The intention of the transfer was, however, lost sight of by the illiterate; and when they would kindle their fires on the tops of _mountains_ on those occasions, they used to blend with them the features of the pagan institution, by passing children and cattle between them for the purpose of purification. The propriety, therefore, of thus subserving to deep-rooted prejudices, has by some been impugned; but “surely,” after all, to use the words of a very able writer, “they were much wiser and better who, in those early times, grafted the evangelical upon the druidical culture, than they who, in subsequent times, instituted a system of extirpation in order to regenerate.” The other pagan solemnities were similarly metamorphosed, and partook of similar transmutations. The 1st of May alone retained the name and characteristics of its original appropriation, being still called “_La Beuil-tinne_,” that is, the day of Baal’s fire, as familiarly as the name _Christmas_ is given to the 25th of December. On it, too, fires are kindled on “high places,” as before; and children and cattle purified by passing between them;-- --------“Yet, oh! remember Oft I have heard thee say, the secret heart Is fair Devotion’s temple: there the saint Even on that living altar lights the flame Of purest sacrifice, which burns unseen, Not unaccepted.”[223] I next turn to Killmalloch, the ancient name of which, as given by Ptolemy, was Macollicon,--a metathesis for Mallochicon; and the final, _icon_, which is only a Greek termination, being taken away, leaves Malloch, that is, Moloch, the Apollo or great divinity of the ancient universe. To divert the natives from this misplaced enthusiasm, one of the early converts to Christianity assumed to himself the name of _Maloch_; and then prefixing to it the adjunct _Kill_, made it the _church_ of _Maloch_, instead of the _city_ of _Moloch_. Here is still to be seen, careering towards the skies, one of those “_singular_ temples of round form,” of the existence of which Vitruvius was so ignorant, but whose dogmatic enunciation of “monopteres” and “peripteres,” sounds as feebly in _my_ ears, as Montmorency’s assumption that the round towers were dungeons!--and the violence which this structure has latterly undergone--by the effort made to incorporate it with the Christian cathedral, built beside it in rivalship, after an interval of nearly three thousand years--is one of the most triumphant evidences which truth can produce in suppression of error. My soul burned with earnestness to visit this hallowed scene, upon which I had revolved so much, and which I associated in my fancy with the recorded glories of Apollo. I have, at last, seen it; and he must be indeed a slave to faction, or the dupe of prejudice, who will not subscribe to that evidence which the very stones proclaim.