Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/38

26 ON THE ETHNOLOGY AND CIVILIZATION OF THE ANCIENT BRITONS.

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BEFORE THE ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY

JULY 8, 1857.

The spirit of philosophical enquiry which has- characterized the researches of so many later writers on the ancient histories of Greece and Rome does not seem to have extended its influence over those who have had to refer to the ancient history of our own island, though on this subject we might certainly have expected to find as favourable a consideration given, and as discriminating a judgment evinced, as on any questions relating to the more renowned nations of antiquity.

In other countries which have been subjected to the sway of such ruthless conquerors as the Romans, the national writers of succeeding ages have almost uniformly exhibited a generous feeling of commiseration for the fate of the conquered. They have exalted their good qualities and palliated their reverses. But English writers, at least those of a later date, seem on the contrary actuated by a perverse determination to describe the ancient inhabitants of this island as if they had been unquestionably entirely irreclamiable savages, though the accounts given of them by the first conquerors themselves afford the most conclusive contradictions to such a supposition.

Poets may perhaps be allowed the license of exaggeration; but when we find the most popular of our modern historians writing of the first known inhabitants of this island as "little inferior to the Sandwich islanders" and as capable of receiving only "a scanty and superficial civilization from the Romans" it becomes well worthy of enquiry whether these representations are correct? And then further whether the Romans did not in the conquest of this island overthrow a