opinions. As our space will not admit of an analysis, we must refer to that amply given by M. Bartholmess, (vol. ii. pp. 128-154.) The " Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante" is the most celebrated of all his writings. It was translated by Toland, in 1713, who printed only a very few copies, as if wishing it to fall into the hands of only a few choice readers. The very title has been a sad puzzle to the world, and has led to the strangest suppositions. The "Triumphant Beast," which Bruno undertakes to expel, is none other than this; ancient astronomy disfigured the heavens with animals as constellations, and under guise of expelling these, he attacks the great beast (superstition) whose predominance causes men to believe that the stars influence human affairs. In his "Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo," he sarcastically calls the ass "la bestia trionfante viva," and indites a sonnet in praise of that respectable quadruped: "Oh sant' asìnità, sant' ignoranza, Santa stoltizia, e pia divozione, Qual sola puoi far l'anima sì boune Ch' uman ingegno e studio non l'avanza!" &c. The "Spaccio" is an attack upon the superstitions of the day; a war against ignorance, and "that orthodoxy without morality, and without belief, which is the ruin of all justice and virtue." Morality Bruno fancifully calls "the astronomy of the heart;" but did not Bacon call it "the Georgics of the mind?" The "Spaccio" is a strange medley of learning, imagination, and buffoonery; and on the whole, perhaps the most tiresome of all his writings. M. Bartholmess, whose admiration for Bruno greatly exceeds our own, says of it: "The mythology and symbolism of the ancients is there employed with as much tact as erudition. The fiction that the modern world is with the same vigor. Every page reveals a rare talent for psychological observation, a profound knowledge of the heart, and of contemporary society. The passions are subtly analyzed and well painted. That which still more captivates this long fiction, which may be regarded as a sort the thoughtful reader is the sustained style of of philosophic sermon. Truth and wisdom, justice and candor, take the place in the future now occupied by error, folly, and falsehood of every species. In this last respect the Spaccio' has sometimes the style of the Apocalypse." Without impugning the justice of this criticism, we must add, that the " "Spaccio" taxes even a bookworm's patience, and ought to be read with a liberal license in skipping. furori" is that which would most interest a Perhaps of all his writings, "Gli eroici modern reader, not curious about the philosophical speculations of the Neapolitan. Its prodigality of sonnets, and its mystic exaltation, carry us at once into the heart of that epoch of Italian culture when poetry and Plato were the great studies of earnest men. In it Bruno, avowing himself a disciple of Petrarch, proclaims a Donna more exalted than Laura, more adorable than all earthly beauty; that Donna is the imperishable image of Divine Perfection. It is unworthy of a man, he says, to languish for a woman; to sacrifice to her all those energies and faculties of a great soul, which might be devoted to the pursuit of the Divine. Wisdom, which is truth and beauty in one, is the idol adored by the genuine hero. Love woman if you will, but remember that you are also a lover of the Infinite. Truth is the food of every heroic soul; hunting for Truth the only occupation worthy of a hero.* reader of Plato will trace a favorite image; and was it not Berkeley who defined Truth as the cry of all, but the game few run down? The thinker, with the hope that it may stimulate some curious reader to penetrate deeper into the subject. There are few epochs better worth studying than the sixteenth century; and amidst the many striking figures of that period, there are few in whom the conflicting tendencies of the age are better represented than in Giordano Bruno. still governed by Jupiter and the court of Olym-ize the life and works of this remarkable We close here our attempt to characterpus, the mixture of reminiscences of chivalry, and the marvels of the middle ages, with the tales and traditions of antiquity-all those notions which have given birth to the philosophy of mythology, of religions, and of history-the Vicos and the Creuzers-this strange medley makes the 'Spaccio' so interesting. The philosopher there speaks the noble language of a moralist. As each virtue in its turn appears to replace the vices which disfigure the heavens, it learns from Jupiter all it has to do, all it has to avoid; all its attributes are enumerated and explained, and mostly personified in the allegorical vein; all the dangers and excesses it is to avoid are characterized | II. p. 406-7. * Vide, in particular, the fine passage, Opp. Ital. From Sharpe's Magazine. BRITISH DRUIDISM. BY MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER. DRUIDISM is a topic of surpassing interest to Britons; and the many who may question this principium, or may suppose it only applicable to vulgar clubs or Welsh concerts, will thank us for illumining their dimness as to the main day-spring of such promised interest. It is then, not too much to aver, (and the grounds for this conclusion shall immediately appear)-that the purest patriarchial religion had many things in common with early Druidism. Oaks standing in consecrated places, pillars and circles and altars of unhewn stone, are frequently mentioned in that book, containing the earliest records of mankind, which is emphatically called the book, Græce the Bible. It is far from our wish to shock early feelings after the fashion of Dr. Milman, who speaks of father Abraham as "the old Emir;" for this cause, we should be sorry to be misunderstood as if it were attempted to attach the name of Druid either to that venerable saint, or to Jacob, or to Joshua, or to Samuel: it would be an inference equally false as to call the first disciples, papists: corruption, error, idolatries, ignorance, contribute quite enough to prove the classes different; while many remainder things in common imply an original unity. The sacred names mentioned above were all prophetic seers, D, derussim they each and all reared their rocky pillars of witness, their holy stones, keremloach, cromlech vicarious sacrifice, the oneness of the Deity, the immortality of the soul, are doctrines common alike to the Patriarchs and the Druids: they worshipped not in temples made with hands," but would meditate with Isaac in the field at eventide, and make their offerings upon the high places. Gilgal, 1, "the circle-circle," the concentric rings of large stones taken out of the rocky bed of Jordan, is an example fulfilling all the requisites of such still existing druidical circles as we have לראח קרם. | seen in Cornwall, Wales, Invernesshire, the Channel Islands, Wilts, Kilkenny, and other primeval localities; just such a double circle as the Gilgal, we remember a little out of the roadside between Aberfeldie and Kenmore. When Jacob hides the teraphim, the idols of his wife, he selects as a sacred place, "under the oak by Shechem." Deborah, Rebecca's foster-mother, was buried with pious carefulness "beneath the stones of Bethel under an oak, and the name of it was called The oak of weeping." So also Saul and his sons were interred "under the oak in Jabesh:" Gideon's angel came and sat under an oak which was in Ophrah;" the erring "man of God" rests under an oak; as if these were in the nature of consecrated trees-religious stations. In Joshua xxiv, 26, we read that the great successor of Moses "took a great stone, and set it up there under an oak, which was by the sanctuary of the Lord;" and this selection of oaks and setting up of monolithic pillars might be illustrated by numerous other examples. In later times, when idolatry had succeeded to the purer worship implied in the primitive natural religion, we find Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Hosea expostulating with their fallen race for "worshipping idols under every thick oak," and for inflaming themselves with the rites of heathenish impiety among the oaks." It is manifest, that the oak was a sacred or a superstitious tree; one selected for the shading of religious places: and this is so principal a feature in Druidism, that some etymologists attribute their adoption of the name to their reverence for the opús, drus, or rather drws, the oak. Once more; we read of cairns and carnedds raised in patriarchal times: the word "cairn" is a Hebrew one, p, keren, "horn" or "hill." We read in Isaiah vi, of “the very fruitful hill," p. In Genesis xxxi, 45, &c., "Jacob took a stone and set it up for a pillar; and Jacob said unto his brethren, Gather stones; and they took stones, and made an heap; and they did eat there upon the heap. And Laban called it, The heap of witness." So likewise over Achan, after "all Israel had stoned him with stones, they raised a great heap of stones over him unto this day.' It is possible, by the way, that the execution by stoning might have had some reference to the sepulchral and other tumuli usually reared to commemorate great men or remarkable events. Again; over the King of Ai "they raised a great heap of stones that remaineth unto this day." That remaineth! we have seen many such perpetual memorials which have outlived the name and fame of their subjacent heroes; as-who knoweth anything of the once great potentate that lies beneath his pyramidal heap of white stones on the Slieve Bloom mountain? That remaineth! What indestructibility pervades a pile like this, for ages solemn and honored in its preservation, and thereafter to the end of time uninjured by decay, and changeless as the everlasting hills! We at least desire not to hint a doubt, but that the " very great heap of stones laid over Absalom," and "the pillar in the king's dale, which Absalom erected for himself to keep his name in remembrance, because he had no son," are now existing as at first, and remain a stony conical hill beside a granite peak, in some secret valley of Judea; there, whether or not now bearing traditional witness to the earthly perpetuity of Absalom's high name, they stand ready at least, and able, to remind some casual traveller from Redruth, or Wiltshire, of the native ancient works he counts Druidical. Yet more; Moses is commanded to raise "an altar of earth and unhewn stones;" we may conceive it not unlike such a cromlech as may still be found in Guernsey, or at Kilmogue. Josephus (Ant. lib. i. c. 2.) mentions "a pillar of stone, erected by the antediluvian posterity of Seth, extant in his time in the land of Seirath or Syrias:" just such a granite witness as may now be seen upon Iona, the Inis Drw, or Druid's Isle; and the like other upright blocks we have visited both at Inverary Castle, and near Penzance. Maundrell asserts that the "furnace" in which the three children, Ananias, Azarias and Misael, were miraculously delivered from the burning, was an open court of stones, (even such an one might have crowned the rocky hill above St. Helier's in Jersey, or have stood on the slope near Harlech,) and that this place of fiery trial was not according to the usual notion of a kiln; indeed, it is difficult to imagine how king Nebuchadnezzar could have seen them walking in the midst of that fierce ordeal unscathed, or how the fire could have flamed aside and consumed the executioners, had the furnace been a close one: we believe it to have been such an open fire-altar as we ourselves have in past years of highland pedestrianism turned aside to see near Taymouth Castle. It is easy to perceive how all these instances bear upon our point. Moreover, Pliny speaks of a rocking-stone at Harpasa in Asia; and Ptolemy of one by the sea-side, which vibrated to the touch of an 66 asphodel:" he gives this stone the remarkable and barbaric epithet "gygonian;" evidently the Celtic gwingog, rocking. Dodona had its sacred oaks with priests hidden in the Spuès-Celticè, drws. It is worthy of note that Iona means a dove in Celtic; and the reλsia or "doves" were priestesses of Dodona. Now Iona was at one time the head-quarters of Druidism, after the more idolatrous Saxon had persecuted it to the extremities of the land in Cornwall, and other desolate and rocky places; to Anglesea also, and to Icolnkil. We see then a plain sympathy between Dodona and Iona; of some importance to our point, as connecting our own now so glorious, but once on a time the poor despised ancient Britain, with the early Greeks, lords of the earth. On the coast of Morocco, overlooking the broad Atlantic, are some mighty druidical remains worthy of Mount Atlas on whose shoulder they are resting: similar monuments are said to occur even in China. Apollonius Rhodius mentions that a rocking-stone existed in his day on the shores of Tenos, supposed to have been erected there by the Argonauts; and King, in his Munimenta Antiqua, (vol. i, p. 226,) says, as a matter of fact, that "the cromlech was introduced in the earliest among the detestable superstitions of the Tyrians and Sidonians." Perhaps, when the Israelites made their children pass through Moloch's fire, it was a rite similar to the Druidic ordeal by fire; and perhaps the "stone upon which a man might be broken," or which falling on him should "grind him to powder," may, besides the common interpretations, be allusive to some Idumean rites and practices of a similar nature to those we call Druidical. To this mass of suggestions-for they are thrown out more in the nature of analogies than arguments -- we might add another discursive series of ex ages, amples deduced from almost every country, which can show those rude temples of unhewn stones, coming under the general phrase οὐ χειροποίητα, "not made with hands:" a fine emblematical fancy, as if the Deity were looked up to as the only legitimate source of adornment, supplying every external appliance to his own service, unpolluted by mortal aid or arm. We need now scarcely bring to bear the focus of light which such scriptural and historic instances as we have noted shed upon our many native cairns, cromlechs, obelisks, and circles. The reader, perhaps to his own surprise, will have some little while surveyed with a different eye the granite ribs of Druidism; and instead of judging them, as it were, the fossil remnants of some extinct destroying monster, he may see some reason to regard them more indulgently as the deep-wrought tracks in stone of the first strong faith of our race. Even granting that, in the corruption of long years, human sacrifices stained those granite altars, might even these not have had some traditionary reference to the great vicarious Substitute? Was the mistletoe, that strange, inexplicable growth, grafted as by a heavenly hand upon the unchanging oak of earthly immortality, in no way allusive to " the Branch," the cut twig that sweetened Marah? Is there not a moral grandeur to which the most decorated fanes have never reached, a sublimity of conception unparalleled, in the rude masses of Stonehenge, and, when perfect, in the vaster precincts of Abury? Is it a vain fancy to suppose, that the huge dynamical skill and power inferred of necessity by such pilings of Ossa on Olympus as cromlechs and rocking-stones imply, might have been immediately derived from those architectural giants in the olden world, the fabled Titans and Cyclops, who reared the walls of Corinth, set up strange monoliths in Edom, shaped the rocks of Elephanta, and piled the pyramids and Babel? Verily, a British cromlech is a structure of deep interest, when thus regarded as a link that connects us with the best and boldest of antiquity. Let farmers at Drewsteignton and engineers in Guernsey beware how they hazard the sacrilege of blowing them up, (a barbarous threat like this was once uttered in our ears)-let contractors for London granite tremble ere they touch such patriarchal holy-stones, and let lieutenants in the navy (we decline to give the wretch the notoriety he aimed at) pause one sober minute before they set a boat's crew to lever down a rocking-stone. Druidical remains will be found naturally to class themselves into seven distinctions; and we trust that some additional analogies and coincidences on a road so little trodden, will serve to excuse a step or two retraced. It is likely, then, as a general observation, that all the seven classes have a sepulchral, or at least a commemorative origin: they may have been erected in consequence of the exploits, or over the dead bodies, of saints, chiefs and heroes, smaller or greater in dimensions according to merit; and, like the tombs of marabouts in Algeria and of fakirs in Hindostan, the holy monument may have in time become a place and station for religious worship. This was the case at Bethel, or Luz, an instance of the first among the seven Druidical classes, the single upright shaft or pillar; Jacob's stone became a hallowed burial-place, and afterwards a college of priests lodged there: the like of the Eben-ezer of Samuel, his stone of help. The upright-shaft class reached its highest phase of excellence in the carved obelisks of Egypt: that from Luxor, now in Paris, is a familiar instance of the newer apotheosis; while many a perpendicular log of granite against which cattle rub themselves in the meagre fields of Cornwall, is an example of the "old mortality." The second class is the Cromlech, or stone altar, often of a vast size; at Kilmogue in Ireland is one, locally called Lachan Schall, the upper slab whereof is forty-five feet in circumference: at Plas-Newydd, in Anglesea, the stones are less in size, but the dimensions of the whole structure are gigantic; and not to be too tedious in examples, cromlechs occur generally wherever granite rocks and boulders are frequent; as in the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Dartmoor, &c.; near Exeter, for instance, there is a tidy little one, which is fifteen feet long, nine high, and ten broad. The cromlech appears to be the first rude notion of what was improved afterwards into an arch: an Argive doorway is a cromlech, built into a Titanic wall; and magnificent Egypt has carried out the idea to a gorgeous immensity in its peculiarly shaped temples, with their leaning sides and flat ceilings. The form of the Gothic II is illustrative of this analogy; and as the letter A is the same, or nearly so, in most languages (the early Hebrew, aleph, is not an exception,) it leads one to suspect that the stone altar (such as Abel might have sacrificed upon) was, upon principles of piety, chosen as the form of the first letter. The third Druidical class is the circular arrangement of stones and trees: the latter have nearly all of necessity perished from lapse of time, (and yet we can point out, on Merroe downs, in Surrey, two distinct concentric groves of venerable yews, a thousand years old, with remnants of like avenues, possibly Druidical)-but, for the less perishable rocky matter, where the road-surveyor has not hammered them up for highways, nor the Cornish farmer built them into his Cyclopic sheepfold, the circles of stone still frequently remain in situ, mocking time and its modernities. We find traces of these circular sites in Egypt; but as they were a people of parallels and angles rather than of curves, more stress has been laid upon the avenue than upon the circular arrangement; that of the Sphinxes at Karnac is but a glorified form of the long lane of rude stones at Abury. Fourthly in class come the Kistvaens, or stone tombs, sometimes built with thick slabs, like small cromlechs; several of which occur in Guernsey, and one we recollect was, years ago, used as a pig-sty! but such desecrations are happily impossible now, under the indefatigable care of Mr. Lukis. Occasionally, these tombs are only cavernous indentations, roofed over, or doored-in sideways with a great stone: perhaps the cave at Macpelah, and even a more familiar and holier instance, may be allowed to connect our British stone sepulchres with those of sacred history. Here too, carrying out our analogies, the formally picturesque mind of Egypt, and its child Etruria, gives us the idea at its zenith in the carved sarcophagus. Fifth in order comes the Cairn, often reared over a kistvaen; according to an archæological poem now before us, entitled "The Complaint of an old Briton;" which We need not repeat apposite scriptural instances; and we might accumulate an innumerous list of secular ones; but we forbear, naming only in addition the cairns of the mound-builders in the Far West, where (according to Cornelius Mathews, in his powerful tale "Behemoth") the subjacent skeleton is always strangely found with a copper cross upon its breast. In the cairn, above all other imitations, the magnificence of Egypt is pre-eminent; "her pyramids eterne of mountain build" are assuredly the most glorious cairns of human piling. And how interesting is it to us Britons-the despised barbaric hordes "at the ends of the the earth"-to note such evident traits of an early eastern origin for the humbler tumili that crown our Cornish heights, and are thickly studded over the downs of Dorsetshire! From the heaped ramparts of Maidun Castle it is easy to count (I have done it myself) threescore and upwards of such pious mounds; and they stretch far away, knobbing every hill in the neighborhood of Weymouth with evidences that our fathers were not the degraded, uncivilized, and cannibal race of savages which many moderns think them; from the imputation of which calumnies archæology alone has power to redeem their memories. We do not claim indeed for these so hoar antiquity as for many other cairns, but we recognize them, nevertheless, as legitimate children of the patriarchal times--only one remove from the Druidical remains of Britain. These also are traditionary offsets of the earliest natural religion; and that which, in our ignorant complacency, we have been accustomed to regard as utterly pagan, heathenish, and abominable, may have been but a very few shades darker than the dim lights accorded to the patriarchs. Sixthly may be numbered the Tolmen, or stones of passage: such did Israel erect in the middle of Jordan for a testimony; of such also are the ancient terminal logs of Rome and Greece; likewise, rock-built waymarks, and possibly such as here and there occur over moors, and in mountainous paths, as of Scotland, Wales, and elsewhere. Perhaps the great Nilometers of Egypt, though put in after times to the agricultural good use of marking the level of the river, had originally somewhat to do with stones of passage; they may have marked a ghaut, or ferry-place, and in Upper Egypt, among the falls of Philæ, they might have pointed out a ford. On the banks of the Teign, a few miles north of Exeter, we noticed, conjecturally, a tolmen; and we doubt not but that local instances might be found in plenty of large detached stones lying near many a ferry. Seventhly, and last in time as in order, we place the Logging or Logan stones. Here |