[65] Ancient Britain, pp. 273, 283.
[66] Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft.
[67] Johnson, W., Byways in British Archæology, p. 304.
[68] Cloudesley Brereton, in The Quest.
[69] Luniolatry, p. 2.
[70] Ancient Britain, p. 298.
[71] This dictum would have cheered the heart of Tertullian, who maintained that God could never forgive an actor because Christ said: No man by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature; a statement which the actor impiously falsified by wearing high heeled boots. Commenting upon The Lost Language of Symbolism, The Expository Times very courteously observed: “To the reader of the Bible its worth is more than to all others, for the Bible is full of symbols and we have lost their language. We are very prosaic. The writers of the Old Testament and of the New were very imaginative. Between us there is a gulf fixed of which we are aware only in unquiet moments.”
[72] “There must have been a time when a simple instinct for poetry was possessed by all nations as it still is by uncivilised races and children. Among European nations this instinct appears to be dead for ever. We can name neither a mountain nor a flower.”—Prof. Weekley, Romance of Words. “Who did first name the flowers? Who first gave them, not their Latin titles, but the old, familiar, fanciful, poetic, rustic ones, that run so curiously alike in all the vulgar tongues? Who first called the lilies of the valley the Madonna’s tears? the wild blue hyacinth, St. Dorothy’s flower? the starry passiflora, the Passion of Christ; who named them all first, in the old days that are forgotten? All the poets that ever the world has known might have been summoned together for the baptism of the flowers, and have failed to name them half so well as popular tradition has done long ago in the dim lost ages, with names that still make all the world akin.”—Anon.
[73] “This pretty name (which Fitzgerald, History of Limerick, vol. i., p. 320, calls the River Dawn) arose from a change of Samhair or Samer to Caimher, ‘the daybreak,’ or ‘Morning Star’”.—Westropp, T. J., Proc. of Royal Irish Acad., xxxiii., C. 2, p. 13.
[74] The peculiar temperament of “us moderns alone” is, I am afraid, more acutely diagnosed by Prof. Weekley, in Surnames, where he observes: “The ‘practical man,’ when his attention is accidentally directed to the starry sky, appraises that terrific spectacle with a non-committal grunt: but he would receive with a positive snort any suggestion that the history of European civilisation is contained in the names of his friends and acquaintances. Still, even the practical man, if he were miraculously gifted with the power of interpreting surnames, could hardly negotiate the length of Oxford Street on a motor-bus without occasionally marvelling and frequently chuckling.”