratify the ancestral vanity of his countrymen, has recorded the names of three hundred fabulous monarchs, and presents a nomenclature without an event; and in his classical latinity we must silently drop a thousand unhistorical years. Even HENRY and WHITAKER, in the gravity of English history, sketched the manners and the characteristics of an unchronicled generation from the fragmentary romances of Ossian.

Caesar imagined that the inhabitants of the interior of Britain, a fiercer people than the dwellers on the coasts, were an indigenous race. But the philosophy of Caesar did not exceed that of Horace and Ovid, who conceived no other origin of man than _Mater Terra_. Man indeed was formed out of "the dust of the ground," but the Divine Spirit alone could have dictated the history of primeval man in the solitude of Eden. To Caesar was not revealed that man was an oriental creature; that a single locality served as the cradle of the human race; and that the generations of man were the offspring of a single pair, when once "the whole earth was of one language and of one speech." "And there is no antiquity but this that can tell _any other beginning_," exclaims our honest VERSTEGAN, exulting in his Teutonic blood, while furnishing an extraordinary evidence of the retreat of Tuisco and his Teutons from the conspiracy against the skies.[3]

The dispersion of Babel, and, consequently, the diversity of languages, is the mysterious link which connects sacred and profane history. There is but a single point whence human nature begins--the universe has been populated by migrations. Wherever the human being is found, he has been transplanted; however varied in structure and dissimilar in dialect, the first inhabitants of every land were not born there: unlike plants and animals, which seem coeval with the region in which they are found, never removing from the soil they occupy. Thus the miracle of Holy Writ solves the enigmas of philosophical theories; of more than one Adam, of distinct stocks of mankind, and of the mechanism of language--vague conjectures, and contested opinions! which have left us without even a conception how the human being is white, or tawny, or sable; or how the first letters of the alphabet are Aleph and Bet, or Alpha and Beta, or A and B!

In tracing the origin of nations later speculators have therefore more discreetly, though not wanting in hardy conjectures or fanciful affinities, conducted people after people, from the mysterious fount of human existence in the Asian region. Through countless centuries they have followed the myriads who, propelling each other, took the right or the left, as chance led them: vanished nations may have received names which they themselves might not have recognised. Kelt or Kimmerian, Scandinavian or Goth, Phoenician or Iberian, have been hurried to the Isles of Britain. Their tale is older, though less "divine," than the tale of Troy; and the difficulty remains to unravel the reality of the fabulous. The learned have rarely satisfied their consciences in arranging their dates in the confusion of unnoted time; nor in that other confusion of races, often mingling together under one common appellative, have they always agreed in assigning that ancient people who were the progenitors of the modern nation; and the aborigines have been more than once described as "an ancient people whose name is unknown." In the pride of erudition, and the irascibility of confutation, they have involved themselves in interminable discussions, yet one might be seduced to adopt any hypothesis, for more or less each bears some ambiguous evidence, or some startling circumstance sufficient to rock the dreaming antiquary, and to kindle the bitter blood of pedantic patriots. The origin of the population of Europe and the first inhabitants of our British Isles has produced some antiquarian romances, often ingenious and amusing, till the romances turn out to be mere polemics, and give us angry words amid the most quaint fancies. This theme, still continued, becomes a cavern of antiquity, where many waving their torches, the light has sometimes fallen on an unperceived angle; but the scattered light has shown the depth and the darkness.

Among those shadows of time we grasp at one certainty. Whoever might be the first-comers to this solitary island, when we obtain any knowledge of the inhabitants, we are struck by their close resemblance to those tribes of savage life whom our navigators have discovered, and who are now found in almost a primitive state among that innumerable cluster of what has recently been designated the Polynesian Isles. The aborigines of Britain took the same modes of existence, and fell into similar customs. We discover their rude population divided into jealous tribes, in perpetual battle with one another; they lived in what Hobbes has called the _status belli_, with no notion of the _meum_ and _tuum_; in the same community of their women as was found in Otaheite;[4] and with the same ignorance of property, when its representative in some form was not yet invented. Our aborigines resembled these races even in their personal appearance; a Polynesian chief has been drawn and coloured after the life, and the figure exhibits the perfect picture of an ancient Briton, almost naked, the body painted red; the British savage chose blue, and made deep incisions in the flesh to insert his indelible woad.[5] The fierce eye, and the bearded lip, with the long hair scattered to the waist, exhibit the Briton as he was seen by Caesar, and, a century afterwards, as the British monarch Caractacus appeared before the Emperor Claudius at Rome: his sole ornaments consisted of an iron collar, and an iron girdle; but as his naked majesty had his skin painted with figures of animals, however rudely, this was probably a distinctive dress of British royalty. These Britons lived in thick woods, herding among circular huts of reed, as we find other tribes in this early state of society; and submissive to the absolute dominion of a priesthood of magicians, as we find even among the Esquimaux; and performing sanguinary rites, similar to those of the ancient Mexicans: we are struck with the conviction that men in a parallel condition remain but uniform beings.

It seems a solecism in the intellectual history of man to discover among such a semi-barbarous people a government of sages, who, we are assured, "invented and taught such philosophy and other learning as were never read of nor heard of by any men before."[6] This paradoxical incident deepens in mystery when we are to be taught that the druidical institution of Britain was Pythagorean, or patriarchal, or Brahminical. The presumed encyclopedic knowledge which this order possessed, and the singular customs which they practised, have afforded sufficient analogies and affinities to maintain the occult and remote origin of Druidism. Nor has this notion been the mere phantom of modern system-makers. It was a subject of inquiry among the ancients whether the Druids had received their singular art of teaching by secret initiation, and the prohibition of all writing, with their doctrine of the pre-existence and transmigration of souls, from Pythagoras; or, whether this philosopher in his universal travels had not alighted among the Druids, and had passed through their initiation?[7] This discussion is not yet obsolete, and it may still offer all the gust of novelty. A Welsh antiquary, according to the spirit of Welsh antiquity, insists that the Druidical system of the Metempsychosis was conveyed to the Brahmins of India by a former emigration from Wales; but the reverse may have occurred, if we trust the elaborate researches which copiously would demonstrate that the Druids were a scion of the oriental family.[8] Every point of the Druidical history, from its mysterious antiquity, may terminate with reversing the proposition. A recent writer confidently intimated that the knowledge of Druidism must be searched for in the Talmudical writings; but another, in return, asserts that the Druids were older than the Jews.

Whence and when the British Druids transplanted themselves to this lone world amid the ocean, bringing with them all the wisdom of far antiquity, to an uncivilized race, is one of those events in the history of man which no historian can write. It is evident that they long preserved what they had brought; since the Druids of Gaul were fain to resort to the Druids of Britain to renovate their instruction.

The Druids have left no record of themselves; they seem to have disdained an immortality separate from the existence of their order; but the shadow of their glory is reflected for ever in the verse of Lucan, and the prose of Caesar. The poet imagined that if the knowledge of the gods was known to man, it had been alone revealed to these priests of Britain. The narrative of the historian is comprehensive, but, with all the philosophical cast of his mind and the intensity of his curiosity, Caesar was not a Druid;[9] and only a Druid could have written--had he dared!--on DRUIDHEACHT--a sacred, unspeakable word at which the people trembled in their veneration.

The British Druids constituted a sacred and a secret society, religious, political, and literary. In the rude mechanism of society in a state of pupilage, the first elements of government, however gross, or even puerile, were the levers to lift and to sustain the unhewn masses of the barbaric mind. Invested with all privileges and immunities, amid that transient omnipotence which man in his first feeble condition can confer, the wild children of society crouched together before those illusions which superstition so easily forges; but the supernatural dominion lay in the secret thoughts of the people; the marauder had not the daring to touch the open treasure as it lay in the consecrated grove; and a single word from a Druid for ever withered a human being, "cut down like grass." The loyalty of the land was a religion of wonder and fear, and to dispute with a Druid was a state crime.

They were a secret society, for whatever was taught was forbidden to be written; and not only their doctrines and their sciences were veiled in this sacred obscurity, but the laws which governed the community were also oral. For the people, the laws, probably, were impartially administered; for the Druids were not the people, and without their sympathies, these judges at least sided with no party. But if these sages, amid the conflicting interests of the multitude, seemed placed above the vicissitudes of humanity, their own more solitary passions were the stronger, violently compressed within a higher sphere: ambition, envy, and revenge, those curses of nobler minds, often broke their dreams. The election of an Arch-Druid was sometimes to be decided by a battle. Some have been chronicled by a surname which indicates a criminal. No king could act without a Druid by his side, for peace or war were on his lips; and whenever the order made common cause, woe to the kingdom![10] It was a terrible hierarchy. The golden knife which pruned the mistletoe beneath the mystic oak, immolated the human victim.

The Druids were the common fathers of the British youth, for they were the sole educators; but the genius of the order admitted of no inept member. For the acolyte unendowed with the faculty of study all initiation ceased; nature herself had refused this youth the glory of Druidism; but he was taught the love of his country. The Druidical lyre kindled patriotism through the land, and the land was saved--for the Druids!

The Druidical custom of unwritten instruction was ingeniously suggested by Cicero, as designed to prevent their secret doctrines from being divulged to those unworthy or ill fitted to receive them, and to strengthen the memory of their votaries by its continued exercise; but we may suspect, that this barbarous custom of this most ancient sodality began at a period when they themselves neither read nor wrote, destitute of an alphabet of their own; for when the Druids had learned from the Greeks their characters, they adopted them in all their public and private affairs. We learn that the Druidical sciences were contained in twenty thousand verses, which were to prompt their perpetual memory. Such traditional science could not be very progressive; what was to be got by rote no disciple would care to consider obsolete, and a century might elapse without furnishing an additional couplet. The Druids, like some other institutions of antiquity, by not perpetuating their doctrines, or their secrets, in this primeval state of theology and philosophy, by writing, have effectually concealed their own puerile simplicity. But the monuments of a people remain to perpetuate their character. We may judge of the genius or state of the Druidical arts and sciences by such objects. We are told that the Druids were so wholly devoted to nature, that they prohibited the use of any tool in the construction of their rude works; all are unhewn masses, or heaps of stones; such are their cairns and cromleches and corneddes, and that wild architecture whose stones hang on one another, still frowning on the plains of Salisbury.[11] A circle of stones marked the consecrated limits of the Druidical tribunal; and in the midst a hillock heaped up for the occasion was the judgment-seat. Here, in the open air, in "the eye of light and the face of the sun," to use the bardic style, the decrees were pronounced, and the Druids harangued the people. Such a scene was exhibited by the Hebrew patriarchs, from whom some imagined these Druids descended; but whether or not the Celtic be of this origin we must not decide by any analogous manners or customs, because these are nearly similar, wherever we trace a primitive race--so uniform is nature, till art, infinitely various, conceals nature herself.

In the depth of antiquity, misty superstition and pristine tradition gave a false magnitude to the founders of human knowledge; and our own literary historians who have been over-curious about "the Genesis" of their antiquities, have inveigled us into the mystic groves of Druidism in all their cloudy obscurity. The "Antiquities of the University of Oxford" open with "the Originals of Learning in this Nation;" and our antiquary discerns the first shadowings of the University of Oxford in "the universal knowledge" of the Druidical institution in "ethics, politics, civil law, divinity, and poetry." Such are the reveries of an antiquary.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Ben Jonson.

[2] The existence of these _giants_ was long historical, and their
real origin was in the fourth verse of the fifth chapter of Genesis,
which no commentator shall ever explain. AYLET SAMMES in his
"Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, or the Antiquities of Ancient Britain
derived from the Phoenicians," has particularly noticed "two teeth of
a certain giant, of such a huge bigness, that two hundred such teeth
as men now-a-days have might be cut out of them." Becanus and Camden
had however observed, that "_the bones of sea-fish_ had been taken
for _giants' bones_;--but can it be rationally supposed that men ever
entombed fishes?" triumphant in his arguments, exclaims Aylet Sammes.
The revelations of geology had not yet been surmised, even by those
who had discovered that giants were but sea-fish. So progressive is
all human knowledge.

[3] The miraculous event was perpetuated by the whole Teutonic
people, "while it was fresh in their memories," as our honest Saxon
asserts; hence to this day we in our Saxon _English_, and our
Teutonic kinsmen and neighbours in their idiom, describe a confusion
of idle talk by the term of _Babel_, now written from our harsh love
of supernumerary consonants _Babble_; and any such workmen of Babel
are still indicated as _Babblers_.--"A Restitution of Decayed
Intelligence," 138, 4to. Antwerp, 1605.

The erudite Menage offers a memorable evidence of the precarious
condition of etymology when it connects things which have no other
affinity than that which depends on _sounds_. See his "Dictionnaire
Etymologique, ou Origines de la Langue Francoise," ad verbum BABIL.
Not satisfied with the usual authorities deduced from _Babel_, this
verbal sage appeals to us English to demonstrate the natural
connexion between _Babbling and Childishness_; for thus he has
shrewdly opined "The English in this manner have _Babble_ and
_Baby_!"

After all the convulsion of lips at Babel, and confusion among the
etymologists, the word is Hebrew, which with a few more such are
found in many languages.

[4] Julia, the empress of Severus, once in raillery remonstrated with
a British female against this singular custom, which annulled every
connubial tie. The British woman, whose observation had evidently
been enlarged during her visit to Rome, retorted by her disdain of
the more polished corruption of the greater nation. "We British women
greatly differ from the Roman ladies, for we follow in public the men
whom we esteem the most worthy, while the Roman women yield
themselves secretly to the vilest of men."

Such was the noble sentiment which broke forth from a lady of savage
education--it was, however, but a savage's view of social life. This
female Briton had not felt how much remained of life which she had
not taken into her view; when the attractions of her sex had ceased,
and the season of flowers had passed, she was left without her
connubial lord amid a progeny who had no father.

[5] This practice of savage races may have originated in a natural
circumstance. The naked body by this slight covering is protected
from the atmosphere, from insects, and other inconveniences to which
the unclothed are exposed. But though it may not have been considered
merely as personal finery, which seems sometimes to have been the
case, it became a refinement of barbarism when they painted their
bodies frightfully to look terrible to the enemy.

[6] See Mr. Tate's twelve questions about the Druids, with Mr.
Jones's answers; a learned Welsh scholar who commented on the ancient
laws of his nation.--Toland's "History of the Druids."

A later Welsh scholar affirms, "beyond all doubt there has been an
era when science diffused a light among the Cymry--in a very early
period of the world."--Owen's "Heroic Elegies of Llywarc Hen."
Preface, xxi.

This style is traditional and still kept up among Welsh and Irish
scholars, who seem familiar with an antiquity beyond record.

[7] Toland's "History of the Druids" in his Miscellaneous Works, ii.
163.

[8] "The Celtic Druids, or an Attempt to show that the Druids were
the Priests of Oriental Colonies, who emigrated from India." By
Godfrey Higgins, Esq. London, 1829.

This is a quarto volume abounding with recondite researches and many
fancies. It is more repulsive, by the absurd abuse of "the Christian
priests who destroyed their (the Druids') influence, and unnerved the
arms of their gallant followers." There are philosophical fanatics!

[9] Caesar was a keen observer of the Britons. He characterizes the
Kentish men, _Ex his omnibus longe sunt humanissimi_,--"Of all this
people the Kentish are far the most humane." Caesar describes the
British boats to have the keel and masts of the lightest wood, and
their bodies of wicker covered with leather; and the hero and sage
was taught a lesson by the barbarians, for Caesar made use of these in
Spain to transport his soldiers,--a circumstance which Lucan has
recorded. In the size and magnitude of Britain, confiding to the
exaggerated accounts of the captives, he was mistaken; but he
acknowledges, that many things he heard of, he had not himself
observed.

[10] Toland's "Hist. of the Druids," 56.

[11] The origin of Stonehenge is as unknown as that of the Pyramids.
As it is evident that those huge masses could not have been raised
and fixed without the machinery of art, Mr. Owen, the Welsh
antiquary, infers, that this building, if such it may be called,
could not have been erected till that later period when the Druidical
genius declined and submitted to Christianity, and the Druids were
taught more skilful masonry in stone, though without mortar. It has
been, however, considered, that those masses which have been ascribed
to the necromancer Merlin, or the more ancient giants, might have
been the work of the Britons themselves, who, without our knowledge
of the mechanical powers in transporting or raising ponderous bodies,
it is alleged, were men of mighty force and stature, whose
co-operation might have done what would be difficult even to our
mechanical science. The lances, helmets, and swords of these Britons
show the vast size and strength of those who wore them. The native
Americans, as those in Peru, unaided by the engines we apply to those
purposes, have raised up such vast stones in building their temples
as the architect of the present time would not perhaps hazard the
attempt to remove. "Essays by a Society at Exeter," 114.

BRITAIN AND THE BRITONS.

Britain stood as the boundary of the universe, beyond Which all was air and water--and long it was ere the trembling coasters were certain whether Britain was an island or a continent, a secret probably to the dispersed natives themselves. It was the triumphant fleet of Agricola, nearly a century after the descent of Caesar, which, encircling it, proclaimed to the universe that Britain was an island. From that day Albion has lifted its white head embraced by the restless ocean, but often betrayed by that treacherous guardian, she became the possession of successive races.

Nations have derived their names from some accidental circumstance; some peculiarity marking their national character, or descriptive of the site of their country. The names of our island and of our islanders have exercised the inquiries, and too often the ingenuity, of our antiquarian etymologists. There are about half a hundred origins of the name of Britain; some absurd, many fanciful, all uncertain.[1] Our primitive ancestors distinguished themselves, in pride or simplicity, as _Brith_ and _Brithon_; _Brith_ signified stained, and _Brithon_, a stained man, according to Camden.[2] The predilection for colouring their bodies induced the civilized Romans to designate the people who were driven to the Caledonian forests as _Picts_, or a painted people.

That the native term of _Brith_ or _Brithon_, by its curt harshness, would clash on the modulating ear of the Greek voyager, or the Latin poet, seems probable, for by them it was amplified. And thus we owe to sonorous antiquity the name now famous as their own, for BRITANNIA first appeared in their writings, bequeathed to us by the masters of the world as their legacy of glory.

To the knowledge of the Romans the island exceeded in magnitude all other islands; and they looked on this land with pride and anxiety, while they dignified Britain as the "Roman island." The Romans even personified the insular Genius with poetic conceptions. Britannia is represented as a female seated on a rock, armed with a spear, or leaning on a prow, while the ship beside her attests her naval power. We may yet be susceptible of the prophetic flattery, when we observe the Roman has also seated her on a globe, with the symbol of military power, and the ocean rolling under her feet.[3]

The tale of these ancient Britons who should have been our ancestors is told by the philosophical historian of antiquity. Under successive Roman governors they still remained divided by native factions: "A circumstance," observes Tacitus, "most useful for us, among such a powerful people, where each combating singly, all are subdued." A century, as we have said, had not elapsed from the landing of Caesar to the administration of Agricola. That enlightened general changed the policy of former governors; he allured the Britons from their forest retreats and reedy roofs to partake of the pleasures of a Roman city--to dwell in houses, to erect lofty temples, and to indulge in dissolving baths. The barbarian who had scorned the Roman tongue now felt the ambition of Roman eloquence; and the painted Briton of Caesar was enveloped in the Roman toga. Severus, in another century after Agricola, as an extraordinary evidence of his successful government, appealed to Britain--"Even the Britons are quiet!" exclaimed the emperor. The tutelary genius of Rome through four centuries preserved Britain--even from the Britons themselves; but the Roman policy was fatal to the national character, and when the day arrived that their protector forsook them, the Britons were left among their ancient discords: for provincial jealousies, however concealed by circumstances, are never suppressed; the fire lives in its embers ready to be kindled.

The island of Britain, itself not extensive, was broken into petty principalities: we are told that there were nearly two hundred kinglings, the greater part of whom did not presume to wear crowns. Sometimes they united in their jealousies of some paramount tyrant, but they raged among themselves; and the passion of Gildas has figured them as "the Lioness of Devonshire" encountering a "Lion's Whelp" in Dorsetshire, and "the Bear-baiter," trembling before his regal brother, "the Great Bull-dog." "These kings were not appointed by God," exclaims the British Jeremiah; he who wrote under the name of Gildas. Thus the Britons formed a powerless aggregate, and never a nation. The naked Irish haunted their shores, covering their sea with piracy; and the Picts rushed from their forests--giants of the North who, if Gildas does not exaggerate, even dragged down from their walls the amazed Britons. Such a people in their terrified councils were to be suppliants to the valour of foreigners; from that hour they were doomed to be chased from their natal soil. They invited, or they encouraged, another race to become their mercenaries or their allies. The small and the great from other shores hastened to a new dominion. Britain then became "a field of fortune to every adventurer when nothing less than kingdoms were the prize of every fortunate commander."[4]

We have now the history of a people whose enemies inhabited their ancient land: the flame and the sword ceaselessly devouring the soil; their dominion shrinking in space, and the people diminishing in number; victory for them was fatal as defeat. The disasters of the Britons pursued them through the despair of almost two centuries; it would have been the history of a whole people ever retreating, yet hardly in flight, had it been written. Shall we refuse, on the score of their disputed antiquity the evidence of the Welsh bards? The wild grandeur of the melancholy poetry of those ancient Britons attests the reality of their story and the depth of their emotions.[5]

We have spun the last thread of our cobweb, and we know not on what points it hangs, such irreconcileable hypotheses are offered to us by our learned antiquaries, whenever they would account for the origin or the disappearance of a whole people. The mystery deepens, and the confusion darkens amid contradictions and incredibilities, when the British historian contemplates in the perspective the Fata Morgana of another Britain on the opposite shores of the ancient Armorica, another Britain in La Bretagne.

The ancient Armorica was a district extending from the Loire to the Seine, about sixty leagues, and except on the land side, which joined Poictou, is encircled by the ocean. Composed of several small states, in the decline of the Roman empire they shook off the Roman yoke, and their independence was secured by the obscurity of their sequestered locality.

The tale runs that Maximus, having engaged his provincial Britons in his ambitious schemes, rewarded their military aid by planting them in one of these Armorican communities. To give colour to this tradition, the story adds that this Roman general had a considerable interest in Wales, "having married the daughter of a powerful chieftain, whose chapel at Carnarvon is still shown."[6] The marriage of this future Roman emperor with a Welsh princess would serve as an embellishment to a Welsh genealogy. This event must have occurred about the year 384. When the Britons were driven out of their country by faithless allies, Armorica would offer an easy refuge for fugitives; there they found brothers already settled, or friends willing to receive them.[7]

In this uncertainty of history, amid the dreams of theoretical antiquaries, we cannot doubt that at some time there was a powerful colony of Britons in Armorica; they acquired dominion as well as territory. They changed that masterless Armorican state to which they were transplanted from an aristocracy into a monarchy--that government to which they had been accustomed; they consecrated the strange land by the baptism of their own national name, and to this day it is called Bretagne, or Britain; and surely the Britons carried with them all their home-affections, for they made the new country an image of the old: not only had they stamped on it the British name, but the Britons of Cornwall called a considerable district by their own provincial name, known in France as "Le Pays de Cornouaille;" and their speech perpetuated their vernacular Celtic. At the siege of Belleisle in 1756, the honest Britons of the principality among our soldiers were amazed to find that they and the peasants of Brittany were capable of conversing together. This expatriation reminds us of the emotions of the first settlers in the New World. Ancient Spain reflected herself in her New Spain; and our first emigrants called their "plantations" "New England;" distributing local names borrowed from the land of their birth--undying memorials of their parent source!

This singular event in the civil annals of the ancient Britons has given rise to a circumstance unparalleled in the literary history of every people, for it has often involved in a mysterious confusion a part of our literary and historical antiquities. The Britain in France is not always discriminated from our own; and this double Britain at times becomes provokingly mystifying. Two eminent antiquaries, Douce and Ritson, sometimes conceived that Bretagne meant England; a circumstance which might upset a whole hypothesis.

In the fastnesses of Wales, on the heights of Caledonia, and on the friendly land of Armorica, are yet tracked the fugitive and ruined Britons. It is most generally conceded that they retreated to the western coasts of England, and that, often discomfited, they took their last refuge in those "mountain heights" of Cambria.

Their shadowy Arthur has left an undying name in romance, and is a nonentity in history. Whether Arthur was a mortal commander heading some kings of Britain, or whether religion and policy were driven to the desperate effort for rallying their fugitives by a national name, and "a hope deferred," like the Sebastian of Portugal, this far-famed chieftain could never have been a fortunate general; he displayed his invincibility but in some obscure and remote locality; he struck no terror among his enemies, for they have left his name unchronicled: nor living, have the bards distinguished his pre-eminence. "The grave of Arthur is a mystery of the world," exclaimed Taliessin, the great bard of the Britons. But the mortal who vanished in the cloud of conflict had never seen death; and to the last the Britons awaited for the day of their Redeemer when Arthur should return in his immortality, accompanied by "the Flood-King of the Deluge," from the Inys Avallon, the Isle of the Mystic Apple-tree, their Eden or their Elysium. Arthur was a myth, half Christian and half Druidical. In Armorica, as in Wales, his coming was long expected, till "Esperance bretonne" became proverbial for all chimerical hopes.

Thus the aborigines of this island vanished, but their name is still attached to us. The Anglo-Saxons became our progenitors, and the Saxon our mother-tongue. Yet so complex and incongruous is the course of time, that we still call ourselves Britons, and "true Britons;" and the land we dwell in Great Britain. Nor is it less remarkable, that the days of the Christian week commemorate the names of seven Saxon idols.[8] There are improbabilities and incongruities in authentic history as hard to reconcile as any we meet with in wild romance.

During six centuries the Saxons and the Normans combined to banish from the public mind the history of the Britons: it was lost; it did not exist even among the Britons in Wales. In the reign of Henry the First, an Archdeacon of Oxford, who was that king's justiciary, being curious in ancient histories, opportunely brought out of "Britain in France," "a very ancient book in the British tongue." This book, which still forms the gordian knot of the antiquary, he confided to the safe custody and fertile genius of Geoffry, the Monk of Monmouth. It contained a regular story of the British kings, opening with Brute, the great grandson of Priam in this airy generation; kings who, Geoffry "had often wondered, were wholly unnoticed by Gildas and Bede." "Yet," adds our historian, "their deeds were celebrated by many people in a _pleasant manner_, and _by heart, as if they had been written_." This remarkable sentence aptly describes that species of national songs which the early poets have always provided for the people, traditions which float before history is written. Whether this very ancient British book, almost five centuries old, was a volume of these poetical legends, which our historian might have arranged into that "regular history" which is furnished by his Latin prose version, we are left without the means of ascertaining, since it proved to be the only copy ever found, and was never seen after the day of the translation. The Monk of Monmouth does not arrogate to himself any other merit than that of a faithful translator, and with honest simplicity warns of certain additions, which, even in a history of two thousand years contained in a small volume, were found necessary.

We are told that the Britons who passed over into France carried with them "their archives." But there were other Britons who did not fly to the sixty leagues of Armorica; and of these the only "archives" we hear of are those which the romancers so perpetually assure us may be consulted at Caerleon, or some other magical residence of the visionary Arthur. The Armorican colony must have formed but a portion of the Britons; and it would be unreasonable to suppose, that these fugitives could by any human means sequestrate and appropriate for themselves the whole history of the nation, without leaving a fragment behind. Yet nothing resembling the Armorican originals has been traced among the Welsh. Our Geoffry modestly congratulates his contemporary annalists, while he warns them off the preserve where lies his own well-stocked game. And thus he speaks:--"The history of the kings who were the successors in Wales of those here recorded, I leave to Karadoc of Lancarven, as I do also the kings of the Saxons to William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon; but I advise them to be silent concerning the British kings, since they have not that book written in the British tongue which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought out of Britain." Well might Geoffry exult. He possessed the sole copy ever found in both the Britains.

The British history is left to speak for itself in a great simplicity of narrative, where even the supernatural offers no obstacle to the faith of the historian--a history which might fascinate a child as well as an antiquary. These remote occurrences are substantiated by the careful dates of a romantic chronology. Events are recorded which happened when David reigned in Judea, and Sylvius Latinus in Italy, and Gad, Nathan, and Asaph prophesied in Israel. And the incidents of Lear's pathetic story occurred when Isaiah and Hosea flourished, and Rome was built by the two brothers. It tells of one of the British monarchs, how the lady of his love was concealed during seven years in a subterraneous palace. On his death, his avengeful queen cast the mother and her daughter into the river which still bears that daughter's name, Sabrina, or the Severn, and was not forgotten by Drayton. Another incident adorns a canto of Spenser; the Lear came down to Shakspeare, as the fraternal feuds of Ferrex and Porrex created our first tragedy by Sackville. There are other tales which by their complexion betray their legendary origin.

Whatever assumed the form of history was long deemed authentic; and such was the authority of this romance of Geoffry, that when Edward the First claimed the crown of Scotland in his letter to the pope, he founded his right on a passage in Geoffry's book; doubtless this very passage was held to be as veracious by the Scots themselves, only that on this occasion they decided to fight against the text. Four centuries after Geoffry had written, when Henry the Seventh appointed a commission to draw up his pedigree, they traced the royal descent from the imaginary Brutus, and reckoning all Geoffry's British kings in the line--the fairies of history--made the English monarch a descendant in the hundredth degree. We now often hear of "the fabulous" History of Geoffry of Monmouth; but neither his learned translator in 1718, nor the most eminent Welsh antiquaries, attach any such notion to a history crowded with domestic events, and with names famous yet unknown.

After the lapse of so many centuries, the scrutinising investigation of a thoughtful explorer in British antiquities has demonstrated, through a chain of recondite circumstances, that this History of Geoffry of Monmouth, and its immediate predecessor, the celebrated Chronicle of the pseudo-Archbishop Turpin, were sent forth on the same principle on which to this day we publish party pamphlets, to influence the spirit of two great nations opposed in interest and glory to each other; in a word, that they were two Tales of a Tub thrown out to busy those mighty whales, France and England.[9]

One great result of their successful grasp of the popular feelings could never have been contemplated by these grave forgers of fabulous history. The Chronicle of Archbishop Turpin and the British History of Geoffry of Monmouth became the parents of those two rival families of romances which commemorate the deeds of the Paladins of Charlemagne, and the Knights of Arthur, the delight of three centuries.

The Welsh of this day possess very ancient manuscripts, which they cherish as the remains of the ancient Britons. These preserve the deep strains of poets composed in triumph or in defeat, the poetry of a melancholy race. Gray first attuned the Cymry harp to British notes, more poetical than the poems themselves, while others have devoted their pens to translation, unhappily not always master of the language of their version. These manuscripts contain also a remarkable body of fiction in the MABINOGION, or juvenile amusements, a collection of prose tales combining the marvellous and the imaginative. Some are chivalric and amatory, stamped with the manners and customs of the middle ages; others apparently of a much higher antiquity, like all such national remains, are considered mythological; some there are not well adapted, perhaps, to the initiation of youth. Obviously they are nothing more than short romances; but we are solemnly assured that the Mabinogion abound with occult mysteries, and that simple fiction only served to allure the British neophyte to bardic mysticism. A learned writer, who is apt to view old things in a new light, and whose boldness invigorates the creeping toil of the antiquary, reveals the esoteric doctrine----"the childhood alluded to in their title is an early and preparatory stage of initiation; they were calculated to inflame curiosity, to exercise ingenuity, and lead the aspirant gradually into a state of preparation for things which ears not long and carefully disciplined were unfit to hear."[10]

Every people have tales which do not require to be written to be remembered, whose shortness is the salt which preserves them through generations. Our ancestors long had heard of "Breton lays" and "British tales," from the days of Chaucer to those of Milton; but it was reserved for our own day to ascertain the species, and to possess those forgotten yet imaginative effusions of the ancient Celtic genius. Our literary antiquaries have discovered reposing among the Harleian manuscripts the writings of Marie de France,[11] an Anglo-Norman poetess, who in the thirteenth century versified many old Breton lais, which, she says, "she had heard and well remembered." Who can assure us whether this Anglo-Norman poetess gathered her old tales, for such she calls them, in the French Britain or the English Britain, where she always resided?

It is among the Welsh we find a singular form of artificial memory which can be traced among no other people. These are their TRIADS. Though unauthorized by the learned in Celtic antiquities, I have sometimes fancied that in the form we may possess a relic of druidical genius. A triad is formed by classing together three things, neither more nor less, but supposed to bear some affinity, though a fourth or fifth might occur with equal claim to be admitted into the category.[12] To connect three things together apparently analogous, though in reality not so, sufficed for the stores of knowledge of a Triadist; but to fix on any three incidents for an historical triad discovered a very narrow range of research; and if designed as an artificial memory, three insulated facts, deprived of dates or descriptions or connexion, neither settled the chronology, nor enlarged the understanding. It is, however, worthy of remark, that when the Triad is of an ethical cast, the number _three_ may compose an excellent aphorism; for three things may be predicated with poignant concision, when they relate to our moral qualities, or to the intellectual faculties: in this capricious form the Triad has often afforded an enduring principle of human conduct, or of critical discrimination; for our feelings are less problematical than historical events, and more permanent than the recollection of three names.[13]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the opening of Speed's "Chronicle."

[2] The historian of our land in the solemnity of his high office,
unwilling that an obscure Welsh prince named _Prydain_ should have
left his immemorable name to this glorious realm, as a Welsh triad
professes, was delighted to draw the national name out of the native
tongue, appositely descriptive of the prevalent custom. But when,
seduced by this syren of etymology, our grave Camden, to display the
passion of a painted people for colours, collects a long list of
ancient British names of polysyllabic elongation, and culls from each
a single syllable which by its sound he conceives alludes to blue, or
red, or yellow, our sage, in proving more than was requisite, has
encumbered his cause, and has thrown suspicion over the whole. The
doom of the etymologist, so often duped by affinity of _sounds_,
seems to have been that of our judicious Camden.

[3] Evelyn's "Numismata." Pinkerton has engraven ten of these
Britannias struck by the Romans in his "Essay on Medals."

[4] Milton.

[5] See Mr. Turner's able "Vindication of the Genuineness of the
Ancient British Bards."

[6] Warton draws his knowledge from Rowland's "Mona Antiqua;" Geoffry
of Monmouth would have extended his inquiry. Camden, judicious as he
was, has actually bestowed the kingdom, as well as the princess, on
this Roman general; and Gibbon has sarcastically noticed that Camden
has been authority for all "his blind followers." The source of this
sort of history lies in the volume of the "Monk of Monmouth," where
Gibbon might have found the number of the numerous army of Maximus.
Rowland's "Mona Antiqua Restaurata" is one of the most extraordinary
pieces of our British Antiquities. It is written with the embrowned
rust of our old English Antiquaries, where nothing on a subject seems
to be omitted; but our author, unlike his contemporary antiquaries,
is sceptical even on his own acquisitions; he asserts little and
assumes nothing. One may conceive the native simplicity of an author,
who having to describe the Isle of Anglesey, opens his work with the
history of Chaos itself, to explain by the division of land and water
the origin of islands. I have heard that this learned antiquary never
travelled from his native island.

[7] "L'Art de verifier les Dates," article _Bretagne_, is thrown into
utter confusion. It seems, however, to indicate that there were many
migrations; but all is indistinct or uncertain.

[8] Verstegan has finely engraved these idols in his "Restitution,"
so delighted was this Teutonic Christian with these hideous
absurdities of his pagan ancestors, and so proud of his Saxon
descent.

[9] Turner's "History of England during the Middle Ages," iv. 326.