THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
41 
chaff some grains of wheat may be winnowed. The story of Brutus 
appears to be one of these. " Stripped of the dress in which it was 
decked out by Geoffrey, improving on his predecessors; deprived 
of its false lustre of classicism ; cleared from the religious associa- 
tions of a later day — the myth of Brutus the Trojan loses its 
personality, but becomes the traditionary record of the earliest 
invasion of this land by an historic people, 1 who, in their assumed 
superiority, dubbed the less cultivated possessors of the soil, whose 
rights they invaded, ' giants,' and extirpated them as speedily as 
they knew how." 2 
We are now brought to the dawn of the Historic Period, to that 
shadowy frontier between the written and the unrecorded, where 
myth and legend find their most congenial home, and the air is 
peopled with a few gigantic shapes like the fabled Arthur and his 
famous knights, unsubstantial visions, never in one stay. 3 Hence- 
forward the historical student has a double duty — he must reject 
as well as accept, overturn as well as build, eliminate as well as 
gather. Our surest lights are still the material facts of Archaeology, 
which may indeed be misinterpreted, but themselves cannot lie. 
Though Herodotus and Aristotle mention the Cassiterides by 
name, and other writers of antiquity appear to allude to the 
British Isles, Diodorus Siculus is the first author who makes 4 
direct reference to this western peninsula. He describes, in words 
1 " The Myth of Brutus the Trojan." — Trans. Devon. Assoc. vol. xii. p. 570. 
The Totnes at which Brutus landed was not the modern town, but seems to 
have been ' ' an elder name for this England of ours than either the Britain 
of the later Kelts, or the Albion of the Romans." 
2 There does not appear sufficient evidence to pronounce who and what this 
people were. 
3 Tintagel, and Camelford, and Dozmare, notwithstanding, Arthur is an 
anachronism in history, as great as a pterodactyle would be in an aviary — the 
creation of a later age than that to which he is assigned ; the embodiment of 
the traditions, not of one British hero, but of many. He is the common 
property of the British Kelts in their dispersion, and is localised in so many 
places that he can find rest in none. Perhaps for the origin of the Arthurian 
myth we need not look beyond the monks of Glastonbury, who had a happy 
knack of finding whatever relics they might have in special need, and to 
whom was unquestionably due the allied myth of the Arimathean origin of 
their own Vetusta Ecclcsia, and thence of the whole British Church. I have 
no intention in saying this to disparage the undoubtedly unique antiquity of 
that famous foundation. 
4 Towards the close of the first century B.C. 
