fairs of barbarians. These and
numberless other local legends are indeed for us buried by the forests
of popular fancies that have grown out of them. It is all the harder for
the serious modern mind because our fathers felt at home with these
tales, and therefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme which
runs,

"When good King Arthur ruled this land
He was a noble king,
He stole three pecks of barley meal,"

is much nearer the true mediaeval note than the aristocratic stateliness
of Tennyson. But about all these grotesques of the popular fancy there
is one last thing to be remembered. It must especially be remembered by
those who would dwell exclusively on documents, and take no note of
tradition at all. Wild as would be the results of credulity concerning
all the old wives' tales, it would not be so wild as the errors that can
arise from trusting to written evidence when there is not enough of it.
Now the whole written evidence for the first parts of our history would
go into a small book. A very few details are mentioned, and none are
explained. A fact thus standing alone, without the key of contemporary
thought, may be very much more misleading than any fable. To know what
word an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of what thing he meant,
may produce a result that is literally mad. Thus, for instance, it would
be unwise to accept literally the tale that St. Helena was not only a
native of Colchester, but was a daughter of Old King Cole. But it would
not be very unwise; not so unwise as some things that are deduced from
documents. The natives of Colchester certainly did honour to St. Helena,
and might have had a king named Cole. According to the more serious
story, the saint's father was an innkeeper; and the only recorded action
of Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not be
nearly so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic of
the future may do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters.

IV

THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS

It is a quaint accident that we employ the word "short-sighted" as a
condemnation; but not the word "long-sighted," which we should probably
use, if at all, as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of
vision as the other. We rightly say, in rebuke of a small-minded
modernity, that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent to all that
is historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted to be interested