PERSONAL MOTIVES AND PATRIOTISM.

79

the book was, we are certain, never contemplated by Mr. Temple. He probably is as much opposed as his colleagues to "shabby superficiality." We must also object to what may be called the astronomical parts of Milton being offered for the explanation of candidates; and we do not greatly admire the encouragement given to such books as Elegant Extracts, by calling on young men "to write out Johnson's celebrated comparison of Dryden and Pope."

HUME'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

Though Hume's authority as a text-book is growing weaker and weaker, he has still a classic status on our bookshelves; and his style will probably keep him, as it has kept him hitherto, in tolerable repute. But for a faithful presentment of history, apart from his scepticism and his inveterate antipathy to the popular elements of our progress, he has been in great measure superseded by the lapse of time and by the infinite accretions to our knowledge which time has brought to light. No one refers with confidence to his narrative of our earlier kings since the researches of Hallam and others into our institutions during the Middle Ages. His knowledge of the Tudor sovereigns is equally meagre beside that of Mr. Froude, Mr. Bruce, and various modern contributors. Godwin, Guizot, Forster, Carlyle, Sandford, and others have materially damaged his presentation of Charles I. and of the Commonwealth; and his whole history of the Stuarts is now seen to be an inadequate statement even of the facts, irrespective of its unwarrantable bias, in which it has been counterbalanced by the eloquent exaggerations of Macaulay. In short, not only is Hume the reverse of popular in his aim and predilections, but his narrative, in the presence of our better information, is imperfect as a mere record of the incidents which constitute the History of England.

PERSONAL MOTIVES AND PRETENDED PATRIOTISM.

66

Could we sometimes discover the motives of those who first head political revolutions, we should find how greatly personal hatreds have actuated them in deeds which have come down to us in the form of patriotism, and how often the revolutionary spirit disguises its private passions by its public conduct. In illustration of this principle, Disraeli takes two very notorious politicians-Wat Tyler and Sir William Walworth. 'Wat, when in servitude, had been beaten by his master, a great merchant of wines, and a sheriff of London. His chastisement, working on an evil disposition, appears never to have been forgiven; and when this Radical assumed his short-lived dominion, he had his old master beheaded, and his head carried before him on the point of a spear! So Grafton tells us, to the eternal obloquy of this arch-Jacobin, who 6 was a crafty fellow, and an excellent wit, but wanting grace. I would not sully the glory of the patriotic blow which ended the

80

WHITEWASHING REPUTATIONS.

rebellion with the rebel; yet there are secrets in history! Sir William Walworth, the ever-famous mayor of London,' as Stow designates him, has left the immortality of his name to one of our suburbs; but when I discovered in Stow's Survey, that Bankside, which he farmed out to the Dutch vrows, and which Wat had pulled down, I am inclined to suspect that private feeling first knocked down the saucy ribald, and then thrust him through and through with his dagger; and that there was as much of personal vengeance as patriotism, which raised his arm to crush the demolisher of so much valuable property !"-Curiosities of Literature, p. 550, note. Edit. 1867.

WHITEWASHING REPUTATIONS.

It was the shrewd remark of Dr. Johnson, that when the world think long about a matter, they generally think right; and this may be one reason why attempts to whitewash the received villains or tyrants of history have been commonly attended with but indifferent success. The ugly features of Robespierre's character look positively more repulsive through the varnish of sophistry which M. Louis Blanc has spread over them. The new light thrown by Mr. Carlyle on the domestic and political career of Frederic William of Prussia, the collector of giants, simply exhibits him as the closest approximation to a downright brute or madman that was ever long tolerated as the ruler of a civilized community. Despite of Mr. Froude's indefatigable research, skilful arrangement of materials, and attractive style, Henry VIII. is still the Royal Bluebeard, who spared neither man in his anger nor woman in his lust; and hardly any perceptible change has been effected in the popular impression of Richard III., although since 1621 (the date of Buck's History), it has continued an open question whether he was really guilty of more than a small fraction of the crimes imputed to him.

66

Walpole's Historic Doubts are described by Sir Walter Scott as an acute and curious example how minute antiquarian research may shake our faith in the facts most pointedly averred by general history. It is remarkable also to observe how, in defending a system, which was, probably, at first adopted as a mere literary exercise, Mr. Walpole's doubts acquired in his own eyes the respectability of certainties, in which he could not brook controversy." Yet, no part of this remarkable essay is freshly remembered, except an incidental reference (on which the ingenious author laid little stress) to the apocryphal testimony of the Countess of Desmond, who had danced with Richard in her youth, and declared him to be the handsomest man at court except his brother Edward, confessedly the handsomest man of his day. Mr. Sharon Turner's learned and conscientious recapitulation of the good measures, enlightened views, and kindly actions of Richard, has proved equally inoperative to stem the current of obloquy. Why is all this? why do we thus cling to a judgment which, we are assured, has been ill considered, to the extent of uniformly opposing a deaf ear to motions for a new trial? Is it because the numerical majority of the English public

CELTIC POPULATION OF BRITAIN.

81

are in the same predicament as the great Duke of Marlborough, who boldly avowed Shakspeare to be the only History of England he ever read? because the ground once occupied by creative genius is thenceforth unapproachable by realities and unassailable by proofs.--(Abridged from the Edinburgh Review, No. 234.) The paper has this naive conclusion: Polydore Vergil speaks of Richard's 'horrible vigilance and celerity.' It was the old story of the sword wearing out the scabbard; and the chances are that he would not long have survived Bosworth Field had he come off unscathed the conqueror."

66

THE CELTS AND THE IRISH COMPARED.

Dr. Mommsen, in his History of Rome, vol. iv., vividly describes the Celtic race in Gaul, with their loose septs, their impressionable nature, their sense of nationality without its power, their superstition, idleness, and vanity, and adds the following comparison:

"On the eve of parting from this remarkable nation we may be allowed to call attention to the fact that in the accounts of the ancients, as to the Celts on the Loire and Seine, we find almost every one of the characteristic traits which we are accustomed to recognise as marking the Irish. Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields; the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation; the language, full of comparisons and hyperboles, of allusions and quaint terms; the droll humour, the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds of past ages, and the most decided talent for rhetoric and poetry; the curiosity and the extravagant credulity; the childlike piety which sees in a priest a father and asks for his advice in all things; the unsurpassed power of national feeling; and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen cling together, almost like one family, in opposition to the stranger; the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance leader, but, at the same time, the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage, to perceive the right time for waiting and for striking, to attain or even to tolerate any organization, any sort of fixed military or political discipline. It is, and remains, at all times and places the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisitive, credulous, amiable, clever, but, in a political point of view, thoroughly useless nation."

THE CELTIC POPULATION OF BRITAIN.

In the History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, Mr. Pearson, in his chapter on "the Saxon Conquest," thus ably confutes a notion which has hitherto been prevalent. The Celtic race in this country, never a dense population, became fused and soon lost sight of, among the hordes that from the fourth century, if not from an earlier date, in ever-increasing numbers, were descending upon the British coasts. "The common belief (says Mr. Pearson) that the Celtic popu

G

82

PRE-HISTORIC KINGS OF BRITAIN.

...

lation of Britain was exterminated or driven into Wales or Brittany by the Saxons, has absolutely no foundation in history. It probably originated with the Welsh, who confounded the position of their ancestors, as premier tribe under Vortigern, with the occupation of the island. The mistake is as if we should suppose that the Silures, under Caractacus, were the whole British people. We hear of great slaughters by the Saxons on their bloody battle-fields, but no massacres after the fight, except in the single case of Anderida. . . . We know, by the complaints of Welsh poets, that a race of Romanized Britons, whom they called Loegrians, took part with the invaders against their Celtic kinsmen; and we cannot suppose that the Saxons would cut the throats of their allies after the war. The object of the races who broke up the Roman Empire was not to settle in a desert, but to live at ease, as an aristocracy of soldiers, drawing rent from a peaceful population of tenants. Moreover, coming in small and narrow skiffs, the conquerors could not bring their families with them, and must in most cases have taken wives from the women of the country. . . . These probabilities are confirmed by facts that meet us on every side. The political division of hundreds belonged to the Germans, in the time of the earliest Frank kings, and probably indicates in England what number of Saxons settled in a conquered district. Now here we find as a rule that the number is always greatest in maritime countries, and smaller as we advance inland and westward. Sixty-six in Kent and seventy-two in Sussex contrast strongly with six in Lancashire, five in Staffordshire, and seven in Leicestershire. . . . Evidently the sea-rovers settled chiefly in the parts which the sea washed, and which they had first fought for and won, leaving the heart of the country to a more gradual process of military colonization by their sons.

...

PRÆ-HISTORIC KINGS OF BRITAIN.

Dr. Latham, in a paper read by him to the Royal Society of Literature, has pointed out the remarkable repetition of the same names noticeable in the earliest accounts of English history; and has shown “(1) That many of the early names may be accounted for by the effort so natural in all early nations to invent an Eponymus from which the different districts were supposed to have taken their names: thus Debbon was assumed as the ancestor (so to speak) of Devon; Corindus of Cornwall; Canute of Kent. (2) That the whole story of these rulers must be considered, not as legend, not as the offspring of mere fancy, but rather as inferential-with some slight book-learning intermixed; when, however, this occurs, it is altogether incorrect. (3) That the early story of Britain repeats itself in that of Prussia. Thus the ancient name of that country is Prothenia, and so we find a Prothenius as its Eponymus. In the same way, we find the three sons of Brutus, Locrine, Albanac, and Camber, respectively as the eponymi of Luggris (the Welsh part of England), of Albion, and of Cambria. Besides these, some names occur which cannot be connected with any particular places, such as Madan, Membricius, and Maguild. These last are possibly of German origin,

BRITONS IN THE TIME OF CÆSAR.

83

alliteration being common in the German genealogies. Again, such names as Ebroin and Brunehild are clearly historical, and refer, the latter to a Queen of the Franks in the fifth century, and contemporary with King Arthur (see Gregory of Tours), the former, to a well-known Chamberlain. Then, we find a set of names (such as Reval, Dunwa', Cassival) who agree in the termination val which is common to all of them; of these Čassival, probably, has some connexion with the wellknown Cassivelaunus. In the same way, it is possible that Gorboduc and Vigent may be modifications of Caractacus and Fulgentius. Generally, much of this legendary story must be looked upon rather as a misrepresentation of real history—a portion, in fact, of true history repeated and distorted, with an entire absence of any poetry or imagination. In all, we probably have before us a reflexion of the way in which the true history struck different hearers with reference, in some instances, to the conflict between the British and Saxon Church, and a representation of speculations which would be not unnatural to the period and to the disciples of St. Columbanus."

THE BRITONS IN THE TIME OF CÆSAR.

Mr. Craufurd, F.R.S., has written an able critical dissertation on "Cæsar's Account of Britain and its Inhabitants in reference to Ethnology." The facts stated and opinions put forward by the Roman General are minutely examined by the light of the knowledge since acquired, and the accounts of barbarous countries visited for the first time in our own day. "The conclusion," said Mr. Craufurd, "to which we must, I think, come from the perusal of Cæsar's account of such of the Britons as he saw is, that although they were certainly barbarians, they were very far from being savages. They were in possession of nearly all the domestic animals known to the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. They possessed the art of making malleable iron, and they mixed and melted, and exported tin. They had a fixed money, although a very rude one. In war they had an infantry, a cavalry, and chariots. There can be no doubt that they possessed the art of manufacturing pottery; and I think it most probable that they had the art of weaving the wool into a coarse fabric, and perhaps of dyeing this fabric with woad. We may, then, safely pronounce our forefathers to have been a more advanced people than were the Mexicans and Peruvians when first seen by Europeans, 1600 years after the time of Cæsar. They encountered the first invader of their country with far more courage and even military prowess than did the Mexicans the Spaniards, or than did even the Hindoos the Greeks and Macedonians of Alexander; but these last results were more an affair of race than of civilization. Such were the Britons whom Cæsar saw, and assuredly he saw no savages."