[18] The names and history of the Pyrenean Cagots are equally obscure.
Some have supposed that, during the period of the Gothic warfare with the
Moors, the Cagots were a Christian tribe that betrayed the Christian
cause and interests at a critical moment. But all is conjecture. As to
the name, Southey has somewhere offered a possible interpretation of it;
but it struck me as far from felicitous, and not what might have been
expected from Southey, whose vast historical research and commanding
talent should naturally have unlocked this most mysterious of modern
secrets, if any unlocking does yet lie within the resources of human
skill and combining power, now that so many ages divide us from the
original steps of the case. I may here mention, as a fact accidentally
made known to myself, and apparently not known to Southey, that the
Cagots, under a name very slightly altered, are found in France also, as
well as Spain, and in provinces of France that have no connection at all
with Spain.

[19] "_Strulbrugs_."--Hardly _strulbrugs_, will be the thought of the
learned reader, who knows that _young_ women could not be strulbrugs;
since the true strulbrug was one who, from base fear of dying, had
lingered on into an old age, omnivorous of every genial or vital impulse.
The strulbrug of Swift (and Swift, being his horrid creator, ought to
understand his own horrid creation) was a wreck, a shell, that had been
burned hollow, and cancered by the fierce furnace of life. His clockwork
was gone, or carious; only some miserable fragment of a pendulum
continued to oscillate paralytically from mere incapacity of any thing so
abrupt, and therefore so vigorous, as a decided HALT! However, the use of
this dreadful word may be reasonably extended to the young who happen to
have become essentially old in misery. Intensity of a suffering existence
may compensate the want of extension; and a boundless depth of misery may
be a transformed expression for a boundless duration of misery. The most