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 forth with the most imperturbable seriousness, and with an air of complete assurance of the truth.  It appears, too, to have fully answered the purpose intended; and the Scots, finding that the papal antiquity was but a poor defence against such claims, and as if determined not to be outdone by the Southron, replied in a document asserting their independence by virtue of descent from Scota, one of the daughters of Pharaoh.  The pope seems to have been silenced in a conflict of ancestral authority, in which the succession of St. Peter seemed quite a modern affair, when overshadowed, by such Trojan and Egyptian antiquity.

* * * * *

=_Caroline M. Kirkland, 1808-1864._= (Manual, p. 484.)

From “Forest Life.”

=_208._= THE FELLING OF A GREAT TREE.