284 TIN TRADE BETWEEN BRITAIN AND ALEXANDRIA. 



cloister ; tliey are applicable also to some of the most authentic 

 historians of classic times. When Titus Livius relates the political 

 events of Roman history, we are disposed to j)lace reliance on 

 him. But when he tells us that in the year of Rome 538 an 

 "ox spoke" in Sicily, we pass over the incident without even 

 troubling ourselves to enquire what the animal said, or what 

 lang-uage or provincial dialect it employed as the vehicle of its 

 observations. And so it is when Ave turn over the ponderous 

 volumes (now exceeding fifty volumes folio, and still incomplete) 

 of those " Acts of the Saints " which are called, after the name of 

 one of the earliest editors, BoUandists. 



It is to one of these fifty volumes that I desire to draw your 

 attention respecting a matter of some interest in this county. 



We have all heard, till we are all well nigh tired of hearing, 

 the names of Strabo, Diodorus, and other Roman and Grseco- 

 Roman writers, who have told us of the Phoenician and Cartha- 

 ginian traffic with Britaili in tin. But from these writers, even 

 the latest of them, down to the 11th or 12th century, there is a 

 vast chasm of 800 years at least, in which a record of anything 

 like trustworthy facts in relation to the tin-trade must be admitted 

 to be exceedingly rare. Perhaps no one, who reads this, will be 

 able to point out, at the moment, a single instance of such a 

 record. 



The Collection to which I refer was not, I believe, regarded, 

 even by the compilers of it, as a series of unimpeachable bio- 

 graphies of those who are accepted as saintly persons by the 

 Church of Rome. The volumes are accomj)anied by critical ob- 

 servations on the narratives and their authors ; and I have reason 

 to believe that in most cases the miraculous agency attributed to 

 the Saints, whose lives are recorded in them, is matter on which 

 even an "orthodox" reader is at liberty to exercise his own 

 judgment. 



There are many points of local history in them to which modern 

 writers of intelligence have had no scruple to refer for illustration 

 of the political condition, the municij)al institutions, or the social 

 manners and customs, of times and peoples which have long dis- 

 appeared from our present geography, or memory, or have assumed 

 very different names or forms. Raynouard, in his history of the 

 municipal institutions of France, and, if I recollect rightly, the 



