"This fortress, built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war,-- This earth of majesty--this little world-- This precious stone set in the silver sea-- England, bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious surge Of watery Neptune." SHAKSPERE. Almost every historian has set out by regretting how little is known of the early inhabitants of Great Britain--a fact which only the lovers of hoar antiquity deplore, since from all we can with certainty glean from the pages of contemporary history, we should find but little more to interest us than if we possessed written records of the remotest origin of the Red Indians; for both would alike but be the history of an unlettered and uncivilized race. The same dim obscurity, with scarcely an exception, hangs over the primeval inhabitants of every other country; and if we lift up the mysterious curtain which has so long fallen over and concealed the past, we only obtain glimpses of obscure hieroglyphics; and from the unmeaning fables of monsters and giants, to which the rudest nations trace their origin, we but glance backward and backward, to find that civilized Rome and classic Greece can produce no better authorities than old undated traditions, teeming with fabulous accounts of heathen gods and goddesses. What we can see of the remote past through the half-darkened twilight of time, is as of a great and unknown sea, on which some solitary ship is afloat, whose course we cannot trace through the shadows which everywhere deepen around her, nor tell what strange land lies beyond the dim horizon to which she seems bound. The dark night of mystery has for ever settled down upon the early history of our island, and the first dawning which throws the shadow of man upon the scene, reveals a rude hunter, clad in the skins of beasts of the chase, whose path is disputed by the maned and shaggy bison, whose rude hut in the forest fastnesses is pitched beside the lair of the hungry wolf, and whose first conquest is the extirpation of these formidable animals. And so, in as few words, might the early history of many another country be written. The shores of Time are thickly strown with the remains of extinct animals, which, when living, the eye of man never looked upon, as if from the deep sea of Eternity had heaved up one wave, which washed over and blotted out for ever all that was coëval with her silent and ancient reign, leaving a monument upon the confines of this old and obliterated world, for man in a far and future day to read, on which stands ever engraven the solemn sentence, "_Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further!_"--beyond this boundary all is Mine! Neither does this mystery end here, for around the monuments which were reared by the earliest inhabitants of Great Britain, there still reigns a deep darkness; we know not what hand piled together the rude remains of Stonehenge; we have but few records