By the Rev. A. C. Smith. 



107 



iif they did make mention of their distant markets, they overlaid 

 their accounts with such frightful pictures of the difficulties and 

 dangers to be encountered in those dreary latitudes, that they 

 repelled all other less daring adventurers, and thus the casual 

 mention of Britain we sometimes though rarely meet with in the 

 earliest Greek and Latin authors, almost always contains a descrip- 

 tion or an epithet attached to our island, little flattering to our 

 national vanity, 1 such as " barbarous," " inhospitable," " cruel," 

 |" dark," "dismal," and the like. 



But these allusions to Britain, in the earliest classical authors, 

 though extremely rare, are at the same time extremety valuable : 

 indeed, like the precious metals, they are valuable in proportion to 

 their rarity. I will not stop now to argue that Homer had a dim 

 perception of Britain, though we know that his knowledge of 

 general geography, beyond his own immediate locality, however 

 indistinct, not to say faulty, was not mere guess work, but founded 

 | on information derived through the Phoenicians: but I would 

 remark in passing as an antidote to the insulting epithets alluded 

 I to just now, that in Mr. Gladstone's though tfully conceived map 

 of the world as imagined by Homer, (accompanying his most able 

 work on the Homeric age,) the Ehysian fields, or the Islands of the 

 Blessed, 2 (the Paradise of the heathen world) are set down as 

 occupying in the mind of that chief of poets, the exact spot in 

 which we are so fortunate as to dwell. Homer flourished about 



The geographer Strabo relates that so great was the caution in this respect, 

 used by the Phoenicians, that the master of one of their vessels, seeing himself 

 pursued by a Roman, for the purpose of discovering his place of trade, ran his 

 own vessel on shore ; that of the Romans followed, and both were lost ; but the 

 Phoenician was indemnified for his loss out of the public treasury, and applauded 

 for his discretion and courage. [Strabo, iii., 175.] Sir R. Hoare's Ancient 

 Wilts, i., 10. 



Strutt's Chronicles of England, vol. i.. p. 1. 



Lingard's History of England, vol. i., p. 11. 



Tyrrell's History of England, vol. i., p. 3. 



Sharon Turner's History of England, vol. i., p. 50. 



1 Humes' History of England, chap. i. 

 Horace Odes, book iii., 4, 33. 



2 Selden thought that our islands were the "Fortunate Islands" of the Greeks. 

 [See Higgins' Celtic Druids, p. 80.] Speed's Historie of Great Britaine, p. 3. 



