188 Druidism in connection with Wiltshire. 
their habitation, allowed them full time to meditate upon all these 
points. 
“Tt is not,” adds the same writer, “‘to be doubted but the Druids, 
and in general the Gauls, believed the Immortality of the Soul; and 
it was this persuasion made them rush upon death, as a sure means 
of attaining a more happy life. Strabo further informs us that the 
Druids taught that all things were one day to be destroyed by fire 
and water.” 
Abbé Banier is decidedly of opinion that the Druids did not 
obtain their philosophy or religion from Pythagoras or his disciples, 
both of which were known long before his birth in Egypt and 
almost the whole East, and had also been taught in Gaul by the 
Druids long before the time of that philosopher. In speaking of 
their funeral rites, Pomponius Mela states, “that the Gauls in 
burying their dead, or the ashes of those they burnt, put into their 
tombs their moveables, their accounts, and the bit/s of money which 
they had lent, to serve them in the other world; that they even 
wrote J/etters also to their dead friends; customs, say they, which 
they never would have observed, had they not been persuaded that 
their souls passed into new bodies. But is it not well known, that 
the partizans of the doctrine of Metempsychosis taught that it 
was not always immediately after death that the soul was introduced 
into a new body ; that it first went to hell (or the invisible world) 
to expiate its faults; that from thence it often passed into the Ely- 
sian Fields, where after some stay, (as to the duration whereof they 
varied a great deal,) it drank of the water of Lethe which obliterated 
the memory of all that had passed, and then it returned into this 
world to inhabit a new body, more or less honourable, according to 
the merit of its actions? Nothing is more celebrated among the 
ancients than those expiations, whereof Virgil fixes the time to a 
thousand years. It was therefore to be of use to them in this in- 
terval, that the Gauls (i.e. Druids) put clothes, moveables,! and 
1 The barrow of Milbarrow at Monkton, Wilts, was recently opened in the 
presence of several highly respectable witnesses, and aCinerary urn was discovered 
within under some large stones, where also a very ancient key was found, now 
in the possession of Mr. Falkner of Devizes, who has drawn up an account of the 
