Twickenham, June 8th, 1747.
To the Hon. H. S. Conway.
You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left my tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs. Chevenix’s shop, and the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows with filagree hedges:
A small Euphrates through the place is roll’d,
And little finches wave their wings of gold.Two delightful roads; that you would call dusty, supply me continually with coaches and chaises: barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope’s ghost is just now skimming under my window by the most poetical moonlight. … The Chevenixes had tricked it out for themselves; up two pairs of stairs is what they call Mr. Chevenix’s library, furnished with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton and a lame telescope without any glasses. Lord John Sackville predeceased me here and instituted certain games called cricketalia, which has been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.
You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all tranquility while a Parliament is bursting about my ears. You know it is going to be dissolved. … They say the Prince has taken up two hundred thousand pounds, to carry elections which he won’t carry—he had much better have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen.
There you have Horatio Walpole, the man-about-town, almost precisely echoing Horatius Flaccus, the man-about-town; and this (if you will bring your minds to it) is just the sort of passage a Roman colonist in Britain would open upon, out of his parcel of new books, and read, and understand, some eighteen hundred years ago.
What became of it all?—of that easy colonial life, of the men and women who trod those tessellated pavements? “Wiped out,” say the historians, knowing nothing, merely guessing: for you may with small trouble assure yourselves that the fifth and sixth centuries in the story of this island are a blind spot, concerning which one man’s guess may be as good as another’s. “Wiped out,” they will commonly agree; for while, as I warned you in another lecture, the pedantic mind, faced with a difficulty, tends to remove it conveniently into a category to which it does not belong, still more prone is the pedantic mind to remove it out of existence altogether. So “wiped out” is the theory; and upon it a sympathetic imagination can invent what sorrowful pictures it will of departing legions, the last little cloud of dust down the highway, the lovers by the gate watching it, not comprehending; the peaceful homestead in the background, ripe for doom—and whatnot.
Or, stay! There is another theory to which the late Professor Freeman inclined (if so sturdy a figure could be said to incline), laying stress on a passage in Gildas, that the Romans in Britain, faced by the Saxon invader, got together their money, and bolted away into Gaul. “The Romans that were in Britain gathered together their gold-hoard, hid part in the ground and carried the rest over to Gaul,” writes Gildas. “The hiding in the ground,” says Freeman, “is of course a guess to explain the frequent finding of Roman coins”—which indeed it does explain better than the guess that they were carried away, and perhaps better than the schoolboy’s suggestion that during their occupation of Britain the Romans spent most of their time in dropping money about. Likely enough, large numbers of the colonists did gather up what they could and flee before the approaching storm; but by no means all, I think. For (since, where all is uncertain, we must reason from what is probable of human nature) in the first place men with large estates do not behave in that way before a danger which creeps upon them little by little, as this Saxon danger did. These colonists could not dig up their fields and carry them over to Gaul. They did not keep banking accounts; and in the course of four hundred years their main wealth had certainly been sunk in the land. They could not carry away their villas. We know that many of them did not carry away the tessellæ for which (as we have seen) they had so peculiar a veneration; for these remain. Secondly, if the colonists left Britain in a mass, when in the middle of the sixth century we find Belisarius offering the Goths to trade Britain for Sicily, as being “much larger and this long time subservient to Roman rule,”13 we must suppose either (as Freeman appears to suppose) that Belisarius did not know what he was offering, or that he was attempting a gigantic “bluff,” or lastly that he really was offering an exchange not flatly derisory; of which three possible suppositions I prefer the last as the likeliest. Nor am I the less inclined to choose it, because these very English historians go on to clear the ground in a like convenient way of the Celtic inhabitants, exterminating them as they exterminated the Romans, with a wave of the hand, quite in the fashion of Mr. Podsnap. “This is un-English: therefore for me it merely ceases to exist.”
“Probable extirpation of the Celtic inhabitants” jots down Freeman in his margin, and proceeds to write:
In short, though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extinguished as a nation could be. The
