ECLECTIC REVIEW,

FOR AUGUST, 1816.

Art. I. The Ancient History of South Wiltshire; by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart. pp. 254. Royal Folio, Boards. Price 121. 12s. (Nearly 80 Plates, including the Maps of the Stations.) Murray, 1812.

THIS splendid volume has been published in three distinct

portions, the first of which appeared so long since as 1810. The third portion has completed the investigation of South Wiltshire; and the concluding paragraph announces the Author's intention to prosecute the same researches throughout the Northern District of the County, where a spacious and unexplored field is left open for inquiry and investigation.' That course of investigation he has since been pursuing; and very recently he has publicly signified that the first portion of his second volume will shortly appear. It is probable that volume, if completed, will equal, in size and sumptuousness, the one that has preceded it. We presume the greater part of the materials are already accumulated.

To those who have acquainted themselves with the performance we need not remark, how decidedly it takes precedence of all works relating to the earliest British antiquities. And this precedence has been very fairly and very dearly earned, at the expense of many years of zealous prosecution, and of many thousands of pounds. It will ever stand high among the most conspicuous instances illustrative of the good fortune which befalls the cause of knowledge, when a man whose taste devotes him to that cause, can afford, and has the spirit to afford, to pursue an inquiry in which there is no way to success but through an expensive process. The necessity of such a process was never more evident than in the present instance. The injunction, "Put money in thy purse," might pertinently have been enforced, with more than Iago's reiteration, on a man entering on such a field. The results of a few days' operations with the battalion of spadeand-pick-axe-men, might no doubt have sufficed, to an ingenious man, for originating a multitude of conjectures and VOL. VI. N. S.

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amusing speculations; might even have been made the basis of some fanciful and perhaps plausible system; but this would have brought us into no intimacy with ancient reality: the main substance of the grand deposite of the materials of knowledge would have remained in darkness beneath the ground, secure against inquisitiveness, learning, speculation, and fancy, till a man should arrive with the means of commanding permanently a posse of disciplined labourers, and himself insatiably intent on unveiling the secrets of Time and Death.

It is very gratifying that here and there an individual of the class who are able to subsidize all kind of forces in aid of a laudable purpose, should be seized upon by a passion for opening avenues, and, as it were, making roads, into some of the most obstructed and obscure tracts of inquiry.

The peculiar subjects of Sir R. Hoare's extensive and minute investigations, may be denominated the British Antiquities, by eminence; for he takes us completely back beyond the age of the Saxons, and of the Romans, and surrounds us with the memorials of the Aborigines of our island. He marks in the most decided manner the sites of their villages, collects a multitude of the identical implements once grasped in their hands, for uses of domestic economy, or hunting, or religion, or war; and of ornaments which decked their wild and painted forms. But more than this, he follows those forms themselves to the last retreat, and brings to light the cinerary relics, or the complete skeletons, of rational beings, many of whom lived before the commencement of our era, and whose remains had reposed inviolate till the hour of our Author's invasion of their sepulchres. And, before the frequency of the researches had rendered the spectacle familiar, it must have been very striking to see the forms which have lain still and silent so prodigiously longer a time than they lived and moved; to behold, brought for a moment to the light of the sun, the beings that walked in that light at a period so much nearer the morning of the world; to realise in imagination the fact, that these very forms, seen and handled by the disturbers of their long repose, have conversed, and walked, and played, and worshipped, and fought, on the fields and hills, at a few feet beneath the green turf of which they have been lying unseen while unnumbered generations have had, in succession, their youth and age, their gaieties and sorrows, their business, superstitions, and animosities, on the very same fields and hills. The rude and barbarous state of these Aborigines, that absence of all the high improvements of human nature which reduces so low the interest felt towards a living race, has a far less repressive effect on that felt for a race contem

plated in the shades of remote time. The combination of antiquity and death has a strange power of investing objects with a character of dignity and solemnity.

Under the influence of this character of the venerable relics of the ancient Britons, a person whose sensibility should be of a pensive and romantic tendency, would not feel unmin gled complacency in such a wide unsparing ransack of the aboriginal tombs. While eager to know their contents, he would be sometimes haunted by a slight intimating sentiment, as if a certain kind of sanctity were violated by the rapacious curiosity which marches the gang of sturdy excavators from tumulus to tumulus, with unrelenting activity, and in a short time throws open scores of these primitive asylums of the dead. To the dying Celta, and to their kindred and friends who raised these mounds over their remains, it would have been, notwithstanding the rude state of their moral nature, a most ungracious thought, that their sepulchral abodes would be ravaged by the hands of a future and alien race. The case, however, may be allowed to be one in which the interests of knowledge take just precedence of the refinements of sensibility; and the knowledge very properly desired, could not be obtained without the accumulation of a great number of facts. It is to be mentioned, besides, that our indefatigable investigator made it a rule to leave the human relics in their repository, and to restore them to their darkness, taking away only the articles which had accompanied the interment.

Wiltshire, the county in which our Author resides, is distinguished above every other part of England, for the number of monumental vestiges of the people of the earliest ages. And from the circumstance of so large a part of it having remained, from those ages till now, unviolated by agricultural operations, a very great proportion of those vestiges have continued conspicuous and entire, being of a nature over which mere time and the elements have little power. When our Author, in his younger days, used to fly over these tracts so palpably marked with the memorials of antiquity, in the wild ardour of the chace, he little dreamed, he confesses, that the field was ever to become to him so enchanted a ground in so very different a way. He was, it seems, led into this new pursuit by a man in comparatively humble life, Mr. Cunnington, of Heytesbury, whose enthusiasm for British Antiquities had found means for prosecuting, on a considerable scale, the investigation of the barrows the habitual sight of which had kindled it. He had made a most valuable collection of their venerable spoils; and no one who was introduced to him will ever forget the friendly manner in which he received an inquisitive visitant, or the interest and intelligence with which he

use, however, must be matter of mere conjecture. But there seems to be no room left for conjecture with respect to another description of earthen works, in the form of a double bank with a hollow way between, carried across the downs in a varying direction, sometimes to a considerable length.

"I shall consider them,' says Sir Richard, as covered ways, or lines of communication from one British town to another: they were evidently not raised for barriers of defence; the bark being of equal height on each side, and the area of the ditch broader in proportion, and flatter,' (than in the barrier ramparts previously described.) The frequent occurrence of these on our downs opened a wide field for reflection and conjecture; and much time was spent in doubt and uncertainty, till at length their connexion with the British towns became apparent, and ascertained most clearly the original cause of their formation.'

As to the Barrows, the general fact of their sepulchral design was familiarly known; it was for our Author's experience to detect the anomaly that a small proportion of them, the same in external appearance, are not sepulchral, and do not yield to the investigator any indication of their design. Such operations without conceivable use would be strange, (as it may well be supposed the toil of raising and shaping these masses must have been a very undesirable thing to the wild companies whose hands and rude implements had so heavy a task,) if we had not been informed by Cæsar how much of the valuable properties which recommend more modern forms of social economy prevailed in the constitution of society of the Gaulish and British population; of which the smaller portion, the Druids and a species of nobles, held the rest in a state of slavery, or little better. Let any of these worthy persons be seized with a fancy to have an artificial hill on any particular spot for the purpose merely of enjoying the sunshine and air upon, the subject tribe knew their duty.

Our Author's long attention to barrows has enabled him to form a classification, of twelve distinctions. So many definable varieties of shape he denominates long barrow, of two classes-bowl barrow-bell barrow-druid barrow, of four classes-pond barrow-twin barrow-cone barrow-and broad barrow; illustrating all the descriptions by elegant engravings. It seems there would be an exception or two to the general rule that these exterior forms supply no index of the specific nature of the contents. In the Pond Barrow indeed, Sir Richard never found any sepulchral remains; and it is as unaccountable, as to its use, as it is singular in form. 'It 'differs totally from all the others, and resembles an excavation 'made for a pond; it is circular, and formed with the greatest 'exactness; having no protuberance within the area, which is