Note 1047 — Chapter XVII · THE GRECIAN MYTHICAL VEIN COMPARED WITH THAT OF MODERN EUROPE.

The remarks in Speed’s Chronicle (book v. c. 3. sect. 11-12), and the preface to Howes’s Continuation of Stow’s Chronicle, published in 1631, are curious as illustrating this earnest feeling. The Chancellor Fortescue, in impressing upon his royal pupil, the son of Henry VI., the limited character of English monarchy, deduces it from Brute the Trojan: “Concerning the different powers which kings claim over their subjects, I am firmly of opinion that it arises solely from the different nature of their original institution. So the kingdom of England had its original from Brute and the Trojans, who attended him from Italy and Greece, and became a mixed kind of government, compounded of the regal and the political.” (Hallam, Hist. Mid. Ages, ch. viii. P. 3, page 230.)