THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex tibris C. K. OGDEN Poems of AoexirilL, transcribed in. the XIII cerAury. 'from tke Library of < 6i Rev. Tkom.a.s Price. ) tmC(matv eaecWu corctw en Poems cf Lywarck-Heii , written m the XIV century [TTOTO. tke Hed Book, Jesus College, Oxfo-rd.) Poems of Taliesm, writter,. m tke XlVr ceiitary. (From, tlve same Red Book.) ESSAYS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, PHILOLOGICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, ETHNOLOGICAL, AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL, CONNECTED WITH THE PREHISTORICAL RECORDS THE CIVILIZED NATIONS OF ANCIENT EUROPE, ESPECIALLY OF THAT EACE WHICH FIRST OCCUPIED GREAT BRITAIN. BY JOHN WILLIAMS, A.M., OXON., / / / * ARCHDEACON OF CARDIGAN; Author of "ffomerus" " Gomer," and of the Lives of Julius Ccesar, and Alexander the Great, tyc. Sfc. LONDON: JOHN RUSSELL SMITH, 36, SO HO SQUARE. M.DCCC.LVIII. Ac? LONDON : P. PICKTON, PRINTER, Perry's Place, 29, Oxford Street. PREFACE. HAVING just published a volume of discourses "On the Unity of God's Will as revealed in Scripture; and on the Necessity laid upon all Christian Communities of acknow- ledging such Will as the only Rule of Life, with special Reference to God's Dealings with Christianized Britain," l I publish the several papers contained in the present volume, as embodying my views of the non-scriptural evidence of the same truths, as deducible from documents and monuments, both historical and prehistorical, which I have had an oppor- tunity of examining. In the dedication to the Lord Bishop of London of the above-mentioned volume, I have given the following statement of my views upon the subject : " I hold that the first man, as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual being, had nothing to learn from experience; that, as a labourer in the struggle against matter, he had almost everything to learn ; and that the triumphs of man over the material world, and which are daily in a greater or less degree obtained, will never give him, individually, more intel- lectual, moral, and spiritual knowledge, than was possessed by the first Adam ; that a school opposite to mine expects new teaching to be discovered on this same field from modern experience; and that the spirit of the age is indeed a light 1 London: Eivingtons, Waterloo Place ; 1857. VI PREFACE. from heaven, which may be assumed by us as a safe guide, superseding the patriarchs, the prophets, and the apostles, and be proclaimed the gospel of the nineteenth century. The spirit of the age is nevertheless no gospel, but embodies a great truth. Materially we are fulfilling our vocations, and subduing and replenishing the earth; but intellectually, morally, and spiritually speaking, we derive no benefits from the modern triumphs of art and science. Excitement, encou- ragement, and enlarged powers for diffusing the blessings of the Revelation in Christ, we undoubtedly do derive ; and may God grant us his grace to render our triumphs over matter subservient to the spread of truth, as embodied in the tradi- tions of the patriarchs, typified and declared by Moses and the prophets, and finally developed in the everlasting gospel." I also quoted from the works of Plutarch, a passage which proves that the same great truths had been traditionally pre- served among the historical heathens down to the time of Christ's first advent: "For," writes the philosopher, "we must not ascribe the work of creation to certain lifeless particles of matter, as Epicurus has done, nor say, with the Stoics, that one divine foreknowledge binds and fetters all things in one inviolable law of consequences. For it is impossible that there should be any evil, if the Being vested with the fettering fore- knowledge should be good, or that there should be any good, should this same principle be evil. Wherefore, that very ancient doctrine which we cannot refer to any author, but of which the belief is strong and ineffaceable, not only in words and expressions, but is developed everywhere, both among Greeks and Barbarians, in their mysterious initiations and sacrifices ; that there is more than one principle acting in the government of the universe in fact, that there are two anta- gonistic principles, of which one guides man to the right PREFACE. Vll along the straight road, the other leads him astray into various byways and errors. He, in a following passage, tells us that there was an equally strong tradition, that " at a destined period the evil principle would either be destroyed or made to disappear ; and that this earth, freed from all inequalities and rugged barren- ness, should become the happy residence of innocent beings, all forming one political state, and speaking one language." The great truths here recorded will receive further eluci- dation from several of the papers published in this volume. I refer especially to the papers, " On the Early Intercourse between the Eastern and the Western World," " On the Con- nection between Hellas and Britain," "A few Observations on certain Ancient Traditions," and " On the Antiquity of Celtic Coins," a subject which, in the hands of the great conti- nental numismatical writers, has thrown new light upon the secret tenets of the Druidical teachers of the Western world. I have also held and taught, that " it must have been in consequence of some extraordinary delusion, that so many Christian scholars sought for the origin of Hellenic doctrines in the several details of the Mosaic law, and the revelations subsequent to its establishment. According to my belief, all the doctrines and practices common to the Hellenic and Hebrew nations, are to be traced to a common source the patriarchal traditions ; while the Mosaic dispensation, with its peculiar laws and customs, was a close system divinely pro- vided to keep one people distinct from other nations, by building a wall of separation between them and all with whom they were likely to be brought in contact. And that the great difficulty under this theocratic system was to pre- vent the Israelites from adopting the corrupt traditions of their heathen neighbours, who are never described as in- V1U PREFACE. clined to derive any pure knowledge from the hateful and, as they deemed them, ' godless ' followers of Moses." This subject is amply illustrated in the paper " On Primi- tive Tradition" in the present volume, which recapitulates most of the doctrines propounded by me in my Humerus, Part I. I may add, that the importance of the poems of the Homeric age, as forming a body of documents whence not only amuse- ment and intellectual enjoyment of the highest character can be derived, but also as the source whence much valuable instruction, for the purposes both of private and public life, may be drawn, has been fully recognized in the popular and admirable paper published in the Oxford Essays, by W. E. Gladstone, Esq., M.P. A writer of the same school has, in a similar article, which appeared in a late number of the Quarterly Review, clearly proved that the tone of moral and political principles displayed by the writers of the Homeric age, is far more healthy and elevated than that of the Euri- pidean age, when aesthetic art had won its most splendid triumphs in dramatic poetry, in painting, sculpture, and architecture. My doctrine respecting the language in which Moses and the prophets embodied their revelations, went still further, and I held that it also was, comparatively speaking, a language of separation, and that the long-continued effort to trace the various dialects of the Western world to a Hebrew source, is not among the least striking of the extent to which the errors of good and wise men may be carried, should they com- mence their inquiries with an inveterate prejudice. And of this character was the glossolatry with which the language of Moses was long and extensively honoured. Should any one language be rationally deemed more worthy than another, it was assuredly that language which the Holy Ghost selected PREFACE. IX for the more perfect revelation in Christ, when the wall of separation was thrown down. All the Semitic alphabets were, to a certain extent, crypto- graphic, and all their written documents needed, consequently, a living instructor. When, therefore, the inspired writer and instructor was to cease, then also ceased the divine use of the Semitic language, as an instrument too imperfect to convey the xrvjpu* eg asi, " the new will " of God, as revealed in Christ to all the descendants of Adam, to be by them received as the only sure standard of faith, as the only rule of life. That the Greek language was admirably adapted for this purpose, is proved to us from the existence of the Homeric poems, which have brought down to our own days long messages conceived and penned by men who lived and died some three thousand years ago, and respecting whose history, times, manners, customs, habits, laws, and religion, we have no other trust- worthy information than what can be gathered from the con- tents of the documents in which these long messages have been embodied ; and yet the Homeric scholar reads in them at this day, the whole stream of thought, intended to be ex- pressed with a facility and distinctness which carries convic- tion to the mind of every intelligent critic, that the translation propounded by the scholar fully represents the thoughts and words of the world-renowned but, as individuals, unknown poets. The history of this language and of its offshoots, at later or earlier periods, is the special study of all sound philologists of the present day. Some labour in wider, others in more narrow, felds ; my own investigations have been almost ex- clusively confined to its Celtic, Teutonic, Roman, and Hel- lenic branches, as they are to be found in our Western world. The reader will find some important information in the essay X PREFACE. " On the Non-Hellenic Portion of the Latin Language." It was written some five-and-twenty years ago, and was pub- lished in the thirteenth volume of the Transactions of the Edinburgh Royal Society. Many writers have, without ac- knowledgment, poached largely upon this my peculiar pro- perty. But I leave them unnamed 'to the tribunals of their own consciences. It, however, brought down upon me the high dis- pleasure of Teutornanes of great influence and even of power, who, in claiming unbounded honours for the Germanic branch, are sure to be backed by all the prejudices of our dominant people, who choose to regard themselves as being all de- scendants from the Anglo-Saxons, who, in the fifth and sixth centuries after Christ, emigrated into this island. The papers contain certain views which I have since discarded, but have thought right to reprint them as first published. My essays "On the Ancient Phoenicians and their Language" are merely tentative, and were undertaken in mere despair, as I was utterly unable to see any traces of Aramaean influences in the vocabularies and grammars of the Homeric, Hellenic, and Attic languages, which, if the Sidonians of Homer and of history had been a Semitic people, I concluded must have been the case. In the same manner, the people who brought to this island the Cumraeg, seemed to have had no Semitic elements in their constitution, but were closely allied with all the inhabitants of the European continent. The paper which is being prepared to prove, by the aid of philology, that the Sidonians of the Homeric poems, and their immediate de- scendants, whether in Boeotia or Attica, or at Sparta, or in the various islands of the JEgean Sea, left no trace of a Semitic parentage, is not completely finished, and must therefore, at present, be left unpublished. The various papers on the Megalithic and Cyclopean Struc- PREFACE. XI tures are so intimately connected with the first inhabitants of Great Britain, Ireland, and the opposite continent, that they require the particular consideration of every seeker after truth in these and similar disquisitions. The extreme aversion with which the forefathers of the pure English in this island enter- tained against all the Celtic race, both here and in Ireland, should render the Englishman of the present day more willing to listen with impartial ears to the evidence respecting the existence, from the remotest times, of an ancient branch of the Caucasian race in Great Britain, venerable for its history, its primeval civilization, and for its preservation of an important dialect of the common language which the Japetida3 brought into Europe. It is too late in the day to overlook this over- powering evidence, and to class the Britons, whom Julius Caesar had to encounter here, with the Red Indian and with the Australian savage. For further information on this subject, as well as respect- ing the high and true philosophy embodied in the Cumric language and literature, the reader is referred to my Gomer, where the whole subject is thoroughly investigated and explained. In the two papers, the one " On the Virgilian Cosmogony," the other " On the Aristotelian Expression M* ra ret QuffiHu" I have endeavoured to make patent to the common reader the doctrine respecting the formation of our globe and its inha- bitants, which is usually called the Epicurean system, not in- vented by Epicurus, but borrowed by him from the works of a much greater man, the famous traveller in the Eastern world, Democritus of Abdera, and also the doctrines on very im- portant subjects, ascribed by Aristotle to the philosophers whom he styles the xuiMruketioi " the altogether ancient." Aristotle himself may justly be termed the great exponent of truths Xli PREFACE. f connected with the material creation, and with the laws of human thought, while reasoning on things comprehensible. He either ignored or disbelieved all spiritual existence; a xoa/xoc *7reptf<7/xsvo was his favourite doctrine ; nor does he seem to have known that it was as incomprehensible by human thought as a xo J* E O C 5 1" cf o ^ fi -*i -^ -4 O " _jr ^~ ^^ * w i 1 S c ^ \ c t 1 tr; f S S |- ^ p " I "d. c E r S & i^ CO * K-> 1 i! 9 Tf k M p^ c v i i i s a I 1 G The Cambrian Annals ending A.D. 945, written in the X* century (British Museum N 3859. ii 190.) mfi cJte6; ^e-trtfe; nocnb; vnfru tD cKrf\t of^ An! Ancient Poems transcribed about the middle of die III . century. (Black Boole of Carmarthen, fol.36.) LCient Poems transcribed at the commencement cf the 3QL. century (about the year, 11040 (From -die Black Book cf' Carmarthen. fcl 3) 1 Copy of Brut y Brerihinoedjlj written in. the XHT. century. (British Museum, Cleqp.B.C.A.) hi if vy ^ferb 4 d^ffir Ancient Ibems transcribed about the middle of the III century. (Black Book oi" Carmacdien., fol. 37. ) Ancient Poems transcribed about the middle of the XII ^century (Black Boole of Carmarthen. foil.*!) Copy of Brut y Erenhinoedd, written m the XIV ^ century. (From tke Red Book) DJJO ^ttutunt a oc cf Aihbx Dangcrfitli, 22BuiAr