Page:Old and New London, vol. 1.djvu/37

 relapsed to its old shape the moment Caesar, mounting his tall galley, turned his eyes towards Gaul.

The Mandubert who sought Caesar's help is by some thought to be the son of the semi-fabulous King Lud (King Brown), the mythical founder of London, and, according to Milton, who, as we have said, follows the old historians, a descendant of Brute of Troy. The successor of the warlike Cassivellaunus had his capital at St. Alban's ; his son Cunobelin (Shakespeare's Cymbeline) — a name which seems to glow with perpetual sunshine as we write it — had a palace at Colchester; and the son of Cunobelin. was the famed Caradoc, or Caractacus, that hero of the Silures, who struggled bravely for nine long years against the generals of Rome.



Celtic etymologists differ, as etymologists usually do, about the derivation of the name of London. Lon, or Lun, meant, they say, either a lake, a wood, a populous place, a plain, or a ship-town. This last conjecture is, however, now the most generally received, as it at once gives the modern pronunciation, to which Llyn-don would never have assimilated. The first British town was indeed a simple Celtic hill fortress, formed first on Tower Hill, and afterwards continued to Cornhill and Ludgate. It was moated on the south by the river, which it controlled; by fens on the north ; and on the east by the marshy low ground of Wapping. It was a high, dry, and fortified point of communication between the river and the inland country of Essex and Hertfordshire, a safe sixty miles from the sea, and central as a depot and meeting-place for the tribes of Kent and Middlesex.

Hitherto the London about which we have been conjecturing has been a mere cloud city. The first mention of real London is by Tacitus, who, writing in the reign of Nero (A.D. 62, more than a century after the landing of Caesar), in that style of his so full of vigour and so sharp in outline,