of the interior," he
writes, "do not sow; they live on milk and flesh, and clothe themselves
in skins. All Britons stain themselves dark blue with woad, which gives
them a terrible aspect in battle. They wear their hair long, and shave
all their body except their hair and moustaches."

Did we forget the original is in Latin, we might think the passage was
extracted from the travels of Captain Cook; and this is so true that, in
the account of his first journey around the world, the great navigator,
on arriving at the island of Savu, notices the similitude himself.

With the exception of a few details, the Celtic tribes of future England
were similar to those of future France.[3] Brave like them, with an
undisciplined impetuosity that often brought them to grief (the
impetuosity of Poictiers and Nicopolis), curious, quick-tempered, prompt
to quarrel, they fought after the same fashion as the Gauls, with the
same arms; and in the Witham and Thames have been found bronze shields
similar in shape and carving to those graven on the triumphal arch at
Orange, the image of which has now recalled for eighteen centuries Roman
triumph and Celtic defeat. Horace's saying concerning the Gaulish
ancestors applies equally well to Britons: never "feared they
funerals."[4] The grave was for them without terrors; their faith in the
immortality of the soul absolute; death for them was not the goal, but
the link between two existences; the new life was as complete and
desirable as the old, and bore no likeness to that subterranean
existence, believed in by the ancients, partly localised in the
sepulchre, with nothing sweeter in it than those sad things, rest and
oblivion. According to Celtic belief, the dead lived again under the
light of heaven; they did not descend, as they did with the Latins, to
the land of shades. No Briton, Gaul, or Irish could have understood the
melancholy words of Achilles: "Seek not, glorious Ulysses, to comfort me
for death; rather would I till the ground for wages on some poor man's
small estate than reign over all the dead."[5] The race was an
optimistic one. It made the best of life, and even of death.

These beliefs were carefully fostered by the druids, priests and
philosophers, whose part has been the same in Gaul, Ireland, and
Britain. Their teaching was a cause of surprise and admiration to the
Latins. "And you, druids," exclaims Lucan, "dwelling afar under the
broad trees of the sacred groves, according