By MRS. E. BOGER.
The author has somewhat departed from her original intention of making
a collection of the myths and legends of Somerset. Unwittingly fiction
glided into fact, and the story developed into history, and it was
found difficult, if not impossible, to define their respective limits.
For instance, though Arthur is an impalpable and shadowy personage,
while Alfred is a most real and substantial one, yet the mingling of
truth and fable in the story of each--as connected with Somerset--is
only one of degree; and even in later times, myth is so intertwined
with the lives of St. Dunstan, of Sir John de Courcy, of Roger Bacon,
&c., that, if one tries rudely to tear away the accretions of myth and
fable, a maimed and distorted picture is all that is left.
Among the legends of Saints are some of rare beauty, full of earnest
thought and quaint suggestiveness. It has been endeavoured to show
that, instead of being, as they are generally and conveniently
classed--with a charming simplicity--as the “lying inventions of the
monks,” they are in most cases but the loving exaggerations of a simple
age, to which every unexplained wonder was a miracle.
Some of the articles may be thought to be of undue length; but St.
Dunstan is a character so strangely misrepresented in most histories,
that the author was anxious to prove incontestably his claim to be one
of the worthiest of the worthies of Somerset; again, as to the unhappy
Duke of Monmouth, though the story of his rebellion is of necessity
taken chiefly from Macaulay, the story of his quasi-royal progress is
little known, and Macaulay studiously omits any palliating or softening
circumstance in the terrible record of the battle of Sedgmoor and the
Bloody Assize.
_In Preparation._