Having said thus much, and given the views of the Druids and their practices popularly received, it is only fair to those ancients and to the respectable old gentlemen who, in these days of Celtic revivals and Eisteddfodau, become Arch Druids and things of that sort, and attend gatherings in mystic garments like nightshirts over their highly respectable tweed trousers and broadcloth frock-coats—it is only just and fair to say that Julius Cæsar, in his _Commentaries_, gives the Druids a very high character. The priests, he says, taught the immortality of the soul, and held truth to be the highest virtue. They were sound as priests, as legislators politic, and as philosophers enlightened and humane. We have nothing in the way of public men so good as this nowadays, and therefore we cannot but deplore the action of Suetonius Paulinus in wiping them off the face of the earth; and at the same time may hope that the Arch Druids and lesser Druids of modern summer gatherings in Wales, who look so supremely silly with laurel wreaths round their respectable old bald heads, and white whiskers and collars beneath—and would certainly not dream of auguring over any fellow-creature’s entrails—may get equal wisdom and political soundness. [Illustration: THE MENAI BRIDGE AND THE ISLE OF BENGLAS.] There is on the Anglesey side, near Llanedwen, a field called “Maes Mawr Gad,” or the Field of the Great Army, marking the spot where Paulinus and his victorious host landed. The Roman general rested but a short while here, for the Druids had scarce been blotted out when the terrible news reached him of the revolt of the Iceni, and the massacre at Camulodunum. He hasted back, collecting an army of ten thousand on the way, and, leaving the young and old and defenceless of Verulamium to their fate, advanced into Essex and utterly defeated Boadicea. LIII Very few are the old travellers or modern writers who have a good word to say for Anglesey. It is “flat, dull, monotonous, barren, treeless, wind-swept,” and many more things expressed by adjectives in the uncomplimentary sort; but will the present historian be credited when, with his hand upon his heart, and if necessary—should his bare word not be held to deserve credit when opposed to that bulk of damnatory evidence—his lips upon the Book he declares that Anglesey is none of these things? A recent traveller finds in the word “Mona” what he calls a “soft-sounding name, well suited to the present aspect” of the island. What does he mean? “In all the bare, flat fields,” he continues, “you scarcely see a tree.” To this the returned traveller from Anglesey may reply, in the inelegant but expressive schoolboy phrase, “What rot!” But then that writer traversed Anglesey by train, as he confesses, and therefore has no _locus standi_ in topographical criticism. Probably the others explored the island as little as he.