Well, I have now in my thoughts to write a letter, to be sent to Dr. Philipps and Mr. Pegge, by way of reprisals. It is not fair I should always be on the defence. It is about some Saxon affair. If coughing and death do not interfere you shall have it soon. I am really very bad as to my health, and jogg on by mere dint of strength of spirits only. Many an heroe would have sunk under such infirmities. If the materials of my body will hold out, I am now in a fit humour to write what I know of natural philosophy and antiquities: for I am not fit for any active part of life, which requires strength and motion. For God's sake, make no excuses. The world wants to know what you know, and are capable of knowing in a more exquisite manner than others. You that are arm'd with all manner of weapons can fight with more effect than a poor fellow with twcca carn corn, let him be ever so willing. Such a one am I. God be with you.

"I am, yours sincerely,

"LEWIS MORRIS."

"Penbryn, July 27th, 1760.

"Dear Sir,-By the nature of things I expected this summer, after my illness last winter, to be in tolerable health; but so it is that, considering everything, I am really worse than ever. I cannot sit down for half an hour to write; I cannot walk about for want of breath. Tho' I endeavour to be with my haymakers hitherto, I can scarce be said to exist anywhere, and live merely by art. This is my case. The Herbert inscription was designed by a good hand, but murdered either by the stonecutter or the schoolmaster that copied it. I thank you for your translation of it. The original should be, I think, as I wrote it in the inclosed copy. Pray, let me hear how far you have gone with Camden.

"I am, yours, whilst

"LEWIS MORRIS."

"Penbryn, July 28th, 1760.

"Dear Sir,-The pleasure I had in meeting with agreement of sentiments with mine in perusing Dr. Philipps and Mr. Pegge's letters hath produced this. They had no occasion to apologize for taking copies of mine provided they go no farther. What I wrote in my late letters was an answer to some doubts of theirs about our ancient British antiquities, which was intirely within mine own sphere, and within my depth, having made it my study for many years, and consequently, I ought to be a tolerable master of it, having come at such materials and opportunities as but few men have met with, some lucky accidents conspiring to bring these things together. But as for my performing what they so earnestly wish-a translation of Tyssilio's British History-it is very uncertain, tho' I have been providing materials this 35 years. I thank Mr. Pegge for his hint about the giants. What I write now is, in a manner, out of my depth, and I apply to them as men of learning, as I was applied to as a Cambrian antiquary. I have met with I think a British MS., a very great curiosity, which regards the English more than the Welsh. The Teutonic language and its branches is what I never made my study, except by a transient view of it, as it is pretty much mixed in ancient time with the Celtic. The Celtic in all its branches, the Welsh, Erse, Armoric and Cornish, has been my study from my childhood, and for which I have the strongest inclination; but I never had proper materials or opportunities to study the Teutonic; and the slips of Mr. Camden, and his followers, who pretended to etymologize the British tongue, is a sufficient caveat for me not to meddle or pretend to any extraordinary knowledge in the Saxon, Danish, or any branch of the Teutonic language, which I do not perfectly understand. This must be left to the learned English, the descendants of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans, who have MSS. in plenty of the Teutonic language in their

public libraries, and the observations of learned men upon them, which I never saw. This is an advantage the English antiquaries have: they are many in number, and they have materials in great plenty, as far back as the time of Bede, who I reckon as their first author of whom we can be certain. My meeting with this MS., of which I shall give some account by and bye, confirms me in the opinion I have been long of, that the people of Germany, and all the North about the Baltic, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, spoke the same language (the Teutonic), except a colony of Cimbrians, that once inhabited the Cimbric Chersonnesus, who in process of time mixed with our unconquered North Albanian Britons, and incorporated themselves together under the name of Brython, (called) by Latin writers, Picti, by the English called Pights, and by the Welsh, Pichtiaid, but by their own people, Brython, derived from the Celtic Brith, particularised as their own poet Myrddin ap Morfryn, the Caledonian testifies

'Brython dros Saesson Brithwyr ai medd'.

Hoianan Myrddin.

Our Tyssilio also gives us a hint of this incorporation, and the reason of it, as doth the Triades, so that the Pictish tongue, the language of these Cimbrian sea-rovers was Celtic, and nearly related to the British, tho' Bede, who was a stranger to both, thought otherwise; but the rest of the nations about the Baltic were certainly Teutons, and were, as we find in old MSS., called by the Britons Llychlymwyr, i.e., Llychlyn men, and so to this day we, in Wales, call the inhabitants of Norway and Sweden; and the Irish call them Lochlonnach; but the ancient Irish made a distinction between some of the sea-rovers which came from those parts. The Danes they called Dubhlochlonnach, i.e., Black Lochlyn men, and some other nation, the Finlanders perhaps, Fionlochlonnach, i.e., White Lochlyn men. The word Lochlon

nach among the Irish signifies also a mariner in general; but their antiquaries don't know the derivation of it to be from those Lochlyn men's being formerly masters of the sea; and this also gives a reason why our old English writers calls the Danes the Black Nation, and the Black Army. Llychlyn is an ancient British word, compounded of Lewch and Llyn. Lum in Irish is standing water; in Welsh, a lake or pool is called Llynn, so that the meaning of Llychlyn among the Gwyddelian Britons (now Irish), the aborigines of Britain, was a sea-lake; and among the Britons who succeeded them here, the Lake of Lakes, which comes much to the same purpose, a proper name enough for the Baltic. You know that in the beginning of the 11th century, Canutus, king of Denmark, who was called in his own language Cnut, after many years infesting the coast, and making use of the usual arts of princes, conquered England, and became king of England, Denmark, and Norway, and after many violent proceedings to fix himself on the throne, thought it the safest way to please the people, to encourage the country's religion. About the year 1030 he went to Rome, bribed the Pope with vast presents, and came to England to do the same by his sons, the bishops and abbots, by heaping gifts of lands upon them out of other men's estates, to wash away his former sins. I think there can be little doubt that he advanced his own friends to the profitable places in the Church, or that he propagated and encouraged the use of his own language, the Danish, in England. If there was a considerable difference between that dialect of the Teutonic and the Saxon, and one would think that the grants he made to the churches were wrote in the Danish language, these things are natural enough to an aspiring prince, who settled himself by bloodshed and force. Some learned men think that Danes and Normans, or Northmen, signified originally the same people, and it is said that Rollo, the Dane or Norman, first gave name to the

country called Normandy, in France, about the year A.D. 900. But the Pictish Poet Myrddin mentions Northmyn, ¿.e., Normans, about the Baltic, about 300 years before this, and calls their country Normandi.

'Pan ddyffo Northmyn ar lydan lynn'.

Hoianan Myrddin.

i.e., when Normans or Northmen came from the broad lake, &c. By all which, it seems that the nations who from time to time infested Britain from the North above the Baltic, whether Danes, Norwegians, Frisians, Angles, Jutes, or Saxons, were all Teutons or Northmyn, and spoke the same language, tho' differing in dialects, which, as I take it, was not very different from our present English in its pronunciation. These things premised, I come to give an account of the MS. I mentioned. A friend of mine is in possession of a Latin MS. of the Four Gospels, on vellum, wrote in a most beautiful hand in the ancient British letter, now commonly called the Saxon letter. The MS. seems to me to be as old as St. Hierome's time, with whose version, as in print, I find it to agree in most places. There is a note in it, in capital letters, in Latin, which looks but modern in comparison to the book, signifying that it was expounded by Mæielbrith Macdurnam, and the book was given by Æthelstan, king of the Anglo-Saxons, to the Church of Canterbury; and in the margin, in (I think) a still more modern hand in figures, 925, which probably was inserted about the 15th century, when figures were in use. I take the book to have belonged originally to the Britons, not only on account of the character (the same letters being to be seen on our ancient tomb stones in Wales, erected before the Saxons had the use of letters), but also because Mæielbrith Macdurn was also a Briton, as plainly appears by his name; and you may see in some copies of Gildas's Nennius that the Cambro-British kings used, on the first coming of the Saxons, the appellation