rson gave may be a fiction, but it is admitted
by those who know the native Scotch and Irish tongues, and have dwelt
where no other language is spoken, that there are poems which have been
transmitted from generation to generation (orally it must be, since
letters are either entirely unknown or are comparatively of recent
introduction), the machinery of which prove them to have been invented
about the time when Christianity was first preached in these islands.

Tradition may well be named the eldest daughter of Time, and
nursing-mother of the Muses--the fruitful parent of that very learning
which would, in the cruel spirit of its pedantry and malice, make her
the sacrifice while it lays claim to the inheritance. What is learning
but a laborious, often ill-drawn, and almost invariably partial
deduction from facts which tradition has first collected? When we
consider in whose hands learning has been, almost ever since its
creation; the uses which have been made of it by priests and
politicians; by poets, orators, and flatterers; by controversialists and
designing historians;--how commonly has it been perverted to abuse the
very senses of mankind, and to give a bias to their thoughts and
feelings, only to mislead and to betray! Let the evidence be well
compared, and a view taken of the respective amounts of doubt and
certainty which appertain to human history as it appears in written
records; and it will be seen that, to verify any given fact, so as to
prevent the possibility of doubt, we must throw aside our reverence for
the scholar's pen and the midnight lamp, which seem, like the faculty of
speech, only given to men, as the witty Frenchman observed, "to conceal
their thoughts." This comparative process is precisely what has been
adopted by M.L. Petit Radel in his new theory upon the origin of Greece.
"Not satisfied with the mythological equivocation and contradictory
statements which till now have perplexed the question, after a residence
of ten years this learned man returns with a new theory, which would
destroy all our received ideas, and carry the civilisation and cradle of
the Greeks much beyond the time and place that have till now been
supposed. It is their very architecture that M. Petit Radel
interrogates, and its passive testimony serves as a basis to his system.
He has visited, compared, and meditated on the unequivocal vestiges of
more than one hundred and fifty antique citadels, altogether neglected
by the