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pursued to the sea -shore. Finding no boat or means of 
escape, and on the point of being captured, he exercised his 
saintly power, and converted into granite pillars the soldiers 
who thought to seize him. 
However absurd this idea may seem to us, it is quite 
equalled by that of a French engineer officer (Mens, de la 
Sauvagere) of the last century, who imagined that the 
Romans erected these lines for the purpose of protecting 
their tents from the fury of the tempest." 
The hypothesis of our countryman who saw here a temple 
in the form of an enormous serpent, is not more satisfactory. 
Nor are the other opinions admissible which would make 
these stones memorials of the defeat of the Veneti by Caesar ; 
or a cemetery of the same people after a battle; or an 
enormous astronomical calendar ; or a military trophy in 
honour of Hercules; or a grove of sacred oaks, and these 
great stones placed in lines like rows of trees. 
My friend Canon Jackson suggests that a key, that may 
fit this “very rusty old lock” which so many have vainly 
essayed to open, may possibly be found in the account of the 
ancient chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth. According to 
Geoffrey, in the year of Our Lord 381 a large body of 
British soldiers passed over to Armorica under the command 
of Clemens Maximus, for the purpose of attacking and 
dethroning the Emperor Gratian. On the defeat of the 
emperor, Maximus resolved to establish his army as a colony 
in Brittany, instead of sending them back to England. 
Wishing to avoid all mixture with the Gauls, he sent over 
to England for wives for his soldiers and emigrants. 
Ursula, daughter of the prince of Cornwall, and eleven 
thousand ladies of the higher class, to say nothing of a much 
larger number of others of a lower class, embarked for 
Brittany. Contrary and stormy winds dispersed the fleet, 
most of the ships foundered, and nearly all the ladies 
perished (See Notes and Queries for July, 1869). 
