PREFACE. THE so obscure, that each attempt to rescue any portion of its traditions, and to give confirmation to the conjectures or the ascertained facts of previous investigators must be acceptable, one would presume, to the enquirer after historical truth. History of our own country by contemporaneous writers, until within a comparatively recent period, we may be literally said to have none; and the traditional accounts of our early ancestors which we derive from Nennius (or whoever may have been the author of the work which passes under his name), are so brief and obscure, so wanting in confirmation, that every additional evidence which we may be enabled to bring forward, cannot be otherwise than valuable: while the history of Geoffry of Monmouth and of other monkish writers are so long subsequent to the facts and circumstances which they pretend to relate, and so frequently filled with fable, that it is difficult to decide what to receive and what to reject. Where direct testimony cannot be had, circumstantial evidence, when surrounded by numerous circumstances, probabilities, and occasionally even of possibilities, may well be accepted, as being as near an approach to truth as we may be enabled to arrive at; and perhaps a vast number of circumstances culmi nating to one and the same point, may be received as better evidence than the single unsupported testimony of any individual author. Scientific investigation has made great progress of late years; archæological discoveries are more noted and appreciated than formerly; there is greater interchange of discovery and of opinion; different sciences are now called in to render a mutual aid in enabling us to work out the problem of the history of the human race, of which each individual nation forms a component part, and of which, therefore, none should be overlooked. Foreign travel, the study of language, the discoveries made by the spade and pickaxe of the antiquary, geology, anatomy, craniology, the collateral history of other nations are all helping on an enquiry which either of them alone would be insufficient to solve. Whatever, therefore, may tend to elucidate the history of our own country, however feeble, in whatever respect it succeeds, may be taken as supplying an additional stone to the building up of our historical edifice. The writer of these pages, fully impressed with the difficulty of his subject, fully aware also that some of the views advanced will clash with the suggestions of other writers, and may perhaps be considered by cursory readers as fanciful and visionary, sees nevertheless such a remarkable concurrence of striking ideas apparently converging to the same end, that he does not hesitate to place them before the public, as courting further enquiry. He desires that these pages shall be taken as pre |