_Druid_ proper was governor, judge, philosopher, expounder, and
executioner. The _ovaidd_, or _ovates_, were the priests, chiefly
concerned in the study of theology and the practice of religion. The
_bards_ were heroic poets of rare lyric power; they kept the national
traditions in trust, and claimed the second sight and the power of
prophecy. Much has been said of their human sacrifices in colossal images
of wicker-work--the "_immani magnitudine simulacra_" of Cæsar--which were
filled with human victims, and which crackled and disappeared in towering
flame and columns of smoke, amid the loud chantings of the bards. The most
that can be said in palliation of this custom is, that almost always such
a scene presented the judicial execution of criminals, invested with the
solemnities of religion.

In their theology, _Esus_, the God Force--the Eternal Father--has for his
agents the personification of spiritual light, of immortality, of nature,
and of heroism; _Camul_ was the war-god; _Tarann_ the thunder-god; _Heol_,
the king of the sun, who inflames the soldier's heart, and gives vitality
to the corn and the grape.[4]

But Druidism, which left its monuments like Stonehenge, and its strong
traces in English life, now especially found in Wales and other
mountainous parts of the kingdom, has not left any written record.


ROMAN WRITERS.--Of the Roman occupancy we have Roman and Greek accounts,
many of them by those who took part in the doings of the time. Among the
principal writers are _Julius Cæsar_, _Tacitus_, _Diodorus Siculus_,
_Strabo_, and _Suetonius_.