Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/354

 themselves blue with woad, and wore their hair long, with moustachios."

On the other hand, there is good reason for believing that the Britons of the south and south-*eastern parts of England were by no means the barbarians some writers have asserted. It is certain that they were of the same race, and nearly connected with the Belgæ of the opposite continents, for Cæsar tells us that many names of cities in the two countries were the same; that their manners greatly resembled those of the Gauls; that Divitiacus, a king of one of the Belgian tribes, was also the ruler of a wide district in England, much as in later times our Edwards and Henries held large provinces of France; that Cingetorix, though ruler of the Treviri on the Moselle, was also a king in Kent; and that the buildings of South Britain and Gaul bore a great similarity one to the other. More than this, we know that the languages of the two countries, divided as they were from one another only by the narrowest part of the English Channel, must have been, as Tacitus states, very similar—a fact partially supported by Cæsar's mission to England of Comius, the chief of the Atrebates (Artois), that he might advocate the cause of the Romans in the British language.

We know further that the southern portions of England were then thickly peopled, and that the Britons were in some respects so far in advance of their neighbours that the Gauls used to send their sons to England for the purpose of learning the sacred rites of the Druids, an order of priests, be it