have not to complain of oppression. When they are offended, their resentment is prompt and violent; they may be conquered, but not tamed; they may be led to obedience, but not to servitude.'

Would you know their savagery? Imagine them—as old Celtic story tells-mixing the brains of their slain enemies with lime, and playing with the hard balls they made of them. Such a brainstone is said to have gone through the skull of an Irish chief, who lived afterwards seven years with two brains in his head, always sitting very still, lest in shaking himself he should. die. Yet they esteem it infamous for a chieftain to close the door of his house at all, 'lest the stranger should come and behold his contracting soul.'

Their dead are buried in mounds. Here vases are discovered, containing their bones and ashes, together with their swords and hatchets, arrow-heads of flint and bronze, and beads of glass and amber, for they believe, after the manner of savages, things which are useful or pleasing to the living are needed, for pleasure or use, in the shadowy realm:

---

'Secure beneath his ancient hill

The British warrior slumbers still;
There lie in order, still the same,

The bones which reared his stately frame;
Still at his side his spear, his bow,

As placed two thousand years ago.'

that

The priests of their religion are the Druids, who are so careful lest their secret doctrines be revealed to the uninitiated that they teach their disciples in hidden caves and forest recesses. They are the arbiters of disputes, and the judges of crime. Whoever refuses to submit to their decree is banished from human intercourse. The young resort to them for instruction. They teach the eternal transmigration of souls. They will not worship their gods under roofs. At noon and night, within a circular area, of enormous stones and of vast circumference,' they make their appeals with sacrifices-captives and criminals, or the innocent and fair. When the priest has ripped open the

1 One of these - Stonehenge-may yet be seen standing in mysterious and awful silence on Salisbury Plain. So massive are the pieces, that it was fabled to have been built by giants or magic art:

Not less than that huge pile (from some abyss

Of mortal power unquestionably sprung,)

Whose hoary Diadem of pendant rocks

Confines the shrill-voiced whirlwind, round and round

Eddying within its vast circumference,

On Sarum's naked plain.- Wordsworth.

body of a human being or lighted the fires around a living mass, we may hear the shriek of mad excitement as the " 'congregation' dance and shout. Nor is their teaching confined to their worship. Says Cæsar:

The Druids discuss many things concerning the stars and their revolutions, the magnitude of the globe and its various divisions, the nature of the universe, energy and power of the immortal gods.'

There are bards, also, with power and privilege, who sing the praises of British heroes to the crowd. A wheel striking on strings is the instrument of these our ancestral lyrists. Among the three things which will secure a man from hunger and nakedness is the blessing of a bard. His curse brings fatalities upon man and beast.

Four hundred years cannot but have made a vast difference between the fierce savages who rushed into the sea on that old September day, and those who were citizens of the stately Roman towns or tillers of the fertile districts that lay around them. Tacitus is said to have expressed surprise at the facility and eagerness with which the Britons adopted the customs, the arts, and the garb of their conquerors. Under the Roman Empire there were British kings, of whom one of the few famous was Cunobelin - the Cymbeline of the drama. Government became more centralized. A milder worship and a more merciful law were the lot of the people. The Romans improved the agriculture of the country, and bestowed upon the cultivators 'the crooked plough' with an eight-foot beam,' of which Virgil speaks. In the middle of the fourth century, warehouses were built in Rome for the reception of corn from Britain. An export of six hundred large barks in one season assumes the existence of a large rural population. The tin and lead mines were worked with jealous care for Roman use; and the presence of cinders at this day is the visible proof of the mining and smelting of iron.

The refinement thus introduced among the Celtic Britons was not uncommunicated to the barbarous tribes whose occupation speedily followed the retirement of the imperial armies. Traces of the Roman modes of thought are indelibly stamped upon much that relates to common life. In January survives the 'Two-faced Janus'; July embalms the memory of the mighty Julius; March is the month of Mars, the god of war; and August

claims an annual reverence for the crafty Augustus.

Our Mayday is the festival of Flora. Our marriage ceremonies are all Roman, the veil, the ring, the wedding gifts, the groomsmen and bridesmaids, the bride-cake. Our funeral imagery is Roman,the cypress, the flowers strewn upon the graves, the black for mourning. The girl who says, when her ears tingle, a distant one is talking of her, recalls the Roman belief in some influence of a mesmeric nature which produced the same effect. 'A screech-owl at midnight,' says Addison, has alarmed a family more than a band of robbers.' It was ever an omen of evil. No Roman superstition was more intense. Men all on fire, walking up and down the streets, seemed to Casca a prodigy less dire than 'the bird of night' that sat

Even at noonday, upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking.'

But there are latent qualities here which would ornament any age. With the skin of a beast slung across his loins, the exposed parts of his body painted with sundry figures, a chain of iron about his neck as a symbol of wealth, and another about his waist, his hair hanging in curling locks and covering his shoulders, Caractacus had stood captive in the imperial presence of Claudius, and said:

'Had my moderation in prosperity been equal to the greatness of my birth and estate, or the success of my late attempts been equal to the resolution of my mind, I might have come to this city rather as a friend to be entertained, than as a captive to be gazed upon. But what cloud soever hath darkened my present lot, yet have the Heavens and Nature given me that in birth and mind which none can vanquish or deprive me of. I well see that you make other men's miseries the subject and matter of your triumphs, and in this my calamity, as in a still water, you now contemplate your own glory. Yet know that I am, and was, a prince, furnished with strength of men and habiliments of war; and what marvel is it if all be lost, seeing experience teacheth that the events of war are variable, and the success of policies guided by uncertain fates? As it is with me, who thought that the deep waters, like a wall enclosing our land, and it so situated by the gods as might have been a sufficient privilege and defense against foreign invasions: but now I perceive that the desire of your sovereignty admits no limitation; and if you Romans must command all, then all must obey. For mine own part, while I was able I made resistance; and unwilling I was to submit my neck to a servile yoke; so far the law of Nature alloweth every man, that he may defend himself being assailed, and to withstand force by force. Had I at first yielded, thy glory and my ruin had not been so renowned. Fortune hath now done her worst; we have nothing left us but our lives, which if thou take from us, our miseries end, and if thou spare us, we are but the objects of thy clemency.'

In many-colored robe, with a golden zone about her, Queen Boadicea exhorted the Britons on the eve of battle:

'My friends and companions of equal fortunes! -There needeth no excuse of this my present authority or place in regard of my sex, seeing it is not unknown to you all that the

wonted manner of our nation hath been to war under the conduct of women. My blood and birth might challenge some preeminence, as sprung from the roots of most royal descents; but my breath, received from the same air, my body sustained by the same soil, and my glory clouded with imposed ignominies, I disdain all superiority, and, as a fellow in bondage, bear the yoke of oppression with as heavy weight and pressure, if not more!... You that have known the freedom of life, will with me confess that liberty, though in a poor estate, is better than bondage with fetters of gold. . . . Have the Heavens made us the ends of the world, and not assigned the end of our wrongs? Or hath Nature, among all our free works, created us Britons only for bondage? Why, what are the Romans? Are they more than men, or immortal? Their slain carcasses sacrificed by us, and their putrefied blood corrupting our air, doth tell us they are no gods. Our persons are more tall, our bodies more strong, and our joints better knit than theirs! But you will say they are our conquerors. Indeed, overcome we are, but by ourselves, by our own factions, still giving way to their intrusions. . . . See we not the army of Plautius crouched together like fowis in a storm? If we but consider the number of their forces and the motives of the war, we shall resolve to vanquish or die. It is better worth to fall in honour of liberty, than be exposed again to the outrages of the Romans. This is my resolution, who am but a woman; you who are men may, if you please, live and be slaves.'

Diodorus told how

Love of bright color is a Celtic passion. the Gauls wore bracelets and costly finger-rings, gold corselets, dyed tunics flowered with various hues, striped cloaks fastened with a brooch and divided into many parti-colored squares, a taste still represented by the Highland plaid. This joy in the beautiful will display itself, in poetry, in an outpouring of imagery and grace of expression, as in the Cymric' battle-ode of Aneurin:

Have ye seen the tusky boar,

Or the bull with sullen roar,
On surrounding foes advancing?
So Garadawg bore his lance.

As the flame's devouring force,
As the whirlwind in its course,
As the thunder's fiery stroke,
Glancing on the shivered oak;
Did the sword of Vedel's mow
The crimson harvest of the foe.'

This fancy, active and bold, is not content to conceive. It must draw and paint, vividly, in detail, as in this glimpse of a Gaelic banquet:

As the king's people were afterwards at the assembly they saw a couple approaching them,- a woman and a man; larger than the summit of a rock or a mountain was each member of their members; sharper than a shaving-knife the edge of their shins; their heels and hams in front of them. Should a sackful of apples be thrown on their heads, not one of them would fall to the ground, but would stick on the points of the long bristly hair which grew out of their heads; blacker than the coal or darker than the smoke was each of their members: whiter than snow their eyes. A lock of the lower beard was carried round the back of the head, and a lock of the upper beard descended so as to cover the knees; the woman had whiskers, but the man was without whiskers.'

1 Ancient Welsh. 2 Ancient Irish.

But the true artist, with an eye to see, has also a heart to feel. A bard and a prince, who has seen his sons fall in battle, wondering why he should still be left, sings of his youngest and last dead:

...

Let the wave break noisily; let it cover the shore when the joined lancers are in battle. O, Gwenn, woe to him who is too old, since he has lost you! Let the wave break noisily; let it cover the plain when the lancers join with a shock. Gwenn has been slain at the ford of Morlas. Here is the bier made for him by his fierce-conquered enemy after he had been surrounded on all sides by the army of the Lloegrians; here is the tomb of Gwenn, the son of the old Llywarch. Sweetly a bird sang on a pear tree above the head of Gwenn, before they covered him with turf; that broke the heart of the old Llywarch.' This vivacity, this tenderness, this sweet melancholy, will pass, to a certain degree, into English thought.

Danish. The Danes were preeminently a sea-faring and piratical people-vultures who swept the seas in quest of prey. Their sea-kings, who had never slept under the smoky rafters of a roof, who had never drained the ale-horn by an inhabited hearth,' are renowned in the stories of the North. With no territory but the waves, no dwelling but their two-sailed ships, they laughed at the storm, and sang: The blast of the tempest aids our oars; the bellowing of heaven, the howling of the thunder, hurts us not; the hurricane is our servant, and drives us whither we wish to go.' In his last hour, the sea-king looks gladly to his immortal feasts 'in the seats of Balder's father,' where we shall drink ale continually from the large hollowed skulls.'

Listen to their table-talk, and from it infer the rest. A youth takes his seat beside the Danish jarl, and is reproached with 'seldom having provided the wolves with hot meat, with never having seen for the whole autumn a raven croaking over the carnage.' But he pacifies her by singing: 'I have marched with my bloody sword, and the raven has followed me. Furiously we fought, the fire passed over the dwellings of men; to sleep in blood those who kept the gates.'

we have sent

Here is their code of honor: 'A brave man should attack two, stand firm against three, give ground a little to four, and only retreat from five.' No wonder they were irresistible. Add to this the deeper incitement of an immortality in Valhalla, where they should forever hew each other in bloodless conflict.

When Saxon independence was given up to a Danish king, their character was greatly changed from what it had been during their first invasions. They had embraced the Christian faith, were