Page:British costume (IA britishcostumeco00planuoft).djvu/30

 have been alternately suggested as the correct reading. Pliny says they used "glastum" (i. e. woad), but Ovid uses the singular expression "Viridesque Britannos." Amorum. Eleg. 16. And glas, in Celtic, signifies green as well as blue. It is applied to the sea, and to express, poetically, the sea as glasmhaigh, a green plain. Crann ghlas is a green tree. It enters into combination also with a variety of words in the Celtic expressive of grass, greens for food, salad, sea wrack, and also means pale, wan, poor, and even in colour greyish. Each glas is a grey horse. The dress of the fairies is always spoken of as glas, Anglice, green and shining : and no doubt it is the origin of our word glass, which has been applied to the composition so called in consequence of its presenting indifferently the hues and lustrous appearance alluded to. A man could not dye his body with glass, but the obvious derivation of that word from the Celtic renders the vitro of Caesar a still more curious expression. The word "cœruleum" may also be translated green, wan, or pale, like the Celtic glas, and the skin washed lightly over with blue or grey would present a greenish and ghastly appearance. And here it may be remarked, that from the fact of the Romans, on their first invasion of the island, beholding the inhabitants only when, according to a common Celtic custom (a custom partially followed by the Scotch Highlanders to the days of the battle of Killicrankie), they had flung otf their garments to rush into action, arose the vulgar error that the Britons lived continually "in puris naturalibus," whereas, we have the testimony of Caesar himself to the fact, that even the