Ellis says in reply:—“My dear
Scott, I must begin by congratulating
you on Mrs Scott’s escape; Camp, if he had had no previous title to immortality,
would deserve it, for his zeal and address in detecting the stupid marksman,
who, while he took aim at a bird on a tree, was so near shooting your fair
‘bird in bower.’ If there were many such shooters, it would become
then a sufficient excuse for the reluctance of Government to furnish arms
indifferently to all volunteers. In the next place, I am glad to hear that you
are disposed to adopt my channel for transmitting the tale of Tristrem to Chretien de
Troye. The more I have thought on the subject the more I am
convinced that the Normans, long before the Conquest, had acquired from the
Britons of Armorica a considerable knowledge of our old British fables, and
that this led them, after the Conquest, to enquire after such accounts as were
to be found in the country where the events are supposed to have taken place. I
am satisfied, from the internal evidence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, that it must have been
fabricated in Bretagne, and that he did, as he asserts, only translate it. Now, as Marie, who lived about a century later, certainly translated also from the Breton a series of
lays relating to Arthur and his knights, it
will follow that the first poets who wrote in France,
such as Chretien, &c., must have acquired their
knowledge of our traditions from Bretagne. Observe, that the pseudo-
| 394 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“What you tell me about your Cornish fisherman is very curious; and I think with you that little reliance is to be placed on our Welsh geography—and that Caerlion on Uske is by no means the Caerlion of Tristrem. Few writers or readers have hitherto considered sufficiently that from the moment when Hengist first obtained a settlement in the Isle of Thanet, that settlement became England, and all the rest of the country became Wales; that these divisions continued to represent different proportions of the island at different periods; but that Wales, during the whole Heptarchy, and for a long time after, comprehended the whole western coast very nearly from Cornwall to Dunbretton; and that this whole tract, of which the eastern frontier may be easily traced for each particular period, preserved most probably to the age of Thomas a community of language, of manners, and traditions.
“As your last volume announces your Lay, as well as Sir Tristrem, as in the press, I begin, in
common with all your friends, to be uneasy about the future disposal
| CORRESPONDENCE WITH ELLIS—1803. | 395 |
