Stranica 50 [50]
OCR
28 ORIGIN OF THE CITY that she ever visited England. It is even asserted on good authority that, so far from converting her son Constantine to Christianity, it was he who converted her. We may be said to have come to authentic history with 43 A.D. ; but we may well inquire why people in the middle ages should have been at the pains and trouble to make up all these stories. ail ee “A a I have only quoted from Harry, but BiH | 4 3 q Holinshed s Chvonicle is much fuller d : ő on the subject, and the stories may be ABS sea found in Higden and in Geoffrey of ay Monmouth, and were eagerly re- ee ENS ceived and believed. Perhaps Shakethem, perhaps not. speare believed He took Cymbdeline from them, as well as King Lear, and his contemporary Spenser also gives us Lear's story. I think the reason these legends were so widely accepted is because they gave a plausible answer to questions which must have greatly puzzled our ances- tors as they have puzzled us. ‘True, ee a Ae nea me SS we see no wall. The gates have dis- wil ssezezüt 4 appeared for more than a century. But the Bridge, or its successor, is there, and we have the Tower, or what " restorers " have left of it. The chief question was no doubt as to the wall. The people of the twelfth century saw London girt with a mighty rampart, which, so far as their authentic history went, had never been forced. How came it there? ‘Then, too, there was a bridge, and so far back as their annals or their traditions went, there always had been a bridge. How did the bridge come to
