But it may be said that this is a day-dream of youth--the hereditary vanity of one of Iran’s sons, arrogating antiquity and renown for an inconsiderable little island, without a particle of proof to substantiate their assumption, or a shadow of authority to give colour to their claims. Why, sir, cast your eye over the fair face of the land itself, and does not the scene abound with the superfluity of its evidences? What are those high aspiring edifices which rise with towering elevation towards the canopy of the “_Most High_”?[42] What are those stupendous and awful structures of another form--the study at once and admiration of the antiquarian and the philosopher, to be found on the summits of our various hills[43] as well as in the bowels[44] of the earth itself?--what are they but the historical monuments of splendour departed--surviving the ravages of time and decay, not as London’s column, to “lift their heads and lie,” but to give the lie and discomfiture to those, who, from the interested suggestions of an illiberal policy, or the more pardonable delusions of a beclouded judgment, would deny the authenticity of our historic records, and question the truth of our _primeval_ civilisation? It is true, the magnificence which those memorials demonstrate is but the unenviable grandeur of druidical, as it is called, idolatry and unenlightened paganism,--when man, relinquishing that supremacy consigned to him at his creation, or rather divested thereof in punishment for the transgression of his degenerate disposition, lost sight of that Being to whom he owed his safety and his life, and bent himself in homage before perishable creatures that crawl their ephemeral pilgrimage through the same scene with himself. Granted; yet that cannot well be objected to _us_ as a disgrace, which, co-extensive in its adoption with the amplitude of the earth’s extension, equally characterised the illiterate and the sage; and if, amidst this lamentable prostration of the human understanding, anything like redemption or feature of superiority may be allowed, it must be, unquestionably, to the adherents of that system, which, excluding the objects of matter and clay, recognised, in its worship of the bright luminaries of the firmament, the purity and omnipotence of that Spirit who brought all into existence, and who guides and preserves them in their respective spheres;--and when I shall have _proved_ that the intent and application of those _Sabian[45] Towers_,--or, to speak more correctly, those _primitive Budhist Temples_,--which decorate our landscape and commemorate our past renown, appertained to this species of purified idolatry, which worshipped only the host of heaven, the moon and the solar body, which gives _vigour_ to all things, I shall, methinks, have removed one obstacle from the elucidation of our antiquities, and facilitated the road to further adventure in this interesting inquiry.