a mighty empire has passed forever out of the memory of man. "Palmyra, central in the desert," is no more than a name; and "Babylon, Learned and wise, hath perished utterly, Nor leaves her speech one word to aid the sigh Britain did not lie in the path of the ancient world. I am very sure that when we think of ancient history, we do not adequately or distinctly conceive what vast spaces of the earth are left untouched. We have, I am inclined to think, a kind of ill-defined notion, that all the races of men had gathered either to the west of Asia, or the north of Africa, or to the sunny regions of Southern Europe. The great highway of the human race seems to us to have been the Mediterranean Sea alone; and certainly there is no spectacle on the earth which can call up so many historic memories— such throngs of thoughts associated with other ages. If each wild wave upon its surface were vocal, it might speak a history; for all that was glorious in profane story, and all that was holy in sacred, centred there. It is the natural expression of a thoughtful mind, when a modern traveller thus describes his first sight of the great and beautiful sea that touches the shores of three continents :—“I was looking upon the Mediterranean: it was the first time those haunted waters had met my gaze. * The Excursion, book viii, p. 626, Am. ed. † Wordsworth's Sonnet on Missions and Travels, p. 352. I pondered on the name-the Mediterranean- -as if the very letters had folded in their little characters the secret of my joy. My inner eye roved in and out along the coasts of religious Spain, the land of an eternal crusade, where alone, and for that reason, the true religiousness of knighthood was ever realized; it overleaped the straits. and followed the outline of St. Augustine's land, where Carthage was and rich Cyrene; onward it went to 'old hushed Egypt,' the symbol of spiritual darkness, and the mystical house of bondage; from thence to Jaffa, from Jaffa to Beyroot; the birthplace of the Morning, the land of the world's pilgrimage, where the Tomb is, lay stretched out like a line of light, and the nets were drying on the rocks of Tyre; onward still along that large projection of Asia, the field ploughed and sown by apostolic husbandmen; then came a rapid glance upon the little Ægean islands, and upward through the Hellespont; and, over the Sea of Marmora, St. Sophia's minaret sparkled like a star; the sea-surges were faint in the myriad bays of Greece, and that other peninsula, twice the throne of the world's masters, was beautiful in her peculiar twilight."* * Faber's "Sights and Thoughts," p. 112. My brother had read this volume some years before, and was much delighted with it. Writing to a friend, in 1842, he says:-"I have been reading aloud to my one listener (Charles Lamb's idea of an audience) Faber's Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches and among Foreign Peoples. It is a remarkable production-very bold and very beautiful—one of the most imaginative and fanciful prose books I ever read—very, very Oxfordish in its fashion of sentiment and reflection-abounding in architectural spirit which would delight you, and Wordsworthian deeply, saving an occasional censoriousness which he ought to cure. But I found it one of those books which I delight in floating along Britain was too remote from the region of the Mediterranean to have any place in ancient history; and all that was known of it was, that it must have been peopled at an early age of the world, and that it was occasionally visited by some of the maritime people of the South for purposes of traffic. This long tract of time is not, however, left wholly a blank, for the legendary story tells us, that the Britons were descended from Trojan ancestry, and take their name from Brutus, who came from Troy to the shores of a land called "Albion," and conquered the inhabitants. Such is the story of national origin given by all the early English chroniclers, who narrate also the succession of a long dynasty of kings-"sprung of old Anchises' line"-who ruled over Britain in times very long ago. It is the very witchcraft of history; and, as we read in these legendary annals the name of one king after another, they pass before the mind, visionary creations like the shadows of the kings that the weird sisters showed to Macbeth,-one "gold-bound brow is like the first, a third is like the former,"-and others more shadowy still, like the images of the many more reflected in the glass of the spectral Banquo. In the history of England written by Milton, he precisely enumerates this series of ancient sovereigns according to the traditions, which he recapitulates dutifully, though with something like impatience, when, in one part of his narrative, he has to speak of "twenty kings in a continued row, who either the tide of, though, in this case, there are some ugly snags and sawyers in the stream. The volume abounds in deep and beautiful reflections clothed in prose most musical. In one or two places its beauty is marred by some John Bullish impudence about America." MS. Letter, July 23, 1842. W. B. R. did nothing or lived in ages that wrote nothing—a foul pretermission," he adds, "in the author of this, whether story or fable, himself weary, as seems, of his own tedious tale." These negative sovereigns are succeeded by one who is recorded to have excelled all before him in the art of music, whereupon Milton quaintly laments that he "did not leave us one song of his twenty predecessors' doings;" and, on reaching the confines of authentic history, he likens the change to the approach of "dawn to one who had set out on his way by night and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams. The very origin of this legendary British history is wrapped in obscurity. It was circulated chiefly by the chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welsh ecclesiastic, who flourished in the twelfth century; but, as the legend of the Trojan migration and settlement in Britain is traced back to still earlier writers, it is reasonable to believe, that the chronicle was either a translation from the British into the Latin language of an ancient history of Britain found in Armorica, or a compilation of all the stories and fables which had currency in the shape of Welsh songs and oral traditions among the descendants of the Britons. It would be a weary, and probably vain, inquiry to consider minutely the claims which such historical materials have on our belief; and so little is there attractive in the legends of British history, that I need not attempt to dwell upon any of the alleged facts. But I wish, before passing from this part of my subject, briefly, to examine the curious tenacity with which the belief in this legendary literature was once held, and to * History of Britain, pp. 36, 37. show that it was not relinquished until a more critical. standard of historic belief was adopted, and scientific investigation took the place of uninquiring and passive credulity. It has been said that no man, before the sixteenth century, presumed to doubt that the Britons were descended from Brutus the Trojan; and it is equally certain that no modern writer could presume confidently to assert it. Let us turn to Milton's history of England; for, if it were only as a psychological speculation, it will be curious to observe how such a subject was regarded by a masculine and mighty mind, in which, too, there was a feeling very far removed from reverence for monastic legendary lore. I have already noticed his scarce-repressed impatience, as he rehearsed some passages in the history which he dismisses with these words:-"I neither oblige the belief of other persons, nor hastily subscribe my own. Nor have I stood with others computing or collating years and chronologies, lest I should be vainly curious about the time and circumstance of things whereof the substance is so much in doubt." When he introduces the subject, after having summarily disposed of the stories anterior to the Trojan legend, it is with these words, in which it is easy to trace a lingering respect for the time-honoured legends:-"Of Brutus and his line, with the whole progeny of kings to the entrance of Julius Cæsar, we cannot so easily be discharged-descents of ancestry long-continued, laws and exploits not plainly seeming to be borrowed or devised, which, on the common belief, have wrought no small impression, defended by many, denied utterly by few. For what though Brutus and the whole Trojan pretence were yielded up, |