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106 THE HISTORYthat many of them ichich believed, and usd cnriousartSf brought their books together,before all me7i;and burnt themand they coimted the price of them,and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver*, orabout three hundred pounds sterling.This wasthe first instance of burning books among christians;and ever since that time the example hasbeen better follow'd, than any precept of the gospel.XVII. From what we have hitlierto observed,you see that our historians, my lord, do (in spiteof ail chances) abound with matter enough to reviveand illustrate the memory of the Druids.Besidesthat the rites and opinions of other nationsserve not only to give light to theirs, but weremany of them of Druidical or Celtic extraction.This no body will deny of the aboriginal Italians,who having been often over-run by the Gauls, andhaving several Gallic colonies planted among them,they partook both of their language and religion;as will be very easily evinc'd in our JDissertation,and has been already tolei^ablydone by FatherPezron in his Celtic originals. Diogenes Laertius,in the proem of his philosophical history, reckonstheDruids among the chief authors of thebarbarous theology and philosophy, long anteriorto the Greecs, their disciples:and Phurnutus, inhis treatise of the Nature of the Gods, says mostexpressly, that " among the many and various*Acts 19. 19.