home, and speedily christened the tavern and the
hill after his name. In time, a village grew about
the wine-shop; and then arose the fortification
which gave the French so much trouble in the
Crimean war. Such, at least, is the narrative
which was put forth at the time by the Gazette
de France.

The etymology of the name of our island—
Britain— suggests some curious considerations.
The origin of the word seems to be lost in the
remoteness of antiquity— a fact which brings
very forcibly before the mind the singular union
in this country of the most ancient traditions
with the most vigorous manifestations of modern
life and civilisation. Authorities differ as to
the etymology of the name. Some say that
it is Syriac, and means " land of tin;" some
that it comes through a Greek channel from
the old Punic language, and has the same
signification; others, again, that we are to
seek its origin in the Hebrew word bara,
to create, which, under certain grammatical
modifications, also means " to divide, separate,
cut off." Shaw, in his History of Staffordshire,
says: " Dr. Boerhaave, fond of chemistry,
and willing to do honour to England, from
whence he had derived not a few guineas,
asserts that, in Chaldee and Syriac, Brachmanac
means both the kingdom of Jupiter and of
tin, which metal the chemists assigned to the
god; and that Britain may easily be derived
therefrom."

That the word, whatever its remote parentage,
comes to us from the aboriginal Celtic
inhabitants of this island, the ancestors of
the modern Welsh, seems pretty clear. In
Welsh, brith or brit signifies " divers colours,
spotted"— an allusion, as some maintain, to
the custom which the ancient Britons had of
staining their bodies with woad. Owen, in his
Welsh Dictionary, fetches the name from "Prydam
(pryd), exhibiting presence, or cognisance;
exhibiting an open or fair aspect; full of beauty,
well-seeming, beautiful; polished or civilised,
with respect to morals. Ynys Prydain, ' the fair
island,' ' the isle of Britain.' . . Before it was
inhabited, the Hord Gali used to call it, ' the
water-girt Green Plat;' after obtaining it, the
Honey Island; and, after Prydyn, son of Aez
the Great, had obtained it, the Isle of Prydyn."
The reader will of course exercise his judgment
in accepting derivations which rest on such
misty traditions; but it is amusing to note their
existence.

Another etymology is from a British compound
word, meaning " the top of the wave;"
and Armstrong, in his Gaelic Dictionary, favours
the supposition, and remarks that, " to perceive
the force of this, one has merely to imagine
himself viewing Britain across the Channel from
the north coast of France, whence came our
Celtic ancestors; that our island from that
quarter seems a low, dark line, lying along the
surface of the deep; and that no term could
have been found more descriptive of that appearance
than Bràith-tonn, or Braith-tuinn (pronounced
braitonn or braituinn), ' the land on
the top of the waves.' " Some etymologists, of
a poetical turn of mind, have derived the name
of our island from Brutus the Trojan, the fabulous
discoverer of the country, and founder of
the British monarchy and race. Of this same
Brutus, authentic history makes no mention;
but some enthusiastic Welshmen, even to this
day, contend for the truth of the narration.
For ourselves, we shall always look on the fable
with respect and affection, because it has been
irradiated by the genius of Spenser in the Faerie
Queene, and of Milton in his History of England.
Milton simply repeats the story for the
benefit of the poets, who, says he, will know
how to make use of it. From this fable of
Trojan Brutus, London derives its poetical name
of Troynovant— " New Troy."

And Troynovant was built of Old Troy's ashes cold,

says Spenser, in one of his fine, drowsy, murmuring
alexandrines. It is very pleasant to find
this modern London of ours, with its ever-augmenting
new streets of raw brick-and-mortar, its
manufactories, its steam-boats, its railways, and
its youthful energies unsurpassed by the newest
settlement in the Far West,— thus linked with
old-world dreams and fables, with the romance
of antiquity, and with the city of which Homer
sang, and whose very existence has been doubted
by recent inquirers. The story is that Brutus,
the great grandson of Æneas, fled into Italy,
some time after the capture of Troy by the
Greeks, and thence (being compelled by misfortune
to become once more a wanderer) took to
the open seas, and was directed, by a miraculous
vision of the goddess Diana, to a great island
in the north-west. Here he arrived in the
course of time, named it after himself, conquered
the giants by whom it had previously
been filled, and, together with his followers,
peopled it.

The etymology of the name London is equally
obscure with that of Britain; some dozen guesses
having been made by various philologists. There
is little doubt, however, that the word is British,
and very ancient, and that the Saxons only
adopted what they found ready to their hand.
A great many names of places in England and
Scotland are British, the old terms lingering,
and indeed obtaining a firm root, after the race
who originated them has given way to another
and more vigorous stock. In the same manner,
we find that in America the aboriginal Red Indian
names of places still exist in some instances,
though the Red Indians themselves are dying
out in the backwoods, and Smith, Brown,
Jones, and Robinson have long succeeded to
their lands.

Words are the most vital and the most
imperishable of man's creations. As they are
mysterious in their origin, so have they something
of an awful force and intensity of life,
which gives to them a perpetuity beyond the
decay of races and the revolutions of empires.
They spring from some primal instinct of
truth, some deep perception of human necessities;
and in the darkness of their