plains of Troy, and won an immortal line from Homer himself, had he but witnessed those deeds achieved by the British heroes in a later day. What fear of death had they before their eyes who believed that their souls passed at once into the body of some brave warrior, or that they but quitted the battle-field to be admitted into the abodes of the gods? They sprang from a race whose mothers and wives had many a time hemmed in the back of battle, and with their own hands struck down the first of their tribe who fled,--sparing neither father, husband, brother, nor son, if he once turned his back upon the enemy: a race whose huge war-drums had, centuries before, sounded in Greek and Roman combats. And from this hardy stock, which drooped awhile beneath the pruning arms of civilized Rome, was the Gothic grandeur of the Saxon stem grafted, and when its antique roots had been manured by the bones of thousands of misbelieving Danes, and its exuberant shoots lopped by the swords of the Norman chivalry, there sprang up that mighty tree, the shadows of whose branches stretch far away over the pathless ocean, reaching to the uttermost ends of the earth. CHAPTER III. THE DRUIDS. "----You Druids now maintain Your barbarous rites, and sacrifice again; You what heaven is, and gods alone can tell, Or else alone are ignorant: you dwell In vast and desert woods; you teach no spirit, Pluto's pale kingdom can by death inherit: They in another world inform again, The space betwixt two lives is all the death." LUCAN'S PHARSALIA, _T. May's Translation_, 1635.