By William Long, Esq. 55 



ditch forming an avenue which leads directly into it. Immediately 

 within the entrance a large stone lies prostrate. It is 21 feet long, 

 and 6 feet 10 inches wide. People of the Stukeleian turn of mind, 

 who see Druids and Archdruids everywhere, and would fain believe 

 that within Stonehenge the wicker basket ' with its burning victims 



'It is the sacrificial altar, fed 



With living men, — how deep the groans! the view 

 Of those that crowd the giant wicker thrills 

 The monumental hillocks.'' 



Wordsworth' t 'Prelude," BookiuK. 



And 



" Pile of Stonehenge ! so prond to hint yet keep 

 Thy secrets, thou that lov'st to stand and hear 

 'I'he Plain resounding to the whiilwind's sweep. 

 Inmate of lonesome Nature's endless year ; 

 Even if thou saw'st the giant wicker rear 

 For sacrifice its throngs of living men, 

 Before thy face did ever wretch appear. 

 Who in his heart had groaned with deadlier pain 

 Than he who now at nightfall treads thy bare domain ! " 



Wordsworth' i ' ' Guilt and Sorrow." 



Of the Druids, Dr. Thurnam writes as follows in one of the notes to his valu- 

 able paper on British Barrows in the Arehseologia, vol. xliii., p. 306; " It has 

 become a fashion to question our knowledge of the Druids ; but surely what 

 contemporary writers of the first rank, such as Caesar, Diodorus, and Tacitus, 

 concur in telling us cannot lightly be set aside. Professor Max Miiller {Chips 

 from a German Workshop, iii., 250), says: ' Caesar most likely never conversed 

 with a Druid,' forgetting that Divitiacus the Druid was for long his camp com- 

 panion, held by him in great esteem, and likewise was the guest of Cicero at 

 Kome. B. G., i., 16, 19, 20, et passim. Cicero, De Divin, i., 41." Whatever 

 importance ought to be attached to the mention made of the Druids by Caesar 

 and other Latin writers, it is clear to Mr. Nash, the author of '* Taliesin, or the 

 Bards and Druids of Britain," 1858, who has carefully studied the remains of the 

 earliest "Welsh Bards, that '* we have no allusion in the old "Welsh compositions 

 to any of the celebrated symbols of the Druidic priesthood, nor the slightest 

 testimony in support of the fables promulgated as to the character, institutions, 

 rites, and ceremonies of this famous hierarchy." (p. 335.) " "Whoever may 

 have been the authors of the documents from which Geoffrey of Monmouth 

 drew up his British History (and it is clear that they were derived from 

 British sources, even if through a Bretonic channel) they knew nothing, at 

 least have related nothing, of the Druids or Druidic worship in Britain. In 

 the passage where Cassibelaunus, elated by his victory over Julius Caesar, 

 assembles all the nobility of Britain with their wives at London, ' in order 

 to perform solemn sacrifices to their tutelary Gods,' at which solemnity they 

 sacrificed 40,000 cows, 100,000 sheep, and 30,000 wild beasts, besides fowls 

 without number, we hear nothing of the celebrated Druids. In the time of 

 Lucius, the first convert to Christianity, Geoffrey of Monmouth knows only 

 of Flamens and Arch-Flamens as the priests of idolaters ; and neither he nor 



