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CHAPTER 1 FIRST PEOPLING OF BRITAIN.

While Alexander was Overruning the world by his arms, and Greece was enlightening it with her arts, Scotland lay hidden beneath the cloud of barbarianism, and had neither name nor place among the nations of the earth. Its isolation, however was not complete and absolute. Centuries before the great Macedonian had commenced his victorious career, the adventurous navigators of the Phoenician seaboard had explored the darkness of the hyperbborean ocean. The First to steer by the pole- star, they boldly adventured where less skilful mariners would have feared to penetrate. Within the Hazy confine of the North Sea they descried an island, swathed in a mild if humid air, and disclosing the eye, behind its frontier screen of chalk cliffs, the pleasing prospect of wooded hills and far expanding meadows, roamed over by numerous herds, and dotted by the frequent wattle- built hamlets of its rude inhabitants. The Phoenicians oft revisited this remote, and to all but themselves unknown shore,2 but the enriching trade which they carried on with it they retained for centuries in their own hands. Their ships might be seen passing out at the “Pillars of Hercules” on voyages of unknown destination, and, after the lapse of months, they would return laden with the products of regions, which had found as yet no name on the chart of geographer. 1 But the source of this trade they kept a secret from the rest of the nations. By and by, however, it began to be rumored that the fleets seen going and returning on these mysterious voyages traded with an island that lay far north, and which was rich in a metal so white and lustrous that it had begun to be used as a substitute for silver. In this capacity it was employed how to lend a meretricious glitter to the robe of the courtezan, and now to impart a more legitimate splendor to the mantle of the magistrate.

In the process of time other sea- faring peoples, taught by the example of the Phoenicians to sail by the stars, and to brave terrors in pursuit of wealth, followed in the track which these early merchants had seen the first to open. The tin of cornwall and of the Scilly Islands, the “Cassiterides” of the ancients, began to circulate among the nations of Asia Minor, and was not unknown even to the tribes of the Arabian desert. It is interesting to think that Britain had already begun to benefit nations which knew not as yet to pronounce her name. But it was on the Syrian shore, and among the maritime tribes that nestled in the bays of Lebanon, that the main stream of this traffic continued to diffuse its various riches. The wealth and power of the Phoenician state were largely owing to its trade with Britain. Its capital, Sidon, was nursed by the produce of our mines into early greatness. The site of Rome was still morass; the cities of Greece were only mean hamlets; the palaces of Babylon were brick- built structures; and Jerusalem was but a hill fort; while Sidon had risen in splendor and grown to a size that made men speak of her, evening the age of Joshua, as the “Great Sidon” Nor was Sidon the only city on that shore that owed its greatness to the remote and barbarous Britain. Tyre, the daughter of Sidon, feeding her power at the same distant springs, came ultimately to surpass in wealth , and eclipses in beauty, the mother city. No sublimer ode has come down to us than that which has as its burden the greatness and the fall of Tyre- the number of her ships, the multitude of her merchants, the splendor of her palaces, the exceeding loftiness of her pomp and pride, and the dark night in which her day of if glory was to close.

The bronzed gates set up by Shalmaneezer to commemorate his triumphs, exhumed but the other day from the ruined mounds of Assyria, present to modern eyes a vivid picture of the greatness of the Phoenician cities. On these gates Tyre is seen seated on her island- rock, encompassed by strong walls, with other serrated battlements and flanking towers. A broad avenue leads from her gates to the sea. Down this path is being borne her rich and various merchandise, which we see ferried across to the mainland. Ingots of gold and silver, rare woods, curious bowls, precious stones, spices, dyed clothes, embroidered garments, and similar products, brought from far off lands, form the tribute which we here see laid at the feet of the conqueror Shalmanezer. The monarch in his robes of state, a tiara on his head, stands a little in advance of a brilliant staff of officers and princes, while an attendant eunuch shades him with a richly embroidered umbrella from the hot Syrian sun, and a deputation of Tyrian merchants offer him the submission of the now tributary city. This was in the year B. C. 859. f1 But though the doom foretold by the prophet has long since fallen upon this ancient mistress of the seas, her ruin is not so utter but that we may trace at this day the dimensions of those harbors from which the fleets engaged in the traffic with Britain set sail, and where, on their return, they discharged their rich cargos. The harbors of Tyre, as their ruins, still visible below the waves, show, had an average area of twelve acres. The ports of Sidon were of a somewhat larger capacity. Their average area was twenty acres, so do the scholars of the “Palestine Exploration” tell us. We who are familiar with the “Leviathans” that plow the deep in modern times, cannot but feel surprise at the diminutive size of the craft employed in the Tyrian traffic, as judged of by the limited capacity of the basins in which they unloaded their wares. A modern ironclad would hardly venture into a port of so diminutive a size. But if the ships of Tyre were of small tonnage, so much greater the evidence of the skill and courage of the crews that manned them, and the enterprise of the merchants that sent them forth on such distant voyages. And it is pleasant to reflect that even at that early age, the riches of our mines formed an important factor in the commercial activity, the artistic taste, and the varied grandeur, of which the narrow strip of territory that stretches along on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, beneath the cliffs of Lebanon, was then the seat. f2 The palmiest era of the Phoenician commerce was from the twelfth to the sixth century before Christ. It follows, that Britain, with whom these early merchants traded, was then inhabited, and probably had been so for some considerable time previous. At what time did the first immigrants arrive on its shore, and from what quarter did they come? We cannot tell the year, nor even the century, when the first wanderer from across the sea sighted its cliffs, and moored his bark on its strand; nor can we solve the question touching the first peopling of our island, otherwise than by an approximating process. In a brief discussion of this point, we shall avail ourselves of the guidance furnished by great ethnological principles and facts, as well as of the help given us by historic statements.

The earliest and most authentic of all histories- for the monumental and historic evidence of the Bible does not lessen but grow with the current of the centuries- tells us that the Ark rested, after the flood, on one of the mountains of Ararat. Here, at the center of the earth, is placed the second cradle of the human family, and to this point are we to trace up all the migrations of mankind. The Ark might have been set down by the retiring waters on the verge of Asia, or on the remotest boundary of America; or it might have been floated on currents, or driven by winds far into the polar regions. Escaping all these mischances, here, the central regions of the world, and probably within sight of those plains with which Noah had been familiar before the flood overspread the earth, did the Ark deposit its burden. It was the first great providential act towards the human family in post- diluvian times.

Let us take our stand beside “the world’s grey fathers,” and survey with them, from the summits where the ark is seen to rest, the singular framework of rivers, mountains, and plains spread out around the spot.

The various fortunes and destinies of their descendants lie written before the eyes of the first fathers of mankind on the face of the silent earth; for undoubted it is that in the geographical arrangements of the globe is so far laid the ground- work of the history, political and moral, of its nations. The physical conditions of a region assist insensibly but powerfully in shaping the mental and moral peculiarities of its inhabitants, and prognosticate dimly the events of which any particular region is to become the theatre. The mountainchains that part kingdoms, the oceans that divide continents by diversifying the climatic influences of the globe, enrich that “one blood” of which all the nations of the earth partake, and by engendering a difference of temperament and aptitude, and stimulating to a variety of pursuit prepare more variously endowed instrumentalities for the world’s work, and impart to history a breadth, a variety, and grandeur which otherwise would have been lacking to it.

From this new starting point of the race great natural pathways are soon to stretch out in all directions. In the heart of the Armenian mountains, close to the resting place of the ark, four great rivers take their rise, and proceeding thence in divergent courses, flow towards the four quarters of the globe. A tribe or colony in quest of habitations naturally follows the course of some great stream, seeing the fertility which its waters create along its banks afford pasture for their flocks and food for themselves. Of the four great rivers which here have their birth, the Euphrates turned off to the west, and pointed the way to Palestine and Egypt and Greece. The second of these great streams, the Tigris, sending its floods to the south, and traveling with rapid flow the great plains which lie between the mountains of Armenia and the Persian gulf, would open the road to India and the countries of the East.

The Araxes and the Phasis, rising on the other side of the mountain- chain which here forms the water- shed between Asia and Europe, and flowing towards the north, would draw off, in that direction, no inconsiderable portion of the human tide that was now going forth from this central region to people the wilderness, into which, since the flood, the earth had again reverted. The settlers who proceeded along the banks of the Araxes, whose waters fall into the Caspian, would people the northern and north- eastern lands of Asia. Those who took the Phasis as the guide of their exploring footsteps, would arrive in due time in the west and north of Europe. By the several roads spread out around their starting- point, do these emigrants journey to those distant and unknown homes where their posterity in after ages are to found kingdoms, build cities, become great in arms, or seek renown in the nobler pursuits of peace.

But farther, this mountain- girdle, which is drawn round the middle of the globe, and which has two great river on either side of it flowing in opposite directions and in divergent channels, parts the earth into two grand divisions. It gives us a northern and a southern world. In this striking arrangement we see two stages prepared in anticipation of two great dramas, an earlier and a later, to be enacted after time. The one was destined to introduce, and the other to conclude and crown the business of the world. Let us mark what a difference betwixt the natural endowments of the two zones, yet how perfect the adaptation of each to the races that were to occupy them, and the part these races were to play in the affairs of the world!

On the south of the great mountain- chain which bisected Asia and Europe was a world blessed with the happiest physical conditions. The skies were serene, the air was warm, and the soil was molient and fertile. How manifest is it that this favored region had been prepared with special view to its occupancy by the early races, whose knowledge of the arts did not enable them meanwhile to construct dwellings such as should suffice to protect them from the cold of a northern sky, and whose skill in husbandry was not enough, as yet, to draw from less fertile soils the necessaries of life in sufficient abundance. In this genial clime the inhabitants could dispense with houses of stone; a tent of hair- cloth would better meet their wants; and hardly was it necessary that their exuberant soil should be turned by the plow; without labor almost it would yield the food of man. Here then was meet dwelling- place for the infancy and youth of the human family; the brilliant light, the sparkling waters, the gorgeous tints of the sky, and the rich fruitage of field and tree, would combine to quicken the sensibilities and stimulate the imagination of man, and so fit him for those more elegant acquisitions and those lighter labors in which his youth was to be passed. Here the arts of music and painting grew up, and here, too, passion poured itself forth in poetry and song. In these voluptuous climes man perfected his conceptions as regards symmetry of form and melody of speech, and from these ages and lands have come to us the incomparable models of statuary, of architecture, and of eloquence. “Graiis dedit ore rotundo Musa loqui.” Nor, even yet, has the glow of morning altogether left the sky of the world.

The pure and beautiful ideals which these young races succeeded in perfecting for us still continue to delight. They exert to this day a refining and elevating influence on the whole of life. Our graver thoughts and more matter- of- fact labors wear something of the golden lacquering of these early times.

On the north of the great mountain- wall which, as we have said, parts the world in two, the ground runs off in a mighty downward slope, diversified by forests and lakes, and furrowed by mountain- chains, and finally terminates in the steppes of Tartary and the frozen lands of Siberia. This vast descent would conduct man by slow journeys from the genial air and teeming luxuriance of his primeval dwelling to the stony soils, the stunted products, and the biting sky of a northern latitude. The boundless plains spread out on this mighty decline refuse their harvests save to the skill of the hand and the sweat of the brow. In vain the inhabitant holds out his cup to have it filled with the spontaneous bounty of the earth. But if nature has denied to these regions the feathery palm, the odorous gum, and the precious jewel, she has provided an ample compensation in having ordained that products of infinitely greater price should here be ripened.

This zone was to be the trainingground of the hardier races. Here, in their contests with the ruggedness of nature, were they to acquire the virtues of courage, of perseverance, and of endurance, and by that discipline were they to be prepared to step upon the stage, and take up the weightier business of the world, when the earlier races had fulfilled their mission, and closed their brief but brilliant career. Here, in a word, on these stern soils, and under these tempestuous skies, was to be set that hardy stock on which the precious grafts of liberty and Christianity were to be implanted in days to come. With the advent of the northern races the real business of the world began.

When Noah comes forth from the Ark we see him accompanied by three sons- Shem, Ham, and Japhet. These are the three fountain- heads of the world’s population. “These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth overspread.” “Peleg,” who lived in the fifth generation from Noah, is set up as a great finger- post at the parting of the ways, “for in his days was the earth divided.” And it is strikingly corroborative of the truth of this statement, that after four thousand years, during which climate, migration, and numerous other influences have been acting unceasingly on the species, all tending to deepen the peculiarities of race, and to widen the distinctions between nations, the population of the world at this day, by whatever test we try it, whether that of physical characteristic, or by the surer proof of language, is still resolvable into three grand groups, corresponding to the three patriarchs of the race, Shem, Ham, and Japhet.

The descendants of Ham, crossing the narrow bridge between Asia and Africa, the Isthmus of Suez to wit, planted themselves along the banks of the Nile, finding in that rich valley a second plain of Shinar, and in the great river that waters it another Euphrates. Egypt is known by its inhabitants as the land of Mizraim to this day. From the black loamy Delta, which reposes so securely betwixt the two great deserts of the world, and which the annual overflow of the Nile clothes with an eternal luxuriance, Ham spread his swarthy swarms over the African continent. Shem turned his face towards Arabia and India, and his advancing bands, crossing the Indus and the Ganges, overflowed the vast and fertile plains which are bounded by the lofty Himalayas on the one side, and washed by the Indian Ocean on the other. An illustrious member of the Semitic family was recalled westward to occupy Palestine, where his posterity, as the divinelyappointed priesthood of the world, dwelt apart with a glory all their own.

Japhet, crossing the mountainous wall which rose like a vast partition betwixt the north and the south, poured the tide of his numerous and hardy descendants down the vast slope of the northern hemisphere over Europe, and the trans- Caucasian regions of Asia, with, at times, a reflex wave that flowed back into the territories of Shem. Thus was the splendid inheritance of a world divided amongst the three sons of Noah.

Our main business is to track the migration of the sons of Japhet, and see by what route they traveled towards our island. From their starting point in the highlands of Armenia, or on the plain of the Euphrates, two great pathways offer themselves, by either of which, or by both, their migrating hordes might reach the shores of the distant Britain. There is the great hollow which Nature has scooped out between the giant Atlas and the mountains of the Alps, and which forms the basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Moving westward through this great natural cleft, and dropping colonies on the fair islands, and by the sheltered bays of its delicious shores, they would people in succession the soil Greece and the countries of Italy and Spain. Pushed on from behind by their ever increasing numbers, or drawn by the powerful attraction of new habitations, they maintain their slow but inevitable advance across the rugged Pyrenees and the broad and fertile plains of France. The van of the advancing horde is now in sight of Albion. They can descry the gleam of its white cliffs across the narrow channel that separates it from the continent; and passing over, they find a land, which, though owned as yet by only the beast of prey, offers enough in the various produce of its soil and the hidden treasures of its rocks to reward them for the toil of their long journey and to induce them to make it the final goal of their wanderings.

By this route, we know, did the clans and tribes springing from Javan- the ION of the Greeks- travel to the west. We trace the footprints of his sons, Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim all along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, from the Lebanon to the pyrenees, notably in Greece and Italy, less palpably in Cyprus and Spain, attesting to this day the truth of the Bible’s statement, that by them were the “isles of the Gentiles,” that is, the western seaboard of Asia Minor and the northern coast of the Mediterranean, “peopled.”

Meanwhile, another branch of the great Japhethian family is on its way by slow marches to the northern and western world by another route. This great emigrant host proceeds along the great pathways which have been so distinctly traced out by the hand of Nature on the surface of the globe. The Araxes and the Phasis are the guide of their steps. They descend the great slope of northern Asia, and winding round the shores of the Euxine, they thread their way through a boundless maze of river and morass, of meadow and forest, and mountain- chain, and stand at length on the shores of that ocean that washes the flats of Holland and the headlands of Norway: and thus of the human tide which we see advancing towards our island, which is still lying as the waters of the flood had left it, the one division, flowing along through the basin of the Mediterranean, finds egress by the Pillars of Hercules, and the other, rolling down the great northern slope of the Caucasian chain, issues forth at the frozen doors of the Baltic.

This parting of the emigrant host into two great bands, and the sending of them round to their future home by two different routes, had in it a great moral end. There are worse schools for a nation destined for future service, than a long and arduous journey on which they have to suffer hunger and brave danger. The horde of slaves that left Egypt of old, having finished their “forty years” in the “great and terrible wilderness,” emerged on Canaan a disciplined and courageous nation. The route by which these two Japhethian bands journeyed to their final possessions, left on each a marked and indelible stamp. The resemblance between the two at the beginning of their journey, as regards the great features of the Japhethian image, which was common to both, was, we can well imagine, much altered and diversified by the time they had arrived at the end of it, and our country, in consequence, came to be stocked with a race more varied in faculty, richer in genius, and sturdier in intellect than its occupants would probably have been, but for the disciplinary influences to which they were subjected while yet on the road to it. The aborigines of Albion combined the strength of the north with the passion of the south. Of the two great hosts that mingled on its soil, the one, passing under the freezing sky of the Sarmatian plains, and combatting with flood and storm on their way, arrived in their new abode earnest, patient, and courageous. The other, coming round by the bright and genial shores of the Mediterranean, were lively and volatile, and brimming with rich and lofty impulses. Though sprung of the same stock, they came in this way to unite the qualities of different races and climesthe gravity of the Occident with the warm and thrilling enthusiasm of the Orient.

The stream that descended the slopes of the Caucasus, passing betwixt the Caspian and the Euxine, would arrive on our eastern sea- board, and people that part of our island which fronts the German Ocean. The other current, which flowed along by the Mediterranean, and turned northward over France and Spain, would have its course directed towards our western coasts. In the different temperaments that mark the population of the two sides of our island, we trace the vestiges of this long and devious peregrination. The strong Teutonic fiber of our eastern sea- board, and the poetic fire that glows in the men of our western mountains, give evidence at this day of various original endowments in this one population. These mixed qualities are seen working together in the daily life of the people, which exhibits it sustained and fruitful industry, fed and quickened by a latent enthusiasm. The presence of the two qualities is traceable also in their higher and more artistic pursuits, as, for instance, in their literary productions, which, even when they kindle into the passionate glow of the East, are always seen to have as their substratum that cool and sober reason which is the characteristic of the West. Most of all is this line union discernible, on those occasions when a great principle stirs the soul of the nation, and its feelings find vent he an overmastering and dazzling outburst of patriotism.

We do not know the number of links which connected the Patriarch of the Armenian mountains with that generation of his descendants, who were the first to set foot on the shores of Britain; but we seem warranted in concluding that Gomer and Ashkenaz were the two great fathers of the first British population. The nomadic hordes that we see descending the vast slope that leads down to the Scandinavian countries and the coast of the White Sea, are those of Gomer. This much do their footsteps, still traceable, attest. They have their names to the lands over which their track lay, and these memorials, more durable than written record or even pillar of stone, remain to this day, the ineffaceable mementos of that primeval immigration by which Europe was peopled. Here is Gomer- land (Germany) lying on their direct route: for this track was far too extensive and fertile not to commend itself to the permanent occupation of a people on the out- look for new habitations. “The Celts, from the Euxine to the Baltic,” says Pinkerton, “were commonly called Cimmerii, a name noted in Grecian history and fable; and from their antiquity so obscure that a Cimmerian darkness dwells upon them. From the ancients we learn to a certainty, that they were the same people with the Cimbri, and that they extended from the Bosphorus Cimmerius on the Euxine, to the Cimbric Chersonese of Denmark, and to the Rhine.” The main body of these immigrants would squat down on the soil at each successive halt, and only the front rank would be pushed forward into the unpeopled wilderness.

Their progress, olden retarded by scarce penetrable forest ,and by swollen river, would be at length conclusively arrested on the shores of the North Sea; and yet not finally even there. Passing over in such craft as their skill enabled them to construct- a fleet of canoes, hollowed out of the trunks of oaks, felled in the German forests- they would take possession of Britain, and begin to people a land, till then a region of silence or solitude, untrodden by human foot since the period of the Flood, if not since the era of the creation.

The new- comers brought with them the tradition of their descent. They called themselves Cymry or Kymbry. They are the Gimirrai of the Assyrian monuments. The Greeks, adopting their own designation, styled them Kimmerioi, and the Latins Cimbri. Cymry is the name by which the aborigines of Britain have uniformly distinguished themselves from the remotest antiquity up to the present hour; and their language, which they have retained through all revolutions, they have invariably called Cymraeg, which means the language of the aborigines, or “the language of the first race.” “It is reasonable to conclude,” says Pinkerton in his learned “Enquiry into the History of Scotland,” “that the north and east of Britain were peopled from Germany by the Cimbri of the opposite shores, who were the first inhabitants of Scotland, who can be traced, from leaving Cumraig names to rivers and mountains, even in the furthest Hebudes.” f7

CHAPTER - JOURNEY OF THE KYMRI TO BRITAIN.

THERE are three guides which we can summon to our aid when we set out in quest of the cradle of the tribes, races, and nations that people the globe. The first is Philology, or language: the second is Mythology, or worship: and third is Tradition, or folk- lore. These are three guides that will not lie, and that cannot mislead us.

As regards the first, no great power of reflection is needed to convince us that in the first age men conversed with one another in a common language; in other words, that man started with one speech. May not that one speech linger somewhere on the earth, slightly changed and modified, it may be, by time and other influences, but still containing the roots and elemental characteristics of those numerous tongues which are diffused over the earth, and of which it is the parent? This is not a supposition, but a fact. Philology holds in its hand the clue by which it can track all the tongues of the world through the perplexed labyrinth of diverse grammars, idioms, and dialects, to the one primeval tongue of the race. And when we permit philology to perform its office, it conducts us to the great central plain of Asia, called Iran. The researches of Max Muller, Sir William Jones, and others, appear to have established the fact, that we find the ancestor of all the numerous tongues of the nations, not in the classic languages of Greece and Rome, nor in the more ancient Semitic, but in the speech of the Indo- European races, or Aryans. The Sanscrit possesses the rootaffinities, and stands in a common relation to all the languages of the East on the one hand, and the West on the other. It presents its proud claim to be the parent of human tongues, and it identifies Iran as the spot whence the human family was spread abroad. “After thousands of years,” says Mr.

Dasent, “the language and traditions of those who went East, and of those who went West, bear such an affinity to each other, as to have established, beyond discussion or dispute, the fact of their descent from a common stock.”

Let us next attend to the evidence, on the point before us, of the second witness, Mythology, or worship. The first form of worship- keeping out of view the one divinely appointed form- was Nature worship. By nature worship we mean the adoration of the Deity through an earthly symbol.

The first symbol of the Creator was the sun, and consequently the earliest form of nature worship was sunworship. Where, and in what region of the earth was the first act of sun- worship performed? All are agreed that this form of worship took its rise in the same region to which philology has already conducted us and identified as the father- land of mankind. On the plains of Shinar rose the great tower or temple of Bel, or the Sun. There was the first outbreak of a worship which quickly spread over the earth, continually multiplying its rites, and varying its outward forms, becoming ever the more gorgeous but ever the more gross, but exhibiting in every land, and among all peoples, the same seminal characteristics and rootaffinities which were embodied in the first act of sun- adoration on the Chaldean plain. Thus a second time we arrive on those great plains on which Ararat looks down.

There is a third witness, and the testimony of this witness is to the same effect with that of the former two. There exists a unique body of literature which is found floating in the languages of both the East and the West. It is mainly popular, consisting of traditions, fables, and tales, and is commonly styled folk- lore. These Tales bear the stamp of being the creation of a young race: they are bright with the colors of romance, and they embody, in the guise of allegory ; and fable, the maxims of an ancient wisdom.

Whether it is the Celtic or the Teutonic, the classic or the vernacular tongue, in which we hear these tales rehearsed, they are found to be the same. They have the same groundwork or plot though diffused over the globe. This points to a common origin, and in tracing them up to that origin we pass the tongues of modern Europe, we pass the Latin and (Greek tongues, we come to the language spoken by the Aryan races of Asia, and there we find the fountain- head of these unique and world- wide tales. Thus is another link )between the East and the West, between the peoples that beheld the “grey dawn” and those on whom the world’s “eve” is destined to descend. Such is the witness of these three- Philology, Religion, Tradition. They are the footprints which the human family have left on the road by which they have traveled; and following these traces we are led to Iran, where lived the men who were the first to “till and ear” the soil.

Thirty years ago it would have required some little courage to mention, unless to repudiate, the authority which we are about to cite. At that time it was fashionable to stand in doubt of the early traditions of all nations. The first chroniclers were believed to display a vein for legend rather than a genius for history. Lacking the critical acumen of the wise moderns, they were supposed to delight in garnishing their pages with prodigies and marvels, rather than storing them with ascertained facts. But this spirit of historic skepticism has since been markedly rebuked. The graven tablets dug up from the ruins of Nineveh, the treasures exhumed from the mounds of Babylon, and .the secrets of a bygone time with which the explorations on the plain of Troy have made us acquainted, have signally attested the veracity of the ,early writers, and shown us, that instead of indulging a love of fable, they exercised a scrupulous regard to fact, and an abstention from poetic adornment for which the world, in these latter days, had not given them credit. The consequence is that the early historians now speak with a justly enhanced authority. This remark is specially true of the sacred writers, and also, to a large extent, of the secular historians.

We in Great Britain likewise possess the records of an ancient time. These writings have been preserved, not in the dust of the earth, like the written cylinders and graven slabs of the Tigris and the Euphrates valley, but in the sacred repositories of the aboriginal race whose origin they profess to record. We refer to the “Welsh Triads.” These documents are the traditions received from the first settlers, handed down from father to son, and at last committed to writing by the Druids, the priests of the aborigines. They are arranged in groups, and each group consists of three analogous events; the design of this arrangement obviously being to simplify the narrative and aid the memory. We do not claim for them the authority of history; we use them solely as throwing a side light on the darkness of that remote age, and as confirmatory, or at least illustrative, as far as it is now possible to understand them, of the sketch we have ventured to trace of the peopling of Europe, and the first settling of Britain, from the etymological and historic proofs that remain to us.

The fourth Triad says: “There are three pillars of the nation of Britain. The first was Hu the Mighty, who brought the nation of the Kymry first to the isle of Britain; and they came from the summer country, which is called Defrobani (the shores of the Bosphorus), and they came over the Hazy Sea to the Isle of Britain, and to Armorica (Gaul) where they settled. The other two pillars of the nation of the Kymri were Prydain and Moelmud, who gave them laws, and established sovereignty among them.”

The fifth Triad says: “There were three social tribes of the Isle of Britain.

The first was the tribe of the Kymry who came to the Isle of Britain with Hu the Mighty, because he would not possess a country and land by fighting and pursuit, but by justice and tranquillity. The second was the tribe of Lloegrians (the Loire) who came from Gascony; and they were descended from the primitive tribe of the Kymry. The third were the Brython, who came from Armorica, and who were descended from the primitive tribe of the Kymry, and they had all three the same language and speech.” This Triad offers a rough sketch of two migrations which are seen moving towards our island, each by a different route. The one comes over the Hazy Sea (most probably the German Ocean), and the other from Gaul across the channel. But both are sprung of the same stock, the Kymri, the descendants of Gomer that first peopled Europe.

The Triads go on to speak of two subsequent arrivals of settlers by whom the first great immigration into Britain was followed and supplemented.

The two later immigrations were doubtless passed on to the remoter, and perhaps as yet, uninhabitated districts of our country. The first arrivals, it is natural to suppose, would plant themselves in the fertile and grassy plains of England, and would refuse, not without reason, to surrender to newcomers lands in which they had already established, by cultivation, the right of ownership. These last explorers would have to move onward and seek a settlement in the less hospitable and more mountainous regions of Scotland. Those whom we now see arriving in our island, and retiring to the straths and slopes of the Grampians, are probably the ancestors of the men who came afterwards to bear the name of Caledonians.

At what period the sons of Gomer- for their migration Claudian calls the ocean opposite the Rhine the Cimbric. The Duan, says Pinkerton, puts the Cumri as first possessors of only does it concern us to trace- took their departure from their original scats in the East, no history informs us. It is natural to suppose that before his death Noah gave to his sons no uncertain intimation of how he meant the earth to be parted amongst them, and the quarter of the globe in which they were to seek their several dwellings. As the great Patriarch of mankind he possessed the princedom of the world.

This vast sovereignty he could not transmit entire. Like some great monarchs who have lived since his day, he must needs distribute his power among his successors; and in this he acted, we cannot doubt, in conformity with the intimations which had been made to him of the will of a yet greater monarch than himself. For we are told that “the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance.” But rivalships and conflicts would, not unlikely, spring up in connection with the distribution of so splendid a possession. Some might be unwilling to go forth into the unknown regions allotted to them, and instead of a long and doubtful journey, would prefer remaining near their original seat. The fruitful hills and well- watered vales of Armenia, and the broad plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, would not be easily forsaken for a climate less hospitable and an earth less bounteous.

Noah would judge it expedient, doubtless, that while he was yet alive the three Septs into which his descendants were parted should begin their journey each in the direction of its allotted possession.

Ham must direct his steps toward his sandy continent on the West. Japhet must cross the mountains on the North, and seek a home for his posterity under skies less genial than those of Assyria. Shem must turn his face towards the burning plains of India. To leave their sheltered and now wellcultivated valley for unknown lands whose rugged soils they must begin by subduing, was a prospect far from inviting. The command to go forth seemed a hard one. They would lose the strength which union gives, and be scattered defenseless over the face of the earth. And if we read aright the brief record of Genesis, the mandate of heaven, delivered to mankind through their common Father, that they should disperse and settle the world, met with an open and organized resistance. They broke out into revolt, and in token thereof built their tower on the plain of Shinar. There is one name that stands out, bold and distinct, in the darkness, that hides all his contemporaries; that even of the leader in this rebellion. Nimrod saw in this strong aversion of the human kind to break up into tribes and disperse abroad, a sentiment on which he might rest his project of a universal monarchy. His plan was to keep the human family in one place, and accordingly he encouraged the rearing of this enormous structure, and he consecrated it to the worship of the Sun, or Bel. This tower on the plain of Shinar was meant to be the great temple of the world, the shrine at which the unbroken family of man should meet and perform their worship, and so realize their unity. The tower was the symbol of a double tyranny, that of political despotism and that of religious superstition. The policy of Nimrod was the same with that of many an autocrat since, who has found priestcraft the best ally of ambition, and concluded that the surest way to keep a people under his own .yoke was first to bend their necks to that of a false god. It was the policy adopted by Jeroboam in an age long posterior, when he set up his golden calves at Dan and Bethel, that the ten tribes might have no occasion to resort to Jerusalem to worship, and so be seduced back into their allegiance to the House of David.

This bold and impious attempt met with speedy and awful discomfiture. “The Lord came down,” says the inspired historian, using a form of speech which is commonly employed to indicate, not indeed a bodily or personal appearance on the scene, but all occurrence so altogether out of the ordinary course; a catastrophe so unlooked for, and so tremendous, that it is felt to be the work of Deity. We can imagine the lightenings and mighty tempests which accompanied the overthrow of this earliest of idolatrous temples, and center of what was meant to be a worldwide despotism. There was after this no need to repeat the patriarchal command to go forth. Pursued by strange terrors, men were in haste to flee from a region where the Almighty’s authority had been signally defied, and was now as signally vindicated. If Noah outlived this catastrophe, as he had survived all earlier and more awful one, he now beheld the insurrection against his patriarchal government quelled, and his posterity forced to go forth in three great bodies or colonies to seek the primeval forests and wildernesses of the world each its allotted home. We cannot be very wide of the mark if we fix the epoch of this great exodus it about the three hundredth year after the Flood.

The length of time occupied by the bands of Gomer in their journey from their starting- point to the shores of Britain would depend not so much on the space to be traversed, as on the incidents which might arise to facilitate or retard their journey. They had no pioneers to smooth their way, and they could have no chart to guide them over regions which they themselves were the first to explore. The speed of the single traveler, and even the caravan, is swift and uninterrupted; the movements of a million or two of emigrants are unwieldy and laborious. Their flocks and herds accompany them on their march. They had to cross innumerable rivers, passable only by extemporized bridges, or in canoes scooped hastily out of great oaks felled in the neighboring forest. They had to traverse swampy plains, hew their way through tangled woods, and struggle through narrow mountain defiles. A march of this sort must necessarily be slow. They made long halts, doubtless, in the more fertile. regions that lay on their route. In these spots they would practice a little husbandry, and exchange their nomadic habits for the pursuits of a more settled mode of life; and only, when the place became too narrow for their increasing numbers, would they send forth a new swarm to spy out the wilderness beyond, and find new habitations which would become in turn radiating points whence fresh streams might go forth to people the plains and mountains lying around their track. Their progress would exhibit the reverse picture of that presented by the army whose terrible march an inspired writer has so graphically described. The locust host of the prophet pursued its way, an Eden before it, a wilderness behind it. It was otherwise with the invading, but peaceful, millions, whose march we are contemplating. Wherever their footsteps passed the barren earth was turned into a garden. It was beauty, not blackness and burning, which lay behind them. They advanced to make war upon the desert only. The swampy pool and the black wood disappeared as they went on, and behind them on their track lay smiling fields and the habitations of men.

Forty years sufficed to carry the Goths from the banks of the Danube to the shores of the Atlantic. But their steps were quickened by their love of war and their thirst for plunder. No such incentives animated the emigrant horde whose march we are tracing, or urged on their advance. Their movement would bear not a little resemblance to what we see in America and Australia at this day, where there is a gradual but continuous outflow from the centers of population into the wilderness beyond, and the zone of desolation and silence is constantly receding before the face of man.

Hundreds of year- we know not how many -would these early intruders into the silent wastes of the northern hemisphere occupy as they journeyed slowly onward and gave the first touch of cultivation to what is now, and has long been, the scene of fair kingdoms and flourishing cities. The men whom we now see stepping upon our shores are shepherds and hunters.

They had learned something. in their long journey, but they had forgotten more. That journey had not been conducive to their advance in knowledge, nor to their refinement in manners. The epithet “barbarian” was doubtless more applicable to them on their arrival at their new homes than when they took their departure from their original abodes. Whatever skill in husbandry’ and the arts they possessed in their native seats, would be diminished, if not well nigh lost in its transmission through successive generations in the course of their wandering and unsettled life. Their daily combats with the ruggedness of the earth, with the storms of the sky, or with the beast of prey, would brace their bodies and discipline their courage, but it would at the same time tend to roughen their manners, and impart a tinge of ferocity to their tempers and dispositions.

Counteractive influences, such as the modern emigrant from the old centers of civilization carries with him into the wilds of the southern or western world, they had none. We are accustomed to invest the shepherd’s life with the hues of poetry, and we people Arcadia with the virtues of simplicity and innocence, but when from this imaginary world we turn to the contemplation of real life we are rudely awakened from our dream. We are shocked to find brutality and cruelty where we had pictured to ourselves gentleness and love. It is the pasture grounds of Europe float have sent forth its fiercest warriors. Its nomadic tribes have been its most ruthless desolators. In proof of our assertion we might appeal to the portrait which Herodotus draws of the Scythians of his day; or to the ravaging hordes which issued from the banks of the Borysthenes, or of the Volga; or to the sanguinary halberdiers which in later times so often descended from the mountains of the Swiss to spread battle and carnage over the Austrian and Italian plains. The influences which molded these dwellers amid sheep- cots into warriors and plunderers would operate, though with greatly modified force, on the army of nomades which we see pursuing their way century after century, down the great slope which conducts from the highlands of Armenia, and the ranges of Caucasus, to the shores of the North Sea. They could hardly avoid catching the color of the savage scenes amid which their track lay. There are souls to which the gloom of the far- extending forest, the grandeur of the soaring peak, and the darkness of tim tempest impart a sentiment of elevation and refinement; but as regards the generality of mankind they are but little moved by the grandest of nature’s scenes, and are apt to become stern and hard as the rocks amid which they dwell.

The tendency of these injurious influences on the host whose movement we are tracing would be aggravated by other circumstances inseparable from their condition. They could carry with them no magazine of corn. Their daily food would be the flesh of their slaughtered herds, or of the animals caught in the chase. This is a species of diet, as physicians tell us, which is by no means fitted to cool the blood or allay the passions, but rather to inflame the irritability of both. Besides, this host was subjected to a natural process of weeding, in virtue of which only the hardiest and the most daring were sent onward. The less adventurous would remain behind at each halt to be transformed into tillers of the soil, or dressers of the vineyard, and this process of selection, repeated time alter time, would result at last in the creation of a race singularly robust in body and equally indomitable in spirit. And such, doubtless, were the physical and mental characteristics of that band of immigrants that ultimately stepped upon our shore. They were not like the Scythians of Herodotus, or the Goths of the Roman invasion, or the treacherous and cruel Arab of our own day. They were men occupied in the first great humanizing mission of subduing and cultivating the earth. Battle they had not seen all the way, if we except the contests they had to wage with the forces of nature. Blood they had not shed, save that of bullock or of beast of prey. But if their long journey had schooled them in the peaceable virtues of patience and endurance, it had engendered not less a keen relish for their wild freedom, and stalwart in frame and strong of heart, they were able and ready to defend the independence which had been theirs ever since the day that they rallied beneath the standard of their great progenitor, and contemning the double yoke of despotism and sun- worship which Nimrod had attempted to impose upon them, turned their faces toward the free lands of the North. f9

CHAPTER - HABITS, HABITATIOIN’S, AND ARTS OF THE FIRST SETTLERS.

WE see these emigrants from the land of Armenia arriving on our shore, but the moment they pass within the confine of our island the curtain drops behind them, and for ages they are completely hidden from our view. What passed in our country during the centuries that elapsed between the period when it was taken possession of by the sons of Gomer and the advent of Caesar with his fleet, we can only dubiously conjecture.

As regards one important particular, we have tolerable grounds, we apprehend, for the conclusion we are now to state. These emigrants brought with them the essentials of Divine revelation. When they left their original dwelling, the world’s first Christianity, the Edenic to wit, had not been wholly obscured by the rising cloud of nature- worship. The first idolatrous temple had already been reared, and the earliest form of idolatrous worship, that of the sun ,and the heavenly bodies, had been instituted; but the dispersion which immediately followed had removed the Japhethian emigrants, whom we now see on their way to the fill’ north, from contact with the rites of the rising idolatry, and from those corrupting and darkening influences which acted powerfully, doubtless, on those who remained nearer the seat of the Nimrod instituted worship. Besides, the heads of this emigration had conversed with the men who had been in the ark with Noah, and stood beside the altar whereon the Common Father offered his first sacrifice to Jehovah after the flood. It is not conceivable that Japhet had joined in the rebellion of Nimrod, or ever worshipped in the great temple on Shinar. From Japhet they had learned the knowledge of the one true God, and the promise of a Redeemer, who was to appear in after ages, and in some not yet clearly understood way, though dimly foreshadowed in the victim on the Patriarchal Altar, was to accomplish a great deliverance for the race. This great Tradition would journey with them, and some rays of the primeval day would shine on the remote shores of Britain. We have been taught to picture the earliest condition of our country as one of unbroken darkness. A calm consideration of the time and circumstances of its first peopling warrants a more cheerful view. Believing in a God, invisible and eternal, and knowing that He heareth those in every land who pray unto Him, who can tell how many “devout fearers” of ‘His name there may have been among the first inhabitants of our country? How many lives may this knowledge have. purified, and how many death- beds may it have brightened! The Patriarchs themselves had not much more than was possessed by those whom we behold setting ,out towards our distant shore.

Our idea that the earliest ages of all nations were the purest, and that as time passed on mankind receded ever the farther from the knowledge of the true God and sank ever the deeper into idolatry, is corroborated by the fact that the oldest known Egyptian manuscript, and of course the oldest known manuscript in the world, contains no traces of idolatry, and does not mention the name of one Egyptian god. f10 These settlers found the climate of their new country more temperate- its summers less hot, and its winters less cold- than that of the continental lands over which they had passed on their way thither. Its plains wore a covering of luxuriant grass, and afforded ample pasturage for their flocks and herds. Forests covered the mountain sides, and in places not a few stretched down into the valleys and straths. These would furnish in abundance materials for the construction of dwellings, one of the first requisites of the emigrant. The new- comers go about this task in the following wise. They clear a space in the forest, or on the jungly plain, felling the trees with a stone hatchet. On the open area they plant stakes of timber, intertwine them with wattles, and roof them with straw. There rises a little cluster of huts. A wall of palisades is run around the hamlet to defend it from the beast of prey, for, as yet, human foe they have none to dread.

In at least one instance, if we mistake not, we come upon the traces of these aboriginal settlers, and the memorials, disclosed after so long an interval, touchingly attest the truth of the picture we have drawn. The relics in question occur as far north as Loch Etive, Argyleshire. Under a black peat moss, on the banks of the loch just named, are found, here and there, patches of stone pavement of an oval form. These pavements, on being dug down to, are found strewed over with wood- ashes, the remains of fires long since extinguished; and around them lie portions of decayed hazel stakes, the relics of the palisading that once formed the defenses of the encampment. Here stood a cluster of log huts, and at a period so remote that the moss that now covers the site to a depth of eight feet has had time to grow above it. It is touching to think that in these memorials we behold the oldest known “hearths” in Scotland. We picture to ourselves the forms that sat around their fires. They may not have been just the savages we are so apt to fancy them. They had their joys and their sorrows as we at this day have ours. The human heart is the same whether it beats under a garment of ox- hide or under a vesture of fine linen. It ever goes back into the past, or forward into the future, in quest of the elements of hope and happiness. These settlers cherished, doubtless, as their most precious treasure, the traditions which their fathers had brought with them from their far- off early home. They will not let them die even in this rude land. And when the winter draws on, and the storm lowers dark on the hill, and the winds roar in the fir wood, or lash into fury the waters of the lake, beside which they have raised their huts, the inmates gather in a circle round their blazing hearth, and the patriarch of the dwelling rehearses to ears attent the traditions of an early day and a distant land. Tales of the flood and of the ark, who knows, may here have had their eloquent reciters and their absorbed listeners. The “glorious hopes” carried to our island by the first pilgrim settlers would be clung to by their descendants. The knowledge of them alone kept their head above the darkness. To part with them was to obliterate by far the brightest traces by which to track their past. But gradually, veiled in legend, or disfigured and darkened by fable, these “hopes” died out, or, rather, were crystallized in the ritual of the Druid.

The sons of Gomer, who erected these frail structures on the shores of Loch Etive, were probably coeval with the sons of Ham, who were the first builders of the pyramids on thebanks of the Nile. The monuments of the workers in granite, thanks to the durability of the material, still remain to us. The perishable edifices of the workers in wattle and sod have also been preserved by the kindly moss which, growing with the centuries, at last covered them up for the benefit of future ages. We can now compare them with the huts in which their brethren of the Gomer race, on the other side of the German Ocean, were found still living, in times not so very remote. Simple, indeed, in both style and material, was the architecture of these Cymric houses, whether on German plain or on Scottish moor. A circular row of wooden piles formed their wall. The roof was of straw; a fire was kindled on the stone floor, and the smoke made its escape by an opening left for that purpose in the center of the roof.

The habits of the inmates were simple. They were compelled to accommodate their life to the conditions of the country i~ which they found themselves. A humid atmosphere, the necessary accompaniment of a Swampy soil, would darken the sky with a frequent haze, and diminish the sun’s power to ripen the grain. Corn they did not grow. Their long devotion to the shepherd’s life had made them unfamiliar with the art of tillage. What of the husbandman’s skill they had known and practised in their ancestral homes had been unlearned on their long journey. It hardly matters, for their wants are supplied by the milk of their flocks, by the game in which their forests abound, and the fish with which their rivers are stocked, which they spear with sharpened stakes. Their hardihood is maintained by the daily combats in which they are compelled to engage with the beasts of prey. The weapons with which they do battle against these depredators of their herds, and, at times, assailants of their villages, are simple indeed. The club, the stone hatchet, the bow, the spear tipped with flint or bone, the snare, the sling, are the instruments they wield, being the only ones then known to them.

Invention sleeps when the wants of man are few. Necessity rouses the dormant faculties, and impels to the cultivation of the arts, slow and tardy at the best. It is easier transforming the shepherd into ~t warrior than training him into an artisan; the wild freedom of the hills is not easily cast off for the minute diligence and close application of the workshop. Yet were there handicrafts which these pilgrim- shepherds were compelled to learn. We find them expert at canoe- building. They had had frequent occasion to practice this art on their long journey, and the friths and lakes of their new home were too numerous to permit their skill in this important department to rust. New needs as they arise prompt to new devices. A tent may suffice as a dwelling on the plains of Asia, but not on the bleak Caledonian moor. The inhabitants of the latter must dig a chamber in the earth, or erect a hut above ground of dry sods, or of unhewn stones, would they protect themselves from the rains and frost. Garments of some sort they must needs have; for though some historians have portrayed the Caledonian as running nude on his mountains, or covering his person with paint instead of raiment, we submit that this was incompatible with existence amid the snow and ice of a Scottish winter. A succession of rigorous seasons, such as are incident to our high latitude, would have wound up the drama of the race before it had well begun, and instead of flourishing in stalwart figure for centuries, the Caledonian would have perished from the land, and left it ,is desolate and silent as when he first set foot on it. It is the historian, we suspect, who has painted.

If the Caledonian dispensed with clothing, it was only at times. He stripped himself that he might give greater agility to his limbs when he chased the roe, or greater terror to his visage when he grappled with his enemy in battle; or he disencumbered himself to wade his marshes and swim his rivers. Raiment he not only needed, but raiment of ~ very substantial kind.

The hoar frosts of Caledonia were so famous as to be heard of at Rome, and the light fabrics woven on the looms of later days would have afforded but small protection from the hairs and icy blasts of the then Scotland.

The skin of sheep or the hide of ox formed a substantial and comfortable garment for the native. This was his winter covering. The stitching of it together taught him a little tailoring. He used a needle of bone with a sinew for a thread. His summer robe was lighter, and, moreover, admitted of a little gaiety in the way of color, which would bring out in bright relief the figure of the wearer as he was seen moving athwart brown moor or blue hill. This was fabricated from the wool of his flock or the hair of his goats. The manufacture of these homely stuffs initiated the Caledonian into the useful arts of carding, spinning, and weaving.

The aboriginal dwellings merit a more particular description. They are commonly known by the name of weems. These weems have been discovered in groups in almost every county of Scotland, more particularly in Aberdeenshire, in Buchan, in Forfarshire, and even in the wildest districts of the Highlands. They are nearly as common as the sepulchral cairn. Generally the surface of the ground gives no clue to the existence of these underground dwellings. The moor or heath looks perfectly level and unbroken, and the traveler may pass and repass a hundred times without once suspecting that underneath his feet are houses that were constructed thousands of years ago, still containing the implements and utensils of the men who lived in them- the quernes in which they ground their corn, the bones and horns of the animals they hunted, the relics of their meal, and the ashes of the fire on which they cooked it.

These weems in their construction show both ingenuity and labor. Those found in Aberdeenshire are built of blocks of granite more than six feet long. They vary, of course, in their details, but the general style and structure are alike in all of them. Some of these subterranean abodes arc upwards of thirty feet long, and from eight to nine feet wide. The walls converge as they rise, and the roof is formed in the same way as in the cyclopean edifices of early Greece and the colossal temples of Mexico and Yucatan, whose builders would appear to have been ignorant of the principle of the arch. The great slabs have been made to overlap each other; the intervening space is reduced at each successive row, and at last the opening a- top is so narrowed as to be covered in by a single block, and the vault completed. Not unfrequently small side chambers are attached to the main chamber. These are entered by passages not above three feet in height, and as a proof of the inefficiency of the tools with which these primitive builders worked, the stones in the wall longing the partition between the two chambers, though placed flush in the side which presents itself to the great chamber, project their narrow ends in the side turned to the small apartment. The workmen evidently lacked metal tools to dress and smooth the stones. If one may judge from the indications in the case of the best preserved of these weems, the doorway was formed of two upright slabs; the width between being sufficient for the occupant to glide in, and by a slanting passage find his way to the chamber below. It was in many cases the only opening, and served the purpose of door, window, and chimney all in one. In some instances, however, a small aperture is found at the farther end, which might give egress to the smoke, or permit the entrance of a little light. On the approach of an enemy, the entire population of a district would make a rush to these narrow apertures, and vanish as quickly and noiselessly as if the earth had swallowed them up, or they had melted into thin air, leaving the intruder partly amazed and partly amazed by their sudden and complete disappearance.

These underground massy halls were the winter abodes of their builders.

Once safely below, a little fire to dispel the darkness, their larder replenished from the spoils of the chase or the produce of the flock, they would make a shift to get through the long months, and would not be greatly incommoded by the fiercest storms that raged above ground. But we can imagine how glad and joyous the occupants would be when the winter drew to a close, and spring filled the air with its sweetness, and the beauty of the first green was seen on strath and wood, and the early floweret looked forth, to exchange these dreary vaults in the earth for the huts above ground, built of turf and the branches of trees, in which they were wont to pass the warm days of their brief summer.

When at last, after centuries had passed by, the Phoenician navigator, penetrating the recesses of the North Sea, moored his bark beneath the white cliffs of Albion, or under the dark rocks of Caledonia, the ingenuity and resource of the natives were quickened afresh. The Invention of the Caledonian was set to work to create new forms of art which might tempt the distant trader to re- visit his barbarous shore. New artistic designs, some of them of rare ingenuity and exquisite beauty, arose in an after- age on our soil, all of them nativeto the land. Shut in by their four seas, these early artists had no foreign models to copy from. Nevertheless, though they had studied in no school of design, and despite the farther disadvantage under which they labored of being but ill- served by the tools with which they worked, the products of their home- born art surprise and delight us by their purity, their ingenuity, their elegance, and the finish of the workmanship. More graceful designs were not to have been seen in the famous studios of Phoenicia, or even in the more celebrated workshops of Greece.

As their numbers grew other necessities dawned upon them. The pilgrimbond, so strong when they arrived in the country, now began to be relaxed and to lose its hold. They felt the need of laws and of a stronger authority than the Parental to govern them. First came the chief, whose rule extended over a tribe. When quarrels broke out between tribe and tribe, a higher authority still- a chief of chiefs- was felt to be needed for the government of the community, and the administration of the laws. Now came the king. This brings us to that long procession of august personages which Fordoun and Boethius make to defile past us, and which they dignify with the title of monarchs. These fir- off and dimly- seen potentates may not be mere shadows after all; they may have had an actual existence, and exercised a rude sovereignty in those obscure times; but it does not concern us to establish their historic identity, and celebrate over again the glory of those valorous and worthy exploits which they have been made to perform on the battle- field, and which, doubtless, if ever they were achieved, received due laud from the age in which they were done.

CHAPTER 4. THE STONE AGE.

LET us come closer to these British aborigines. They have no knowledge of letters. They had set out from their original homes before the invention of the alphabet. They have brought with them the implements of the shepherd and of the hunter, and in the foresight of danger they have provided themselves with some rude weapons of defense, such as the club and the stone hatchet, but they are wholly ignorant of the art of conversing with posterity, and of communicating to the ages to come a knowledge of what they were, and what they did. This parts them from our ken even more completely than the wild sea around their island sundered them from their contemporaries, and it may seem bootless, therefore, to pursue them into the thick darkness into which they have passed. And yet the labor of such inquiry will not be altogether thrown away. These ancient men have left behind them traces which enable us to reproduce, in outline, the manner of life which they led, much as the Arab of the desert can tell from the footprints of the traveler on the sand to what tribe he belonged, whether he carried a burden, and the days or weeks that have elapsed since he passed that way. The characters which we are now to essay to read are inscribed on no page of book, they are written on the soil of the country; nevertheless, they bear sure testimony regarding the men to whom they belong, and the study of them will disclose to us something, at least, of what went on in our dark land before history arrived with her torch to dispel its night.

We begin with the stone age. We know not when this age opened or when it closed, and it is bootless to inquire. Viewing the matter generally, the stone age was coeval with man. All around him were the stones of the field. They were his natural weapons, especially of attack, and he must have continued to make use of them till he came into possession of a better material for the fabrication of his implements and tools. This was not till the arrival of bronze, a date which it is impossible to fix. These great discoveries were made before history had begun to note the steps of human progress, and therefore we are here able to speak not of time but of sequences. We are not, however, to conclude that all nations began their career with the stone age. There was one family of mankind which retained the traditional knowledge of the metals, but the colateral branches of that family, when they wandered away from their original seat, lost the art of extracting and smelting the ore, and had to begin their upward career on the low level of the stone age. Let us hear what archeology has to say of our country on this head.

On yonder moor is a cairn. It was there at the dawn of history; how long before we do not know. It has seen, probably, as many centuries as have passed over the pyramids. Its simplicity of structure has fitted it even better to withstand the tear and wear of the elements than those mountainous masses which still rear their hoar forms in the valley of the Nile; and it has more sacredly guarded the treasures committed to its keeping than have the proud mausolea of the Pharaohs. Let us open it, and see whether it does not contain some record of a long forgotten past. We dig down into it, and light upon a stone coffin. We open the lid of the rude sarcophagus.

There, resting in the same grave in which weeping warriors laid him four thousand or more years ago, is the skeleton of one who was, doubtless, of note and rank in his day. We can imagine the blows that great arm- bone would deal when it was clothed with sinew and flesh, and the fate that would await the luckless antagonist who should encounter its owner on the battlefield. This ancient sleeper, whom we have so rudely disturbed in his dark chamber, may have surpassed in stature and strength the average Caledonian of his day, but even granting this, he enables us to guess the physical endowments of a race which could send forth such stalwart, if exceptional, specimens to assist in clearing the forest or subduing the rugged glebe, or fighting the battles of clan or of country.

We open this coffin as we would a book, and we scan its contents with the same engrossing interest with which we devour the printed volume which tells of some newly discovered and far- off country. But we have not yet read all that is written in this ancient tome. We turn to its next page. The weapons of the warrior have been interred in the same rude cist with himself. Here, lying by his side, is his stone battle- axe. Its once tough wooden handle is now only a bit of rotten timber. On its stone head, however, time has been able to effect no change: it is compact and hard as when last carried into battle. This stone axe is a silent but significant witness touching the age in which its owner lived. No one would have gone into battle armed only with an implement of stone if he could have provided himself with a weapon of iron, or of other metal. But weapon of iron the occupant of this cist had none. He fought as best he could with such weapons as his age supplied him with, making strength of arm, doubtless, compensate for what was lacking in his weapon. The inference is clear. There was an age when iron was unknown in Scotland, and when implements of all kinds were made of stone.

There is a close resemblance betwixt the battle- axes dug out of the cairns and tumuli of our country and those fabricated by the savages of the South Sea Islands not longer ago than a little prior to the last age. It is not necessary that we should suppose that the latter worked upon the models furnished by our ancestors of savage times. The constructive powers of man in a savage state are always found working in the same rugged groove, and hence the resemblance between the two though parted by thousands of years. All his implements, peaceful and warlike, did man then fabricate of stone. With an axe of stone he cut down the oak; with an axe of stone he hollowed out the canoe; with an axe of stone he drove into the ground the stakes of his rude habitation; with an axe of stone he slaughtered the ox on which he was to feast; and with an axe of stone he laid low his enemy on the battle- field, or himself bit the dust by a blow from the same weapon. It was theSTONE AGE, the first march on the road to civilization.

The harder stones were used in the fabrication of the heavier instruments.

It was of no use going into battle with a weapon which would fly in splinters after dealing a few blows. The stone used in the manufacture of the battle axe was that known as green- stone. But the lighter weapons, and in particular the projectiles, were fashioned out of flint. A mass of flint was split up in flakes, the flakes were chipped into the form of arrowheads, and were fitted on to a cane, and made fast by a ribbon of skin.

These flint arrow- heads proved rather formidable missiles. Shot by a strong hand from a well- strung bow, they brought down the roe as he bounded through the forest, or laid the warrior prostrate on the field.

These flints were capable of receiving an edge of great sharpness. Flint knives were made use of by both the Hebrews and the Egyptians in their religious rites, in those especially where a clean incision had to be made, as in the process of embalming and other ceremonies. The hieroglyphics on the Egyptian obelisks are supposed to have been cut by flint knives. The granite in which the hieroglyphics were graven is too hard to have been operated upon by bronze or iron, and the Egyptians were not acquainted with steel.

These arrow- heads buried in the soil are often turned up at this day in dozens by the Spade or the plough, showing how prevalent was their use in early times, and for a very considerable period. They suggest curious thoughts touching the artists that so deftly shaped them, and the men who turned them to so good account in the chase or in the fight. Were these ancient warriors to look up from their cairns and stone cists, how astonished would they be to mark the difference betwixt their simple missiles and the formidable projectiles- the breech- loaders, the guns, the mortars, and various artillery- with which the moderns decide their quarrels.

In some localities these flints are gathered in a heap, as if they had fallen in a shower, and lay as they fell till the plough uncovered them. This accumulation of weapons tells a tale of forgotten warfare. When we dig in the moor of Culloden, or in the field of Waterloo, and exhume the broken shells, the round shot, the swords, and other memorials of battle which so plentifully exist in these soils, we say, and would say, though no record existed of the carnage formerly enacted on the spot, here armies must have met, and here furious battle must have been waged. And so, when we gaze on these long- buried flints laid bare by the plough, we are forcibly carried back to a day in our country’s unrecorded past, when uncouth warriors, with matted locks, painted limbs, and eyes gleaming with the fire of battle, gathered here to decide some weighty point of tribal dissension, and awaken the echoes of the lonely hills with their wild war- whoop, and the crash of their stone axes.

Let us look a moment with the eyes of these men, and view the world as it was seen by them. What a narrow horizon begirt them all round! History had never unrolled to their eye her storied page, and beyond the genealogy of their chief, which they had heard their senachies rehearse, they knew little of what had happened in the world till they themselves came into it. In front they were shut in by a near and thick darkness. The moor on which they dwelt was their world. The chase or the battle was the business of their lives; and to die at last by the side of their chieftain in some great tribal conflict, and have their bones inurned in the same sepulchral mound, was the supreme object of their ambition. Their range of knowledge and enjoyment was only a little less contracted than that of the beasts that perish. What a change when knowledge lit her lamp, and the barbarian, loosed from the handbreadth of earth to which he had been chained, could make the circuit of the globe, and the circuit of the centuries, and draw the elements of his happiness from all the realms of space, and from all the ages of time!

Let us ascend an eminence and take a survey of the landscape of this age.

It looks to the eye a vast shaggy wood, crossed by sedgy rivers, dotted by black tarns, and broken by rocky cliffs and ridges. Here and there a gleam of gold tells where a patch of grain is ripening, and the ascending wreath of blue smoke reveals the wattle- worked homestead that nestles in the forest.

We visit one of these clearings. We find the hamlet within its staked enclosure. The inhabitants, some in linen, for they grow a little flax, others in skins, are variously occupied. Some are cutting wood with stone axes of wonderful sharpness, or sawing it with pieces of notched flint, or splitting it up by means of a stone wedge. Others are fabricating spear- shafts, arrowheads, or scraping skins, or polishing celts, or carving implements out of bone and antler. Outside the huts the women are grinding the corn with pestle and mortar- for the hand quern has not yet been invented- and cooking the meal on the fire, or they are spinning thread with spindle and distaff, to be woven into cloth on a rude loom. Perchance some are engaged moulding with the hand vessels of clay. It is verily but the infancy of the arts, but we here behold the foundation on which have been built the mighty industries that now occupy our populations.

Outside the stockade that runs round the hamlet are flocks of sheep, herds of goats, troops of horses, and droves of short- horned cattle. Numerous hogs scour the clearing in search of roots, tended by swine herds and defended by large dogs against the bears, wolves, and foxes that infest the forest that forms the environment of the homestead. Such is the picture the clearing presents.

CHAPTER - THE BRONZE AGE.

THE tail, fair- haired, round- headed Celt brought the knowledge of bronze with him into Britain. Man made a vast stride when he passed from stone to metal. With that transition came an instant and rapid advance all along the line of civilization. The art of war was the first to feel “the quickening influence of the new instrument with which man was now armed. His weapons were no longer of stone but of bronze; and although this is every way an inferior metal to that by which it was to be succeeded, iron, to wit, it was immeasurably superior to stone, and accordingly victory remained with the warrior who entered the field armed with sword, and axe, and dagger, all of bronze. This wrought a revolution in the military art not unlike that which the invention of gunpowder in an after- age brought with it.

When we speak of the Celts, and the gift they conferred on the nations of the West, let us pause a moment to note their origin and career. They are known in history by three names- the Celtae, the Galatae, and the Galli.

Their irruption from their primeval home in Central Asia was the terror of the age in which it took place. In the fourth century before Christ, after some considerable halt, they resumed their migration westwards in overwhelming numbers and resistless force. They scaled the barrier of the Alps, rushed down on Italy, gave the towns of Etruria to sack, defeated the Roman armies in battle, and pursued their victorious march to the gates of Rome, where they butchered the senators in the Capitol, and had well nigh strangled the Great Republic in its infancy. Another division of these slaughtering and marauding hordes took the direction of Greece, and threatened to overcloud with their barbarism that renowned seat of Philosophy and Art. It was with the utmost difficulty that they were repulsed, and Athens saved. The legions of the first Caesar, after nine bloody campaigns, broke the strength of the Galli; but it was not till the days of the second Caesar that all danger from them was past, and that Rome could breathe freely.

This is the first appearance of the Celts in history; but it is undoubted that long before this, at a period of unknown antiquity, they had begun to migrate from the East, and to mingle largely with the Cimmeric nations which had preceded them in their march westwards. The whole of Europe, from the border of Scythia to the Pillars of Hercules, was known to Herodotus as the Land of the Celts.

Their sudden and furious descent on Italy and Greece was probably owing to the pressure of some other people, Scythic or Teutonic, that began to act upon them, putting them again in motion, and sending them surging over the great mountains that flanked their westward march. Their prolific swarms largely mixed themselves with the Iberians of Spain, the Cimri around the German Ocean, and the aborigines of Britain, and generally formed the great bulk of the population west of the Rhine and the Alps.

They were a pastoral people. To till the ground they held a mean occupation, and one that was below the dignity of a Celt. But if they disdained or neglected the plough, they knew how to wield the sword.

They were fierce warriors. Even Sallust confesses that they bore off the prize from the Romans themselves in feats of arms. Compared with the legions, they were but poorly equipped- an ill- tempered sword, a dagger, and a lance were their weapons- though they far excelled the Britons, whom they found, when they first came into contact with them, doing their fighting with weapons of stone. They delighted in garments of showy colors, which they not unfrequently threw off widen they engaged in combat. The character of the Celts was strangely and most antithetically mixed. It presented a combination of the best and the worst qualities. They were eager to learn, they were quick of apprehension, they were very impressible, they were impulsive and impetuous, but they were unstable, lacking in perseverance, easily discouraged by reverses, and it was their ill fortune to mar their greatest enterprises by the discords and quarrels into which they were continually falling among themselves. The picture drawn of them by Cato the censor has been true of them in all ages of their history. “Gaul, for the most part,” said he, “pursues two things most perseveringly- war and talking cleaverly.” f15 Such were the people who brought the knowledge of bronze into Britain.

Hewing their way through a population armed only with implements of stone, the intruders taught the Caledonian by dear experience to avail himself of the advantage offered by the new material. This was the first fruit that grew out of their invasion. But the Celts were destined to render, in an after- age, a far higher service to the nations of the West than any we see them performing on occasion of their first appearance in Europe. Only they had first to undergo other vicissitudes and migrations. They had to be dislodged from great part of that vast European area of which they had held for a while exclusive possession.

They must flee before the sword with which they had chased others: they must be parted into separate bodies, shifted about and driven into corners; they must, in particular, mingle their blood with that of the Caledonian and the Scot, imparting to these races something of their own fire, and receiving back something of the strength and resoluteness of these other.

The faith which they had left behind them in their Aryan home, then only in the simplicity of its early dawn, will break upon them in the West, in the full, clear light of Christianity; this will open to them new channels for their activities and energies, and then they will crown themselves with nobler victories than they have won heretofore. Instead of unsettling kingdoms by the sword, it will now be their only ambition to build them up by diffusing amongst them the light of knowledge, the benefits of art, and the blessings of Christianity. There awaits the Celts in the future, as we shall see at a subsequent stage of our History, the glorious task of leading in the evangelization of the West.

But this is an event as yet far distant, and we return to our task of tracing, as dimly recorded in our sepulchral barrows and cairns, the changes in our national life consequent on the introduction of bronze. The first of man’s pursuits to feel the influence of the new metal was war, as we have said.

And, accordingly, when we open the cists and cairns of that ancient world, there is the sword, and there are the other instruments of battle, all of bronze. Yet in its evolutions and applications, bronze was found to benefit the arts of peace even more than it quickened the work of human slaughter.

The art of shipbuilding took a stride. From earliest time man had sailed the seas, at least he had crept along their shores, but in how humble a craft! a boat of wicker work, covered with skin, or a canoe hollowed, by means of fire or a stone hatchet, out of a single trunk; but now he begins to cross frith and loch in a boat built of plank His vessels, though still diminutive, are now more sea- worthy. He can more safely extend his voyages. He can cross the narrow seas around his island, carrying with him, mayhap, a few of the products of his soil, which perchance his neighbors may need, and which he exchanges in barter for such things as his own country does not produce. Thus the tides of commerce begin to circulate, though as yet their pulse is feeble and slow.

There is an advance, too, in the art of house- building. A chamber in the earth, or a hut of turf and twigs above .ground, had heretofore contented the Caledonian, who bravely met with hardihood and endurance the inclemencies which he knew not otherwise to master. Now in the bronze age, he erects for himself a dwelling of stone. His habitation as yet can boast of no architectural grace, for his tools are still imperfect, and his masonry is of the rudest type; but his ingenuity and labor make up for what is lacking in his art or in his implements, and now his hut of wattles is forsaken for a stone house, and his stronghold underneath the ground is exchanged for strengths, or castles of dry stone, exceedingly somber in their exterior, but cunningly planned within, which now began to dot the face of the country.

A further consequence of the introduction of bronze was the developement of a taste for personal ornament. The love of finery is an instinct operative even in the savage. Our ancestors of unrecorded time were not without this passion, or the means of gratifying it. The beauties of those days rejoiced their bead necklaces and bracelets. These were formed of various materials- bone, horn, jet, the finer sort of stones, and frequently of seashells, perforated, and strung upon a sinew or vegetable fiber. Beads of glass have in some instances been discovered in the cists and tumuli of the stone period, the importation probably of some wandering trader, from the far- off shore of Phoenicia. But when we come to the cists of the bronze age, we find them more amply replenished with articles of personal ornament than those of the foregoing period. These, moreover, are of costlier material, and, as we should expect, they are more elegant in form, and more skillful in workmanship. As among the ancients so with the primitive Britons, neckornaments seem to have been the most highly prized; for collars abound among the treasures of the cist. The other members of the body had their due share, however. These were pendants for the ears, clasps for the arms, rings for the finger, and anklets for the legs. Nor was this love of ornament confined to the females of the period.

As is the case among all savage nations, it was hardly less strongly developed among the gentlemen of Caledonia than among the ladies. The archeologist finds not unfrequently in the cist of the chieftain and warrior, lying alongside his skeleton, the ornaments which graced his person, as well as the sword and spear that served him in the battle. Among female ornaments, necklaces have been discovered, consisting of alternate beads of jet and amber. The native origin of these articles is placed beyond doubt by the fact that they totally differ from the Anglo- Roman or classic remains, and that they are found in the earliest tombs, dug long ere foot of Roman had touched the soil.

A yet greater obligation did Scottish civilization owe to bronze when it introduced, as it now did, a superior and more serviceable class of domestic utensils. Hitherto culinary vessels and table- dishes had been of stone or clay rudely fashioned. These would fall into disuse on the advent of bronze. The natives had now access to a material of which to fashion vessels, possessing not only greater durability, but susceptible also of greater variety of form and greater grace of decoration. The articles of bronze- cups, tripods, kettles, and cauldrons- dug up from underneath our mosses, show that the Caledonian was not slow to appreciate the advantages which bronze put within his reach, that he set himself to acquire the art of working in it, and that he succeeded in producing utensils of greater utility and of superior beauty to any that he or his fathers had known. His table had a grace which had been absent from it till now. He felt pardonable pride, doubtless, as he beheld it garnished with vessels of precious material and curious workmanship. king might sit at his board.

Nor did the matter end there. The art refined the artificer. The Caledonian workman came under the humanising influence of a sense of beauty. As time went on his genius expanded, and the deftness of his hand increased.

Every new creation of symmetry or of grace as it unfolded itself under his eye gave him new inspiration, and not only prompted the desire, but imparted the ability to surpass all his former efforts by something better still- some yet rarer pattern, some yet lovelier form. Thus grew up the Celtic art. The time of its efflorescence was not yet come- was far distant.

But when at length that period arrives, and Celtic art is perfected, it is found to challenge a place all its own among the arts of the world. From the simplest elements it evolved effects of the most exquisite grace and beauty. It was unique. Celtic hands only knew to create it, and on none but Celtic soil did it flourish.

It is natural to suppose that for some time after the introduction of bronze the supply of the metal was limited, and its cost correspondingly high. In these circumstances vessels of stone and clay would continue some little time in use, along with those of the new manufacture. The finds in the bogs and cists of our country verify this conjecture. The two kinds of vessels are found in bogs and pits in miscellaneous heaps, showing that the worker in clay and stone was not instantaneously superseded by the worker in bronze. Not only did his occupation continue, but from this time Iris art was vastly improved. He profited, doubtless, by the metallic patterns to which he had now access, and he learned to impart to his stone arts and implements something of the symmetry and grace which characterized the new creations in bronze. It is now that we come on traces of the potter’s wheel; as later on of the turning lathe. The clay vessels of the period are no longer molded rudely by the hand, they have a regularity and elegance of shape which the hand could not bestow, and which must have been given them by machinery. This is particularly the case as regards the cinery vases, which are found in the cists and cairns of the bronze period: many of them are specially graceful. The appearance of urns containing the ashes of the dead in this age, and not till this age, is significant as betokening the entrance of a new race and of new customs, if not of new beliefs. The inhumation of the body was, beyond doubt, the earliest mode of sculpture in our country. Its first inhabitants had brought tiffs custom with them from their eastern home, and continued to practice and, accordingly, in the very oldest cairns and cists the skeleton is found laid out at its full length, and one consequence of its long entombment is that on the opening of ‘the cist, and the admission of air, the bones fall in dust and the skeleton disappears under the gaze. But in the bronze age there is a change: this most ancient and patriarchal method of burial is discontinued.

The presence of the cinery was in the grave shows that the body was first burned, and then the ashes were collected and put into an urn. This treatment of the dead has classic example to recommend it. Every one knows that the Greeks and Romans placed the bodies of their departed warriors and philosophers on the funeral pyre. Homer has grandly sung the burning of the bodies of Hector and Patroclus on the plain of Troy: the kindling of the pile over- night, the quenching of the flames at dawn with libations of wine, and the raising over the inurned ashes of the deceased heroes that mighty tumulus that still attracts the gaze of the traveler as he voyages along that shore. But despite the halo which these high classic examples throw around the funeral pyre, we revolt from it. It shocks the reverence which clings even to the bodies of those whom we have revered and loved while they were alive. From these grand obsequies on the Trojan plain we turn with a feeling of relief to the simple yet dignified scene in the Palestinian vale, where the Hebrew Patriarch is seen following his dead to hide it out of his sight in the chambers of the earth. This mode of sepulture, that is, by incremation, would seem to have been only temporary. When we come later down the cinery urns ,disappear from the graves, and we are permitted to conclude that the Caledonians ceased to light the funeral pyre, and reverted ill their disposal of their dead to the more ancient and certainly more seemly rite of laying them in the earth. f16 With bronze, too, came a marked improvement on the dress of the natives.

Their clothing hitherto had alternated betwixt a coat of fur, which was worn in winter, and a garment of linen, which formed their summer attire.

The former cost them little trouble, save what it took to hunt the boar or other beast of prey and compel him to give up his skin for the use of his captor. The latter they wove from the little flax which they had learned to cultivate. But they needed a stuff more suitable for clothing in a moist and variable climate than either the hide of ox or the light fabric of linen. A woolen garment was what they wanted as intermediate betwixt one of fur and one of flax. But in the stone age it does not appear that they knew to weave wool into cloth. Probably their implements were at fault. But the arrival of bronze got them over the difficulty. It supplied them with finer tools, and now an advance takes place in the arts of spiraling and weaving.

They had now less need to rob the bear of his skin, or slaughter the Ox for his hide. The wool of their flocks would furnish a garment more suitable for most purposes than even these. Accordingly, woolen cloth now begins to make its appearance. And from this time we can imagine the Caledonian, when he went afield, wrapping himself in his woolen plaid, or donning his woolen cloak and cap, while his legs are encased in leather, and his feet are thrust in- to sandals of skin. But it is in the agriculture of the country that the main change that followed the introduction of bronze is seen. The stone axe, with its edge so easily blunted, made the process of clearing the forest a slow and laborious one. The oaks and firs that covered Scotland yielded to the axe only after long and painful blows, and it was with immense toil that a small patch was redeemed for pasture, or for growing a little grain.

In truth, the clearances were mostly effected by the agency of fire. But when bronze made its appearance the Caledonian became master of the great forests that environed and hemmed him in. His pasturages stretched out wider and wider; the golden grain was seen where the dark wood had waved. The beasts of prey decreased, their covert being cut down. If the hunter had now less scope for the exercise of the chase, and his venison began in consequence to grow scarce, he could make up for the lack of that food in which he delights by a freer use of the flesh of his flocks and herds. There came to be no lack of corn and milk; and the morasses beginning to be drained, not only was the face of the country beautified, but the air above it became drier and more salubrious. Such is the evidence furnished by the contents of the refuse- heaps of the bronze age, found in caves, in barrows, in lake- dwellings, and in ancient burial- places. f17 It is the admixture of tin with copper that gives us bronze. Copper is one of the most abundant of the higher metals, but it is also one of the softest, but when alloyed with tin in the proportion of from a tenth to a twelfth per cent., copper acquires the hardness requisite to fit it for all the purposes to which bronze was put. And as this is the proportion found in the bronze relics which have been dug up in the various countries, it is thence inferred that bronze was diffused from one center, and that center in Asia Minor.

Brass is a later and different metal. It is the admixture of zinc with copper, and is not found in use till we come down to the rise of the Roman empire. The invention of bronze carries us back to an unknown antiquity.

CHAPTER - THE IRON AGE.

THE iron age is a sort of twilight between the utter night of the stone and bronze periods and the morning of history. Of all the metals iron is by far the most useful. This superiority it owes to its greater hardness, which permits, especially when converted into steel, tools to be made of it which are equally adapted for the most delicate operations and the roughest labors. With iron we can trace the finest line on the precious stone, or hew a pathway into the bowels of the mountain. When man came into possession of this metal, he wielded that one of all the material instrumentalities which was the fittest to give him the mastery of the globe.

Man could now till the earth, quarry the rock, dig into the mine, clear the forest, build cities, and enclose them within impregnable ramparts. But what, perhaps, most pleased the Caledonian of that age was that he could now ride forth to battle in his war chariot, brandishing his flashing weapons, and blazing iii a coat of mail.

But if the first result of the introduction of iron, as in the case of bronze, was the dismal one of increased battlecarnage, aftertimes were to bring a compensation for this initial evil in the indefinite multiplication of the resources of art. The half- trained savage, as he busies himself smelting the ore and hammering the metal to forge therewith an instrument of slaughter little dreams that he is in reality a pioneer of peace. And yet it is so. He is making proof of a substance whose many unrivaled properties need only to be known to convince man that he now holds in his hand an instrument of such potency that compared with it Thor’s famous hammer was but a reed.

When the qualities of iron shall have been tested and ascertained, man will be able to harness and set working in his service the mighty forces of steam and electricity. And when this has come to pass, the savage shall have grown into a sovereign with not an clement in earth, in sea, or in air, which is not his willing subject and servant. The mountain will part asunder to give him passage, the billows of the Atlantic will support his steps, and the lightnings will run on his errands to the ends of the earth.

In Asia, it is probable, was the discovery made that ironstone is an ore, and can be smelted and wrought like the more ductile bronze. At all events, it is in that quarter of the world that we come upon the first historic traces of this metal. The Homeric heroes are seen fighting with weapons of bronze and of iron. The dream of Nebuchadnezzar makes it undoubted that iron was known in Chaldea in his day. This metal formed an important part of the colossal figure that stood before the king in his sleep. From the ancient centers- Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia- iron slowly made its way westward. Hesiod (B. C. 850) tells us that in his day it had superseded bronze among the Greeks. The Aryan races, which were the first to settle in Europe, were ignorant of metals. Not so the Celtae which succeeded them. They excelled in the metallurgic arts, and if not the filet teachers of the Romans in them, they greatly advanced their knowledge and proficiency. The Norici, a Celtic tribe, inhabiting near the Danube, and to whom is ascribed the art of converting iron into Steel, are believed to have supplied the Romans with iron weapons in their life and death struggle with Cartilage. In the days of Augustus, a Noric sword was as famous at Rome as a “Damascus blade” or an “Andrew Ferrara” in after times. From the Mediterranean iron traveled into northern Europe by the ordinary channels of commerce, and finally made its appearance in Britain. The Caledonians were, doubtless, at first dependent on the southern nations for their supply, but only for a time, for their country abounds in iron ore; and from the day that they learned the art of smelting, they were wholly independent of their neighbors for their supply of this useful metal. In the days of Caesar the native mines yielded, we know, enough for the needs of the inhabitants.

Their implements and weapons were now of iron; their personal ornaments were formed of the same metal, along with bronze, which, though now dismissed from the service of the arts, was still retained in the business of personal ornamentation.

The change which iron brought with it in the arts and uses of life, was neither so sudden nor so radical as that which was attendant on the introduction of bronze. It was not to be expected that it would. The transition from bronze to iron was not by any means so great as that from stone to bronze. The change now effected was simply a change from an inferior metal to a higher. Many of the purposes served by iron had been served by bronze, though not so well. Custom and prejudice were on the side of the older metal. The savage would be slow to discard the tools which had served him aforetime, or to cast aside the ornaments in which he had taken no little pride, and which he might even deem more fitting than those, so lacking in glitter, as ornaments of iron. Besides, iron at first was doubtless the more costly. Though the most abundant of all the metals, its ore is the most difficult to smelt. It fuses only under an intense heat. But its greater utility at last carried the day and brought it into general use, first of all , in the field of battle. Self- preservation being the first law of nature, man will always make choice of the best material within his reach for the weapons with which he defends himself. The bronze sword was adapted only for attack. The warrior who was armed with it could deal a thrust, but he could not parry the return blow. His sword of cast bronze was apt to shiver like glass. It was useless as a weapon of fence. This revolutionized the battle- field; and we begin to find the record of that revolution in the cists and cairns. The leaf- shaped bronze sword disappears, and the iron brand comes in its room. The shape of the weapon, too, is different. The sword has now a guarded handle. It is clear that the warrior used it to parry the blow of his antagonist as well as deal a thrust, and this necessitated some contrivance for guarding his sword- hand. f20 From the battle- field, and the dreadful work there required of it, iron passed into the kindlier and lovelier uses of social and domestic life. And for some of the uses to which it was now put, iron would seem to be but little adapted, as, for instance, that of personal adornment. The modern beauty would think iron a poor substitute for gold in the matter of jewelry, and would feel nothing but horror in the prospect of appearing at the concert or in the ballroom as the horse appears in the battle, harnessed in iron.

But not so her sisters of two or three thousand years ago. They deemed that their charms had not justice done them unless they were set off in iron bracelets, iron anklets, and other trinkets of the same unlovely metal. Even their lords, who were hardly less enamoured of personal ornaments than their ladies, wore, Herodian tells us, their iron neckcollars and iron girdles as proudly as Roman his insignia of the finest gold; another proof, by the way, of the adage that there is no disputing about matters of taste. This much, however, can be said for the Caledonian, even that the metal was novel, that it was probably rare and costly, and therefore was deemed precious. Nor was the these things when he died. He took them with him to the grave, that he might appear in a manner befitting his rank in the spirit world. He would wear them in Odin’s Hall.

Iron, too, was used in the coinage of our country. The current money of our island in those days consisted in good part of iron coined into small rings. So Caesar informs us. Iron money has this advantage over gold, it better resists the tear and wear of use; and this may have recommended it to the Caledonians. We can imagine our ancestors going a- marketing provided with a score or two of these little iron rings. The Caledonian wishes to provide himself with a skin coat, or a plaid of the newest pattern and brightest colors, or ft hand- guarded iron sword, for flint arrow- heads and bronze- tipped spears are now antiquated; or he would like to grace his table with a drinking- cup, or a bowl, or other utensil turned on the wheel; or he aspires to present his better- half with a bracelet or a finger- ring, and having counted the cost and found that he is master of the requisite number of iron rings, he sets off to effect the purchase. The seller hands over the goods and takes the rings in payment; they are current money with the merchant. We moderns like to combine the beautiful with the useful even in these every- day matters. It gratifies our loyalty as well as our taste to see the image of our sovereign, bright and gracious every time we handle her coin. The Caledonian did not understand such subtle sentimentalities. The iron rings he traded with bore neither image nor superscription. They did his turn in the market nevertheless, and he was therewith content.

A gold coinage appears to have been not altogether unknown even then. “Little doubt is now entertained by our best numismatists,” says Wilson, “that the coins of Comius, and others of an earlier date than Cunobeline, or the first Roman invasion, include native British mintage. There is no question at any rate that they circulated as freely in Britain as in Gaul, and have been found in considerable quantities in many parts of the island. The iron or bronze or copper ring money of the first century must therefore be presumed as only analogous to our modern copper coinage, and not as the sole barbarous substitute for a minted circulating medium.”

These rings, in some cases, at least, were interred with the dead, despite the saying of Scripture that we bring nothing with us into the world and shall carry nothing out of it. The departing in these ages cartied with them the money with which they had traded in the markets of earth, or what portion of it their friends judged necessary. Here it is beside themin their graves, doubtless, in the idea that in some way or other it would be serviceable in the world beyond. The porter at the gate of Valhalla might be the more quick to open if he had the prospect of a gratuity. And the man to whom he gave admission- unless, indeed, this new world was altogether unlike the one from which he had come- would be all the more welcome that he was known to be not without assets, and might help his friends at a pinch. But not to dogmatize about the theory that underlay these burial ceremonies, the fact is undoubted that these little rings are found in the graves and cists of that ancient time lying alongside the skeleton of their former owner. The discovery, however, makes us little the wiser. The great enemy of iron is rust. The hardest of all the metals, it more quickly succumbs to corrosion than any of the others. The ring money found h~ the old graves cannot be described, because it cannot be handled and examined. It is found, on the opening of the tomb, to be nothing but a circlet of brown rust. The thin gold ornaments dug up at Mycenae, and now in the museum at Athens, are as old, at least, as our ring money, and yet they can be seen and handled at this day. Not so the iron coinage of our forefathers. Not unfrequently does it happen, when their graves are opened, that the small rings remain visible for a few minutes, and then, along with their companion skeleton, dissolve in ashes.

The cists and graves testify to the new face that began to appear on our northern and barbarous country on the coming of iron. With it the streaks of the historic dawn begin to be seen on the horizon. The. isolation of the land is now well nigh at an end. The Britons in the south are seen crossing and recrossing the channel in frequent intercourse with their neighbors and kinsfolk the Belgae. The arts draw them together. They understand one another’s speech. The coinage of the two nations passes from hand to hand on both sides of the sea. The tides of commerce flow more freely. The pulse of trade is quickened. State necessities, too, draw them to each other, and tend to cement their friendship. Rome is advancing northward, and wherever she comes she imposes her yoke, and the Britons, desirous, no doubt, of keeping the danger from their own door, send secret assistance to the Belgae in resisting the advances of their great enemy. The influences which this contact and commingling make operative in the south of the island extend into the north, bringing therewith a certain refinement to the Caledonian, and multiplying the resources of his art, of which we begin to find traces in that only writing he has left behind him- his cairns and cists, to wit. His art- designs are better defined, and also more graceful. He has better material to work with, and he does better work. He is gathering round him new appliances both for use and for ornament, and may now be said to stand on the level which the nations of Asia had reached five centuries before, or, it may be, earlier. His fighting equipage is now complete. He appears on the battlefield in his war- chariot; and when his battles come to an end, he takes it with him to the grave. For when we uncover his barrow, there are the iron wheels that were wont to career over the field, carrying dismay into the hostile ranks, resting in darkness- at peace, like the skeleton alongside. There, too, is his shield with its iron rim and studs, together with his sword, the prey, all of them, of the same devouring rust, but telling their tale, all the same, of bloody conflicts long since over. We have a glimpse, too, into the boudoirs of the period. We see the beauty performing her toilet with the help of a polished iron mirror; for when we open her cist, there, resting by her side, in the dark land, is the identical mirror in which she was wont to contemplate the image of her beauty when she lived beneath the sun; and there, too, are the trinkets of gold, of amber, and of other material which she wore above ground, and which she has taken with her as credentials of the rank she is entitled to claim in the world into which she has now passed. f21 Of the thrifts and industries practiced in the Scotland of those days, we have memorials not a few treasured up, unwittingly, long ago for our instruction in this latter age. Let us bestow a glance upon them. We have seen how the Caledonian could build, sagaciously planting his winter house far down in the warm earth, and his summer retreat of twigs hard by in the open air. Now that he is in possession of iron tools, many improvements, doubtless, take place in the accommodation and furnishings of his hut. But he knows also to weave. The loom of that age, like its plough, was of the simplest construction, existing only in its rudiments. It survives, however, in the cairns and cists- the great storehouse of pre- historic records- and with it specimens of the cloth woven upon it. Here is the long- handed, short- toothed comb with which the thread, having been passed through the warp, Was driven home. This, and the beam to which the threads were fastened, formed the loom. In the tumuli are found portions of cloth of a quality far from contemptible, and sometimes of bright and even beautiful colors. To create such fabrics on so rude a loom, argues both deftness and taste on the part of the workman. To pass from the weaver of the iron age to the potter, we trace, too, an advance in his art. The cups and vases dug up aremore elegantly shaped, and by means of a few waving lines, have a simple but graceful decoration given them. The art of glazing pottery- the color commonly being green- has now been found out. From the potter’s wheel we come to an instrument of still greater importance in domestic life.

The grain- stones are now laid aside, and the quern has come in their room.

May we not infer from this that a greater breadth of corn has now began to be grown, and that the natives depend more on the field than on the chase for their subsistence, and may have regaled themselves on the same dish that may yet be seen on the breakfast tables of our own day. Nor are the cists silent respecting so humble an actor on the scene as the dog. The attendant of man in all stages of his career, we know that he followed the steps and looked up into the face of the Caledonian, savage though he was, for here the bones of dog and master lie together in the same grave. And when the Caledonian was no longer a savage, though still a barbarian, he had broken to his use, and attached to his person and service, a yet nobler animal- the horse, to wit. For here, in the same barrow, beside the bones of the warrior, lie those of the steed that bore him into the battle, and mayhap carried him safely out of it. He shares the honour as he shared the perils of his master.

Nor did beauty in those days, any more than in ours, neglect the labors or disdain the aids of the toilet. Here are the whalebone combs, the bone and iron pins, and the articles of gold and amber and jet, which were employed in the arranging of the hair and the adorning of the person. These remain, but- such is the irony of time- the charms they helped to set off have long since faded. The men of those days, too, made merry on occasion. Here are the drinking- cups, the goblets, and the vases that figured at their banquets, once bright and sparkling, but now encrusted with the rust of two thousand years and more. In vain we question these witnesses of the long past carousals touching the liquor that filled them, and the warriors and knights that sat round the board and quaffed it, while the song of bard or the tale of palmer mingled in the loud din of the banqueting- hall. The climate of Scotland did not favor then, any more than in our day, the cultivation of the vine; but when denied the juice of the grape, man has seldom been at a loss to find a substitute, and commonly a more potent one. Our ancestors, like the Germans, regaled themselves on a beverage brewed from a mixture of barley and honey, termed mead; and, though stronger than the simple wines of southern lands, it was greatly less so than the potent drinks with which the art of distillation has since supplied their descendants.

The cuisine of the Caledonians of that period was far from perfect. But, if their food was cooked in homely fashion, it was varied and nutritious, as the long preserved relics of their feasts testify. The museum at Bulak shows us on what luxuries the Egyptians of four thousand years ago regaled themselves. The buried hearthstones of our country show us the dainties on which the Scottish contemporaries of these old Egyptians were used to feed. The wheatfields of Manitoba and Transylvania had not been opened to them. To the vineyards of Oporto and Burgundy they had no access. Of the tea and coffee plantations of China and Java they did not even dream. But their own island, little as had as yet been done to develop its resources, amply supplied their wants. They could furnish their boards from the cereals of their straths, the wild berries of their woods, the fish of their rivers, the milk and flesh of their herds, and the venison of their moors and mountains. There is not a broch in Orkney that does not contain the remains of the rein or red deer. The red deer does not exist in Orkney at this day; the animal continued down to about the twelfth century.

A marked feature in the Scottish landscape of those days was the broch.

The broch was peculiar to Scotland; not a single instance of this sort of structure is to be found out of the country. The brochs were places of strength, and they tell of hostile visits to which Scotland was then liable, and which made it necessary for its inhabitants to provide for their safety.

The brochs were built of dry stones; mark of tool is not to be seen upon them; nevertheless, their materials, though neither hewn nor embedded in mortar or lime, fit in perfectly, and make their wails compact and solid.

When danger approached, we can imagine the whole inhabitants of a district leaving the open country and crowding into the broch with their goods, and finding complete protection within their strong enclosure. They were circular ramparts, in short, planted thick in some places- the districts, doubtless, most liable to incursion- and they must have given a fortified look to the land. Their average height was 50 feet, their diameter 40, and the thickness of their wail from 12 to 15 feet. Their door was on the ground level, but, for obvious reasons, unusually narrow and low. It was little over 3 feet in height and 2 in width. They were open to the sky within. Their thick wall was honeycombed with chambers, placed row above row, with a stair ascending within, and giving access to the circular chambers. Their windows looked into the area of the broch; their exteriors presented only an unbroken mass of building. In some instances they were provided with a well and a drain. There is not now one entire broch in Scotland, but their ruins are numerous. Not fewer than 370 have been traced in the country, mostly to the north of the Caledonian valley. More may have existed at one time, but their ruins have disappeared. The construction of these fabrics, so perfectly adapted to their purpose, argues a considerable amount of architectural skill on the part of their builders, and also a certain advance in civilization. The discovery of Roman coins, and the red glazed pottery of Roman manufacture in these brochs, indicate their existence and use down to the occupation of the southern part of Britain by the Romans.

There remains one point of great moment. What knowledge did the inhabitants of Scotland of that age possess of a Supreme Being and a future state? This is the inner principle of civilization, and, dissociated from it, no civilization is of much value, seeing it lacks the capability of being carried higher than a certain stage, or of lasting beyond a very brief period.

What hold was this principle acquiring on our ancestors? We have only general considerations to guide us here.

Noah, before sending his sons forth to people his vast dominions, doubtless communicated to thcm, as we have said above, those Divine traditions which were their best inheritance, and which the posterity of Seth had carried down from Eden. He taught them the spirituality and unity of God; the institution of the Sabbath and marriage -the two foundation- stones of society; the fall of man, the promise of a Savior, and the rite of sacrifice.

These great doctrines they were to carry with them in their several dispersions, and teach to their sons. As one who had come up out of the waters of the deluge- the grave of a worldthe words of Noah, spoken on the morrow of that tremendous catastrophe, would deeply impress themselves on the minds of his sons, and would remain for some considerable time, distinct and clear, in the memory and knowledge of their posterity. How long they did so we have no means of certainly knowing.

Without a written record, and left solely to oral transmission, these doctrines, so simple and grand, and fully apprehended by Noah’s immediate descendants, would gradually come to be corrupted by additions, and obscured by allegory and legend. We know it to have been so as a fact. Hence the world of heathen mythology which grew up, and grafted itself on the men and events recorded in early Scripture. When the tenth or twentieth generation of the men who had sat at the feet of the great Patriarch arrived on the shores of Britain, it is natural to suppose that parts of the primeval revelation were lost, and that what of it was preserved was greatly obscured. But in the darkest eras of our country, as we shall afterwards see, the rites of worship were publicly observed. And with worship there are necessarily associated two ideas- a Supreme Being, and a life to come.

There is one fact which throws a pleasing light on these remote times of our country- No idol or graven image has ever been dug up in our soil. The cists and cairns of our moors contain the implements of the hunter and of the warrior, but no traces of the image- maker- no gods of wood and stone. The museums of Egypt are stocked by the thousand with the gods her inhabitants worshipped in old time, and scarce can we cast up a shovelful of earth in Cyprus, but we find in it some memorial of pagan idolatry. In the lands of Italy, of Greece, of Assyria, and of India, longburied deities are ever and anon cropping up and showing themselves in the light of day, but no such phenomenon has ever occurred on the soil of Scotland. Ancient Caledonia would seem, by some means or other, to have been preserved from a taint which had polluted almost every other land.

Relics of all sorts have been found in our soil, but never idol of British manufacture; nor is one such to be seen in any of our museums. “The relics,” says Wilson, “recovered from the sepulchral mounds of the great valley of the Mississippi, as well as in the regions of Mexico and Yucatan, display numerous indications of imitative skill. The same is observable in the arts of various tribes of Africa, Polynesia, and of other modern races in an equally primitive state. What is to be specially noted in connection with this is, that both in the ancient and modern examples the imitative arts accompany the existence of idols, and the abundant evidences of an idolatrous worship. So far as we know, the converse holds true in relation to the primitive British races, and as a marked importance is justly attached to the contrasting creeds and modes of worship and policy of the Allophylian and Aryan nations, I venture to throw out this suggestion as not unworthy of farther consideration.” f22 May we not infer from a circumstance so anomalous and striking that the ancient Briton had not lapsed into the gross polytheism to which the Greeks and Romans abandoned themselves. Lying off the highway of the world, and shut in by their four seas, they would seem to have been exempt, to a large extent, from the corrupting influences which acted so powerfully on the classic nations around the Mediterranean. They stood in “the old paths,” while the latter, yielding to an idealistic and passionate temperament, plunged headlong into a devotion which at length crowded their cities with temples and altars, and covered their valleys and hills with gods and goddesses in stone.

We do not lay much stress- although some lay a great deal- upon the mode of burial practiced by the ancient Briton as a means of spelling out his creed. His weapons were interred along with the warrior. “Why?” it has been asked. “Because,” it has been answered, “it was an article of his belief that he would need them in the spirit world.” In times still later, the war horse of the chief, his favorite hound, his attendants in the chase, or his followers on the battlefield, were all interred in company, that all might together resume, in a future life, the occupations and amusements in which they had been wont to exercise themselves in this. With fleeter foot would they chase the roe and hunt the boar. With even keener delight would they mingle in the strife of battle, and as on earth, so again in the world beyond, they would forget the toil of the chase and the peril of the conflict in the symposia of the celestial halls.

It was not within the gates of Valhalla only that the ,departed warrior was permitted to taste these supreme joys. Between him and the world in which he had passed his former existence, there was fixed no impassable gulf, and he had it in his power to return for a space to earth, and vary the delights of the upper sky with occasional pastime under “the pale glimpses of the moon.” Popular belief pictured the spectral warrior mounted on spectral steed, returning from the halls of Odin and entering his sepulchral barrow and becoming for a while its inhabitant. There, joined by those with whom he had fought, and hunted, and reveled, and whose bones lay in the same funereal chamber with his own, he would renew those carousals with which it had been his wont to close a day of battle or of chase dining the period of his mortal life. The tumulus or barrow was sacred to his memory. His spirit was believed to haunt it, and might on occasion hold fellowship with surviving relations and friends who chose to visit him in it. The wife would enter it and lie down by the side of her dead lord, in the idea of having communion with him, or she would bring meat and drink to regale him, which she would place in little cups provided for the purpose. Helge, one of the heroes of the Edda, returned from the hall of Odin on horseback, and entered his tumulus accompanied by a troop of horsemen. There his wife visited him, and for some time kept him company in his grave. This superstitious idea protected these barrows from demolition, and to it is owing the preservation of so many of them, forming as they do the only contemporaneous and authentic record we possess of the age to which they belong. On the advent of Christianity, burial with “grave- goods” ceased.

It is one of the lessons of history that unaided man, whatever his stage of civilization, always paints the life to come in colors borrowed from the life that now is. His heaven is the picture of earth. It is a freshened, brightened, glorified life which he promises himself, but still, in its essentials and substance, an earthly life. The thinking of the mightiest among the Greeks on the question of the life that is to come, moved, after all, in the same low groove with that of our early forefathers. The philosopher of Athens, when dying, fancied himself departing to another Academe, where the same subtle speculations, and the same intellectual combats, which had ministered so much pleasurable excitement to him in the Porch or in the Grove, would be resumed, with this difference, that there his powers would be immensely refined and invigorated, and consequently should have attendant on their exercise a far higher and purer happiness than he had ever tasted here. The idea of a new nature, with occupations and pleasures fitted to that new nature, was an idea unknown alike to the Greek and to the barbarian. It is a doctrine revealed in the Bible alone.

CHAPTER - THE DRUIDS- THE SUN WORSHIP OF ASIA AND CALEDONIA.

WE have traveled back thirty or forty centuries, and dug up the early Scottish world which, all the while, was lying entombed in our barrows and cairns. The historian of a former day never thought of looking into these ancient repositories, and hearing what they had to tell respecting the doings of a long past time. He obeyed, as he thought, a high authority, when he refused to entertain the hope of finding “knowledge or device in the grave.” He knew of no record save a written one, and so turning to ancient chronicles, he accepted the picture which some pious father had painted in the twilight of his monastery, as the true and genuine image of the ancient world. He was all the while unaware that what he was in quest of was lying close at hand- in fact, under his feet. In yonder barrow, which he had passed and re- passed an hundred times, but never once paused to inspect, was that same old world embalmed, and waiting through the long centuries to come forth and reveal the secrets of ancient time to the men of a later and more civilized age.

It is to this record we have turned. It is hardly possible that there should be deception or mistake in the picture. In truth it is no picture, it is the thing itself. It is that veritable world in all its barbarism: its battles, its boar hunts, its rude handicrafts, its earth- dug dwellings, its huts of wattled osiers plastered with mud, its feasts, its burials- ill short, the men with all the scenery of their lives around them. It is not tradition speaking to us through the fallible voice of a hundred or more generations; the information comes direct, we receive it at first hand. For while the centuries have been revolving, and outside that tumulus races have been changing, and dynasties passing away, changes there have been none on the world within that tumulus, the ages have there stood still, and as regards the validity and certainty of the evidence it furnishes, it is all the same, as if we had opened that barrow on the morrow immediately succeeding the day on which it was raised and closed in.

From the barrow and the cist, where the history of the Caledonian is written in the weapons with which he fought and the tools with which he worked, we turn to another chapter in his history, one partly written and partly monumental. We have seen the Caledonian on his battlefields in the first age slaughtering or being slaughtered with his stone axe; in the next, plunging at his foe with his bronze sword; in the third, riding into battle in his iron chariot, and hewing down his foes with a sword of the same metal.

We have seen him essaying the more profitable labors of art; first molding the clay with his hand, not caring how unshapely his vessel if it served its purpose, then turning it on the wheel, and taking a pride in the symmetry and beauty of the cup out of which he drank. We have traced, too, his progress in dress: at first he is content to envelope himself in fur of fox or skin of deer, but by and by he aspires to be differently clad from the animals he pursues in the chase. With a stone whorle and spindle he converts flax into thread; and when the metals come to the assistance of his art, he spins wool, and clothes himself with a garment of that texture.

Probably some visitor from the Phoenician shore, where the art is well understood, initiates him into the process of dyeing, and now his moors are illumined by the bright and glowing colors of the Caledonian tartan. We have seen his banquets and his funeral arrangements; but there is one chapter of his history we have not yet opened. How did the Caledonian worship?

There must all the while have been growing up at the heart of that barbarous world a higher life. Human society, however debased and barbarous, is ever at the core moral. Feeble, exceedingly feeble, its pulse may be, so feeble as to be scarce perceptible, but that pulse never can totally cease. For the moral sense of society is no acquired quality, it was given it by the law of its creation. But how can its moral consciousness be developed, unless in some rite, or system of rites, by which it gives expression to its sense of a Being above itself? By what rite, or system of rites, did the early Caledonian indicate his knowledge- vague, shadowy, and undefined it may have been- of a Supreme Being? Let us observe him as he worships, we shall have a truer knowledge of him, not of Iris art or his bravery merely, but of himself, his thoughts and feelings, than when we see him chipping arrow heads, or tipping the spear with stone or bronze for the chase or the battle.

We have abundant evidence, both monumental and historic, that the Caledonian worshipped, and not only so, but that his worship was purer than that of most early purer even than that of most early nations, and purer even than that of some contemporary nations who were far higher in the scale of civilization. Fetishism appears never to have defiled our country. Our barrows and cists contain no such figures, grotesque, hideous and horrible, as are objects of worship to some savage nations in our own day. We find no trace that such deities or demons were ever adored or dreaded by our early ancestors. The bestial idolatry of Egypt had not reached them. Their religious level appears to have been higher even than that of the Greeks and Romans. For, as we have said, by the side of the skeleton that three thousand years ago was a living man, there lies no image or god graven in stone, or in silver, or in bronze. Had such been in use by the men who sleep in these ancient cists, they would infallibly have been found in their graves. Around the dead man we discover that entire order of things amid which he lived: his battle weapons, the trophies of the chase, the cups, clay or bronze, that graced his table, and brimmed at his banquets; the trinkets of stone or of jet that he wore on his person, all are around him in the grave; but one thing is lacking, and, curious enough, it is that one thing which we should beforehand have made ourselves most sure of finding there, and which, had it formed part of the system amid which he lived, would infallibly have been there- the objects of his worship even.

That the dead should sleep with their stone axe or their bronze sword by their side, and yet not seek to hallow their cist and guard their rest by the image of their god, is strange indeed. Yet so it is. We are driven, therefore, to the conclusion that the early Caledonians had no notion of a Supreme Being, in short, were atheists, or that their conceptions of God were higher and more spiritual than those entertained by many contemporaneous peoples.

It is the latter conclusion which is undoubtedly the true one. The Caledonian saw a Being above himself, Allpowerful and Eternal. He had brought this great idea with him from his Aryan home, or rather- for that idea is not astricted to locality, or found only where man first began his career- it is the corner- stone of his constitution, and equally indestructible, and accordingly he instituted rites in honor of that Being, and reared, with his barbarian hands, structures, rough, huge, majestic, in which to perform these rites. This is a point which recent archeological discoveries in many and far- sundered lands have placed beyond dispute, and it enables us to pass to a very important phase of our country’s early history- the Druidic, to wit.

Among the vestiges of a remote time that linger on the face of our country, none are more remarkable than the tall upright stones, ranged in circle, and the broad, massy horizontal slabs, resting table- wise on supports, that are so frequently met with on our moors and hill- sides, and sometimes in the depth of our forests. To both learned and unlearned these unique and mysterious erections are objects of curiosity and interest. The questions they suggest are, In what age were they set up, and what purpose were they meant to serve? Immemorial tradition connects them with the religious rites of the earliest inhabitants of Scotland, and teaches us to see in them the first temples in which our fathers worshipped. Till lately, the universal belief regarding these singular erections was in accordance with the immemorial tradition. It was no more doubted that these great stones, ranged in solemn circle, filling the mind of the spectator with a vague awe, had been set up with a view to worship, than it was doubted that the stone hammer and axe, their contemporaries, had been fashioned with a view to battle. But in more recent times opinion on this point has shifted. The theory that referred these structures to a far- off time, and which saw in them the work of men unskilled in art but reverent of spirit, began, some half century ago, to be discredited. We were told that we were ascribing to them an antiquity far too high, and that we ought to seek for their origin in an age much nearer our own.

The period of the Vikings was fixed upon as that which first saw these monuments lift up their tall, uncouth, and solemn shapes on the moors of Scotland. The northern marauders reared them in hour of their god. So it has been said. Devout and pious men must these sea robbers have been, seeing they were intent on converting to the faith of Woden the men whose goods they harried and whose blood they spilt. We had not thought that their incursions partook so largely an evangelistic character. But there are difficulties neither few nor easily surmounted in the way of accepting this theory. How is it that the few centuries which have passed since their erection have been able to impart to these columns the appearance of so marvelous an age? We have monuments at least four thousand years old which are not so time- worn and hoary. Moreover, if their origin lies within historic times, why is there no record or reference to their setting up? Why do we not read that such and such a Viking, having won a glorious victory, constructed a magnificent ring of monoliths on the Caledonian moor in honor of the god by whose help his arms had triumphed? And why, in fine, do the surface of these columns bear no mark of hammer or chisel, seeing iron tools were not unknown in the age of the Vikings? But it is needless to combat an opinion which has no inherent probability, and which has now scarce a supporter. Our dolmens and stone circles were gray with age before keel of Northman had touched our shore, or Norwegian rover had dyed our soil with blood, whether ours or his own.

Yet another theory has been broached to account for the existence of monuments so unique in point of rugged grandeur, and so unlike any that are known certainly to belong to historic times. There are archaeologists of our day who will have it that they are graveyards. They are the mausolea of a barbarous age in which sleep the dead of a long- forgotten past: chieftains of note and warriors of renown, but whose names have gone into utter oblivion. This is a theory only a little less improbable than that on which we have been commenting. Where, we ask, are the signs and tokens that they are sepulchres? Are they placed near city, or seat of population, as we should expect a great cemetery to be? On the contrary, they are found in the solitudes and wildernesses of our land, in spots not then, nor ever likely to become, the scene of populous life. It may indeed be said that these remote and solitary spots were chosen on purpose, that prince and warrior might, sleep apart in lonely grandeur amid silence undisturbed.

Then, why were these supposed mausolea constructed on so vast a scale?

A few feet of earth will suffice for the greatest monarch, and as regards a funeral pile to draw the eye to his resting- place, a cairn like those that rise on our northern moors, or a tumulus like that which towers on the plain of Troy, or a mountain of stone like that beneath which Cheops sleeps, will serve the purpose far better than an open ring of monoliths enclosing some hundred or so of acres. We must surely grant to the builders of these structures some reasonable sense of fitness. Or if it again be urged that these places were meant to afford burial not to a few men of note only, but to the multitude, then, we ask, Did the thinly- peopled Orkney require a graveyard on the scale of the circles of Bogar and Stennes? Or did the England of that day demand a necropolis of a size so vast as Stonehenge and Avebury?

And then, too, where are the memorials of the dead supposed to have been interred in these ancient graveyards? When we dig into the barrow or the cairn, we are at no loss as to their character and design. Their contents make it clear that they were meant to be receptacles of the dead; for there to this day is the skeleton of the chieftain or warrior who was committed to its keeping, and along with their leader, it may be, the bones of the men who fell fighting around him, and now sleep in a common tomb. But when we search around the Cyclopean monoliths on the plain of Stonehenge, or the wilds of Stennes, we fail to discover relic or memorial of the dead. We light on nothing to show that bier of prince or of peasant was ever borne within their precincts; nothing, at least, to show that the dead of a nation, great and small, and not for one generation only, but for many, were brought hither and interred, as must have been the case, if they were national burying places.

It is the fact, no doubt, that, in some instances, explorers have found the remains of mortality beneath or adjoining these stones. But this is just what we should expect. If these structures bore a sacred character, and were the scene of religious rites, as we believe them to have been, what so likely as that men of note should wish to lie within their hallowed enclosure, and that the wish, in some cases, should be acceded to. But these few solitary graves only strengthen our contention that these places were temples, not graveyards. For if these exceptional burials still attest themselves by the presence of stone cists with their moldering contents, why should there not be traces also of that great multitude of burials which must have taken place here, if they were public receptacles for the dead? Why have the few been preserved, while the majority have disappeared? In fact, many of these stone circles and cromlechs stand on a bed of rock, where grave never could have been dug, or the dead interred.

Moreover, is it not a fact universally true of all early nations, that their first great monuments were reared not in, memory of their dead, but in reverence of their deities? They honored the departed warrior by piling over his remains a heap of stones, the height of the cairn corresponding to the rank of the deceased: their common dead they disposed of with less ceremony. In short, they did not need public graveyards; their earliest buildings were altars, or sacred towers. The tower on the plain of Shinar, the earliest monument of which we read, being an instance in point. f23 The oldest of our monuments are stones set on end, and standing singly, or in groups. All savage nations are seen rearing such memorials; they are their first attempts to communicate with posterity. Some event has happened deemed by them of importance, and which they wish, therefore, should be known to those who are to come after them. How shall they hand it down to posterity? They have not yet acquired the art of committing transactions to writing: they know not to engrave or to paint; but they have simpler and readier methods. They set up a tall stone on the spot where the occurrence took place. Father tells to son the story of the pillar. It is a public and perpetual memorial of the fact; for should the tempest throw it down, pious hands will set it up again, that the event committed to its keeping may not fall into oblivion.

In the pages of the Bible, especially ill its earlier pages, we meet with numerous traces of this custom. It was thus which mark the site of its earliest cities. Our ancestors did the best they could to imitate these structures by piling up an altar of huge blocks, and drawing round it a grand circle of tall, shaggy columns.- See Smith and Syce’s Babylonia; Rawlinson’s Ancient Monarchies, vol. i.. the patriarchs marked whatever was most eventful and memorable in their lives. Jacob sealed the vow which he made to the august Being who was seen by him in his dream, by setting up a stone on the spot when the morning broke, and anointing it with oil. The covenant betwixt the same patriarch and Laban, made on the summit of Gilead, instead of being written and attested by the signatures of the contracting paddies, ]lad, as its sole record, a cairn on the top of the mount. Twelve stones, rough as when taken from the bed of the river, rose on the banks of the Jordan as the perpetual witnesses of that miraculous act which opened to the Tribes the gates of the Land of Promise. At times the column of stone rose as a trophy of victory, and at other times as a symbol of personal or domestic sorrow. When Jacob laid his Rachel in the grave, he set up a pillar to mark the spot. By this simple act, the stricken man signified his desire that his descendants in days to come should mourn with him in a sorrow, the shadow of which was destined to hang around him till he reached the grave. And well, as we know, did that pillar fulfill its trust; for there was not an Israelite but knew where Rachel slept, nor ever passed her tomb without rehearsing the touching story of her death.

Simple blocks of unhewn stone were the earliest altars. Such were the altars, doubtless, which Abraham, and after him his son and grandson, built on the scene of their successive encampments as they journeyed through Palestine. Man in the earliest ages had no tools with which to quarry the rock; but the agencies of nature came to his assistance. The tempest, or the lightning, or the shock of earthquake, or simply the winter’s frosts, tore up the strata, and made it ready for his use, whatever the purpose to which he meant to devote it, whether the record of a vow, or the seal of a covenant, or the trophy of a victory, or the symbol of grief. But of all uses to which stones were put in the early ages, none was more common than the religious one. They were shrines at which worship was performed. In the instances that have already come before us, the pillar simply indicated the spot hallowed by some special appearance, and henceforth set apart as the place where the family or the tribe was to assemble, at stated times, to worship Jehovah. When the knowledge of the true God waxed dim, the Sun was installed as his Vicar, and worshipped as the Power who daily called the world out of darkness, and yearly awoke the vitalities and powers of nature. Towers or temples now rose to the sun and his goodly train of secondary gods, the moon, and the seven planets, or “seven lights of the world.” The more civilized nations embellished the centers of their idol worship with great magnificence of art, but ruder nations, having neither the skill nor the materials for the construction of such splendid temples, were content to rear humbler shrines. They took a tail stone, unhewn and uncouth, as the tempest or the earthquake had torn it from the strata, and setting it on end, and consecrating it as the representative of the sun, or of some deified hero, they made it the rallying point and center of their worship. Descending yet a stage lower, the stone so set up was no longer a mere stone like its fellows in the quarry, having neither more nor less virtue than they; it was now a consecrated pillar, and, as such, was filled with the spirit and potency, to some degree at least, of the god whom it repre sented. Worship at the stone passed easily, naturally, and speedily into worship of the stone. Lower still, and now it was believed that these stones were inhabited by a race of genii, or inferior gods, to whom had been given power over the destinies of men, and whom, therefore, it was the interest of man to propitiate by offerings and sacrifices. And thus it is that we find the worship of stones one of the earliest forms of idolatry, and one of the most widelyspread and universally practiced. Palestine bristled throughout with these demon- stones when the Israelites entered it. Hardly a hill- top without its cluster of monoliths, or grove without its altar of unhewn, massy block, on which fires burned in honor of the Sun or Bel, or human victims bled in propitiation of the deity who was believed to haunt the place. Hence the command to the Israelites to break down and utterly destroy these hateful and horrible objects, and to cleanse their land by sweeping from off its surface the last vestiges of an idolatry so foul and bloody. The specification of these idolatrous objects is very minute, and might equally apply to the Druidic shrines of Caledonia. It includes the menhir, or single stone pillar, and the altar- dolman, as well as the graven image. Over both the Divine injunction suspended the same doom- entire and utter demolition. Their stone pillars were to be demolished, their graven images of gold were to be battered and broken with the hammer, their wooden deities hewn with the axe, their sacrificial dolmens overturned, and the groves in which these demon- altars had stood were to be burned with fire. It is the very picture of Scotland some thousand years later; and hence the fallen menhirs, the broken and ragged stone circles, and the overturned and moss- grown dolmens that strew the face of our country,- the ruins which a once flourishing superstition has left behind it to attest its former prevalence and dominancy in our island. This form of worship came to Scotland from the far east. We trace it by the footprints it leaves behind it as it journeys westward. It accompanied, probably, not the first, but the second great wave of immigration which poured itself forth from the great birthplace of nations in Central Asia. East and west we behold this mighty system extending its dark shadow, and enveloping all lands. For though it has now passed away, at least in the names and rites it then sanctioned and made obligatory, it has left its roots in the supposed mystic virtue of rites, images, and holy places, as well as in the rude Cyclopean monuments which it set up, and which, after enduring the shock of the tempest and the violence of thousands of years, still show their gigantic fragments cumbering the soil of almost all countries. Yonder, in the far east, on the mountains of India, we descry the menhir, the ancestor of the obelisk. Tribes that knew no other art knew to rear the stone column in honor of the sun. Rude stone monuments are found in the hills of the Ganges, and in the heart of Africa; on the plains of Persia, and amid the mountains of Spain; in the countries bordering on the Dead Sea, and on the shores of the Euxine and the Baltic. They are found in Tuscany and in Orkney. We lose trace of them among the Negro races. Their builders, it is supposed, were sprung of an early Asiatic stock, which preceded the Aryan and Semitic races, and flourished in the pre- historic stone and bronze ages, and whose migration westward into Europe can be traced by etymological as well as monumental proofs. f26 The Land of Moab bristles from valley to mountain- top with menhirs, stone circles, and cromlechs, offering at this day the very spectacle which some of our moors present. The Phoenician plain afforded a magnificent theater for this worship where it was fed by the riches of an opulent commerce, and embellished by the skill of a consummate art. Westward ‘along either shore of the Mediterranean these idol- altars flamed.

Traveling beyond the Pillars of Hercules, this system turned northwards, and extending along the western shores of Europe- then the farthest known West- it ultimately reached our island. Here grafting itself upon an earlier and purer system, it reared, with barbarous strength and rude pomp, its great cromlechs, and its circles of tall, shaggy columns, and taught to the men of Caledonia the names of new deities, and the practice of new rites.

We have thought it necessary thus to trace at some length the early rise and origin of this form of worship, because it throws light on the history of our country, and on its oldest existing monuments. It enables us to guess at the time when these monuments were erected, and it leaves hardly a doubt as regards their character and use. They were reared for worship. They form a part of that great system of sunworship which sprung up soon after the flood, and which, with essential unity, but great variety of names and forms, traveled over the earth, and set up its altars, and taught the practice of its foul and cruel rites in every land and to every people.

CHAPTER - THE DRUIDS- THEIR RELIGION, DEITIES, HIERARCHY, DOCTRINES,

IT is delightful to watch the first buddings of art and the first kindlings of patriotism, and see in these the great imperishable elements in man- in even savage man- asserting themselves, and fighting their way upward through the darkness of savage life into the light of civilization. But there is a power which is still more potential as regards the development of society than either art or liberty, for it is the nurse of both. Its divine touch awakens them into life, and not only puts them in motion, but guides them along the road that leads to their supreme goal. To watch the expanding sphere and the growing influence of this power is a truly delightful and profitable study. Religion is the glory of man and the crown of the State.

This can be said, however, of but one religion, that even which, having its origin neither in man nor on the world on which he dwells, but descending from a sphere infinitely above both, sits apart, and refuses to own either equality or kindred with the crowd of spurious faiths that surround it.

These others, though classed in the category of religions, may blast rather than bless society. Their power in this respect will depend on the degree in which they retain the essential elements of that one religion which is divine.

Had the Caledonians a religion, and what was it? A history of Scotland with this great question left out would be a husk with the kernel lacking- a skeleton of dry facts but with no soul under “the cold ribs of death.”

We have already said that the Caledonians had a religion, and that that religion was Druidism. It must, however, be acknowledged that the religion of early Caledonia is a point in which all are not agreed. Some go the length of maintaining that the Caledonian had no religion at all: that altar he never set up, and that god he never worshipped, but all life long went onward, never once lifting his eye to heaven, in a night of black atheism. A dismal past, truly! but happily we are under no necessity to accept it as the actual past of our country. To maintain, as some have done, that the Druids are an entirely fabulous class of men, like the Fairies, Kelpies, and similar beings with which superstition peopled our moors and lochs, is a bold position in the presence of the numerous and palpable footprints which the Druid has left behind him. In truth, the Druidic age is as plainly written on the face of Scotland as the stone age, and the bronze age, and the iron age. Our cairns and cists do not furnish more convincing evidence as to the tools with which the Caledonian worked, and the weapons with which he fought, than the stone fanes, the ruins of which dot the moors and hills of our country, testify to a time when the creed of the. Druid was dominant in, our land, and the Caledonian worshipped accordingly. Besides the names attached to numerous localities clearly connecting them with the Druidic religion, the traces of its ancient rites still lingering in the social customs of the people, and keeping their place though all knowledge of their origin and meaning has been lost, present us with indisputable proofs of the former existence of a powerful but now fallen Druidic hierarchy.

These footprints of the Druid will come more fully under our notice at a subsequent stage.

But farther, we hold, on the fundamental principles of man’s nature, that the profession of downright atheism is impossible to a savage or barbarous people. Such a thing can only take place in a nation that has made certain advances in what it deems enlightenment, and has so far cultivated the faculty of reason as to be able to make this woeful abuse of it. One must have eyes before he can be subject to the illusion of the mirage, and in like manner one must have considerable practice in the science of sophistry before he can be able to reason himself into a position so irrational as that there is no God. Atheists are not born, but made.

Did Druidism spring up on the soil of Scotland, or was it imported from some other and remote region? This is the first question. We have already more than hinted our belief that Druidism- we mean the system, not the name- arose in a very early age, and had its birth in the primeval scat of mankind. Druidism is a more venerable system than the paganism of Italy, or the polytheism of Greece. It had a less gross admixture of nature worship, and it was more abstract and spiritual. Druidism was an eider branch of sun- worship which arose in Chaldea. Leaving its eastern birthplace at an early period, and traveling northward, where for ages it occupied an isolated position, it had no opportunity of studying the newest fashions of sun- worship, and it consequently retained till a late period its comparative simplicity and purity. Such is our idea, and that idea has of late received strong corroboration from the inscribed tablets and hieroglyphic records which have been dug up in the buried cities of Assyria and Chaldea. And to the same conclusion do all the recent philosophical investigations which have been made into this creed tend. Reynaud, in France maintains that “the ancient Druids were the first clearly to teach the doctrine of the soul’s immortality, and that they had originally as high conceptions of the Deity as the Jews themselves. If they afterwards encouraged the worship of subordinate deities, it was,” he says, “for the purpose of reconciling Druidism to that class of uneducated minds for which the cultus of demi- gods and angels has more attraction than the worship of the Unseen One.” The countryman of Reynaud, M. Amedde Thierry, who has subjected the religions of ancient Gaul to analytical and philosophical inquiry, comes to substantially the same conclusion. He finds traces of two distinct religions in ancient Gaul. One resembled the polytheism of the Greeks. The other was a kind of metaphysical pantheism, resembling the religions of some eastern nations. The latter appeared to him to be the foundation of Druidism, and had been brought into the country by the Cymric Gauls when they entered it under their leader Hu or Hesus, deified after his death. In other words, this writer, with whom agrees the historian Martin, finds, as the result of his inquiries, that Druidism comes from the East, that in its earlier stages it was a comparatively abstract and spiritual system, but in its later days became mixed in the West with the nature worship of the Greeks, its votaries adoring deified heroes as representing the sun, as also storms, groves, fountains, and streams; taking these natural agencies for the action of the invisible spirits that resided in them. Pinkerton, though he wrote before the polytheisms had been tracked to their original birthplace, could not help being struck with the oriental features borne by Druidism, and ascribed to it an eastern origin. He says briefly but emphatically, “Druidism was palpably Phoenician.” Had he gone farther east he would have come still nearer the truth.

BEL (sun- worship) was, in sooth, the prodigal son who left his father’s house and traveled into far countries, under various disguises and amid great diversity of fortune. The wanderer changed his name and Iris garb to suit the genius of every people, and aspired to be accepted as the true son of the Great Father over all the earth. As be passed from land to land, he accommodated himself to the predominating tastes and passions of the peoples among whom he successively found a home. Idolatry was philosophical and abstract among the Orientals. It was darkly mysterious, but boundlessly voluptuous among the Egyptians. It came to the Greeks in the garb of poetry and beauty. Among the warlike Romans it marched at the head of their armies, delighting in the clash of arms and the shout of them that overcome. Among the Caledonians it affected a severe simplicity and majesty, as befitted the people and the cloudcapped mountains which were their dwelling. It was the real Proteus who assumed a new name and a new shape in each new land. And as the consequence of these endless transformations, its votaries in one country strove with its rotaries in another for the supremacy of their several deities, blindly mistaking for rivals those who all the while were in truth but one. “Religion,” says James, “assumed almost in every country a different name, in consequence of the difference of language which everywhere prevailed. Among the ancient Hindoos it was called ‘Brachmanism, ‘ and its ministers ‘Brachmans’; among the Chaldeans ‘Wisdom, ‘ and its ministers ‘wise men’; among the Persians’Magisto, ‘ and its ministers ‘Magi’; among the Greeks ‘Priesthood,’ and its ministers ‘priests’; among the ancient Gauls and Britons ‘Druidism, ‘ and its ministers ‘Druids’;- all synonymous terms, implying ‘wisdom and wise men, priesthood and priests.’” This was the link which united the Scotland of those ages with the far- off Chaldea, this overshadowing idolatry, to wit, which made its deities, though under different names, be adored all round the earth- in the temples of Babylon and the fanes of Egypt, in the shrines of Greece and the Pantheon of Rome, in the woods of Germany and the oak forests of Scotland. This essential oneness of the false religions accounts for the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that in all of them we find more than mere naturalism. The idolatries are not, out and out; the institution of man, they all embody conceptions above man, and, like man himself, exhibit amid the ruins of their fall some of the grand uneffaced features of their glorious original. They all contain, though to no real practical purpose, the ideas of sin, of expiation, of forgiveness, and of purification. This is owing to no unanimous consent or happy coincidence of thought on the part of widely dispersed tribes; the fact is soluble only on the theory of the origination of all the idolatries in a common source, and their propagation from a common center. These doctrines could no ways have grown up in the field of naturalism; they are, as history and etymology attest, the traces, sadly obscured, of what was once more clearly seen, and more firmly grasped by the race. They are at once the twilight lights of a departing day; and are the morning tints of a coming one.

Were the gods of Druidism one or many? This is the next question, and the answer to it must depend upon the stage of Druidism to which it applies. In the course of its existence of from one to two thousand years, Druidism must have undergone not a few modifications, and all of them for the worse. In its early stage it had but one Deity, doubtless, whom, however, it worshipped through the Sun as His symbol, or through Baal, the Chaldean representative of the Sun. In its latter stages it aspired to be like the nations with whom it had now begun to mingle. Caesar, the first to describe the Druids, paints their pantheon in a way that makes it bear no distant resemblance to the Olympus of the Greeks. The Druidic gods, it is true, have other names than those under which the Greek deities were known, but they have the same attributes and functions, and we have but little difficulty in recognizing the same deity under his Celtic appellative, who figures in the Greek pantheon under a more classic cognomen. In the Teutates of the Druids Caesar found Mercury, the god of letters and eloquence. In Belenus or Bel he saw a likeness to Apollo, the god of the sun. In Taranis, which is Celtic for thunder, he found Jupiter the thunderer.

And in Hu or Hesus he thought he could detect Mars. 1 The Caledonians had no Olympus, lifting its head above the clouds, on which to enthrone their deities; they could offer them only their bare moors, and their dark oak forests. There they built them temples of unhewn stone, and bowed down in adoration unto them.

The hierarchy of the Druids formed a numerous and Caesar, Bell. Gall. vi. 17. powerful body. The priests were divided, Caesar tells us, into three classes. There was, first, the Chroniclers, who registered events and, in especial, gave attention to the king, that his worthy acts might be handed down with luster unimpaired to the ages to come. There was, second, the Bards, who celebrated in verse the exploits of the battlefield, and sang in fitting strains the praises of herocs. Then, third, came the Priests, the most numerous and influential of the Druidic body. They presided over the sacrifices, but to this main function they added a host of multifarious pursuits and duties. 1 They were the depositories of letters and learning, and had a great reputation for vast and profound knowledge. The estimate of that age, however, or own may not be prepared to accept, unless with very considerable modification. They were students of science, more especially of astronomy and geometry, in which they were said to have been deeply versed. The astronomy in those days was mainly judicial astrology: though there can be no question that the early Chaldeans made great attainments in pure astronomy, and recent discoveries in Babylonia have given back to the Chaldean astronomers an honor which has hitherto been assigned to the Egyptians, that, even, of determining and naming the constellations of the zodiac. In geometry the Druids were so greatly skilled as to be able, it is said, to measure the magnitude of the earth. At least they had enough geometry to settle disputes touching the boundaries of properties. They searched into the virtues of herbs, and be this useful study qualified themselves for the practice of the healing art. They were the interpreters of omens- a branch of knowledge so seductive that their class in no land has been able to refrain from meddling with it. Their divination was rounded mainly on their sacrifices. They narrowly watched the victim, sometimes a human one, as he received the blow from the sacrificial knife, and drew their auguries from the direction in which he fell, to the right or to the left, the squirting of his blood, and the contortions of his limbs.

At the head of the priesthood was an arch- Druid. The post was one of high dignity and great authority. Being an object of ambition and of emolument, the office was eagerly sought after. It was decided by a plurality of votes, and the person chosen to fill it held it for life. The rivalships and quarrels to which the election to this great post gave rise were sometimes so violent and furious that the sword had to be called in before the priest on whom the choice had fallen could mount the Druidic throne. The official dress of the arch- Druid was of special magnificence and splendor. “He was clothed in a stole of virgin- white, over a closer robe of the same fastened by a girdle on which appeared the crystal of augury cased in gold. Round his neck was the breastplate of judgment.

Below the breastplate was suspended the Glain Neidr, or serpent’s jewel.

On his head he had a tiara of gold. On each of two fingers of his right hand he wore a ring; one plain, and the other the chain ring of divination.” f34 The Druids acted as judges. By this union of the judicial and the sacerdotal offices they vastly increased their influence and authority. A tumulus, closely adjoining their stone circle, or even within it, served for their tribunal. At tumulus times they would erect their judgment seat beneath the boughs of some great oak, and when the people came up to sacrifice, or gathered to the festivals, they had the farther privilege, if so they wished, of having their causes heard and decided. The Druids were also, to a large extent, the legislators of the nation. Their position, their character, and, above all, their superior intelligence, enabled them easily to monopolist the direction of public affairs, and to become the virtual rulers of the country.

No great ,measure could be undertaken without their approval. They were the counselors of the king. With their advice he made peace or he made war. If he chose to act contrary to their counsel it was at his own peril. It behoved him to be wary in all his dealings with a class of men who enjoyed such consideration in the eyes of the vulgar, and whose power was believed to stretch into the supernatural sphere, and might, if their pride was wounded or their interests touched, visit the country with plague, or tempest, or famine, or other calamity. So powerful was the control which the Druids wielded, Caesar informs us, that they would arrest armies on their march to the battlefield. Nay, even when rank stood confronting rank with leveled spears and swords unsheathed, if the Druids stepped in betwixt the hostile lines, ,tad commanded peace, the combatants, though burning to engage, instantly sheathed their weapons and left the field.

The Druids held an annual general assembly for the regulation of their affairs. This convocation, Caesar informs us, was held in the territory of the Carnutes in Gaul, by which Dreux, north of the Loire, is most probably meant. Their places of rendezvous was a consecrated grove. Whether delegates attended from Caledonia we are not informed. It is not likely that they did, seeing the Scottish Druids regarded themselves as an earlier and purer branch of the great Druidic family, and were not likely to own submission to a body meeting beyond seas. They had their own convocation doubtless on their own soil, and framed their own laws for the guidance of their affairs. The convention at Dreux, besides enacting general decrees binding on all their confraternities throughout Gaul, gave audience to any who had private suits and controversies to prosecute before them. It was understood that all who submitted their quarrels to their arbitrament bound themselves to bow to their decision. The court was armed with terrible powers for enforcing its judgment. If any resisted he was smitten with excommunication. This penalty stripped the man of everything. It placed him beyond the pale of all natural and social as well as ecclesiastical rights. No one durst speak to him or render him the least help, even to the extent of of lying him a morsel of bread, or a cup of water, or even a light.

His extremity was dire, and alternative he had none, save to submit to Druidic authority, or be crushed by Druidic vengeance.

This powerful class enjoyed, moreover, large and special immunities.

Whether a national provision was made for them does not appear. They hardly needed such, considering the wealth which must have flowed in upon them from a variety of sources. “Their endowment,” says Yeowell, f35 “was five free acres of land,” without making it clear whether it was each individual Druid or each fraternity that was so endowed. They are said to have imposed a tax on each plough in the parish in which they officiated as priests. They were the judges, physicians, and teachers of their nation, besides being the dispensers of the sacred rites; and it is not easy to believe that all these functions were void of emolument. The Druids enjoyed, besides, other and very special privileges. Their persons were held inviolable. They could pass through the territories of hostile tribes without dreading or receiving harm. His white robe was protection enough to the Druid. When he journeyed he was welcomed; it every table, and when night fell he could enter any door and sleep under any roof. He was exempt from land tax. lie was never required to gird himself with sword or risk life on the battlefield. He was not obliged to toil at the plough, or the spade, or the loom. He left these necessary labors to others. “They contributed,” says Toland, though the sentence, after what we have said, will be felt to be too sweeping-” They contributed nothing to the State but charms.”

It is a question not less important than any of the preceding, What were the doctrines that formed the creed of Druidism? We can answer only doubtfully. Not a scrap of writing has come down to us from hand of Druid; and in the absence of all information at first hand touching their tenets, we are compelled to be content with the fragmentary notices which Caesar and Pliny and Tacitus and Pomponius Mela and others have been pleased to give us. These are not exactly the pens from which we would expect a full and accurate account of Druidic theology. These writers but pause in the midst of weightier matters to bestow a glance on what they deemed a curious if not barbarous subject. With every disposition to be accurate, we may well doubt their ability to be so. But we must accept their statements, or confess that we know nothing of the creed of Druidism. On the more prominent doctrines- especially those discussed in the schools of their own country- these writers could hardly be mistaken, and with their hints we may venture on an attempt to reconstruct the framework, or rather, we ought to say, exhume the skeleton of Druidic theology from its grave of two thousand years.

Philosophy begins at MAN; the starting point of theology is GOD. What were the notions of the Druids respecting the first and highest of all Beings? From all we can gather, they cherished worthier and more exalted ideas of the Supreme than the other peoples of their day. They brought with them. from the East, and would seem to have long preserved, the great idea of one Supreme Being, infinite, eternal, and omnipotent, the maker of all things, and the disposer of all events, who might be conceived of by the mind, but of whom no likeness could be fashioned by the hand.

Such is the account transmitted to us by Pliny, and his statement is corroborated by Tacitus, who says, that “they do not confine their deities within buildings, nor represent them by any likeness to the human form.

They mercia- consecrate bowers and groves, and designate by the names of gods that mysterious essence which they behold only in the spirit of adoration.” It is fan, her authenticated by the negative testimony of our cairns and cists. In these, as we have already said, no image of God, no likeness of the Invisible has hitherto been found. This fact is striking, especially when the state of things in Egypt and Greece is taken into account, and is explicable only on the supposition that the Caledonians abstained from making images of the object of their worship, and clung to the nobler and more spiritual conceptions of their early ancestors.

Some doubt is thrown on this, however, by the statement of Caesar already quoted, that the Druids worshipped a plurality of gods. His words were spoken with an immediate reference to the Druids in Gaul. The Druidism of Britain, he admits, was not exactly of the same type; it was purer. Nor does it follow from Caesar’s statement that the British Druids made images of their gods, even granting that they had now come to worship the Supreme under a variety of names. In Caesar’s day the more abstract and spiritual Druidism of an early time had come to be mixed and debased both in Gaul and Britain with the polytheistic notions of the Greeks. The light of primeval revelation which the first immigrants brought with them, imperfect from the first, had faded age after age, as was inevitable where there was so written record, and where the memorials of the primitive faith were committed solely to tradition. And though preserved longer in a state of purity in Britain than anywhere else, those who now inhabited our island cherished less worthy notions of the Deity, and were more polytheistic in their worship than the men whom the first transport fleet of canoes had carried across to its shore.

That they believed in the immortality of the soul, and consequently in a state of existence beyond the grave, we have the explicit testimony of Pomponius Mela. And he assigns the motive which led the priests to inculcate this doctrine on the people, the hope even that it would inspire them with courage on the battlefield. His words are, “There is one thing they teach their disciples, which also has been disclosed to the common people, in order to render them more brave and fearless; even that the soul is immortal, and that there is another life after death.” The testimony of Caesar on the point is to the same effect. The soul’s immortality, and a life to come, in which every worthy and valorous deed shall receive reward, forms, he tells us part of the teaching of the Druids. And he notes, too, salutary- influence in heightening the courage of the warriors by removing the fear of death as the end of existence, There was no such certain belief on this point in the country of the great Roman, and the teaching of the Athenian sages was, too, less clear and definite touching a life after death.

But a doctrine unknown, or but dimly seen in the noon Greek and Roman civilization, was fully apprehended in the barbaric night of the remote Britain. To this extent the Druidism of Caledonia surpassed the paganisms of classic lands, and to the extent in which it excelled them did approximate primeval revelation.

The Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls has been attributed to the Druids, but on no sufficient evidence. Transplanted from the hot valley of the Nile to the scarcely less genial air of Athens, that tenet might flourish in Greece, but hardly in the bleak climate of Caledonia. In fact, the doctrine of the future life as a scene of rewards and punishments, and the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, are hardly compatible, and could scarce be received as articles of belief by the same people. If in the life to come the hero was to receive honor and the coward to meet merited disgrace, was it not essential that both should retain their identity? If they should change their shapes and become, or appear to become, other being’s, might not some confusion arise in the allotment of rewards ~ What was to hinder the coward running off with the honors of the hero, and the hero being subjected to the stigma of the coward Besides Pomponius Mela, in his few pregnant sentences on the Druids, communicates a piece of information touching a curious burial custom of theirs, which is certainly at variance with the belief that souls, after death, migrate into other forms with a total forgetfulness of all that passed in their previous state of existence. He tells us that when they inurned the ashes of their dead they buried along with them their books of account and the hand notes of the moneys they had lent when alive, but which had not been repaid them by their debtors, that they might have the means of prosecuting their claim in the world beyond the grave. They were clearly not of opinion that death pays all debts. But if they accepted the doctrine of transmigration as a truth, it was idle to take with them to the grave the accounts of their undischarged acceptances; for, amongst the multitude of shapes into any one of which the debtor might chance to be metamorphosed, how was it possible for the creditor to discover and identify him, so as to compel him to discharge the obligations which he had shirked in the upper world? On the theory of transmigration the thing was hopeless.

This is all that we can with certainty make out as regards the religious beliefs of the Druid. And, granting that all this is true, how little, after all, does it amount to! He is sure of but two things, a Being, eternal and omnipotent, and an existence beyond the grave, also eternal. But these two awful truths bring crowding into his mind a thousand anxious inquiries, not one of which he can answer. He has no means of knowing with what dispositions the great Being above him regards him, and so he cannot tell what his own eternal lot and destiny shall be. The two lights in his sky are enough, and only enough, to show him the fathomless night that encompasses him on all sides, but not his way through it. Travel in thought, or strain His vision as he may through the appalling succession of ages, eternity rising behind eternity it is still night, black night, and he never comes to streak of morning, or to golden gleam as from the half opened gates of a world beyond these ages of darkness. Such was Druidism in its best days.

In what an air of mystery and wisdom did the Druid wrap up the little that he knew! He abstained from putting his system into writing, and communicated it only orally to select disciples, whom he withdrew into caves and the solitude of dark forests; and there, only after long years of study, in the course of which their minds were prepared for the sublime revelation to be imparted to them, did he initiate them into the highest mysteries of his system. This retreat and secrecy he affected, doubtless, not only to guard his sacred tenets from the knowledge of the vulgar, but to aid the imagination in representing to itself how awful and sublime a thing Druidism was, when its last and profoundest doctrines could be whispered only in the bowels of the earth, or the deepest shades of the forest, and to none save to minds trained, purified, and strengthened for the final disclosure, and so conducted step by step to those sublime heights which it might have been dangerous and impious to approach more quickly. Had the Druid made the experiment of reducing his system to writing, and stating it in plain words and definite propositions, he would have seen, and others too would have seen, that his vaunted knowledge might have been contained within narrow limits indeed- compressed into a nut shell.

When the intercourse between our island and Phoenicia and Greece sprang up and became more frequent, the golden age of British Druidism began to decline. It was natural that the eastern trader should bring with him the newest fashions from these noted theaters of paganism, and should strive to teach the unsophisticated islanders a more aesthetic ritual. And yet there is no evidence that the change effected was great. The British Druid fought shy of these foreign novelties, and continued to walk in the “old paths ;” and Caesar, long after, found the system flourishing here in a purity and perfection unknown to it in other lands, which made it be looked upon as a product peculiar to Britain, and forming a model and standard for Druidism everywhere else. Those in Gaul who wished to be more perfectly initiated into its mysteries than was possible in their own country, crossed the sea to what they believed to be its birthplace, and there “drank at the well of Druidism undefiled.” f41

CHAPTER - THE DRUID’S EGG- THE MISTLETOE- THE DRUID’S SACRIFICE.

WE have essayed to reproduce the theology of the Druids so far as we can glean it from the fragmentary notices of the classic writers. Had these writers been of the number of its inner disciples, and sat at the feet of Druid in dark cave or in gloom of oak forest, we should have known more of the tenets of those venerable teachers who might be seen in former ages traversing, in long white robes, the same fields and highways which are now trodden by ourselves. Instead of a meager outline we might have had a full body of Druidic divinity transmitted to us. And yet it might not have been so. We shrewdly suspect that we are in possession of all the truths which Druidism contained, and that what we lack is only the shadowy sublimities in which they were wrapped up, and which, by removing them beyond the sphere of clear and definite comprehension, made them imposing.

From the theology of Druidism we pass to its worship and rites. Some of these rites were curious, others were picturesque, and others were repulsive and horrible. Of the first, the curious, but not less credulous than curious, was the Druid’s egg. This egg appears to have been an object of some interest to the ancients, seeing they speak of it, and some of them aver having actually seen and handled it. Of the number who have specially described it is Pliny. If half of what is related of this egg be true, it must be to us, as it was to the ancients, an object of no little wonder. was formed of the scum of serpents. As the snakes twisted and writhed in a tangled knot, the egg, produced in some mysterious way, was seen to emerge from the foaming mass of vipers, and float upward into the air. It was caught by the priests while in the act of falling. The Druid who found himself the fortunate possessor of this invaluable treasure took instant measures to prevent being stripped of it almost as soon as he had secured it. Throwing himself upon a horse that was kept waiting for him, he galloped off, pursued by the snakes, nor halted till he had got on the other side of the first running water to which his flight brought him. His pursuers were stopped by the stream they had power to follow him no farther. The egg was his. It was an inexhaustible magazine of virtues, a storehouse of mighty forces, all of them at his command, and endorsing its happy possessor with the enviable but somewhat dangerous attribute, so liable to be abused, one should think, of obtaining almost all he might desire, and of doing nearly all that he pleased. Of those who have testified to having seen this egg, we do not know one who was witness to its birth, or was prepared to speak to the extraordinary circumstances said to accompany its production, or the wonderful deeds performed, or that might have been performed, by the Druid who was so fortunate as to get it into his keeping.

The story of the mistletoe is less curious but more credible. The mistletoe grew upon the oak, the sacred tree of the Druids. The mighty parent trunk, its tender offshoot clinging to it, with its ever- green leaves and its bunches of yellow flowers, was a thing of beauty. But what made it so pleasing m the eyes of Druid was not its loveliness, but its significance.

The mistletoe was the emblem of one of the more recondite mysteries of his creed. Its finding was an occasion of great joy, and the ceremony of gathering it wore the sunny air of poetry, reminding one of some of the festivals of ancient Greece, of which it had the gaiety but not the voluptuousness. The mistletoe- the child of his sacred tree- the Druid held in high veneration, and the severing of it from the parent oak was gone about with much solemnity. It was gathered on the sixth day of the moon.

A procession was formed, and walked slowly to the oak on which the mistletoe grew: a priest in white robes climbed the tree, and cutting away the plant with a golden sickle, he let it drop into a white sheet held underneath, for it might not touch the ground without losing its virtue. The sacrifice of two milk- white bulls concluded the ceremony.

The reverence in which the Druids held the mistletoe, and the ceremonies connected with it, have led to the formation of some very extravagant theories respecting this system, as if it was almost, if not altogether, an evangelical one. While some will have it that the night of the ancient Caledonia was unbroken by a single ray from the great source of Divine revelation, there are others who are equally confident that Caledonia was nearly as brightly illuminated as Judea itself, and place the priesthood of the Druids only a little way below the priesthood of the Hebrews. These last find in the ritual of the mistletoe an amount of Christian doctrine and evangelical sentiment which we are very far from being able to see in it, and which we believe the Druids themselves did not see in it. Their views, however, have been set forth with great plausibility, and it may be right, therefore, that we give a few moments to the statement of them. The Druids named the mistletoe the “Heal- All;” and they made it, according to the theory of which we speak, the emblem of the Great Healer who was to appear on the earth at a later day, and by his sovereign interposition cure all our ills. The oak, out of which the mistletoe sprang, was held to represent the Almighty Father, eternal, self- existent, defying all assaults, and living through all time. From him was to come the “Branch” foretold by the prophets of Israel, and sung of also by the poets of classic antiquity.

Virgil, speaking of this plant, calls it the “golden branch,” and says, that “by its efficacious powers alone could we return from the realms below.”

Homer, too, makes mention of the “golden rod or branch.” Above these doubtful utterances, a far greater voice is heard predicting the advent of the Messiah, and saluting him as the “branch,” “the rod from the stem of Jesse,” the “plant of renown.” The Druids, catching up and prolonging the strain of the inspired prophet, hail the coming deliverer, and adopt the mistletoe as his symbol; they see in this plant, as it clings to the great oak, the figure of one who was to spring from an eternal stock, and who was to grow up as a tender plant, full of heavenly virtue, the desired of all nations, and by whose efficacious death man was to return from the realms of the grave. Such is the evangelical ,garb the system of Druidism has been made to wear.

Most pleasing would it be to be able to put a little Bible light into these dark mysteries. Most pleasing assuredly would it be to think that our fathers heard in these legends the voices of the prophets, and saw in these rites the day of a coming Savior. A new and more touching interest would gather round their sleeping places on moor and hill- side. But we cannot conceal from ourselves that these notions lack footing in historic fact; and neither do they receive countenance from a critical analysis of the system.

Without the key of the prophets we should not have so unlocked the arcana of Druidism, and without the lamp of the apostles we should never have seen such evangelical things in it. The fact is, we bring these evangelical meanings to Druidism, we do not find them in it. Druidism was the worship of the fire- the worship of Baal. Still it was better for Scotland that Druidism should be, than that it should not be. It was a link between man and the world above him. It kept the conscience from falling into the sleep of death; it maintained alive a feeble sense of guilt and the need of expiation, and to that extent it prepared the way for a better system, and a more sovereign remedy for the many maladies of the human soul than ever grew on oak of Druid.

As the great symbol in Druidism was the mistletoe, so the central act in its worship was sacrifice. Here, again, we approximate in point of form the divinely appointed worship of the Hebrews. In common with the whole heathen world, the Druids connected the idea of expiation with their sacrifices. They offered them to propitiate the Deity. Nevertheless their sacrifices were pagan not evangelical.

The victim on the altar of the Druid was itself the propitiation; the victim on the Jewish altar was the type, and nothing but the type, of that propitiation. The Hebrew looked beyond his sacrifice to the divine victim typified and promised by it, and whose blood alone could expiate and cleanse. Of this divine victim we have no proof that the Druid knew anything, beyond sharing, it may be, in the vague and uncertain expectation which then filled the world of the coming of a Great One who was to introduce a new and happier age, which should make that “golden morning” of which the poets sang, be forgotten in the greater splendor of the world’s noon. Beyond these vague hopes, the priests of Druidism had no settled beliefs or opinions, and to their own sacrifices did they attribute exclusively that power to propitiate, which, of all the sacrifices of all the ages belonged to but one sacrifice, and that a sacrifice as yet in the distance.

It is long since the baleful fires of Druid were seen on our hill- tops. A purer light has since arisen in the sky of Scotland. But we are able to recall the scene which for ages continued to be witnessed in our land. Like all false religions, the spirit of Druidism was terror, and we can imagine the awe it inspired in the minds of men over whom it had been its pleasure for ages to hang the threefold cloud of ignorance, superstition, and serfdom.

The festival has come round, and this day the fires are to be lighted, and the sacrifice is to be offered on the “high place.” The procession has been marshaled. At its head walks the high- priest, a venerable and imposing figure, in his long- flowing robes of white. His train is swelled by other priests, also attired in white, who follow, leading the animal destined for sacrifice. It is the best and choicest of its kind; for only such is it fit to lay upon the altar. It is a bullock, or a sheep, or a goat, or, it may be, other animal. It has been previously examined with the greatest care, lest, peradventure, there should be about it defect, or maim, or fault of any sort.

It has been found “without blemish,” we shall suppose, and now it is crowned with flowers, and led away to be slain. As the procession moves onward, songs are sung by the attendant bards. The multitudes that throng round the priests and the victim perform dances as the procession, with slow and solemn steps, climbs the sacred mount. The height has been gained, and priests and victim and worshippers sweep in at the open portal of the stone circle, and gather round the massy block in the center, on which “no tool of iron ]ms been lift up,” and on which the sacrifice is to be immolated. The more solemn rites are now to proceed; let us mark them.

The priest, in his robes of snowy whiteness, takes His stand at the altar. He lays his hand solemnly upon the head of the animal which he is about to offer in sacrifice. In this posture- his hand on the sacrifice- he prays. In his prayer he makes a confession of sin, his own, and that of all who claim a part in the sacrifice. These transgressions he lays- such is his intention- on the victim, on whose flowercrowned head his hand is rested. It is now separated- devoted- for even the Druid feels that with sin is bound up doom, and that on whomsoever the one is laid the other lies also. Wine and frankincense are freely used iii the ceremony of devotement. Set free from human ownership, the animal is now given to the deity. In what way? Is it dismissed to range the mountains as no man’s property? No: bound with cords, it is laid on the altar; its blood is poured on the earth, its flesh is given to the fire, its life is offered to God.

Such was the worship of the Druid. It consisted of three great acts. First, the laying of his offense on the victim. Second, the offering up of the life of that victim. Third, the expiation, as he believed, thereby effected. The three principles which underlie these three acts look out upon us with unequivocal and unmistakable distinctness. We can neither misunderstand nor misinterpret them. We do not say that the three principles were full and clear to the eye of Druid in his deep darkness. But though he had become unable to read them, that no more proves that they were void of significance and taught no truth, than the inability of the barbarian to understand a foreign tongue or a dead language proves that its writings express no intelligible ideas, and that it never could have been the vehicle of thought. We leave its meaning to be interpreted by the men to whom it was a living language. So in respect to these rites, we look at them in the light of their first institution, and we place ourselves in the position of those to whom they were, so to speak, a living language, and when we do so the three doctrines that shine out upon us from the sacrificial rites of the Druid are the doctrine of the Fall, the doctrine of a substitutionary Victim, and the doctrine of Expiation and Forgiveness. Such is the testimony borne by the altars of the Druid to the three earliest facts in human history, and the three fundamental doctrines of revealed religion.

How came the Druids to worship by sacrifice? No philosophy is sounder than that which, following up these traces, arrives at the conclusion of an original revelation, of which this is the remote and dim reflection. Sacrifice is no mere Druidic rite, transacted nowhere save in the oak forests of Scotland. A consensus of all nations had adopted sacrifice as the method of worship, and wherever we go backward into history, or abroad over the earth, to ages the most remote, and to lands the farthest removed from each other, we find the altar set up and the victim bleeding upon it. Strange and amazing it is that the nations of the earth, the most polished as well as the most barbarous, the Greek with his passionate love of beauty, and the untutored and realistic Goth, should with one consent unite in a worship, the main characteristics of which are BLOOD and DEATH. Who told man that the Almighty delights to “eat the flesh of bulls and drink the blood of goats”? Left to the promptings of his own instincts, this method of worship is the last which man would have chosen. From what he knew of the Creator from nature, he would have judged that of all modes of worship this would prove the most unacceptable, and would even be abhorrent. “What!” he would have reasoned, “shall He who has spread loveliness with so lavish a hand over all creation; who has taught the morning to break in silvery beauty and the evening to set in golden glory; who clothes the mountain in purple, dyes the clouds in vermilion, and strews the earth with flowers- shall He take pleasure in a sanctuary hung in gloom, nay, filled with horrors, or delight in an altar loaded with ghastly carcasses and streaming with the blood of slaughtered victims?” So did the firstborn of men reason; and in accordance with what he judged fit and right in the matter, he brought no bleeding lamb, he laid upon the altar instead an offering of new- gathered flowers and fruits. And so would the race have worshipped to this day but for some early and decisive check which crossed their inclinations and taught them that it was not only idle but even perilous to come before the Deity, save with blood, and to offer to Him ought but life.

Apart from the idea of an original divine appointment, there is no fact of history, and no phenomenon of the human mind more inexplicable than this consensus of the nations in the rite of sacrifice. A problem so strange did not escape the observation of the wise men of the heathen world; but their efforts to solve it were utterly abortive. To those of the moderns who refuse to look at the inspired explanation of this phenomenon, it remains as abstruse and dark as it was to the ancients.

These red prints- these altars and victims- which we trace down the ages, and all round the earth, what are they? They are the foot- prints which have been left by the soul of man. They are like the etymological and archaeological traces, which the early races have left on the countries which they inhabited, and which so surely attest the fact of their presence at a former era in the regions where these traces occur. So of these moral traces. They could no more have imprinted themselves upon the mind of the species apart from causes adequate to their production, than the etymological and archeological ones could have written themselves upon the soil of a country, without its previous occupation by certain races.

These moral vestiges lay a foundation for philosophical deduction, quite as solid as that which the other lay for historic and ethnical conclusions. They form a chain by which we ascend to the fountain- head of history. We have in them the most indubitable attestation of the great fact of the fall. We have its historic imprint made visible to us in the sense of guilt, so deep, so. inextinguishable, and so universal, which that primal act of transgression has left on the conscience of the world, and which has transformed worship, in every age, and among every people, from an act of thanksgiving into au act of propitiation. This is the world’s confession that it has sinned: it is the cry of the human soul for pardon.

We have DEATH in the worship of man; we have GUILT in the conscience of man: and these two facts compel us to infer the existence of a third great fact, without which the first two are inexplicable, even SIN in the history of man. No other solution can even philosophy accept.

CHAPTER - THE TEMPLES OR STONE CIRCLES OF THE DRUID.

FROM the worship of Druidism we pass to the structures in which it was performed. These were so unlike the temples of later ages that we hesitate to apply to them the same name, or to rank them in the same class of edifices. The whole idea of their construction was borrowed from eastern lands and from patriarchal times. The models on which they were reared had come into existence before architecture had grown into a science, or had taught men to build walls of solid masonry, or hang the lofty roof on tall massy column. In the temple of the Druid no richly colored light streamed in through mullioned oriel, and no pillared and sculptured portico, or gate of brass, gave entrance to the long train of white- robed priests, as they swept in, leading to the altar the flower- crowned sacrifice.

But if these graces were lacking in Druidic structures, they possessed others in some respects even more in harmony with their character as religious edifices. They had a rough, unadorned grandeur which made them more truly imposing than many a fane which boasts the glory of Byzantine grace or of Gothic majesty. If the simplest, they were notwithstanding among the strongest of all the fabrics of man’s rearing. They have outlasted races and empires, nay, the very deities in whose honor they were set up.

And while the pyramids, which it cost millions of money and millions of lives to build, are bowing to the earth, or have wholly vanished from it, these simple stones still stand erect on field and moor, and link us in these western parts with the world’s morning and the first races of men.

We have three examples of these, the earliest of British fanes, in a state of tolerable preservation: Stennes, Stonehenge, and Avebury. All these are partially in ruins, but enough remains to show us the mode of their construction and to give us an idea of their magnitude and grandeur when they were entire, while the fact that they have survived, though only in fragmentary condition, to our day, sufficiently attests their amazing and unsurpassed strength. Nothing could be simpler than the plan of their construction. They consisted of single stones, rough and shaggy, as when ,dug out of the earth, or when taken from the quarry, set on end, and ranged in a circle, each stone a little way apart from the other. The area which they enclosed was consecrated ground, and in the center of it was the altar, an enormous block of stone. The chisel had not approached those great blocks; ornament and grace their builders knew not and indeed cared not to give them. We look in vain for carving or inscription upon them. They were the work of an illiterate age. They possess but one quality, but that is the quality which of all others the barbarian most appreciates- size, colossal size.

The description of these structures belongs to the archaeologist, and hardly falls within the province of the historian. The latter has to do with them only as they shed light oil the social and religious condition of the people, among whom and by whom they were reared. At Stennes, in Orkney there are two circles, the larger, called Brogar, consisting originally, it is believed, of sixty stones, of which only thirteen remain erect, and ten lie overturned; the smaller being a half circle. The greater circle was a temple to Baal, or the sun- god, while the smaller was dedicated to the moon.

Others see in the smaller a court of judicature. The Druids, adding the office of judges to their functions as priests, generally set up their courts hard by their temples. The Norse rovers of the ninth century found these circles standing when they took possession of the island, for the spot is referred to under the name of Steinsness by Olaf Trygresson, when recording the slaughter of Earl Havard (970). Designating the spot by its most remarkable feature, the Norsemen called it, in their own language, the Stiensness- that is, the Ness of the Stones- the Stones’ ness.

Stonehenge is the second greatest stone circle that remains to us. It stands on the open plain of Salisbury, with no bulky object near it to mar its effect by dwarfing its apparent size. It must be visited before its weird splendor can be truly judged. The length of the tallest stone is 21 feet; the number of stones still erect is 140; and the diameter of the circle which they form is 106 feet. The circle appears to have had a coping, or corona, of headstones, but nearly all of these are now displaced. Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the twelfth century, calls Stonehenge one of the four wonders of England. It was old even in his day, for he confesses that he knew nothing of its origin, or of the means by which such stupendous columns had been set up.

Diodorus Siculus quotes a passage from Hecataeus of Abdera, who lived B. C. 300, and wrote a history of the henge. “The ancient or Cymric name,” says, Gidley, “appears to have been Gwaith Emrys, divine, or immortal.” An ancient coin of Tyre has on it two stone pillars with the inscription, “Ambrosiae petrae,” ambrosial stones. Stukeley quotes Camden as speaking of a remarkable stone near Penzance, Cornwall, called Main Ambre, or the ambrosial stone. It was destroyed by Cromwell’s soldiers. The ancient name of Stonehenge is preserved probably in the neighboring town of Amesbury.

Hyperboreans, or people of the farthest north. Speaking of an island the size of Sicily, lying opposite the coast of Gaul, and which he characterises as grassy and fertile, Hecataeus says, “The men of the island are, as it were, priests of Apollo, daily singing his hymns and praises, and highly honoring him. They say, moreover, that in it there is a great forest, and a goodly temple of Apollo, which is round and beautified with many rich gifts and ornaments.” Mr. Davies, author of the “Celtic Researches,” reasonably concludes that the island here spoken of is Britain, and the temple in which harpers sang daily the praises of Apollo is Stonehenge and the Druids. If so, Stonehenge was in existence B. C. 300. And this supposition is strengthened by Pindar, the Greek lyric poet, who speaks of “the Assembly met to view public games of the Hyperboreans.” It was the custom of the ancients to celebrate games and races on the high festivals of their gods; and that they did so at Stonehenge when the people assembled for sacrifice is rendered almost certain by the discovery of Dr. Stukeley (1723) of a “cursus,” or hippodrome, half a mile north of Stonehenge, about 10,000 feet in length, and 350 feet in width. It runs east and west, and is lined by two parallel ditches. At the west end is a curve for the chariots to turn, and on the east a mound where the principal men might view the contest, and the judge award the prizes to the victors.

These stones have a weird spell to which the imagination not unwillingly surrenders itself. Standing on the bare, solitary plain, they suggest the idea of a Parliament of Cyclops met to discuss some knotty point of the stone age; for with that age, doubtless, are they coeval. As the centuries flow past, new races and new arts spring up at their feet, still they keep their place and form part of the British world of to- day. They saw the Celtae arrive and bring with them the bronze age. They were standing here when Caesar and his legions stepped upon our shore. Their tail forms were seen on that plain when One greater than Caesar walked our earth. They saw the Romans depart, and the Angles and Saxons rush in and redden the land with cruel slaughter. They heard the great shout of the Gothic nations when Rome was overturned. They saw the scepter of England handed over from the Saxon to the Norman. They have waited here, fixed and changeless, while a long line of great kings- the Johns, the Edwards, the Henry’s, of our history- have been mounting the throne in succession and guiding the destinies of Britain. And now they behold the little isle in which they first lifted up their heads become the center of a world- wide empire, and the scepter of its august ruler- the daughter of a hundred monarchsstretched over realms which extend from the rising to the setting sun, and far to the south under skies which are nightly lighted up with the glories of the Southern Cross. Such are some of the mighty memories which cluster round these old stones. To see them morning by morning, freshening their rugged forms in the radiance of the opening day, and to watch them at eve solemnly and majestically withdrawing themselves into the dusk and cloud of night, is to feel something of the awe with which they inspired our forefathers of three thousand years ago. f49 But wonderful as Stonehenge is, it is eclipsed by the grandeur of Avebury.

According to the remark of Aubrey two hundred years ago, and quoted by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, “Avebury does as much exceed in greatness the sorenowned Stonehenge as cathedral does a parish church.”

A vast earthen rampart or mound sweeps round the site of this rude but majestic fane. Inside this mound is a fosse or ditch, and the perpendicular height in some places from the bottom of the fosse to the top of the mound is 80 feet. Half way up the mound, on its inner side, is a broad ledge, running round the entire circle, on which the spectators could seat themselves by hundreds of thousands and witness the rites which were celebrated on the level floor, 28 acres in extent, which the vallum and rampart enclosed and overlooked. Just within the fosse was a second rampart of great stones, set on end, and sweeping round the entire area, stone parted from stone by an average interval of 27 feet. The row consisted of an hundred stones of from 17 to 20 feet in height, not one of which had known chisel or hammer. To give them firm hold of the earth they were sunk to a depth of 10 feet, making the actual length of the stone about 30 feet. There are remains of an inner row, 8 feet from the inside of the outer one, and consisted of about 30 smaller stones, of which only remain, and 11 standing. The walk between these two circles is 300 feet in circumference. At the upper end of the adytum is the altar, a large slab of blue coarse marble,20 inches thick, 16 feet long, and 4 broad: pressed down by the weight of the vast stones that have fallen upon it. The whole number of stones when the structure was complete is calculated to have been about 140. The heads of oxen, deer, and other beasts have been found on digging in and about Stonehenge, and human bodies have also been discovered in the circumjacent barrows. Showing that this encompassing circle of grand monoliths was double. The diameter of the area enclosed by the fosse is 1200 feet, and of that enclosed by the great outer mound feet. f50 In the center of the area rises a beautiful little artificial hill of which we shall presently speak. On each side of this mount, and equally distant from it, stood a double concentric stone circle, formed of the same columnar masses as the great outer ring, presenting us with two small fanes enclosed within the great fane. The outer ring of these two little fanes contains thirty, and the inner twelve pillars, and the diameters of the rings were respectively 270 feet and 166 feet.

The conical mount in the center is 125 feet high. Seldom disturbed by foot it has a covering of the freshest and loveliest verdure. It is wholly composed of earth, with an area at the top of 100 feet, and 500 at the base.

Dr. Stukeley says that in his time (1740) its height was 170 feet. It was ringed with stone pillars at the base. What its use was, whether an altar or a judgment- scat, it is now impossible to say.

This grand temple, with its fourfold circumvallation and its inner sanctuaries, is approached by two grand pathways which sweep on with a slight curve (the one from the northeast and the other from the northwest) for upwards of a mile. These approaches are spacious, thousands might journey along them without jostling, their breadth being not less than 45 feet, and they are lined throughout with a grand balustrade of pillars.

They remind one of those grand avenues of sphinxes that lead up to the great temples of ancient Egypt; and doubtless the impression they made on the Druidic worshipper as he drew nigh the grand shrine, was not less solemn than that which the marvels of Edfou made on the mind of the Coptic devotee; for what impresses the barbarian most is not artistic grace, but colossal size. It was when the Romans had passed the climax of their civilization, and begun to decline once more towards barbarism, that, despising the Athenian models, they began to rear piles remarkable mainly for their stupendous magnitude.

All round the level plain on which these monuments occur swell up the ridges or low heights of Avebury. These little hills are dotted thickly over with sepulchral tumuli. If the great temple which is enclosed by this zone of graves be one of our earliest cathedrals, as in a sort it no doubt is, may we not, in the well- nigh obliterated sepulchers around it, see one of the earliest graveyards of our country? Here king and priest, warrior and bard mingle their dust, and sleep together. They have gone down into a land of “deep forgetfulness,” for even Tradition has grown weary of her task, and has long since ceased to repeat their names and tell the story of the exploits which doubtless made these names, however forgotten now, famous in their day.

In comparison with these cyclopean structures, which it required only strength, not art, to rear, the grandest temples of Greece and Italy, on which science had lavished her skill, and wealth her treasures, were but as toys. The special charm of the Greek temple was beauty: majesty was the more commanding attribute of the Druidic fane. The snow- white marble, the fluted column, with its graceful volutes and sculptured pediment, the airy grace which clothed it like sun- light, was a thing to fascinate and delight, but in proportion as it did so it conflicted with the spirit of devotion, and lessened the reverence of the worshipper. The stone circle of the Druid, severe, somber, vast, its roof the open heavens, was a thing to engender awe, and concentrate, not distract the mind. In our judgment our barbarian forefathers had a truer apprehension of the sort of structure in which to worship the Maker of the earth and heavens than the Greeks and Romans had.

We have already stated our deliberate and settled conviction that these monuments were reared for a religious purpose, in short are the earliest fanes ever set up on Scottish or British soil. But the recent discovery of a grand dolmen- center in the land of Moab offers new and, we think, conclusive proof in support of our opinion. This discovery, moreover, sheds a new and most interesting light on the early history of Scotland, and corroborates the account we have given touching its first settlers, as coming from Eastern lands, and bringing with them this earliest of the forms of worship, while yet in a state of comparative purity.

No reader of the Old Testament needs to be told of the interest that invests Mount Nebo, or to have recalled to his mind the memorable occasion on which that hill was engirdled with altars and seen to blaze with sacrificial fires. Recent discoveries in that locality vividly recall the whole scene as depicted on the sacred page. The scholars of the “Palestine Exploration,” enjoying a leisure for investigation which ordinary travelers cannot command, have discovered not fewer than 700 dolmens, standing or overturned, in the territory east of the Jordan. With these were mingled the remains of stone circles. This multitude of ruined shrines in one territory may well astonish us, and yet it is probable that these are only a few out of that great host of similar monuments with which that whole region bristled in former days. One shudders when he thinks of the abyss in which the inhabitants were sunk, as attested by these relics of a worship at once lewd and bloody. These monuments appear to have been equally numerous on the west of the Jordan before the entrance of the Israelites into Palestine, and if their ruins are there more rarely met with it is owing to the Divine injunction laid on Joshua to utterly destroy these erections and cleanse the land from the fearfully , demoralizing and debasing practices to which they gave birth.

Mount Nebo, in the land of Moab, was an object of special interest for examination on the part of the members of the “Palestine Exploration” expedition. “Close beside the knob of the mountain they saw,” says Captain Conder, “a dolmen standing perfect and unshaken.” They found other dolmens on the southern slope of the mountain; and on the west side of Nebo, yet another a little way below the “field of Zophim.” This latter lies overturned. There is, moreover, a rude stone circle on the southern slope of the mountain. Around this very hill- top did Balak rear seven altars, thrice told; may not these be their remains? There stood “Balaam with the king and princes of Moab beside him,” and while the smoke of the sacrifices ascended into heaven, and the dolmen tables ran red with the blood of the slain bullocks, the “son of Boor” looked down on the city of black tents in the gorge at his feet, and obeying an impulse by which his own inclination and wishes were overborne, he broke out into a lofty strain of prophetic blessing where he had hoped to pour forth a torrent of scathing male, fictions.

This is the holy place of Moab, and these are the altars of Baal. But in shape, in size, in the method of their construction. in short, in every particular, they are the exact resemblances of the Druidic remains of Scotland. There are races which even at this day raise such structures in connection with religious uses. The tribes of the Khassia hills, the remains of the pre- Aryan inhabitants of India, still continue to erect menhirs. f52 The Arabs worshipped stones before the days of Mohammed: and no traveler can pass through Palestine without having his attention arrested by fields dotted all over with little pyramids of stones, the humble imitations of those statelier monuments which former ages reared for a sacred purpose. The Khonds of Eastern India, the remains of the Dravidians, still employ circles in connection with their worship of the rising sun. They offer at times human sacrifices. This was a common though horrible practice of the Baal worshipper of ancient days. He deemed his altar specially honored when he laid upon it a human victim. Above the blood of bullock his deity delighted, he believed, in the blood of mall.

The Druids were of opinion that the higher the victim the greater its power to make expiation. On this theory the sacrifice of a human victim was of all others the most efficacious and the most acceptable to the deity. They therefore on occasion offered such, as Caesar and others assure us. It is easy to see what a fearful effect this would have in hardening the heart, and leading to waste and destruction of human life. Lucan tells us that in the forests the stone altars of the Druids were so thick, and the sacrifices so numerous, that the oaks were crimson with the blood. When a great man made atonement it was often with a human victim. Such, however, was generally selected from condemned criminals; lint when these were not to be had, a victim was procured for the altar by purchase, or other means.

Moloch turned the hearts of his worshippers to stone. In Caledonia, as in Judea, the mother shed no tear when she threw her babe upon the burning pile, nor did the father utter groan when he offered his son to the knife of the Druid. Sigh or tear would have tarnished the glory of the sacrifice. f53 Nor was a single victim enough for the Druid’s altar. He constructed, on occasion, castles of wicker- work, and filling their niches with young children, whose shrieks he drowned in the noise of his musical instruments, he kindled the pile, and offered up all in one mournful and dreadful hetacomb. But human sacrifices are not the reproach of barbarous races to the exclusion of civilized peoples. It was not the Moabite and Druidic altar only that flowed with the blood of man. These ghastly holocausts were seen among the Greeks and Romans, and that, too, in their most enlightened age. The same city that was the center of ancient commerce was also the theater of human sacrifices. The altars of Phoenicia- whence Greece borrowed her letters and arts- smoked with the bodies of infants immolated to Moloch. At Carthage a child was yearly offered in sacrifice, and the custom was continued down to the days of the pro- consul Tiberias, who hanged the priests on the trees of their own sacred grove.

The rite of human sacrifice was not abolished ,it Rome, according to Pliny, till B. C. 87. Idolatry at the core is the same in all ages and among every people. It is a thing of untamable malignity, and unsatiable bloodthirstiness.

Despite of arts and letters, and conquest, and all counteracting influences, it hardens the heart, that fountain of life and death, and slowly but inevitably barbarises society. What a difference betwixt the circle of unhewn stones on the Caledonian moor and the marble temples of Greece!

What a difference betwixt the unadorned ritual performed in the one, and the graceful and gorgeous ceremonial exhibited in the other! but whatever the people, whether painted barbarians or lettered Greeks, and whatever the shrine, whether a fane of unchiselled blocks, or temple of snow- white marble, idolatry, refusing to be modified, was the same malignant, cruel, and murderous thing in the one as in the other. It was invincibly and eternally at war with the pure affections and the up-ward aspirations of man. It converted its priests into manslayers, and made the mother the murderess of her own offspring.

Of the old pre- historic stones that linger on moor or in forest of our country, we do not affirm that all are remains of religious or Druidic structures. Some may mark the site of battles, others may signalize the spot where a warrior or chief was interred, and others may have been set up to commemorate some important event in the history of a clan or of a family.

These are like the memorial- stones of the Patriarchal and Jewish history.

But whatever the original use and purpose of these venerable monuments, they have now become, all of them, in very deed, “stones of remembrance,” and the sight of them may well move us to thankfulness that the “day- spring” has risen on the night of our country, and that the advent of Christianity, by revealing the “one great sacrifice,” has abolished for ever the sacrifice of the Druid.

CHAPTER - THE “ALTEINS” OR STONES OF FIRE- BELTINE OR MAYDAY AND MIDSUMMER FESTIVALS

THE names which the first settlers of a country give to the particular localities which they occupy, are not mere brands, they are significant appellatives. Such were the names of the ancient Palestine. They expressed some quality or incident connected with the town or valley or mountain which bore them, and despite the many masters into whose possession that land has since passed, and the diverse races that have successively peopled it, the aboriginal names still cling to its cities and villages though now in ruins. It is the same with Scotland. Its first inhabitants gave names in their vernacular to the localities where they reared their wattled dwellings or dug their underground abodes. There have since come new peoples to mix with the ancient population of the land, and new tongues to displace the original speech of its inhabitants, nevertheless the names given to hamlet and village in olden times are, in numerous instances, the names by which they continue to be known at this day; and these names carry in them the key which unlocks the early history of the place to which they are affixed.

Some of these names are simply the footprints of the Druid. Of these footprints one of the most noted is the term clachan. Clachan is a Gaelic word signifying stones. From this, which is its primary meaning, it came to denote, secondarily, a stone erection, and, in especial, a stone erection for religious observances. Gaelic lexicographers define “Clachan” to be “a village or hamlet in which a parish church is situate.” Before a hamlet could be promoted to the dignity of a clachan it was required of it that it should possess two things- a stone fabric and a place of rank of clachan from a date when there was not a stone house in them, and their inhabitants dwelt in mud huts, or in fabrics of wattles. How, then, came they by their name of clachan or “stones,” when they had neither parish church nor stone house. Simply in this way, and only in this way can the name be accounted for, that they had a “stone circle,” which was their parish church, inasmuch as they assembled in it for the celebration of the rites of Druidism. Hence to go to the “stones” and to go to worship came to mean the same thing. “Going to and from church,” says Dr. Jamieson, “and going to and from the clachan are phrases used synonymously.” Even till recently this was a usual form of speech in the Highlands, and is probably in use in some parts still. Thus has Druidism left its traces in the language of the people as in the names of localities.

Altein is another of these footprints. Altein is a name given to certain stones or rocks found in many districts of Scotland, and which are remarkable for their great size, and the reverence in which they are held by the populace, from the tradition that they played an important part in the mysteries transacted in former days. Altein is a compound word- al, a stone, and teine, fire, and so it signifies “the stone of fire.” It is corrupted sometimes into Alten, Altens, and Hilton. One of these alteins, or “stones of fire,” is found in the neighborhood of Old Aberdeen. It is termed the “Hilton Stone,” and stands a mile west of the cathedral, upon what have always been church lands. It is a truly magnificent column of granite, rhomboidal in form, each of its sides a yard in breadth, and measuring from base to top 10 feet. The religious use to which it was destined is certified by the near proximity of two stone circles, each thirty yards in diameter, and having, when entire, eighteen granite columns. The eastern circle remained untouched till 7830. Spared so long by tempests and other and worse agents of destruction, it was demolished in the year just named, and its monoliths broken up and utilized as building materials. The western circle, too, has all but vanished. It is represented at this day by but two stones, standing, doubtless, in the position in which Druid placed them long ages ago. When entire, these two granite circles, with the grand rhomboidal “stone of fire” standing betwixt them, would form tolerably complete Druidic establishment; and thence, not improbably, was borrowed the name of the neighboring cathedral city, which is often spoken of as the Altein- e- Aberdeen, or, to render the Gaelic appellatives into modern vernacular, the stone of fire at the city on the mouth of the black river. f57 Were the dead of seventy generations ago, which sleep in the neighboring churchyards, to look up, they would describe for us the scenes that were wont to be enacted here, and in which they bore their part. They would paint the eager upturned faces of the crowd that pressed around this “altein” expectant of the fire which, as they believed, was to fall upon it out of heaven. And not less vividly would they picture the yet greater crowds, that, on high festival days, gathered round these “stone circles,” and looked on in silent awe, while the white- robed Druid was going through his rites at the central dolmen. Victim after victim is led forward and slain- mayhap in the number is babe of some poor mother in the crowd, who seeks by this cruel and horrid deed to expiate her sin- and now the altar streams with blood, besmeared are hands and robe of officiating priest, and gory prints speckle the grassy plot which the granite monoliths enclose. The sound of the rude instruments waxes yet louder, till at last their noise drowns the cries of the victim, and the smoke of the sacrifices rises into the sky and hangs its murky wreaths like a black canopy above the landscape.

Altiens are met with in various parts of Scotland. Every locality to which such name is affixed, is marked by its great rock- like stone, on which the fire of Druid was wont to blaze in days long past. Here Druid no longer kindles his fire, but the stone remains as if to bear its testimony to the beliefs and usages of old times. There is the liateine, or stone of fire, in the parish of Belhelvie, corrupted into Leyton. A few miles to the west of Edinburgh is the parish of Liston. The name has a similar derivation and has undergone a similar corruption as Leyton and Alton. Liston is at once the compound and the corruption of Lias- teine, and being rendered from the Gaelic into the vernacular, signifies the “stone of firebrands.” Thus translated, the name opens a vista into far back ages. It recalls the ceremonies of that eventful night, October 30th, on which, as Druidic ordinance enjoined, the fire of every hearth in Scotland, without one exception, had to be extinguished, and the inhabitants of its various districts were to repair to their several “stone of firebrands,” at which, on payment of a certain specified sum, they would receive from the hands of officiating Druid torch kindled at his sacred fire, to carry back to their homes, and therewith rekindle their extinguished hearths.

The stone of Liston, at which this ceremony was wont to be enacted, is nine feet and a half in height. It is to be seen in a field a little to the east of the mansion- house of old. Liston, not far from the stone circle and dyke which surround the mound called “Huly Hill.” Other and more exciting scenes has this quiet neighborhood witnessed than the ordinary rural occupations that engross its inhabitants in our day. Here Druid has left the print of his foot, and it is not difficult, and it may not be unprofitable, to recall the scenes in which he was here pleased to display the extent of his power and the mysteries of his craft, year after year, through long centuries.

The day has again come round. It draws towards evening, the last gleam of sunlight has faded on the summits of the Pentlands, and the shadows begin to lengthen and thicken on the plain at their feet. The gloom is deepened by reason of the absence of those numerous lights which are wont, on other evenings, to flicker out from dwelling and casement on the departure of the day. No lamp must this night burn, no hearth must this night blaze: for so has Druid commanded. And that command has been faithfully obeyed. In every house the inmates have extinguished the brands on their hearth and carefully trodden out the last embers. But it is not in the parish of Liston only that every fire has been extinguished in obedience to Druidic authority. The command is obligatory on every house in Scotland. Not a hearth in all the land is there that is not this night cold and black; nor dare it be rekindled till first the Druid, by his powerful intercessions, has brought fire from heaven. Then only may the kindly glow again brighten hearth and dwelling.

And now comes the more solemn part of the proceedings. From all the hamlets and dwellings around the inhabitants sally forth and wend their way in the dusk of the evening, across meadow and stubble- field, or along rural lane, towards that part of the plain where stands the “altein,” or stone of firebrands. They carry torches in their hands, if so be, by favor of Druid, they may return with them lighted. They gather round the sacred stone, and await in awe the mysteries that are about to be enacted. A little knot of Druids have preceded them thither, and stand close around the “pillar of firebrands.” All is dark,- dark around the stone as throughout the whole region. Anon the silence in the crowd is broken by a voice which is heard rising in prayer. It is that of a priest who beseeches Baal to show his acceptance of his worshippers by sending down fire to kindle anew their hearths. He cries yet louder, all the priests joining in the supplication, and lo! suddenly, a bright and mysterious light is seen to shoot up from the “altein.” The flame has come down from heaven: so do the priests assure the awestruck crowd. Their god is propitious: he has answered by fire. The multitude hail the omen with shouts and rejoicings.

And now the people press forward around the “altein,” and holding out their torches, kindle them at the sacred flame, and bear them in triumph to their several homes. Long lines of twinkling lights may be seen in the darkness moving in the direction of the various villages and cottages, and in a little space every hearth is again ablaze. From every casement the cheerful ray streams out upon the night, and the whole region is once more lighted up with the new holy fire.

These “stones of fire” form a connecting link between the early Caledonia and the ancient Phoenicia. Of this latter country, the pioneer, and to a large extent the instructress of the ancient Caledonians in the mvsteries of fireworship, the capital, Tyre, was as distinguished for its idolatry as for its commerce; and if it transmitted the alphabetic letters invented in Chaldea and Egypt to the western world, it transmitted not less to the Westerns the deities of Asia. These were but second- hand gods, though set forth by the Phoenicians as if they had been the divine aborigines of their famous coast; for the gods and goddesses of paganism start up in different countries with other names. Here Ashtaroth was born rising on her shell from the blue deep. Here her star or thunderbolt fell on the island, which afterwards became the scat of Tyre, and that city never forgot what it owed to her who had given so miraculous a consecration to its soil. Here Hercules, a local Adonis, reigned supreme. His dog it was that fished up the first murex from the sea, its mouth purpled with the dye. Here Adonis, killed by the wild boar as he hunted in the Lebanon glen, was mourned by Ashtaroth, the Phoenician Venus; and here rejoicings were yearly held in honor of the awakening of Adonis, the Phoenician Tammuz. These festivals of mourning and rejoicing were not restricted to the Phoenician shore, they crept into the neighboring country of Judea; hence the women whom Ezekiel saw in the temple “weeping for Tammuz.” And here, too, as we have said, rose the altein.

The fire- pillars that blazed at the foot of Lebanon burned in honor of the same gods as those that lighted up the straths of Caledonia. Ezekiel speaks of the “stones of fire” of Tyre, and his description enables us to trace the same ceremonies at the Phoenician alteins as we find enacted at the Scottish ones.

When kindled, on the 30th of October, the Druid kept his “altein” alive all the year through till the 30th October again came round. It was then extinguished for a brief space, in order that a new gift of fire might be bestowed by his god. And as was the custom of the Scottish Druid, so, too, was that of the Phoenician Magus. His fires were kept burning, night and day, all the year round. Ezekiel depicts Tyre as “walking up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.” For what purpose? To trim them and keep them alive, lest should they be suffered to go out, the gods in whose honor they burned might take offense, and visit the State with calamity.

They were guardian fires, and, while they shone, the glory of Tyre was safe, and her rich merchandise, spread over many seas, was guarded from tempest and shipwreck. Compassed about by these guardian fires, her invincible defense as she deemed them, Tyre believed herself secure against overthrow; but the prophet foretold that destruction would find entrance nevertheless, and the crowning feature in the prophecy- so full of magnificence and terror- of her fall, is the extinction of these “alteins,” or fires -” I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.” f60 The words of Ezekiel throw light on what was done in old time on the moors of Scotland. They pierce the darkness of long past time, and show us the ceremonies enacted at the “alteins” and “stone circles” of Caledonia by our forefathers of three thousand years ago. Hardly can a doubt remain that the “alteins” of early Scotland, and the “firestones” of Phoenicia, were identical as regards their character and use. We behold the same priests standing by them, and the same rites performed at them. Both were altars to Baal, or Moloch, or the Sun- god. In both countries their ruins still remain, though the baleful fires that so often blazed upon them have been long extinct. In Scotland a better light has arisen in their room. On the Phoenician shore the night, alas! still holds sway; and though there Astarte is no longer worshipped, she has bequeathed her “crescent” as the symbol of a new faith equally false, and even more barbarous.

The great days, or holy seasons of the Druid, still retain their place in our almanacs, and have a shadowy celebration in the observances of our peasantry, at least in some parts of the country. The 1st of May was wont to be known as Beltane, and to this day figures in our almanacs under this name. It is a festival of Druidic times, and its observance ]ms not wholly ceased even yet. In the neighborhood of Crieff there are the remains of a Druidic stonecircle, where a number of men and women were wont to assemble every year on the 1st of May. “They light a fire in the center,” says a witness and narrator of the ceremonies; “each person puts a bit of oat cake in a shepherd’s bonnet: they all sit down, and draw blindfold a piece from the bonnet. One piece has been previously blackened, and whoever gets that piece has to jump through the fire in the center of the circle, and pay a forfeit. This is in fact a part of the ancient worship of Baal. Formerly the person on whom the lot fell was burned as a sacrifice.

Now, passing through the fire represents the burning, and the payment of a forfeit redeems the victim.” f61 The rites of this festival, as practiced in the district of Calendar in the end of last century, have been described to us in yet fuller detail by the Rev.

John Robertson, minister of that parish. “Upon the first day of May,” says Mr. Robertson, “which is called Beltan, or Bal- tein day, all the boys in a township or hamlet meet on the moors.

They cut a table in the green sod, of a round figure, by casting a trench in the ground of such circumference as to hold the whole company. They kindle a fire, and dress a repast of eggs and milk in the consistence of a custard. They knead a cake of oatmeal, which is toasted at the embers against a stone. After the custard is eaten up, they divide the cake into so many’ portions, as similar as possible to one another in size and shape as there are persons in the company. They daub one of these portions all over with charcoal, until it be perfectly black. They put all the bits of the cake into a bonnet. Every one, blindfold, draws out a portion. He who holds the bonnet is entitled to the last bit. Whoever draws the black bit, is the devoted person who is to be sacrificed to Baal, whose favor they mean to implore, in rendering the year productive in sustenance for man and beast.

There is little doubt of these inhuman sacrifices having been once offered in this country, as well as in the cast, although they now pass from the act of sacrificing, and only compel the devoted person to leap three times through the flames, with which the ceremonies of this festival are closed.” Mr.

Robertson adds other facts in which we can clearly trace the rites of sunworship. “When,” says he, “a highlander goes to bathe, or to drink waters out of a consecrated fountain, he must always approach by going round the place, from east to west on the south side, in imitation of the apparent diurnal motion of the sun. When the dead are laid in the earth, the grave is approached by going round in the same manner. The bride is conducted to her future spouse in the presence of the minister, and the glass goes round a company in the course of the sun. This is called, in Gaelic, going round the right or the lucky way.” f62 Next comes Midsummer. Then again the Druid lighted his fires. Alike on the Chaldean plain and on the moorlands of Caledonia, the summer solstice was a notable and sacred season. In Assyria the midsummer fires blazed in honor of the return from the dead of Adonis or Tammuz. f63 Beltane. We are happy to be able to insert the following note kindly sent us by the accomplished Professor of “Celtic Languages and Literature” in the University of Edinburgh :- “Beltane- beltane (Bealltainn in modern Gaelic). The attribution to Baal, whether scientific or not, is very old. “The earliest explanation of the meaning of the word known to me is that given in Cormac’s Glossary (edited by O’Donovan and Stokes, Calcutta, 1868) (Cormac, 831- 903, was prince and bishop of Cashel)- ‘Belltaine, i.e. bil- tene, i.e. lucky fire, i.e. two fires which Druids used to make with great incantations, and they used to bring cattle [as a safeguard] against the diseases of each year to those fires.’” In Scotland this festival was celebrated with more immediate reference to the harvest, which Baal the sun- god was invoked to bless and ripen. “These mid- summer fires and sacrifices,” says Toland, “were to obtain a blessing on the fruits of the earth, now becoming ready for gathering, and the last day of October as a thanksgiving for the harvest. It was customary for the lord of the place, or his son, or some other person of distinction, to take the entrails of the sacrificed animals in his hands, and walking barefoot over the coals thrice, after the flames had ceased, to carry them straight to the Druid, who waited in a whole skin at the altar. If the nobleman escaped harmless it was reckoned a good omen, welcomed with loud acclamations; but if he received any hurt, it was deemed unlucky, both to the community and himself.” “Thus have I seen,” adds Toland, “the people running and leaping through the St. John’s fires in Ireland- the same midsummer festival- and not only proud of passing unsinged, but, as if it were some kind of lustration, thinking themselves in an especial manner blest by the ceremony.” It is not in the cities of Phoenicia, nor in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom only, that we see men passing through the fire to Baal; we behold the same ordeal undergone on the soil of our own country, and doubtless in the same belief, even, that in these fires resided a divine efficacy, and that those who passed through them were purified and made holy.

Chambers informs us, in his Picture of Scotland, that a fair is held regularly at Peebles on the first Wednesday of May, called the Beltaine Fair. It has come in the room of “the 1st of May is by the original Irish called La Bealtine, or the day of Belan’s fair.” “These last,” May and Midsummer eve, says Owen (1743), “are still continued in Wales without knowing why, but that they found it the custom of their ancestors;” as are those on Midsummer eve “by the Roman Catholics of Ireland,” says Toland, “making them in all their grounds, and carrying flaming brands about their cornfields.” “This they do,” adds he, “likewise all over France and in some of the Scottish isles.” The custom of passing through the fire was also observed in these countries. “Two fires,” says Toland, “were kindled on May eve in every village of the nation, as well as throughout all Gaul, as well as in Britain, Ireland, and the adjoining lesser islands, between which fires the men and the beasts to be sacrificed were to pass.

One of the fires was on the corn, another on the ground. Hence the proverb amongst the people, when speaking of being in a strait betwixt two, of their being between Bel’s two fires.” “The more ignorant Irish,” says Ledwich, “still drive their cattle through these fires as an actual means of preserving them from future accidents.” The identity of these rites with those practiced in Phoenicia and in Judea in its degenerate age, and in lands lying still farther to the east, cannot be mistaken.

As the midsummer festival was one of the more important of the Druidic observances, care was taken that it should be kept punctually as to time.

Outside the stone circle it was usual to set up a single upright pillar. This was termed the pointer, and its design was to indicate the arrival of the summer solstice. It stood on the north- east of the circle, and to one standing in the center of the ring, and looking along the line of the pointer its top would appear to touch that point in the horizon where the sun would be seen to rise on the 22nd of June. When this happened the Druid knew that the moment was come to kindle his midsummer fires. At Avebury the pointer still remains. So, too, at Stennes in Orkney. In Upper Galilee, as we have already said, the white top of Hermon indicates the point of sunrise at midsummer to one standing in the center of the stonecircles to the west of Tel- el- Kady, the ancient Dan. These stones were the clocks of the Druid: they measured for him the march of the seasons, and enabled him to observe as great exactitude in the kindling of his fires and the celebration of his festivals as the sun- the god in whose honor his sacrifices were offered in his annual march along the pathway of the zodiac.

CHAPTER - VITRIFIED FORTS- ROCKING- STONES- DRUID’S CIRCLE- NO MAN’S LAND- DIVINATION- GALLOW- HILLSA YOKE BROKEN.

IN our vitrified forts, too, it is possible that we behold a relic of the times and observances of Druidism. This is the likeliest solution of a problem which, after many attempts, still remains unsolved. We know that on a certain night of the year immense bonfires were kindled on the more conspicuous of our hill tops, and the whole country from one end to the other, was lit up with the blaze of these pyres. The intense heat of such immense masses of wood as were consumed on these sites year by year through a series of centuries, must, in process of time have converted the stones and rocks on which they were kindled into a vitrified mass. The idea that these vitrifactions were forts is barely admissible. They occur, with a few exceptions, on mountains which possess no strategical quality, and which were not likely to have been selected in any great plan of national fortification, supposing the natives capable of forming such a scheme of military defense. The undoubted hill- fortresses of Scotland may be traced by hundreds in their still existing remains, but these are of a character wholly different from the antiquities of which we are now speaking. The site selected for their erection was some hill of moderate height, standing forward from the chain of mountains that swept along behind it and which overlooked the wide plains and far- extending straths which lay spread out in front. The builders of these strengths, whoever they were, did not seek to fuse the materials with which they worked into a solid mass, they were content to draw around the mountain- tops, which they fortified, a series of concentric walls, broad and strong, constructed of loose stones, with ample space betwixt each circular rampart for the troops to maneuver. The vitrifactions, on the other hand, are scattered over our mountainous districts, with no strategical link binding them together, and in the absence of any conceivable use to be served by them, which would compensate for the toil of dragging up their materials to the elevated sites where they are found, the annual occurrence of a religious observance which, year by year, during a very lengthened period, rekindled on the same spot immense bonfires, presents us with by much the likeliest solution of their origin.

Other vestiges of this early and now fallen superstition are scattered over the face of the country, and a glance at these may help to bring back the image of the time, and strengthen the proof, if it needs further strengthening, that Druidism once dominated in Scotland. Among the more prominent of these are the rocking stones, so termed because the slightest application of force sufficed to set them a vibrating. They were huge unhewn rocks, weighing from thirty to fifty tons, hoisted up and placed on the top of another rock, equal to the burden, and so nicely poised as to move at the touch of the finger.

The rocking- stone is not a megalithic curiosity known only to Scotland. It is met with in England and Ireland, and in countries lying far beyond the British seas. When we travel back in time we find mention made of it by writers who flourished twenty centuries ago. Camden speaks of one in Pembrokeshire, Wales, on a sea- cliff, within half a mile of St. David’s. It is so large, that, says Owen, his informant, “I presume it may exceed the draught of an hundred oxen.” It is “mounted upon divers other stones, about a yard in height; it is so equally poised that a man may shake it with one finger.” Perhaps the most remarkable is that in Cornwall, called “the Logan Stone,” at Treryn Castle, in the parish of St. Levan. It is supposed to weigh ninety tons, yet is so balanced on an immense pile of rocks that “one individual, by placing his back to it, can move it to and fro easily.” f70 Rocking- stones are found in Ireland as well as in Cornwall and Wales.

Toland regards them as part of the mechanism of Druidism, and so do almost all who have occasion to speak of them whether in ancient or in modern times. “It was usual,” says Byrant, “among the Egyptians to place one vast stone above another for a religious memorial, so equally poised, that the least external force, nay, a breath of wind, would sometimes make them vibrate.” Nor did these stones escape the notice of Pliny. “Near Harpasa, a town of Asia,” say’s he, “there stands a dreadful rock, moveable with one finger, the same immovable with the whole body.” The motion of so large a body on the application of so slight a force, Photius in his life of Isidore, tells us, formed the subject of some curious discussions.

Some attributed the vibrations of the stone to divine power, but others saw in them only the workings of a demon. It does not surprise us to find a class of men so astute as the priests of Druidism quick to perceive the use to which these stones might be turned in the way of supporting their system. The man conscious of guilt when he saw the ponderous mass begin to quiver and tremble the moment he laid his finger upon it, mistaking the mechanical principle, of which he was ignorant, for the presence of the deity to whom his crime was known, would feel constrained to confess his sin.

These stones were termed also Judgment Stones. They were, in fact, the Urim and Thummim of the Druid. They could not be worn on the breast like the oracle of the Jewish priesthood, they were set up in the glen or on the moor and were had recourse to for a divine decision in matters too hard for the determination of a human judge. If one was suspected of treason, or other crime, and there were neither witnesses nor proof to convict him, he was led into the presence of this dumb, awful judge, in whose breast of adamant was locked up the secret of his innocence or his guilt, and according to the response of the oracle, so was the award of doom. If the stone moved when the suspect touched it, he was declared innocent; if it remained obdurately fixed and motionless, alas! for the unhappy man, his guilt was held to be indubitably established. A judge with neither eyes to see, nor cars to hear, but in whom dwelt a divinity from which no secrets were hidden, had condemned him. From that verdict there was no appeal; as was wont to be said of another judge, whose decisions were received as the emanations of divine and infallible knowledge, so was it said of the Druidic Infallibility. “Peter has spoken, the cause is decided.” “Behold yon huge And unhewn sphere of living adamant Which, poised by magic, rests its central weight On yonder pointed rock; firm as it seems, Such is its strange and virtuous property, It moves obsequious to the gentlest touch Of him whose breast is pure; but to a traitor, Tho’ even a giant’s prowess nerved his arm, It stands as fixed as Snowdon.”

A rocking- stone was a quarry in itself, and such stones were dealt with as such in process of time; that is, they were broken up, and dwelling- houses and farm- steadings were built out of the materials which they so abundantly supplied, and hence, though anciently these rocking- stones were common they are now rare. There was a “rocking” or “judgment” stone at Ardiffery near Boddam. Half a century ago it still existed, and called up images of unhappy persons standing before it, awaiting, in trembling and terror, their doom. It has now vanished, doubtless under the fore- hammer of the builder. It lives only in the pages of a local antiquary, who describes it as he saw it sixty years ago. “In walking up this solitary glen (Boddam) you come in contact with a very large stone of unhewn granite, and whose dimensions are (as measured in May 1819), 37 feet in circumference and 27 feet over it. . . . It is placed upon several small blocks of granite, so as to free it entirely from the ground, which must evidently have been done by the hands of men. As there are evident marks of fire close by it, I have every reason to believe it to have been accounted sacred, and a place of worship of the ancient Druids.” f73 By what means these great stones were placed in the position in which we find them is a problem which remains to this day a mystery. The combined strength of a whole parish would hardly have sufficed, one should think, to accomplish such a feat. It is plain that the Druids knew the art of the engineer as well as the science of the astronomer, and possessed appliances for combining, accumulating, and applying force in the transportation of heavy bodies far beyond what we commonly credit them with. They knew the uses before they knew the principles of the mechanical powers, and hence such machines as pulleys, cranes, and inclined planes have been in practice from time immemorial. They could yoke hundreds of oxen, or thousands of men to the car on which these immense masses were conveyed from the spot where they were dug up to the spot where they were to stand; but having dragged them thither, how were these enormous blocks to be lifted into the air? hung, as it were, on a needle’s point, and so evenly balanced as to vibrate at the gentlest touch? This would have taxed the resources, and it might be baffled the skill of the mechanist of the present day. And yet, the natives of Scotland could accomplish this feat three thousand years ago! When one thinks of this one is tempted to half believe that the builders of these mighty structures, which war, tempest, and time have not been able even yet utterly to demolish, did indeed possess the magical powers to which they laid claim. The only magic with which they wrought was knowledge; but. is it wonderful that the untaught multitude mistook a skill and craft that were so far above their comprehension, and which they saw performing prodigies, for a knowledge wholly supernatural, and, in the awe and terror thus inspired, were willing to accept the manipulations of the Druid for the intimations of the Deity?

The Druid’s favorite figure was the circle- another link between Scottish Druidism and the world- wide system of Sun worship. Two things have come down to us from the earliest ages as the most perfect of their kind, seven amongst numbers, and the circle amongst figures. A certain mystic potency was supposed to reside in both. When we turn to the all- prevalent system of sun worship we see at once how this belief arose. Bunsen tells us that the circle was the symbol of the sun. It came thus to be the canonical and orthodox form of all buildings reared for his worship.

Wherever we come on the remains of these structures, whether in Asia or Europe, they are seen to be circular. As the Magus performed his incantations within his circle, traced, it might be, on the ground with his staff, so the Druid, when he performed his worship, stood within his ring of cyclopean stones. The spell of the magician was more potent, and the worship of the Druid was more acceptable when done within this charmed enclosure. Nor was it their religious edifices only that were so constructed; almost all their erections were regulated as to shape by their belief that there was in the circle a sacred efficacy. From their barrows on the moor to their dwelling- houses, all were circular. The well- known Pict’s house was a circle. And when these huts formed a brough or hamlet, they were so arranged as to form a series of circles. Of this a curious specimen is still to be seen in the north of England. On the slope of a hill in Northumberland, about six miles south of the Tweed, in a district abounding in stone remains of a Druidic character, is a little city in which no man has dwelt these long centuries. As it has been described to us by eyewitnesses, it is a congeries of circular huts, arranged in streets, all of which form circles having a common center.

We have already spoken of the great days of the Druid, which even so late as the seventeenth century were observed with the old pagan honors by a large portion of the Scottish peasantry; nor has their observance wholly ceased even in our day. Fires were extinguished and rekindled, arts of divination were practiced, and other ceremonies of Druidic times were performed, though in many cases all knowledge of the origin and design of these observances had been lost. “In many parts of the Scottish highlands,” says Dr. Maclachlan, “there are spots round which the dead are borne sunwise in their progress toward the place of sepulture; all these being relics not of a Christian but of a pagan age, and an age in which the sun was an object of worship.” “There are places in Scotland where within the memory of living man the teine eigin, or ‘forced fire, ‘ was lighted once every year by the rubbing of two pieces of wood together, while every fire in the neighborhood was extinguished in order that they might be lighted anew from this sacred source.”

It was accounted unlawful to yoke the plow or to engage in any of the duties of ordinary labor on these festival days; such seasons were passed in idleness, or were devoted to the practice of magical arts. There were, moreover, in various parts of the country, plots of land consecrated to the gods of Druidism, and sacredly guarded from all pollution of spade or plough. Such fields were termed, “the good man’s land and the guid man’s fauld.” No one dared cultivate them for fear of incurring the wrath of the powerful and terribly vengeful imps of Druidism. They lay untilled from century to century, and were viewed with mysterious awe as the trystingplace of familiar spirits, who were supposed to be willing and able to disclose the secrets of futurity to anyone who had the courage to meet them on their own proper territory. So prevalent were these things that we find the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland of 1649 appointing a large Commission of their number to take steps for discouraging and suppressing these superstitious practices. We trace the action of the Commission in the consequent procedure of several of the Kirk Sessions.

These courts summoned delinquents before them and enjoined on them the cultivation of fields which had not been turned by the plow from immemorial time, and they required of farmers that they should yoke their carts on the sacred festival of Yule, and of housewives that they should keep their hearth- fire burning on Beltane as on other days.

Arrogance is an unfailing characteristic of all false priesthoods. To be able to open the human breast and read what is passing therein has not contented such pretenders; they have claimed to open the portals of the future and foretell events yet to come. Every idolatry has its Vatican or mount of divination. There is an instinctive and ineradicable belief in the race that He to whom the events of tomorrow and the events of a thousand years hence are alike clearly known, can, when great ends are to be served, make known to man what is to come to pass hereafter. It is a shallow philosophy that rejects the doctrine of prophecy in its predictive form. The second great Father of the world, before he died, gathered his children, then an undivided and unbroken family around him, and showed them what should befall them in the latter days. The race started on their path with this prophecy burning like a light, and carried it with them in their several dispersions. Their belief in it grew stronger as, age by age, they saw it fulfilling itself in their various fortunes; and though the divine gift, after the dispersion, remained only with the family of Seth- the worshippers of the true God- all nations laid claim to prophecy, and all priesthoods professed to exercise it. The Druids of Britain challenged this gift not less than the wise men of Chaldea, the Magi of Persia, and the priests of Greece. The earliest of our writings, which are the archeological ones, attest the former prevalence in Scotland of this, as well as of all the other forms of divination and soothsaying.

By the help of these archaeological lights we can still identify many of those “high places” to which the Druid went up, that there he might have the future unveiled to himself, and be able to unveil it to others. The “Laws” and “Gallow- hills” scattered here and there all over our country attest by the name they before that here were the divining places of the priests of the Scottish Baal. The name comes from a Gaelic word, gea- lia, which signifies “The Sorcery Stone,” now corrupted into gallow. The Gaelic words gea (sorcery), and lia (a stone) enter into a variety of combinations, and appear in many altered forms, but wherever we light upon them as the names of places we there behold the Druidic brand still uneffaced, though affixed so long ago, and most surely indicating that we are treading on what was once holy ground, and in times remote witnessed the vigils of the astrologer and the incantations of the soothsayer. It must be noted as confirmatory of this etymological interpretation, that these laws and gallow- hills have the common accompaniment of a neighborhood abounding in Druidic remains- pillar- stones or remains of circles.

The popular belief regarding these laws and gallow- hills is that in other days they were places of judgment and of execution,- in short, that here stood the gallows. But this is to mistake the etymological meaning of the name. The term is not gallows- hill and gallows- gate, but gallow- hill and gallow- gate. It is the Celtic gea- lia, and not the English vernacular, gallows, which is but of yesterday, compared with the olden and venerable word which has been corrupted into a sound so like that it has been mistaken for it. The name was affixed to these places long before the gallows had come into use as an instrument of capital punishment, and sentence of death was carried out on the criminal by the stone weapon, or by the yet more dreadful agency of fire.

In no land, if ancient writers are to be believed, did divination more flourish than in the Britain of the Druid. No, not in Chaldea, where this unholy art arose; nor in Egypt, where it had a second youth; nor in Greece, where stood the world- renowned oracle of Delphi, nor even at Rome where flourished the college of augurs. The soothsayers of Britain were had in not less honor, their oaks were deemed not less sacred, and their oracles were listened to with not less reverence than were the utterances of the same powerful fraternity in classic countries. Nay, it would seem that nowhere did their credit stand so high as in Britain. The testimony of Pliny is very explicit. Speaking of Magism, by which the ancients meant a knowledge of the future, he says, “In Britain at this day it is highly honored, where the people are so wholly devoted to it, with all reverence and religious observance of ceremonies, that one would think the Persians first learned all their magic from them.” So great was the fame of the British diviners that the Roman emperors sometimes consulted them. They rivaled, if they did riot eclipse the Greek Pythoness, and the Roman augur, at least in the homage that waited on them in their own country, and the respect and submission which they extorted from all who visited the island.

The rites which they practiced to compel the future to disclose itself to their eye, were similar to those which their brethren abroad- partners in the same dark craft- employed for the same end. They watched the sacrifices, and from the appearance of the entrails divined the good or ill fortune of the offerer. They drew auguries from the flight of birds, from the cry of fowls, from the appearance of plants, as also from the drawing of lots, and the observation of omens, such as tempests and comets. To these comparatively harmless methods they are said to have added one horrible rite. They took a man, most commonly a criminal, and dealing him a blow above the diaphragm, they slew him at a single stroke, and drew their vaticinations from the posture in which he fell, and the convulsions he underwent in dying. So does Diodorus Siculus relate. To these arts they added, it is probable, a little sleight of hand; and, moreover, possessing considerable skill in medicine, in mechanics, and in astronomy, it is reasonable to suppose that they made use of their superior knowledge to do things, which to the uninstructed and credulous would appear possible only by the aid of supernatural power. His unbounded pretensions being met the unbounded credence of his votaries, the Druid foretold the issue of battles, the defeat or triumph of heroes, the calamities or blessings that awaited nations- in short, the good or ill success of whatever enterprise of a private or of a public kind, might happen to be on hand.

A truly formidable power it was with which the art of divination armed the Druid. The people among whom he practiced his auguries, and who accorded him the most unbounded faith as the possessor of the terrible attributes to which he laid claim, could never very clearly distinguish, we may well believe, between the power to foretell the future, and the power to fix the complexion and character of the future. The prediction of flood, or tempest, or earthquake, or other dire elemental convulsion, and the power to evoke and direct these terrible chastisements, were, doubtless, in their imagination, very much mixed up together. They had no clear conceptions of the limits of this mysterious power; or whether indeed, it had boundaries at all. He who could read the stars, for aught they knew, might be able to stay- them in their courses, and compel them to do his pleasure. If he should command the ocean to leave its bed and drown their dwellings, would not its waters obey him? If he should summon the tempest, would it not awake at His call? Or if he should lift up his voice to the clouds, would they not straightway rain their hailstones and hurl their thunderbolts upon the disobedient? They saw the Druid, with all the forces, visible and invisible, of nature ready to be marshaled at his bidding against all who should dare to disobey or offend him. What a miserable vassalage! and from that vassalage there was no escape. The earth was but a wide prison, peopled throughout with invisible agents, countless in number, and malign in spirit, whose only employment and delight were to torment the race of man. Nature itself groaned “travailing in pain” under the bondage of this corruption, and waited in “earnest expectation,” for the coming of Christianity that it might be brought into the liberty of a purer system. And when at length the Gospel came, and broke the divining rod of the Druid, and purged out the gross defilement of those vengeful deities with which he had peopled earth and air, sea and sky, and tumbled their dark empireto believer in Druidism no imaginary one- into ruin, what a glorious and blessed emancipation !- not to man only, but also to the earth on which he dwelt. If, as some historians say, wailings were heard to issue from the shrines and oracles of paganism, when the cry went forth and resounded along the shores of every island and continent, “great Pan is dead,” well might songs and shoutings ;arise from the Britons when they felt their ancient yoke falling from off their neck, and the thick gloom in which they had so long sat, giving place to the morning light of a better day.

CHAPTER - SCOTLAND AS SEEN BY AGRICOLA AND DESCRIBED BY TACITUS AND HERODIAN.

AFTER long ages- how many we do not know, for they reach back into the primeval night, and offer us nothing to guide our hesitating steps but the dubious memorials which the poor barbarian has left behind him in cairn and cist- we gladly welcome the rising of the light of history. It is a Roman hand that carries the torch that first illumines our sky, and reveals the face of our country to us. Time has not yet come to its “fullness,” nor has the world’s grand epoch taken place, yet here on the coast of England is the Roman fleet searching along the shores of Kent for a place of anchorage and disembarkation. The invasion is led by the great Julius in person. That remarkable man, uniting letters with arms, touches no spot of earth on which he does not shed light; alas ! also inflict devastation. He has just set foot on a new shore, and he feels the curiosity of the discoverer as well as the lust of the invader and conqueror. We see him, on the evening after the battle, retiring to his tent, or to his ship, and noting down, in traces rapid and brief, but destined to be ineffaceable, whatever had fallen under his own observation, or had been reported to him by others, respecting the appearance of the country, and the manners, opinions, and condition of the barbarians on whose shore he had just hurled his legions.

It is verily no pleasant or flattering picture to which the pen of Caesar introduces us. And the darkness of that picture is deepened by the sharp contrast which so strongly suggests itself betwixt the country of the writer, then just touching the acme of its literary and warlike glory, and the poor country which his pen seeks to portray. That contrast has since that day been most strikingly reversed. But if civilization and empire have transferred their scat from the country of the polished writer and invincible conqueror to that of the skin- clothed man, on whose neck we see Rome now imposing her yoke, we behold in this no proof, though some might regard it as such, of the fickleness of fortune, and the instability of power and grandeur.

This change of place on the part of the two countries, looked at below the surface, is, on the contrary, a conspicuous monument of the steadfast and unchangeable working of those laws and forces that determine whether a nation is to go forward or to fall back- forward to empire or backward into slavery. Nations may win battles, or achieve great triumphs in art, but there is a mightier power in the world than either arms or arts, though the Roman knew it not, and statesmen still make but small account of it; and in the stupendous revolution of which we have spoken we trace simply the working of this Power: a power compared with which the strength of the Roman legions was but as weakness: a power, moreover, that crowns itself with far other victories than those which the mistress of the ancient world was wont to celebrate with such magnificence of pomp and haughtiness of spirit, on her Capitol.

It is England rather than Scotland which the invasion of Caesar brings into view. No foot of Roman soldier, so far as is known, had yet been set down on Scottish soil. Slowly the Roman eagle made its way northward into Caledonia, as if it feared to approach those great mountains, dark with tempests, which nature had placed there as if to form the last impregnable defense of a liberty which Rome was devouring. It was in the year 55 B. C. that Julius Caesar invaded Britain; but it was not till about one hundred and thirty- five years after this, that is, in the year 80 of our era, that Agricola, leading his legions across the Tweed, brought Scotland for the first time into contact with Rome.

All England by this time was comprehended within the limits of the empire, and had become a Roman province. It was dotted with Roman camps, and studded with Roman cities, in which both foreigners and natives were living the life of Italy under a northern sky. England, in a word, was already very thoroughly permeated by those refining but emasculating influences of which Rome was the center, and which she studied to diffuse in all her provinces as a means of reconciling to her yoke, and of retaining under her scepter, those countries which her sword had subjugated. But as yet Scotland was untouched by these insidious and enfeebling influences.

Roman luxury had not relaxed its barbaric rigor, nor had Roman power tamed its spirit, or curtailed its wild independence. But now its subjugation was begun.

The task of conquering it, however, Agricola found a difficult one.

Scotland was not to be so speedily subdued, nor so securely retained, as the level country of England. The forests were more dense, the swamps more impenetrable, and the mountain strengths more formidable on the north of the Tweed than in the southern country. The natives, moreover, less readily accepted defeat, and though routed and dispersed in battle, they would again renew the attack with revived. desperation and in augmented numbers. But Roman discipline and perseverance at last surmounted these obstacles, though neither wholly nor permanently. The legions hewed their way into the country, scattering or crushing every living thing that opposed their progress. Advancing from stream to stream, and from one mountain range to another, guarding the passes behind him with camps, erecting forts of observation and defense on the hill tops, throwing bridges across rivers, and laying down lines of roads through forest and moor, and ever presenting a stern front to the natives, who kept retreating before him, unless when at times surprised and slaughtered by his soldiers, Agricola held on his way till at last he stood on the shores of the Firth of Forth.

Here, in sight of the north hills, the conqueror halted, and drawing a chain of forts across the country from the Forth to the Clyde to repel the attack, or shut out the eruption of the natives still numerous in the country beyond, the Roman general fixed here for the time the boundary of the now overgrown empire of Rome. His future progress northward, and the sanguinary battles it cost him to make good this advance, will fall to be narrated in subsequent chapters. Meanwhile let us pause and look around on the country and the people amid which the triumphs of Agricola have placed both him and us.

Happily for us, in the invasion of Scotland under Julius Agricola, as in the previous invasion of England under Julius Caesar, letters and arms were once more conjoined. Not, however, as before, in the same person, although in the same expedition. Along with this Roman general came his son- in- law, Tacitus, the great historian. While the soldier, withkeen eye scrutinized the strategic points of the country, and determined the movement of the legions, the historian, equally alert, noted down the more prominent and remarkable characteristics of the new region into which they had come, and the peculiar qualities and appearance of the race among which they found themselves. The touches of a feebler pen, especially when engaged on a country so obscure as Scotland then was, would have speedily faded into utter oblivion. The picture produced by the genius of Tacitus, posterity has taken care to preserve. It is vivid, but not complete or full. To see Scotland as it disclosed itself to the eyes of the two great Romans, it is necessary to fill in the bold outline of the great master with the fragmentary and casual glimpses which we obtain from the pen of other writers, chiefly those which flourished subsequent to the time of Tacitus.

There is a time for countries as for men to be born. Till that time had come to Scotland, the country lay shrouded in night; but now the hour had arrived when the world had need of this land lying far off in the darkness and storms of the Northern Ocean. Jerusalem had newly fallen. The Seer of Patmos was closing the canon of Inspiration. The light, which had been waxing in brightness ever since its first kindling in the morning of time, was now perfected as a revelation or system of truth. It needed to be placed where it could be seen, and where the nations might be able to walk in its radiance. Providence had notified by a terrible event that henceforth it was not to occupy its old site. The city where, till now, it had been enshrined, had been east down with tragic horror, and the Jews, whose glory it had been that they were the keepers of the “holy oracles,” were deposed from their great function, and scattered to the four quarters of heaven. The philosophy of Greece, after shedding a false brilliance over that fair land for centuries, had gone out in darkness, never more to be rekindled. And with the failure of Greek philosophy all the wisdom of the previous ages had failed as the true guide of men to happiness; for the schools of Chaldea, of Egypt, of Phoenicia, and of all the earth, had emptied their intellectual treasures into the schools of Greece, that, through Athens, as the embodiment of the world’s wisdom, they might make trial to the utmost of what the wisdom of man could do. The answer was a people emasculated and sensuous, and a state enslaved and fallen. Rome, whose name filled the earth, and whose sword had subjugated it, was reeling under the number of her victories, and was fated to sink under the more enormous burden of her ambition and her crimes, and to pull down with her into the ruin of corruption a wisdom not of this world, so far as it had been committed to her keeping. It was at this hour of impending terrible revolution that a new country was summoned out of the darkness to be in Christian times what Judea had been in early days- a lamp of light to the world. Agricola had gone forth on the errand of Caesar, as he believed. He sought only to illustrate the greatness of Rome by adding yet another country to her already too vast dominions. But in truth he was doing the bidding of a greater than Caesar, who had commissioned him to search in the North Sea, far away from the pride of learning and the pomp of empire, for a savage land and a barbarous people, where Christianity might build up from its foundations an empire of more durable estate and truer glory than that which Rome had succeeded in rearing after ages of intrigue and toil and blood. Neither learning nor the sword could claim any share in the brilliant achievement now to be witnessed in our solitary and barbarous isle. The work would here be seen to be entirely the doing of Christianity, and would remain a monument of its power to the ages to come. With Agricola, we have said, comes the historian of the age, whose pen alone could do justice to the wild country, and draw such a picture of it as the world would keep for ever in its eye, and measure by it the transformation the country was about to undergo, and confess that only one power known to man was able to have effected a change so marvelously vast, brilliant, and beneficent.

Let us mark it well. The Scotland of the age of Tacitus rises on the sight ringed with breakers-” lashed,” says the historian, “with the billows of a prodigious sea!” Here it is upheaved in great mountains, there it sinks into deep and far- retreating straths, and there it opens out into broad plains never turned by the plough, and where neither is sower to be seen in the molient spring, nor reaper in the mellow autumn. The clothing of the surface is various. Here it wears a covering of brown moor, there of shaggy wood. The places not covered by heath or forest lie drowned mostly in reedy swamps and sullen marshes. The sea enters the land by numerous creeks. Arms of ocean intersect the country, and run in silvery lines far into the interior, up dusky glen, and round the base of dark, rocky mountain, their bri