Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Bulfinch

A “favorite boast” is Bulfinch’s neat little pin: he doesn’t flatter Welsh and Cornish pride so much as place it under glass, labeled, and slightly mocked. The line captures a 19th-century obsession with origins, when “stock” was a respectable word for what we would now recognize as an anxious mix of anthropology, nationalism, and proto-racial thinking. Bulfinch, a compiler and popularizer of myth, is attuned to how people use ancestry as narrative, not evidence. He’s describing a story a community tells itself to feel continuous, coherent, and uncolonized.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s reportage of regional identity: Wales and Cornwall as holdouts of “original” Britons against waves of Saxon, Norman, and later English dominance. Underneath, Bulfinch signals the vanity of purity language. “Unmixed purity” reads like an alchemical fantasy: bloodlines as sealed jars, history as something that can be kept from spilling. The phrase also hints at an outsider’s gaze, the Victorian habit of treating Celtic fringes as living museums - romantically “authentic,” safely distant from modern power.

Context matters: Wales and Cornwall were culturally distinct, linguistically marked, and politically subordinated within Britain. Claiming “original British stock” is a defensive countermove, a way to reverse the hierarchy: if London rules, the periphery can still claim to be the real Britain. Bulfinch’s choice of “boast” keeps the reader aware that such claims are less about genetics than about status, belonging, and the comforting fiction that identity can be kept pure.