Either the writing of ages; or time and war Thus man even knew

THE history of man, so voluminous and bulky at present, is very slight and slender in all the early period of it. history was an employ unpractised by the first have united since, to sweep away the writings. not his own origin, before the Hebrew scriptures disclosed the secret to him. The world, therefore, might well be ignorant, before, of the origin of the nations within it. The history of the world and of man, indeed, stood then like a colossal statue of antiquity, that had accidentally lost its head. Even since the divine history has given a beginning to the human annals, and so has replaced the head upon the statue; much darkness still spreads over the particular origin of nations. The head of this statue, like the head of the Nile's at Rome, is still wrapped up in a veil. Nor do we know, with any degree of accuracy, the primary period of the history of any one nation in Europe. This is apparently the case in our domestic annals; and in that very period of them too, which is not prior to the Romans. We know nothing almost of the early transactions of the WELSH or of the CORNISH, before the Saxons came to invade them, and so united their history with their own. Thus two large communities of Britons, which had been composed each of united tribes

VOL. I.

B

tribes of Britain, and enlightened all by the rays of the literature of Rome, even more enlightened still by the bright beams of the Gospel, sunk back into the darkness nearly of their original history; and owe the main knowledge of their own annals immediately after the Roman departure, to those rude barbarians who had come from the shores of the Baltic, and whom they had half raised into knowledge, while these had wholly depressed them into ignorance. So much heavier is the scale of ignorance in man, than that of knowledge! This we see strikingly exemplified in the early history of CORNWALL; with which in general we can begin only where the annals of its Saxon invaders begin; and for which, as the sun of history was then set among the Cornish themselves, we can derive an illumination only from the very moon, that was then shining with the rays of the sun, faint, indeed, in the reflection, yet serving to dispel the darkness.

By this kind of moonlight I mean to direct my course in making my survey of the ancient cathedral of Cornwall. Yet I hope to collect the beams so carefully into one focus, as to find them combining into some degree of lustre, and lighting me with truth along the winding path to my point. In that hope, therefore, I set out; expecting, however, not to find my point within the petty circle of any one parish, or even the ample orbit of a whole county, but to trace it steadily across the island, and to pursue it occasionally into the continent.

SECTION I.

THE Saxons, who had come as auxiliaries to the Britons, but turned their arms against their employers, had gradually won their way by battles and by sieges, by victories and by conquests, from the eastern coast of Kent, over the whole nearly of Roman Britain, from the brink of the Channel on the south, to the friths of Forth and Clyde on the north. Then, with that spirit of hostility which is ever ready in the vitiated heart of man, they had turned their arms against each other; and the