Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 | Page 8

John Ro
one leg. An embassy from the interior was
conducted into the presence of the viceroy, and he could by no

persuasion prevail upon the obsequious minister to use more than one
of his legs, though he stood during the whole of a protracted audience.
But there are other forces now drawing into the field to support the
long-neglected claims of tradition. Etymology, which professed to
settle doubts by an appeal to the elementary sounds of words, was
banished from the politer and more influential circles of English
learning by a decree as arbitrary as that pronounced on the poems of
Ossian. It has come back with a new commission and under a new
title;--Ethnography is the name given by our continental neighbours to
this new science, which, in its future developments, may bring to light
some of the most obscure and important circumstances affecting the
human race, from its origin through every succeeding epoch of its
existence. The distinguishing object of this inquiry is to identify the
fortunes, migrations, and changes of the human family as to situation,
policy, religion, agriculture, and arts, by comparing the terms supplied
by or introduced into the language of any one country with the names
of the same objects in every other. There would be no such thing as
chance in nature could we know the laws which determine every
separate accident. In like manner there will scarcely be any doubt
respecting the primitive history of man when this new science shall
have accumulated and revealed all the treasures which it may be
enabled to appropriate. An agreement in the primitive term which any
object of cultivation, physical or moral, bears among many different
tribes, spread over many and far-distant regions, will be considered as
the best evidence of one common origin. Disagreement in a similar
case, accompanied with a great variety of terms of considerable
dissonance, will be equally conclusive as to the object being indigenous
or of a multifarious origin.
Already has Balbi, in his Ethnographic Atlas, given us a list of names
and coincidences to an extent truly astonishing. Yet what is this, in fact,
but a judicious use of Bacon's old but much-neglected rule of
questioning nature about facts instead of theories--examining evidences
ere rhetoric had made language one vast heap of implied falsehood?
In a court of inquiry we examine witnesses as to facts, not opinions.
But the historian reads mankind in cities; the philosopher in the clouds.
He who is anxious for the truth should look abroad on the plains or in
the woods, where man's first prerogative, the giving of names, was

exercised. His knowledge of nature must be wretchedly imperfect who
thinks that no grand outline of truth can possibly exist in the dim
records of human recollection ere the pen of the scholar was employed
to depict the scenes that opinion or prejudice had created. How many
pages of Clarendon's, Hume's, or even Robertson's history would be
cancelled if we had access to all the recollections of each event, and the
evidence of the unlettered vulgar who had witnessed the fact brought to
our notice, even through the mouthpiece of tradition!
There is more truth than comes to the surface in that speech put into the
lips of the father of lies by a late poet, where he says--
"The Bible's your book--history mine."
Savigny makes the same charge against one class of historians in his
own country:--"However discordant," says he, "their other doctrines
may appear, they agree in the practice of adopting each a particular
system, and in viewing all historical evidence as so many proofs of its
truth."
Were it not for that contempt we have already noticed as the offspring
of pride and dogmatism, and which, in the administration of the
republic of letters, has been entertained and openly proclaimed for
every kind of history except that which its own acts may have
originated, we should have been in possession of thousands of facts and
notions now overlaid and lost irrecoverably to the philosopher and the
historian.
The origin and the progress of nations, next after the school divinity of
the Middle Ages, has occasioned the most copious outpouring of
conjectural criticism. The simple mode of research suggested by the
works of Verstegan, Camden, and Spelman would, long before this
time, have made the early history of the British tribes as clear as it is
now obscure. Analogies in the primary sounds of each dialect;
similarity or difference in regard to objects of the first, or of a common
necessity; rules or laws for the succession of property, which are as
various as the tribes which overran the empire; the nature, agreement,
or dissimilarity in religious worship with those vestiges of its ritual and
celebration which, by the "pious frauds" and connivance of the
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