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The real condition of society, it has sometimes been thought, might suggest stories of knight errantry, which were wrought up into the popular romances of the middle ages. A baron, abusing the advantage of an inaccessible castle in the fastnesses of the Black Forest or the Alps, to pillage the neighbourhood and confine travellers in his dungeon, though neither a giant nor a Saracen, was a monster not less formidable, and could, perhaps, as little be destroyed without the aid of disinterested bravery. Knight errantry, indeed, as a profession, cannot rationally be conceived to have had any existence, beyond the precincts of romance. Yet there seems no improbability in supposing that a knight, journeying through uncivilised regions in his way to the Holy Land, or to the court of a foreign sovereign, might find himself engaged in adventures not very dissimilar to those which are the theme of romance. We cannot indeed expect to find any historical evidence of such incidents.
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represent so many mythical characteristics it is not unlikely that something of the kind may be found in connection with their corporeal antitheses, the dwarfs. Timbs, in his
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Historic Ninepins,
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Tom Thumb, it is conjectured, if the truth should be discovered, would be found to be a mythological personage. His adventure bears a near analogy to the rite of adoption into the Brahminical order, a ceremony which still exists in India, and to which the Raja of Tanjore submitted many years ago. In Dubois's work there is an account of a diminutive deity, whose person and character are analogous to those of Tom Thumb. He, too, was not originally a Brahmin, but became one by adoption, like some of the worthies in the Ramayana. Compare the multiplicity of Tom Thumb's metamorphoses with those of Taliesin, as quoted by Davies, we shall then see that this diminutive personage is a slender but distinct thread of communication between the Brahminical and Druidical superstitions.[35] Even independent of the analogy between his transformations and those of Taliesin, his station in the court of King Arthur (evidently the mythological Arthur), marks him as a person of the highest fabulous antiquity in this island; while the adventure of the cow, to which there is nothing analogous in Celtic mythology, appears to connect him with India.
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A story is told of a large cave just discovered near St. Josephs, Mo., in which was a human skeleton, thirty-eight feet six inches long, with a head six feet in circumference. Where is Barnum? I suspect, however, that even Barnum would fancy this story is a little
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The mendacious Falstaff regretted that
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Druid temple at Bramham, near Harrowgate, Yorkshire. These huge rocks, locally termed
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Bramham Crags,