practice of carrying them back, in disjointed syllables, to their supposed originals.

This has given offence to many critical readers, who maintain, that by such a mode of proceeding, any common word may be forced into whatever meaning the author pleases. How far such a scheme of etymology may be allowed, I shall not pretend to determine. At the same time, I must acknowledge that, in my apprehension, these gentlemen have made an injudicious, as well as an intemperate use of it. Proofs of this kind seldom amount to demonstration. They give the reader too many occasions of hesitating, or of differing in opinion from his author; and thus tend to lessen that confidence, which might otherwise have been preserved by the legitimate argument, and the candid exposition of recorded facts, which are to be found in the works before us.

Could I give an unqualified assent to the justice of these etymologies, yet, in my present subject, I should not be able to reduce them to general practice. For though most of the sacred terms, employed in the British documents, have meanings appropriate to the business in hand, and should therefore be translated, yet by far the greatest part of them are native terms of the British language, and have the same import with the corresponding terms in Greek mythology.

Were I then to admit, that the Greek terms are nothing more than etymological blunders, I must also infer that the Britons, who furnish us with the very same blunders in their own dialect, derived their mythology immediately from the Greeks: but I have some reason to believe that this was not the case.

In the mystic Bards and tales, I find certain terms, which evidently pertain to the Hebrew language, or to some dialect of near affinity; as Adonai, the Lord; Al Adur, the Glorious God; Arawn, the Arkite, and the like.

Taliesin, the chief Bard, declares, that his lore had been detailed in Hebraic ;* and in a song, the substance of which he professes to have derived from the sacred Ogdoad, or Arkites, there are several lines together in some foreign dialect, apparently of great affinity with the Hebrew, though obscured by British orthography. + Hence I think it probable, that the Britons once had certain mystic poems, composed in some dialect of Asia; that this is a fragment of those poems; and that those parts of their superstition, which were not properly Celtic, were derived from that quarter of the globe. And if so, our ancestors could not have obtained their sacred vocabulary, by adopt ing the mere grammatical blunders of the Greeks.

Thus I am compelled to decline any general assistance from the derivations of our learned mythologists. At the same time, I shall not scruple to remark occasional coincidences between British terms, and those which appear in their works. This, I trust, I may do with impunity. If some of their etymologies are forced or doubtful, others may be natural, and well founded.

Thus far I have deemed it prudent to meet the objections of criticism. Should this compromise prove unsatisfactory, I must farther declare, that the basis of my argument does

* See Appendix, No, 13.

+ Ibid. No. 12.

not rest upon the works of these authors. I cite them only for collateral proof, or elucidation of the evidence which I draw from another source; and, for the purpose of verifying the report of history, that the superstition of the Druids was radically the same with that of other nations. In my attempt to establish my main proposition, I mean to stand or fall upon my own ground.

And to this end I must, first of all, produce evidence, that the people who professed Druidism, retained some memorials of the deluge, and of the patriarch of the new world.

The subject has already been touched upon in the volume which I lately published. I there remarked a curious record in the British Triads, of an awful event, namely, The bursting forth of the Lake of Llion, and the overwhelming of the face of all lands; so that all mankind were drowned, excepting Dwyvan and Dayvach, who escaped in a naked vessel (or a vessel without sails), and by whom the island of Britain was repeopled.

To this I subjoined a tradition, taken from the same documents, of the Master-works, or great achievements of the Island of Britain. The first of these was, Building the ship of Nevydd Nav Neivion, which carried in it a male and a female of every animal species, when the Lake of Llion burst forth: and the second was, The drawing of the Avanc to land, out of the lake, by the oxen of Hu Gadarn, so that the lake burst no more."

These are evident traditions of the deluge; and their

* See Celt. Res. p. 157, from Archaiology of Wales, V. II. p. 59, and 71.

locality, as well as their other peculiarities, furnishes suffi cient proof, that they must have been ancient national traditions. Such memorials as these cannot be supposed to have originated in the perversion of the sacred records, during any age subsequent to the introduction of Christianity. The contrary appears, from their whimsical discrepancy with historical fact.

The Britons, then, had a tradition of a deluge, which had overwhelmed all lands; but this deluge, according to them, was occasioned by the sudden bursting of a lake. One vessel had escaped the catastrophe: in this a single man and woman were preserved; and as Britain and its inhabitants were, in their estimation, the most important objects in the world, so we are told, that this island, in an especial manner, was repeopled by the man and woman who had escaped. This has no appearance of having been drawn from the record of Moses: it is a mere mutilated tradition, such as was common to most heathen nations.

So again, the Britons had a tradition, that a vessel had been provided, somewhere or other, to preserve a single family, and the race of animals, from the destruction of a deluge; but they possessed only a mutilated part of the real history and, as tradition positively affirmed, that their own ancestors were concerned in the building of this vessel, they naturally ascribed the achievement to that country, in which their progenitors had been settled from remote antiquity. And lastly, they had a tradition, that some great operating cause protected the world from a repetition of the deluge. They had lost sight of the true history, which rests this security upon the promise of the supreme Being, and ascribed it to the feat of a yoke of oxen, which drew the avanc, or beaver, out of the lake.

And the want of more accurate information gave them an opportunity of placing this ideal achievement in the island of Britain.

In such tales as these, we have only the vestiges of hea thenism. Even the locality of British tradition is exactly similar to that of other heathen reports. To give one instance.

The flood of Deucalion was undoubtedly the flood of Noah. It is described by Greek and Latin writers, with circumstances which apply exclusively to this event. There never has been another deluge, which could have borne a vessel to the top of a loftÿ mountain, and which destroyed the whole human race, excepting those who were preserved in that vessel. Yet the Thessalians represented Deucalion, the person preserved, as one of their own princes, and affirmed, that the vessel which escaped the deluge, rested upon the top of Parnassus; a mountain of their own country.

It

may

be remarked, that upon their popular tradition of the deluge, the Britons grounded another national error. They represented the Cymry as having descended from one mother (the woman who disembarked from the sacred ship), within this island, or, in other words, that this was the cradle of the Cymry nation. And it appears from Cæsar, that the Britons of his age, in the interior of this island, had the very same ancient tradition or memorial. Britanniæ pars interior ab iis incolitur, quos natos in insulâ ipsâ, MEMORIA PRODITUM dicunt.*

H

De Bell, Gal, L. V. c. 12.