existed, it would have been left wholly unnoticed in the Roman accounts of Britain.

Even if the Roman accounts were as full and complete as they are fragmentary and defective, this argument would have but little cogency. What say the Scriptures about the Pyramids? Nothing. Yet Egypt was as well known to the Jews as Britain was to the Romans, and the Pyramids are certainly as striking as Stonehenge. It is submitted, then, that the few facts in favour of the post-Roman origin of the great monoliths, and their congeners, are wholly inadequate to the superstructure which rests on them.

Another class of superstitions, or, rather, of ebullitions of religious feeling, is one which we may bring home much nearer to the Channel Islands than even the Druidism of Gaul and Britain; one concerning which the few notices which have come down to us specially refer to some island of the Channel, if not limited to it. We can hardly give it a name; because even the name of the island in which it was exercised and the names of the exercisers are uncertain. Still, as we have it, it is essentially insular. Nor is this wonderful. In all parts of the world, islands have been the special localities for certain superstitious ceremonies. Whether it be from their isolation, their comparative solitude, the fact of their being the occupancy of the ruder and more primitive portion of the population, or from some similar, though uninvestigated, reason, they have always been the conservators of some notable form of superstition, which has shown itself in smaller dimensions and on a smaller scale on the Continent. In this way the first notice of the old heathenism of the Angles is connected with a holy grove, in a holy island; the island being either Heligoland or Rugen. In this way there are notices of ten holy islands for one hallowed portion of the Continent.

For one of the islands of the Channel, there is a notice as early as the first century of our era; being found in Strabo.

But, as he quotes it from Artemidorus, we may make it two hundred years older. It came to us from the Greeks, and not from the Romans, and, so doing, may have found its way to the informants of the original authority through either the Phenicians or the Greeks of Marseilles.

It consisted in a wild and mysterious meeting of devotees, who gave themselves up to a periodical indulgence in a set of orgies, which reminded the Greeks of those of the Bacchanals in Thrace, or of the frantic revellings they had heard of in India. Women alone joined in this; and it seems that, even during the intervals, they kept the island in which they occurred as the exclusive occupancy of their sex. Like the Amazons,

they only visited their husbands at certain periods. This gives us the main facts of the picture, which is, probably, exaggerated. All about the wreath of ivy with which they decked their heads, and shook madly during their intoxicating dances, seems to be borrowed from what the historians had heard of elsewhere. The same applies to the doctrine of Bacchus being the deity in whose honour they were held. Under the actual name of that intoxicating divinity no member of the Channel Island Pantheon could have been known in the Channel Islands. That the excitement, however, was Bacchic enough to deserve it, can be easily believed.

The notice itself is as follows:

They say there is a little island, not far out of the ocean, over against the mouth of the Ligeris, inhabited by Samnite women, inspired by Bacchus, whom they worship by ceremonies and sacrifices. No man ever comes thither; but the women come off in boats to enjoy their husbands' embraces, and then return to the isle again. It is also the custom to take off the roof of the temple every year, and put on a new one the same day before the sun sets, every woman bringing her load, and she who lets fall her load is presently torn in pieces by the rest, who, heaping up the mangled limbs with shouts at the temple, do not leave off till their furious transports subside; and it always happens that one of them does let fall her load, and is thus torn to pieces. These things savour somewhat of the fabu

lous; but he [Artemidorus] states with regard to Ceres and Proserpine, what is more worthy of credit. For he says that there is an island near Britain, wherein are celebrated sacred rites, similar to such as were celebrated in Samothrace to these goddesses."

The last notice of it in the reign of Queen Elizabeth,-the poetry being from Drayton's curious, lengthy, but not unpoetical Polyolbion: the notes to which are by the learned Camden. In these we get the germ of the present criticism.

"Thus scarcely said the muse, but hovering while she hung
Upon the Celtic wastes, the sea-nymphs loudly sung ;—
O! ever happy isles, your heads so high that rear,
By nature strongly fenc'd, which never need to fear;
On Neptune's wat'ry realms, when Æolus raised wars,
And every billow bounds, as though to quench the stars.
Fair Jersey, first of these, here scatter'd in the deep,
Peculiarly that boasts thy double-horned sheep;
Inferior not to thee, thou Guernsey! bravely crown'd!
With rough embattl'd rocks, whose venom-hating ground
The harden'd emeril hath, which thou abroad dost send;
Thou Ligou, her belov'd, and Sark, that doth attend
Her pleasure every hour, as Jethou, them at need,
With pheasants, fallow deer, and conies thou dost feed!
Ye seven small sister isles and Sorlings, which to see,
The half-sunk seaman joys; or whatsoe'er you be!
From fruitful Aurency, near to the ancient Celtic shore,

To Ushant and the Seams, whereas those nuns of yore

Gave answers from their caves, and took what shapes they please,

Ye happy islands set within the British seas.”

Let us see what is got by connecting these two notices, giving special heed to that, of the emeril (some mysterious mineral), and the Seams.

Three other writers, whom, by courtesy, we may call classical, mention these Bacchic orgies, and the fact of their being women who enacted them. They all copied one another; so that, except so far as they show the generality of the belief that some island in these parts witnessed something mystic and

mysterious, they are not very important. Still, as they relate to an obscure portion of an obscure subject, I give the two last in full. The first is by Diogenes Periegetes, of which the third

is all but a literal translation.

"Sed summam contra sacram cognomine, dicunt
Quam caput Europæ, sunt stanni pondere plenæ
Hesperides: populus tenuit quas fortis Iberi
Ast aliæ Oceani juxta Boreotidas actas

Sunt geminæ, Rhenique Britannides ostia cernunt;
Hic etenim lasso perrumpit Tethya cursu
Has tamen haut valeat spatio superare per orbem
Insula; perfulget nigro splendore gagates
Hic lapis, ardescens haustu perfusus aquarum.
Ast oleo perdens flammas, mirabile visu :
Attonitas rapit hic teneras, seu succina, frondes.
Nec spatio distant Nesidum littora longo,

In quilus uxores Amnitum Bacchica sacra

Concelebrant hederæ foliis tectæque corymbis.

Non sic Bistonides Absinthi ad flumina Thraces

Exertes celebrant clamoribus Ειραφιώτην.”

There are several in the current text; but they are not of sufficient importance to delay us.

The next is as follows:

"Eminus hic aliæ gelidi prope flabra Aquilonis
Exsuperant undas et vasta cacumina tollunt.

Hæ numero geminæ, pingues sola, cespitis amplæ,
Conditur occidui qua Rhenus gurgitis unda,
Dira Britannorum sustentant agmina terris.
Hic spumosus item ponti liquor explicat æstum,
Et brevis e pelago vertex subit. His chorus ingens
Fæminei cætus pulcri colit orgia Bacchi.
Producit noctem ludus sacer: aera pulsant
Vocibus, et crebris late sola cantubus urgent.
Non sic Absynthi prope flumina Thracis alumnæ
Bistonides, non qua celeri ruit agmine Ganges
Indorum populi stata curant festa Lyæo."

LOCALITY OF THE ISLAND ORGIES.

427

What is the island here alluded to; for all the notices make it an island? Between the accounts there is, at the first view, hopeless confusion, to which the notice of the Rhenus (Rhine) adds. The allusion, too, of the stone, may be passed over. Whether, word for word, gagates be achates (the agate), or jet, or both, is irrelevant, except so far as it seems to be the emeril intended by Drayton, and which Camden passes over without notice; probably, because, like worse men who have come after him, he had nothing to say about it.

What, however, was the name of the island? Camden suggests that, between the Seams of Drayton and the "Aμ and Samnitæ, there may be a connection; and Seams he makes an island off the coast of Britany. "Sena, in the British sea, opposite to the coasts of the Osismii, is remarkable for the oracle of a Gaulish deity, whose priestesses, nine in number, are devoted to perpetual virginity. The Gauls call them zene, or lene (for so we must read with Turnebus for Gallicena), and imagine them endued with singular talents for raising storms by their songs; changing themselves into what animals they please; healing disorders incurable to others; foreseeing and foretelling futurity." This is from Pomponius Mela, who evidently alludes to the same superstition, if not to the same island. The songs and the feminine character of the singers tell us this. But the text of Mela is doubtful. What is meant by zene, lenæ, or anything suggested in their place? The word was a Gallic gloss, and, as such, unintelligible to the Romans as it is to us.

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In the Itinerary, however, of Antoninus, we have a corrupt text which gives us the name Uxantisena Uxantis and Sena, two islands run into one. Pliny, meanwhile, gives us Sounos, according to one reading, Siambis according to another. That these are garbled forms of Samnis or Amnis (or vice versa, that Samnis and Amnis are garbled forms of something like Sounos or Siambis), is no conjecture of the present author's, but of