was a religion of wonder and fear, and to dispute with a Druid was a state-crime.

They were a secret society, for whatever was taught was forbidden to be written; and not only their doctrines and their sciences were veiled in this sacred obscurity, but the laws which governed the community were also oral. For the people, the laws, probably, were impartially administered; for the Druids were not the people, and without their sympathies, these judges at least sided with no party. But if these sages, amid the conflicting interests of the multitude, seemed placed above the vicissitudes of humanity, their own more solitary passions were the stronger, violently compressed within a higher sphere: ambition, envy, and revenge, those curses of nobler minds, often broke their dreams. The election of an Arch-Druid was sometimes to be decided by a battle. Some have been chronicled by a surname which indicates a criminal. No king could act without a Druid by his side, for peace or war were on his lips; and whenever the order made common cause, woe to the kingdom*! It was a terrible hierarchy. The golden knife which pruned the mistletoe beneath the mystic oak, immolated the human victim.

The Druids were the common fathers of the British

*Toland's Hist. of the Druids, 56.

youth, for they were the sole educators; but the genius of the order admitted of no inept member. For the Acolyte unendowed with the faculty of study all initiation ceased; nature herself had refused this youth the glory of Druidism; but he was taught the love of his country. The Druidical lyre kindled patriotism through the land, and the land was saved-for the Druids!

The Druidical custom of unwritten instruction was ingeniously suggested by Cicero as designed to prevent their secret doctrines from being divulged to those unworthy or ill fitted to receive them, and to strengthen the memory of their votaries by its continued exercise; but we may suspect, that this barbarous custom of this most ancient sodality began at a period when they themselves neither read nor wrote, destitute of an alphabet of their own; for when the Druids had learned from the Greeks their characters, they adopted them in all their public and private affairs. We learn that the Druidical sciences were contained in twenty thousand verses, which were to prompt their perpetual memory. Such traditional science could not be very progressive; what was to be got by rote no disciple would care to consider obsolete, and a century might elapse without furnishing an additional couplet. The Druids, like some other institutions of antiquity, by not perpetuating their doctrines, or their secrets, in this primeval state

of theology and philosophy, by writing, have effectually concealed their own puerile simplicity. But the monuments of a people remain to perpetuate their character. We may judge of the genius or state of the Druidical arts and sciences by such objects. We are told that the Druids were so wholly devoted to nature that they prohibited the use of any tool in the construction of their rude works; all are unhewn masses, or heaps of stones; such are their cairns and cromleches and corneddes, and that wild architecture whose stones hang on one another, still frowning on the plains of Salisbury*. A circle of stones marked

* The origin of Stonehenge is as unknown as that of the Pyramids. As it is evident that those huge masses could not have been raised and fixed without the machinery of art, Mr. Owen, the Welsh antiquary, infers, that this building, if such it may be called, could not have been erected till that later period when the Druidical genius declined and submitted to Christianity, and the Druids were taught more skilful masonry in stone, though without mortar. It has been, however, considered, that those masses which have been ascribed to the necromancer Merlin, or the more ancient giants, might have been the work of the Britons themselves, who, without our knowledge of the mechanical powers in transporting or raising ponderous bodies, it is alleged, were men of mighty force and stature, whose co-operation might have done what would be difficult even to our mechanical science. The lances, helmets, and swords of these Britons show the vast size and strength of those who wore them. The native Americans, as those in Peru, unaided by the engines we apply to those purposes, have raised up such vast stones in building their temples as the architect of the present time would not perhaps hazard the attempt to remove. Essays by a Society at Exeter, 114.

the consecrated limits of the Druidical Tribunal; and in the midst a hillock heaped up for the occasion was the judgment-seat. Here, in the open air, in "the eye of light and the face of the sun," to use the Bardic style, the decrees were pronounced, and the Druids harangued the people. Such a scene was exhibited by the Hebrew Patriarchs, from whom some imagine these Druids descended; but whether or not the Celtic be of this origin we must not decide by any analogous manners or customs, because these are nearly similar, wherever we trace a primitive race— so uniform is nature, till art, infinitely various, conceals nature herself.

In the depth of antiquity, misty superstition and pristine tradition gave a false magnitude to the founders of human knowledge; and our own literary historians who have been over-curious about "the Genesis" of their antiquities, have inveigled us into the mystic groves of Druidism in all their cloudy obscurity. The " Antiquities of the University of Oxford" open with "the Originals of Learning in this nation ;" and our antiquary discerns the first shadowings of the University of Oxford in "the universal knowledge" of the Druidical institution in "ethics, politics, civil law, divinity, and poetry." Such are the reveries of an antiquary.

18

BRITAIN AND THE BRITONS.

BRITAIN stood as the boundary of the universe, beyond which all was air and water-and long it was ere the trembling coasters were certain whether Britain was an island or a continent, a secret probably to the dispersed natives themselves. It was the triumphant fleet of Agricola, nearly a century after the descent of Cæsar, which, encircling it, proclaimed to the universe that Britain was an island. From that day Albion has lifted its white head embraced by the restless ocean, but often betrayed by that treacherous guardian, she became the possession of successive races.

Nations have derived their names from some accidental circumstance; some peculiarity marking their national character, or descriptive of the site of their country. The names of our island and of our islanders have exercised the inquiries, and too often the ingenuity, of our antiquarian etymologists. There are about half a hundred origins of the name of Britain; some absurd, many fanciful, all uncertain*. Our primitive ancestors distinguished themselves, in pride or

* See the opening of Speed's Chronicle.