BOOKS.

REVOLETIONS Ili ENGLISH HISTORY.* " WHAT is it that has made England what it is ?" This is the problem which Dr. Vaughan proposes to solve in a work not more remarkable for the novelty of its plan, than for its masterly execu- tion. In our first brief notice of the work we called it a biologi- cal history, because it professes to trace the phenomena and the laws of our national life from the most rudimentary stage up- wards. We might call it also a differential history of England, because it puts out of view that which English history embraces in common with the history of Europe, and occupies itself only with that which is peculiar to ourselves, that which has made us what we are, a people distinguished from every other by many and strongly marked points of difference. The changes which our national life has undergone present certain great phases, each cor- responding to a great dominant principle. Down to the close of the fourteenth century change among us comes mainly from the conflicts of race. Under the Tudors the great principle of revolu- tion is religion ; under the Stuarts that principle gives place con- siderably to the principles of government. The first question to be settled was the question of race ; accordingly it is the business of Dr. Vaughan's first volume to investigate the origins and the growth of the English people ; to characterize the several elements of which it is compounded. ; to show in what proportions and by what processes these have been made to coalesce, and what has been the net result of each successive combination, as regards the composition of the whole and its civilization. The conclusiOns arrived at differ in some important particulars from those to which preceding writers have given currency.

We are grateful to Dr. Vaughan for the pains he has success- fully taken to restore our British forefathers to their rightful place in history. They were a far nobler race, and have be- queathed far more of their blood and spirit to their English suc- cessors than is commonly supposed. Lord Macaulay has been pleased to say that the inhabitants of Britain, "when first known to the Tyrian mariners, were little superior to the natives of the Sandwich Islands." The assertion is in his lordship's usual style —rhetorically disdainful of fact. What the Britons were when first discovered by the Phoenicians, no one now can tell. Herodotus knew of their existence and nothing more. He forbore to speak of the Tin islands because "he had no certain knowledge of them." Our first authentic information respecting them is derived from some fragments of the report of the great Carthaginian captain Himilco, who visited them in 360 n.c. He found in the Scilly Islands and Cornwall "a numerous race of men, endowed with spirit, and with no slight industry, busied all in the cares of trade alone." Diodorus Sionlus and Stroh() repeating three centuries later what was known of Cornish Britain from the reports of the Phoenicians, describe the inhabitants as fond of strangers, civilized in their manners, industrious, skilful in working mines, wearing tunics of woollen cloth descending to the feet, just in their deal- ings, and possessing herds of cattle. Is this a picture of the Sand- wich Islanders as discovered by Captain Cook ? The other Bri- tons, though ruder than those of Cornwall, were even in the time of Omar far removed from the savage state. It is true that, though living in a colder latitude, they were comparatively naked.

" They were clad in skins. They stained their bodies with woad, cover- ing them with purple figures; a custom not necessarily barbarous, inasmuch as it has been common among British seamen within our own memory. Its design could hardly have been to give fierceness to their aspect ; it was the effect rather of a rude love of ornament. They wore a moustache, but no beard. Their hair fell long upon their shoulders; and they were brave and skilful in war."

Barbarous tribes depend for subsistence on hunting, trapping, and fishing. The rudest Britons in Ctesar's time reared abundance of cattle, or cultivated their lands with manure and the plough ; and other useful arts must have been in an advanced state among them before the first Roman invasion. It is clear from what we know of the war chariot that there must then have been good wheelwrights, carpenters, and smiths in Britain, men who could build houses and produce furniture, after a manner unknown among nations in the lower state of barbarism.

" Cesar himself speaks of the houses he saw in Britain as reaembling those in Gaul. Now Gaul was not a country of wigwams. It contained cities of considerable strength and beauty. Before the close of the first century, when the Romans had still their conquest to achieve in this country, London, as we have Been, had become a place of great traffic, and of many thousand inhabitants. Early in the second century, Ptolemy makes mention of nearly sixty cities then existing in Britain. Some of these cities the Barnum had created, but much the greater number consisted of Roman settlements fixed on British roads, and grafted on British towns. Exeter, for example, had been the capital—the place of general gathering, for the people of that part of Britain from the earliest time. It was thus almost everywhere. The old sites became the home of the new masters. In the interior and remote districts, the dwelling-places of our ancestors, at the time of the first Roman invasion, were no doubt for the most part of a very humble description. They were generally circular in form, con- structed of wood, the spaces between the framework being filled up with mortar or clay, the covering being of reeds or thatch. The roof was of a cone shape, with an opening at the summit to admit light, and to give egress to the smoke, the interior presenting a rounded apartment with its fire on the earth in the centre. Wretched as such hovels may be deemed, large portions of the subjects of great monarchies in modern Europe have been hardly better housed. Such erections as Stonehenge, though reared by Druids, evince a knowledge of mechanics which cannot be supposed to exist apart from much useful knowledge beside. The whole track of the

• Revolutions in English History. By Robert Vaughan, D.D. Vol. I. Revolu- Hens of Race. Published by Parkerand Son.

Celtic tribes, in their migration from the east to the west, is marked by each monuments. The works of this nature at Abury in Wiltshire are of greater extent than those of Stonehenge, and those of the temple of Carnac in Gaul were greater stilL The aptness of the Britons to learn whatever Gaul, or Rome itself, could teach, is amply attested by Tacitus, whose informatics must have come from the best authority—from the great Agricola."

Ctesar failed to accomplish the subjugation of Britain, and it was long before his successors ventured to renew an attempt in which he had fared so ill. "They were brave men, those old Britons, magnanimous and unselfish men in their way ; prepared to hazard every possible loss, rather than lose their rude sense of independence and freedom." For a hundred and fifty years they fiercely withstood the Roman invaders, and again for an equal period they disputed the ground inch by inch with the swarming Saxons, Lord Macaulay says, " Of the western provinces, which. obeyed the Caisars, she [Britain] was the last that was conquered, and the first that was thrown away." " This may be true," re- plies Dr. Vaughan, " and the conclusion which the antithesis tends to convey may be untrue. The remote and isolated position of this country made it the most difficult to reach while Rome continued strong, and the most difficult to retain when Rome had become weak." But the antithesis is untrue in both its clauses. The first chapter of Gibbon shows that some rich provinces in the east were acquired later and flung away sooner. The Britain which ultimately submitted to the authority of Rome was certainly a country of considerable industry and wealth ; none other could have furnished to the conquerors a revenue adequate to maintain. a military establishment of 50,000 men, and a civil establishment of corresponding magnitude, in addition to the wealth devoured by private spoliation.

"Concerning the domestic habits and the general morals of the Britons, our opinion will be very low if we credit one statement made by Cesar. According to this historian, the male members of a family, however nume- rous, had their wives in common, and the children borne by a wife passed for the children of her accredited husband. It may be questioned, how- ever, whether Caesar had such knowledge of the Britons as to warrant him in making this statement. He could only have made such a report from hearsay ; and we have no means of knowing what that hearsay was really worth. We doubt if it was even partially true. The conclusion may have been a hasty inference from appearances that should not have been so in- terpreted. The evidence which raav be adduced as justifying scepticism es this point is various and considerable. It is well known that chastity in women, is in general rigorously exacted by men in rude states of society.. Even among barbarians, there are natural instincts which operate as power- ful safeguards in such relations—especially in a latitude like ours. Tacitus furnishes strong evidence to this effect in his account of the ancient Ger- mans. It is Caesar himself, moreover, who states that the Britons differed in scarcely anything from the Gauls; and among the Gauls, from whom the Britons derived their blood, their language, their religion, and their cus- toms, no trace of any such usage is found. It is certain, also, that women among the Britons were held in high estimation. They shared in the honours of priesthood. The highest gifts pertained to them—inspiration, prophecy, the power of working miracles. Females, when next in succes- sion, became sovereigns, as we see in the case of Boadicea. Should a reign- ing queen take to herself a husband, she did not cease to be the possessor of the supreme power ; as we see in the history of Cartismandua, the Queen of the Brigantes. It was the wrong done to the chastity of the daughters of Boadicea that filled the cup of indignation among the Britons to overflowing. We further learn from Tacitas, that it was the scandalous proceeding of Cartismandua in marrying beneath her rank, that helped to produce such disaffection among her subjects as to compel her to fly to the Romans-for protection. To these considerations, and more of the same complexion, we have to add the material fact, that this charge against the Britons rests on the authority of Caesar alone."

If such a custom had ever existed, it would have left some trace in the literature of the Welsh, which goes far back on their his- tory ; but " there is not a word in their laws, their traditions, or any of their writings, implying that any such custom had ever to be rooted out from among them."

Dr. Vaughan agrees with Tacitus in regarding the influence of the Romans upon social life in Britain as in the main pernicious. The country was civilized into helplessness and then left to its fate. One lasting benefit Rome has bequeathed to the conquered nations of the continent in her laws, especially her municipal laws, but England owes really nothing to that source. Our laws are all from ourselves, were born with us, and have lived and grown with us. The chief effect of the conquest of Britain by the Romans was to facilitate the subsequent conquest by the Anglo- Saxons, partly by impairing the warlike energies of the old in- habitants, and partly by expelling them from that portion of the island which lies east of the central chain of mountains stretching from the Highlands of Scotland into Derbyshire.

" The eastern side of this great watershed embraces the level and rich lands between the Humber and the Forth, and over that space the traces of the past are very conspicuously, Roman. But from the vale of Strathclyde, em- bracing a largo tract of land in Dumbartonshire, from Cumberland, the old land of the Cumry, and along to the southward through Westmoreland, Lancashire, and the border counties of Wales, into Devonshire and Corn- wall, the natives remain more thickly on the ground, and have given the impress of their language more generally to the objects which have sur- vived them. The great northern line of road in those days, was not so much on the Lancashire as on the Yorkshire side of the Yorkshire hills, passing through Leicester, Lincoln, York, and Newcastle. This is one of the facts concerning the disturbance, and the new distributions of race, con- sequent on the settlement of the Romans in Britain, which contribute to explain some later facts in our history. The Britons of Cumberland and Cornwall were linked together by the Silures, whose territories extended through Cheshire and Shropshire down to the Welsh side of the Bristol Channel. In the western half of the island, thus marked off for the most part by mountains or rivers from the eastern half, the Britons have never been more than partially displaced. Over this surface they have been largely amalgamated with other races ; first with the settlers who came in with the Romans, and afterwards with Saxons and Danes. On the more race." and eastern side of the island, the blood which prevailed, even in the period, Roman peod, was much more the blood of the stranger, or of a mixed It was in those parts where the Romans had been most in the ascendant that the Angles and Saxons gained their earliest and their easiest victories, and there chiefly they themselves suc- cumbed in turn to the Danes. But even in the eastern half of Britain many of the aboriginal race remained after the retreat of the greater number, to modify the blood and the usages of the conquerors. " It is not probable . . . . that the population of any of the Saxon states was without a considerable admixture of British blood. The keels of the Saxon freebooters can hardly be supposed to have brought settlers in sufficient numbers, and of both sexes, to warrant such an opinion. Greatly more was done erelong upon the soil than can be explained on such a supposition. That a large admixture of this kind took place along the border lands which separated between the two races is unquestionable."

So then it appears we English are not Anglo-Saxons, as some affect to call us in the cant of the day. The bases of our race and of our language are Anglo-Saxon, but other elements have mingled with those of Teutonic origin to form the flesh and bone and brain of the Englishman. Let us not for the sake of a pe- dantic crotchet deny the brave blood we inherit from our Celtic forefathers, the men who for twice a hundred and fifty years heroically defended their native land, first against the Roman legions and then against the Saxon freebooters.

"The chivalrous performances assigned to this [latter) period of British history by British tradition and romance may be entitled to little credit. But fictions so impassioned and so permanent imply facts—the mythic Arthur supposes a real one. The conception of an age of heroes can have no place with a people who are not themselves heroic. It is unfortunate, indeed, for the fame of those supposed heroes that writers so near their time as Bede and Gildas should seem to have heard so little about them. But, on the other hand, the writings of the ancient bards, Aneurin and Taliesin, and those of Nennius, of Tysilio, and of Geoffrey of Monmouth, point to the channel through which the faith of a people in regard to that heroic age has descended. V. e have no great confidence in what these writers record as facts, but there is an historical significance in the spirit which pervades their productions. The renowned Arthur is not an Armorican, but strictly a British hero. The conception of him has come to us from a people whose descendants are still living about us."

The Norsemen, too, are to be numbered among our ancestors— "It is clear that the strength of the Danish element in Anglo-Saxon Bri- tain was great—much greater than is commonly apprehended ; and dis-

astrous in many respects as was the collision between the two races on our soil, it is probable that the two together furnished a better stamina for the England of a later age, than would have been furnished by the Saxon alone. It is not easy to say how much of our passion for the sea, and of our power there, have come from the blood of this later generation of sea-kings who found their home among us. It is certain that our great sea-captaius, and our men of genius in all departments, have their full share of Danish names among them. But if the Danish race were to contribute towards our great- ness in the end, it is not less certain that they proved a sad impediment to our progress in the beginning."

Last came the Norman conquerors, a brutal race, superior to the conquered in military science alone ; in few other things on a level with them, and in many greatly their inferiors. It was the destiny of these barbarians to be the means of knitting the Eng- lish together in greater unity, and to be themselves immensely improved in the process. Physically and morally the English were the superior race, and from them the Normans derived those arts and graces of civilization, which, pace Lord Macaulay, they had never possessed in Normandy, and in which they were but partially proficient in the third or fourth generation after the Conquest. Infinite were the evils accompanying the beginning of their rule-

" But the effect of this change was not all evil. The Norman government proved to be a strong government. Only by such a government could that old enemy the Dane be taught to respect the shores of this island. In securing the kingdom against all further danger from that quarter the Nor- mans did a good work. And though by their settlement in England they added still another race to that over fretting mixture of races which had found their home in this country, they came as the new and more powerful element which was to contribute to give a new unity to the whole. The Saxons had only partially vanquished the Britons. The lesser states of the Heptarchy had submitted but imperfectly to the greater. The struggle be- tween the Saxons and the Danes had issued in an angry compromise, rather than in a peaceful settlement. The Normans were the first real masters of the island since the departure of the Romans. Under the kings of this race, England became properly a kingdom, compact, potent, and promised to be some day equal to great things."

It was fortunate for England that her first Norman kings were men who exercised the worst of tyrannies in the worst of ways ; for as their Norman subjects suffered only in a somewhat less de- gree than the English under the abuses of an almost unbounded prerogative, the two races had a common interest in opposing a power so exorbitant. This circumstance probably increased the tendency to intermarriages between them, which again gave in- creased strength to their resistance. Then as the national feel- ing became more united, so would it come to embrace a wider range of interests, and England would begin to live a larger na- tional life.

" By the Conquest, our island almost ceased to be insular. England be- came a consolidated power, participating in all the questions and interests affecting the nations of Europe. In the great controversy, for example, be- tween the ecclesiastical and the civil power, England has its full share. All the subtle pleas on whidi such controversies were founded became familiar to men's thoughts in this country. Ecclesiastical disputes, military affairs in Normandy, the commencement of the Crusades, the fame of our Richard the First in those enterprises, the new laws, and the new features in the administration of law—all may be said to fiave been both the effects and the causes of a new wakefulness, disposing men to observe, to reflect, and judge in regard to what was passing about them. The five hundred mouse- teries had their schools, but the five hundred towns and cities were all schools ; and in these last, the lessons taught, though little marked or per- ceived, were ceaseless, manifold, and potent. By degrees, Norman and Saxon became more equal. Marriages between the two races became every- day events. In the face of the law and of the magistrate, the two races may be said by this time to be two races no longer. If the Saxon burgess, and the Norman alderman, still looked at times with jealousy upon each other, the fight between them became comparatively fair and harm- less, as it became less a battle of the strong against the weak. When the corpse of King John was laid in Worcester Cathedral, the dark day in the history of the English had passed. In future, the Norman, whether prince or baron, must demean himself honourably towards the Englishman, or cease to be powerful. The revolution of this period to the Saxon, had con- sisted in his being defeated, despoiled, downtrodden—and in his recovering himself from that position, by his own patient energy, so as to regain from the new race of kings all the liberty he had lost, and guarantees for that liberty which were full of the seeds of a greater liberty to come. With this revolution to the Saxon, there came revolution to the Norman. The Norman is no longer a man of military science, and nothing more—no longer a mere patron of letters, with scarcely a tincture of them himself. His intelligence is enlarged. His tastes are expanded and refined. The country of his adoption is becoming more an object of affection to him than the country from which he has derived his name. In short, the Norman is about to disappear in the Englishman. The Englishman is not about to disappear in the Norman. After all, the oldest dwellers upon the soil have proved to be the strongest."