as the weight would allow him, to the next shore, and there getting upon the top of a high rock, hurled down the savage monster into the sea, where, falling on the sides of craggy rocks, he was torn to pieces, and coloured the waves with his blood. The place where he fell, taking its name from the giant’s fall, is called Lam Goemagot, that is, Goemagot’s Leap, to this day.”[1] ----- Footnote 1: _Geoffrey of Monmouth_, Giles’ Translation. ----- Such, in its complete form, is the myth of Brutus the Trojan, as told by Geoffrey of Monmouth, sometime Bishop of St. Asaph, who professed, and probably with truth, to translate the British history of which it forms a part from “a very ancient book in the British tongue,” given to him by Walter Mapes, by whom it had been brought from Brittany. Geoffrey wrote in the earlier part of the twelfth century, and he does not indicate with more precision than the use of the term “very ancient” the date of his original. If, however, we are to accept the writings of Nennius as they have been handed down as substantially of the date assigned to them by the author—the middle of the ninth century—the legend of Brutus, though not in the full dimensions of the Geoffreian myth, was current at least a thousand years ago; and in two forms. In one account, Nennius states that our island derives its name from Brutus, a Roman consul, grandson of Æneas, who shot his father with an arrow, and, being expelled from Italy, after sundry wanderings settled in Britain—a statement that agrees fairly well with that of Geoffrey. In the other account, which Nennius says he had learned from the ancient books of his ancestors, Brutus, though still through Rhea Silvia, his great-grandmother, of Trojan descent, was grandson of Alanus, the first man who dwelt in Europe, twelfth in descent from Japhet in his Trojan genealogy, and twentieth on the side of his great-grandfather, Fethuir. Alanus is a kind of European Noah, with three sons—Hisicion, Armenon, and Neugio; and all his grandsons are reputed to have founded nations—Francus, Romanus, Alamanus, Brutus, Gothus, Valagothus, Cibidus, Burgundus, Longobardus, Vandalus, Saxo, Boganus. He is wholly mythical.