ON THE PEOPLE OF THE LONG-BARROW PERIOD. 361 



as understood by a good judge of it 1 — Professor Nillson— in having 

 no chiefs; they nevertheless take great pains with the burial of 

 their dead, marking out and adorning the graves with posts, and 

 decorating them with the bones of the dugong. It is true that the 

 long-barrow people can be proved to have been in a higher state 

 of civilisation than are these miserable Kudangs, by the purely 

 quantitative considerations — firstly, that their barrows are so large 

 as they are, and, secondly, that they contain so few skeletons. 



But when a small number of individuals can get large structures 

 erected for their lodgment, either when dead or alive, the society in 

 which they have lived, or are living, has attained some elevation, 

 however low, in the road leading upwards from sheer barbarism. 

 On the other hand, the poet of a civilised age, catching, as a poet 

 sometimes does 2 , the essential features of early times with a sin- 

 gular, or even a scientific, accuracy, writes of a prehistoric funeral 

 thus — 



Ergo instauramus Polydoro funus, et ingens 

 Aggeritur tumulo tellus 3 — 



whilst, at the same time, his friend Horace, and their common 

 patron Maecenas 4 , could utter their injunctions, and sympathise 

 with the wishes expressed in the lines — 



Absint inani funere neniae, 

 Luctusque turpes et querimoniae ; 

 Compesce clamorem, ac sepulcri 

 Mitte supervacuos honores 5 . 



Considerations of less generality, but not, perhaps, less convincing 

 as regards the early date of the long-barrows, are drawn from the 

 facts, that in none of them in Great Britain has any metal imple- 

 ment been found, at least in connexion with a primary interment ; 

 that tanged and barbed arrow-heads are similarly wanting in these 



1 Nillson's 'Early Inhabitants of Scandinavia,' ed. Lubbock, p. 167. 

 ' 2 See, in illustration of this, Wordsworth's lines, near the end of the eleventh book 

 of the ■ Prelude ; ' or Tennyson's lines describing the condition of Britain in the 

 interval between the evacuation of it by the Romans and the establishment of a new 

 order of things (' Idylls of the King. The Coming of Arthur,' line 6, seqq.). 



3 Vergil's ' Aeneid,' iii. 62. 



* The line, 'Nee tumulum euro, sepelit natura relictos,' ascribed to Maecenas by 

 Seneca, Ep. 92, justifies us in thinking that Horace, in the lines quoted in the text, 

 was not merely reproducing the epitaph of Ennius — 



' Nemo me lacrymis decoret nee funera fletu 

 Faxit. Cur ? volito vivu' per ora virum.' 



5 Hor. Od. II. xx. 21-24. 



