It is outwith the scope of this chapter to go into many of the interesting details which these various authors furnish, but a few of those which astonished the writers may be noted in passing, such as, the Celts’ intellectual cleverness; their numbers and great size; the magnificence of their funerals, and their belief in the immortality of the soul. Their cities were forests, and though otherwise cleanly in their eating, lion-like, they were wont to take up huge joints and gnaw at them. Other features of striking peculiarity were their figurative, exaggerated language; the functions of bards and druids; their chariots and excellent horsemanship; the fierceness and noise of their first onset in battle; their readiness to be disheartened by reverse; their astounding clothes,—dyed tunics, flowered with various colours, flaming and fantastic, striped cloaks buckled on their shoulders, and breeches. Their chiefs generally appeared with a retinue of followers. Of old, the Celts devoted themselves to plundering other people’s countries. The heads of their fallen enemies they cut off and hung to their horses’ manes; they were warlike, passionate, and always ready for fighting; otherwise simple, frank, hospitable to strangers, but vain, quarrelsome, fickle, and ever prone to waste their strength on personal feuds and factions. Such were some of the curious traits and customs of our Celtic progenitors as seen through Greek and Roman eyes. Scarcely had the Romans finally abandoned Britain than the Celts enter upon a new rôle. They annex the Roman script, the Roman language for literary work, and the Roman art of writing. And thus equipped, they proceed to produce a literature of their own in Latin and Gaelic. The wonder is that with their natural quickness and thirst for knowledge they did not achieve a record in this direction before. When we reflect on the other great nations of antiquity, we find that they generally had a literature of some kind, written down, if not in books, then on skins or slabs and in temples. The Egyptians had their “Book of the Dead,” the Indians their “Rig-veda,” the Persians their “Zend-avesta,” the Chinese and Hebrews their “Sacred Books,” the Greeks and Romans their classics, and we naturally ask, “What had the Celts in the zenith of their power?” say between 500 and 300 B.C. No writing at all that we know of. At this day only a few inscriptions remain in the Gaulish language of Cæsar’s time and later, but nothing earlier. These nomadic warrior populations may have had their bardic compositions and tales floating by oral tradition, but we have no evidence that they developed a literature, though some of them may have known Greek letters.