diseased imagination brought to an untimely end through the sheer want of oriental shadowings.

In the first place, I have no objection to the term 'cassiteros' being derived, according to fantasy, from the Sanscrit verb kasdir, to shine, or castir, something shining, nor at its being, at a running jump, applied to a shining metallic substance; but I do logically object to this substance, call it brass, tin, copper, or lead, if you please, serving as a theoretical basis to be referible to some alleged unsupported discovery of tin in remote antiquity by a quasi posthumous disinterring of the same within, yea far within, the scope and remembrance of the Christian era.

Let us probe this view-this Indian-Ocean-aspect-this ideal manifestation, or rather obscuration, of Occidentalism, as mooted by the shining Kasdir or Castir element. The problematical adoption or rejection of its signification has nothing whatever to do with the enquiry. What then!-look at your maps. Is it presumable that the Phoenicians periodically crossed the mighty Indian Ocean without a compass, to Banca or Malacca, in quest of tin or gold? The idea is preposterous; though, I admit, daring sailors might have possibly doubled the Cape of Good Hope without a compass, by keeping the land ever or occasionally in view, as stated by Herodotus. Will this idea of a Banca satisfy general belief? Credat Judæus! But a Jew has already, through Ezekiel, smashed the theory before it was or could be concocted. But, granting the hypothesis, en passant, where is the result of the mental operation? Nowhere, as far as its application to or in history is concerned-nowhere, as far as practical facts can or ever were deduced: nowhere, as regards the probability-the recorded results of a CassiteRian substantiality, except in the lucid brains of the modern concocters.

But, on the other hand, it can be confidently asserted that an early British Commerce did really take place with the traffickers of East and West, in this very article.

Here a very natural question propounds itself to our view. What did the Cærulei Britanni get in return for their hardware? In all histories of commerce these questions are correlative. Whatever the exchange may have been, with the Phoenicians, Armoricans, or Veneti, the Massilians, the Phoceans, Ionians, Carthaginians, and Romans (who, after the conquest of their Punic rival, were the first to seize and plunder the gold-and-loreinvested island, and subject it to foreign rule) the intercourse, both socially and commercially, as regards the former Powers, must have been, as already shown, in primeval ages, advantageous to their growth and development as "a numerous, a civilised, and a powerful nation," (magna vis gentis) and "a people of energetic skill," and "hospitable in the extreme," in their own mother-land and their own Britannia Antiquissima.

M

194

LECTURE VI.

CASTELLA ET EDIFICIA BRITANNICA.

"Beautiful art thou, land of my home, e'en to a stranger's glance, "Thy mountains are magnificent, thy castles breathe romance, "There is a charm in the 'time-worn towers,' a sadly pleasing spell "In the roofless chambers where alone the owl and the ivy dwell. "Land of the bard, the harp, the song, land of my love and birth, “Oh, be the 'Awen' still thine own, and thine the kindly hearth."

AMID scenes of uninterrupted aggression, of insatiable vengeance, and of threatened depopulation, is it to be wondered at, that, during a period, not, be it remembered, of a thirty years' war— direful even then to agricultural pursuits, to arts and sciences, in fact, to modern civilization-but during a compass of a thousand years and upwards of such a,' status quo,' devastation, that any fragments whatever of our triadic and bardic literature-that any relics of our prehistoric forts and castles, much less of our, as of Roman, or of your own, very humble homesteads-should have been left us, other tens of hundreds of years afterwards, to glean a tale of distant woes and wrongs not yet filled up, as to doled out honors in the Cambrian Church or State, by ministers of the Crown-mementoes of the sweeping past; or that any Cimmerianspeaking Cymro should have remained alive on earth to prove, from the heniaith gysefin, our identity with the great Cimmerian nation of Asiatic and European antiquity, beyond the extant grasp, the powerless control, of literary annals?

'Well, indeed!' is the generous, the manly sneer! 'Well!' the happy retort! Where, oh, where? is your boasted literature? where is there a trace of your footsteps on the soil? where the tokens of your golden torcs, your silver, and your bronze? your castles and your princely homes?

The

Stop, thou worse than adroit concealer of the truth. 'wheres' and 'whereabouts,' Deo gratiæ, from north to south of Prydain Fawr, are extant still, though grave-like robed in majesty of death, as veiled with ivy-sprigs and yews or other Taliesinian emblems of the forest, to confound the slanderous unsubstantiality of the charge, and point a moral to us both. Dost thou

insinuate thereby the plausibility, the absolute necessity of Cimmerian freebooting-subjugations, if not of Cimbric extermination, to prove thy then superior state of moral culture, as of thy humanising appliances of life, as a sort of posthumous excuse to civilise the isle and arrogate supremacy? Thou reckonest without thine host. Let Sharon Turner tell thee who and what a Saxon was in pirate days of yore;-what illiterate, what LAWless, what COINless members of disturbed society thy very traitor chiefs and warriors were, without refining codes of honor, or principles of right and wrong, in the palmy days of Arthur and his Augustan age of bardic literature of Taliesin, of Aneurin, or of Llywarch Hen! How many centuries, yea, how many adventitious causes, ignored, unthanked, or seemingly unknown, led thee onward in the countless march of ages to produce a Spencer, or a Chaucer, or e'en a Caractacusian model of a British 'Imperator gentium,' full six hundred years before our own Cimmerian galaxy of lettered stars above? Thy boasted princes were, for centuries, like those Miranda chants of, in his 'Lays of Portugal'

or,

"Dizem dos nossos passados

"Que os mais nao Sabiam ler;"

"So rude were our forefathers in the lore
"Of letters, that they scarce knew how to read."

There, utrinque, will I leave thee with thy wished-for records and authorities. Close my page: consult thine own. Truth and wisdom-lessons will be found therein, perhaps.

But this mode of action, as propounded by the foregoing questions, reminds me, and not inaptly, of an anecdote I once heard in Llyn-dan, Llyn-din, or Llyn-deyn, alias Troi-no-fant, since known under its plagiarised and corrupted forms of Lon-din-(um), Trinovant-(um), Lon-don, Lun-nun, or Lon-dres (the city lake) of the continent an anecdote, I say, of three self-assured robbers of the highways, S, D, and Ngloating in their pelf, who, after having adroitly purloined the golden snuff-box of an Hibernian, conveyed the property, and passed it over, en reglé,' from one accomplice to the other. One of these immaculate innocents in crime boldly and impudently asked him hailing from Ierne, the ultima Thule of the West, to have a look at his gold box, and take a pinch of his best Irish blackguard.' The Hibernian, at once and complacently, without the usual reserve and ridiculous hauteur of accidental pomposities, put his gentlemanlike hands in his pockets, and, to his dismay and cost, found the ancestral treasure of his clan non est inventus. What was to be done? A brilliant thought, peculiar to the isle that gave him birth, struck the party aggrieved. "How," addressing himself to his purloiner and plausible interrogationist, "how did you know,

sir, that I took that peculiar kind of snuff at all? How were you aware it was gold and not silver?" A searching investigation took place before the tribunals of justice. The insult added to injury was exposed. A plea of alibi was impossible, though attempted, flagrante delicto. Another of the culprits had the impertinence, however, (say before William Yardley, Esq., P.M.,) to put forward another plea, and dared to swear that the Irish gentleman, his ancestors, and his neighbors, whether of Prydain or Celyddon, were and ever had been as poor as himself and his mates, with regard to golden ornaments or coinage of the realm, and alleging that, from certain Volusenian hints or inuendos, or some technical Scaligerian versions of the law about his family, he could not have possessed himself of such a golden appendage without having, as a prior particeps criminis, stolen it himself from some other favored and more distant golden lands, at least, he surmised as much-he thought so-was not quite sure-but when further cross-examined by the bar, he had heard so from Smith, Brown, or Robinson, of the bankrupt firm of Hume, Maunder, and Co. "That will do, sir." Sentence was pronounced, and the trio were transferred to a QUOD, reserved by Justice, to conscientiously study the principles and relative value of Whewel's Moral Right and Wrong.' Humanity expects the chaplains to do their duty.

Apply the moral and its process to the treasures of our Caerau, our Castellau, and the fragmental gems of our prehistoric literature. Sic sæcula sæculorum witnessed with amazement and with awe, if not with shudder, the Cimmerian nation in the pangs of life and death with the legions of the Roman world, in arms against the Sons of Earth-the true autochtons of the Isle. Natio tamen supervixit.

Thus, hundreds upon hundreds of years beheld the Cimmerian nation in the gasping throes of agony with the traitorous and unlettered hordes of Saxons and of Danes, the flattered angeli of Rome. It outlived the shock after all.

Ainsi siecles sur siecles saw and felt the plundering, burning armaments of Norman sway, of Norman tyranny of the deepest dye, goreing the life-blood of Cimmerian sons and daughters, sans relâche, et sans remords. La nation a survecu malgré tout.

Similarly, century upon century heard the beating throbs of our own Britannia Antiquissima circumscribed to Cambria, in mortal combat with a now quadrupled league of amalgamated foes of Anglo-Saxon-cum-Danish-Norman usurpers of her virgin soil, with here and there a renegade from the Cimbric camp, bent on havock, ruin, death, and capture of her forts, her castles, and her strongholds-the hospitable bulwarks of her ageless freedom and Yet withal the nation managed to exist.

renown.

Felly, oes ar ol oes looked down upon Cimmerian forts and

castles, now reft of their invaluable bardic-druid treasures-now Gothishly dismantled or Vandally levelled to the ground; or else, as safety swayed the after-thought, the

66

“ Αι δευτεραι γε φροντίδες σοφωτέραι"

of tyrant this, or monster that, a series of years, of months, of weeks, became, each in their turn, a witness, in the cycle of events, to a few strongholds left behind as a base of future wrong to one, of future theft-monopolising-glory to the other nation, when a Roman, when a Saxon, or a Norman wing or tower, with a portcullis or a mound entrenched, was superadded to, or when, in other cases, novel piles-an Ossa on a Pelion, replaced or e'en enclosed the former British structure, on its vantageground of immemorial song. "Ti, Arglwydd ein D. U. W. fuost yn breswylfa i ni yn mhob cenhedlaeth."

Thus, here, as with the plagiarisms of our own distinctive tongue, the tulit-alter-honorem-principle has been, as ever, rife, as ever, exclusive. Trifles do, and do not, mark events. Knowledge of races and their habits, deductions based on scientific truths, are the surest landmarks of conjecturc-the indications of the gloomy past. Truth oft becomes a base to fiction: but fiction claims not that of truth. A Roman, or a later Norman coin, for instance, (I am not aware of early or anti-Cæsarean Saxon coins,) if casually found by an unreflective Anglo-Saxon, within the precincts of any fort or ground, though regardless of Britannic indications, as of coins, and heedless of its pre-occupancy of site by a former tenant, is made to stamp, at once and without reflection on his part, the aforesaid spot to be, or to have been, no other than the primary relics or exclusive foundation of either a Roman or a Norman structure. Thus the appliances of an artistic condition of life and manners are thereby systematically ignored, if they do not sometimes become the sport of rhymesters, aided by the conjectural sneers of prosaic incompetency or of partial worth.

We shall test the validity, the antiquarian truth, of this Saxonic exclusiveness, of this perversion of facts, in reference to the adificia, castella vel domus of the Antiquissimi Britanni. Amor patriæ perdita demands it; vinclum veritatis honorisque enjoins it; vox Adamitica linquæ Cimmericæ condemns it.

But why? it may asked by those indifferent to OUR honor, why rake up the past and ope the wounds of time? We Cimmerians do it not. "Tis you, as a gallinacious tribe-a cackling order of Menura Annalists,' that crow defiance. "Tis you, as longtailed flocks of lyre-bird poets, essayists, babblers, that mock, insult, the whole Cimmerian race, with Beleck-beleck' repetitions or concoctions of distorted views, or with stale, unerring caricatures of Balangara' minstrelsy, en fait d'un peuple fabuleux, sans lettres, sans habitations, et sans mœurs civilisées.