Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/41

Rh indignant if they were called so. Ut jam se Gallos dici nesciant, si audiant indignentur. They also seem to have equally ignored the name of Belgæ, which therefore we may presume to have been a name given them by some other people who had communicated it to the Romans. Supposing this other people to have been Gauls or Celts of the Cymric branch, now represented by the inhabitants of Wales and Brittany, and supposing these were the people who had been expelled from their ancient possessions, then we might expect to find in their language some traces of the origin of the name. Turning then to this language we accordingly find the roots beli, belg to ravage or destroy, and the substantive Belgiad, ravagers or destroyers. In fact the Belgians stood to the neighbouring Celts or Gauls in the relation of invaders, ravagers and destroyers, and formed the first eruption of those roving tribes who subsequently became better known to history as Angles or Saxons or Anglo-Saxons.

The languages which have been spoken of and considered by many as if distinct under the names of Anglo-Saxon, Flemish, Friesic, Dutch or Low-German were in fact only dialects of one and the same language, which language we may conclude to have been spoken in Belgic Gaul in the time of Cæsar from this consideration, that though we cannot trace it up to that very date yet we can trace it up so remotely as to show that it could not have been introduced there at any intermediate period. No other people had come there to supplant them or change their language, and thus we find Dutch writers so impressed with its antiquity as to ascribe it unhesitatingly to the Batavi and one even to claim for it the honor of having been spoken in Paradise. Without discussing the validity of this claim, we may be content with admitting the other, and then the question next arises for us to consider who were the people driven away by the Belgæ and what became of them.

In this enquiry we must again resort to Cæsar who informs us they were Gauls, by which name he seems to have spoken especially of the inhabitants of Mid-Gaul, now represented by the people of Brittany or Bretons who speak a language almost identical with the modern Welsh or Cymric. Those then who formerly inhabited Belgic or North-Gaul, and who had been thence expelled by the Germans, can be supposed to have had only two courses open to them to escape from their invaders, either to fall back on their kindred in Mid-Gaul or to fly to this island. Of these two probabilities, the latter may be taken as the most probable,