Amenities of Literature: Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English LiteratureDisraeli, Isaac
History
Amenities of Literature: Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature
Disraeli, Isaac
Authors, English -- Biography; English literature -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life
The tale runs that Maximus, having engaged his provincial Britons in his
ambitious schemes, rewarded their military aid by planting them in one
of these Armorican communities. To give colour to this tradition, the
story adds that this Roman general had a considerable interest in Wales,
"having married the daughter of a powerful chieftain, whose chapel at
Carnarvon is still shown."[6] The marriage of this future Roman emperor
with a Welsh princess would serve as an embellishment to a Welsh
genealogy. This event must have occurred about the year 384. When the
Britons were driven out of their country by faithless allies, Armorica
would offer an easy refuge for fugitives; there they found brothers
already settled, or friends willing to receive them.[7]
In this uncertainty of history, amid the dreams of theoretical
antiquaries, we cannot doubt that at some time there was a powerful
colony of Britons in Armorica; they acquired dominion as well as
territory. They changed that masterless Armorican state to which they
were transplanted from an aristocracy into a monarchy--that government
to which they had been accustomed; they consecrated the strange land by
the baptism of their own national name, and to this day it is called
Brétagne, or Britain; and surely the Britons carried with them all their
home-affections, for they made the new country an image of the old: not
only had they stamped on it the British name, but the Britons of
Cornwall called a considerable district by their own provincial name,
known in France as "Le Pays de Cornouaille;" and their speech
perpetuated their vernacular Celtic. At the siege of Belleisle in 1756,
the honest Britons of the principality among our soldiers were amazed to
find that they and the peasants of Brittany were capable of conversing
together. This expatriation reminds us of the emotions of the first
settlers in the New World. Ancient Spain reflected herself in her New
Spain; and our first emigrants called their "plantations" "New England;"
distributing local names borrowed from the land of their birth--undying
memorials of their parent source!
This singular event in the civil annals of the ancient Britons has given
rise to a circumstance unparalleled in the literary history of every
people, for it has often involved in a mysterious confusion a part of
our literary and historical antiquities. The Britain in France is not
always discriminated from our own; and this double Britain at times
becomes provokingly mystifying. Two eminent antiquaries, Douce and
Ritson, sometimes conceived that Bretagne meant England; a circumstance
which might upset a whole hypothesis.
In the fastnesses of Wales, on the heights of Caledonia, and on the
friendly land of Armorica, are yet tracked the fugitive and ruined
Britons. It is most generally conceded that they retreated to the
western coasts of England, and that, often discomfited, they took their
last refuge in those "mountain heights" of Cambria.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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