Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/45

Rh banks of the Elbe so strong an infusion of the Cymric that Welsh scholars of whose good faith we have no more reason to doubt than of their ability, as Owen, Parry and others unreservedly claim the Wendish as a dialect of the Welsh, as well as the Armoric or the language spoken in Brittany. Whether their statements can be fully verified or not, is of little consequence as it will be sufficient for my argument that there are any traces of Celtic in their language at all.

The Armoric as I said before I consider to be the representative of the language spoken in Celtic or Mid-Gaul in Cæsar's time, and respecting its affinity to the modern Cymric or Welsh on the one hand and to the modern Gaelic or Irish and Scotch on the other I shall have soon to make some observations. At present having I trust satisfactorily shown you from traces left there, that a Cymric people formerly occupied the western shores of Europe, I proceed to argue that a portion of them on being driven away from thence came to the Eastern shores of this island as their first place of refuge.

4. The Cymri now it is well known only inhabit the mountainous district of the West of this island or the country we call Wales. But according to the argument I have undertaken to maintain they first occupied the Eastern shores whence they were driven to the West, we have therefore now to follow the traces they left of that occupation.

In Cæsar's time the maritime parts or seacoasts of Britain were already inhabited by the Belgæ, who not content it seems with driving out the Celts or Gauls from their former country had thus followed them into this island and were encroaching upon them here. (Lib. 5. c. 10.) Thus even then there seems to have begun to be spoken in England a dialect of that language which was afterwards known among us as Anglo-Saxon, and now represented by that "in which Shakespeare and Milton wrote and which wise Bacon and brave Raleigh spoke." Before however this could have encroached materially upon the Cymric in England, an evil had befallen the people here which had not fallen so disastrously on their kindred on the Continent, and that was the exterminating influence of Roman conquests.

The Romans did not penetrate at all beyond the Rhine and never occupied Belgic Gaul in the manner in which they trampled over Britain; consequently the traces left in Belgic Gaul of the Cymri may be thus even more distinct there than in the East of Britain, though both countries were equally afterwards subjected to the invasions of the countless tribes which Germany, the officina gentium, sent forth