St | 
69 
—when he had neither time, nor inclination, nor inducement, to 
utter anything but that which he strongly and intensely felt. “ Early 
poets,” says Sir Walter Scott, “almost uniformly display a bold, 
rude original cast of genius and expression. They have walked at 
free will, and with unconstrained steps along the wilds of Parnassus, 
while their followers move with constrained gestures and forced 
attitudes to avoid placing their feet, where their predecessors have 
stepped before them.” Such ballads are the very outcome of the 
people’s life, they breathe their spirit, record the incidents that 
most thrilled their hearts, and the sentiments and emotions that 
inspired them. And there is no reason to believe that the old 
Cymri, who stand out upon the threshold of our history, 
who loved their native hills, and dales, and streams, and 
fought for them so stoutly against the various invaders that sought 
to dispossess them, had less of those sentiments and emotions than 
other early races, or were less able to throw them into the sort of 
rude rhythms, that were then their only literature. 
At the close of the 11th century, the Normans, as you know 
established themselves in this country. They brought with them, 
both in Church and State, more developed ideas of law and 
government, and organization, than had been known before. Many 
Norman families settled here amongst us in the north; but I fear 
they did little to tranquilize the Border, and possibly only 
introduced another element of disturbance. It was still to remain 
for centuries to come, what it is described by an old chronicle of 
the day—‘“‘a certain district lying between England and Scotland” 
—claimed by both, the claim acknowledged by neither—fit nursing 
ground for the men 
Who stole the beeves to make their broth, 
From England and from Scotland both. 
At Carlisle we know the old Castle was erected to frown upon 
Northern invaders ; and by its side rose the Cathedral, to be the 
seat of the new Bishopric, which was soon to be established. But 
past them both, a long tide of invasion, from the one side and the 
other, must have flowed. Cumberland was Scottish almost as much 
