The condition of the Gauls at the time of the Roman conquest has been described by their conqueror. Cæsar in his _Commentaries_ states that the Gauls were divided into three classes--priests, nobles and nobodies. The priests, who enjoyed complete immunity from military service, insisted on oral tradition in the teaching of their tenets. Their object in so doing, as Cæsar conjectured, was to prevent the memory from being weakened and their doctrines from being vulgarised; but the result has been that, apart from the few facts I shall mention and a vast superstructure of theory and legend which has been built upon them, they have faded from the ken of mankind. Chief among their tenets Cæsar mentions the belief in the immortality and the transmigration of the soul. The Druids were properly the highest of three orders of priests--Bards, Soothsayers and Druids, the latter being philosophers who, to the natural science studied by the soothsayers, added the study of ethics. There would seem to have been much of the Pythagorean and something also of the Brahman in these philosophers, whose teaching was once expounded by the Arch-Druid Divitiacus, in Rome, to the sympathetic ears of Marcus Tullius Cicero and his brother Quintus. That teaching, alas! has not been enshrined in Cicero’s sonorous page, but Lucan in his _Pharsalia_ corroborates Cæsar:-- ‘The Druids now, while arms are heard no more, Old mysteries and barbarous rites restore: A tribe who singular religion love, And haunt the lonely coverts of the grove. If dying mortals’ doom they sing aright No ghosts descend to dwell in dreadful night, No parting souls to grisly Pluto go, Nor seek the dreary silent shades below: But forth they fly immortal in their kind And other bodies in new worlds they find. Thus life forever runs its endless race, And like a line death but divides the space. A stop which can but for a moment last, A point between the future and the past. Thrice happy they beneath their northern skies Who that worst fear, the fear of death, despise!’ In another passage the same poet describes in dark colours the gloomy rites of the barbarous priests; their rude, misshapen images, and the scene of their ritual in the sacred wood, smeared with human blood. But of their ritual we really know nothing, apart from the fact of human sacrifices, which, in extreme cases, they justified by the dogma that ‘unless for the life of a man man’s life be rendered the wrath of the immortal gods cannot be appeased,’ and excepting their veneration for the mistletoe.[5]