Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/20

8 languages entirely different from each other in their main characteristics, and in the construction of nouns and verbs, with a reservation to which I shall have afterwards to refer. In other respects they have their vocabularies remarkably similar. Whether therefore they ought to be considered of the same national origin appears to me somewhat questionable, but there can be no dispute of the fact of some very considerable admixture having taken place between them at some period of which we have no record.

That branch of the Celtic nation settled in England acknowledge the name of Cymry, but the Bretons of France ignore it, though their dialect is substantially the same as the Welsh. It follows hence that this nation had been also subdivided into two or more sections, the one in France calling themselves Bretons, who had probably sent colonies into England, to the shores adjacent, while the others, calling themselves Cymry, had had their dwellings elsewhere. Where that locality was we may reasonably conclude, from the account given us of the Belgic Germans having driven away the Gauls from the northern parts of Gaul, when their most obvious course was to take refuge in England, on the shores opposite. In corroboration of this assumption, we find accordingly, that though driven away from that locality, they still left their name attached to what is yet recognized as the Cimbric Chersonesus (Ptol. ii. c. 2; Tac. de Mor. Ger. c. 37); and even remnants of their population are said by Welsh writers to be yet traceable among the Wends of the North of Germany. If this be correct, they are probably a tribe of the same people as the Veneti mentioned by Cæsar, as they are said yet to speak a language having an affinity to those of Wales and Brittany, though so long separated from their brethren in those regions as to have adopted a different phraseology, in which the Slavonic element has become predominant. See Pughe's Welsh Dictionary.

In accordance with the same hypothesis, all our best writers on British antiquities, from Camden to the present day, show us that the Cymry evidently once inhabited all the eastern parts of England and Scotland; and it seems probable that they left their name finally in Cumberland, if not also elsewhere, when afterwards driven into Wales. When they settled upon this emergency in their present abodes, they probably met and amalgameted with their kindred tribes of Bretons, who were in like manner receding before the Saxons. It is certain that some Belgic Germans had also settled in England in the time of Cæsar, bringing with them, according to our argument, a dialect of that language,