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. In the history of an insular race, and in a site so peculiar as our own, a people whom the ocean severed from all nations, where are we to seek for our ABORIGINES? AWelsh triad and a Welsh is presumed to be a Britishhas 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 VOL. I.-1 • Ben Jonson. gods who seem to have been men, or men who resemble gods; we read in the form of prose what had once been a poem; imaginations so wildly constructed, and afterward as strangely allegorised, 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 "Troy-novant," was one of the results of the immortality of Homer, though it came reflected through his imitator Virgil, whose Latin in the mediæval 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 * 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 Phenicians," 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. jealousy of antiquity, eagerly adopted, and claimed a lineal descent from 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. Cesar 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 Cesar 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 Cesar 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 |