No one would at present think of any other answer to a Query as to the
meaning of this term than that the phrase originated with the scarecrows
and stuffed apings of humanity with which the rising generation enlivens
our streets on every fifth of November, and dins in our ears the cry,
"Please to remember the guy," and that it alludes to the Christian name
of the culprit, Guido. Have, however, any of your readers met this
title, or any allusion to it, in any writer previously to 1605? and may
its attribution to the supposed framer of the Gunpowder Plot only have
been the accidental appropriation of an earlier term of popular
reproach, and which had become so since the conversion of the nation to
Christianity? This naturally heaped contumely and insult upon every
thing relating to the Druids, and the heathen superstitions of the
earlier inhabitants.

Amongst others, _Guy_ was a term by which, no doubt, the Druids were
very early designated, and is cognate, with the Italian _Guido_ and our
own _Guide_, to the Latin _cuidare_, which would give it great
appropriativeness when applied to the offices of teachers and leaders,
with which these lordly flamens were invested. Narrowly connected with
their rites, the term has descended to the present day, as is decidedly
shown in the French name of the mistletoe, _le Gui_, and as denoting the
priesthood. The common cry of the children at Christmas in France, _au
gui l'an neuf_, marks the winter solstice, and their most solemn
festival; so _ai-guil-lac_, as the name of new year's gifts, so
necessary and expensive to a Frenchman, which they particularly bear in
the diocese of Chartres, can only be explained by referring it to the
same origin. In the French vocabulary at present this word, as I have
before observed, is restricted to the mistletoe, the _viscum album_ of
Linnæus: but in Germany we have pretty much the same conversion of a
favourite druidical plant, the trefoil, or shamrock, and the cinquefoil;