land was known to Drayton,[1] but he does not tell the wonderful stories of Lyonesse that others have done. The wrestling-match in which giant Corineus, a henchman of Brutus, overcame great Gogmagog upon the Hoe at Plymouth, is related by Drayton in the person of the River Dart. Corineus took up his huge antagonist and pitched him headlong from the hill into the waves below, and they leapt out of their place and left a bare horn of sand, which Brutus bestowed upon the winner, dubbing it Cornwall in honour of Corin.[2] In memory of this struggle, the figures of two men armed with clubs were for long enough afterwards cut out in the turf; and the steps by which the conqueror dragged his foe to the edge of the cliff "were pointed out very recently."[3]
In the third and eleventh "Songs," reference is made to Cheshire's "sad death-boding water" —
"Of neighbours Black-mere nam'd, of strangers,
Brereton's Lake,"[4]
which was mentioned in one of the earliest papers published by the Folk-Lore Society,[5] Mrs. Latham's "West Sussex Superstitions," in connection with the fancy that, to dream of a tree uprooted in your garden, is a death-warning to the owner. Camden[6] says of Brereton, "Here is one thing exceeding strange, but attested in my hearing by many persons and commonly believ'd. Before any heir of this [Brereton] family dies, there are seen in a lake adjoyning the bodies of trees swimming upon the water for several days together; not much different from what Leonardus Vairus relates upon the authority of Cardinal Granvellan: that near the abbey of St. Maurice, in Burgundy, there is a fish-pond into which a number of fishes are put equal to the number of monks of that place; and if any one of them happen to be sick, there is a fish seen floating upon the water sick too, and, in case the fit of sickness proves fatal to the monk, the fish foretells it by its own death some days before. As to these things I have
- ↑ Pol. i. [ii. 658, note, 674].
- ↑ Pol i. [ii. 668, note, 681].
- ↑ Murray's Handbook to Devon and Cornwall (1863), p. 132.
- ↑ [ii. 711, iii. 861.]
- ↑ Folk-Lore Record, vol. i. p. 68.
- ↑ Britannia (Gibson's edition), vol. i. p. 677. On this passage, Mrs. Hemans wrote some verses, entitled The Vassal's Lament for the Fallen Tree.
