child!"

"Why, it is in rhyme!"

"No, no! the rhyme is only in your imagination. You promised not to
interrupt me, and you have already snapped asunder the gossamer threads
of as sweet a dream as was ever spun from a poet's brain."

"It certainly did rhyme!"

* * * * *

=_Henry Reed, 1808-1854._= (Manual, p. 501.)

From "Lectures on English History."

=_207._= LEGENDARY PERIOD OF BRITISH HISTORY.

It would be a weary, and probably vain inquiry to consider minutely the
claims which such historical materials have on our belief; and so little
is there attractive in the legends of British history, that I need
not attempt to dwell upon any of the alleged facts. But I wish before
passing from this part of my subject, briefly to examine the curious
tenacity with which the belief in this legendary literature was once
held, and to show that it was not relinquished until a more critical
standard of historic belief was adopted, and scientific investigation
took the place of uninquiring and passive credulity. It has been said
that no man, before the sixteenth century, presumed to doubt that the
Britons were descended from Brutus the Trojan; and it is equally certain
that no modern writer could presume confidently to assert it.

... It is most difficult for us, in these later days of higher standards
of historic credibility, to form anything like an adequate conception,
of the entire and unquestioning confidence which was felt for the story
of British origin, and the race of ancient British kings. Of this
feeling there is a curious proof in a transaction in the reign of Edward
I., when the sovereignty of Scotland was claimed by the English monarch.
The Scots sought the interposition and protection of the pope, alleging
that the Scottish realm belonged of right to the see of Rome. Boniface
VIII., a pontiff not backward in asserting the claims of the papacy,
did interpose to check the English conquest, and was answered by an
elaborate and respectful epistle from Edward, in which the English claim
is most carefully and confidently derived from the conquest of the whole
country by the Trojans in the times of Eli and Samuel--assuredly a
very respectable antiquity of some two thousand four hundred years.
No Philadelphia estate could be more methodically traced back to the
proprietary title of William Penn, than was this claim to Scotland up to
Brutus, the exile from Troy.... Now, all this is set