Still more would it have gratified him if he had known (as has before been cursorily observed) how entirely his own theory coincided with the Druidical philosophy, a philosophy which he would rather have traced to the Patriarchs, than to the Canaanites. Their doctrine, as explained by the Welsh translator of the Paradise Lost, in the sketch of Bardism which he has prefixed to the poems of Llywarc the Aged, was that “the whole animated creation originated in the lowest point of existence, and arrived by a regular train of gradations at the probationary state of humanity, the intermediate stages being all necessarily evil, but more or less so as they were removed from the beginning, which was evil in the extreme. In the state of humanity, good and evil were equally balanced, consequently it was a state of liberty, in which if the conduct of the free agent preponderated towards evil, death gave but an awful passage whereby he returned to animal life, in a condition below humanity equal to the degree of turpitude to which he had debased himself, when free to chuse between good and evil: and if his life were desperately wicked, it was possible for him to fall to his original vileness, in the lowest point of existence, there to recommence his painful progression through the ascending series of brute being. But if he had acted well in this his stage of probation, death was then to the soul thus tried and approved, what the word by which in the language of the Druids it is denoted, literally means, enlargement. The soul was removed from the sphere wherein evil hath any place, into a state necessarily good; not to continue there in one eternal condition of blessedness, eternity being what no inferior existence could endure, but to pass from one gradation to another, gaining at every ascent increase of knowledge, and retaining the consciousness of its whole preceding progress through all. For the good of the human race, such a soul might again be sent on earth, but the human being of which it then formed the life was incapable of falling.” In this fancy the Bardic system approached that of the Bramins, this Celtic avatar of a happy soul, corresponding to the twice-born man of the Hindus. And the Doctor would have extracted some confirmation for the ground of the theory from that verse of the Psalm which speaks of us as “curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.” Young, he used to say, expressed unconsciously this system of progressive life, when he spoke of man as a creature From different natures marvellously mix'd; Connection exquisite of distant worlds; Distinguish'd link in being's endless chain, Midway from nothing to the Deity. It was more distinctly enounced by Akenside.