nce and fable. Before arts and
letters arrived at such a state of progress as that public events
could be recorded in writing, tradition was the only means of
handing down the memory of events from generation to generation; and
tradition, among semi-savages, changes every thing it touches into
romantic and marvelous fiction.

The stories connected with the earliest discovery and settlement of
Great Britain afford very good illustrations of the nature of these
fabulous tales. The following may serve as a specimen:

At the close of the Trojan war,[1] AEneas retired with a company of
Trojans, who escaped from the city with him, and, after a great
variety of adventures, which Virgil has related, he landed and settled
in Italy. Here, in process of time, he had a grandson named Silvius,
who had a son named Brutus, Brutus being thus AEneas's great-grandson.

One day, while Brutus was hunting in the forests, he accidentally
killed his father with an arrow. His father was at that time King of
Alba--a region of Italy near the spot on which Rome was subsequently
built--and the accident brought Brutus under such suspicions, and
exposed him to such dangers, that he fled from the country. After
various wanderings he at last reached Greece, where he collected a
number of Trojan followers, whom he found roaming about the country,
and formed them into an army. With this half-savage force he attacked
a king of the country named Pandrasus. Brutus was successful in the
war, and Pandrasus was taken prisoner. This compelled Pandrasus to sue
for peace, and peace was concluded on the following very extraordinary
terms:

Pandrasus was to give Brutus his daughter Imogena for a wife, and a
fleet of ships as her dowry. Brutus, on the other hand, was to take
his wife and all his followers on board of his fleet, and sail away
and seek a home in some other quarter of the globe. This plan of a
monarch's purchasing his own ransom and peace for his realm from a
band of roaming robbers, by offering the leader of them his daughter
for a wife, however strange to our ideas, was very characteristic of
the times. Imogena must have found it a hard alternative to choose
between such a husband and such a father.

Brutus, with his fleet and his bride, betook themselves to sea, and
within a short time landed on a deserted island, where they found the
ruins of a city. Here there was an ancient temple of Diana, and
an image of the goddess, which image was endu