CHAPTER I - THE CYMRY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN

Summary

Love thou thy land with love far brought

From out the storied past, and used

Within the present, but transfused

Through future time by power of thought.

—Tennyson

§ 1. It has been well said that the memory of races, like that of individual men, tenaciously and vividly retains the recollections of infancy, which become in each race the subjects of oral traditions and of songs and ballads, until at last they assume a mythic or symbolic form, presenting usually two different aspects, one exhibiting the migrations of the several tribes and their arrival in successive colonies; the other assigning to each race a paternal ancestor, whose name personifies that of the people, and from whom an ethnological genealogy connects their tribes as his children and the kinsfolk of each other.

The earliest British historian who treats of ethnology states that, according to Roman annals, the Britons deduce their origin from the Trojans; and that according to another account derived from ‘the ancient books of our ancestors’ and from ‘ancient tradition,’ Alanus, a descendant of Japheth, was the first man who dwelt in Europe; that he had three sons, Hisicion, Armenon, and Neugo; that Hisicion had four sons, three of them being Romanus, Brittus, called also Briutus and Brutus, and Albanus; that from each of these sons sprang a distinct people, Brittus being the progenitor of the Britons, and Albanus of the Albans.