looked with contempt on all other nations. Partly from this national pride, but still more perhaps from a want of that philological talent peculiar to modern times, they gave little heed to the languages of their most civilized contemporaries, and looked on their barbarian arts and manners with contempt. Yet among the _barbarians_ of the Greeks we must include the Egyptians, the Phœnicians, and the Hebrews; even as we ourselves rank among the barbarians of the modern Chinese, whose annals at most will tell of us as a roving race who first appeared in history towards the end of the seventeenth century! The civilisation of the British Bronze Period does not appear to have been of so active a nature as to have produced any very rapid social changes. It did not break up the isolated tribes of Britain, and unite them into kingdoms or associated states. Its material element was never so abundant as to admit of any such great contemporaneous development. It was rather such a change as might slowly operate over many centuries; and that it did so is rendered most probable by the many relics of it which still remain. The Toltecans and Yucatecs of the New World achieved much in their Bronze Period unknown to medieval Europe; nor is it altogether impossible that even now, beyond the vast forests so recently explored by Mr. Stephens, a native race may be found practising arts akin to those of Montezuma's reign. Certain it is that the British Bronze Period was passing away in the transition-state of a later era when the Roman galleys first crossed the English Channel, and from the last century B.C. we must reckon backward up to that remote and altogether undetermined era, when the elder Stone Period passed by slow transition into that of Bronze. FOOTNOTES: [265] Nineveh and its Remains, vol. i. p. 224. [266] Martin's Western Isles. Lond. 1703, p. 208. The Glenlyon brooch and the brooch of Lorn--worn according to the tradition of the Macdougals, by Robert the Bruce, and still preserved in that family--beautiful examples of this favourite Celtic ornament, are engraved on Plates II. and III. The Lorn brooch corresponds in some degree to the description in the text; and a common brass one, probably of the seventeenth century, in the Collection of C. K. Sharpe, Esq., figured on a later page, furnishes a good example of native Celtic art. [267] Travels in the Western Hebrides from 1782 to 1790. London, 1793, p. 87. [268] Ibid. p. 83. [269] Kincardine Moss. General Append. Sinclair's Stat. Acc. vol. xxi. p. 154. [270] Archæol. Jour. vol. iii. p. 257. [271] MS. Letter Book, vol. i. p. 43, 1780-1781, Libr. Soc. Antiq. Scot. In a subsequent letter, (Ibid. p. 70,) Sir Alexander Dick describes several very large deer's horns, in addition to the fragments previously found. The results of a careful analysis of some of these bronze relics are given in the succeeding chapter. [272] They are figured in the Abbotsford Edition, vol. ii. p. 103.