Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/391

Rh 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.

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.

But King Sylvius did not have his child exposed to wild beasts; he gave it to be nursed by a good woman, who reared the "Brute" till he was fifteen.