Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/328

318[March 6, 1869] greatest. Joyce arrived first. What he saw was a large pool of water where ice had been; floating on it a small round velvet cap trimmed with fur. He looked hastily round. She was not there—then he knew what had occurred.

At that instant his arm was seized by Mr. Biscoe, who whispered, "Wait man! They're fetching the rope!" "Stand back!" he cried, "it'd be too late! Let me go!" and the next instant he was diving beneath the floating fragments of ice.

"It was as near as a toucher," Mr. Boyd said, and he was right. When they pulled him in, Joyce's arm, which had been wound round Lady Caroline, had nearly given way, and the hand with which he had clung to the ice-edge was bruised and bleeding. Just as they were lifted on shore he thought he saw her lips move. He bent his head, and heard one word—"Walter!" Then he fainted.

French assure us that "rien n'est sacré pour un sapeur." But neither the sapper, nor the French, have any monopoly of irreverence and incredulity in our day. People question everything, past and present. The wisdom and veracity of our ancestors are laughed to scorn, and historians and annalists of all degrees of note and authority are put into the witness-box, and rigidly cross-examined. Niebuhr with Rome, and Cornewall Lewis with Greece, remind one of bulls in a china shop, butting and smashing with might and main among the brittle but beautiful wares of antiquity. There was no Romulus and no Remus, and consequently those interesting babes were never suckled by a wolf. Virgil and the Roman poets are yet mercifully left us; they were but moderns after all, but Homer, in racing phrase, "is nowhere." His existence is denied, and if that by any chance be granted, his authorship of the Iliad is impugned by the literary sappers, who disintegrate the immortal work into a series of separate ballads, written or composed by various "eminent hands," whose names no one knows or can possibly discover. We are not even allowed to imagine that Macbeth killed Duncan as Shakespeare tells us, but we are informed and commanded to believe, that these two rivals for the crown of Scotland fought out their quarrel fairly in the battle-field; that Duncan was slain in single combat, and that Macbeth was no murderer at all. We are also told by the sappers that Richard the Third had not a hunchback, but was a very handsome man, with only a slight and studious stoop in his shoulders; that, moreover, he was a very good king, beloved by the people, and only hated by the nobility, who employed and paid partial historians to blacken his character and misinterpret the events of his reign. We hear also that Henry the Eighth was a soft, kind-hearted gentleman, the victim of designing women, whom he loved but too well, and too foolishly; that his daughter Mary no more deserved to be called "bloody," than his daughter Elizabeth; with various other contradictions of our pre-instilled knowledge or beliefs, sufficient to justify the wary old Sir Robert Walpole in proclaiming all history to be, as in plain Saxon English he called it, "a lie." Saxon! did I say? Yes, I did, but who and what are the Saxons? A very determined sapper, one Thomas Nicholas, Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy, following in the wake of other incredulous philosophers, denies that the English are Saxons, or Anglo-Saxons, and proclaims us to be a nation, in which the Celtic or Keltic blood is more largely predominant than any other, and this more especially in the midland counties, where Shakespeare was born. Here is a sapper with a vengeance! The facts and arguments on which this ethnological iconoclast bases his astounding statement, are to be found in a volume recently published, entitled, "The Pedigree of the English People investigated; an Argument Historical and Scientific on English Ethnology, showing the Progress of Race-amalgamation in Britain from the Earliest Times, with especial Reference to the incorporation of the Celtic Aborigines." Dr. Nicholas, like other sappers, has a good deal to say for himself, and merits respectful attention both for the array and marshalment of his facts, and for the arguments which he builds upon them. Let us hear, and then judge his exposition, that we may either continue to call ourselves Anglo-Saxons, as we have been in the habit of doing for more than a thousand years, or Celto-Saxons, if that be the truer and more accurate definition.

Every one knows now-a-days that the Ancient Britons or Celts of this island were not exactly savages, as it was once the fashion to consider them; inasmuch as they were cunning artificers in gold, iron, and brass, kept cattle, built houses, and cultivated the soil. Diodorus Siculus says, "that the Britons used chariots, as the ancient Greek heroes are reported to have done in the Trojan war; that they were simple in their manners, and far removed from the crimes and wickedness of the men of the present day; that the island was thickly inhabited; and that the people of Cornwall were particularly fond of strangers, and civilised in their manners." Cæsar himself, who never penetrated very far into the interior, is forced to admit, evidently much against his inclination, that the Britons of Kent "were not barbarians; that the land was well peopled, and full of houses built after the manner of the Gauls; that the people used brass and gold money, and employed iron rings of a certain weight in barter." He also confessed that the heavy armed legions of Rome were no match