A specious air of eternal midsummer and sunshine belongs to the name of Somerset. Camden, writing in the first years of the seventeenth century, was not too grave an historian and antiquary to notice the fact; and we find him, accordingly, at considerable pains to disabuse any one likely to be deceived by it. He says, in his great work “Britannia”: “Some suppose its name was given it for the mildness and, as it were, _summer_ temperature of its air.... But as it may be truly called in summer a summer country, so it has as good right to be called a winter one in winter, when it is for the most part wet, fenny and marshy, to the great inconvenience of travellers. I am more inclined to think it derives from _Somerton_, anciently the most considerable town in the whole country.” True, it did; for Somerton was until the eighth century the capital of the tribe of Britons known as Somersætas. Their kingdom and their capital were finally swept away by the victorious irresistible advance of the great Saxon kingdom of Wessex, in A.D. 710. Hence Somerset, although we occasionally hear of “Somerset_shire_,” is not really a shire, in the sense of being a more or less arbitrarily shorn-off division after the fashion of the Midland shires—Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and many others—but is historically an individual entity; the ancient kingdom of the Somersætas, remaining in name, though not in fact; just as Wiltshire, wrongly so-called, is the ancient country of the Wilsætas; Devon the land of the Damnonians, and Cornwall the home of the Cornu-Welsh. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II THE RIVER AVON—CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE BRISTOL, whence one comes most conveniently to the coast of Somerset, is among the most fortunate of cities. It has a long and interesting history, both in the warlike and the commercial sorts, and its citizens have ever been public-spirited men, of generous impulses. (It is not really necessary for the discreet historian to go into the story of Bristol’s old-time thriving business of kidnapping and slave-trading, by which her merchants grew wealthy, and so we will say nothing about it, nor enlarge upon the wealth-producing import of Jamaica rum.) It has many noble and interesting buildings, and a lovely and striking countryside is at its very gates, while the river Avon, to which Bristol owes the possibility of its greatness, flows out to sea, amid the most romantic river scenery in England, at Clifton.