ld faith, they fought loyally for their king, and they molested his
enemies when he was at peace with them. In general they were a tough
and independent lot, with a considerable scorn of those who live "in
England"--that is to say, beyond the Tamar; and to this day an
Englishman from the shires is very much of a foreigner with them. Even
the man from a parish a few miles distant is looked at somewhat
askance; after long years of residence they will still think him an
outsider, and they repudiate with scorn the idea that any interlopers
can understand them or their ways. They do not easily initiate
strangers into the local mysteries or bestow the freedom of their
township. Such an attitude may be out of date in this cosmopolitan
age, but it is not unpleasant to strike against it; it coexists with
the kindest of welcomes, the warmest of hospitalities. Yet it must be
confessed that there are moods in which these Cornish folk are neither
kind nor hospitable; their roughness is very rough, their
parliamentary elections are often conducted in a spirit notorious for
its violence. They are not all the gentle visionary dreamers that the
Celts sometimes claim to be; indeed, there is much in their very
physiognomy that proclaims them in large measure to be not true Celts
at all, but men of still more aboriginal blood. Where then, it may be
asked, shall we find the pure Celt? Yet it cannot matter greatly,
except to those who set far too much store on matters of race. The
weaving of ethnologic Britain would take more skill to unravel than
the most learned can now attain to; it is a weft of many strands,
strangely inter-knitted, and its result is infinite variety of
personality. But it may be that here in Cornwall some of its earliest
elements have lingered longer than in parts of the kingdom more
exposed to invasion and immigration.

Both Plymouth and Falmouth may be spoken of as modern towns compared
with Fowey. Its antiquity is proved by the dedication of its church to
the Irish St. Finbar, who seems to have been a pupil of the Welsh
Dewi, or St. David. Very many of Cornwall's saints came either from
Ireland or Wales, and some from Brittany, to which the debt was
repaid. Not much is known of Finbar, and that little is probably
apocryphal. In 1336 the church was reconstructed and rededicated;
Bishop Grandisson, who did this, may have thought that a more firmly
established saint would be better, and he chose St. Nicholas, the
patro