were buried in the convent at Ambresbury, the Botallick circles near Penzance in Cornthought fit to send for Merlin to counsel him wall, and were no doubt in former times ten as to the proper monument to be erected to times more numerous, it seems very unlikely the slain." He then goes on to tell the same that no classical author should have alluded story as Giraldus, with more detail, and to this mode of honoring their dead, or wormore miraculous circumstances. Henry of shipping their gods, on the part of the naHuntingdon mentions it as one of the won- tives of this country. The Romans could ders of Britain, but merely to ask "Quare not possibly have been ignorant of their exibi constructi sunt?" a question to which he istence, as Old Sarum, where four of their gives no answer. Camden, in 1556, men- great roads meet, is hardly six miles from tions it as the common report that "Ambro- Stonehenge, and another of their roads sius Aurelianus, or his brother Uther Pen- passes within a mile of Avebury, and cuts dragon, did rear them up by the aid of across its two avenues. Yet we have deMerlin, that great mathematician, in mem- tailed accounts of the worship of the Druids, ory of the Britains who, by the treachery of and of the modes of burial adopted by the the Saxons, were slain at a parley. Others natives, not only in one but in several ausay that the Britons erected this for a stately thors, while no mention is made of these sepulchre of the same Ambrosius in the stone circles, which certainly are, and were, very place where he was slain by the en- the most remarkable works of the native emy's sword." Britons. The Welsh Triads seem in more instances than one to allude to this building, and so far as their meaning can be made out confirm all that we have quoted, but their testimony is so indistinct that it is impossible to rely upon it. The general result to be derived from the assertions of all those who expressed an opinion on the subject before the Vitruvian theory of Inigo Jones, simply is, that Stonehenge was a cenotaph, or memorial kirk, erected by a British king, Aurelius Ambrosius, to commemorate the death of those who had fallen in battle in the great struggle with Hengist, or who were slain by his treachery. So consentaneous is the testimony, and so probable the story, that we might suppose some very strong reason existed for rejecting it, but the probabilities of the case, on the contrary, seem so strongly to confirm it, that less evidence would almost suffice to establish this as the true history of the monument. In the first place we have the negative evidence of the total silence of all the Greek and Roman geographers with regard to these circles. It is true, that, as no Pausanias ever visited these shores, it would not be wonderful if no mention were found of such a monument as Stonehenge; but as these circles exist everywhere, from the "Standing Stones of Stennis" in the Orkneys, to There can be very little doubt but that the word kirk, or, as we soften it into church, is identical with the French cirque, or Welch cyrch, a centre or circle. It was applied by the German and Celtic nations to their Christian places of worship, because in early times these were almost invariably circular, but also it may be assumed because the pre-Christian places of worship were of that form, and probably had that name. Kirkdale, in Cumberland, for instance, takes its name from an ancient circular temple of earth which is called the Kirk to this day, and many other examples might be cited. Roman coins have been frequently found by those who have been digging in and about Stonehenge. These were never in such sites as would render it certain that they had existed there before the monument itself; but in 1797, when Mr. Cunnington was exploring the holes formed by the fall of one of the great trilithons, he found fragments of fine black Roman pottery in the bottom of the pits, and consequently under the base of the great stones. He suggests that they may have fallen into the pits afterwards; and as this is possible, though very improbable, it will not do to rely too much upon the circumstance, but, like the coins and other fragments of Roman pottery discovered about the place, it must be considered as strong presumptive evidence that the building was erected after Roman times. This view is further confirmed by the ordinance of the building, the amount of art shown in hewing the stones into shape, and the exactness with which the upper stones are fitted to the lower ones by tenons and mortices. From all we know we have no reason to believe that before the Roman conquest the Britons were capable of moving such masses, or of fashioning them with such art, or of arranging them with such regard to architectural effect. If we admit the end of the fifth century to be the true epoch of the erection, this is easily understood; for the Britons had then the advantage of all that was taught them by the Romans. It also explains why Stonehenge alone of these circular buildings was erected with hewn stones, and with a view to a complicated architectural effect, for its reputed founder was by descent a Roman, and having been educated as such he naturally strove to instil some of the art of his ancestors into the works of his subjects, while Avebury, and the other buildings of purely British origin, still retained the impress of careful examination of all the circumstances the rude conceptions of uncivilized races. of the case, the conclusion seems inevitave If from Stonehenge we pass to the neigh-ble that Silbury Hill stands on the Romance boring circles at Avebury, we do not find road, and consequently must have been much that at first sight throws any light on erected subsequently to the time of the Rot our inquiries. No ancient author mentions mans leaving the country. As excavations the place by name, and no local traditions have proved that it was not a burying-place, hint at the time or the purposes for which it probably is a monument erected to comit was erected. Silbury Hill, however, is memorate some event which took place there. not quite so mute, and does furnish one or It may be that a battle was decided on this two indications of no small value. For this spot, and it may be that the dead of the vicpurpose it was necessary to assume that it torious army were buried beneath the valforms a contemporaneous part of the arrange- lum, or in the circles of the neighboring temment. This, however, can hardly be doubted, ple at Avebury. Whether this were so or as it forms so symmetrical a portion of the not, we may rest tolerably sure that Silbury whole, standing as it does exactly opposite Hill, for whatever purpose erected, was to the centre of the temple, and almost ex- heaped up after the departure of the Romans actly half way between the two great avenues from this country. which stretch out like arms as if to embrace it. It has, indeed, been more than once re-tolerably clear from the following passage, ® marked that if you take a pair of compasses and place one leg on Silbury Hill, and the other at the exact distance of a Roman mile, you describe the avenues, and pass through the centre of the temple itself. This has been used as an argument by Rickman and others for its post-Roman design; but the coincidence may be accidental, and the avenues, if meant for a semicircle, are so badly drawn that little reliance can be placed on such an indication. There is another indication, however, of much more value, which is that the Roman road from Bath to Marlborough either passes under the hill, or makes a sudden bend to get round it in a manner that no Roman road, in Britain at least, was ever known to do. Unfortunately the spread of cultivation has obliterated the road for nearly a mile on either side of the hill itself; for, like all the roads in the down country, it was neither paved nor metalled, so that no traces of its Course remained when once the plough had passed over it. Still no one standing on Oldborough Down, and, casting his eye along its straight unbending line, can avoid seeing that it runs straight at the centre of Silbury Hill. It is true it may have diverged just before hitting it, but nothing can be more unlikely. It would have been just as easy for the Roman engineer to have carried its arrow-like course a hundred yards to the right. This indeed would have been a preferable line, looked at from a Roman point of view,-straighter for Marlborough, to which it was tending, and fitting better to a fragment of the road found beyond the village of Kennet. But all this was disregarded if the hill existed at that time, and the road runs straight at its heart, as if on purpose to make a sharp turn to avoid it, a thing as abhorrent to a Roman road-maker as a vacuum is said to be to nature. From a That Avebury was a burying-place seems disinterred by the late Mr. Kemble from the If Stukeley had not been determined to find a Dracontium at Avebury, he probably would have arrived at this conclusion long ago, for he records that, "when Lord Stawell, who owned the manor of Abury, levelled the vallum on the side of the town next the church where the barn now stands, the workmen came to the original surface of the ground, which was easily discernible by a black stratum of mould upon the chalk. Here they found large quantities of buckhorns, bones, oyster-shells, and wood-coals. The old man who was employed in the work says there was a quantity of a cartload of the horns, that they were very rotten, and that there were many burnt bones among them." If this be so, the mystery of Avebury may easily be cleared up by a section being cut, or a tunnel bored through the val lum. If burned human bones are found, no one will doubt that the Saxon records are correct, though it hardly requires this testimony to prove that it was, like almost all the circular buildings throughout the world, dedicated to the memory of the dead, and not to the worship of any living God. After Stonehenge and Avebury the most important group of circles in the south of England is that at Stanton Drew, in Somersetshire. They possess a tradition, such as it is, that the place was erected by Keyna, the daughter of a Welsh prince who lived in the fifth century, and who, having crossed the Severn in search of a secluded spot where she might devote herself to contemplation, fixed on Stanton Drew. Then follows the story of the snakes, which need hardly be repeated. The one point which at present interests us is the date of the fifth century, which is given as the time of its erection. of these buildings; and the only conclusion we can come to is that in the remote corners of France the old superstition still lingered, and the old mode of burying was still practised, even as late as the twelfth century. One other indication of date is worth alluding to, which is, that the name given to these so-called Druidical remains are in almost all instances Saxon, which would hardly be the case if they had existed long before the Saxon period, and had had any well-known Celtic appellation applied to them. In many cases, such as Stonehenge, Stanton Drew, Stennis, etc., it is the good Saxon word for stone, which is the main feature in their nomenclature. Stonehenge, it is true, seems to have been called Choir Gaur, somewhat absurdly translated by the monkish chroniclers "the Giant's Dance." Chorea, however, certainly meant then as now Choir, as we now understand it, and Gaur may have been used as an adjective to mean simply "gigantic The well-known Kits-Cotty-house is al- choir,"-an_ appellation without any local ways assumed to be the grave of Katigren, meaning. Its real name was either "Stanwho was killed in the battle of Aylesford Henge" or hanging stones, or, which is even fighting against Hengist; and the neighbor- more probable, "Stan-Hengist," from being ing circles of Addington across the Medway are in like manner believed to be the burying-places or to have been erected in memory of those who fell in that struggle. Bruath Arthur, or Caermarthenshire, carries its dato in its name. Even Rolldrich, in Oxfordshire, is irreverently ascribed to Rollo, the Dane; and though this can hardly be maintained, it is at least curious that every shadow of tradition that exists regarding these monuments should point to the time which elapsed between the departure of the Romans and the conquest by the Saxons as the period when they all were erected. The traditions may be too vague to be of much value in themselves, but they become valuable when they confirm the evidences derived from other sources. erected to commemorate those who fell in the war against that invader. Be this as it may, the final proof of the age of these buildings will probably be ascertained from well-directed excavations. Hitherto, from being assumed to be temples, none of those who have been so industrious in digging into barrows have ever thought of exploring the floors of these circles. Many, no doubt, like Stonehenge, were mere monuments,-many enclose sacred spots, as probably was the case at Rolldrich; but Avebury was almost certainly sepulchral, and so, in all probability, were the greater part of the similar erections which still exist in most parts of these islands. Pending some more systematic investigation we may rest content with the approxiIt was supposed that the cognate monu-mate certainity that all great stone monuments of Brittany would throw some light on the subject; but they are perhaps even more uncommunicative than our own, or it may be that they have been less diligently explored. There is, however, one curious cromlech in that neighborhood which lets us into a secret that was hardly to be expected. It is called the Dolmen de St. Germain-sur-Vienne, and is situated near Confolens in Charente. Its peculiarity is that the stone table, which, as in all monuments of this class, is a rude unhewn mass of rock, is supported by four slender columns of what we would call early English architecture. There is no reason whatever to suppose that these are not the original supports of the roof, or that they replaced the rude blocks which, in all other known instances, support the upper stone ments of this country belong to the period that elapsed between the departure of the Romans and the conquest of the country by the Danes and Saxons-to that great Arthurian period, to which we owe all that we know of the poetry and of the mythology of the Celtic race, and which seem to have been their culminating point in the early form of their civilization. In France, where the Saxons never went, the Celts seem to have retained their old faith and their old feelings to a much later period. But even if these propositions are not fully admitted, their rejection does not affect the conclusion that Stonehege itself was erected by Aurelius Ambrosius, who reigned from about 464 to 502 A.D., and who raised it as a memorial to those who fell in the Saxon war. Although, therefore, there seems to be no the river or dispersed in the air. The rites great difficulty in fixing a date to these seem to have finished at the pyre, and the buildings with a tolerable degree of approx- subsequent disposal of the remains to have imate certainty, and although we may feel been thought of little importance. The consure that the people who erected them were sequence is, that in India the tumulus is Celts, we are not much further advanced in only a simulated tomb, and generally contains the object of our researches, for we know so merely a relic of the deceased, a bone, a little of the history of this people at that tooth, a lock of hair,-it may be only a garperiod, and are so deficient in correct in- ment, or some household article. It bore, in formation as to their manners and customs, fact, exactly the same relation to a real tomb and the particular forms of their worship or as the sarcophagus containing relics and religion, that we are more inclined to look to forming the stone altar in Catholic churches the monuments to supply us with the partic- bears to a stone coffin used for the inhumaulars we are seeking, than to attempt to ex- tion of a body. It can not be doubted but plain the uses of the buildings from the that both these kinds of relic-shrines are a stores of our extraneous learning. In fact refinement on the practical modes of burial there does not appear to be any source from used before they came to be adopted. which light can be thrown on the question, unless it should be that we can discover a cognate style of architecture among some more civilized people, whose writings or sculptures should enable us, by comparing the known with the unknown, to solve the riddle. .In India the tumulus is sometimes, though rarely, of earth, but generally of rubble masonry internally, and of hewn stone or brick on the external surface, and originally was apparently always surrounded by a circular enclosure of upright stones, though in later times this came to be attached to the building as an ornamental band, instead of an independent feature. In the most celebrated example in India, that at Sanchee, the circle consists of roughly-squared upright stone posts, joined at the top by an architrave of the same thickness as the posts, exactly as at Stonehenge; the only difference being the insertion of three stone rails between each of the uprights, which is a masonic refinement hardly to be expected among the Celts. What adds to their interest is, that almost every upright bears a short inscription to say that it is the "Danam" (Donum) or gift of some pious individual who is named. It is evident that neither Greece, nor Rome, nor Egypt, will supply this deficiency. All the styles of the ancient Roman world have long been familiar to the learned, and every conceivable analogy has been exhausted without any approach to success; but there is one style still existing in India, which has only recently been examined, and which promises a better result. The Buddhist architecture in India, as practised from the third century B.C. to the seventh A.D., is essentially. tumular, circular, and external; possessing the three great characteristics of all the so-called Drudical remains. The analogies of the two styles are not, it must be confessed, particularly apparent at first sight, The tope or tumulus itself was raised either for the obvious reason, that, though prac- by an individual or a body of men; and altised contemporaneously, the eastern style though the principal one contained no relic, is the utterance of a highly civilized people, those around it did contain relics of Buddpossessing an extensive literature, fond of hist saints and missionaries who lived in the sculpture and carrying ornament in archi- third century B.C., and whose names and tectural detail to a most lavish extent, acts are familiar to Indian antiquaries. The whereas the western style is that of a rude surrounding pillars were the offerings of the uncivilized race, who, if they knew of let-people afterwards, but, as far as can be ters, have left no trace of them, never re- judged from the characters used in the inpresented the human figure, and have not set up a single stone with a sculptured moulding upon it. To compare the two styles is, consequently, no easy task, and requires an intimate knowledge of their essentials which few possess, and which it is difficult to impart without entering into elaborate details. The difficulty is further increased by the fact, that inhumation of the bodies of dead persons was rarely practised in India by any section of the population. Cremation seems always to have been the general practice, and the ashes were commonly either thrown into scriptions, and other circumstances, they are all earlier than the Christian era. Besides being used as burial-places, or as relic-shrines, the tumuli of India were frequently erected to mark spots where great events, either sacred or secular, had occurred. Of those which have been dug into and explored, hardly one-half have yielded relics; the rest denote battle-fields, or the localities visited by Buddha or his successors, and where they performed miracles, or some other noteable act. Besides the tumuli with their enclosing circles, there are in India circles of upright greater part of Europe and of Asia with the tumuli which meet the traveller's eye on every plain, and have hitherto been considcred merely as the depositories of the dead bodies of extinct races of men. stones, which apparently enclose nothing. ished, their enclosures must have perished Of these, the most celebrated is that at with them. The similarity of the Menhirs Amravati, on the Kistna. It now surrounds and lâts need hardly be insisted upon, nor a tank, which certainly in modern times has the general peculiarity of the pyramid and been enlarged, but may have been a place relic worship so distinctly described by Clemwhere some one bathed, or where some mir-ens of Alexandria. This form of religion acle was wrought, which the stones were seems to be that which has covered the set up to commemorate and sanctify. Like every structure in India, the stones are covered with sculpture, but they are, otherwise, simply two concentric rows of upright stones, without any joining lintel, enclosing a space 193 feet in diameter. In its immediate These coincidences are too striking to be proximity are numberless little circles of accidental, and would no doubt have been rude unhewn stones, identical with those in perceived long ago, but for the want of any this country, but smaller. All which have recorded historical connection between the been opened have been found to enclose races and the religions of two nations situated funereal remains. There are also in South-so far apart from each other. The answer is ern India cromlechs so like those which exist on everybody's lips, the one class of monu both here and in France, that they could ments belongs to a Buddhist people, and they not be distinguished if placed side by side. are adapted to the rites of that religion; the There are again kistvaens, sometimes simi- other belongs to a people whose priests were lar to our own, but generally consisting of four Druids, and were used for their sanguinary upright slabs, with a flat one on the top, but rites. Unless it can be shown that the all more or less squared either by splitting Druids came, as has often been suspected, or hewing. Single obelisks, or as we should from Dravida Desa, or the Madras country, call them Menhirs, are among the common- or that the Buddhist religion once prevailed est forms of Buddhist architecture. They in these islands, the analogies, however ingenare either isolated pillars, then called Lâts, ious, fail entirely in conveying conviction to put up to commemorate events or to bear the mind. inscriptions, or stand in pairs before the gates or temples. Another form, but only now found in rockcut examples, is the oblong choir, shaped into an apse at the altar end, and having an aisle winding around in, so as to admit of a circulation of processions around the sacred spot. Some hundreds of these exist cut in the rock in various parts of India, but there is only one example in a structural form, and that is among the tumuli at Sanchee. Here then we have a group of monuments which, if not identical, must be admitted to bear a strong resemblance to those found in this country. We have tumuli which are burying-places, but more rarely in both countries than is generally supposed; tumuli which are relic-shrines, which many of those opened in this country certainly are; and tumuli which, like Silbury Hill, and many other blind barrows, are commemorative of the acts of living men, not depositories of their bones. We have circles which enclose sacred spots, circles which enclose tombs, circles which enclose tumuli, like that at New Grange in Ireland, and the one destroyed at Avebury, but unfortunately we have in India no example of a circle enclosing a choir like that at Stonehenge. That such there may have been is more than probable, but they could not exist in rock-cut examples, and all the structural choirs except one having per We have intimated that it is by no means clear that the Druids were the priests of the inhabitants of the south-eastern parts of this country; but that their votaries were to be found principally in the fastnesses of the Welsh mountains and the forests of Anglesea, and possibly also in the less cultivated forestdistricts throughout the island. The truth seems to be, as is clearly expressed by Edwin Norris, the best and safest of our ethnogra phers and philologists, that, "All the accounts left us by ancient writers indicate two different races simultaneously inhabiting Britain; the one a tribe who went naked and painted their bodies, who dwelt in tents, and indulged in promiscuous intercourse, were ignorant of agriculture, used stone hatchets and arrows, and probably were cannibals; the others, men who built houses, dressed in black garments or skins, coined money, constructed chariots, grew a great deal of corn, extracted metals from the ore, made bronze tools, and probably had some use of letters. It seems difficult to believe that these were one people, though confounded by classical writers, who received without criticism the accounts brought home by casual travellers. But this was in early times, and the less civilized race may have been destroyed or absorbed by the time the Romans became better acquainted with the island; and yet Saint Jerome in his youth, about the middle of the fourth century, saw the Attacotti, gens Britannica,' feeding on human flesh; and he says that these savages, though they had plenty of swine and cattle in |