Neolithic man, he thinks, is in all probability to be identified to-day with the short, dark, dolichocephalic inhabitants of Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and Ireland. His language was probably Gaelic.

Towards the end of the Neolithic period, or the beginning of the Bronze, a new type appeared along the eastern shores of our country. This type was in strongest possible contrast to the earlier type, and there could be little if any doubt that it came from the region of the Baltic. Skulls with the closest resemblance to the famous Borreby skull from Denmark have been obtained from the round burrows of East Yorkshire.

Then probably came, at the dawn of history, a downward movement of a tall, fair-haired people, upon the short, dark-haired people of the Mediterranean. At any rate, the very mixed character of Europe ethnologically is gathered from the Homeric poems and the earliest historical records.

The evidence of Cæsar is pretty clear as to the inhabitants of England, particularly his statement that the eastern portion of England was inhabited by tribes of Belga who had passed over, taking the names of the corresponding continental tribes with them, into England from Gallia Belgica. They spoke the Brythonic language.

The Celtic is evidently about the oldest blood of the world. Our sources of tradition, of time-worn fables and delicious stories are Celtic. The Greeks have come and gone, the Romans have had their day. Where are the Etruscans? The Celts or Sidonides are with us to-day. They are an old family of whose beginning there is no memory, and whose end is likely to be coeval with the end of the world, for they have stern endurance and marvellous productiveness-the Irish gone from Ireland at the present moment rule the United States of America. As Emerson says, they planted Britain; and gave to the seas and mountains names which are poems and imitate the pure voices of nature. They are favourably remembered in the oldest extant records of the human race in Europe. They had no violent feudal tenure, but the husbandman owned the land. They had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly culture, and a sublime creed. They have a hidden and precarious genius. They made the best popular literature of

LADY HESTER STANHOPE

439

the Middle Ages in the songs of Merlin, and the tender and delicious mythology of Arthur. Take away the rich and human Celtic influence from our literature, and it would indeed be poor. It would be less romantic, certainly less poetic. It would lack the vitality which is associated with human hopes, passions, and despair, and would be hardly worth preserving. And the predominant note in Celtic literature is an indefinable melancholy, an exquisitely longdrawn-out regret. The poetry may be, as Matthew Arnold said, drenched in the dew of natural magic, and the romances may be threaded with radiant lights; but there always remains the underlying sombreness of texture or the overhanging cloud-darkening of the scene. Joyous music ends in a minor key; bright, happy beginnings are broken up, as the tale unfolds, in sudden changes to deep pathos.

That highly eccentric gentlewoman, Lady Hester Stanhope, the "Princess of Djoun," who lived for many years and died in an old convent on the Lebanon range, was once visited by Kinglake, and in his Eothen he relates that during his conversation with her there he learnt that "she had a vast idea of the Cornish miners, on account of their race, and said, if she chose, she could give me the means of rousing them to the most tremendous enthusiasm." Unfortunately Kinglake apparently did not obtain from the strange, mystic recluse her reasons for wanting to rouse the Cornish miners to enthusiasm nor any indication of the way in which the desirable latent energy should be directed. Still the incident shows the great-granddaughter of Chatham had a high opinion of their possibilities. R. L. Stevenson thought differently. In his Fellow Passengers he alludes to this conversation with Lady Hester, and tells how he, Stevenson, met on his emigrant travels west a knot of Cornish miners "who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious race." He takes quite a different view of Cornishmen, for he continues: "Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish ; for my part, I can make nothing of them at all. A division

1 Eothen, third edition, London, John Ollivier, 1845, p. 139.

of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keep this close, esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel-that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home."1

I came across some thoughtful remarks on the Celtic character of the Cornish in the Edinburgh Review, in a notice of the life of Sir Francis Drake. "Drake," says the writer, was a Cornishman, or next door to it. There is a vein of imagination which runs through the character of the old Celtic race; not, however, poetic imagination, for Cornwall has not a single poetical tradition, nor ever produced a versifier of a higher order than Peter Pindar; but rather that which displays itself in a warm belief in the marvellous, so often the companion of great and flexible talents; and when so united, enabling its possessor to sway the imaginations of others. Something may be ascribed to the peculiar industry of that corner of the world, in mines and fisheries, which makes every man a speculator and a dreamer of dreams. There is scarcely, we have heard it said, a farmer or a tradesman in the west of Cornwall who has not a most potent belief in two things: one, that he is heir to some great property, if he could only prove his pedigree; the other, that he will some day or other make his fortune by mining. Sometimes the temperament thus engendered is combined with genius; sometimes with shrewdness and thriftiness; sometimes it runs out into a wild and contagious enthusiasm: and the false Sir William Courtenay-Thom, the Cornish prophet-who led the credulous peasants of Kent against the musketry of the soldiers, was only a somewhat extravagant type of a not uncommon class among his countrymen. It is, and always has been, a land of practical visionaries-inventors, projectors, natural philosophers, and founders of sects. In Elizabeth's age of golden dreams, the sanguine disposition of a projector was almost a necessary ingredient in the character of those who were to cut their way to eminence."

Of course, in these days, as is obvious, the Cornish are

1 Edinburgh edition of the works of R. L. Stevenson, Edinburgh, 1895. Vol. II, p. 153.

2 LXXX (1844), p. 383.

SLIGHTLY MIXED

441

to a certain extent a mixed race, but less mixed than the people in other of the English counties. They are certainly as a class more like the French than the English; their blood chiefly Celtic; containing also signs of the Vikings66 red-haired Danes "-and the Saxons.

As travelling facilities increase and peoples mix more with peoples, intermarriages more and more take place. National and race idiosyncrasies and peculiarities tend to disappear. It becomes, therefore, of more importance than ever to scrupulously preserve and record traits, manners, customs, antiquities, phrases, folk-lore, and songs, before they are lost for ever in the rush of modern life, in the maelstrom of overpowering modernity.

CHAPTER XLIII

THE HISTORIANS OF CORNWALL

HE men who write county histories are a set apart.

The peculiar qualities required to make a satisfactory county historian are not commonly found collected in one individual. Hence I have always taken a delight in searching into the life histories of the successful historians, who have given us those ponderous tomes, commonly known as county histories, one meets with on the bottom shelves of libraries. A book of short biographies of those who have written these well-known standard county histories would be interesting reading, and I have no doubt certain peculiarities common to the class-whether of temperament, education, general character, and so on-would be elucidated.

Patience, methodical persistency, great application, judgment, and sound common sense are only a few of the many characteristics needed to make a successful recorder of the history of that small piece of England's surface which we call a county.

In addition to all other qualifications, there has to be, largely developed, an intense patriotism-local, county patriotism-for without that no one in his senses would attempt the heavy, wearisome, and often depressing task.

The labour is great, the researches required to be made most laborious and minute, if there is to be any value in them at all; the reward can never repay the time and energy expended. Most of these fine quarto county histories we see in the deepest shelves of our libraries, and which fetch nowadays considerable sums of money-far in advance of their published prices-were produced at a loss and, in more than one instance, caused the financial ruin of the writers.

The county of Cornwall has been unusually fortunate in her historians. Her story has been told by some of the