Details of an Address hy Br. Phene at Stonehenge. 253 



instituting games, and raising as an honorary edifice a grand imi- 

 tation of what they found existing, in which both the people of the 

 plain and hill country might from time to time swear fealty, and 

 renew their pledges of good faith. 



It would be less a revival of the old British religion which they 

 had destroyed, than a concession to prejudices and feelings, and 

 perhaps a permission to worship among the deities of Rome, the 

 local tutelary deities of the land ; and would accord with the Roman 

 custom of doing homage to the local deities by an appropriation of 

 their worship, or an election of those deities among their own. 



No other spot in Britain contains such evidences of Roman public 

 assemblage as this shown by the cursus, a magnificent work, 

 evidently formed to honour the use of the British chariot, and being 

 much larger than the Roman stadium, and in selecting a spot 

 they would have chosen that one of all others where the greatest 

 assemblage of the different tribes took place, which Avebury on the 

 one hand and this, as it seems to me, Phoenician temple on the other 

 indicate would be the locality. 



It is curious also that in this view of the case the confusion of 

 identity of the island Ictis or Vectis (now Wight), as the spot to 

 which the tin was transported by the new route, and the description 

 of the island of St. Michael's Mount under the above name, as 

 though the two were one, becomes clear. The first so used being 

 the old depot for Brittany, the last for the northern coast of Gaul. 



If weight is to be given to the asserted burials of the highest 

 persons among the Romans, as well as the Britons, at this place, we 

 can hardly suppose on that ground alone that the Romans would 

 have failed to augment the original temple. 



The removal of the bishopric from Sherborne to Old Sarum, and 

 the intense interest the clergy exhibited in the locality, shows a 

 somewhat similar disposition to conciliate old prejudices on the part 

 of the Norman monarchs, and the importance of Old Sarum in 

 British, Roman, Saxon, and Danish times, shows, that about here 

 lingered old prejudices and feelings, which, being in constant an- 

 tagonism to the crown, if not indeed to the eastern, or what we now 

 call the English, or Anglo feeling, it was politic to conciliate. 



X % 



