hartshorn; they prove this by the names of those places yet enduring, to wit, Attall-Sazarin; in English, the Jews' Offcast." Camden (p. 69) says: "We are taught from Diodorus and Ethicus, that the ancient Britons had worked hard at the mines, but the Saxons and Normans seem to have neglected them for a long time, or to have employed the labor of Arabs or Saracens, for the inhabitants call deserted shafts, Attall-Sarasin, i. e. the leavings of the Saracens." Thus then we have not only the Saracens in Cornwall admitted as simply a matter of history, but their presence actually used in order to prove that the Saxons and Normans neglected to work the mines in the West of England. A still more circumstantial account is given by Hals, as quoted by Gilbert in his Parochial history of Cornwall. Here we are told that King Henry III., by proclamation, let out all Jews in his dominions at a certain rent to such as would poll and rifle them, and amongst others, to his brother Richard, King of the Romans, who, after he had plundered their estates, committed their bodies as his slaves, to labor in the tin-mines of Cornwall; the memory of whose workings is still preserved in the names of several tin-works, called Towle Sarasin, and corruptly Attall Saracen i. e. the refuse or outcast of Saracens; that is to say, of those Jews descended from Sarah and Abraham. Other works were called Whele Etherson (alias Ethewon, the Jews' Works, or Unbelievers' Works, in Cor nish. Here we see how history is made; and if our inquiries led to no other resalt, they would still be useful as a warning against putting any implicit faith in the statements of writers who are separated by several centuries from the events they are relating. Here we have men like Carew and Camden, both highly cultivated, learned, and conscientious, and yet neither of them hesitating, in a work of an historical character, to assert as a fact, what, after making every allowance, can only be called a very bold guess. Have we any reason to suppose that Herodotus and Thucydides, when speaking of the original abodes of the various races of Greece, of their migra tions, their wars and final settlements, had better evidence before them, or were more cautious in using their evidence, than Camden and Carew? And is it likely that modern scholars, however learned and however careful, can ever arrive at really satisfactory. results by sifting and arranging and re-arranging the ethnological statements of the ancients, as to the original abodes or the later migrations of Pelasgians, and Tyrrhenians, Thracians, Macedonians, and Illyrians, or even of Dorians, Æolians. and Ionians? What is Carew's evidence in support of his statement that the Jews first worked the tin-mines of Cornwall? Simply the sayings of the people in Cornwall, who support their sayings by the name given to deserted mines, Attall Sazarin. Now admitting that Attall Sazarin or Attall Sarasin meant the refuse of the Saracens, how is it possible, in cold blood, to identify the Saracens with Jews, and where is there a tittle of evidence to prove that the Jews were the first to work these mines, mines, be it remembered, which, according to the same Carew, were certainly worked before the beginning of our era? But leaving the Jews of the time of Nero, let us examine the more definite and more moderate statements of Hall and Gilbert. According to them, the deserted shafts are called by a Cornish name, meaning the refuse of the Saracens, because, as late as the thirteenth century, the Jews were sent to work in these mines. It is difficult, no doubt, to prove a negative, and to show that no Jews ever worked in the mines of Cornwall. All that can be done, in a case like this, is to show that no one has produced an attom of evidence in support of Mr. Gilbert's opinion. The Jews were certainly ill-treated, plundered, tortured, and exiled during the reign of the Plantagenet kings; but that they were sent to the Cornish mines, no contemporary writer has ever ventured to assert. The passage in Matthew Paris, to which Mr. Gilbert most likely alludes, says the very contrary of what he draws from it. Matthew Paris says that Henry III. extorted money from the Jews, and that when they petitioned for a safe conduct, in order to leave England altogether, he sold them to his brother Richard, "ut quos Rex excoriaveret, Comes evisceraret."* But this selling of the Jews meant no more than that, in return for money advanced him by his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, the king pawned to him, for a number of years, the taxes, legitimate or illegitimate, which could be extorted from the Jews. That this was the real meaning of the bargain between the king and his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, can be proved by the document printed in Rymer's Fadera, vol. i. p. 543, "De Judæis Comiti Cornubia assignatis, pro solutione pecuniæ. sibi a Rege debitæ."† Anyhow, there is not a single word about the Jews having been sent to Cornwall, or having had to work in the mines. On the contrary, Mathew Paris says, Comes pepercit is, "the Earl spared them." After thus looking in vain for any truly historical evidence in support of Jewish settlements in Cornwall, I suppose they may in future be safely treated as a "verbal myth," of which there are more indeed, in different chapters of history, both ancient and modern, than is commonly supposed. As in Cornwall the name of a market has given rise to the fable of Jewish settlements, the name of another market in Finland led to the belief that there were Turks settled in that northern country. Abo, the ancient capital of Finland, was called Turku, which is the Swedish word torg, market. Adam, of Bremen, enumerating the various tribes adjoining the Baltic, mentions Turci among the rest, and these Turci were by others mistaken for Turks.‡ Even after such myths have been laid open to the very roots, there is a strong tendency not to drop them altogether. Thus Mr. H. Merivale is far too good an historian to admit the presence of Jews in Cornwall as far back as the destruction of Jerusalem. He knows there is no evidence for it, and he would not repeat a mere fable, however plausible. * Mathew Paris, Opera, ed. Wats, p 902. † See Reymeri Fœdera, A.D. 1255, tom. i. p. .543. See Adam Bremensis' De Situ Daniæ, ed. Lindenbruch, p. 136; Buckle's History of Civilization, vol. i. p. 275. Carew, Survey (ed. 1602), p. 8; "and perhaps under one of those Flavians, the Jewish workmen made here their first arrival.” Is Yet Marazion and the Jews' houses evidently linger in his memory, and he throws out a hint that they may find an historical explanation in the fact that under the Plantagenet kings the Jews commonly farmed or wrought the mines. there any contemporary evidence even for this? I do not think so. Dr. Borlase, indeed, in his Natural History of Cornwall (p. 190), says, "In the time of King John, I find the product of tin in this county very inconsiderable, the right of working for tin being as yet wholly in the king, the property of tinners precarious and unsettled, and what tin was raised was engrossed and managed by the Jews, to the great regret of the barons and their vassals." It is a pity that Dr. Borlase should not have given his authority, but there is little doubt that he simply quoted from Carew. Carew tells us how the Cornish gentlemen borrowed money from the merchants of London, giving them tin as security (p. 14); and though he does not call the merchants Jews, yet he speaks of them as usurers, and of their "cut throate and abominable dealing." He continues afterwards, speaking of the same usurers (p. 16), "After such time as the Jewes by their extreme dealing had worne themselves, first out of the love of the English inhabitants, and afterwards out of the land itselfe, and so left the mines unwrought, it hapned, that certaine gentlemen, being lords of seven tithings in Blackmoore, whose grounds were best stored with this minerall, grewe desirous to renew this benefit," &c. To judge from several indications, this is really the passage which Dr. Borlase had before him when writing of the Jews as engrossing and managing the tin that was raised, and in that case neither is Carew a contemporary witness, nor would it follow from what he says, that one single Jew ever set foot on Cornish soil, or that any Jew ever tasted the actual bitterness of working in the mines. Having thus disposed of the Jews, we now turn to the Saracens in Cornwall. We shall not enter upon the curious and complicated history of that name. It is enough to refer to a short note in Gibbon, in order to show that Saracen was * Gibbon, cap. i. The name which, used by a name known to Greeks and Romans, long before the rise of Islam, but never applied to the Jews by any writer of authority, not even by those who saw in the Saracens "the children of Sarah." What, then, it may be asked, is the origin of the expression Attal Sarasin in Cornwall? Attal, or Atal, is a Cornish word, the Welsh Athail, and means refuse. As to Sarasin, it is most likely another Cornish word, which, by a metamorphic process, has been slightly changed in order to yield some sense intelligible to Saxon speakers. We find in Cornish tarad, meaning a piercer, a borer; and, in another form, tardar is distinctly used, together with axe and hammer, as the name of a mining implement. The Latin taratrum, Gr. réperpov, Fr. tariere, all come from the same source. If from tarad we form a prual, we get taradion. In modern Cornish we find that d sinks down to 8, which would give us taras, and plural tarasion. Next, the final of atal may, like several final l's in the closely allied language of Brittany, have infected the initial t of tarasion, and changed it to th, which th, again, would, in modern Cornish, sink down to s.† Thus atal tharasin might have been intended for the refuse of the borings, possibly the refuse of the mines, but pronounced in Saxon fashion it might readily have been mistaken for the Atal or refuse of the Sarasion or Saracens. Ptolemy and Pliny in a more confined, by Ammianus and Procopius in a larger sense, has been derived, ridiculously, from Sarah, the wife of Abraham, obscurely from the village of Saraka, more plausibly from the Arabic words, which signify a thievish character, or Oriental situation. Yet the last and most popular of these etymologies is refuted by Ptolemy, who expressly remarks the western and southern position of the Saracens, then an obscure tribe on the borders of Egypt. The appellation cannot therefore allude to any national character; and, since it was imported by strangers, it must be found, not in the Arabic, but in a foreign language. "It may be given as a rule, without exception, that words ending with t or d in Welsh or Briton, do, if they exist in Cornish, turn t or d to 8."-Norris, vol, ii. p. 237. "The frequent use of th instead of s shows that (in Cornish) the sound was not so definite as in English."-bid. vol. ii. p. 224. London Quarterly. ARCHIVES DE LA BASTILLE.* "ONE day Voiture met in the street of St. Thomas du Louvre, a couple of bear-wards, with their muzzled beasts. What did he do but bring the whole following into the Hotel Rambouillet, and make the animals walk up stairs right into the room where the lady of the house was reading with her back to the screen. She heard a noise, turned round, and saw two big brown monsters standing up close behind her." "There," says M. Clèment, "is a true picture of those good old-world manners which it took all the efforts of Richelieu and his successors down to Colbert to civilize." Alas for old French politeness, and for the courtesy based on the so-called maxims of chivalry. French politeness is found on investigation to be an outgrowth of absolute monarchy, springing up (so to speak) from the grave of that feudalism which in common language we so erroneously identify with chivalry. The fact is, chivalry is antecedent, as well as diametrically opposite, to feudalism. The system which strove to put the law of honor in the place of the law of brute force, to support the weak against the strong, to teach self-restraint and real nobleness, has nothing in common with that worst of despotisms, the despotism of a crowd of petty tyrants, which resulted from the invasion of the German tribes. We err in imagining, because our own country, where divers races are happily kneaded together, has long set the world a pattern of freedom, that German and freeman are interchangeable terms. The state of Germany up to the time of the French Revolution, the feudalism still existing there, and the singular inaptitude for self-government 1. Archives de la Bastille. Documents Inédits, Recueillis et Publiés par FRANCOIS RAVAISSON, Conservateur-adjoint à la Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. Règne de Louis XIV. (16591661). Paris: Durand et Pedone-Lauriel. 1866. 2. La Police sous Louis XIV. Par PIERRE CLEMENT, Didier, de l'Institut. Paris: 1866. 3. France under Richelieu and Colbert. By J. H. BRIDGES, M.B., late Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas. 1866. which the Germanic race has always shown, might have taught us differently. The error goes a long way back. The other day the Spectator, speaking of king Arthur, descanted on "the strange way in which Teutons have taken a Celtic hero and made him the central figure in the chivalry which they (the Teutons) invented." That is how we all talk, forgetting that chivalry is of the Celts! that, long before there was anything like knighthood in "Teutonic" Europe, Brittany was the land of knights errant, and Ireland had its glorious "knights of the red branch." We shall very probably find that the ogres against whom knights everywhere made war were great feudal lords, given to eat up the possessions of their neighbors. There never was the least approach to chivalry in Saxon England, though feudalism had, under slightly different forms, saturated the whole system of Anglo Saxon tenures. And when feudalism became all through Europe the order of the day, knighthood necessarily underwent an entire change. Old names were indeed kept up, but the spirit was gone. It was no longer a system for upholding the right against overmastering violence, for "redressing human wrongs;" it was the burlesque of true knighthood, kept up for the pleasure and profit of the privileged class. All who were not noble were canaille, for whom the nobles had no care nor concern, and who repaid their ill-treatment by jacqueries. Even to one another knights and nobles were not always courteous and kind. Richard I., the preux chevalier of his day, hanged all the garrison of the castle of Chaluz, reserving only Bertrand de Gourdon, who had shot him, for a still harsher fate. Edward III. having grudgingly let off the six burghers, and turned out all the inhabitants of Calais, actually imprisoned the garrison which had made such an heroic defence. There is nothing over which time has thrown a more deceptive "glamour than the chivalry of feudal times. Cruel, as well as depraved and grossly vicious, we shall find that society to have been, the moment we look beneath the external splendor which has so long dazzled us. In Germany, knighthood, even in the latter sense of the word, never found a congenial home. France was the counFrance was the coun try of its full development; the reason being that France was acted on by non German elements-Provence at one end and Brittany at the other. And, even in France, first Teuton feudalism and then the savagery of the religious wars had so thoroughly rubbed off the polish of pseudo-chivalry, that Voiture's conduct is a fair sample of the way noblemen and gentlemen behaved in those days. Hear what Mademoiselle de Montpensier tells us about the great Condé, how, during the street-fighting at the Porte St. Antoine, he rushed into the presence of "la grande Mademoiselle," dusty and bloodstained as he was, his hair rough, his sword without a scabbard. This was as late as 1652. M. Ravaisson, too, as well as M. Clément has his budget of stories illustrating the wildness and coarse licence so general during the earlier half of the seventeenth century. We know of no time like it except that just before '98, when Irish squires lived in a strange fools' paradise; and when drinking, dueling, and running off with heiresses were the order of the day. This last was quite a "vice of the age" among Frondeurs, as well as among the Irish squires. A nobleman could always get his friends and relations to help him; they made up a troop, and rode to the lady's castle. If her servants resisted, they were killed then and there, and the lady, carried to some neighboring house, was married at once in spite of all her protests. Nor was the man who had figured in an abduction looked upon by people in fashion as in any degree compromised. Worse, indeed, by far, than Irish society of the last century, was French society as Louis XIV. found it. For, beside the reckless violence which was common to both, there existed in France a gross licentiousness-" a tradition, (says M. Ravaisson) from the evil days of the Valois "— which polluted the springs of domestic life, and also an Italian maliciousness which showed itself in the poisonings so frequent, as to have given a character to "the times of Brinvilliers." Hired bravos, swash bucklers, like those who were the originals of Shakespeare's "ruffians," abounded. So did cheats at cards. Men ". like De Grammont cheated, and actually boasted that they took that way of "setting their luck right;" yet nobody thought of excluding them from society for so doing. It was a bad time, and sharp remedies were needed if society was to be saved from falling to pieces. The Bastille was (says the modern French school) the grand agent in the hands of Louis XV. and his ministers, for effecting a reform which was necessary, unless ⚫ France was to drop back socially to the unprogressive grossness of that loose gang of German states, to which the Fronde party would fain have assimilated her politically. There were other civilizing influences at work; the queen mother, accustomed to the elaborate courtesy of her Spanish countrymen, did a good deal to form the manners of those about her; and the "Précieuses," laugh at them as we may, made decent conversation possible; the king himself set an example of refinement, the value of which may be estimated by comparing him to many of his great nobles. But chastisement was needed as well as example, and the Bastille gave, when the police of the country had been well centralized, just what was needed for crushing extraordinary offenders. That is M. Ravaisson's view. He is so determined to show that the Bastille does not deserve the illname which it has got, that we might almost fancy that he has been taking a lesson of Mr. Froude, and, improving on his example, has set to work to justify the instruments of oppression, exactly as his instructor is fond of justifying the oppressors themselves. Nothing can mark more strongly the radical difference between the way in which most Frenchmen and most Englishmen look at things, than the passage in which the Bastille is glorified, because it is "something in reserve, whereby precautionary measures may be taken as quietly as possible; laurre caché du pouvoir, in fact, by which the internal administration of the country is conducted." Fancy any one claiming such titles for our Tower of London. We are almost ashamed of the way in which Elizabeth used, or abused, it; and yet no one had more excuse than she had for "taking her precautions" quickly yet summarily. From this deep-seated unlikeness between the nations it comes to pass that while our working against feudalism has been gradual, from the severe measures of Henry VII. on through the days of the Long Parliament, and downwards till the time of the Reform Bill, France has moved in a spasmodic way, getting on by fits and starts, and making (amongst others) one grand protest against feudalism in Louis XIV.'s day, a protest the reaction against which brought about the Revolution. These sudden and violent protests can only be carried out by these exceptional agencies-"terribles moyens de salut public." M. Ravaisson calls them-which our law-loving nature has always led us to distrust, whatever temporary good they might seem to promise. With Frenchmen the case is otherwise; and M. Ravaisson reminds us how Colbert's lieutenant of police, whose creation he calls a master-stroke of policy, has survived all the revolutions. He might have added that, though the Bastille was swept away, the "cachet "-solitary confinement for political offenses-proposed by the liberty-loving chiefs of the Convention, was something far more terrible than the system of lettres de cachet" and that during the present régime the Mazas prison and Cayenne have answered very well as that œuvre caché," without which it seems, "le pouvoir" cannot get on in France. Premising so much about the object of M. Ravaisson's book, which we might almost call "A Plea for the Bastille," let us briefly state how the book came to be written, and what the author tells us about the great fortress-prison whose name has become a sort of socio-political bugbear. There have been books about the Bastille before, based also on authentic documents; for, when the place was taken in 1789, all the papers were thrown into the courtyards, and left for several days exposed to chance pillagers. Speculators in autographs hung about, pocketing anything that seemed valuable; soldiers and national guards put heaps of records under their camp kettles; and, no doubt, a good deal of valuable matter had been lost before; on the 16th of July, Dessaulx and three other commissioners were appointed by the committee of the Hotel de Ville to carry what papers remained to the "provisional dépôt of archives," in the Abbey of St. Germain in the Fields. Those who remember Carlyle's graphic narrative will readily understand that the crowd-" a living |