EXTRAIT.

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turned the civil order. When the Christian Religion had been established among the Celts, they tried to abolish this barbaric custom. In the Capitularies of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, it is forbidden to come to Church with one's arms. A law of Charlemagne prescribes, original: "ut nullus ad mallum vel ad placitum intrà patriam arma, id-eſt, ſcutum & lanceam portet" that no one shall carry arms, that is, shield and lance, to the assembly or the court within the country. This custom could not be abolished. It is believed that it maintains in a nation the warlike spirit and bravery. But were not the Greeks and Romans as brave as we?

The Celts were generally recognized by their long, blonde, or red hair. The Thracians, the Goths, the Saxons, and the Pelasgians shaved the front, others the back of the head. The Gauls and the Britons let all their hair grow. The Lords wore their hair longer than the People. Thus the name Capillatus Long-haired one signified a Noble, a Lord. The Franks gave the Princes and Lords of their nation the names of Criniti, Crinigeri, Cristati, that is to say, Long-haired. Their hair was the principal mark of their dignity, from which they were degraded by having their hair cut or by having their head shaved.

The author notes another custom among the Celtic peoples, from which the hausse-cols gorgets of our military officers seem to take their origin; it is that in combat, the Nobles and those who had command wore around their neck chains or collars of solid gold. They also had bracelets of the same metal. original: "Præda ex torquibus Gallorum ingens Romam perlata eſt" A huge booty of Gallic collars was brought to Rome, says Eutropius. The Persians had the same custom. When Livy speaks of some victory won by the Romans over the Gauls, he usually specifies the number of collars and bracelets won from the enemy. When the Romans began to employ the Barbarians in their armies, they made these collars and bracelets into military rewards.

Here is what concerns the studies of the Celts. It is a certain fact that compositions in verse are much older than compositions in prose; that is to say, that the poets preceded the historians and the orators. The Greek and Latin authors have noted the time when one began to write poetry in the two languages; but they could not fix the beginning of poetry. It goes back beyond the Olympiads and even the siege of Troy. The ancient inhabitants of Europe did not know letters at all: they received them rather late from the Phoenicians. Before that time, everything that has since been entrusted to paper was entrusted to memory. The laws, religion, the history of peoples and of great men were only preserved and transmitted to posterity by oral tradition. To relieve the memory, it was judged appropriate to express all of this in verse, because verse is retained more easily than prose. These verses, which the youth learned by heart, were the only annals of the peoples of Europe; and those who composed them bore the name of Bards among the Gauls. These poets were highly considered, according to Diodorus Siculus. The author notes here the mistake of Dom Jacques Martin in his book On the Religion of the Gauls, where he confuses the poets and the singers of the Celts, deceived by a passage from Athenaeus, whose true meaning is nevertheless very clear.

The author believes that the verses of the Bards were rhymed. "If one considers," he says, "that the most ancient poems of the French, the Germans, the peoples of the North, and even the Persians, are all written in rhymes, one will not doubt that this custom, which distinguishes

our poetry from that of the Greeks and the Latins, originates with the Celts. These rhymes were of great utility to help the memory, the cadence of the first verse always alerting one to that of the second." These verses were not only sung, but they danced while singing them; this is, according to the author, the origin of the feet, the measure, and the scansion of poetry. The Celts must have had a great number of these poems, since the youth, whose education was entrusted to the Druids, sometimes spent up to 20 years learning verses. referring to Caesar, Book VI, 14 It pleased the author of The Religion of the Gauls to say in his preface that these verses amounted to 20,000. He is asked here from where he drew this calculation.

Furthermore, this custom of the Celts was common to them with all ancient peoples. In the most remote times, all the studies of youth among the Greeks consisted of charging the memory with verse. It is, still today, the best education one can give to young people. Verses learned in early youth are never forgotten; they are an ornament of the mind that adorns a man all his life. A child, to whom one teaches from the age of eight years history, mathematics, or even physics (I know some people singular enough to apply eight-year-old children to these sciences), usually forgets everything one intended to make him understand. Moreover, one makes him lose time, because what one teaches him then in a year with much trouble, he could learn in a month, or in a week, at a more advanced age. I would just as soon have him learn at that age to ride a horse and to practice arms. The verses with which one fills the memory of a child form his taste early on, by providing him with pieces for comparison that he can always use; moreover, they prepare him to one day choose his expressions and to discern pure, noble, and elevated language from neglected, familiar, and low language.

The ancient inhabitants of Europe knew neither how to read nor write, and took pride in their ignorance; letters were carried, as is believed, from Phoenicia into Greece by Cadmus. Pherecydes of Syros gave the Greeks the first work in prose, nearly a thousand years after the Greeks had known letters, according to the calculation of the Oxford marbles cited by Mr. de Vignoles. It is true that the poems of Homer and Hesiod seem to have been written about two hundred and fifty years before the time of Pherecydes; but these poems are still posterior to Cadmus by 675 years. From this, our author concludes that letters were known in Greece much later than is claimed. Indeed, could they have been 675 years without making use of them, if they had been known there? The Latins received letters from the Greeks: it was from them that they held the art of writing, as they held from them a part of their language. Pliny proves by an ancient inscription that the characters of the Latins did not formerly differ from those of the Greeks. referring to Pliny, Book 7, 48 Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus say that it was Evander, King of the Arcadians, who, having settled in Italy, brought Greek letters there; but all that is said of Evander and his mother Carmenta could well be a fable.

The author of The Religion of the Gauls pretends that the Gauls, whom he makes out to have come from Phoenicia, had brought their letters from Asia to Europe, and that they nevertheless used (which is true) Greek characters. Here is the proof from Dom Jacques Martin. It is a Latin inscription in Greek characters, found in Rome on the tomb of the Martyr Gordian, a messenger of the Gauls.