The
remains of roads, cities, and fortifications show that they did
much to develop and improve the country, while those of their
villas and castles prove that many of the settlers possessed
wealth and taste for the ornamental arts. Yet the Roman sway was
sustained chiefly by force, and never extended over the entire
island. The northern portion, now Scotland, remained independent,
and the western portion, constituting Wales and Cornwall, was only
nominally subjected.
Neither did the later invading hordes succeed in subduing the
remoter sections of the island. For ages after the arrival of the
Saxons under Hengist and Horsa, A.D. 449, the whole western coast
of Britain was possessed by the aboriginal inhabitants, engaged in
constant warfare with the invaders.
It has, therefore, been a favorite boast of the people of Wales
and Cornwall that the original British stock flourishes in its
unmixed purity only among them. We see this notion flashing out in
poetry occasionally, as when Gray, in "The Bard," prophetically
describing Queen Elizabeth, who was of the Tudor, a Welsh race,
says:
"Her eye proclaims her of the Briton line;"
and, contrasting the princes of the Tudor with those of the Norman
race, he exclaims:
"All hail, ye genuine kings, Britannia's issue, hail!"
THE WELSH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
The Welsh language is one of the oldest in Europe.
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