AMENITIES OF LITERATURE.

THE DRUIDICAL INSTITUTION.

ENGLAND, which has given models to Europe of the most masterly productions in every class of learning and every province of genius, so late as within the last three centuries was herself destitute of a national literature. Even enlightened Europe itself, amid the revolving ages of time, is but of yesterday.

How "that was performed in our tongue, which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome," becomes a tale in the history of the human mind.

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In the history of an insular race, and in a site so pecu liar as our own, a people whom the ocean severed from all nations, where are we to seek for our ABORIGINES? Welsh triad - and a Welsh is presumed to be a British has commemorated an epoch when these mighty realms were a region of impenetrable forests and impassable morasses, and their sole tenants were wolves, bears, and beavers, and wild cattle. Who were the first human beings in this lone world? Every people have had a fabulous age. Priests and poets invented, and traditionists expatiated. We discover gods who seem to have been men, or men who resemble gods. We read

Ben Jonson.

in the form of prose what had once been a poem. Imaginations so wildly constructed, and afterwards as strangely allegorized, served as the milky food of the children of society, quieting their vague curiosity, and circumscribing the illimitable unknown. The earliest epoch of society is unapproachable to human inquiry. Greece, with all her ambiguous poetry, was called "the mendacious;" credulous Rome rested its faith on five centuries of legends; and our Albion dates from that unhistorical period, when, as our earliest historian, the Monk of Monmouth, aiming at probability, affirms, "there were but a few giants in the land,"* and these the more melancholy Gildas, to familiarize us with hell itself, accompanied by "a few devils." Every people, however, long acknowledged, with national pride, beings as fabulous, in those tutelary heroes who bore their own

names.

The landing of Brutus with his fugitive Trojans on "the White Island," and here founding a "Troynovant," was one of the results of the immortality of Homer, though it came reflected through his imitator, Virgil, whose Latin, in the mediaval ages, was read when Greek was unknown. The landing of Æneas on the shores of Italy, and the pride of the Romans in their Trojan ancestry, as their flattering epic sanctioned, every modern people, in their jealousy of antiquity, eagerly adopted, and claimed a lineal descent from

The existence of these giants was long historical, and their real origin was in the fourth verse of the fifth chapter of Genesis, which no commentator shall ever explain. AYLET SAMMES, in his "Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, or the Antiquities of Ancient Britain derived from the Phoenicians," has particularly noticed "two teeth of a certain giant, of such a huge bigness that two hundred such teeth as men now-a-days have might be cut out of them." Becanus and Camden had, however, observed that "the bones of sea-fish had been taken for giants' bones; but can it be rationally supposed that men ever entombed fishes?" triumphant in his arguments. exclaims Aylet Sammes. The revelations of geology had not yet been surmised, even by those who had discovered that giants were but sea-fish So progressive is all human knowledge.

some of this spurious progeny of Priam. The idle humor of the learned flattered the imaginations of their countrymen; and each in his own land raised up a fictitious personage, who was declared to have left his name to the people. The excess of their patriotism exposed their forgeries, while every pretended Trojan betrayed a Gothic name. France had its Francion; Ireland, its Iberus; the Danes, their Danus; and the Saxons, their Saxo. The descent of Brutus into Britain is even tenderly touched by so late a writer as our CAMDEN; for, while he abstains from affording us either denial or assent, he expends his costly erudition in furnishing every refutation which had been urged against the preposterous existence of these fabulous founders of every European people.

Such is the corruption of the earliest history, either to gratify the idle pride of a people, or to give completeness to inquiries extending beyond human knowledge. Even BUCHANAN, to gratify the ancestral vanity of his countrymen, has recorded the names of three hundred fabulous monarchs, and presents a nomenclature without an event; and, in his classical Latinity, we must silently drop a thousand unhistorical years. Even HENRY and WHITAKER, in the gravity of English history, sketched the manners and the characteristics of an unchronicled generation from the fragmentary romances of Ossian.

Cæsar imagined that the inhabitants of the interior of Britain, a fiercer people than the dwellers on the coasts, were an indigenous race; but the philosophy of Cæsar did not exceed that of Horace and Ovid, who conceived no other origin of man than Mater Terra. Man, indeed, was formed out of "the dust of the ground;" but the Divine Spirit alone could have dictated the history of primeval man in the solitude of Eden. To Cæsar was not revealed that man was an Oriental creature; that a single locality served as the cradle of the human race; and that the generations of man were

the offspring of a single pair, when once "the whole earth was of one language and of one speech." "And there is no antiquity but this that can tell any other beginning," exclaims our honest VERSTEGAN, exulting in his Teutonic blood, while furnishing an extraordinary evidence of the retreat of Tuisco and his Teutons from the conspiracy against the skies.*

The dispersion of Babel, and consequently the diversity of languages, is the mysterious link which connects sacred and profane history. There is but a single point whence human nature begins, the universe has been populated by migrations. Wherever the human being is found, he has been transplanted. However varied in structure and dissimilar in dialect, the first inhabitants of every land were not born there; unlike plants and animals, which seem coeval with the region in which they are found, never removing from the soil they occupy. Thus the miracle of Holy Writ solves the enigmas of philosophical theories, of more than one Adam, of distinct stocks of mankind, and of the mechanism of language, vague conjectures and contested opinions, which have left us without even a conception how the human being

*The miraculous event was perpetuated by the whole Teutonic people, "while it was fresh in their memories," as our honest Saxon asserts: hence, to this day, we in our Saxon English, and our Teutonic kinsmen and neighbors in their idiom, describe a confusion of idle talk by the term of Babel, — now written, from our harsh love of supernumerary consonants, Babble; and any such workmen of Babel are still indicated as Babblers. —“ A Restitutica of Decayed Intelligence," 138, 4to. Antwerp, 1605.

The erudite Menage offers a memorable evidence of the precarious condi tion of etymology when it connects things which have no other affinity than that which depends on sounds. See his "Dictionnaire Etymologique, ou Origines de la Langue Françoise," ad verbum BABIL. Not satisfied with the usual authorities deduced from Babel, this verbal sage appeals to us English to demonstrate the natural connection between Babbling and Chillishness; for thus, he has shrewdly opined, "the English in this manner have Babble and Baby!"

After all the convulsion of lips at Babel, and confusion among the etymo logists, the word is Hebrew, which, with a few more such, are found in many languages.

is white or tawny or sable; or how the first letters of the alphabet are Aleph and Bêt, or Alpha and Beta, or A and B!

In tracing the origin of nations, later speculators have therefore more discreetly, though not wanting in hardy conjectures or fanciful affinities, conducted people after people from the mysterious fount of human existence in the Asian region. Through countless centuries they have followed the myriads, who, propelling each other, took the right or the left, as chance led them. Vanished nations may have received names which they themselves might not have recognized. Kelt or Kimmerian, Scandinavian or Goth, Phoenician or Iberian, have been hurried to the isles of Britain. Their tale is older, though less “divine,” than the tale of Troy; and the difficulty remains to unravel the reality of the fabulous. The learned have rarely satisfied their consciences in arranging their dates in the confusion of unnoted time; nor in that other confusion of races, often mingling together under one common appellative, have they always agreed in assigning that ancient people who were the progenitors of the modern nation; and the aborigines have been more than once described as "an ancient people whose name is unknown." In the pride of erudition, and the irascibility of confutation, they have involved themselves in interminable discussions: yet one might be seduced to adopt any hypothesis; for, more or less, each bears some ambiguous evidence or some startling circumstance sufficient to rock the dreaming antiquary, and to kindle the bitter blood of pedantic patriots. The origin of the population of Europe and the first inhabitants of our British isles has produced some antiquarian romances, often ingenious and amusing, till the romances turn out to be mere polemics, and give us angry words amid the most quaint fancies. This theme, still continued, becomes a cavern of antiquity, where, many waving their torches, the light has sometimes fallen on an unperceived angle; but the scattered light has shown the depth and the darkness.