roic poems in praise of the kings, heroes, and great men of their country, in which they employed all their art, and exerted all their genius, and these compositions were sung to the sweet and melodious sounds of the lyre and the harp.

The second class were termed by the Greeks Ovaris; by the Romans Vates; and by the Gauls and Britons Faids. These were unquestionably of the priestly order, and performed an important part in the public offices of religion. They were a species of pretended prophets, common to all the Celtic nations, who believed them to be divinely inspired in their poetical compositions, and favoured with revelations from heaven, concerning the nature of things, the will of the gods, and future events. The third class were by far the most numerous, and therefore the whole order was commonly denoted by the name of Druids. They were competent to discharge all the offices of religion, including those of the Bards, and the Vates, or Faids, when the latter were absent.

The number of British Druids appears to have been very considerable. Both the Gauls and Britons of these times were greatly addicted to superstition; and among a superstitious people there will never be any lack of priests. Besides this, an opinion was prevalent among them, as Strabo informs us, that the greater the number of Druids they had in the country, the more plentiful would be their harvests. and the greater abundance would they enjoy of the fruits of the earth—an opinion that must have been highly favourable to the priestly order. It seems a probable supposition, that the British Druids bore as great a proportion to the rest of the people, as the clergy in popish countries bear to the laity in the present age. Their revenues also were as great as the people could afford: they consisted of the offerings which were brought to their sacred places and presented to their gods; and these were said to be very frequent, and on some occasions very great. It was a common practice, with the nations of Gaul and Britain, to dedicate all the cattle and other spoils which were taken in war to that deity by whose assistance they imagined they had gained the victory; and of these devoted spoils the Druids were the administrators, if not the proprietors. Independently of all this, however, these artful priests are said to have invented a most effec

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tual method of enforcing the payment of certain annual dues, that were exacted by them from every house. All the families were obliged, under the dreadful penalties of excommunication, to extinguish their fires on the last evening of October, and to attend at the temple with their annual payment; and on the first day of November to receive some of the sacred fire from the altar to rekindle those in their own houses. By this contrivance the people were reduced to the necessity of paying their impost, or be deprived of the use of fire at the approach of winter, when the want of it would be most sensibly felt. Should any of their friends or neighbours take pity on the delinquents, and supply them with fire, they thereby subjected themselves to the same terrible sentence of excommunication, by which they were not only excluded from all the sacred solemnities, but from all the sweets of society, and all the benefits of law and justice. From these sources of wealth, it seems not unreasonable to conclude that the British Druids were the most opulent, as well as the most respected, body of men in the country, at the times in which they flourished.

Besides the Druids, there were also Druidesses, who assisted in the offices and shared in the honours and emoluments of the priesthood. When the Roman general Suetonius invaded the island of Anglesey, his soldiers were struck with terror at the strange appearance of a great number of these consecrated females, who ran up and down among the ranks of the British army like enraged furies, with hair dishevelled, and flaming torches in their hands, imprecating the wrath of heaven on the invaders of their country! Of these Druidesses, there were also distinct classes. Some vowed perpetual virginity and lived together in sisterhoods, much sequestered from the world. They were great pretenders to divination, prophecy, and miracleshighly admired by the people, who consulted them on all important occasions as infallible oracles, and gave them the honourable appellations of Senæ, or venerable women. Another class consisted of female devotees, who were married, but spent the far greater part of their time in the company of the Druids, and in the offices of their religion, conversing only occasionally with their husbands. A third class of Druidesses consisted of such as performed the most servile offices about the temples,

sacrifices, and persons of the Druids. Such were the ministers and teachers of religion among the ancient Britons: we shall now turn our attention to the principles and opinions which they inculcated.

II. The Druids, like all the other priests of antiquity, had two sets of religious opinions, or doctrinal systems, and these differed greatly from each other. One of those systems they communicated only to the initiated, or such as were admitted into their own order, and at their admission were solemnly sworn to keep that system of doctrines a profound secret from all the rest of mankind, like our modern Freemasons. And, to prevent their secret from transpiring, they instructed their disciples in the most private places, such as caves of the earth, or the deepest recesses of the thickest forests, in order that they might not be overheard by any who were not initiated. They never committed to writing any of their doctrines, for fear they should thereby become public; and so jealous were some of the ancient priests, on this head, that they made it an inviolable rule never to communicate any of their secret doctrines to females, lest they should divulge them. The other system of religious doctrines was made public, being adapted to the capacities and superstitious inclinations of the people, and calculated to promote the honour and opulence of the priesthood.

There has been much ingenious conjecture exercised concerning the secret doctrines of the Druids; but, whatever they were, they could be of no benefit to the bulk of mankind, from whom they were carefully concealed. These artful priests, for their own mercenary ends, seem to have adopted a maxim, which unhappily has survived them; namely, that "ignorance is the mother of devotion," and that the common people are incapable of comprehending rational principles, or of being influenced by rational motives. Strabo, an excellent writer of antiquity, who died about the period of the birth of Christ, has assigned the true reason of the fabulous theology of the ancients. He says, "It is not possible to bring women, and the common herd of mankind, to religion, piety, and virtue, by the pure and simple dictates of reason. It is necessary to call in the aids of superstition, which must be nourished by fables and prodigies of various kinds. With this view, therefore, were all the fables of

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ancient theology invented, to awaken superstitious terrors in the minds of the ignorant multitude."* As the Druids had the

same ends in view with other priests of antiquity, we can readily suppose that their public theology was of the same complexion as theirs-consisting of a thousand mythological fables concerning the genealogies, attributes, offices, and actions of their deities; the various superstitious methods of appeasing their anger, gaining their favour, and discovering their will. This farrago of fables was couched in verse, full of tropes and figures, and was delivered by the Druids to the surrounding multitude, from little eminences, of which there are many still remaining. With this fabulous divinity these poetical declaimers intermixed moral precepts for the regulation of the lives and manners of their hearers, and were always earnest in exhorting them to abstain from injuring one another, and to fight valiantly in defence of their country. The secret and public theology of the Druids, together with their system of morals and philosophy, had accumulated to such an enormous mass, about the period of the Christian era, that it required a tuition of twenty years to become master of it, in all its various branches, and get by heart that infinite multitude of verses in which it was contained.

The objects of worship among the ancient Britons were many and various. The Supreme Being was worshipped under the name of Hosus-a word expressive of his attribute of Omnipotence, as Hizzus is in the Hebrew. But, when Polytheism was introduced, Hosus was adored only as a particular divinity, who by his great power presided over military affairs, and was the same with the Mars of the Romans. This was a favourite deity with the Germans, the Gauls, and the Britons. Teutates was another name or attribute of the Supreme Being, which, in these times of ignorance and idolatry, was worshipped by the Gauls and Britons as a particular divinity. It is evidently compounded of two British words, Deu-Tatt, which signify God the Parent, or Creator; who was originally intended by that name. But, when these nations sunk into idolatry, they degraded Teutates into the sovereign of the infernal world-the same with Dis and Pluto of the Greeks and Romans, and worshipped him in such a manner as could be pleasing to none but an infernal *Strabo, lib. i. 2 F

VOL. I,

power. So tremendous and awful is the sound of thunder, that all nations seem to have agreed in regarding it as the voice of the Supreme Being, and as such it was considered by the Gauls and Britons. But, when they began to multiply their deities, Taranis, so called from Taran, thunder, became one of their particular divinities, and was worshipped also by very inhuman rites.

The heavenly bodies were universally considered as objects of worship in all idolatrous nations. The sun was worshipped by the ancient Britons with great devotion, and under various names, all of which in their language were expressive of the nature and properties of that visible fountain of light and heat. To this illustrious object of idolatrous worship those famous circles of stones, of which many remain unto the present day, are said to have been dedicated: there the Druids kept the sacred fire, the symbol of this divinity, and thence, as being situated on eminences, they obtained the fullest view of the heavenly bodies. The moon also came in for her share of idolatrous veneration. The Gauls and Britons paid the same kind of worship to the moon as they did to the sun; and it has been remarked that the circular temples dedicated to these two luminaries were of the same construction, and generally contiguous.

But a vast majority of the deities worshipped by our ancestors were deified men, such as military warriors of renown, victorious princes, wise legislators, the inventors of useful arts, &c. Such among the ancient Greeks and Romans, for instance, were Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and others, and these also were worshipped by the Gauls and Britons. A question however has arisen, and been debated, whether our forefathers borrowed the gods of this class from the renowned Greeks and Romans, or they from us; and, if there be any honour attached to it, we seem warranted to lay claim to it, for the balance of evidence is said greatly to predominate in our favour. To convince us that the Celtic gods are the originals, and those of the Greeks and Romans the copies, it is pleaded that all those deified princes belonged to the Celta by their birth, and were sovereigns of the Celtic tribes, who peopled Gaul and Britain-that all their names were significant in the Celtic language, and expressive of their several characters; and that the Gauls and Britons, and the other nations who were termed Barbarians, were much more