Mr. Thomas Hardy, in his powerful fiction, "Tess," plainly accepts the conclusiveness of these views. His heroine, though of humble origin, clearly owed her involuntary seductiveness and fatal charm to the transmitted potency of her Norman blood, and it is said that in certain secluded parts of England may be found to-day rural or village populations of the same class gathered about some old Norman castle, donjon, or keep; their Norman descent distinctly visible in their inherited personal traits; a certain characteristic combination of intellect, courage, beauty, and social charm distinguishing them at a glance from the dull, heavy, long-bodied, short-legged, unshapely Saxon of a neighboring town or shire. The same restless blood or the same spirit of adventure which brought the Scandinavian to Normandy and the Norman to English soil, in time drove him to the great settlements beyond the Atlantic Sea—settlements known by the English of to-day as "The States." Their brethren in Ireland followed in great numbers at a later day, and, wherever in recent wars the American flag has been unfurled, "the fighting race" has stood beneath its folds—always in force and always at the front, each with the line of battle beneath his feet and the fire of battle in his eye.
"We fight wheriver a gintleman should,"
Says Murphy, and Kelly, and Shea;
"We fight wheriver the fighting is good;
And here's to the good, straight fighting blood!"
Says Murphy, and Kelly, and Shea.
DANIEL BOONE.
Thither, too, came the indomitable Scot, precisely as he came in the Colonial and Revolutionary days. "The Lowland race," says Mackintosh, "Briton and Norman and Saxon and Dane, gave the world a new man—the Sea Rover, the Border Soldier, the Pioneer.... The folk speech, from Northumberland to the Clyde and the Forth, is Northern English or Lowland Scotch; and the future man of Bannockburn and King's Mountain is beginning to appear. He is the man with the blood of the Sea Rover mixed with the blood of the Borderer, and the soldier, the scholar and thinker, the statesman and lawyer, the trader and farmer." He is the man that crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains as a pioneer. He is the man that sat in the conventions that organized the State, and stood in an unbroken line in all the pioneer battles of his race. The earliest migration of the Anglo-Norman folk was to the Colony of Virginia, as many of the old Virginian surnames, Bacon, Baskerville, Boys (Bois), Cabell, Clay, etc., clearly attest; and the State of Kentucky deriving a large population of English descent from Virginia, we should naturally find a strong infusion of Anglo-Norman blood in the people of this State—an inference fully sustained by the transcript of Anglo-Norman surnames which the writer made from the list that he found in the great Library in London.
The late Professor Shaler is frequently quoted to the effect that ethnological research discloses the existence in Kentucky of the largest body of nearly pure English folk to be found on the face of the globe—that has been separated for two hundred years from the parent English stock. But the facts do not warrant the assumption that the Kentuckian is of purely "Anglo-Saxon" derivation. In him, at least, the blood of the Norman is not wholly lost. He is, however, as Professor Shaler says, an "Elizabethan" Englishman.