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thwaite, dedicated in his name. An interesting story is told by 
the chroniclers, how the new bishop in his wanderings by Tweed- 
side, met Merlin, the famous seer of the age—who had been 
among the defeated pagan party at the battle—how he met him, 
and pressed upon him, but in vain, the claims of the new faith he 
had come to preach. Merlin, like many others, clung to his old 
gods, to the old superstitions in which he had been reared. He 
turned again to his native hills and dales for solace, and at length 
found his grave by Tweed, beneath an aged thorn tree, still, says 
Sir W. Scott, in his Scottish Minstrelsy, to be seen. There 
Is Merlin prisoner till the judgment day. 
St. Kentigern himself was a follower of the great Scotch Saint 
Columba; and the influence of that great teacher never reached 
much further south than it did in the 6th and 7th centuries. It was 
rolled back in the end by that other tide of teaching which came 
from Rome with St. Augustine; but the Border was the barrier 
once again, and so you have in these early events the germ of the 
distinction, that to-day exists between Presbyterian Scotland and 
Episcopal England. 
It would be quite impossible for any but a profound antiquary 
—and I have no pretension to be such—to steer you through the 
various conflicting struggles between the different races and nation- 
alities, which strove together on the Border from the 7th to the 
roth century. I don’t know that even they always make it very 
clear, even to each other, for antiquaries, I have observed, like 
doctors, sometimes differ. But it is not difficult to give you an 
idea of what was happening, to shew you how, out of this seething 
mass in constant contention and ever varying strife, sprang the 
Borderers as we find them in later days, having in them, and their 
habits, and their language, many traces of the old Cymric race, 
who had been the original possessors of the soil, but among whom 
had been introduced a large mixture of those other elements, which 
have united to form our English people. We are, as some one 
‘said the other day, a piebald mixture of peoples, and the Borderers 
are no exemption to the rule. We have the Anglo Saxon—what 
