T

CO-EQUAL CUSTOMS.

CHAPTER II.

HE object of treating on this subject is the endeavour to prove that the so-called tramp is

the outcome or the last relic of our original state. In their own way they enjoy the life provided for them at the expense of the working bees. All of us want relief from work; they take it without earning it, and they number 2,000,000 of souls prowling about England and Wales. Therefore I fall back on Macaulay, who tells us that "nothing in the early existence of Britain indicated the greatness which she was destined to attain. Her inhabitants, when first they became known to the Tyrian mariners, were little superior to the natives of the Sandwich Islands at the date they brained Captain Cook with a log of wood. The continental kingdoms which had risen on the ruins of the Western Empire kept up some intercourse with those eastern provinces where the ancient civilisation, though slowly fading away under the influence of misgovernment, might still astonish and instruct bar

barians? From this communion Britain was cut off. Her shores were, to the polished race which dwelt by the Bosphorus, objects of a mysterious horror, such as that with which the Ionians of the age of Homer had regarded the straits of Scylla and the city of the Lostrygonian cannibals. There was one province of our island in which, as Procopius had been told, the ground was covered with serpents, and the air was such that no man could inhale it and live. To this desolate region the spirits of the departed were ferried over from the land of the Franks at midnight. A strange race of fishermen performed the ghastly office. The speech of the dead was distinctly heard by the boatmen; their weight made the keel sink deep in the water; but their forms were invisible to mortal eye. Such were the marvels which an able historian, the contemporary of Belisarius, of Simplicius, and of Tribonian, gravely related in the rich and polite Constantinople, touching the country in which the founder of Constantinople had assumed the imperial purple. Concerning all the other provinces of the Western Empire we have continuous information. It is only in Britain that an age of fable completely separates two ages of truth. Odoacer and Totila, Euric and Thrasimund, Clovis, Fredegunda, and Brunechild are historical men and women; but Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena, Arthur and Mordred, are mythical persons whose very existence may be questioned, and whose adventures must be classed with those of Hercules and Romulus."

It is agreed by British antiquarians that the most ancient inhabitants of Britain were called Cymry (pronounced Kumri); they are so named in all that remains of the

ancient British literature. The Welsh, who are their descendants, have always called themselves Cymry, and have given the same name to the earliest colonists of Albion; and as the Kimbri or Cymry were the ancient possessors of the northern coasts of the German Ocean, and attempted foreign enterprises, it seems to be a reasonable inference that the Cymry of Britain originated from the continental Kimmerians. Tacitus relates of the Estii on the Baltic, that their language resembled the British: "Lingua Britannica proprior" (De Morgerm). That a district in the northern part of England was inhabited by a part of the ancient British nation called Cumbria, whence Cumberland, is a fact favourable to this presumption. The historical triads of the Welsh state that the Cymry were the first inhabitants of Britain, before whose arrival it was occupied by bears, wolves, beavers, and oxen with large protuberances. They add, that Hugh Gadarn, or Hu the Strong or Mighty, led the nation of the Cymry through the Hazy or German Ocean into Britain, and to Llydaw, or Amorica, in France; and that the Cymry came from the eastern parts of Europe, Constantinople. "The three pillars of the nation of the Isle of Britain. First, Hu Gadarn, who led the nation of the Cymry to the Isle of Britain; and from the country of summer, which is called Deffrobani, they came-this is where Constantinople is; and through the hazy ocean they came to the Island of Britain, and to Llydaw, where they have remained." (Triad iv. p. 57.)

Euphorus said of the Kimmerians, that they dwelt in subterraneous habitations, which they called argillas, communicating by trenches. (Ap. Strabo, Geo. lib. v. p. 375.) It is certainly a curious analogy of language, that argel, in