Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 3.djvu/53



step has been made in the history of Celtic Monuments by the researches of antiquaries among the traditions and the monuments of ancient Britain, as well as by those acute observers, who, like Mr. Lukis and some of his contemporaries, have had the good fortune to find cromlechs almost untouched by the hands of the vulgar, and who have shewn them, by their contents, to have been places of sepulture, not of barbarous sacrifices and ceremonies. The quantity of conjecture and of guess work, that was issued during the latter end of the last century upon this subject, was astonishing: no antiquary of that time could be said to have fairly won his title unless he had advanced some new hypothesis, or suggested some new idea as to the destination of the cromlechs. They were proved to be altars, temples, houses, any thing in fact that their examiners,—or rather those that had not examined them,—thought proper to conjecture: the fact of their being in wild parts of the country went for a good deal, and the circumstance of the top stone sloping generally to one side or the other, enabled the clear-sighted to see streams of blood running off them from the quivering limbs of unhappy victims. Even bones were found near them—sometimes under them—and (the victims having been slaughtered above,—at least in the imaginations of the enquirers) they were of course the remains of the wretched creatures who had been immolated to the false gods of our heathen ancestors. Capital theories! excellent discoveries!—until in some luckless hour, an observer more far-sighted than the rest bethought himself of digging into a tumulus, and then he disinterred—not a body,—but a cromlech full of bodies:—and another dug under a cromlech divested of its original earthen envelope, and he too found bodies;—in fact they turned out to be enormous coffins, or cistvaens, or vaults, (if it were not an anomaly so to style them,) houses in good truth,—houses not of the living, but the dead:—the true of Homer;—the "narrow home" of a later poet. In few instances has the value of accurate searching enquiry, and of good common sense, in