events of the morning to a Protestant fellow-
countryman, a clergyman who had not
accompanied us to the mass, and whose blue eye
twinkles with fun as he listens to the comments
of the youth. "I thought the queen looked
uneasy, poor thing! She was not frightened,
no, but flurried." "Is it flurried? My dear
sir, flurried? You'd as asily flurry a beefsteak."
With the roar which greeted this unpoetic but
singularly appropriate simile I terminate my
reminiscences of Athens.

NAMES OF ENGLISH RIVERS.

IT was from Grimson's farm, in a wild and
lonely part of Cumberland, near the Fells, that
I drove one morning last February with my
friend the antiquarian and etymologist to Burd-
Oswald. At Burd-Oswald, there is most to be
seen of the remains of the old Roman wall. There
are ramparts, ten or twelve tiers of which are
still standing, half-demolished corner-towers,
broken hypocausts, fragments of gateways, doors,
and windows. But the grass grows over the
threshold where the war-chariots once rattled,
and the fox hides in the bath-rooms of the
proconsul. The quern that once held the
centurion's wheat is now choked with moss, and
the rude stone altars are spotted with the grey
lichen. Amid these ruins, where the Roman
eagle was once planted to scare back the savage
and half-clothed Scot, we spent a long day
rambling and musing, and at night slept in the
adjacent farm-house. Before a huge peat-fire
we sat examining the farmer's collection, the
bronze handle of a Roman sword terminating in
a bull's-head, little bronze mannikins representing
household deities, boars' tusks, and other
antiquities. All these exhausted, Grimson
began on his favourite subject of etymology,
and from discussing the boat-headed race, and
the Picts, and the aborigines before the Celt,
and the Dane and the Norman, we fell upon
derivations.

Now Grimson had been busy tracing the
derivations of the names of our English rivers
back to the Celtic, the Norse, or even the
old Sanscrit, and he had some notes about his
recent labours then in his great-coat pocket. So
I pressed him to read them, and, lighting my
cigar and filling my glass with toddy, not only
prepared to listen, but took a sheet of paper and
made some notes of what he read me. Believing
these notes to be too curious to be allowed to
perish, I here, by Grimson's leave, append them,
with a few preliminary remarks:

When the etymologist, hunting a word through
the thorny thickets of many Indo-Germanic
languages, brings it to bay at last, and finally runs
it to death in the Sanscrit, he feels a delight
keener than that of the fox-hunter—keener,
because the pleasure, though less robust, is one
more intellectual and refined. When, therefore,
my friend Grimson, after cutting and cutting,
traces a nerve of the root of a Saxon word
through chest and heart up to its grey ganglion
in the brain of the early Norse, he is as happy
as a miner when he meets with a lode. The
happiest day of Grimson's life was, I believe,
when he discovered that the river Humber
derived its grand old name from the Sanscrit
word ambu (water), and the river Otter its title
from the Sanscrit ud (also water). He felt then
that he had widened our knowledge of the
English language, and classified one more clue to
the Oriental origin of the European races.

The names of the English rivers were often
given to them by the pre-Celtic races. These
names, rude and simple, are like fossils, for
they remain unaltered: incontestable proofs
of certain ethnic epochs and certain national
changes. They exist, but they are not of the
present day, and have no more in common
with the substance they are embedded in, than a
bullet has with the soldier's leg that receives it.
Yet these words of bygone races are, like fossils,
of extreme interest and value. There they are,
and they must be accounted for; they are nearly
all that we know for certain, of those early
tenants of the land; they might have lived in
the historic times, but whoever and whenever
they were, they used words that came
originally from the strange land which thousands
of years after their descendants conquered and
held.

My friend Grimson divides the derivations of
names of rivers into seven classes. 1. Those
which describe the river simply and abstractedly
as the water. 2. Those which describe it as
violent, gentle, wide, or sluggish. 3. Those
which describe a river by its course, as winding,
straight, or crooked. 4. Those which refer to
the quality of its waters as clear, bright, dark,
or turbid. 5. Those which refer to the sound
made by its waters. 6. Those which refer to its
source or the manner of its formation. 7. Those
which refer to it as a boundary or a protection.

Of the first simple and more barbaric class,
which includes mere appellatives, are many
English rivers whose names end in "a" and "ew," as
the Rotha and the Caldew. The Avon that
wanders by the church where Shakespeare lies
buried, owes its name to the old Celtic word
avon (water), the Gothic, ahva. The
Devonshire Anne, the Cumberland Eheu, and
the Cornish Inney, owe their origin to the same
simple source; while the Scotch Bannock and
Errick, like the Berkshire Ock and the Devonshire
Oke, were christened from the obsolete
Gaelic word oich, signifying also water. From
the Sanscrit ambu (water) flows as it were
the Berkshire Emme, the Humber, the Mole,
that mysterious stream in Surrey, and the
Staffordshire Hamps: all expressing what the
Sanscrit root of ambu does—movement, the
most wonderful thing about water being its
involuntary movement and inner life.

It is to the Celts we are indebted for that
dangerous gift whisky; to them too we owe its
name, which means water, from the Welsh wysg,
water. From this root come the names of
many rivers, as the Devonshire Axe, the