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—NOTES. 373ting, and had an alphabet of their own* Having satisfactorily(I hope) established this point, I shall next tarn my attentionto the Celts in Great Britain.To establish the antiquity of the use of letters in Britain, itmight be deemed sufficient to point out its early commercial intercoursewith Greece and Phoenicia, in both which countries^the art of writing was well known. Commercial nation* have,of all others, been soonest acquainted with this art.The reasonis obvious ;for commerce can be carried to no great extent withoutit.The inhabitants of Gaul and Britain were descended ofthe same common stock, they spoke the same language, and hadthe same civil and religious institutions; their intercourse waseasy and frequent, and hence any ait or science known in theone country could not be long unknown in the other. Fortunatelywe have no occasion to res^t thismatter on hypotheticalor presumptive evidence. Caisar (lib. 6. cap. 13.) puts it beyondall doubt, when he tells usDisciplina in Britannia reper^ia, atqut inde in Galliam translata esse existimatur ; et nunc,,tjiii dUigentms earn rem cognoscere voiunt, plenunque illodiscen^di causa projidscunlur— i. e. " The discipline (of the Druids.)is supposed to have been Inveiited iu Britain, and thence transferredinto Gaul; and even at the present day, they who wishto know this discipline more perfectly, for the most part resortto Britain for the purpose of studying it." By disciplina Uclearly meant the whole learning or philoscphif of the Druids.We thus see that the Druids in Gaul, so far from being iu anylespect superior to those in Britain, were in fact their pupils;and hence it must follow, that whatever degree of learning wasknown in Gaul, had been carried to a higher pitch of perfectionin Britain. We have already seen that the use of letters was, inCa?sar's time, well known in Gaul. We have also seen that theBritons were the preceptors of the Gauls; and if it were possible10 imagine that the teacher was more ignorant than the scholar,or that the Druids in Britain were unacquainted with theuse of letters, still it is certain that this noble art would havebeeo sneedijv communicated by one or other wf the aumerouii3 l>.