ancient writers sustain this broad application of the term Celtae or Celts; which, according to Strabo’s etymology of it, means horsemen, and seems to have been almost as general as our word Indians.  But Caesar informs us that the name was more particularly claimed by the people who, in his day, lived in France between the Seine and the Garonne, and who by the Romans were called Galli, or Gauls.

9.  The Celtic tribes are said to have been the descendants of Gomer, the son of Japhet.  The English historians agree that the first inhabitants of their island owed their origin and their language to the Celtae, or Gauls, who settled on the opposite shore.  Julius Caesar, who invaded Britain about half a century before the Christian era, found the inhabitants ignorant of letters, and destitute of any history but oral tradition.  To this, however, they paid great attention, teaching every thing in verse.  Some of the Druids, it is said in Caesar’s Commentaries, spent twenty years in learning to repeat songs and hymns that were never committed to writing.  These ancient priests, or diviners, are represented as having great power, and as exercising it in some respects beneficially; but their horrid rites, with human sacrifices, provoked the Romans to destroy them.  Smollett says, “Tiberius suppressed those human sacrifices in Gaul; and Claudius destroyed the Druids of that country; but they subsisted in Britain till the reign of Nero, when Paulus Suetonius reduced the island of Anglesey, which was the place of their retreat, and overwhelmed them with such unexpected and sudden destruction, that all their knowledge and tradition, conveyed to them in the songs of their predecessors, perished at once.”—­Smollett’s Hist. of Eng., 4to, B. i, Ch. i, Sec.7.

10.  The Romans considered Britain a province of their empire, for a period of about five hundred years; but the northern part of the island was never entirely subdued by them, and not till Anno Domini 78, a hundred and thirty-three years after their first invasion of the country, had they completed their conquest of England.  Letters and arts, so far at least as these are necessary to the purposes of war or government, the victors carried with them; and under their auspices some knowledge of Christianity was, at a very early period, introduced into Britain.  But it seems strange, that after all that is related of their conquests, settlements, cities, fortifications, buildings, seminaries, churches, laws, &c., they should at last have left the Britons in so helpless, degraded, and forlorn a condition.  They did not sow among them the seeds of any permanent improvement.