ve retained them in vassalage.

8. The ancient languages of France and of the British isles are said to
have proceeded from an other language yet more ancient, called the
_Celtic_; so that, from one common source, are supposed to have sprung the
present Welsh, the present Irish, and the present Highland Scotch.[46] The
term _Celtic_ Dr. Webster defines, as a noun, "The language of the Celts;"
and, as an adjective, "Pertaining to the primitive inhabitants of the south
and west of Europe, or to the early inhabitants of Italy, Gaul, Spain, and
Britain." What _unity_, according to this, there was, or could have been,
in the ancient Celtic tongue, does not appear from books, nor is it easy to
be conjectured.[47] Many 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
Hi