HISTORY AND THE PARISH 151 



Out of a whole century or age we remember nothing 

 vividly and in a manner that appeals to the eye, except 

 some such picture as that which Gerald of Wales gives 

 of a Welsh prince, Cyneuric, son of Rhys. He was tall 

 and handsome, fair-complexioned, his hair curled; his 

 dress was a thin cloak, and under that a shirt, his legs 

 and feet being bare, regardless of thistle and brier; a man 

 to whom nature and not art had given his beauty and 

 comely bearing. Outside Wales, and in ages far removed 

 from the twelfth century, this figure of a man will follow 

 us, and help to animate any wild scene that is coloured by 

 antiquity. It is some such man, his fair hair perhaps 

 exchanged for black, and his nobility more animal and 

 clothed in skins, that we see, if we see a man at all, when 

 we muse deeply upon the old road worn deep into the 

 chalk, among burial mound and encampment; we feel 

 rather than see the innumerable companies of men like 

 this, following their small cattle to the stream or the dew- 

 pond, wearing out the hard eartK with their naked feet 

 and trailing ash staves. Going up such a road, between 

 steep banks of chalk and the roots and projecting bases 

 of beeches whose foliage meets overhead a road worn 

 twenty feet deep, and now scarce ever used as a footpath 

 except by fox and hare we may be half-conscious that 

 we have climbed that way before during the furrowing 

 of the road, and we move as in a dream between this age 

 and that dim one which we vainly strive to recover. 



But because we are imperfectly versed in history, we are 

 not therefore blind to the past. The eye that sees the 

 things of to-day, and the ear that hears, the mind that 

 contemplates or dreams, is itself an instrument of an 

 antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to appre- 



