much later: (1) the Black Book of Caermarthen, written in the reign of Henry II. (1054-1189); (2) the Book of Aneurin, a manuscript of the latter part of the thirteenth century; (3) the Book of Taliessin, a manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth century; and (4) the Red Book of Hergest, completed at different times in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is in these four books or manuscripts that the oldest known texts are to be found, and Mr Skene has had them translated by two of the most eminent living Welsh scholars the Rev. D. Silvan Evans of Llanymawddwy, the author of the English and Welsh Dictionary, and other works; and the Rev. Robert Williams of Rhydycroesau, author of the Biography of Eminent Welshmen, and the Cornish Dictionary. Besides the poems in the Red Book of Hergest, the manuscript also contains the text of several prose tales and romances connected with the early history of Wales, published with an English translation by Lady Charlotte Guest, in 1849, under the title of The Mabinogion.

Date of the Welsh Poems.

During the last half-century of the Roman dominion in Britain, the most important military events took place at the northern frontier of the province, where it was chiefly assailed by those whom they called the barbarian races, and their troops were massed at the Roman walls to protect the province. After their departure it was still the scene of a struggle between the contending races for supremacy. It was here that the provincial Britons had mainly to contend under the Guledig against the invading Picts and Scots, succeeded by the resistance of the native Cymric population of the north to the

encroachment of the Angles of Bernicia.

Throughout this clash and jar of contending races, a body of popular poetry appears to have grown up, and the events of this never-ending war, and the dim recollections of social changes and revolutions, seem to have been reflected in national lays attributed to bards supposed to have lived at the time in which the deeds of their warriors were celebrated, and the legends of the country preserved in language, which, if not poetical, was figurative and obscure. It was not till the seventh century that these popular lays floating about among the people were brought into shape, and assumed a consistent form. I do not attempt to take them farther back.

The principal poem in the Four Books, supposed to possess historical value, is entitled Gododen,' by Aneurin, in which the bard laments the inglorious defeat of his countrymen by the Saxons. This war ode or battle-piece is in ninetyfour stanzas. One of them-the twenty-first-has been paraphrased by Gray, and the reader may be interested by seeing together, the literal translation in Mr Skene's book, and the version of the English poet :

The men went to Catraeth; they were renowned ;
Wine and mead from golden cups was their beverage;
That year was to them of exalted solemnity;
Three warriors and three score and three hundred,
wearing the golden torques.

Of those who hurried forth after the excess of revelling
But three escaped by the prowess of the gashing sword,
The two war-dogs of Aeron and Cenon the dauntless,
And myself from the spilling of my blood, the reward
of my sacred song.

Gray renders the passage thus:

To Cattraeth's vale in glittering row,
Thrice two hundred warriors ago:
Every warrior's manly neck
Chains of regal honour deck,
Wreathed in many a golden link:
From the golden cup they drink
Nectar that the bees produce,
Or the grape's ecstatic juice.
Flushed with mirth and hope they burn:
But none from Cattraeth's vale return.
Save Aeron brave and Conan strong
(Bursting through the bloody throng),
And I, the meanest of them all,
That live to weep and sing their fall.*

An

The Celtic Scotland of Mr Skene is, like his Welsh work, designed to ascertain what can be really extracted from the early authorities. He adopts the conclusion of Professor Huxley, that eighteen hundred years ago the population of Britain comprised peoples of two types of complexion, the one fair and the other dark-the latter resembling Aquitani and the Iberians; the fair people resembling the Belgic Gauls. Iberian or Basque people preceded the Celtic race in Britain and Ireland. The victory gained by Agricola, 86 A.D., is said by Tacitus to have been fought at Mons Grampius.' The hills now called the Grampians were then known as Drumalban, so that we cannot identify the scene of action with that noble mountain range. But it appears that the latest editor of the Life of Agricola has discovered from some Vatican manuscripts that Tacitus really wrote Mons Graupius,' and thus the word Grampius is, as Mr Burton says, 'an editor's or printer's blunder, nearly four hundred years old.'+

The name of the Western Islands, it may be mentioned, originated in a similar blunder. The printer of an edition of Pliny in 1503 converted Hebudes' into 'Hebrides,' and Boece having copied the error, it became fixed. Mr Skene prefers reading Granpius' to Graupius.' It is hardly possible, he says, to distinguish u from # in such manuscripts; but the point is certainly of no import

ance. The old fabulous Scotch narratives Mr Skene traces to the rivalry and ambition of ecclesiastical establishments, and to the great national controversy of old excited by the claim of England to a feudal. superiority over Scotland. The attempt made by Lloyd and Stillingfleet in the seventeenth century to cut off King Fergus and twenty-four other Scotch kings chronicled by Hector Boece, filled the Lord Advocate of that day, Sir George Mackenzie, with horror and dismay. Precedency,' he said, 'is one of the chief glories of the crown, for which not only kings but subjects fight and debate, and how could I suffer this right and privilege of our crown to be stolen from it by the assertion which did expressly subtract about eight hundred and thirty years from its antiquity?' Sir George would as willingly have prosecuted the iconoclasts, had they been citizens

the poem that two districts, called respectively Gododen and As to the scene of the struggle, Mr Skene says: 'It is plain from Catraeth, met at or near a great rampart; that both were washed by the sea, and that in connection with the latter was a fort called Eyddin. The name of Eyddin takes us to Lothian, where we have

Dunedin, or Edinburgh, and Caredin on the shore.

+ Burton's History of Scotland, 2d edit. i. 3.

north of the Tweed, as he prosecuted the poor Covenanters. But King Fergus and his twentyfour royal successors were doomed. They have been all swept off the stage into the limbo of vanity, and Scotland has lost eight hundred and thirty years of her imaginary but cherished sovereignty.

Battle of Mons Granpius, 86 A.D.

On the peninsula formed by the junction of the Isla with the Tay are the remains of a strong and massive vallum, called Cleaven Dyke, extending from the one river to the other, with a small Roman fort at one end, and inclosing a large triangular space capable of containing Agricola's whole troops, guarded by the rampart in front, and by a river on each side. Before the rampart a plain of some size extends to the foot of the Blair Hill, or the mount of battle, the lowest of a succession of elevations which rise from the plain till they attain the full height of the great mountain range of the socalled Grampians; and on the heights above are the remains of a large native encampment called Buzzard Dykes, capable of containing upwards of thirty thousand men. Certainly no position in Scotland presents features which correspond so remarkably with Tacitus' description as this.

Such was the position of the two armies when the echoes of the wild yells and shouts of the natives, and the glitter of their arms as their divisions were seen in motion and hurrying to the front, announced to Agricola that they were forming the line of battle. The Roman commander immediately drew out his troops on the plain. In the centre he placed the auxiliary infantry, amounting to about eight thousand men, and three thousand horse formed the wings. Behind the main line, and in front of the great vallum or rampart, he stationed the legions, consisting of the veteran Roman soldiers. His object was to fight the battle with the auxiliary troops, among whom were even Britons, and to support them, if necessary, with the Roman troops as a body of reserve.

The native army was ranged upon the rising grounds, and their line as far extended as possible. The first line was stationed on the plains, while the others were ranged in separate lines on the acclivity of the hill behind them. On the plains the chariots and horsemen of the native army rushed about in all directions.

Agricola, fearing from the extended line of the enemy that he might be attacked both in front and flank at the same time, ordered the ranks to form in wider

range, at the risk even of weakening his line, and placing himself in front with his colours, this memorable action commenced by the interchange of missiles at a distance. In order to bring the action to close quarters, Agricola ordered three Batavian and two Tungrian cohorts to charge the enemy sword in hand. In close combat they proved to be superior to the natives, whose small targets and large unwieldy swords were no match for the vigorous onslaught of the auxiliaries; and having driven back their first line, they were forcing their way up the ascent, when the whole line of the Roman army advanced and charged with such impetuosity as to carry all before them. The natives endeavoured to turn the fate of the battle by their chariots, and dashed with them upon the Roman cavalry, who were driven back and thrown into confusion; but the chariots becoming mixed with the cavalry, were in their turn thrown into confusion, and were thus rendered ineffectual as well by the roughness of the ground.

The reserve of the natives now descended, and endeavoured to outflank the Roman army and attack them in the rear, when Agricola ordered four squadrons of reserve cavalry to advance to the charge. The native troops were repulsed, and being attacked in the rear by the cavalry from the wings, were completely routed, and this concluded the battle. The defeat became general;

the natives drew off in a body to the woods and marshes on the west side of the plain. They attempted to check the pursuit by making a last effort and again forming, but Agricola sent some cohorts to the assistance of the pursuers; and, surrounding the ground, while part of the cavalry scoured the more open woods, and part dismounting entered the closer thickets, the native line again broke, and the flight became general, till night put an end to the pursuit.

Such was the great battle at Mons Granpius, and such the events of the day as they may be gathered from the concise narrative of a Roman writing of a battle in which the victorious general was his own father-in-law. The slaughter on the part of the natives was great, though probably as much overstated, when put at onethird of their whole army, as that of the Romans is underestimated; and the significant silence of the historian as to the death of Calgacus, or any other of sufficient note to be mentioned, and the admission that the great body of the native army at first drew off in good order, shew that it was not the crushing blow which might otherwise be inferred. On the succeeding day there was no appearance of the enemy; silence all around, desolate hills, and the distant smoke of burning dwellings alone met the eye of the victor.

A series of historical memoirs by LUCY AIKIN (1781-1864), daughter of Dr John Aikin,* and sister of Mrs Barbauld, enjoyed a considerable share of popularity. These are-Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, 1818; Memoirs of the Court of Charles I., 1833; and Memoirs of the Court of James 1. Miss Aikin also wrote a Life of Addison, 1843 (see ante, vol. i. page 477), which, besides being the most copious, though often incorrect, memoir of that English classic, had the merit of producing one of the most finished of Macaulay's critical essays.

PICTORIAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND: PROFESSOR CRAIK-C. MACFARLANE.

The Pictorial History of England, planned by Mr Charles Knight, in the manner of Dr Henry's History, is deserving of honourable mention. It was commenced about the year 1840, and was continued for four years, forming eight large volumes, and extending from the earliest period to the Peace of 1815. Professing to be a history of the people as well as of the kingdom, every period of English history includes chapters on religion, the constitution and laws, national industry, manners, literature, &c. A great number of illustrations was also added; and the work altogether was precisely what was wanted by the general reader. The two principal writers in this work were Mr Craik and Mr Macfarlane. GEORGE LILLIE CRAIK was born in Fife in 1798. He was educated for the church, but preferred a literary career, and was one of the ablest and most diligent of the writers engaged in the works issued by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.

Mr Craik was editor of the Pictorial History of England, and parts of it he enlarged and published separately-as, Sketches of Literature and Learning from the Norman Conquest, 1844; and History of British Commerce, 1844.

* Dr John Aikin (1747-1822) was an industrious editor and compiler. Besides several medical works, he published Essays on Song Writing, 1772, and was editor successively of the Monthly Maga sine, the Athenæum (1807-1809), a General Biographical Diction ary, Dodsley's Annual Register from 1811 to 1815, and Select Works of the British Poets Johnson to Beattie), 1820. 613

being devised for the great commodity of the realmas it was thought-hath proved far otherwise for at that time fat oxen were sold for six-and-twenty shillings and eight pence the piece; fat wethers for three shillings and fourpence the piece; fat calves at a like price; and fat lambs for twelvepence. The butchers of London sold penny pieces of beef for the relief of the poorevery piece two pounds and a half, sometimes three pounds for a penny; and thirteen and sometimes fourteen of these pieces for twelvepence; mutton, eightpence the quarter; and an hundredweight of beef for four shillings and eightpence.' The act was repealed in consequence of the complaints against it, but the prices never fell again to what they had been, although beef, sold in the gross, could still be had for a halfpenny a pound in 1570. Strong beer, such as we now buy for eighteenpence a gallon, was then a penny a gallon; and table-beer less than a halfpenny. French and German wines were eightpence the gallon. Spanish and Portuguese wines, a shilling. This was the highest price at which the best wines might be sold; and if there was any fault in quality or quantity, the dealers forfeited four times the amount. Rent, another important consideration, cannot be fixed so accurately, for parliament did not interfere with it. Here, however, we are not without very tolerable information. My father,' says Latimer, 'was a yeoman, and had no land of his own; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness, with himself and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the king's majesty now. He married my sisters with fiye pounds, or twenty nobles, each, having brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this he did off the said farm.' If three or four pounds at the uttermost' was the rent of a farm yielding such results, the rent of labourers' cottages is not likely to have been considerable.

I am below the truth, therefore, with this scale of prices in assuming the penny in terms of a labourer's necessities to have been equal in the reign of Henry VIII. to the present shilling. For a penny, at the time of which I write, the labourer could buy more bread, beef, beer, and wine-he could do more towards finding lodging for himself and his family-than the labourer of the nineteenth century can for a shilling. I do not see that this admits of question. Turning, then, to the table of wages, it will be easy to ascertain his position. By the 3d of the 6th of Henry VIII., it was enacted that master carpenters, masons, bricklayers, tylers, plumbers, glaziers, joiners, and other employers of such skilled workmen, should give to each of their journeymen, if no meat or drink was allowed, sixpence a day for half the year, fivepence a day for the other half; or fivepence half-penny for the yearly average. The common labourers were to receive fourpence a day for half the year, for the remaining half, threepence. In the harvest months they were allowed to work by the piece, and might earn considerably more ; so that, in factand this was the rate at which their wages were usually estimated the day-labourer received, on an average, fourpence a day for the whole year. Nor was he in danger, except by his own fault or by unusual accident, of being thrown out of employ; for he was engaged by contract for not less than a year, and could not be dismissed before his term had expired, unless some gross misconduct could be proved against him before two magistrates. Allowing a deduction of one day in the week for a saint's day or a holiday, he received, therefore, steadily and regularly, if well conducted, an equivalent of twenty shillings a week: twenty shillings a week and a holiday: and this is far from being a full

account of his advantages. In most parishes, if not in all, there were large ranges of common and uninclosed forest-land, which furnished his fuel to him gratis, where pigs might range, and ducks and geese; where, if he could afford a cow, he was in no danger of being unable to feed it; and so important was this privilege considered, that when the commons began to be largely inclosed, parliament insisted that the working-man should not be without some piece of ground on which he could employ his own and his family's industry. By the 7th of the 31st of Elizabeth, it was ordered that no cottage should be built for residence without four acres of land at lowest being attached to it for the sole use of the occupants of such cottage.

Portrait of Henry VIII.

Nature had been prodigal to him of her rarest gifts. In person he is said to have resembled his grandfather, Edward IV., who was the handsomest man in Europe. His form and bearing were princely; and amidst the easy freedom of his address, his manner remained majestic. No knight in England could match him in the tournament, except the Duke of Suffolk; he drew with ease as strong a bow as was borne by any yeoman of his guard; and these powers were sustained in unfailing vigour by a temperate habit and by constant exercise. Of his intellectual ability we are not left to judge from the suspicious panegyrics of his contemporaries. His state-papers and letters may be placed by the side of those of Wolsey or of Cromwell, and they lose nothing in the comparison. Though they are broadly different, the perception is equally clear, the expression equally powerful, and they breathe throughout an irresistible vigour of purpose. In addition to this, he had a fine musical taste, carefully cultivated; he spoke and wrote in four languages; and his knowledge of a multitude of other subjects, with which his versatile ability made him conversant, would have formed the reputation of any ordinary man. among the best physicians of his age; he was his own engineer, inventing improvements in artillery, and new constructions in ship-building; and this not with the condescending incapacity of a royal amateur, but with thorough workmanlike understanding. His reading was vast, especially in theology, which has been ridiculously ascribed by Lord Herbert to his father's intention of educating him for the archbishopric of Canterburyas if the scientific mastery of such a subject could have been acquired by a boy of twelve years of age, for he was no more when he became Prince of Wales. He must have studied theology with the full maturity of his understanding; and he had a fixed, and perhaps unfortunate, interest in the subject itself.

He was

In all directions of human activity, Henry displayed natural powers of the highest order, at the highest stretch of industrious culture. He was 'attentive,' as it is called, 'to his religious duties,' being present at the services in the chapel two or three times a day with unfailing regularity, and shewing to outward appearance a real sense of religious obligation in the energy and purity of his life. In private, he was goodhumoured and good-natured. His letters to his secretaries, though never undignified, are simple, easy, and unrestrained; and the letters written by them to him are similarly plain and business-like, as if the writers knew that the person whom they were addressing disliked compliments, and chose to be treated as a man. Again, from their correspondence with one another, when they describe interviews with him, we gather the same pleasant impression. He seems to have been always kind, always considerate; inquiring into their private concerns with genuine interest, and winning, as a consequence, their warm and unaffected attachment.

As a ruler, he had been eminently popular. All his wars had been successful. He had the splendid tastes | in which the English people most delighted, and he had

substantially acted out his own theory of his duty, which was expressed in the following words:

'Scripture taketh princes to be, as it were, fathers and nurses to their subjects, and by Scripture it appeareth that it appertaineth unto the office of princes to see that right religion and true doctrine be maintained and taught, and that their subjects may be well ruled and governed by good and just laws; and to provide and care for them that all things necessary for them may be plenteous; and that the people and commonweal may increase; and to defend them from oppression and invasion, as well within the realm as without; and to see that justice be administered unto them indifferently; and to hear benignly all their complaints; and to shew towards them, although they offend, fatherly pity.'

These principles do really appear to have determined Henry's conduct in his earlier years. He had more than once been tried with insurrection, which he had soothed down without bloodshed, and extinguished in forgiveness; and London long recollected the great scene which followed 'evil May-day,' 1517, when the apprentices were brought down to Westminster Hall to receive their pardons. There had been a dangerous riot in the streets, which might have provoked a mild government to severity; but the king contented himself with punishing the five ringleaders, and four hundred other prisoners, after being paraded down the streets in white shirts with halters round their necks, were dismissed with an admonition, Wolsey weeping as he pronounced it.

Death of Mary, Queen of Scots, Feb. 8, 1587.

Briefly, solemnly, and sternly they delivered their awful message. They informed her that they had received a commission under the great seal to see her executed, and she was told that she must prepare to suffer on the following morning. She was dreadfully agitated. For a moment she refused to believe them. Then, as the truth forced itself upon her, tossing her head in disdain, and struggling to control herself, she called her physician, and began to speak to him of money that was owed to her in France. At last it seems that she broke down altogether, and they left her with a fear either that she would destroy herself in the night, or that she would refuse to come to the scaffold, and that it might be necessary to drag her there by violence.

The end had come. She had long professed to expect it, but the clearest expectation is not certainty. The scene for which she had affected to prepare she was to encounter in its dread reality, and all her busy schemes, her dreams of vengeance, her visions of a revolution, with herself ascending out of the convulsion and seating herself on her rival's throne-all were gone. She had played deep, and the dice had gone against her.

Yet in death, if she encountered it bravely, victory was still possible. Could she but sustain to the last the character of a calumniated suppliant accepting heroically for God's sake and her creed's the concluding stroke of a long series of wrongs, she might stir a tempest of indignation which, if it could not save herself, might at least overwhelm her enemy. Persisting, as she persisted to the last, in denying all knowledge of Babington, it would be affectation to credit her with a genuine feeling of religion; but the imperfection of her motive exalts the greatness of her fortitude. To an impassioned believer death is comparatively easy.

dress had been exchanged for a robe of black satin; her jacket was of black satin also, looped and slashed and trimmed with velvet. Her false hair was arranged studiously with a coif, and over her head and falling down over her back was a white veil of delicate lawn. A crucifix of gold hung from her neck. In her hand she held a crucifix of ivory, and a number of jewelled paternosters was attached to her girdle. Led by two of Paulet's gentlemen, the sheriff walking before her, she passed to the chamber of presence in which she had been tried, where Shrewsbury, Kent, Paulet, Drury, and others were waiting to receive her. Andrew Melville, Sir Robert's brother, who had been master of her household, was kneeling in tears. Melville,' she said, '‘you should rather rejoice than weep that the end of my troubles is come. Tell my friends I die a true Catholic. Commend me to my son. Tell him I have done nothing to prejudice his kingdom of Scotland, and so, good Melville, farewell.' She kissed him, and turning, asked for her chaplain Du Preau. He was not present. There had been a fear of some religious melodrame which it was thought well to avoid. Her ladies, who had attempted to follow her, had been kept back also. She could not afford to leave the account of her death to be reported by enemies and Puritans, and she required assistance for the scene which she meditated. Missing them, she asked the reason of their absence, and said she wished them to see her die. Kent said he feared they might scream or faint, or attempt perhaps to dip their handkerchiefs in her blood. She undertook that they should be quiet and obedient. 'The queen,' she said, 'would never deny her so slight a request;' and when Kent still hesitated, she added, with tears, 'You know I am cousin to your Queen, of the blood of Henry the Seventh, a married Queen of France, and anointed Queen of Scotland.'

It was impossible to refuse. She was allowed to take six of her own people with her, and select them herself. She chose her physician Burgoyne, Andrew Melville, the apothecary Gorion, and her surgeon, with two ladies, Elizabeth Kennedy and Curle's young wife Barbara Mowbray, whose child she had baptised. 'Allons donc,' she then said, 'let us go;' and passing out attended by the earls, and leaning on the arm of an officer of the guard, she descended the great staircase to the hall. The news had spread far through the country. Thousands of people were collected outside the walls. About three hundred knights and gentlemen of the county had been admitted to witness the execution. The tables and forms had been removed, and a great wood fire was blazing in the chimney. At the upper end of the hall, above the fireplace, but near it, stood the scaffold, twelve feet square, and two feet and a half high. It was covered with black cloth; a low rail ran round it covered with black cloth also, and the sheriff's guard of halberdiers were ranged on the floor below on the four sides, to keep off the crowd. On the scaffold was the block, black like the rest; a square black cushion was placed behind it, and behind the cushion a black chair; on the right were two other chairs for the earls. The axe leant against the rail, and two masked figures stood like mutes on either side at the back. The Queen of Scots, as she swept in, seemed as if coming to take a part in some solemn pageant. Not a muscle of her face could be seen to quiver; she ascended the scaffold with absolute composure, looked round her smiling, and sat down. Shrewsbury and Kent followed, and took their places, the sheriff stood at her left hand, and Beale then mounted a platform and read the warrant aloud.

She laid her crucifix on her chair. The chief executioner took it as a perquisite, but was ordered instantly to lay it down. The lawn veil was lifted carefully off, not to disturb the hair, and was hung upon the