99 



religious opinions to writing, although in other transactions, public as 

 well as private, they use [ Greek ] letters. They seem to me to have 

 established this regulation on two accounts, their unwillingness that 

 their tenets should be too commonly understood, and lest those who 

 are initiated in them, should, by confiding too much in the letters, 

 impress the matter less upon their memories ; as it frequently happens 

 to many, that by the artificial aid of letters they remit the due dili- 

 gence of learning, and also the retention of what they have learned."* 

 The term, "in vulgus," necessarily suggests, that writing was of 

 general experience, while the word Greeds has by many critics been 

 supposed to be a mere interpolation ; (see Rees's Cyclopaedia, tit. 

 Ogham:) and that it must have been so, and that this common 

 alphabet of the country could not have been Greek, is clearly evi- 

 denced by a passage in the preceding book of the same work, where 

 Caesar, having occasion to transmit a despatch through Gaul, sends it 

 written in Greek characters, lest, if his letter were intercepted, the 

 enemy might become acquainted with his plans. -f It is also to be 

 observed, that Diodorus himself, a Greek author, does not say that the 

 letters, which he distinctly affirms,:J; were thrown by the Gauls (as for 

 their departed friends) on the funeral piles of the dead, were written 

 in Greek, and all the specimens and characters of northern writings, 



* " Neque fas esse existimant ex literis mandare, cum in reliquis fere rebus, publicis prU 

 vatisque, rationibus Graecis literis utantur. Id mibi duabus de causis instituisse videntur; quod 

 neque in vulgus disciplinam efferri velint, neque eos qui discunt literis confisos minus memo- 

 riae studere ; quod fere plerisque accidit, ut prsesidio literarum diligentiam in perdiscendo ac 

 memoriam remittant." — DeBell. Gall. lib. 6. c. 14. 



t " Hanc Graecis conscriptam literis mittit, ne intercepta epistolS nostra ab hostibus con- 

 silia cognoBcantur." — De Bell. Gall. lib. 6. 



tfivuXXut u( Tii> Tvf*f, uf Tftin T(TiA{vTi|)c«Twi> ictxYiuTOftttctt TtcvT»f.' — Bibl. Hist. lib. 5. p. 362. 



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