What a pity it is that the dear old legends that lie at the root of history have been dissipated! That we can no longer believe in Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf—no, not even when the Lupercale remains on the side of the Palatine Hill, after the palaces of Augustus, of Tiberius, of Caligula, of Septimius Severus, have been levelled with the dust.
How cruel, too, that the delightful story of Alfred and the cakes, that also of Edwin and Elgiva, are relegated to the region of fables; that we are told there never was such a person as King Arthur, and that S. George for Merry England never was a gallant knight, and certainly slew no dragon, nor delivered fair maid!
Dust we are, but is it absolutely necessary that all human history, and the history of nature, should spring out of dust? that the events of the childhood of our race should have been all orderly and unromantic, as if every nationality had been bred in trimness as a Board School scholar? Now, what if we could believe that old gossiping—I am afraid I must add lying—historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth! Why, the transformation scene at a pantomime would be nothing to the blaze of wonders and romance in the midst of which the England of history steps on to the stage.
ON THE DART
Ah! if we could but believe old Geoffrey, or the British book which he saw and translated, why, then, Totnes would be the most revered spot in England, as that where the first man set his foot when he landed in an uncultivated, unpeopled island. Is there not on the Palatine the Lupercale, the very den in which the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, to prove the tale? Are there not Arthur's Seats enough in Cornwall, Wales, Cumberland, Scotland, to show that there must have been an Arthur to sit in them? And is there not the stone in the high street of Totnes on which Brut, when he landed, set his foot to establish against all doubters the existence of Brut and the fact of his landing there?
The story is this.
As it fell upon a day there was a certain king called Sylvius in Italy, and when he was about to become a father he consulted a magician, who by the stars could tell all that was to be. Now this magician read that the child that was to be born to Sylvius would be the death of his father and mother.
In course of time the child was born, and at his birth his mother died. "He's a Brute," said King Sylvius, and so that was his name.