London / by Walter Besant.

  • Walter Besant
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: London / by Walter Besant. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to spend a day or two with a young man of the present day. Those who were neither rich nor free lived hardly, as they do to this day, but more hardly ; those who were young and strong, even though they were not perhaps trained to the use of arms, easily learned how to use them, and when it came to victory or death they soon recovered the old British spirit This is not the place, otherwise it would be interesting to show what a long and gallant stand was made by these people whom it is customary to call cowardly and luxurious—these ancestors of the gallant Welsh.1 It is manifest that a period of two hundred years and more of peace, almost profound, their frontiers and their coasts guarded for them by the legions of Rome, must have lowered the British spirit. But the ROMAN MARBLE SARCOPHAGUS (Guildhall) people quickly recovered it. The Arthurian epic, it is certain, has plenty of foundation in fact, and perhaps poor King Cuneglass himself, the Bear and Butcher, wielded a valiant sword in spite of his family troubles. The Britons were, it is quite certain, prone to internal dissensions, which greatly assisted their defeat and conquest. But they had one bond of union. Their enemies were pagan ; they were Christian. Gildas addresses a nation of Christians, not a Church planted among idolaters. Christian symbols and emblems have been found everywhere on the site of Roman towns, not, it is true, in large quantities, but they are found ; while, though altars have also been found, and pagan emblems and statuettes of 1 See The Two Lost Centuries of Britain, by W. H. Babcock. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1890; an excellent little work on this subject.
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